Director: Manoel de Oliveira
Year Released: 2006
Rating: 2.0
Close to forty years have passed since Buñuel's masterpiece Belle du Jour was created, but forever curious Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli) spots Séverine (Bulle Ogier, as a character formerly played by Catherine Deneuve) at a concert and is determined to have dinner with her, talk of old times ... and also antagonize her. Oliveira borrows a page from the Spanish master by casting a different actress to play the former prostitute (she tells Piccoli in a conversation that time has made her a different woman ... and she means it), and the idea of 'revisiting' classic characters years later is a charming idea (it's a sign of the original film's greatness that we'd care about what happened to them in the first place), though this is more of a lark than a fully developed feature and could have very well been made as a short film. Piccoli's such an amazing presence, however, that watching him eat asparagus and belt down glass after glass of whiskey is never dull.
