Place Vendôme - Heiße Diamanten

I loved this movie. Yes, I can understand that it is often opaque and may make you reach for the rewind a few times to understand what it was you were just seeing - yes, there are many characters and not too much explanation - but it's not more complicated than, say Funeral in Berlin or The Maltese Falcon.

This is the sort of movie that people who think they might want to try a European movie should see - the clothes, the style, the characters, the stunning contemporary settings, the 85% explained plot, the beautiful women, the roles of jewels and mistresses, striving and excess, guilt and recrimination, forgiveness and imbalance, and an underworld pressing close up against a very haut monde.

I think this and My Favorite Season are as good as anything Deneuve has ever done. Both are quite remarkable given that she has been in movies for over forty years. All the actors are quite remarkable - and Emmanuelle Seigner (whom you may remember from Frantic with Harrison Ford, Bitter Moon with Hugh Grant) is all slender strong beauty - and a wonderful blonde contrast with the older blonde, heavy-set/blowsy (in character) Deneuve.

The movie completely jumps any moral compass headings - and yet somehow one doesn't mind.

So even though you may feel you must watch it twice, you'd enjoy it both times.

It's as cool and elegant a movie as I've ever seen. And yet almost as sad a movie as I've ever seen. It's wonderful.

The plot of this film may centre around scams in the the diamond trade but don't expect slick plotlines and witty, glamorous characters. The film offers instead a look behind the glamour at individuals worn down by their lives, by wrong decisions and damaging relationships. These relationships have developed between characters involved at some time in questionable aspects of the trade and appear to suffer as if mirroring the dishonesty and deceitfulness of the scams. It is a story told at a slow pace allowing the details to unfold and to enable us to get to know the characters and understand their motivation. The acting is superb, particularly Catherine Deneuve, and the film ends on a note which suggests some kind of atonement and reconciliation.

elegance is the basic virtue of this beautiful film. the elegance of story and performances, the elegance of details and the tension. and, sure, obvious, the elegance of Catherine Deneuve. a film about the confrontation against the past, the revelation about old experiences, the struggle for survive and the rules of a small world in which the gems are more important than the people. short, a seductive film. for the theme and for the inspired way to translate it in the image. for the beautiful science of trip in essence of the gestures and states of characters. for the air of an universe who seems be artificial. and for the great job of Deneuve.

"Place Vendome" tells of the rise of a widow from an abyss of alcoholism to rescue her late husband's prestigious and bankrupt jewelry store on the renown Parisian mall Place Vendome. Her daunting task is to make her way though the shadowy word of diamond trade from whence she came some 18 years before while hawking several rare cut diamonds. With sinister undercurrents and a polished veneer, the film swirls around an emotionally void Deneuve, her encounters and long over due reconciliations. Those used to Hollywoodish hardball drama with exaggerated characters will likely find "Place Vendome" refreshing or underdone or both. Good stuff for Europic buffs in which Deneuve proves again she's more than just another pretty face.

The story of a woman that for meny years remained distracted from her own life, from the passions that made her feel alive. The importance of true love is compared with the material value of diamonds. Only one of these two truly lasts in time. She's got to choose witch one values most for her, the thing that will make her find happiness and psychical steadiness again. Award for Deneuve in Biennale di Venezia 1998 (55 festival d'arte cinematografica di Venezia)