I had a vague awareness this was a cultural fixture from back around the time when The Story of O, Emmanuelle and stories like it came out – I was barely even aware it was a movie.

But it was from Luis Bunuel, and I really liked The Phantom of Liberty, it was about a repressed young woman going to work in a brothel and it was made in France, so at the very least I thought it might have a few scenes of Gallic nymphettes rolling around in bed in the altogether.

It came out in 1967, so no such luck, but it's still a very French idea. As the premise asks, what would cause a genteel, respectable young wife to want to be a prostitute when she can't even respond sexually to her handsome, successful husband?

Catherine Deneuve, back when she was a doll-like ingenue, plays Severine. She's married to Pierre (Jean Sorel), and when we meet the couple they're in what turns out to be a dream/fantasy sequence. Taking a romantic carriage ride, Pierre wants to make out with his wife, but she seems to hate being touched, the effect of some unseen trauma.

So he has the footmen of the coach drag her out into the woods, tie her to a tree, undress and start to whip her, and Severine wakes up. In real life he husband is ever-patient with her refusal to touch him, sure he'll bring her around eventually.

During a ski trip with another couple, during which the sleazy husband hits on her, his friendly wife tells Severine about a mutual acquaintance who works in a high end house of ill repute in town, and for some reason, Severine can't get the idea out of her head.

She walks up and down the street in question, looking at the door as if it's a portal to somewhere mysterious and potentially dangerous, finally working up the courage to go inside and meet the kindly madam, Anais, and the other two girls who work there. They give her a new professional name, Belle de Jour, and she sleeps with her first client.

Slightly horrified at what she's done, Severine stays away for more than a week, but gradually finds her way back, somehow hooked, and before long she's settled in her routine of working as a hooker in the afternoons and returning to her husband in the evening, her relationship with him gradually improving – apparently a consequence of her new profession.

Here and there, the crux of Severine's behaviour is revealed, the film showing the merest snippets of life from her past, including one in which she's barely a tween and a man we presume is her father pulls her into an embrace that's far too suggestive for her age, hinting that he's been sexually abusing her.

In another scene, she's again tied up while people fling mud and garbage and berate her seeming to reveal a BDSM streak the abuse has caused in her.

Narratively, it all has to come to a head eventually, and it does so in the case of petty crook Marcel, who takes such a shine to Severine it's only going to end badly. It seems destined she'd leave the profession eventually when she works out her demons, but he's in love with her and won't let go of her easily.

The final quarter or so of the film mostly abandons Severine's internal plight inasmuch as she's figured out her sexual psychology and is ready to leave. As her and Marcel's relationship descends into violence I wondered if it was a classic conservative viewpoint about promiscuity getting you or the people you love hurt or killed.

It's visually quite dull and I don't know how much nudity would have solved that (all jokes aside), so I had a hard time maintaining interest, and I think a slightly outsized reputation about how shocking it might have been when it came out goes some way to explaining its status as a classic today.

I was also torn between appreciating the way the film gave Severine the depth of explaining what she was doing and wanting to resist the other politically conservative idea I saw in it, that women only sell their bodies for sex because of trauma from some past emotional mistreatment or abuse and not because they're perfectly mentally healthy, have agency and have to make a living.