THEY...CANNOT...TOUCH...HER...

CATHERINE DENEUVE AT 80.

The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983)

 Cathérine Deneuve turned 80 in October, an event marked by the release of a new film, Bernadette, bringing her screen and TV appearances to 143.  

I wrote the piece below before I met her, but there isn’t much I’d change. In person, she replicates the poise and calm of her performances. In my memory she always comes accompanied by the line in which Travis in Taxi Driver articulates his awe of Betsy – “Out of this filthy mess, she is alone…They…cannot…touch… her…”

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The wit who mistranslated " La Belle Dame sans merci " as "The Beautiful Lady Who Never Says 'Thank You"' achieved by chance a perfect encapsulation of France's two most potent female stars of the 1960s. On an axis with Jeanne Moreau at one pole and Cathérine Deneuve at the other, that cinema can be seen to revolve—an industry and art, paradoxically for a nation which, while united under de Gaulle in its respect for family, social formality, and la gloire , favoured a film industry preoccupied with the demi-mondaine : gamblers, criminals, soldiers of fortune, and, most of all, its destructive, beguiling, but always unbeholden feminine adventurers.

Of the actresses who played these soiled heroines, none succeeded more stylishly than Deneuve. Moreau's pouting sourness led her, via an association with the nouvelle vague, to the epicene baroque of late Fassbinder. Deneuve, almost preternaturally beautiful, a confection of peach skin and golden hair, offered little to stimulate the new directors, with the exception of Roger Vadim. She survived two routine films with him (as well as the obligatory domestic entanglement) to become one of France's most successful star exports, a symbol of lustful purity for forces as disparate as Luis Buñuel and Chanel perfume.

The title of an otherwise unremarkable film, Touche pas à la femme blanche/Don’t Touch the White Lady, might be her emblem. Deneuve's most potent stock in trade has always been a beguiling and complaisant innocence, combined with an ingrained seriousness, even solemnity, that her most unbuttoned action cannot dislodge. To see Deneuve laughing is to see her naked, yet physical nudity reveals no more of this remarkable woman than it would of the young Garbo.

Whether playing a Los Angeles call girl in Aldrich's Hustle , a psychopath in Polanski's Repulsion , the bisexual private eye of Ecoute voir. . .  or a second-rate singer in the trivial Courage, Fuyons , she remains apparently remote, calm, moving to a private rhythm, occupied with thoughts uniquely her own. As Jacques Siclier wrote of her role as the compromised political wife in Le Bon Plaisir , "Here, where artifice covers everything, Cathérine Deneuve remains honest, natural and disinterested."

An actress capable of playing, on the one hand, the sentimental provincial heroines of Demy's musical fantasies Les Parapluies de Cherbourg and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort and the fairy story Peau d'âne , and on the other the calculating lovers of Benjamin, Manon 70 , Mayerling , and Truffaut's La Sirène du Mississippi , as well as the anti-Nazi schemer of his Le Dernier Métro , would clearly attract Buñuel. But it was the disinterest Siclier mentions which gave Buñuel the material for Belle de jour and Tristana

Belle de Jour (Luis Bunuel, 1967)

Buñuel distilled the essence of Deneuve's appeal. Calm but never placid, distant but always touchable, subtly or, as the amputee of Tristana , grossly mutilated but confident in her essential concept of self, she epitomized his vision of woman as destroying angel—a whore with a heart, not of gold, but of glass. In particular in Belle de jour, Deneuve's sexuality is self-contained; she is the detached yet eternally sexual (as opposed to romantic) creature. In this film, she was never more beautiful in the role of Severine, a virginal upper-class lady of leisure who has everything a woman who has not embraced feminism could ask for: porcelain good looks, a handsome and successful husband, servants and good clothes, and all the time to spend money she has had no part in earning. But Severine is despondent. She begins having erotic fantasies. And soon, she takes part-time work in a brothel: a job she eventually comes to relish. Severine does not know why she is so attracted to her double life. "But without this I could not live," she eventually remarks, of her employment. One cannot imagine any actress other than Deneuve in the role.

Like Moreau, Deneuve decorated her middle years with portraits of surpassing decadence, but characteristically the crumbling exterior of Moreau's raddled madam in Querelle hid a girlish romantic, while Deneuve as the vampire in Tony Scott 's The Hunger , though outwardly unmarked by age, has decayed to the core with centuries of lust and self-regard. Yet her innocence remains, almost to the end, unsullied, her tenderness for her dying partner David Bowie sincere and touching, her seduction of Susan Sarandon no mere acquisition of fresh meat but an act of carnal and spiritual love. La Belle Dame sans merci , certainly, but also, as so often with this remarkable actress,without fear and without reproach.

Place Vendome. (Nicole Garcia, 1998)