Belle de Jour

1 9 6 7 (France/Italy)

Séverine, a beautiful but frigid young housewife  loves her doctor husband dearly, but cannot bring herself to be physically intimate with him. She indulges instead in vivid, kinky, erotic fantasies to entertain her sexual desires. 

The movie starts off by showing a lengthy and rather disturbing example of one of these fantasies, in which Séverine is pulled from her carriage by the two drivers after her lukewarm response to her fiancée's marriage proposal, and then tied to a tree and beaten and raped. A scene this strange and disturbing this early in the movie immediately presents her as an unsatisfied woman searching for fulfillment outside of her marriage. 

Eventually she becomes a prostitute, working in a brothel in the afternoons while remaining chaste in her marriage. Considered by many to be Buñuel's greatest work, Belle de Jour is a prime example of Buñuel's affection for the juxtaposition of realism and surrealism. An erotic and cinematic masterpiece.