Don't listen to the complaints; the quality is FINE
First, let's get something straight: Belle de Jour was shot 35 years ago in France. It's just not ever going to look as clean, sharp, and saturated as a newer movie. Director Martin Scorsese (who spearheaded its re-release) is a purist; he would not want to artificially "enhance" the picture at the risk of distorting Luis Bunuel's original vision.
Second, this DVD is non-anamorphic for very good reason: Belle de Jour was photographed in 1.66:1 widescreen. 16:9 enhancement would actually have CUT OFF some of the picture at the top and bottom. People who complain about the quality of this DVD simply don't know what they're talking about.
As for the movie itself, Belle de Jour is one of the few films about eroticism that really gets it right - it knows that eroticism is in the mind, not the body. The always luminous Catherine Deneuve plays Severine - a woman whose life is at once picture-perfect and fundamentally empty. She is married to a good provider, the handsome but boring...
Great exercise in surrealism, and yes the quality is fine!
"Belle de Jour" is generally considered to be director Luis Bunuel's masterpiece; a surprisingly revealing and seemingly personal venture into the world of eroticism and its deviances. It's a truly surrealistic exercise in ambiguity, fantasy, and reality. The line that separates them is blurred so much that the famously mysterious ending has had critics arguing for decades over its meaning.
The fantasy sequences are usually signalled by the sound of carriage bells, but by the end of the film the viewer is no longer able to differentiate between what is another one of Severine's fantasies and what is reality. Even Bunuel admitted to not knowing himself. He said that "by the end, the real and imaginary fuse; for me they form the same thing."
The gorgeous Catherine Deneuve, resplendent in her icy prime, portrays Severine Sevigny, the middle-class wife of Pierre, a doctor. She is frigid, virginal, yet seemingly happy enough in her bourgeoisie life and its trappings...
Bunuel's Masterpiece of Elegant Perversity
A maginificent erotic comedy. Bunuel directs with masterly assurance this icy comedy about a frigid housewife, Severine (Catherine Devenue) who goes to work at a Parisian brothel. Only here is she able to indulge in her masochistic desires by being forced to perform for her clientele. The sly joke is that her loving husband's patience and consideration is precisely NOT what she wants. She wants to keep her social respectability but needs the brothel as an outlet for her drives (Bunuel's point being the fairly well-worn one, even by that time, that bourgeois society has to suppress perversions and control female sexuality to maintain its power).
What's amazing is Bunuel's "respectable" treatment of this material. His cool and discrete approach brillantly contrasts with the frustrated sexual lives and fantasies we see on the screen. Brief nudity, no explicit sexual scenes, everything is done through inference and association. And what associations! Bunuel's...
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