Emmanuelle Seigner et Jacques Dutronc dans PLACE VENDOME
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15 reviews in total |
*
Tricky, Very Stylish, Fascinating, Moody
Author: trpdean from New York, New York
27 October 2003
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.
*
Author: stanton-7 from Glasgow, Scotland
15 November 1999
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.
*
Author: richard from paris
2 September 1999
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.
*
Author: utzutzutz from Ashland, Oregon
1 May 2001
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
To truly appreciate this film, you may either have to be French, a mystery lover or a diamond connoisseur, three things I am not. That said, the shadowy, film noir Place Vendôme, set in Paris' haute couture jewelry district, is a relatively well-crafted third film by French writer-director Nicole Garcia.While I'm also not a huge Catherine Deneuve fan, the 57-year-old famed beauty steals the show in a performance that won her the 1998 Venice Film Festival's Best Actress award. It's a challenging, multifaceted role that she plays with due restraint, making it less maudlin and emotionally charged than it easily could have become.
Deneuve is Marianne, wife of Vincent Malivert (Bernard Fresson, with whom she starred in Buñuel's 1967 film Belle de Jour), owner of one of the most prestigious jewelry shops in the world. Once a gem broker herself, the middle-aged Marianne has fallen into an alcoholic stupor. Her relationship with Vincent is cold and hollow; she has slept at home only 17 nights in the past year, preferring instead to convalesce at various `rest homes.'Vincent is also a troubled person. He hides the extent of his misery and the fact that his debt-ridden business is quickly going bankrupt. (plot spoiler?) When he intentionally drives his speeding Mercedes into a lumber truck, his desperation is revealed.
Garcia spends the bulk of the picture depicting Marianne's process of recovering from her addiction. Faced with relative penury in the wake of her husband's death, she relearns the art of the diamond deal as she tries to sell a handful of probably stolen gems Vincent has left her. Her turning point comes when she gazes at the stones through a loupe and revels in their inherent beauty. This in stark contrast to the rest of the cast, sundry thugs and swarthy millionaires who view the rocks as nothing more than money in the bank. In fact, one could argue that all concerned are addicts, addicted to their work and financial gain, and suitably jacked up, ruthless and miserable.
This, for me, is the film's most absorbing storyline, Marianne's renaissance and her rapprochement with actions and people from the past. Specifically, after a 20-year hiatus she reconnects with a former lover, the Russian mafia-connected Battisstelli (Jacques Dutronc in a fascinating performance), who had once sorely burned her during a jewelry sale. It's a moving moment, when she finds herself able to let go of her anger toward him, and both characters connect with their fundamental humanity. But again, it's a very subtle strand that Garcia only begins to caress near the film's end. Had she moved such human plotlines to the foreground, the film would have emerged much stronger and more poignant.
But I suppose it's unfair to expect a French film to depict Marianne's reawakening in the hat-tossing style of Mary Tyler Moore. After all, the French did coin the word anomie. Still, I wish the main character's development had become less buried in the film's insistence on utter subtlety and dreariness. I suppose the dark interior shots and seemingly unending rainy days could feel atmospheric if your antidepressant is working particularly well, but mostly they just seemed morose. That aside, Laurent Dailland's cinematography frequently stands out. I still haven't forgotten a wide-angle shot of vertical blinds in a boardroom, nor the splashes of crimson - symbolizing Marianne's suppressed then emerging passion - laced throughout the drear.
The film incorporates many classic noir-ish elements - that is, noir of the 1940s rather than the excessive, violence-parading Quentin Tarrantino variety. In the intrigue over the stolen gems, shadowy figures emerge from the woodwork. Tall, svelte beauties reveal themselves as jewelry sellers, then mistresses, then accomplices in crime. Remnants from the past, seemingly long disposed of, come back to haunt the players in nefarious ways. Truth is stark, brutal and straight, no chaser. And yet the surfaces remain as shiny and sleek as the polished glass boardroom tables at which lives and deaths, fortunes and demises are determined with stone-faced certainty.
There's something of a doppelgänger theme here too, which bears noting. Soon after Vincent's death, Marianne meets Nathalie (Emmanuelle Seigner), a young woman she suspects of being her husband's mistress. The two femmes fatale match their men as they match their hairstyles, frequently mirroring the past and future for each other.Place Vendôme offers enough to admire that it's worth a look, especially for thriller lovers. However, it does have its share of flaws. The plot gets overly complex and becomes difficult to track in places. Though presumably adding to the air of mystery, the cuts are sometimes so quick that the action becomes confusing.
I also would have preferred more of a focus on the psychological and emotional elements, rather than the wheeling-dealings of taciturn Gallic businessmen, who seem to multiply like champagne bottles at a French wedding. Despite a good dose of suspense in some places, it was tough to care about these rapacious specimens and their greed-driven lives. In embracing her passion and extending her forgiveness, Deneuve's Marianne proves the only character truly worth watching.
*
"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.
*
Author: Vincentiu from Romania
13 January 2007
The Deneuve's film. The story has not any original element, the action is confuse, the theme of widow in rout is very old. But, the value of this movie exists. And it is present in every scene.Catherine Deneuve's art is the solution. The art to transmit gestures of an ambiguous fight is subtle and powerful.The elements of resignation are pieces of beautiful miniature.
The tiredness, relation with the past, limits of memories, color of words, revenge's intentions, search and fear, gems and victims are episodes of an essential trip .Marianne is not only a character of a French actress but reflexion of a magnificent art, in every acting detail is a touching drop of precision.A film with faint brightness and misty soul.
*
I hate French movies. Hate them, hate them, hate them. All things being equal, you couldn't pay me to see a French movie. French dramas are dull, depressing films about people smoking cigarettes and talking about nothing in particular. And French comedies are like bad Jerry Lewis movies with subtitles. Nonetheless, I was dragged to see "Place Vendome" and was pleasantly surprised.
This is a thriller about Marianne (Catherine Deneuve), the widow of a prominent Parisian jeweler who is involved in some shady deals before he commits suicide. Marianne is an alcoholic who spends 348 days a year voluntarily confined in a mental hospital. When she is out, she needs a nurse to look after her. When she is sober, her hands shake and she is frightened of everything.
Before her husband dies, he tells her about some hot rocks stashed in the house. After he dies, she tries to sell them so she doesn't have to sell her husband's business or go bankrupt. Everyone is too frightened to buy them, but plenty of people want to take them.
She also finds out her husband had a mistress named Nathalie (Emmanuelle Seigner)who looks exactly like she did twenty years ago. It turns out they have more than that in common. They are both intimately acquainted with the jewelry business, legal and otherwise. There is not a man that one has slept with that the other has not. And they are both in over their heads on both the business and romantic fronts.
What I really liked about this film was that it reminded me so much of Hitchcock's romantic thrillers, particularly "Vertigo". There is a scene at the beginning where Marianne has a breakdown in the middle of a stairwell while Richard Robbins' (or is it Bernard Herrmann's) swirling clarinet fugue score plays. This, I thought, was a wonderful homage to the bell-tower scenes in "Vertigo".
There are faults of course. There is just too much coincidence to keep my disbelief suspended for long. And I really would have liked to see more of Nathalie. But overall, this is a stylish thriller from a country where I least expected it. 8 out of 10.
*
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)
