ALTHOUGH the late, great Spanish director Luis Bunuel enjoyed a private and marital life of model normality, his creative vision was uncompromisingly at odds with a bourgeois world where order is maintained by imposing respect for false values. Like the philosopher Henri Bergson, he was in revolt against intelligence, which can never reveal what instinct discovers.

Bunuel, whose 1966 masterpiece Belle de Jour is to be screened at the Irish Film Institute in Dublin from 14-20 February, looked to extreme types and sexually aberrant situations for truths about human nature obscured by the narrow limits of traditional morality meaning. The subconscious world of dreams provided him with a surreal language to explore the ambiguities and contradictions that make life the mystery that it is.

His disbelief in God was not an arrogant affectation but part of his inherent distrust of explanations.

Yet his affirmation of the absurd always found expression in objective reality, undistorted. There are no fantastical effects. Every shot in his movies is rooted in a physical reality involving familiar everyday objects, directly shown. The conscious and the subconscious coexist in the same world.

Nowhere is this more intriguingly explored than in Belle de Jour, filmed in 1966, his version of a 1928 novel by Joseph Kessel in which a flawlessly beautiful but frigid Catherine Deneuve fantasises about being taken into a forest by her adoring husbands' servants and dragged from a carriage so that he can beat and rape her.

Too shy to reveal her urges to her husband, she secretly spends her afternoons working in a Paris brothel, where she feels no guilt participating in sex and gradually becomes liberated enough to contemplate a normal sexual relationship at home. The trouble is that her husband has become so crippled with guilt over his repressed sexual desire for her that he is unable to respond. Or so it might seem.

The brilliance of Belle de Jour is that Bunuel doesn't distinguish between fantasy and reality. The entire movie could conceivably have been imagined by Deneuve, the personification of bourgeois inhibition as she carefully strips off her exquisite designer lingerie item by item before the eyes of loathsome clients. Even when she is naked, she is too well-bred to reveal anything, a perfect receptacle into which the audience is prompted to read its own desires and fears. Belle de Jour is loaded with shots and scenes the meaning of which can only be imagined, most notoriously a lacquered box owned by a Japanese customer of which the whores are afraid. Why, we never discover because the contents are never shown.

Its enduring appeal is evidenced by a recent sequel filmed by Arturo Ripstein in which Deneuve and Michel Piccoli, one of her clients, meet up again over dinner 40 years later, and by a recent twopage spread in The Guardian in which Germaine Greer castigated Deneuve's "Barbie doll" inexpressiveness and inability to express sexual desire. "She might as well be going to the dentist as going to lose her virginity, " objected Greer, which of course is to miss the whole point of Bunuel. Greer also finds the entire premise to be contrived and based on what is "now" a cliché - the idea of a sexually abused child growing up to be a frigid woman turned on only by depravity. Yet this is to saddle Belle de Jour with a tidy explanation, whereas its greatness is that it has none.

Greer accuses Deneuve of an empty performance that gave Bunuel nothing, but in fact she gave him everything in her inexpressiveness, a face and a body into which - as with Garbo - everything and nothing can be read.

Luis Bunuel's 'Belle de Jour', is showing at Dublin's Irish Film Institute from the 14-20 February