A few films I found online recently. Firstly I saw The Goddess of 1967, which won Rose Byrne the Best Actress prize at the Venice film festival in 2000. All that says in retrospect is how chronically weak the films were that year because any of the major Cannes performances that year (Lena Endre in Faithless, Maggie Cheung in In the Mood For Love and Björk in Dancer in the Dark) would have walked it in a heartbeat. The film is absolutely atrocious, it's such a vapid, soulless tale of a blind woman and a Japanese man who go on a road trip in a car (the eponymous goddess). It clumsily exploits a touchy subject matter (incest) and shows such a lack of insight it beggars belief. The acting is adequate but nothing dozens of others couldn't have done (the guy sounds like he's reading his lines phonetically and Byrne's blindness doesn't fully convince), it's a very obscure film and deservedly so, I couldn't recommend seeking it out to anyone.
So from that to the real goddess of 1967, Catherine Deneuve (who was at her most iconic having Belle de Jour and The Young Girls of Rochefort released that year). I found three films of hers online and I'll take them in the order I saw them. First up I saw Mayerling, which I'd never heard of but it was available and one look at the cast (Omar Sharif, Deneuve and Ava Gardner) and I had to see it. It's based on the true story of the Mayerling incident, which involved the Crown Prince of Austria and his mistress. The film is a romanticised version of their love story and it reminds me of The Abdication, which I talked about this month. It's not *that* historically accurate but is a very watchable film. The difference between this film and that one is the Liv Ullmann one relied on the acting whereas this is a period drama which has all the positives that genre affords. Gardner's scene with Deneuve was the only part that stood out on the acting front but it got better the longer it went.
After seeing that I continued searching and found a film that isn't available here which I've wanted to see for years, My Favourite Season, directed by André Téchiné and starring Deneuve and Daniel Auteuil. They play estranged siblings who come together for christmas after Deneuve has had to take their mother into her house following recent illnesses. What plays out is a family drama which for the first 90 minutes is truly first rate. There are a couple of slips in tone and content which are at odds with everything else and slightly derail it at this point, but after that they get it back on track. Deneuve truly excels as the wife, sister and mother giving a restrained but soulful performance similar to that which she got oscar nominated for in Indochine. Auteuil doesn't have a tremendous amount to do but he does everything he's required to and on occasion goes above and beyond. Like Claude Sautet, Téchiné makes very clean films visually and it's just a shame this has got no distribution here because it's one of the better French films from the 90s I've seen.
Back to 1967 and the aforementioned The Young Girls of Rochefort. I expected this (being another Jacques Demy film starring Deneuve) that it would be completely sung like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg was, but it's a normal musical with dialogue followed by musical numbers. This stars Catherine Deneuve and her sister Françoise Dorléac as twins who are trying to move to Paris all the while searching for their "dream man". The choreography is generally very nice and the direction is superb as while having technically challenging shots Demy never draws attention to his technique. The best songs are those involving the sisters as they as performers have the most charm and the songs are better written. Not much to character, they try to keep everyone apart from who they're supposed to be with a little too transparantly but it's a very stylish film, and they really don't make them like this any more. That's it for now, but I may have another Deneuve one in my next entry if I can find the subtitles for it.