The opening night of the 79e The Venice Film Festival was marked by the awarding of an Honorary Golden Lion to Catherine Deneuve, for her entire career. Faced with the international press, the one who refuses the status of icon presented herself as she is, true to her nature. As for White Noisethe opening film, let’s just say it’s all chaos…
Posted at 10:35 a.m.
Updated at 7:05 p.m.
It was very nice to see her in such good shape. Catherine Deneuve came to the press conference preceding the awarding of an Honorary Golden Lion by answering questions from journalists as she always did: without saying too much, sometimes with a wink. of an implied eye, ready to deconstruct all the mythology that has surrounded her for so many years. Which, ironically, only solidifies it.
Particularly venerated by Italians, with whom she has had a close relationship for a long time (she has moreover answered several questions in Dante’s language), Catherine Deneuve insists on staying in the here and now, always very active, driven by an unusual passion for cinema, both as an actress and as a spectator.
“It’s always a great pleasure to go see a film on the big screen, in a room, with people I don’t know. »
She says she feels a shock seeing the images of a retrospective summarizing her career when such a tribute is paid to her.
“It’s a bit difficult to look at what we’ve done, as if everything had been thought out for the future. Because it never happens that way. There is a lot of luck, good decisions, sometimes not so good. After so many years, we look at the list and hope we made the best choices most of the time. It’s not a refusal to look at the past, but I prefer the reality of the present. »
PHOTO GUGLIELMO MANGIAPANE, REUTERS
Catherine Deneuve receives an honorary Golden Lion
But since it is a prize rewarding an entire career, Catherine Deneuve was asked who are the filmmakers who define her best. The actress singled out three: Jacques Demy (Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The ladies of Rochefort, Donkey Skin), Francois Truffaut (The Mississippi Mermaid, The last metro) and André Téchiné, with whom she works regularly (Hotel of the Americas, The crime scene). She believes that it is still much easier for an actress of her age – 78 – to find good roles in Europe.
“In America, it’s starting to change on this level, but it’s still in Europe that older actresses can practice their profession. »
She refuses the status of icon, just as much as that of sex symbol, which was attributed to her in another era.
“I never saw myself as a sex symbol because I’ve never been there. I didn’t have myself photographed with that in mind either. But it is true that when you mature, it becomes a challenge to offer something other than the image that people may have. »
White Noiseless convincing…
Noah Baumbach, whose previous film, Marriage Story, was also launched at the Mostra, re-read just before the pandemic a book he had read as a teenager. What he found in White Noisethe novel that Don DeLillo published in 1985 (Background noise in French), was so in tune with our times that the filmmaker couldn’t resist bringing it to the screen. The project was ambitious, but the result, alas, is half fig, half grape.
While he had dragged us into the harsh reality of a relationship that is dying out with cruel accents of truth in the excellent Marriage StoryNoah Baumbach takes this time a completely different direction by portraying a family whose life will be constantly disturbed by strange phenomena.
Adam Driver, always excellent, this time slips into the skin of Jack, an academic specializing in the history of Nazism and Adolf Hitler. Facing him, or rather in parallel, a colleague fascinated by the life of Elvis Presley. At home, Jack’s wife (Greta Gerwig) treats her life-sickness with a drug that no one knows about, and the turmoil erupts the day a truck accident (this film talks a lot of the spectacular movie accident function) causes such a toxic cloud in the region that all this town of Ohio must be evacuated urgently. With the chaos that entails.
It is true that the themes addressed by Don DeLillo in his novel, set in the America of a few decades ago, are still as relevant as ever. But after a more “realistic” first part, the story then falls almost into the fantastic, without really drawing any coherence from it. Of course, the quality of the dialogues remains intact, and the black humor effects are rather successful, but White Noise will not have really convinced us.
We will have the opportunity to come back to this, since Noah Baumbach’s film, in the running for the Golden Lion, will be released on the Netflix platform on December 30, preceded by a theatrical release a month earlier.