Consider the relation of style to subject matter in this film. Buñuel's mise-en-scène always maintains the impeccable look of the most lavish and respectable bourgeois decors and fashions, even as the plot delves into bizarre sexual perversions. Similarly, Buñuel's editing remains clean and conventional, even as the film disrupts linear temporality with flashbacks, dream sequences, unexplained jumps between scenes, and ambiguous transformations. What do you make of this contrast between form and content?
Surrealism celebrated the eruption of unconscious desires, liberating the imagination and disrupting the dreary routines of everyday life. Belle de Jour seems to follow this pattern, as Séverine's respectable and frigid marriage contrasts with her experiences of sexual desire and satisfaction in the brothel (and also, perhaps, in her masochistic dreams). But is Séverine's life in the brothel really an imaginative liberation? How does the experience change her? Can the film be understood as a struggle between desire and repression, or is some other dynamic at play?
What do you make of Catherine Deneuve's performance? How expressive is she? How warm or cold? Is there a tension between the iconic power of Deneuve as a big star, and the sort of role she is compelled to play in this film?
What do you make of the character of Husson? of Marcel?
What role is played by the film's soundtrack? What do you make of the frequent sounds of carriage bells, and of clock chimes announcing the time?
How do you read the ending of the film, with Pierre's return to perfect health? How does this retrospectively change our understanding of what has come before? Which levels of the film are "real," and which are fantasy? Or does the distinction make sense at all? How does the film's cinematic self-consciousness relate to the questions of desire that it so insistently raises?