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Belle Toujours

Screening on Film
Directed by Manoel de Oliveira.
With Michel Piccoli, Bulle Ogier, Ricardo Trepa.
Portugal/France, 2006, 35mm, color, 68 min.
French with English subtitles.

In this homage to Luís Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière, Manoel de Oliveria reunites the leading characters from the 1967 classic Belle de jour. Picking up thirty-eight years from where Buñuel’s erotic masterpiece left off, Michel Piccoli returns as Henri Husson—older and wiser, but still every bit the sadist libertine who in the original both lusted after and callously taunted Catherine Deneuve's “Belle” to the very end. “An elegant bagatelle, hardly more than an anecdote, Belle Toujours evokes a vanishing world where elegance cohabits with perversity… Alongside ravishing orchestral excerpts from Dvorak’s 8th Symphony and god’s-eye shots of Paris by day and night, Oliveira applies his mannered deadpan style to this tantalizing cinematic grace note" (Robert Keser).

Part of film series

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Seventh Annual New Films from Europe