While a narrative on the background of sometimes unknown television archives, Virginie Linhart’s documentary attempts to pierce the secret of the French actress by assembling a biographical puzzle.
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After Bardot in love (2016) and Jeanne Moreau, the postage (2017), the documentarist Virginie Linhart makes the ascent of another Everest of the profession with Deneuve, Queen Catherine (2021). And it is necessary to go to the ice ax, as the one who took the name of his mother to better distinguish himself from his sister, the actress Françoise Dorleac (1942-1967), seems taken in the ice of a thick mystery – of which she says that it is “a very extensible ground”.
The work done by Virginie Linhart works on the principle of the Danaid barrel: the more we know, the less we know. But it reconstructs a biographical puzzle, with a lot of unknown archival documents that illustrate what has been largely already written, especially in these columns, in the series in six components “Catherine Deneuve, behind the screen”, from Raphaëlle. Backed, in 2020.
Everyone says good comrade and funny in private life and on the trays. The portrait of her Frédéric Mitterrand in bad life (Robert Laffont, 2005), even reveals, at the turn of a narcotic anecdote, the concern for the other when the actress moves before his eyes blank aid. shock with a rugged biker.
Behind the glacis, the cracking
But Deneuve is wary of the press, only receives her home since a journalist, not seeing books in the room where the face-to-face held, had deduced that she did not read – as reported by the American writer Edmund White, in Arts and Letters (Cleis Press, 2004, not translated).
At the favor of what Catherine Deneuve has been able to slide, where, sometimes to foreign media, the documentary evokes with tact a loving life provided and its collateral damage – the disagreement and the weariness that insinuate, ‘disrespect or betrayal that hurt. It lacks parts on the record. It does not matter and better: Deneuve lawyers are watching over the preservation of his private domain.
It has often been bounced on its acts of annoyed attendance – which have sometimes put it in uncomfortable situations – less on its advertising campaigns, many of which have been turned in the United States. “Whether it’s clear: we advertise to make money, those who say something else are hypocrites,” she says to the world, in 1997. and add, in an extract spotted by Virginie Linhart: “I’m very died, I’m not proud, but I’m not ashamed.”
The documentary evokes ultractic or controversial subjects: the work of the father of the actress for Radio Paris during the occupation, the supported support of Deneuve to Roman Polanski, with whom she turned repulsion (1965) – one Roles who broke his image too smooth – and his signature affixed to the bottom of a platform defending “freedom of import, indispensable for sexual freedom”, published in 2018, in Le Monde.
Finally there is the subject that hurts: premature death, in a car accident from Françoise Dorleac. During a television interview, Champagne Cup by hand, Deneuve bleed with the evocation, by the journalist, his missing sister; Then recompose very quickly. But the crack appeared behind the glaze of the surface. Because, as affectionately and lucids the Trintignant Nadine filmmaker: “There is always, at home, something broken inside, even when it laughs.”