At last month's
Deneuve's résumé spans nearly 50 years and 100 movies. She started in the early days of the French New Wave and worked with some of the movement's key directors, including Jacques Demy ("The Umbrellas of Cherbourg") and François Truffaut ("
A filmography this long and prolific is bound to have its fallow patches. Lionsgate's Catherine Deneuve collection, out Tuesday, is far from a greatest hits compilation -- the five films here, which range from feeble to quite good, have largely been forgotten -- but it does attest to her beguiling consistency. Even in the most pedestrian movies, you could count on her to be a movie star.
From the beginning, people have tended to remark on Deneuve's looks more than her talents, but in her case, the two often seem closely linked. David Thomson in his "A Biographical Dictionary of Film" calls her beauty "a receptacle for any imagination," which might sound like a back-handed compliment, but Deneuve, unlike many screen sirens, is always subtly in control of her appearance, coolly aware of her sexual allure.
(The Deneuve set is part of Lionsgate's ongoing series devoted to European sex symbols, after earlier
The chosen films represent a variety of genres -- thriller,
The earliest movie here, Jean Aurel's "Manon 70," dates to 1968 and seamlessly updates the amoral treachery of Abbé Prévost's 18th century source novel to the hedonistic swinging '60s. Deneuve's Manon has a taste for designer clothes and yacht vacations -- which her generous older lovers are happy to satisfy -- but complications ensue when she begins an affair with a penniless journalist (Sami Frey).
Most of these films pair Deneuve with a male lead of equal stature. In Robin Davis' humdrum "Le Choc" (1982), she's an unhappily married farmer who falls for Delon's weary hit man, predictably forced into one last job before retirement. In Jean-Paul Rappeneau's "Le Sauvage" (1975), her ditsy bride-to-be gets cold feet and winds up on an island with suave perfumer
Her role in "Fort Saganne" (1984), Alain Corneau's plodding, three-hour period epic, is basically a glorified cameo, though her celebrity journalist, who lures war hero
André Té
