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BELLE DE JOUR
September 13, 2014  | By David Bianculli

TCM, 8:00 p.m. ET

 

In 1968, when Catherine Deneuve starred in this moody and surrealistic Luis Bunuel film, she was taking quite a risk. Bunuel had famously, and infamously, jump-started the surrealistic movie movement, way back in 1929, by collaborating with Salvador Dali on Un Chien Andalou, that short film with the unforgettable slit-eyeball shot. And here he was, decades later, wanting to make a movie in which Deneuve plays a frigid housewife who moonlights – daylights, actually – as a prostitute. It was a big leap, but Deneuve, at the time among the most beautiful and acclaimed young actresses in France, already had demonstrated a desire to break out of any preconceived cinematic constraints. She starred for Roman Polanski in the brilliant, disturbing Repulsion in 1965, playing a woman who descends into madness – and here, three years later, she collaborates with Bunuel on a movie that’s just as singularly daring, just as indelible – and just as skilled at mixing reality and fantasy.

 
 
 
 
 
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