Belle Toujours

Hollywood philistine William Goldman once said that all directors lose their touch at 60, but clearly he’d forgotten that Luis Buñuel was 67 when he made Belle De Jour, to this day his most revered work and the beginning of an exemplary period in his career. That pales in comparison, however, to Manoel de Oliveira, the Portuguese auteur who here daringly gives us a sequel to Buñuel’s psycho-sexual classic at the age of 100. It would be easy to commend the director’s sheer audacity alone, but the film has much more to offer. At 65 minutes it is admittedly slight and the glacial presence of Catherine Deneuve is sorely missed, but this tale of the confrontation between an elderly Husson (Piccoli again) and Severine (Ogier, who played the other side of sado-masochism in Maitresse) is a rich piece of postmodernism. Less a sequel than an investigation of Buñuel’s themes, there are angels, classical art, a digital rooster (!) and the most intense dinner table sequence since Close Encounters.