The 79th Venice Film Festival, the oldest in the world which runs this year from August 31 to September 10, will honour the French legend, Catherine Deneuve, with a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. Deneuve, who has been acting for six decades now, was an important part of the New French Wave of the 1960s. Her breakthrough work came in 1964 with the musical, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, helmed by Jacques Demy. She played the memorable Genevieve, a lovesick lass.
This movie led to many more collaborations with Demy – The Young Girls of Rochefort and Donkey Skin among others that were far more critically acclaimed than The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
Deneuve also acted for celebrity auteurs, such as Luis Bunuel, Francois Truffaut (The Last Metro) and Roman Polanski(Repulsion). Truffaut’s The Last Metro opens at the height of the German occupation of France in 1942 and follows the life of a small theatre, which despite strict censorship, maintains its dignity and cultural integrity. The theatre emerges victorious at the end of the war and Germany’s surrender. Parisians spent their evenings at the theatre during the war but had to catch the last metro to beat the curfew, hence the title.
It is a fascinating study of people who find ways to keep their spirits alive during the dark and depressing days of World War II. Deneuve plays a former starlet, whose Jewish husband is hiding in the cellar of the theatre. The film also had Gerard Depardieu, another French legend.
Repulsion (1965) was Polanski’s first English-language movie, and second production after Knives in the Water (1962). Deneuve essays a mentally disturbed young woman who has nightmarish experiences. The film was based on a story written by Polanski and Gerard Brach.
Now 78, Deneuve has in her basket 14 Cesar nominations, two wins and an Oscar nod for her performance in the 1992 Indochine. And her ties with the Festival have spanned over five decades.
In 1967, she clinched the Festival’s Golden Lion for her performance as a housewife, who begins working at a high-end brothel during the day in Buñuel’s classic “Belle de Jour.” In 1998, she won the Festival’s Volpi Cup for “Place Vendôme.”
The Festival Director, Alberto Barbera, said in a statement that Deneuve is “the very symbol of French cinema, a timeless diva and a true icon of the silver screen.” Also, Paul Schrader – who wrote Taxi Driver (directed by Martin Scorsese in 1976) and helmed American Gigolo – will receive a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.
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