Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, 2000)

Cast: Björk, Catherine Deneuve, David Morse, Peter Stormare, Joel Grey, Cara Seymour, Vladica Kostic, Jean-Marc Barr, Vincent Paterson, Siobhan Fallon Hogan, Zeljko Ivanek, Udo Kier, Stellan Skarsgard. Screenplay: Lars von Trier. Cinematography: Robby Müller. Production design: Karl Júliusson. Film editing: François Gédigier, Molly Malene Stensgaard. Music: Björk. 

Say what you will about Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard, 2024), but both its musical numbers and the melodramatic narrative that encompasses them are better than those in Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark. So why, other than that it was made first, does von Trier's film seem like the more substantial achievement? Both are formally audacious and, as far as audiences and critics are concerned, radically divisive. Dancer in the Dark goes over the top in both absurdity (people dancing on death row) and performance (Björk's raw emotion), but are either of those enough to earn the kind of ridicule and acclamation the film engendered? I was lukewarm about Emilia Pérez and I'm baffled by Dancer in the Dark, but is that enough for me to call the latter a masterpiece? Or is it just an astonishing cinematic dead end? 

A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, 2008)

A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, 2008)

Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Jean-Paul Roussillon, Anne Consigny, Mathieu Amalric, Melvil Poupaud, Hippolyte Girardot, Emmanuelle Devos, Chiara Mastroianni, Laurent Capelluto, Émile Berling, Thomas Obled, Clément Obled, François Bertin, Samir Guesmi, Azize Kabouche. Screenplay: Arnaud Desplechin, Emmanuelle Bourdieu. Cinematography: Eric Gautier. Production design: Daniel Bevan. Film editing: Laurence Briaud. Music: Grégoire Hetzel, Mike Kourtzer.

A Christmas Tale is not exactly brimful of seasonal cheer, but it warrants watching at any holiday in which families gather to both celebrate and bicker. The Vuillard clan is somewhat dysfunctional, but they're also French, which means that they smoke, drink, and talk a little too much, and have idiosyncratic ways of showing that they love one another. The matriarch, Junon (who would ever have thought Catherine Deneuve would be cast as matriarch?), has cancer and needs a bone marrow transplant. The task of searching for a donor falls to the patriarch, Abel (and who would have ever thought of bringing together the goddess-like Deneuve and the froglike Jean-Paul Roussillon?), since Junon decides at this moment to leave everything to fate. And since this crisis is coming to a head at Christmastime, it means gathering the family for more than just celebrating a holiday. There are three living children -- the first-born died of cancer as a child -- and they don't entirely get along. Elizabeth, the oldest, has banished the middle child, Henri, from her life. The youngest, Ivan, naturally has to exhibit divided loyalties when the other two get together. Elizabeth and Ivan bring along their spouses and children; Henri, unmarried, brings his latest girlfriend, Faunia, who, being Jewish, has her own slightly distant take on the Christmas festivities. Elizabeth's teenage son, Paul, has recently had a nervous breakdown. He also turns out to be a match for Junon's transplant, as does the black sheep Henri, which sets up even more grounds for dissension, especially given the tension between Henri and Elizabeth. And so, out of all this stew of tensions, director Arnaud Desplechin puts together a fascinating portrait of what it means to be a family. He mingles a variety of filmmaking techniques with a whole range of literary, cinematic, and even musical allusions to give us a multifaceted view of the Vuillards, their past, present, and perhaps future. On second thought, maybe it's best not to watch this anytime near one of your own potentially volatile family gatherings -- it cuts a little too close to home.

Un Flic (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1972)

Un Flic (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1972)

Cast: Alain Delon, Richard Crenna, Catherine Deneuve, Riccardo Cucciolla, Michael Conrad, Paul Crauchet, Simone Valère, André Pousse. Screenplay: Jean-Pierre Melville. Cinematography: Walter Wottitz. Production design: Théobald Meurisse. Film editing: Patricia Nény. Music: Michel Colombier.

It's amazing how hard it is to make Alain Delon look ordinary. In Un Flic, the last film by Jean-Pierre Melville, who made Delon's unsurpassable good looks and cool the essence of Le Samouraï (1967), he's supposed to be a tough, weary cop, a chief of detectives. So his hair is not so neatly combed as usual, he's made up to look a little pale, and there are wrinkles under the celebrated blue eyes. The thing is, however, that Delon pulls the character off successfully -- unlike other handsome actors, he makes us look past the beauty. We see what's going on in his head as he makes his rounds. It's Delon's charisma that justifies the film's title, because in fact the movie focuses more on the robbers than on the cops. (When it was released on video in the United States it was retitled Dirty Money.) The thieves get the film's two big set pieces: the bank robbery at the beginning of the film, and the famous 20-minute helicopter-and-train sequence in the middle, in which Richard Crenna's Simon is put through a hair-raising James Bond-style stunt. The latter scene is preposterous, of course: When and how did Simon and the helicopter guys practice for this elaborate heist, which has to come off without a hitch? But the sequence works in part because the rest of the film is based in gritty reality, such as the bleak off-season ocean-front setting of the opening, with the rows of anonymous modern buildings presenting blank, boarded up windows to the stormy winter sea that roars in the background of the bank robbery. (The sound recording of André Hervée and sound editing of Maurice Lemain deserve special mention.) Un Flic exists in a neverland intersection between actuality and movie artifice, a place Melville visited in almost all of his films.

Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965)

Carol: Catherine Deneuve
Michael: Ian Hendry
Colin: John Fraser
Helen: Yvonne Furneaux
Landlord: Patrick Wymark
Miss Balch: Renee Houston
Madame Denise: Valerie Taylor
John: James Villiers
Bridget: Helen Fraser
Reggie: Hugh Futcher

Director: Roman Polanski
Screenplay: Roman Polanski, Gérard Brach
Cinematography: Gilbert Taylor
Art direction: Seamus Flannery
Film editing: Alastair McIntyre
Music: Chico Hamilton

Repulsion was only Roman Polanski's second feature film, yet it's the work of a master. It's nothing more than a portrait of a schizophrenic, played by the astonishingly beautiful Catherine Deneuve, and treated with a remarkable detachment. We don't know why Carol Ledoux is mad. A lesser director would have given us flashbacks to Carol's childhood and a depiction of some trauma that has driven her repulsion toward sex. But all we see of her childhood is a photograph of a family group, glimpsed three times in the film: Once when the camera is surveying the furnishings of the living room in the apartment she shares with her sister, Helen; again when the brutish landlord, before attempting to rape Carol, picks it up and identifies the little blond girl in the picture as her as a child; and at the very end, when the camera tracks into the photograph, singling out the girl and drawing ever closer to her face, finally closing in on the little girl's eye and bringing us back to the opening of the film and its closeup on the adult Carol's eye. The expression on her face is distant, almost blank -- an expression we have seen throughout the film on the grownup Carol's face. What are we to make of this? That Carol was the victim of a childhood sexual trauma? Polanski chooses not to tell us because the focus of his film is on the effect rather than the cause. Carol has apparently been "normal" enough to learn a trade as a beautician, to hold down a job in a salon, to have a handsome boyfriend. But suddenly that "normality" is shattered when her sister decides to go off on a vacation to Italy with her own boyfriend, Michael, whom Carol detests. Left to her own devices, Carol spirals into insanity and eventually into murder. Whenever a headline-making crime occurs -- a mass shooting or something like today's news about a Southern California couple who kept their children prisoners and starved and tortured them for years -- our first instinct is to ask why they did it. And we rarely come upon the sources of the criminal's disturbance. The neighbors usually say he was such a quiet boy, or she was shy and a little weird but seemed nice enough. Polanski keeps us on edge through the film by making Carol's environment one that is simultaneously ordinary and conducive to madness: a piano playing scales somewhere in the apartment building, a neighboring Catholic school ringing bells, a shabby apartment full of dark corners and odd angles, a beauty salon whose customers undergo grotesque treatments like mud packs to improve their looks. On the street she passes an odd trio of buskers (one of whom is played by Polanski) and is harassed by a construction worker. Even her boyfriend, Colin, is a little edgy, having dated this beautiful woman long enough to expect her to have sex with him. In the end, it's as if Carol lashes out at a world that gets on her nerves. Polanski's film seems to be asking if that horror resides within all of us. 

The Last Métro (François Truffaut, 1980)

Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Gérard Depardieu, Jean Poiret, Andréa Ferréol, Paulette Dubost, Jean-Louis Richard, Maurice Risch, Sabine Haudepin, Heinz Bennent. Screenplay: François Truffaut, Suzanne Schiffman, Jean-Claude Grumberg. Cinematography: Néstor Almendros. Production design: Jean-Pierre Kohut-Svelko. Film editing: Martine Barraqué. Music: Georges Delerue.

Watching The Last Métro only a day after The Sorrow and the Pity (Marcel Ophüls, 1969) was instructive, if a little bit unfair to François Truffaut's romantic backstage drama. The two films deal with the same milieu, France during World War II, but with such differing approaches that the stark devotion to ferreting out the truth in Ophüls's film makes Truffaut's dramatization of the plight of a Jewish theater owner and his company feel more glossy and sentimental than it perhaps really is. Truffaut, who was born in 1932, was only a boy during the war, so he can't be expected to have the kind of first-hand awareness of events that the adults pictured in his film possess. Consequently, his own preoccupation, the world of actors and directors, takes precedence in the film over the suffering people endured under the Nazis. He has admitted in interviews that The Last Métro is a kind of companion film to Day for Night (1973), his behind-the-camera account of making a movie. What he does recall is the theater -- in his case the movie theater rather than the legitimate stage -- was a kind of refuge from hardship, the hunger and cold brought about by wartime rationing. People gathered in theaters for communal warmth. The story is principally about an actress, Marion Steiner (Catherine Deneuve), who is trying to keep the theater that was run before the war by her husband, Lucas (Heinz Bennent), open. Lucas, who is Jewish, is rumored to have fled to America, but in fact he is hiding in the cellar of the theater while Marion, with the help of the rest of the regular company, stages a play. The director, Jean-Loup Cottins (Jean Poiret), is working from the notes Lucas made on the play before his disappearance. Cottins has his own dangerous secret: He's gay. A new leading man, Bernard Granger (Gérard Depardieu), joins the company, and inevitably a tension develops between him and Marion. Meanwhile, Lucas has figured out ways to listen in on rehearsals and make suggestions to Marion that she passes along to Cottins, who is unaware of Lucas's hiding place. Marion also has the difficulty of dealing with the authorities, who could close the theater at any moment, especially when the influential critic Daxiat (Jean-Louis Richard), a collaborator with the Nazis, takes an interest in her and the play. What takes place on stage, namely the sexual tension between the characters played by Marion and Bernard, often mirrors what's happening backstage. The Last Métro is a well-crafted movie -- Truffaut wrote the screenplay with Suzanne Schiffman -- that was France's entry for the best foreign-film Oscar and won a raft of the French César Awards, including one for cinematographer Nestor Almendros.

Two With Marcello Mastroianni

A Slightly Pregnant Man (Jacques Demy, 1973)

Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni in A Slightly Pregnant Man

Irène de Fontenoy: Catherine Deneuve
Marco Mazetti: Marcello Mastroianni
Dr. Delavigne: Micheline Presle
Maria Mazetti: Marisa Pavan

Director: Jacques Demy
Screenplay: Jacques Demy
Cinematography: Andréas Winding
Production design: Bernard Evein
Music: Michel Legrand

A Special Day (Ettore Scola, 1977)

Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren in A Special Day

Antonietta: Sophia Loren
Gabriele: Marcello Mastroianni
Emanuele: John Vernon
Caretaker: Françoise Berd

Director: Ettore Scola
Screenplay: Ruggero Maccari, Ettore Scola, Maurizio Costanzo
Cinematography: Pasqualino De Santis
Production design: Luciano Ricceri

The great charm of Marcello Mastroianni lies, I think, in the fact that he always seems to be the odd man out. Despite his good looks and sex appeal, there is always the sense that the characters he plays, even though they attract women on the order of Catherine Deneuve and Sophia Loren, are never quite in charge of the world they inhabit. Certainly this is true of his most famous roles, Marcello in La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960) and Guido in 8 1/2 (Fellini, 1963). And directors Jacques Demy and Ettore Scola exploit this otherness in Mastroianni in very different ways: Demy in the satiric A Slightly Pregnant Man and Scola in the earnest A Special Day. In the former film, whose French title was the lengthy L'Événement le plus important depuis que l'homme a marché sur la Lune (The Most Important Event Since Man Walked on the Moon), Mastroianni plays Marco, a driving-school instructor who feels out of sorts and goes to see a doctor who decides that he must be pregnant. When a well-known specialist confirms the diagnosis and presents his findings to other scientists, the press goes wild and the advertising department for a maternity-wear company launches a campaign for male maternity clothes. Marco winds up on posters everywhere, and he and his fiancée, Irène, begin to make big plans for the money the company pays him. Eventually, the diagnosis proves to be false, however, and the film concludes with an anticlimactic thud. Demy, whose best-known work is probably the cotton-candy musicals The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), seems to have launched into his screenplay with no sense of how to end it satisfactorily. Until that point, however, Mastroianni and Deneuve have fun with their roles. Forgoing her usual sophisticated chic, she plays a somewhat blowsy beauty-shop owner. A Special Day earned Mastroianni one of his three Oscar nominations, partly because there's nothing the Academy likes better than a straight actor daring to play gay. He is Gabriele, a radio announcer who has lost his job because the Fascists have begun purging the work force of "undesirables." The day is May 8, 1938, when Hitler visits Mussolini in Rome to solidify their alliance. He lives in a large apartment complex with windows facing an open courtyard. Across the way lives Antonietta, a woman with an abusive husband and six children. On this day, she has stayed home to clean house after sending her family off to the parades and speeches, but when the family's pet mynah bird escapes and flies out into the courtyard, she asks Gabriele's help in retrieving him. They are virtually the only people left in the complex other than the nosy, gossipy concierge, whose radio is blaring the news of the day -- Fascist anthems, speeches, the cheers of the crowd, and a running patriotic commentary -- which serves as the sometimes ironic counterpoint to the growing intimacy of the mismatched couple. A severely deglamourized Loren gives a fine performance, as does Mastroianni: Gabriele is aware that at any moment he may be taken away to a concentration camp, and he vacillates between suicide and a carpe diem fatalism. The film is a little too predictable, and although the screenplay by Scola and Ruggero Maccari is original, it feels somewhat like an adaptation of a two-character stage play. Pasqualino De Santis's cinematography, using long takes and tracking shots through the apartment complex (which we never leave except in the archival newsreel footage at the film's beginning), helps open it up.  

Belle de Jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967)

Belle de Jour is a famously enigmatic film, venturing into (and often blurring) the space between reality and fantasy, between waking life and dreams. It has led a lot of people astray, into questions like: What's buzzing in the Asian client's box that so frightens the other prostitutes in the brothel, but so satisfies Séverine (Catherine Deneuve)? Why does Séverine so often hear cats meowing? What is the Duke (Georges Marchal) doing that so shakes the coffin in which he has posed Séverine and causes her to flee into the rain? Why is Pierre (Jean Sorel) so fascinated by the wheelchair that foreshadows his fate? How much of any of this is meant to be reality? Critics have been more or less preoccupied by these and other matters of speculation and interpretation for almost 50 years. But I, for one, am content to invoke Keats's "negative capability," which he defined as the ability of an artist to be "in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." Of course, it would be abrogating the critics' responsibility if they failed to pursue the aesthetic and moral effects of the enigmas introduced into the film by Luis Buñuel and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière. I'm arguing that their effect is collective and cumulative, that pursuing any one of these details in search of a definitive answer is like concentrating on the threads at the expense of seeing the tapestry. Belle de Jour is subject to all forms of analysis -- Freudian, Jungian, Lacanian, Marxist, feminist, you name it -- but without exhausting its possibilities to tantalize. I think Buñuel's major achievement in the film is in sticking to his roots in surrealism without resorting to surrealist clichés: Every scene, even the obvious fantasies like the one in which Séverine is pelted with muck by Pierre and Husson (Michel Piccoli), is grounded in actuality, down to the specific address and the mundane Parisian location given to the brothel run by Madame Anaïs (Geneviève Page). It's only in reflecting on the film that we begin to question which scenes are "real" and which aren't. Belle de Jour is one of those inexhaustible films that you revisit with the certain knowledge that it will look slightly different to you every time.

The Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy, 1967)

Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac in The Young Girls of Rochefort

Delphine Garnier: Catherine Deneuve
Solange Garnier: Françoise Dorléac
Yvonne Garnier: Danielle Darrieux
Andy Miller: Gene Kelly
Étienne: George Chakiris
Maxence: Jacques Perrin
Simon Dame: Michel Piccoli
Bill: Grover Dale
Josette: Geneviève Thénier
Subtil Dutroux: Henri Crémieux

Director: Jacques Demy
Screenplay: Jacques Demy
Cinematography: Ghislain Cloquet
Production design: Bernard Evein
Film editing: Jean Hamon
Music: Michel Legrand

I appreciate Jacques Demy's hommage to the Hollywood musical, but I think I would have to like Michel Legrand's songs more to really enjoy The Young Girls of Rochefort. Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) has been known to seriously divide and damage friendships, though when I last saw it I rather enjoyed its cheeky sentimentality and bright colors. Rochefort takes a similar approach to Cherbourg, setting a musical romance in a French town and filling it with wall-to-wall Legrand songs, but by doubling down on the concept -- giving us multiple romances, extending the time from Cherbourg's 91 minutes to Rochefort's more than two hours, and bringing in guest stars from American musicals -- it begins to try one's patience. Catherine Deneuve, who starred in Cherbourg, is joined by her sister, Françoise Dorléac, and the two of them have great charm, though Deneuve's delicately beautiful face is smothered under an enormous blond wig for much of the film. They are courted by Étienne and Bill, who often seem to be doing dance movements borrowed from Jerome Robbins's choreography for West Side Story (Robbins and Robert Wise, 1961), in which the actor playing Étienne, George Chakiris, appeared. (Rochefort's choreographer is Norman Maen.) But Solange winds up with an American composer, Andy Miller, while Delphine keeps missing a connection with Maxence, an artist who has painted a picture of his ideal woman who looks exactly like Delphine. Meanwhile, their mother, Yvonne, doesn't realize that her old flame (and the father of her young son), Simon Dame, has recently moved to Rochefort. (She had turned him down because she didn't want to be known as Madame Dame. No, I'm not kidding.) And so it goes. The movie is given a jolt of life by Gene Kelly's extended cameo: At 55, he's as buoyant as ever, though somewhat implausible as the 25-year-old Dorléac's love interest. He would have been better paired with Darrieux. It's a candy-box movie, but for my taste it's like someone got there first and ate the best pieces, leaving me the ones with coconut centers.