Belle de Jour

Belle de Jour is a 1967 French film directed by Luis Bunuel, starring Catherine Deneuve as a bored, sexually repressed bourgeois housewife who begins secretly working afternoons at a brothel while her fantasies and her waking life become increasingly difficult for the viewer to tell apart. Adapted from Joseph Kessel's novel, the film withholds any clear signal of where reality ends and daydream begins, a deliberate ambiguity that became one of its most discussed features. Belle de Jour won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and is widely regarded as one of Bunuel's major later works.