Belle de Jour

Séverine Serizy is a young wife in a comfortable marriage to a doctor, Pierre. She loves him but finds no physical satisfaction with him, and her fantasies remain separate from their life together. An acquaintance of the couple, Henri Husson, tells her about a discreet, upscale brothel run by Madame Anais, and Séverine begins spending her afternoons there under the name Belle de Jour, returning home each evening as if nothing has changed. Her double life grows more precarious when a client, Marcel, becomes fixated on her.

Luis Buñuel directed and co-wrote the film with Jean-Claude Carrière. It was the eleventh of the fifteen features he directed, following Diary of a Chambermaid and preceding The Milky Way. Catherine Deneuve plays Séverine, with Jean Sorel as Pierre, Michel Piccoli as Henri, Geneviève Page as Madame Anais, Pierre Clémenti as Marcel and Françoise Fabian as Charlotte; twenty-one cast members are credited. The film was produced by Henri Baum and the brothers Raymond and Robert Hakim, and had a worldwide box office of about four million dollars.

Audience response has been solid rather than unanimous: on IMDb it holds 7.6 out of 10 from around 53,000 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 7.3 from roughly a thousand. A critics' rating of 9 out of 10 from sixty reviews places it noticeably higher with reviewers than with the general public.