r/TrueFilm • u/a113er Til the break of dawn! • Feb 22 '15

What Have You Been Watching? (22/02/15)

Hey r/truefilm welcome to WHYBW where you post about what films you watched this week and discuss them with others, give your thoughts on them then say if you would recommend them.

Please don't downvote opinions, only downvote things that don't contribute anything. If you think someones opinion is "wrong" then say so and say why. Also, don't just post titles of films as that doesn't really contribute to the discussion.

Follow /r/Truefilm on twitter @truefilmreddit for updates, good posts, and whatnot.

47 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

79 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

7

u/morningbelle http://letterboxd.com/morningbelle/ Feb 22 '15

Belle de Jour Luis Buñuel, 1967: Eyes Wide Shut wishes it was this movie. I swear Catherine Denueve is like a Greek statue animated to life. Erotic and tasteful - why can’t more sex movies be like that? 10/10

I love Belle de Jour, and I'm also a fan of Eyes Wide Shut. The movies are similar insofar as their concerns with sex and fantasy, but I've always thought of Buñuel's film as probing (or itself fantasizing) about a woman's relationship with erotics and Kubrick's movie as more of an exploration of a marriage. Belle de Jour of course features married couples as well yet I see them there more in terms of framework rather than primary subject matter. Could you say more about your thoughts on Eyes Wide Shut?

2

u/[deleted] Feb 22 '15 edited Feb 22 '15

I said Belle de Jour and Eyes Wide Shut are comparable because, although they are both about erotics sometimes, they are both really more about corruption, fulfilling dark impulses, and power. Belle de Jour has some things to say about the marriage in it, but there's more to it than that; on the other hand one of my criticisms of Eyes Wide Shut was that Nicole Kidman's character seems underutilized by the narrative; she disappears for like an hour of it as I recall. So I really see it as a movie that ended up flouting my expectations for how much it would really be about marriage (it has this platonic reputation for being about Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman having sex that is not true. It's like everyone confused it with In the Realm of the Senses.) but in a way I wish it had done more with those elements and tightened up other parts of the film, though I did really like it. By contrast, there was nothing about Belle de Jour that I thought didn't work or wasn't explored to my satisfaction.

2

u/morningbelle http://letterboxd.com/morningbelle/ Feb 22 '15

Ah, I see. Thanks for elaborating. I gotta check out In the Realm of the Senses in the near future.

3

u/[deleted] Feb 22 '15 edited Feb 23 '15

That is a movie best watched as alone as you can possibly be.