GLASGOW FILM FESTIVAL
Catherine Deneuve in Potiche andi Marion Cotillard in Little White Liesi
contribute two of this year’s best femalei performances to the 2011 GFF. Paul Dalei
examines the careers of both actressesi
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Marion Cotillard in Little White Lies; Catherine Deneuve (inset)
CONNECTION
R umour has it that the great French actor Catherine Deneuve was recently paid £100,000 for an appearance at a wealthy film festival. That being roughly the budget for the whole of the Glasgow Film Festival, the star of the opening film Potiche will not be making an appearance in the west of Scotland this month. But along with Marion Cotillard, her heir to the Euro-queen throne, she has a Gallic spirit, insouciance and sophistication that is a useful metaphor for the many riches that lie inside this, the seventh GFF.
After treading water in decent and mediocre supporting roles for almost a decade (Kings and Queen, A Christmas Tale, The Girl on the Train), Deneuve moves centre stage for François Ozon’s delightful social comedy Potiche, in which she plays a 1970s trophy wife who finds herself empowered when she gets to run her husband’s umbrella shop (her husband being the money and girth-rich Gerard Depardieu). Speaking at the Venice Film Festival Deneuve said her journey back to the 1970s was not one she took lightly: ‘The 1970s was not really a special period for me. The character that I play is so far from me, so I didn’t really have to think of anything. I had no possibility anyway, because I was so much younger in the 70s and had no exposure to women like that and yet I liked very much the character of this woman.’ Deneuve has been here before with writer- director Ozon in 2002’s 8 Women, but Potiche was different: ‘It was me that was the main character, with 8 Women we were eight women on the same level of work and my relation with François was much closer on this one.’
A few days after the opening gala, fellow Parisian and Academy Award-winner Marion Cotillard can be seen in Guillaume Canet’s second directorial feature. Actor and writer-
14 THE LIST 17 Feb–3 Mar 2011
turned-director Canet previously gave the world unparelled thrills in his 2006 Harlan Coben adaptation Tell No One, but Little White Lies is a very different kettle of middle-class angst. The film has already drawn obvious comparisons to The Big Chill (when one of their number is injured, old friends talk around their navels on a beach holiday) but after assured turns in La Vie en Rose, Public Enemies and Inception, Cotillard found she had to clear the decks to play the pivotal character of Marie: ‘When you have an emotional scene to do, if you think about something that happened to the point of being in that state of emotion, then when the scene has finished, that emotion is still there. Because it belongs to you and it doesn’t belong to the scene or the character. So you can’t just run away from this emotion that you brought back from your past and your own suffering. My solution is always to be 100 per cent in character. And then you get what this person feels. Someone who suffers will have very strong emotions and you will get those emotions because you drown yourself in them.’ Cotillard, who keeps her Oscar in her sparse Paris apartment and practises bass guitar when she is not jetting between American and European productions, is a serious actor whose career choices have been wise thus far. Her remarkable body of work is comparable to Deneuve’s when she was Cotillard’s age (to name just a few of many: Belle De Jour, Repulsion, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg). Where Cotillard’s future choices will lead her is anyone’s guess, but if it ends with her in an overheated studio, wearing a 1970s bri- nylon blouse, then it won’t be such a bad thing.
Potiche, GFT, Thu 17 Feb, 7.30pm & 8.30pm & Fri 18 Feb, 3.15pm. Little White Lies, GFT, Mon 21 Feb, 5.45pm & Tue 22 Feb, 3.45pm.
MERYL STREEP HIGHLIGHTS
Allan Hunter, co-director of the GFF, explains his choice of Meryl Streep for this year’s retrospective
‘Meryl Streep is a star who has stood the test of time, and is currently enjoying a fresh wave of popularity among the generation who've seen The Devil Wears Prada, so we thought it might be interesting to go back and let people see the spectrum of her career. Streep is the most Oscar-nominated
performer in movie history (16 times in total) but Sophie’s Choice is the film that she won her Oscar for. In many respects it’s her finest dramatic performance. Along with The French Lieutenant’s Woman, those films established a certain archetype early in her career, pitching her as a haunted, tormented, tragic figure.
One of the things that makes Streep special is her willingness to play the unsympathetic side of characters – in Kramer vs Kramer for instance. For a young actress at that stage of her career it was unusual that she was happy to play a mother who abandons her son, in a fairly selfish way, to go off and find herself. She's not too worried about developing a star image, or the kinds of characters she plays because she's always truthful to them.’ ■ See www.glasgowfilm.org/festival for information on screenings.
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