Belle de Jour

Severine and Pierre are a young relatively newly married Parisienne couple in a comfortable upper middle class life. They are outwardly in a loving, happy marriage, which belies the fact that she more often than not rejects his romantic and sexual advances in the bedroom. He tolerates her rejections in his love for her. Although she tells him of the benign situations of her many dreams, she doesn't tell him of the details, which always include he controlling and humiliating her in some form of sexual dominance. She does not know why she rejects him sexually, or why she has such dreams. She learns from various sources that one of her distant married friends, a woman by the name of Henrietta, works as a prostitute in a high end brothel, which she didn't know even existed. Although initially uncomfortable with both the thought and the actual actions of having sex with strange men for money, Severine is nonetheless drawn to work in such an establishment. In doing so, Severine may be able to exorcise some demons in her life, but perhaps not at others' expense in the process.