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Could an offshoot of spring fever be Catherine Deneuve fervor? Two early, landmark films starring the world’s most famous French actor are playing in shimmering, brand-new prints: Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967) at the Paris and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) at Film Forum. Next month, three films she made with André Téchiné—Hotel of the Americas (1981), Scene of the Crime (1986) and My Favorite Season (1993)—will unspool at the French Institute, and her latest with Téchiné, Changing Times, is scheduled for release in June. Deneuve, who has acted in more than 90 films, has perfected icy iconicity, her performances indelibly marked by coolness and blankness. April weather may bring thaw, but those who still crave chill will delight in Deneuve’s hauteur.
Repulsion, Deneuve’s first English-language film, came only a year after her breakout role as Geneviève, the melancholic jeune fille in Jacques Demy’s lollipop-hued, entirely sung melodrama, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Polanski’s horror show begins with an extremely tight close-up of Deneuve: several shots of her eyeball, her pupil dominating the entire screen. Yet despite the camera’s proximity, Deneuve, at the height of her inscrutable blankness, remains remarkably distant—a damaged beauty hiding under a mane of luxuriant blond hair, her delicate, accented English rarely registering above a whisper. Plummeting into psychosis, Deneuve is an exemplar of glacial catatonia; rather than madwoman thrashing and gnashing, her character spends hours staring motionless at a crack in a sidewalk.
In Belle de Jour, Deneuve is Séverine, a deeply disenchanted Parisian housewife frequently trussed up and mussed up while sporting the smartest finery by Yves Saint Laurent. She emits frost: “I feel this coldness from you,” laments Pierre (Jean Sorel), her doting doctor husband. In an unconsummated marriage, Séverine finds liberation of a sort through byzantine psychosexual fantasies—and the 2 to 5 shift at a bordello. As in Repulsion, there are fleeting flashbacks to childhood trauma (a man touches Séverine inappropriately; she adamantly refuses a Communion wafer). Yet in Buñuel’s film, these scenes are almost non sequiturs, presented not as psychological “explanation” but as blips in a baroque sexual surrealism. Bondage, defilement, debasement: Séverine revels in it all.
Is it merely a coincidence that Deneuve made Belle de Jour shortly after starring in The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), an even sunnier Jacques Demy musical? Deneuve’s early starring roles, it seems, alternate between purity and perversion. In 1970, three years after Belle de Jour, she would appear in Buñuel’s equally bizarre Tristana, in which she plays an innocent lusted after by a well-respected Spanish gentleman; the same year she would star in yet another Demy musical, Donkey Skin, based on a popular French fairy tale.
Changing Times, like some of Deneuve’s more high-profile performances in the past decade—Raul Ruiz’s Time Regained (1999) and François Ozon’s 8 Women (2002)—plays on Deneuve’s legendary status. As Cécile, a radio announcer in Morocco (“To all dancehall reggae fans,” she coos over the airwaves) in a fractious marriage, Deneuve shares an awkward reunion with Antoine (Gérard Depardieu), an engineer who still hasn’t gotten over his love for her 30 years after their relationship. Famously, these two actors, the reigning king and queen of French cinema, were paired in François Truffaut’s The Last Metro (1980); this casting allows Téchiné to make sly jokes on real/reel life. Antoine carries a photo of the two of them—which could have been a snapshot of Deneuve and Depardieu that ran in Paris Match.
Téchiné’s collaboration with Deneuve began one year after The Last Metro with Hotel of the Americas; as in Scene of the Crime and My Favorite Season, the director casts her in Changing Times as a steely, impenetrable woman struggling with family ties. Once again, Deneuve’s character is known for her aloofness: “She was always accused of being cold. She tries to be warm,” Cécile’s son, Sami (Malik Zidi), explains to his girlfriend. Antoine’s ardor has only grown stronger, but Cécile dismisses him: “I don’t live in the past. I went on without you.” But we lucky filmgoers can always revisit Deneuve—and succumb once more to her chilly charms.
Belle de Jour continues at the Paris; Repulsion opens Friday 21 at Film Forum.
