climbing a mystery Everest

FRANCE 3 – THURSDAY APRIL 14 AT 9.10 P.M. – DOCUMENTARY

After Bardot in love (2016) and Jeanne Moreau, the freedwoman (2017), documentary filmmaker Virginie Linhart climbs another Everest of the profession with Deneuve, Queen Catherine (2021). And you have to go with the ice ax, as the one who took her mother’s name to better distinguish herself from her sister, the actress Françoise Dorléac (1942-1967), seems caught in the ice of a thick mystery – of which she says that it is “a very stretchy field”.

The work done by Virginie Linhart works on the principle of the barrel of the Danaides: the more we know, the less we know. But it reconstructs a biographical puzzle, with a lot of little-known archival documents that illustrate what has largely already been written, especially in these columns, in the six-part series “Catherine Deneuve, behind the screen”, by Raphaëlle Bacqué, in 2020.

Everyone calls her a good comrade and funny in private life and on the sets. The portrait made of her by Frédéric Mitterrand in The Bad Life (Robert Laffont, 2005), even reveals, in the course of a stunning anecdote, the concern for the other when the actress turns before his astounded eyes into a shock first-aider with an injured motorcyclist.

Behind the glaze, the crack

But Deneuve is wary of the press, hasn’t received her at home since a journalist, not seeing any books in the room where the face-to-face was held, had deduced that she didn’t read – as well as reports the American writer Edmund White, in Arts and Letters (Cleis Press, 2004, untranslated).

Thanks to what Catherine Deneuve was able to slip, here and there, sometimes to foreign media, the documentary tactfully evokes a rich love life and its collateral damage – the loss of love and the weariness that creep in, the disrespect or betrayal that hurt. There are documents missing from the file. It doesn’t matter and it’s better: Deneuve’s lawyers watch over the preservation of his private domain.

She has often been scolded about her highly paid acts of presence – which sometimes put her in uncomfortable situations –, less about her advertising campaigns, many of which were filmed in the United States. “Let it be clear: we advertise to make money, those who say otherwise are hypocrites”, will she say to World, in 1997. And to add, in an excerpt spotted by Virginie Linhart: “I’m a big spender, I’m not proud of it, but I’m not ashamed of it. »

The documentary evokes stinging or controversial subjects: the work of the actress’ father for Radio Paris during the Occupation, Deneuve’s strong support for Roman Polanski, with whom she toured Repulsion (1965) – one of the roles that broke his too smooth image – and his signature affixed to the bottom of a platform in defense of “the freedom to importune, essential to sexual freedom”, published, in 2018, in The world.

Finally, there is the subject that hurts: the premature death in a car accident of Françoise Dorléac. During a television interview, glass of champagne in hand, Deneuve blanched at the journalist’s mention of his missing sister; then recovers very quickly. But the crack appeared behind the glaze of the surface. Because, as the filmmaker Nadine Trintignant said in an affectionate and lucid way: “There is always something broken inside her, even when she laughs. »