Belle de Jour

Belle de Jour (1967) is Luis Buñuel's drama starring Catherine Deneuve, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Séverine is married to a kind young doctor she loves but can't bear to be touched by, so while he works she quietly takes a job in an upscale brothel.

Under the name Belle de Jour she sees clients from two until five and is home for dinner as if nothing happened. Buñuel barely separates the real from the imagined — which scenes are memory, dream or actual event is left for the viewer to sort out. Deneuve plays it cool and nearly motionless, and that closed surface anchors the whole film. Around her are Jean Sorel as the husband and Michel Piccoli, whose sly malice keeps puncturing the bourgeois calm.

The film took the Golden Lion at Venice and remains one of the director's central studies of the middle class, desire and the hypocrisy of respectability. Buñuel co-wrote the script with Jean-Claude Carrière from Joseph Kessel's novel. People still argue over that final scene with the carriage and the bells. Stream Belle de Jour (1967) online on iFILM.