AThe list of men she has kissed in front of the camera is a piece of film history. It starts with Jean Marais, Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret, Jean-Paul Belmondo. Then follow Alain Delon, Yves Montand, Jean-Louis Trintignant, but also Jack Lemmon, Omar Sharif, Marcello Mastroianni, Vittorio Gassman, Burt Reynolds, John Malkovich and William Hurt. And always Gérard Depardieu. But the most important kiss, which she received and finally returned in a film after a long, stubborn struggle, came from a woman: Fanny Ardant.
The scene from François Ozon’s comedy “8 Women”, in which the two end their family clinch in such an unexpected way, is memorable not only because it unites two of the most important actresses of French cinema in an embrace. It also touches on the core of the fascination that has emanated from the actress Catherine Deneuve for sixty years. This fascination goes far beyond the well-known game of attraction between men and women. It is the magic of the pictorial, of the beauty that has become an image, the promise of happiness of a phenomenon that gives itself over by withdrawing itself.
The movie star’s desire for fear
There is a photo from the filming of “The Disgust” in 1965 that shows Roman Polanski, the director, with the then twenty-one-year-old Catherine Deneuve. He kneels in front of her in the dark, the camera on his shoulder, while she turns her head away, standing in the light. She plays a young woman who, driven by unclear erotic impulses, loses her mind and becomes a murderer, and the film continually looks at her face as if it found the solution to the riddle of her soul. But the mystery remains. Instead, Deneuve’s body takes center stage; in a nighttime vision, dozens of hands grow out of the walls of the dark corridor and reach for him, caressing him, holding him tight. Since then, no one has found a better image for the female film star’s desire for fear.
Catherine Fabienne Dorléac, who took her mother’s maiden name as an actress, has transformed this desire for fear into expression, playing with it, holding it up to the camera like a suit of armor, always guarding the secret that lies beneath the magic of all her characters. There is much to suggest that this secret is based on an experience of loss. As a debutante, Catherine Deneuve was for a long time in the shadow of her older sister Françoise, who had already filmed with Truffaut, René Clair, De Broca and Polanski and was considered the more eccentric and versatile of the two. In June 1967, Françoise Dorléac died in a car accident. A month earlier, the film that made Deneuve suddenly famous and in which she placed her body at the mercy of men’s hands for the second time had been released: “Belle de Jour.”
It is the story of a double life. A doctor’s wife, cool, elegant, works in a luxury brothel during the day. The filming was a duel: Luis Buñuel, the director, already a classic back then, wanted to shoot nude scenes, the actress resisted. She was successful. The film was her triumph because it freed her character from the cage of male fantasy in which Buñuel and his screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière had placed her. But it also created a new kind of prison, as it shaped Deneuve’s image as an actress for decades. She became the icon of the cool seductress who remains unmoved by the passions she arouses. Helmut Newton photographed her in this role at the end of the 1980s, and in 1983 Tony Scott gave her the role of an ancient Egyptian vampire in “Desire” who keeps the bodies of her dead lovers (including David Bowie) in coffins. She had long since freed herself from the shackles of her Buñuel characters (alongside “Belle de Jour” “Tristana”), not coincidentally in a film by François Truffaut.
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