Place Vendôme

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.

"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.

This movie is neither complicated nor complex, but its reading is rather incomprehensible. I have the feeling that Nicole Garcia tries to artificially fill an emptyness with a kaleidoscopic narrative, fuzzily alternating with the different characters on the one hand, the present and the past on the other hand, but without giving any explaination about who, what, when, why, ... like within a slow, very slow hubbub. Although the high level actings and the permanent elegance, this movie is globally frustrating and boring.

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)

Only for Catherine Deneuve's performance, this movie deserves your attention. She is troubling, beautiful, captivating. A whole life's experience is generously invested in this performance. The story is not bad, some other performances are not as satisfying (e.g. Dutronc), but it is an enjoyable movie overall. And again, a great lesson in acting.