Film

Belle de Jour

Name: Belle de Jour
Genre: Drama, Romance
Released: 1967
Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, Michel Piccoli, Geneviève Page, Pierre Clémenti

Buñuel's cool, elegant provocation follows a bored, beautiful Parisian housewife who spends her afternoons at a discreet brothel while her devoted husband suspects nothing. It's less erotic thriller than dry, dreamlike character study—fantasy and reality slide together without warning, and Deneuve's glacial composure gives almost nothing away. Funny, unsettling and quietly subversive, it's for anyone who enjoys their scandal delivered with perfect manners.

TMDb rating

7.3

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But Its horror imagery is far more overt and disturbing than anything in Buñuel's film; if you wanted elegance without dread, this will unsettle you.

The Piano Teacher2001

Isabelle Huppert plays a woman whose desires are just as compartmentalized and self-punishing as Séverine's, but Haneke strips away any dream logic for clinical, unflinching realism.

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Eyes Wide Shut1999

Kubrick's tale of a marriage cracked open by a hidden sexual underworld shares Buñuel's fascination with fantasy bleeding into daylight life, wrapped in the same hypnotic unease.

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The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Girlfriend Experience2016

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But Its deliberate flatness and lack of psychological explanation can feel airless; if you wanted warmth or resolution, this offers neither.

In the Realm of the Senses1976no page yet

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Klute1971

Jane Fonda's Oscar-winning call girl gets a thriller instead of a psychological study, but the double life, compartmentalized self, and eventual reckoning all rhyme with Séverine's story.

But The genre trappings—stalker, detective, slow-burn suspense—pull focus from the interior character study Belle de Jour is built on.

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Peter Strickland's lush, near-wordless film about a submissive/dominant couple treats fantasy and ritual with the same dreamlike formality Buñuel brings to Séverine's double life.

But It's slower, more hermetic, and almost entirely without men—don't expect the social satire Buñuel folds in around the edges.

Secretary2002

A gentler, funnier cousin—submission here is played for warmth and comedy rather than dread, but the idea that desire doesn't answer to shame lands just as clearly.

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Elle2016no page yet

Verhoeven's late-career provocation, with Isabelle Huppert again, shares Buñuel's appetite for scandal and refusal to explain a woman's inner life on anyone else's terms.

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Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles1976no page yet

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Pandora's Box1929

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A dazzling, morally slippery silent classic that refuses to punish or explain its heroine decades before that became fashionable—Louise Brooks' performance is genuinely astonishing.

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