Catherine Deneuve

Catherine Deneuve’s film roles are typically characterised by ‘a temperament at once passionate and inviolable’ (GEOFFREY HARTMAN). To what extent, and in what ways, is this manifested in any ONE OR MORE of the films you have studied on the module?

Catherine Deneuve is famed for not only her acting credentials but her beauty too, having once been the flawless face of Chanel. She has appeared in various films that exploit her sexuality and desirability, but one could claim that her characters are never one-dimensional. Hartman’s assertion that Catherine Deneuve’s characters display both passion and inviolability supports a conception of her roles as multifaceted yet sometimes contradictory; Deneuve has certainly shown passion in her films (as the strong businesswoman of Potiche) and her inviolability cannot be denied (as the inaccessible ice maiden of Repulsion who degenerates into an ‘angel-faced schizophrenic murderess’ to protect herself from men’s advances), but does she demonstrate these two qualities simultaneously through any of her characters? This essay will discuss the validity of Hartman’s argument referring to Deneuve’s performance in Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour, with some supporting references to other films in which Deneuve starred.

To begin, let us consider the ways in which Hartman’s view is positively manifested in Belle de Jour. This film sets Deneuve’s beauty in a ‘narrative that draws out its (her beauty’s) darker implications’ as she plays Séverine, a young housewife who is remarkably disinterested in maintaining a physical relationship with her husband. In terms of gratuitous marital sex, she is absolutely inviolable. However, beneath her ‘corpse-likeness’ and frigidity , she harbours secret masochi...

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...rothel and it is here that her inviolability is shaken; it is here that she shows herself to exemplify ‘both French chic and perverse sexuality’ .

Bibliography

Austin, Guy, Stars in Modern French Film (London: Arnold, 2003)

Deneuve, Catherine, A l’ombre de moi-même (Paris: Stock, 2004)

Fischer, Lucy, ‘Beauty and the Beast: Desire and its Double in Repulsion’, in John Orr and Elzbieta (eds.), The Cinema of Roman Polanski: Dark Spaces of the World (London: Wallflower, 2006), p.76-91

Thompson, John O., ‘Screen Acting and the Commutation Test’ in Gledhill, Christine (ed.), Stardom: Industry of Desire (London: Routledge, 1991), p.183-197

Vincendeau, Ginette, Stars and Stardom in French Cinema (London: Continuum, 2000)

Website consulted

Cinebeats: Costume Design, http://cinebeats.blogsome.com/category/costume-design/, accessed on 1st March 2012