CANNES -- Catherine Deneuve, the blond ice princess who is royalty in French cinema, melted for just a moment yesterday talking about her actress daughter, Chiara Mastroianni.
Deneuve co-stars with the raven-haired beauty in Arnaud Desplechin's family melodrama, A Christmas Tale. It was last night's Cannes Film Festival gala.
Deneuve, elegant and usually invincible, admitted to a Cannes press conference she was nervous about appearing with Mastroianni, her daughter with the late Italian star Marcello Mastroianni.
"Fortunately, I did not have any scenes alone with her. That would be more difficult. Also, I preferred her playing my daughter-in-law, rather than my daughter."
A Christmas Tale, a potential classic of French cinema and a viable candidate for the best film Palme d'Or from Sean Penn's Cannes jury, casts Deneuve as the matriarch of a French family. As Christmas approaches, the family is thrown into despair and chaos because she discovers she will die without a bone marrow transplant to treat her leukemia. Mastroianni plays the wife of Deneuve's youngest son. The entire clan comes together at Christmas. Old wounds are opened and salted.
The film is already controversial in Paris, perhaps because it is a stunning rendering of a severely dysfunctional family. That is because Desplechin is known for making his work autobiographical. In his previous film, a suicide scene caused a scandal and a lawsuit.
In this case, a horrid, out-of-control, self-destructive character played by Mathieu Amalric is reputed to be based on Desplechin himself.
Meanwhile, that man's sister and her son are reportedly based on Desplechin's own sister and nephew. Their portrayals are harsh, too, and the twinned issues of depression and mental breakdown are raised.
Desplechin said it is "a peculiarity of French cinema" to tell such intimate stories. Responding to a Sun Media question about the ethics of using autobiography in "fictional" films, even at the risk of hurting family members, Desplechin said, "I find this rather funny."
He obviously did not mean ha-ha-funny. He meant ironic. All filmmakers, like all actors, channel fragments of their lives into their work, Desplechin said. "Then I make it rather strange; then I make it rather personal."
Desplechin added that cinema is better than real life. "I go to the cinema to have a better life. It is more organized. It is more interesting. It is more intense."
Aging gracefully
Catherine Deneuve, 64, is still a classic beauty, in person and on screen. But she finds all her directors now come from a different generation. "They're younger and younger, that's true," Deneuve said. "And I'm getting older and older. The gap is widening."
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