One can easily get lost in the tricky business of signposting the episodes as "real" or "fantasy" in Buñuel's account of a frigid bourgeois housewife's moonlighting at a swank Parisian brothel. (Sunlighting, actually: she's not Belle de Nuit.) The subtitlist for the original U.S. distributor came to his own dubious decisions, and switched to italics whenever he felt he was in the fantasy realm. The voices, of course, provide no such guidance. And nor, in any other way, does Buñuel, directing in his most unflappable and understated manner, and bundling up cozily in the luxurious color images of Sacha Vierny. In a sense, whether "real" or "fantasy" hardly matters; it is wholly a Buñuel movie, and there are some marvelous moments in his fetishistic, underclothes-sniffing vein. The narrative becomes rather too facile, and too like the anecdotalism of gristmill "nudies," when it capers from one screwball client to another at the brothel; but the total effect is nonetheless slippery, teasing, insinuating. With Catherine Deneuve, Genevieve Page, Jean Sorel, Pierre Clementi, Francisco Rabal. (1967) — Duncan Shepherd
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