In the era of Nymph()maniac and Fifty Shades of Grey, we survey sex at the movies with a list of some of cinema’s naughtiest classics. Warning: this feature contains explicit imagery!
Belle de Jour (1967)
From his very first, surrealist short, Un chien andalou (1929), Luis Buñuel worked to strip away the idea of a concrete, objective reality, preferring to show how our dreams and subconscious desires overrun and erupt out of the everyday.
In 1967’s Belle de Jour, Catherine Deneuve plays Séverine, a frigid bourgeois wife, who makes all excuses to avoid sexual contact with her respectable husband, at the same time harbouring wistful daydreams about being whipped by brutish coachmen. She secretly takes a day job as a prostitute in a Parisian brothel, where she explores her more illicit desires while catering to the idiosyncratic tastes of her customers. One client in particular is a source of enduring mystery: the Japanese businessman who brings along a small box. Mischievously, Buñuel never shows us what’s inside (a creature? some fiendish sex toy?), but whatever it is appears to help bring Séverine to delirious orgasm.
A scandalous cause célèbre in the 60s, Belle de Jour remains a provocative fusion of fantasy and reality and a rare movie to admit how danger informs our sexual reveries.
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