Belle Toujours
by Manoel de Oliveira
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Bulle Ogier, Ricardo Trepa Michel PiccoliDirector: Manoel de Oliveira
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); French (Original Language)
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 70 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-06-24
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: New Yorker
Movie Reviews of Belle Toujours
Movie Review: I have yet to see a bad Manoel de Oliveira film....
Summary: 5 Stars
This is yet one more excellent film in the oeuvre of Manoel de Oliveira. It's another endlessly fascinating, intellectual, thoughtful, and dark film. It's not technically a sequel to Luis Bunuel's Belle de Jour, more like a tribute and a coda to the original story. You don't have to see Belle de Jour to understand this film, but it helps. De Oliveira doesn't try to outdo Bunuel here (except when a chicken makes a cameo), but instead has his own unique, fascinating take of the main characters from Belle de Jour (if you want to see a Manoel de Oliveira film where he gives Bunuel a run for his money, check out Magic Mirror, the film he made before this one). Michel Piccoli once again meets Bulle Ogier (she replaced Catherine Deneuve here), and asks her to dinner. He expects to "rekindle" their relationship, but he's in for quite a surprise.
This is a deceptively simple film. It's beautifully shot, acted, written, and directed. Piccoli is wonderful and charming, and Ogier gives her character an edge here that, dare I say, Deneuve might have missed. Richardo Trepa, a De Oliveira regular, plays a bartender here and he is wonderful, turning in one of his best performances in Manoel's work. The script is quite literate, and the first part of the concluding dinner scene is fascinating, as it is done without any dialogue. All you hear is Ogier and Piccoli eating. When their conversation starts, it's intense, real, sad, bitter, and very poetic. The whole film works wonderfully.
The only complaint I have is that the film is too short. It runs just over an hour (70 minutes), and I wished it was longer. New Yorker Video gave this film a fine transfer, and has some great interviews with de Oliveira, Piccoli, Ogier, and Trepa. The de Oliveira interview was recorded two days after the opening of his retrospective at BAM Rose Cinemas in Brooklyn. I met Manoel on the opening day of the retrospective(they were screening his latest film, Christopher Columbus, The Enigma, a good film, but like Belle Toujours, too short), and it is one of the greatest experiences of my life meeting him. This is one of his best films.
Summary of Belle Toujours
In this homage to Luís Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière, Manoel de Oliveira reunites the leading characters from the 1967 classic Belle de jour. Picking up from where Buñuel s erotic masterpiece left off, Michel Piccoli returns in Manoel de Oliveira's Belle Toujours 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 Séverine to the very end. What exactly did Husson whisper into the ear of her paraplegic husband?In Belle Toujours, Oliveira s Séverine is played by Bulle Ogier, whom Piccoli's Husson first spots sitting a few rows away from him at a concert in Paris. A cat-and-mouse game ensues until Husson manages to gain her attention with the intention of revealing the secret that he alone can unfold. After years of lingering torment, Séverine is finally offered an opportunity to uncover the truth about what her husband learned or didn't learn about her during that fateful visit with Husson so many years earlier.
Special Features:
- Interviews with: Manoel de Oliveira, Michael Piccoli, Bulle Ogier and Ricardo Trêpa
- Theatrical Trailer
- Photo Gallery
- Press Kit (Download the 39-page press kit, including the director's bio, cast & crew filmographies, production notes, an essay by Randal Johnson (author of Contemporary Film Directors: Manoel de Oliveira) and more via your computer s DVD-ROM drive.)
- Enhanced for 16x9 Tvs
- Scene Selections
- Optional English Subtitles
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