La Chamade (Heartbeat)
MGM DVD, $19.95
It’s a numbers game complicated by the language barrier. Parisian face for the ages and gifted actress Catherine Deneuve has appeared in some 90 films since the dawn of the Sixties, and if you were a video store, you could only lay your hands on about 30 of those. Imagine if someone told you that there were 60 James Dean movies you’d never laid eyes on. That the balance of Deneuve’s filmography is in French only compounds the problem. In the U.S., that translates into chiefly dramatic exports – the “important” films: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Belle de Jour, Dancer in the Dark. Until the grand frolic of 2002’s 8 Women, some had never witnessed La Deneuve in a comedic role. DVD could be the great equalizer, for her and all others. Already, with the digital debut of 1965’s black-and-white comedic lark La Vie de Château and the laughably bad major obscurity The Woman With Red Boots – by Juan Luis Buñuel, son of Deneuve’s great collaborator – one might get the impression that, like Garbo, this one laughs, too. 1968’s La Chamade is no comedy, the tagline being, “Kept by One Man’s Riches, freed by Another Man’s Passions,” but as a carefree bourgeois radiant enjoying her trophy-ness, Deneuve’s performance is a prize. At 25, Deneuve is at the height of one of her several peaks, and no director was ever able to resist letting the camera devour her. There’s more than a lick of Belle de Jour (’67) here, but that’s half the fun. The other half are the set-ups; the sheer nightie awakening, closely followed by Deneuve taking her convertible for a spin along the Seine and throwing her arms to the sky with a supernova élan. Playing croquet in an orange turtleneck, being serenaded by college students as she sits on a park bench eating chips, rehearsing her breakup speech. Postcoital in her blue bathrobe. One could go on … Suggestion, distributors: Get ’75’s Le Sauvage, Deneuve and Yves Montand stranded on a desert isle. Talk about The Hunger.
This article appears in March 19 • 2004.
