Directed by Luis Buñuel. Starring Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, and Michel Piccoli.
I guess I'm just a sentimental guy at heart. While the intellectual smart-guy voice in my head (no, not literally, for you armchair shrinks out there) tells me to choose something more cinematically transcendent- 2001, for example- I just can't bring myself to NOT pick BELLE DE JOUR. People who know me know that this has been my favorite for years, once I had set aside my experiment with having a favorite for every day of the week (the others being ANNIE HALL, CITIZEN KANE, VERTIGO, CHINATOWN, and the aforementioned numbers 2 and 3 on this list). So why is this my favorite, you ask? Honestly, I've loved it so long that it's impossible to satisfactorily explain. BELLE DE JOUR has, for lack of a better explanation, become MY movie, of which I've become possessive and protective, the film I've told all my friends to see at some point, and their sometimes dissenting opinions of which, though I'm receptive to them, I can't really understand. I've never allowed it to be a deal-breaker in regards to friendship, merely one of those things upon which we must agree to disagree before moving on. But I guess that if someone held a gun to my head and told me that I had to say why I love BELLE DE JOUR lest he paint the wall with my (limited) critical capacities, I guess it would have to come down to Catherine Deneuve. Ah, Catherine- for me, the eternally bewitching face of the cinema, so impossibly beautiful and refined that her impossible elegance haunts my dreams. Deneuve stars in three films in my top 100, and though the most-represented actor on this list (Jean-Pierre Léaud) appears in five, the difference is that while Léaud (though I like him a lot) is fairly incidental to my enjoyment of at least two of his listed films, Catherine is a if not THE key reason for all three films' dearness to my heart. As BELLE DE JOUR is My Film, so Catherine is My Movie Star. Luckily for me then that BELLE DE JOUR is, from a critical standpoint, a masterpiece of the medium (lucky because otherwise this piece would turn into a long gush and all pretense of critical objectivity, however feeble, would fly right out the window). The film, which for those of you who haven't seen it (rectify this IMMEDIATELY, dudes) centers around a housewife's fantasies of becoming a prostitute, has real mystery to it, and as we see Severine (Deneuve, naturally) acting out her fantasy we become fascinated by her activities, as Buñuel implies more about her than he actually says. In scene after scene the film works its magic, cycling between Severine's dreams and real life until it's impossible to tell the difference anymore. As with all of Buñuel's best work, BELLE DE JOUR deals unforgettably with the strange urges people have, the things we're drawn to on a level rooted so deeply within us as to render our connection to them unexplainable. I suppose that sums up why I love it so much as well as anything I could possibly say.
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