Product Details

• Actors: Bulle Ogier, Ricardo Trepa Michel Piccoli
• Directors: Manoel de Oliveira
• Format: Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
• Language: French
• Subtitles: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: Unrated
• Studio: New Yorker
• DVD Release Date: June 24, 2008
• Run Time: 70 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B0015TJGH8
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #196,184 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "Belle Toujours" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Review

A winking homage to Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière's signature collaboration, Belle de Jour. --Jan Stuart, NEWSDAY

Product Description

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

See all Editorial Reviews

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I have yet to see a bad Manoel de Oliveira film...., July 7, 2008

By 

Grigory's Girl "Grigory's Girl" (NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Belle Toujours (DVD)

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.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars a self-indulgent time-waster, December 12, 2009

By 

Roland E. Zwick (Valencia, Ca USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Belle Toujours (DVD)

Running just a little over an hour in length, "Belle Toujours" is Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira's homage to "Belle De Jour," the classic French film from the 1960s, written and directed by Luis Bunuel. The original featured Catherine Deneuve as a beautiful bored housewife with masochistic fantasies who whiles away her afternoons working as a prostitute in a Paris brothel. In the "sequel," Michel Piccoli returns as Henri Husson, the friend who first suggested the brothel to Severine, and who, all these years later, has decided to have a rendezvous with the woman.

Though Piccoli reprises his role from the first movie, Severine is played by a different actress (Bulle Oglier), a casting imbalance that plays havoc with the symmetry of the piece. At least for "A Man and a Woman: Twenty Years Later," yet another misguided attempt at recapturing the magic of an earlier film, both Anouk Aimee and Jean-Louis Trintignant showed up for the reunion - though one can certainly sympathize with Deneuve`s reluctance to lend her talents to this film, which is smug, self-indulgent, talky and inert, and does nothing to enhance one's memory of the original work (happily, the utter innocuousness of the film also prevents it from HARMING that memory as well).

Henri basically spends the first two-thirds of the movie vainly trying to "connect" with Severine (they keep just missing one another, like in one of those Feydeau bedroom farces), and the last third dining with her in an opulent private room where they talk at length about the past and she tries to convince him that she's a "different" woman from the one he knew before - which should be perfectly obvious to anyone who remembers Catherine Deneuve. Then it all culminates in a fizzle-out ending, and we're left dumbfounded and openmouthed, wondering what the purpose for any of it could possibly have been.

One thing, however, is for certain: "Belle Toujours" is a complete waste of time and film.

0 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Boring, October 24, 2008

By 

Chauncey (Chicago, Illinois) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Belle Toujours (DVD)

It seemed that this movie was made to answer a lingering question from a previous movie but, it did not answer the question. I will avoid this director in the future, he has stung me once. However, if you are learning French it is not too difficult to understand. The characters speak clearly and they do not use a lot of much slang so it is good for practicing your French.