Place Vendôme

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.

This film would get absolutely no attention otherwise. Story/plot are a convoluted mess; direction and editing are mediocre or worse. Production values are high, but that's pretty typical these days. Lurches from one jarring and opaque scene to another. Especially bizarre is a scene where Deneuve is quite abruptly shown on a train, drunkenly involved in a tough game of cards. Also a very annoying thread runs throughout the film, where various women are showing yelling at men who are bothering them "no leave me alone", then there's a jump to the next scene where they are in bed together.

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 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)

Catherine Deneuve did an excellent job in this role. She carried the whole movie. I find her so beautiful to watch. Really love her. Period.