Recently, at age 50, Emma Thompson became a first-time blogger –– a term which, according to her, “as a computer illiterate, I get confused with ‘snog’ (British slang for kissing) and ‘shog’ (Shakespearian word used by Pistol in Henry V meaning ‘leave’) neither of which – I realize – is the correct interpretation.” The email missive posted by Melissa Silverstein was part of Thompson’s promotion for Last Chance Harvey, an older-woman-meets-even-older-man romance co-starring Dustin Hoffman (ah, but for the days of Mrs. Robinson!)
The still-radiant Thompson expresses relief that maturity has given her the freedom to let it all hang out rather than nip and tuck it all back in, but she ain’t got nothing on a few women a decade and more older whose sex appeal (plastic surgery aside) is decidedly more French Riviera than Fort Lauderdale. So to welcome this seasoned British actress/ blogging novice to the wild wild world of cyberspace, here are my picks for an international GGILF club.
Still impossibly gorgeous and chic at age 65, Catherine Deneuve is the ultimate living emblem of the lasting romance of French film. She’s also amongst the busiest international female stars over the age of fifty, and while Deneuve has made the occasional questionable move since hitting that marker of age (dueting with a post-post-post Sex Pistols Malcolm McLaren; playing “herself” in I Want to See, a dramatized document of her visit to war-torn Lebanon), Melissa Anderson is right to note that for the most part, over the last decade and a half, “she has shown a fearlessness in her roles—no matter how small.”
That fearlessness is on display in A Christmas Tale, where Deneuve is at her best rocking a borderline incestuously playful love-hate with her wicked charmer of a son (and potential lifesaver) Matthieu Amalric. With that film hitting theaters tomorrow, here’s a look back at a few iconic Catherine Deneuve moments, all readily available via YouTube.
Arnaud Desplechin makes movies that play like epic novels built out into live-sized pop-up books. Virtually Cubist in their multi-faceted narrative complexity, they cast such a spell that they’re almost interactive. When you watch a Desplechin film, you can smell perfume and feel bass shaking a room, and you feel the burden of each character’s long-simmering loves and resentments as if they were your own. Beyond surround sound, it’s surround space, surround time, surround life.
A Christmas Tale (Un Conte de Noel), Desplechin’s latest, is a darkly comic dysfunctional family fairy tale, more Meet Me In Saint Louis than The Royal Tenenbaums, with a healthy dose of A Midsummer Night’s Dream thrown in. With its whimsies and excesses playing out under the oddly liberating spectre of expected death, the whole thing is infused with a fin de siecle sensibility. While ailing matriarch is Junon Vuillard (Catherine Deneuve) infuriatingly matter-of-fact regarding what may be her own last holiday (she explains the seriousness of her condition to her husband in their warmly-lit budoir, backed by the strains of cafe jazz), her grown-up kids reflexively take the reminder of the ticking clock as an opportunity for boozy, reckless revelry, as an excuse to fight and to stop fighting repressed desires. Weird, warm, gleefully funny and unavoidably heartrending, this grand tale of a family reunited by mortality is, in it’s most impressive trick, not a bit morose. To borrow a line from Desplechin himself, speaking after a screening at the New York Film Festival, the Vuillards “don’t have time for melancholy”; to borrow a line from his script, “suffering is a painted backdrop” for the business of getting through the day.
In the middle of Tom Hall’s interview with Arnaud Desplechin, director of my current favorite film of the year A Christmas Tale, indieWIRE has embedded a clip from the film, which I’ve in turn stolen and embedded above. This scene, in which Catherine Deneuve’s ailing (but still gorgeous) matriarch Junon goes shopping with her son’s new girlfriend (played by Emmanuelle Devos), incorporates the film’s running joke about Angela Bassett.
A Christmas Tale opens in New York and L.A. on November 14, but in the intervening 11 days the IFC Center is hosting a mini-retrospective of Desplechin’s films. I’m hoping to make it out to see L’Aimee, Desplechin’s personal documentary about his own family, andMy Sex Life (…Or How I Got Into An Argument), which stars Christmas‘ Mathieu Almaric, and which I’ve somehow never seen. Check out the full details on the program here.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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