Spine 593: Belle de Jour

Lost in Criterion

We here at Lost in Criterion love Luis Buñuel, and (currently) this is the last one we have in the Criterion Collection. Belle de Jour (1967) is the story of a middle class woman, wife of a surgeon, who becomes a sex worker in the afternoons. Or it's about a middle class woman who imagines that she's become a sex worker in the afternoons. Buñuel takes a lot of liberties with the source material and imagines a film that is perhaps 100% a character's fantasies, but even if it's not, it's still at least 50% a character's fantasies. And yet, somehow, it's also one of the director's most subdued films.