Customer Reviews

Belle de Jour [Blu-ray] [Import]

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Description of product on Amazon is in english but product contains no english subtitles. Even the cd has english warnings about copyrighting etc. A blu-ray / dvd which you would expect hope to go the little extra of english subtitles. Stupid to market this product in north american market - even netflix isn't this stupid! Beware of the lack of effort of this product even though there is the fine print of french language!

This blu-ray & DVD release is basically a stripped down version of the European release of this film. There are no supplements or subtitles whatsoever. The Criterion release is so much better & is worth the extra $7 for this brilliant film. The picture quality is also better on the Criterion. It's a huge shame this isn't the region A version of the British region B release! This would have been worth the money if it had all the supplements of the British release! This was huge opportunity missed! My recommendation is to avoid this at all costs!

Buy this one along with "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie". Two excellent later Bunuel films with very good bluray transfers. A bargain if you like his film-making style.

French, just French. Lovely language, especially if you understand it (so I'm told). This disc has no English content: no English audio and NO ENGLISH SUBTITLES.

This review is for the version by Alliance Films Release Date: Sep 4 2012 ASIN: B008OTGBMU.

I'm used to important French films always having English subtitles.

Although this is an important French film it has no English subtitles.

No English subtitles, no extras, no commentary, no nothing, just the straight film.

Some company should collect some commentary, collect or create some extras, and put out the proper package this film deserves.

If someone were to properly package this important film, they could make a good return on their money from non-French audiences world-wide.

Video quality is fine, reproduction is fine, give it English subtitles and it would be 4 star.

Give it the usual extras and commentary and it would be 5 star.

So if your French is good, this is a 4 star film as it is.

Belle de Jour most definitely belongs to the realm of cinematic classics. It is arguably the most accessible of Bunuel's films and probably the best introduction to his work because it did for me.

Séverine (Deneuve) has everything a young middle class woman is supposed to want. She has a handsome, caring doctor for a husband named Pierre (Sorel), a beautiful home, and plenty of fashionable clothing. But she is not happy. Her bland spouse treats her like a child, so she indulges in dark brutal fantasies filled with guilt, passion, and pain. Already inclined to sadomasochistic fantasies due to some unknown trauma in her past, Severine is increasingly drawn to acting upon her need for degradation. Bored with her life, she works during the afternoons at a brothel which caters to this proclivity, yet she is still the good bourgeois wife who informs her madam that she has to be home by five p.m. (her alias at the brothel is Belle de Jour, a pun on the French euphemism for prostitute, "belle de nuit"). She enjoys this double life until one of her customers, a gangster, becomes so obsessed with her to the point that he is determined to kill her husband. What follows next is a meditation on ambiguity on all levels. Severine is morally torn between living as an upper-class ice maiden and an abandoned fantasy woman. Although Severine is trying to stop her husband's murder, her efforts seem to be somewhat half-hearted, almost as if she is willing to tempt fate.

Thanks to Sacha Vierny's stunning color cinematography, Yves Saint Laurent's couture and her own genes, Deneuve herself looks beautiful that even she seems unreal an indication of how beautiful Deneuve is in this film can be found by recalling Grace Kelly in her Hitchcock period. Finally, the narrative structure is strained by events to the point where the audience cannot be certain whether anything recounted in the course of the film belongs to the realm of the physical or the psychological -- not unlike life itself, at times. Towards the end of this film you'll come to fine out that Severine likes molestation. That is the heart of her perversity and the film's. It absolutely refuses to help us be good bourgeois. Bunuel's naturalistic style was subversive and sadistic. Its pitiless anti-aestheticism means you watch without painkillers. No ambivalence, no softening, no way out. Either you respond from your own perversity, or you check your watch.

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 Pierre (Jean Sorel), and enjoys all the idle upper-middle class accouterments.

But something is wrong in this greeting-card perfect world. Severine seems to find erotic satisfaction only in the repressed desire to be humilated and used sexually. She escapes into waking dreams where she enjoys being whipped, soiled with mud, and bound to trees. This lurid fantasy life leads her to seek employment as a part-time prostitute - but only during the day, before her husband gets home.

Complications arise when her double life is discovered by her husband's friend Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli), and when she finds herself the subject of a stalker - a dangerously obsessed customer named Marcel (Pierre Clementi), who also happens to be a violence-prone thief.

Though it sounds like fodder for a typical Hollywood "erotic thriller", what develops from these elements is a psychological study that, for all its depths, appears to remain moot about just what makes the main character tick.

Central to the film is Deneuve's work. Under Luis Bunuel's precise, disciplined direction, she delivers a performance that is icy, opaque, and ultimately heartbeaking. Yes, she seems distant, and that is precisely the point: the much talked-about ending, by its very ambiguity, shocks us with the revelation that we've been fooled all along. Severine is not unreadable because she is hiding dark motivations. Rather, she is a dreamy, empty vessel; abused as a child (as we see in subtle flashbacks), and acting out of nothing more than instincts she can neither hope, nor care to understand. The lights are on and nobody's home.

Her last, blissful smile as she enters one of the waking dream-states that pervade the film masks the hollowness of a human being squeezed dry of all her humanity by a life of denial, guilt, and empty materialism.

It's an emotional sucker punch - a romantic banality that underscores with bitter irony what a sad, empty life Severine has, and the great damage that has been done to her. The tremendous harm that her own actions have caused by this point is just a tragic ricochet.

All in all, Belle de Jour is a haunting piece of classic cinema. It may be Bunuel's masterpiece. It belongs in any serious movie fan's collection.

Great movie with a great transfer but....it is a region B blu-ray. This is the european edition. You will need a blu-ray player which is switchable to region B. I didn't know that when I ordered the blu-ray. I never thought I could buy a region B blu-ray on amazon.ca... Luckily I found a way to "hack" my LG blu-ray player. If you can watch these blu-rays on your player, then this is a nice Luis Bunuel movie to have. Picture and sound is awesome.

The best film Martin Scorcese has been involved with since *The Last Temptation of Christ* is one he didn't direct: 1967's *Belle de Jour*, by master-director Luis Bunuel. The fact that this movie's re-release, overseen by Scorcese in 1995, created a sensation in art-houses only illustrates what a graveyard European cinema is today by comparison. At any rate . . . *Belle de Jour* is about a repressed, wealthy young housewife who finds herself irresistably drawn to a high-class Parisian whorehouse. She becomes a part-time employee, working the day-shift from 2 to 5, before beating it back home before clueless hubby returns from work. Because this is Bunuel, you may find yourself wondering what's really happening to Catherine Deneuve and what she's simply fantasizing. Don't worry about it. Remember that for Bunuel, the interior and exterior life had the same level of importance; it was all life to him, and therefore real. Applying a magnifying glass to your TV screen in order to look for "clues" that demonstrate either reality or fantasy would be missing the point. I suppose that in the final analysis, *Belle de Jour* will aggravate meat-and-potatoes movie-watchers craving linear narrative. (You know who you are, and you've been warned.) The rest will rightly not give a hoot about "reality", and will enjoy the comical details in this study of sexual fantasies and obsession. The autumnal photography by cinematography legend Sacha Vierny, as well as the magisterial direction itself -- as unobtrusive as it is stylish, an effect earned by Bunuel's 40 years of hard work --, should win over those sitting on the fence. Finally, it must be said that those who thought Stanley Kubrick's *Eyes Wide Shut* was a masterpiece will have their eyes wide opened when they see sexual obsession done right, as it is in *Belle de Jour*. [The DVD looks great. The subtitles, however, are questionable at best. Those seeking to broaden their horizons with a foreign movie can be advised to use the dubbing option to help them along -- something I've never advised, but the translations are THAT bad. Also comes with commentary by a "Bunuel scholar": it's amusing to listen to her try to decipher a movie that not even the director entirely understood.]

Halfway, I had to stop watching the movie. I could not stand the audio! This is a great movie acted by one of the great forces of nature - Catherine Deneuve. The quality of the audio made it sound like she was inside a giant drum or were there water in my ears? It is a shame because this is truly a classic film. Usually I can forgive the DVD quality of some foreign films because they are beautiful movies, eloquently written and artistically filmed. If we can obtain a great DVD quality for an American B-minus movie why not put an effort on this classic? Tsk...tsk!