IT was late at the dimly lighted Chacha, a club here that specializes in wrap parties and other movie-world festivities. Sitting apart from revelers decked out in various combinations of distressed jeans and sequins was a woman in a sober tweed suit. "I'm sorry," said the woman — Catherine Deneuve — "but this is our only chance to meet."
She had just returned from a shoot in Belgium and was preparing for another one elsewhere in France, but she paused to discuss her new role, a significant break from the glamorous parts of her past. Ms. Deneuve, the legendary and perhaps most ethereal beauty of France, has come down to earth in this film, "The Girl on the Train"; she plays a sad widow, one of the least seductive roles in her long career. It will open in New York on Friday and was directed by André Téchiné, a significant lure for Ms. Deneuve.
The filmmaker and the actress have been allies since she starred in his "Hôtel des Amériques" (1981) as a moody young woman mourning a dead lover. Since then the two have made six movies together (including this one) in which she has played various members of mysteriously unhappy families. The two share a complicity she calls fraternal. Mr. Téchiné describes her as "his cinema sister."

"The Girl on the Train" is based on a true story and adapted from the play "La Fille du R.E.R." by Jean-Marie Besset. The Belgian actress Émilie Dequenne plays Jeanne, the daughter, and Ms. Deneuve plays Louise, a plain housewife who has not a moment to be chic: she is worrying about her daughter, who provokes a scandal. The story is based on true events from 2004, when a girl, who was not Jewish but claimed to be the victim of an anti-Semitic attack on a Paris commuter train, went to the police with cuts on her face and a swastika drawn on her stomach. But she had invented the story, and her pose brought out a fear of anti-Semitism in French society.
"This is not a thriller," Ms. Deneuve, 66, said. "You know from the start that the girl lies. But André has a way of telling a story that works."
It's hard to picture Ms. Deneuve, the blond goddess, as a baby sitter, fettered to her daughter, bogged down by her past. Louise's husband, an army officer, has been killed, and she has lost social standing. But "the mother-daughter relationship is at the heart of the film," she said. "It's not a very alluring or sunny part, but it was André Téchiné, and shooting with Téchiné is always enriching."
"I admire him, and we see each other outside work," she said. "We gain time because we know each other so well, but we have to be careful with the others. It's a privileged relationship."
Ms. Deneuve has had privileged relationships with many of her directors since the days when she played Geneviève, the provincial shop girl whose lover goes off to the Algerian war in Jacques Demy's musical "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" (1964).
She and her sister, Françoise Dorléac, were the darlings of their epoch. They did a bewitching sister act in Mr. Demy's "Demoiselles de Rochefort," and each starred in films by François Truffaut and Roman Polanski. But at 25 Ms. Dorléac was killed in a car accident. In "Her Name Was Françoise" Ms. Deneuve wrote about the loss of this sister.
Ms. Deneuve became the seductress of her generation, working with a host of filmmakers, making some great films and some less wonderful ones. Recently she played the majestic mother in Arnaud Desplechin's "Christmas Tale," a part she said she relished, and she has just come off the set of a "long, hard" movie by François Ozon.
"I've been lucky to work with filmmakers at the high point in their careers, when their desire matched my appetite," she said. "And working with André is always a rich experience. He goes after what's behind the scenes. He directs a little like Truffaut, whispering into your ear, with intensity. From our first film together he impressed me; he's timid, brusque, but also sensitive — elegant and mysterious, like life. I find life very mysterious."
Over the years she has followed her heart more than once: she married the English photographer David Bailey and had a son, Christian Vadim, with the filmmaker Roger Vadim and "a delicious daughter," Chiara Mastroianni, with Marcello Mastroianni. "I have no regrets," she said, then hesitated. "Or not that many. I did miss out on working with Hitchcock. He died before we could make a movie together, and I regret it, but I'm philosophical."
The next evening, from his apartment overlooking the Pont Neuf, Mr. Téchiné reflected on his long collaboration with Ms. Deneuve and how he came to cast her in "The Girl on the Train."
"I have gathered, after these years working together, that Catherine likes and trusts me and wants us to explore new paths," he said. "I don't make realistic movies. I try to detect and use what actors have inside, their hidden selves. Catherine is not a transparent person, but I detected a maternal side to her and wanted to explore that in this movie. She's completely convincing as this almost too maternal figure who keeps her daughter from growing up."
While Mr. Téchiné took time preparing with Ms. Dequenne, whose part is very physical, he said that his relationship with Ms. Deneuve is such that he never worked with her in advance. "I've never had discussions with Catherine about her part. We never prepare, and in each film we try something new."
There's a mysterious moment in the film when Louise goes to a cafe to meet a lawyer (Michel Blanc) who was once a suitor and who may help her now. But instead she sits on a bench in front of the cafe and misses the meeting. She appears lost in a secret life, on a vacation from her maternal self. Does she have doubts? Regrets?
"Catherine has a hidden side, like a Hitchcock actor, like Cary Grant," Mr. Téchiné said. "We never know what she's thinking. That's the mystery of her greatness, and her eroticism. Catherine stands on the edge, is tempted by the void, looks down, but holds herself back from falling in the black pit."
Ever since they first met, they have worked intuitively. "If she had inhibitions, she lost them with me," he said. "I used to direct actors as if they were marionettes. I couldn't direct her like that. She changed my way of directing, and I'd like to work with her for the span of a lifetime. That's my secret fantasy, a filmmaker's fantasy."
Da The New York Times, 17 gennaio 2010

These days, all it takes to be labeled a diva is to release a couple of pop albums in a row and exhibit some bad behavior in public. But at least two extraordinary examples of the genuine article continue to walk the earth: Sophia Loren, 73, and Catherine Deneuve, 64. This week Lionsgate Entertainment honors these two near-mythological figures of the European cinema with boxed sets of seldom-seen films.
Although their careers overlap — Ms. Loren’s first film dates from 1950, Ms. Deneuve’s from 1957 — they represent two very different traditions. Both have regularly crossed the Alps, Ms. Loren to appear in French-language films and Ms. Deneuve in Italian ones, but they seem to belong to sovereign territories of their own, which barely have diplomatic relations.

The Deneuve collection begins with a genuine curiosity, Jean Aurel’s 1968 “Manon 70.” Based on the 1731 novel by Antoine François Prévost, as updated into a best-selling novel by Cécil Saint-Laurent, the popular (and pseudonymous) author of a long series of historical bodice-rippers, the film offers Ms. Deneuve as a sort of contemporary courtesan, dressed in Op-Pop Ungaro outfits accessorized by oversize sunglasses.
Manon pings capriciously among assorted wealthy lovers (one is played in deadly earnest by the gifted American comic actor Robert Webber) until she discovers her grand amour, a self-serious journalist (Sami Frey) who destroys his career in order to support her in the jet-setting style to which she has become accustomed. Very much a film of its unsettled time, “Manon 70” strenuously draws parallels between the libertines of the 18th century and the sexual revolutionaries of the 1960s, frequently to unconsciously comic effect.
The downside to being Catherine Deneuve is that no matter how she is cast, she invariably ends up playing the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, seldom an interesting role. Directors have tried to cope with this in different ways over the years. Most struggle unsuccessfully to deglamorize her: In “Le Choc,” a 1982 thriller included here, the director Robin Davis gets some kind of a prize for casting her as the proprietress of a provincial turkey farm (which does not prevent Alain Delon, as a hit man on the run, from falling madly in love with her); in “Le Sauvage,”Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s popular comedy from 1975 set on a tropical island, gives her a sunburn, takes away her couture and dumps her in the drink. (She is little more than a guest star in Alain Corneau’s “Fort Saganne,” a heavy 1984 military epic with Gérard Depardieu, which is also in the Lionsgate box.)
Among Ms. Deneuve’s more recent directors, André Téchiné seems to have found the best solutions to her excess of attractiveness. In the 1981 “Hotel America,” the first of five films they have made together (and by far the best in this collection), he shifts the burden of glamour from her to her male co-star, the wide-eyed, childlike Patrick Dewaere.
Ms. Deneuve is the glum, dowdy Hélène, an anesthesiologist no less, who has come to the resort town of Biarritz to get over the death of her fiancé. Mr. Dewaere is an irresistibly helpless local, a painfully sensitive dreamer who lives in a room in his mother’s small hotel. Although he makes the first advances, soon it is Ms. Deneuve who is pursuing him, rationalizing his emotional upheavals and capricious changes of mind (he’s Manon 81), while she functions as the center of stability. For once, she is not an object of desire but an individual afflicted by desires of her own. The reversal makes her human.
Da The New York Times, 10 Giugno 2008

Alla crociera che sta al centro di Un film parlato, il lavoro più recente e molto bello del novantaseienne maestro del cinema portoghese Manoel de Oliveira, partecipano tre donne famose, non più giovani, emblematiche della civiltà mediterranea. Stefania Sandrelli, ex modella, rappresenta il gusto estetico, il piacere di vivere dell’Italia. Irene Papas, cantante e insegnante di canto, anche interprete di una stupenda canzone, simboleggia la vocazione perle arti delta Grecia E Catherine Deneuve, donna d’affari, esprime il talento per i commerci e i soldi della Francia.

In quest’ultima scelta c’è una sfumatura di malizia perché è vero che la Deneuve, massima diva francese, ufficialmente sessantunenne, un tempo legata a Marcello Mastroianni e madre della loro figlia Chiara Mastroianni, in un tempo più lontano legata a Roger Vadim e madre del loro figlio Christian Vadim, è un autentico genio economico individuale. Non esiste attività portadanaro praticata nel cinema che le sia sfuggita: partecipazioni speciali, apparizioni personali, pubblicità e testimonianze soprattutto per moda, turismo e profumi francesi, viaggi promozionali, cessioni d’immagine, pubblicazioni divario genere. Tutto senza mai perdere la sua aria elegante, composta, anche un po’ superba, superiore e signorile.
Nata in una famiglia dì attori, Catherine prende il cognome della madre (mentre sua sorella attrice, morta prestissimo in un incidente tragico, Françoise Dorléac, conserva il cognome di famiglia) per tentare di diventare attrice. La bellezza dolce e delicata, la finezza dei lineamenti, la grazia lieve e chic, la pelle candida di bionda non sembrano destinarla a personaggi drammatici, ma affascinano registi importanti (e con qualche sfumatura sadica): Roman Polanski le affida la psicopatica assassina di Repulsion, Luis Bunuel l’ambigua doppiezza di Bella di giorno, François Truffaut ne fa la protagonista diplomatica e coraggiosa de L’ultimo metrò e Marco Ferreri l’eroina amorosa e masochista de La cagna Manoel de Oliveira la vuole esploratrice della forza e della follia del desiderio ne Il convento.
Anche tutti gli altri film, meno straordinari ma interpretati con la dedizione, lo scrupolo d’una lavoratrice instancabile, ne fanno un’eccellente professionista, un’attrice molto ricercata, una diva-simbolo. «È la donna che avrei voluto essere», dice Gérard Depardieu.
Da Lo Specchio, 10 aprile 2004

Eppure tanti grandi autori l'hanno scelta perché hanno scorto, dietro questa identità cosi marcata, un'altra persona. Un'altra donna Catherine Deneuve è stata, per tanti registi, la doppiezza in persona.
Non è una: è due. Bunuel, Polanski e Truffaut hanno considerato la sua altera lontananza come una maschera. Quel suo charme rarefatto doveva celare un'ossessione, una carica erotica insoddisfatta e inespressa. Una dualità hitchcockiana (talmente forte da diventare un cliché). Il cinema non poteva non inseguire quel suo lato nascosto, cercare il fuoco sotto la cenere. Di più: sotto il ghiaccio.
C'è un'altra caratteristica che fa di Catherine Deneuve la Deneuve. Anche quando, in un film, ne scorgiamo il volto nascosto, lei resta pur sempre una donna lontana e fredda. È lei ed è un'altra. È lei che si guarda essere un'altra. Esercizio che le riesce grazie alla capacità di controllare in ogni momento quel gioco dell'istinto e del caso che è la recitazione. Ha detto in un'intervista che da piccola era timida e odiava le feste mascherate, si deprimeva a mettersi un vestito che la facesse diventare un'altra. Questo non accettare mascheramenti l'ha portata a essere un'attrice che entra senza maschere in una storia e in un personaggio, un'attrice che in ogni storia porta la donna che è. La Deneuve dà sempre l'impressione di interpretare un personaggio senza mai adattarvisi del tutto. Come se continuasse a osservarsi mentre ci sta dentro. Catherine Deneuve è sempre donna e attrice. Oui, elle est Catherine Deneuve. Un recente sondaggio della rivista francese “Studio”, in occasione del salone parigino del prêt-à-porter, ha decretato che è ancora lei l'attrice più affascinante e più amata. Lei, che è sugli schermi dal 1956, quando, ragazzina tredicenne, interpreta Les collégiennes di André Hunebelle. Usa il cognome della madre attrice (il cognome del padre, l'attore Maurice Dorléac, passa alla sorella maggiore Françoise, attrice anch'essa, morta in un incidente d'auto nel 1967). Il primo che vede in Catherine una doppia personalità cinematografica (sadiana!) è l'allora suo compagno Roger Vadim che, in Il vizio e la virtù (1963), ne fa Juliette, promessa sposa di un partigiano, finita in un castello-bordello per SS nel Tirolo. Ma è Jacques Demy a incoronarla grande attrice in due favole, cantate e danzate, malinconiche e realistiche, Les parapluies de Cherbourg e Les demoiselles de Rochefort, dove recita a fianco della sorella. Così bella e così dolce in Demy, il Polanski di Repulsion la trasforma in un'assassina psicopatica e sessuofoba, affondata nell'oscurità della mente e di un appartamento dalle cui pareti vede uscire mani che la accarezzano laidamente. È pronta per Luis Bunuel: prima, in Bella di giorno (1967), è una moglie frigida e insoddisfatta, borghese e cattolica, che si prostituisce in una casa d'appuntamenti dalle due alle cinque di ogni pomeriggio; poi, in Tristana subisce l'amputazione di una gamba e si vendica elegantemente del morboso tutore. Truffaut ne fa una donna fatale in La mia droga si chiama Julie, e nell'Ultimo metrò, melodramma di vita e di teatro sotto l'occupazione tedesca, le ridà lo stesso nome, Marion, e le fa ripetere con Depardieu il duetto finale del film precedente: tanto la ammira.

La Deneuve ha recitato per Chabrol, Ferreri, Agnès Varda, Risi, Monicelli, Oliveira, Von Trier, Carax, Raoul Ruiz, Garrel..., fino a 8 donne un mistero di Ozon. Fino al bellissimo e ancora inedito in Italia Rois et reine di Desplechin. A nessuno dei suoi registi ha svelato il mistero della doppiezza: che è il segreto del suo fascino.
Da Film Tv, n. 11, 2005