While Luis Buñuel’s Catherine Deneuve-led masterpiece Belle de Jour joined The Criterion Collection earlier this decade, with the film now celebrating its 50th anniversary it had undergone another restoration. Premiering at Cannes earlier this year, the 4K restoration will now hit French theaters next month and a new trailer has arrived.
“It is possibly the best-known erotic film of modern times, perhaps the best. That’s because it understands eroticism from the inside-out–understands how it exists not in sweat and skin, but in the imagination,” Roger Ebert said. Indeed, Buñuel’s film — which follows Deneuve’s housewife character as she begins working at a brothel — still resonates today, and this restoration looks stunning, so hopefully it comes to the U.S. soon.
Check out the new trailer and poster below for the film also starring Jean Sorel, Michel Piccoli, Geneviève Page, and Pierre Clémenti.
Catherine Deneuve’s porcelain perfection hides a cracked interior in one of the actress’s most iconic roles: Séverine, a Paris housewife who begins secretly spending her afternoon hours working in a bordello. This surreal and erotic late-sixties daydream from provocateur for the ages Luis Buñuel is an examination of desire and fetishistic pleasure (its characters’ and its viewers’), as well as a gently absurdist take on contemporary social mores and class divisions. Fantasy and reality commingle in this burst of cinematic transgression, which was one of Buñuel’s biggest hits.
Belle de Jour returns to French theaters on August 2.