Catherine Deneuve
Yesterday afternoon, I watched Nearest to Heaven (Au plus près du paradis), a Tonie Marshall film starring Catherine Deneuve. And William Hurt. I'll have to see it again before I can talk about it with you, but in talking about it with Kathleen afterward I hit on something about Ms Deneuve. The point may be a well-known cliché to people who talk about the movies, so pardon me if I repeat - but do tell me!
And what I'm going to "repeat," if it has been said before, is that Catherine Deneuve has entirely renovated the template of the role of the female star. She has done it the hard way. No one can doubt that in Repulsion and Belle de Jour she played "objects of the male gaze," and did so very well. But she grew up, and so did the filmmakers. At the moment, I'm ignorant enough to say that it was in The Last Metro that she played both a great "desirable" beauty and a person in her own right. Nowadays, of course, she plays only the person in her own right, a person who happens, amazingly, to be more beautiful than her younger self - probably because she's not acting. (Of course she's acting! How could I be so impertinent?) Nowadays, the directors line up to make a film starring Catherine Deneuve, as the fragile but commonsensical beauty she is, a woman whose hands, even, do not betray her sixty-plus years. (All right, she was 59 when she made Nearest to Heaven - opposite an actor two years [really almost three] younger than I am, not five years older.) And they keep making great movies.
Witness Place Vendôme, already eight years old. "Juste un camembert," she says. The movie is about her, not about you. Not about what you want. Not about what you want out of her. It cuts you off on the beach.
It cuts me off.
