A young Paris housewife, Sverine, grows bored with her stable husband. When she learns of the presence of a high-class brothel in her neighborhood, she quietly goes to work there--but only during the day, until five o'clock in the afternoon. This sublime 1967 film is one of the latter-day masterpieces of the Spanish-born director Luis Buħuel, whose career forms one of the greatest and boldest arcs in cinema. By the time of Belle de jour, Buħuel had become almost completely deadpan in his style, which not only leaves the motivation of Sverine a mystery (despite a few flashbacks to degradations of her youth), but also casts the entire plot in doubt. An old surrealist from the 1920s (when his first classic, Un chien andalou, was made in collaboration with Salvador Dali), Buħuel suggests that what we see may be real, or simply Sverine's imagination. Because he was the least pretentious of directors, Buħuel keeps his material playful, wicked, yet cutting. As Sverine, the impossibly lovely Catherine Deneuve uses her cool demeanor to great effect--she never breaks her deadpan, either. In 1995, after having been out of official circulation for years, Belle de Jour was re-released in America and became an unexpected art-house hit. --Robert Horton
