"Belle de Jour" was Buñuel's first film in colour and claimed the Golden Lion at the 1967 Venice Film Festival. It also won the award for Best Foreign Film in 1968 from the New York Film Critics Circle. It was based loosely on a novel by Joseph Kessel and like all of Buñuel's films it's subject matter borders on the surreal and draws upon prevalent ideas of Freudian theory and the idea that our everyday reality is constantly being undermined by subconscious hidden urges. What concerned Buñuel in many of his films was the way in which our underlying emotional forces and acts of sublimation override conscious acts of free will. This was the movie that inspired the website and the book of the same name that in turn inspired the TV series 'Secret Diary Of A Call Girl '.

Catherine Deneuve gives an elegant and impassive performance throughout and is perfectly cast as "Belle de Jour" - a lady of the day rather than a lady of the night - a kind of symbolic play on words. She convincingly portrays Severine's double life where on the surface she is the modern affluent bourgeois housewife, but underneath she harbours a closet full of depraved and self-degrading sado-masochistic sexual fantasies. It is this rich fantasy world that comes to dominate her life. This masochistic imagination is realised in the opening scenes where we observe Severine and Pierre take a horse-drawn coach ride into the country. Suddenly the carriage pulls up and on her husband's command the two drivers drag Severine from the carriage. They are then ordered to whip and rape her. In another disturbing scene we witness Severine draped in a graceful white gown and tied to a tree as Pierre and his morose accomplice (Michel Piccoli) throw clumps of black mud at his wife. Throughout the film these sado-eroto-masochistic fantasies seem to be triggered by the sounds of bells tinkling or cats mewing.

The DVD was produced almost 40 years after its original cinema release in 1967. The DVD extras include an interesting 30 minute documentary about the history and making of the film and there is also an intriguing commentary by Spanish cinema expert Professor Peter William Evans who gives some insight into the meanings and symbolism behind the movie. Although Belle De Jour is erotically charged and deals with some disturbing subject matter that some might still find shocking, there is no explicit sex in the film. It is a film that appeals to our love of mystery and how the mind is drawn to interpret art in a specific way. In Belle de Jour, Buñuel challenges this desire by maintaining a sense of ambiguity to the very end of the film. The film typifies Buñuel's obsession with moral and social dilemmas, and the hypocrisy of the middle classes. Belle De Jour is one of the great erotic films of the 20th century.