08/09/2006

Fifty years after his first appearance at Venice, with the documentary The Artist and the City, veteran filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira is back at the festival with his latest film, Belle Toujours [+see also:
trailer
film profile], screening today out of competition.

The film features the leading characters from 1967's classic Belle de jour, picking up nearly 40 years later in their lives. This year's president of the jury Catherine Deneuve has been replaced by Bulle Ogier in the role of Séverine, a bourgeois lady who once dared to live out her masochist fantasies in a brothel. Michel Piccoli is back as Henry Husson, the man who might have revealed this secret to Séverine's paraplegic husband.

Buñuel's film had an open ending that left a lingering doubt, which could be interpreted as moral punishment for Séverine, who, in Oliveira's film, confesses to have been tormented all these years by that same doubt.

Oliveira stresses that Belle Toujours is not a sequel but his own homage to Luís Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière. Those thinking that such a tribute may mean the master is shedding his style to take on Buñuel’s can rest assured that Oliveira remains faithful to himself and dedicates this self-coherence to the Spanish director. Long still shots feed the film with Oliveira’s typically contemplative style, which is also characterised by a refined humour perfectly embodied by Piccoli’s amazingly sadistic performance.

Playing opposite Piccoli is Portuguese actor Ricardo Trepa, a bartender and astonished listener of mankind’s little perversities, and Bulle Ogier, who tries hard but is incapable to bringing the icy presence of Deneuve’s original performance to the character.

Belle Toujours marks Oliveira’s second collaboration with Portuguese producer Miguel Cadilhe (Filbox), who co-produced the film with France’s Serge Lalou (Les Films d'Ici), with support from ICAM. World sales are being managed by Onoma Production.