Belle de nuit: Catherine Deneuve turns 80!

Although one month ago, French movie icon Catherine Deneuve celebrated her 80^th birthday, she is still far from retirement: after a much talked-about commercial for Cartier in which she revisited all the ages of her career with the magical help of AI, she’s been back on film screens with Bernadette, a humorous biopic in which she plays former First-Lady and philanthropist Bernadette Chirac and she’s already scheduled to appear in new features by Christophe Honoré or Gustave Kervern and Benoît Délépine. Her career, spanning over seven decades and more than a hundred films, has almost no equivalent in French cinema except maybe for Danielle Darrieux’s, who played her mother on-screen on repeated occasions.

At the beginning of the 1960s, few could have imagined such a longevity, as Deneuve was at first perceived as tabloid-fodder, a less-talented facsimile of her sister Françoise Dorléac who owed her fame to her controversial relationship with film mogul Roger Vadim. That was until Jacques Demy offered her the leading role in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a sublime musical drama that was awarded the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival in 1964. Deneuve, with her platinum-blonde hair, angelic features, clear voice and blank expression, portrayed an idealized image of innocence and passivity that defined the first part of her career, and her other classic collaborations with Demy, Young Girls from Rochefort (1970) and Donkey Skin (1970). Roman Polanski (Repulsion, 1965) and Luis Buñuel (Belle de jour, 1967) soon perverted her coy persona by suggesting that her bland mask of diaphanous beauty secretly concealed madness or sexual deviance. As French scholar Gwénaëlle Le Gras convincingly argued in her essays dedicated to the star, the conservative aspect of her initial persona that set her apart from her New Wave peers in the 1960s led to her career stalling during most of the 1970s, during which popular stars like Annie Girardot or Marlène Jobert embodied a modern femininity that resonated more with audiences. Still she managed a few hits like Jean-Pierre Melville’s Un flic (1972) and Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s Lovers Like Us (1975), even if her attempt at her Hollywood career didn’t prove very successful (with the exception maybe of Tony Scott’s cult vampire film, The Hunger). Deneuve made a spectacular comeback in 1980 with François Truffaut’s Last Metro in which she reinvented herself as an active, strong-willed yet vulnerable heroine opposite a sensitive Gérard Depardieu – their onscreen alchemy was so strong that many directors cast them again as a couple in later stages of their careers. The film’s success helped her build a graceful path to maturity, paved with memorable performances in box-offices hits like Régis Wargnier’s Indochine (1992), André Téchiné’s My Favorite Season (1993) or François Ozon’s 8 Women (2002) and striking parts in well-received arthouse films by Raoul Ruiz, Philippe Garrel, Leos Carax, Manoel de Oliveira, Lars von Trier, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Christophe Honoré or Arnaud Desplechin. Deneuve has become a legend and has often been cast as such, her mere presence overflowing the screen with cinematic memories. But after playing so many cold and distant characters, she also has showed unexpected range in those later performances, as the impassioned, feverish heroines that frequent collaborator André Téchiné wrote for her or as an alcoholic diamond merchant in Nicole Garcia’s crime drama Place Vendôme (1998).

How has Deneuve managed to remain a star for so long for many reasons? More than her striking and everlasting beauty that has owed her fruitful partnerships with luxury brands, one has to appreciate the modernity of her fast-spoken, minimalist, anti-sentimental acting style and her relentless curiosity towards young filmmakers. In her later years, she has shown once more her sense of reinvention through her surprising left turn towards comedy, that has allowed her to revisit with wit and distance her glacial persona and to sustain box-office relevance with well-received hits such as Belle Maman (1999), Palais Royal (2005) or Potiche (2010). She also has managed to move gracefully towards complex parts reflecting her entrance into the fourth age, playing headstrong grandmothers in Téchiné’s L’Adieu à la nuit (2019) and Kore-eda’s The Truth (2009) or women suffering from dementia in Pierre Salvadori’s In The Courtyard (2014) and Julie Bertuccelli’s Claire Darling (2018). Her alert performance in Bernadette is another reminder of the diversity of her talents and, knowing Deneuve, she might surprise us again before long!

Image credit: Bernadette, directed by Chirac in Léa Domenach, produced by Fabrice Goldstein and Antoine Rein, 2023.

Written by: Alexandre Moussa