Sundays at the U With Movies: "Belle De Jour" (1967)

Mar 11

Join us at 1 p.m. Sunday, March 16, for Luis Bunuel's box office smash "Belle de Jour," starring Catherine Deneuve as a housewife who starts secretly spending her afternoon working at a bordello.

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."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.

“Belle de Jour” is seen entirely through the eyes of Severine, the proper 23-year-old surgeon’s wife, played by Catherine Deneuve. Bunuel, who was 67 when the film was released, had spent a lifetime making sly films about the secret terrain of human nature, and he knew one thing most directors never discover: For a woman like Severine, walking into a room to have sex, the erotic charge comes not from who is waiting in the room, but from the fact that she is walking into it. Sex is about herself. Love of course is another matter." -- Roger Ebert

Tickets are $6 (including service charge) and available at link above. Students use code UMSTUDENT at checkout for free admission (must show Cane card at the door).

DATE AND TIME: Sunday, March 16, 2025 1pm to 3pm

ADDRESS: Bill Cosford Cinema, Dooly Memorial 225

Sundays at the U With Movies: "Belle De Jour" (1967)

By ML Staff. Courtesy of University of Miami