Place Vendôme (118 mins, 15) Directed by Nicole Garcia; starring Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Seigner, Jacques Dutronc, Jean-Pierre Bacri
There is a narrow line between subtlety and obscurity, and in Place Vendôme , Nicole Garcia, the French stage and movie star turned director, walks it with the skill of a high-wire artist. Her glossy thriller takes its name from that elegant square in Paris's first arrondissement, site of both the Ritz hotel and the Ministry of Justice, where the tall eighteenth-century buildings tower over the casual pedestrian, and the fabulous jewellers' shops and banks attract and intimidate him. The ambience is one of alluring surfaces and inner mystery. This provides the perfect central metaphor for an intelligent, artful movie about money, power and social codes, and the people who covertly run private worlds.
The central character, though she only gradually emerges as such, is Marianne (Catherine Deneuve), the wife of Vincent Malivert (Bernard Fresson), ageing head of an illustrious jeweller's with a head office in the Place Vend&244;me. She's an alcoholic who spends more time in expensive clinics than at home, though what caused her condition we do not learn until late in the picture. Vincent is approaching the end of his tether, the company is in financial straits. We infer that he has committed some serious professional impropriety which involves deceiving De Beers in London and possibly dealing with the Russian mafia. In a culture that thrives on conspiratorial expertise, we, the audience, know only two things as facts because we have been witnesses. First, Vincent has a secret cache of recently cut diamonds which he has put aside for Marianne. Second, his death in what is officially recorded as a driving accident was a carefully contrived suicide.
These diamonds in Marianne's possession become the focus of attention for a variety of people, including the handsome Battistelli (Jacques Dutronc), a physically and mentally crippled dealer in illicit gems who was once Marianne's lover and is now manipulating the beautiful Nathalie (Emmanuelle Seigner), a gifted young gemologist; and Jean-Pierre (Jean-Pierre Bacri), a disbarred lawyer, now a repo man forced to trail Marianne.
Meanwhile, for the first time in 20 years, the bruised, beautiful Marianne takes control of her life, re-entering the world of diamond dealing that had so fascinated her as a young woman. She comes to terms with Battistelli, the lover who learnt from her and betrayed her. She gradually takes a protective interest in Nathalie, and in a crucial silent flashback that is at once confessional and instructive, Emmanuelle Seigner appears as the 30-year-old Catherine Deneuve. It's as if the older woman sees the younger one in her memory, and the younger one identifies with the older in the telling. None of this is made explicit. Nobody tells anyone things they already know. Business proceeds by hints, nods, coded language in this twilight world where everything works by trust but nobody trusts anyone.
Place Vendôme is a strange but consistently effective thriller. The suspense, tension and mystery is constant, but the only violence comes during the suicidal car crash (from which the director cuts at the moment of collision) and a threatened assault in the Ritz that is averted by the appearance of room service.
Catherine Deneuve, who was in two films in competition at Cannes last May, has been emerging as one of the finest actresses in world cinema, and at the age of 56 the most handsome and desirable. She is capable of expressing an infinity of pain without inviting our pity. Bacri, Fresson, Dutronc and Seigner are all first rate, and among the supporting cast it is good to note British actors Julian Fellows and Larry Lamb breaking into French as suave fellows from Hatton Garden. The haunting score is by the Merchant-Ivory company's resident composer, Richard Robbins, who economically draws on his music for Howards End, Remains of the Day and Jefferson in Paris .
