Admittedly, there are a few clues that suggest that the goddess is real: she apparently has two children, and she has occasionally been seen on the street or in a restaurant, but these must be optical illusions. Catherine Deneuve has no contact with the ground, she exists only as a fantasy.
The classic goddess is born in foam, Botticelli paints her as she reveals herself shamefully, with her hair flying in the wind! Catherine Deneuve, it is clear until proven otherwise, is also out of this world, she was born in the cinema and only lives there.
“In the end I thought I’d just let them do it,” says one of their best directors
Whether Greta Garbo, Lauren Bacall, Marilyn Monroe or Audrey Hepburn is the most beautiful woman in the world doesn’t matter in the cinema or for Catherine Deneuve, she is the only goddess. The chiseled face is not humanly possible, it comes from somewhere else entirely. She has made around 140 films since 1957, and there is surprisingly little industrial scrap among them.
The viewer is allowed to be there when she doesn’t disappear into the role each time, but rather Catherine Deneuve appears, whom he only vaguely recognizes. As the saying goes, no role is tailor-made for her; she only discovers it while playing. She allowed great directors to watch her become more and more alien and distant, but in this game they were nothing more than better assistants, indispensable to be sure, but ultimately just amazed spectators.
André Téchiné could only resign before the goddess: “In the end I thought I would just let her do it.” Luis Buñuel was allowed to live out his obsessions with her when he made his bored wife dream of sadomasochistic afternoons. With Roman Polański, she wanders through a London that isn’t at all during the prime of Carnaby Street and the Beatles swinging, but is just one evil art film gray.
That was, a quick look back into the last century, before the Marvel adventures cluttered up the cineplexes, that was when François Truffaut was still alive and Manoel de Oliveira. The goddess could advertise every perfume and every iron that came along, sign manifestos, be an ambassador for this and that, she could only develop her supernatural being on the screen and only with the best. She even claims to have written a letter to Lars von Trier to apply for a role in “Dancer in the Dark”.
Not even the deification of Marianne as ordered by the authorities could harm her. She may have been France’s greatest actress alongside Jeanne Moreau, a national treasure, but she fought back against monumental rigidity with every new role. The task for the cameramen, directors and screenwriters was to find stories for this face.
The goddess is not just looked at, she looks back
She became famous in Jacques Demy as a sweet girl who sells umbrellas and has to let her lover go to war, but with two more films she disturbed the friends of cultivated entertainment. “Disgust” is so profound that no media board, no matter how conscious of regional support, would co-finance such an adventure today. Polański and his cameraman Gilbert Taylor dispense with any psychology and, when expressionism is not raging in Carole’s apartment, they only film her hair, under which, as Agnès Varda remembers, she initially hid her flawless face.
But the goddess cannot be a pure object; she is not just looked at, but looks back. The opening credits only show her eye with the staff list running through it; the director’s name runs through it like the razor in “Andalusian Dog” by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. When Buñuel himself had her play “Belle de Jour”, he revealed the obvious secret of her success: she reveals herself so uninhibitedly that the viewer inevitably becomes a voyeur. When the morbid Duc recruits her to celebrate a black mass with her, the director himself sits in front of the Chalet de la Grand Cascade in the Bois de Boulogne, spectator and accomplice in the perverse spectacle that is about to unfold.
She was frightening and not just aloof in these two films and yet she became popular. Oddly enough, the much earthier Gérard Depardieu seems to be her favorite partner over the years. While he grew in years, in strength and fullness, she remained the distant, cool beauty; In one of the otherwise unimportant Asterix and Obelix films she plays, what else, the queen, in this case the English one. Beauty and the Big Beast.
Truffaut brought the two together in The Last Metro, a dream couple that only the cinema believes possible. During the German occupation in Paris, Deneuve had to hide her Jewish husband in the basement and run the theater in his place. He believes he can continue directing from below until, as I said, the cinema gets involved. Deneuve falls in love with his young lover, Depardieu, and the man in the basement can only watch helplessly at the theater he thinks he is staging and yet has to admire what is happening.
This is the situation of the viewer who, in front of the screen, does not know what is happening to him – and yet absolutely wants to believe it. This is the eternal story of cinema in a single film. And even though it is now getting quite old, it lives on in its goddess. Even when Catherine Deneuve is running through the forest in a red jogging suit or playing grieving widows, she is still the sweet Geneviève who sings and dances in “Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and the inexperienced Belmondo in “Secret of the False Bride”. Head turned, the Princess Donkey Skin, who escapes the incestuous grasp of Jean Marais, the woman with the red boots, the Carole, who consists only of hair and madness and more hair. Rumor has it that the goddess turns eighty this Sunday, but you don’t have to believe everything the newspapers say.