'A lot of people who talk about me in those terms haven't often seen me at the cinema.' That was Catherine Deneuve's reply to anyone who gave her an 'icy image'. Made by Claire Laborey in 2023 and shown on Arte on 21 October, Catherine Deneuve, in the Eye of the Camera is on the ARTE Cinema YouTube channel until 20 March 2027. In 52 minutes of archive footage, clips and interviews, it shows how the actress got out from under that label.
A beginner by chance
She did not choose this job. 'I started somewhat by chance, so I carried on somewhat by chance,' she says in an early interview. She shot her first film during the school year without leaving school, then made Les portes claquent with her sister, Françoise Dorléac. Nothing really attracted her at that age, she adds.
Then came Jacques Demy. Bothered by her bulging fringe, he had it brushed off her face, then cast her in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. 'Jacques Demy gave me an image of myself,' she says. At 19 she felt 'still a little blurred', and he was the first to really trust her, as a woman and as an actress.
Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour then fixed the image that would follow her. She calls herself 'rather withdrawn', hardly an asset for an actress, and some of the brothel scenes made her uncomfortable. One critic wrote of 'eroticism under cellophane'. What she hears most often, she says, is the cold blonde.
Truffaut, from the Mermaid to the Last Metro
François Truffaut tried to get round that image. In Mississippi Mermaid, he explains, he treated Jean-Paul Belmondo as a young girl and Catherine Deneuve as an adventurer, without telling them. Audiences, he admits, hated the film.
For The Last Metro he wrote a part to fit her. He had always thought she could run a factory or a fashion house, so he gave her a theatre to keep going under the Occupation. Parts with responsibility like this, she notes, are rare 'for women in general'. The film was a triumph and changed how audiences saw her. The downside was a stream of offers in the same spirit, when she wanted to move on.
Téchiné, her brother in film
The documentary lingers on her long partnership with André Téchiné. Meeting her, he says, took his work a leap forward: he used to treat actors like modelling clay, and he understood that she needed freedom. On Hôtel des Amériques, faced with her and Patrick Dewaere, he shot his first reverse angle after years of resisting them. She describes a bond that is 'almost indestructible', that of 'a brother and sister in film'.
These shoots reveal how she works. She does not try to prepare everything, because 'too much preparation risks becoming mechanical'. She likes long takes, which let her find her rhythm, and she is happy to be taken in hand, on one condition. 'If it's a power struggle, it doesn't interest me at all.' Nicole Garcia recalls directing her closely for the first ten days of Place Vendôme, until she took off on her own.
Talking fast, laughing a lot
Jean-Paul Rappeneau remembers their first meeting about La Vie de château: she apologised for talking too fast. In a family of four girls, the fastest talker got heard. That pace became the pace of his films, and she credits him with what she knows about comic rhythm, which he compares to a musical score.
François Ozon reports her reading of Potiche: to her it was Rocky, a humiliation followed by revenge. Léa Domenach, who had her play Bernadette Chirac, wanted an actress unafraid of looking ridiculous. 'She's completely punk,' Domenach says.
Breaking her image
She keeps looking for what she has not yet done, like the mother who does not love her son in Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale, or the films of Manoel de Oliveira and Raúl Ruiz. 'I need to do things that surprise me too,' she says, even if she gets it wrong.
The company on set matters more and more to her: acting is solitary work, and the idea of a company has become essential. On Indochine, in Malaysia, in heat that flattened the crew, Régis Wargnier lost his temper. She asked everyone else to leave, heard him list what was wrong, and shooting resumed. On Standing Tall, she reined in Emmanuelle Bercot when she thought the director was being hard on the young Rod Paradot, who says she made him want to carry on.
No script, in south Lebanon
For I Want to See, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige warned her that south Lebanon was destroyed, conditions would be hard, she would get no script, and there might be no film at the end. She said yes at once. They wanted to show ruins that nobody really looks at any more in a new way, and her presence would raise a simple question: what is Catherine Deneuve doing here?
The documentary shows her turned towards the films being made now. In May she published Marilyn chérie with Sébastien Cauchon, from Flammarion, for the centenary of Marilyn Monroe, who also comes up in the film. It closes on what she takes away from the films that stay with her: 'a beauty of life, of people'.
© Video: ARTE Cinema
