The unchallenged classic of elegant kink, wrought by the cinema’s great surrealist Luis Buñuel on the cool beauty of Catherine Deneuve, returns, direct from its 50th-birthday celebrations in Cannes in a stunning new 4K restoration.

“Catherine Deneuve is married to the handsomest, wealthiest young doctor in the land, but she can’t bear to have him touch her – instead, she spends her afternoons in a discreet Paris brothel, brusquely handled by gangsters, kinksters, and one Kalmyk with a magic box. Between workdays she dreams of even more humiliating encounters, starring her husband and different kinds of knots.

 

“The endless appeal of Belle de Jour, I won’t be the first to say, is its insistence on the fantasy and the reality; one doesn’t replace or resolve the other, just as cobbling together an origin story to explain our most singular obsessions cannot exorcise them. As Buñuel knew, a shoe is a shoe is a shoe – unless it’s so much more.” — Elina Mishuris, The L Magazine

Visit nziff.co.nz to see the full schedule of films on at the 2017 New Zealand International Film Festival. 

 

“It’s whatever you want it to be, and one of the very few great films.” — David Thomson, Have You Seen?