Venice 2022: Lion of Honor to Catherine Deneuve – Film Review

With the Cannes Film Festival ended just a few days ago, the next major international cinema event is now taking over. Indeed, it is since today that we know the name of the winner of the Lion of Honor of the 79th edition of the Venice Film Festival. It is the French actress and icon of world cinema Catherine Deneuve, who will therefore be celebrated at the beginning of September, between August 30 and September 10 to be precise. As already announced in early May, American screenwriter and director Paul Schrader will receive the other honorary Golden Lion.

The career of Catherine Deneuve (* 1943) is so long and illustrious that it would be highly simplistic to reduce it to her only passages on the side of the Venetian Lido. However, it made several stopovers there, notably in 1967 with beautiful day by Luis Buñuel, Golden Lion that year, then in 1998 for her Volpi Cup for Best Actress, won thanks to Place Vendôme by Nicole Garcia. Finally, she was the president of the jury at the 63rd Venice Film Festival in 2006, which awarded its Golden Lion to Still Life by Jia Zhang Ke. Since it seems impossible to us to condense more than sixty years of cinema into a few lines, allow us to simply mention a few notable collaborations between the actress and her appointed directors.

It had started in the mid-1960s with Jacques Demy through Umbrellas of Cherbourg – Palme d’or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1964 –, The Demoiselles de Rochefort, Donkey Skin and The most important event since man walked on the moon. Closely followed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau (The good life and The wild), Buñuel therefore (beautiful day and Tristana), Francois Truffaut (The Mississippi Mermaid and The Last Metro), Marco Ferreri (Lisa and Don’t touch the white woman), Francois Ozon (8 women and Vase) and Arnaud Desplechin (kings and queen and A Christmas tale).

However, the longest and most sustained artistic complicity binds Catherine Deneuve to André Téchiné, in eight films between Hotel of the Americas in 1981 until Farewell to the night in 2019, through The crime scene, My favorite season, The thieves, The changing times, The Girl of the RER and The Man We Loved Too Much.

Thanks to her Golden Lion, Catherine Deneuve achieved the grand slam of honorary trophies at the three major European festivals. Previously, she had received the Golden Bear of honor in Berlin in 1998 and a Palme d’or of honor at Cannes in 2005. As for the Césars, she had been nominated fourteen times and had won it two times. times: for The Last Metro in 1981 and Indochina in 1993. The latter also earned her her one and only Best Actress Oscar nomination the following year. In terms of French actresses honored in this way in Venice, Catherine Deneuve is the third, after Jeanne Moreau and Michèle Morgan. Her former companion Marcello Mastroianni, the father of their daughter Chiara Mastroianni (The girl with the bracelet), received his Honorary Golden Lion in 1990.