Place Vendôme

France/Belgium/United Kingdom 1998

Reviewed by Keith Reader

Synopsis

Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.

Vincent Malivert directs a jewellery business in Paris' Place Vendôme. His wife Marianne was once an ambitious dealer, but she slid into alcoholism. Vincent's business is riddled with debts and his creditors are closing in. Realising his position is hopeless, he shows the now-sober Marianne seven magnificent diamonds he is proposing to hide from his creditors. Vincent's assistant Nathalie is in the process of leaving her lover Jean-Pierre for jewel-dealer Battistelli. Vincent commits suicide, leaving Marianne at the helm of the business but she refuses to surrender the stones to her husband's creditors.

In Antwerp, she discovers Battistelli is also trying to get his hands on them. She and Jean-Pierre become lovers. A flashback reveals that many years ago Marianne had been in love with Battistelli. He used her to pass on some stolen gems and abandoned her, thus precipitating her alcoholism. Ostensibly to sell him the diamonds, Marianne makes an appointment to meet Battistelli which the creditors will then discover about his person. She tells Battistelli the creditors are lying in wait for him, and the two flee to Ostend, where they spend a night in separate beds in a hotel room, admitting they were not made for each other. The creditors turn up, tipped off by Battistelli who believes he can negotiate his way out of trouble with them. Later, Marianne is pursued by Jean-Pierre on the beach; she asks if he always runs after women who run from him.

Review

Although she's best known as an actress, Nicole Garcia has directed four feature films including Place Vendôme. In Un week-end sur deux she drew a superb turn from Nathalie Baye, playing a fraught but powerful woman similar to Garcia's own best-known role in Resnais' Mon oncle d'Amérique. Catherine Deneuve here belongs to the same family, giving a performance that ranks as one of the finest of her middle age.

As in André Téchiné's Ma saison préférée, the bodily filling out characteristic of that time of life serves to give her character more gravitas than in many previous incarnations. Eyes and gesture do most of the work - hers is not a verbose role - in her evocation of the iconically named Marianne, whose initial near-catatonia gives way to assertiveness. By the end she is multiply in charge: restored to solvency; capable of dealing with former lovers, whether defaulters from the past (Battistelli) or pursuers in the present (Jean-Pierre); and even (supposedly impossible for a recovering alcoholic) capable of social drinking in moderation. The other performances inevitably tend to look like mere foils to Deneuve's. Emmanuelle Seigner's mannered flouncings irritated this reviewer, but Jacques Dutronc exudes a convincingly disreputable air as Battistelli. Jean-Pierre Bacri deserves credit for his masochistic cragginess, confirming after Un air de famille that he has what it takes as actor as well as screenwriter.

But Place Vendôme is more than a jewelcase for performers. It is subtly scripted, making discreetly resonant use of doublings: Nathalie with Marianne in her youth: Marianne and the disbarred lawyer Jean-Pierre brought together through a shared professional disgrace; Battistelli and Vincent as respectively treacherous and supportive father-figures to their trophy lover/wife. The film also puts on screen a world scarcely seen other than as the backdrop to Jules Dassin's Du rififi chez les hommes (1955) - one whose elegance is matched by its menace, rendered all the more sinister by the fact that no gun is drawn and no violence apart from Vincent's suicide takes place on screen. If the complexity of the intrigue and the genre stereotypes evoke the world of noir, the decor is at its antipodes - thick carpets, luxuriously panelled rooms, expensive cars. Nor could we be further from the gritty banlieue film or the all-gloss cinema du look.

In a curious way Place Vendôme has affinities with the heritage movie, reassuring us that the uppermost echelons of Parisian chic - the eponymous square and Catherine Deneuve - are still as potent as before. Garcia deploys her silky men in designer suits sparingly, making the frisson they generate all the more palpable (though the references to the Russian mafia, a seemingly inescapable component of end-of-the-millennium noir, appear clichéd). We see surprisingly little of the city for a largely Paris-set film, reinforcing the sense that the real action is elsewhere - in the echoing corridors and suave international train and car journeys of a ruthlessly stylish world.

The colonnaded elegance of the Place Vendôme is a spatial counterpart of Deneuve the ice maiden, but not until the very end do we find an equivalent for her character's fragility issuing in wonderfully understated strength. That is emphasised by the scrubby Ostend dunes of the final sequence, deserted save for Marianne and the limpet-like Jean-Pierre, whose desperate loyalty has provided an ironic counterpart to her development throughout. Altogether, Place Vendôme is a film whose performances and settings yield immense pleasure.

Credits

Producer
Alain Sarde
Screenplay/Dialogue
Nicole Garcia
Jacques Fieschi
Director of Photography
Laurent Dailland
Editors
Luc Barnier
Françoise Bonnot
Jean-François Naudon
Art Director
Thierry Flamand
Music/Arranger
Richard Robbins
©Les Films Alain Sarde/TF1 Films Production/Les Films de l'Étang/Alhéna Films/Angel's Company
Production Companies
Alain Sarde presents a Les Films Alain Sarde/TF1 Films Production/Les Films de l'Étang/Alhéna Films/Angel's Company
made with the support of Eurimages
With the participation of Canal+/Centre de la Cinématographie and of Studio Images 3
Executive Producer
Christine Gozlan
Production Co-ordinator
Claude Dallet
Production Manager
François Hamel
Unit Production Manager
François Menny
Unit Managers
Nicolas Fagard
Belgium:
Peter Van Den Borre
Switzerland:
Marco Dellamula
Location Manager
Jean-Philippe Reverdot
Assistant Directors
Douglas Law
Pierre Minot
Bruno Chauris
Laurent Lemarchand
Script Supervisor
Sylvie Koechlin
Casting
Frédérique Moidon
Lucy Boulting
Camera Operator
Alain Masseron
Steadicam Operators
Patrick de Ranter
Valentin Monge
Special Visual Effects
Excalibur
Operators:
Christophe Grelié
Yves Pupulin
Special Effects
François Philippi
Set Decorator
Bernadette Saint-Loubert
Storyboard Artist
Bruno De Dieuleveult
Costume Creators
Nathalie Du Roscoät
Elisabeth Tavernier
Wardrobe
Marine Orfino
Chris Fageol
Key Make-up
Cédric Gérard
Sylvie Duval
Hervé Soulié
Laurence Azouvy-Jarriau
Hairdresser
Caroline Bufalini
Hair Tinting
Christophe Robin
Key Hairdressers
Agathe Moro
Lolita Avellanas
Titles
Cinecool
Opticals
Microfilms
Orchestrations
Geoffrey Alexander
Recording
Didier Lizé
Soundtrack
"Organ Virtuoso" by J. Starkey; "Desert Sky II" by P. Wilson, A. Routh; "Cobwebs and Rainbows" by D. Walter; "Tu me quieres pa bien", "Un castello a tu magia" by Leosbel Jimenez Licca aka Hanny, performed by Hanny; extracts from "The Remains of the Day", "Jefferson in Paris", "Howards End" composed/conducted by Richard Robbins
Choreography
Chris Gandois
Sound
Jean-Pierre Duret
Dominique Hennequin
Post-production Sound Engineer
Jean-François Auger
Supervising Sound Editors
Marie-Christine Ratel
Cécile Ranc
Emmanuelle Lalande
Sound Effects
Jean-Pierre Lelong
Sound Effects Recordist
Anne Le Campion
Post-synchronization
Jacques Lévy
Technical Adviser
Eric Landau
Jewellery Consultant for Catherine Deneuve
Marcial Berro
Cast
Catherine Deneuve
Marianne Malivert
Jean-Pierre Bacri
Jean-Pierre
Emmanuelle Seigner
Nathalie
Jacques Dutronc
Battistelli
Bernard Fresson
Vincent Malivert
François Berléand
Eric Malivert
Philippe Clévenot
Kleiser
László Szabó
Charlie Rosen
Dragan Nikolic
Janos
Otto Tausig
Samy Balin
Malik Zidi
Samy's son
Elisabeth Commelin
Mademoiselle Pierson
Eric Ruf
Philippe Terence
Nidal Al-Ashkar
Saliha
Larry Lamb
Christopher Makos
Julian Fellowes
Wajman
Michael Culkin
Nick Ellworth
Antoine Blanqueforth
De Beers men
Coralie Seyrig
Carmen Roman
Malivert shop assistants
Martine Erhel
Louise
Arnaud Xainte
Aristide Demonico
Paolo Capisano
Malivert employees
Germaine Labarthe
shop customer
Eric Landau
diamond expert
James Olivier
advocate
Sylvie Flepp
Hélène Otternaud
Saliha Fellahi
clinic nurses
Pierre Mottet
the doctor
Michel Huby
Paul Chevillard
Catherine Cretin
dinner guests
Delphine Blamont
chambermaid at The Ritz
Pierre-Jean Le Gregam
bellhop
Pascal Renault
the hunter
Mykhaël Georges-Schar
Hilton concierge
Philippe Giblin
Jean-Pierre's assistant
Arno Feffer
musician behind with the rent
Cécile Camp
his wife
Rahal Jawahir
mini-market manager
Mehdi Mengal
his son
Jean-Claude Perrin
the priest
Albert Goldberg
poker player
Georges David
Henri Leon Bakon
Samy's friends
Beatrice Demachy
Rosen's secretary
Jacques Michel
Kleiser's associate
Patrick Colucci
café manager
Paul Kawan
broker atAntwerp Exchange
Certificate
15
Distributor
Artificial Eye Film Company
10,625 feet
118 minutes 4 seconds
DTS stereo/Digital DTS sound
In Colour
Anamorphic [Technovision]
Subtitles
Last Updated: 20 Dec 2011