Making for a bourgeois sex-abjection double bill with Nathalie this month is the two-week re-release of Luis Buñuel’s 1967 satire Belle de Jour, in which frustrated housewife Severine (Catherine Deneuve) becomes a prostitute. It’s a movie that’s always held a special place in my heart, for that fateful high school afternoon (during a previous re-release run) when I unaccountably thought it the perfect popcorn flick for an outing with someone I didn’t know so well. But watching Buñuel’s visualizations of the woman’s daydreams of abandon and degradation, and her subsequent escort gigs, is always an unsettling education in divided reception. Is the person next to you piqued by the director’s mischievous rejiggering of sex and class hierarchies, or by the sight of a classically beautiful actress being whipped by coachmen? To each his own desire, Buñuel might argue.
Opens April 14 at the Paris Theatre
Opens April 14 at the Paris Theatre
