Belle de Jour

I’ve loved the Bunuel movies I’ve seen, and I hadn’t seen this one, and I read that it was sexy. Even more so perhaps than Bunuel’s usual.

It felt a little more labored to me than the others of his I’ve seen—later ones—less free-wheeling, and even less sexy; the relative coldness of the heroine and the lack of a compelling male protagonist seemed limitations. Part of Bunuel’s way is to play mind-games, and the mind-game playing element is if anything stronger here than in his other movies (maybe a little too-schematic, a little too schematic and therefore “solvable"?) Part of Bunuel’s way is to shock and I found this quite shocking. It’s less genial and sweet-tempered than his later movies, at least in my experience, and as a result seemed perhaps more truly edgy.