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Thursday, Jul 6, 1995
Belle de Jour
Special admission: $10 general; $8 members, UCB students. To inaugurate PFA's 25th Anniversary celebration we are proud to present the premiere revival of Belle de Jour, a Luis Buñuel masterpiece that has long been out of distribution. A portion of the price of each ticket will be placed in the Pacific Film Archive endowment to ensure long-term support of the Archive's activities. In Belle de Jour Catharine Deneuve's beauty is a thing in itself: Deneuve was a collaborator in Buñuel's vision and gives a knowing performance as Séverine, a bored-cold bourgeoise who discovers how good evil can be on afternoons spent in a high-class brothel, where fantasy itself is a fetish object. The film is as endlessly mysterious and fascinating as the Chinese lacquer box into which Séverine peers-and what does she see? Don't quit your day job, Séverine. It takes violence, the more fantasized the better, to make any sort of crack in the lacquer. Belle de Jour is L'Age d'Or updated and in color. As Raymond Durgnat wrote, "Glittery, cool and urbane, Buñuel's film looks just like Lubitsch à la mode-almost a design for living in the Playgirl era. But underneath it's a bleak and sharp surrealist object that one can't touch, or even think about afterwards, without bleeding."
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