Latest news with #BelledeJour
The Guardian
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Geneviève Page obituary
Screen and stage were not equal suitors for the affections of the French actor Geneviève Page, who once described working in cinema as a case of coitus interruptus. 'You start a scene, you rehearse it, you're ready. Then they do the sound and lighting. There comes a moment when you've got to charge in. And then: 'Cut!' It annoyed me each time,' Page told France Culture in 2009. 'Whereas when you arrive in your theatre dressing room in the evening, you know it'll start soon and you'll see it through right to the end.' Page, who has died aged 97, built a heavyweight theatre portfolio over more than five decades; she played roles such as Hermione in Euripides's Andromache, Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and the Fassbinder heroine Petra von Kant. But her film career had a stuttering rhythm, with the French industry never truly finding a place for her. Her melodramatic ardour and throaty timbre were not a natural fit in demure starlet roles; with her long neck and upwardly canted nose, her beauty had a certain haughtiness. Starting with the 1956 film noir Foreign Intrigue, opposite Robert Mitchum, Page instead found better deployment abroad in a series of beguiling impact roles: most notably as a princess offering a safe haven in the 1961 epic El Cid; the high-class brothel madam who gives Catherine Deneuve her soubriquet, Belle de Jour, in Luis Buñuel's 1967 masterpiece; and a German Mata Hari in Billy Wilder's revisionist detective story The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970). But she showed her true allegiance in the week in the late 1950s when she both signed a lucrative three-picture deal in Hollywood and joined France's prestigious Théâtre National Populaire (TNP), then under the stewardship of Jean Vilar, creator of the Avignon theatre festival. For Page, the latter was the big coup. 'I was proud as a peacock. I was under the impression I'd won the biggest medal possible,' Page told France Culture. 'Not in terms of being an actress, but in terms of being a person. It was their ethic and way of doing things: committing to the deepest level.' She was born in Paris, the second child of Jacques Bonjean, an art collector and gallerist, and his wife, Germaine (nee Lipman), a member of the family of Jewish watchmakers who founded the Lip brand. Geneviève and her older brother, Michel, grew up in this bourgeois-aesthete milieu with a young Christian Dior – with whom her father had founded his gallery – as her godfather. She was a bookworm whose imaginative tendencies brought her closer to her father, who was also a poet. 'I was constantly grabbing people to say: 'Look! Look at what I've just read!'' she recalled. 'And after a while, they'd say: 'Very nice, Geneviève. Now go back to your room.' Except for my father. So, from the moment he started taking an interest in me, that made life smoother.' After making her film debut in the 1950 Franco-German portmanteau film Ce Siècle à Cinquante Ans, Page's first role of note was as the Marquise de Pompadour in the 1952 swashbuckler Fanfan la Tulipe. Simultaneously, she took theatre lessons with the method-influenced Russian actor Tania Balachova and then at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique in Paris. This led to initial roles with the Comédie-Française, before – thanks to an introduction from her Fanfan co-star Gérard Philipe – she joined the TNP. Her father vetoed her going to Rome to film I Vitelloni for Federico Fellini, who could offer no script to reassure them about what she would perform. But Page made disconcerting choices of her own, picking out the role of a casino dancer paid to escort a bus driver who deems himself too ugly to be loved in The Strange Desire of Mr Bard (1954). In 1959 she married the businessman and future Club Med managing director Jean-Claude Bujard; they subsequently had two children, Thomas and Adélaïde. Casting around intrepidly for roles in the 60s, she also shot with the directors George Cukor (on the 1960 Liszt biopic Song Without End), John Frankenheimer (the Formula One drama Grand Prix, 1966) and Terence Young (the 1968 period tragedy Mayerling). Page auditioned for the surrealist Buñuel shortly after an accident in her Jaguar E-type; he was captivated by her bruised features and cast her as the stringent Madame Anaïs in Belle de Jour. Page was called upon to briefly kiss Deneuve on the lips, and the director asked her to do it without warning. 'I told him that if she slapped me, I'd give her one back,' Page later told Le Point. Bertrand Blier's Buffet Froid, in 1979, also exploited this sexually forbidding aura with her role as a nymphomaniac widow. All the while, Page continued her love affair with the stage. Playing Petra Kant for the Théâtre National de Chaillot earned her the French critics' union award for best actress in 1980; in 1997, she won the Prix Plaisir for her role as a monstrous grand dame of the theatre in Jean Anouilh's Colombe. Her final stage appearance was in 2011, playing the Roman empress Agrippina in Racine's 1669 play Britannicus. 'A bit wild, a bit daring, a bit nasty when needed,' was how Page summed up the majority of her stage roles. 'My dream since I was 25 or 30 was to play a wife, not particularly distinguished, in front of a sink with her children. Something more quotidian. But no one ever offered me that.' Her husband died in 2011. She is survived by Thomas and Adélaïde, and five grandchildren Adélie, Zoé, Balthazar, Géo and Nestor. Geneviève Page, actor, born 13 December 1927; died 14 February 2025
The Guardian
05-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles review – sex, secrets and the unbearable silence of loneliness
A woman's work is never done in Chantal Akerman's icily deadpan, degree-zero movie from 1975, now on rerelease for its 50th anniversary. Over three hours and 20 minutes, from a sequence of fixed camera positions, it blankly transcribes the ordinary life of Jeanne Dielman, a fortysomething widowed single mother, living with her teenage son Sylvain in a modest one-bedroom apartment in central Brussels (he sleeps in a foldout sofa bed in the front room). The flat is heavily furnished in a style that clearly dates from before the second world war, the glass-fronted dresser weirdly reflecting the flashing blue lights from the store across the street, a touch which the audience will come to notice in time and which may be a premonition of the police's future arrival. The hours and the days go by, each like the last. Jeanne cooks, washes up, cleans, goes shopping, shines Sylvain's shoes; sometimes she looks after a neighbour's baby in a carrycot; she mends Sylvain's jacket, fatefully leaving her dressmaking scissors in the bedroom. And in the afternoons, while he is out at school, Jeanne supplements the widow's pension we see her collecting from the post office by having sex for money with gentlemen visitors who are discreetly attended to on a towel placed primly over the counterpane on what was once Jeanne's marital bed. But her life and state of mind come to pieces – gradually, then suddenly – for reasons which we, the audience, have to supply. Dielman is played by Delphine Seyrig, her son by Jan Decorte, and her clients by film-maker Henri Storck, critic and director Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and actor Yves Bical. This is also the 10th anniversary of something very grim. Akerman heartbreakingly took her own life in 2015 and never lived to see her work win the all-time best film poll run by the UK's Sight and Sound magazine in 2022. Maybe that's just as well. It triggered a certain amount of punching-up satire about out-of-touch elitist cinephilia, on account of this 'greatest ever' prize that Akerman neither expected nor sought and might well have horrified her. Perhaps it's only by forgetting about this gold medal that we can see the film clearly. Jeanne Dielman's secret life is not a secret. The truth is made quite clear at the very beginning of the film: a sad-faced, well-dressed man politely hands over money and leaves. And yet the film follows this with a real-time exposition of her day-to-day life of such sustained banality that we almost forget what we've just seen. It numbs us and we lose our sense of what was just happening, just as Jeanne has herself forgotten about it, over time. It is a surrealist effect. Bought sex in the afternoon is not dramatised or fetishised as it is in, say, Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour, and it doesn't give us any insight into Jeanne's mind. When we see her in the kitchen, wearing a dull housecoat and that permed hairdo immaculately in place, kneading minced beef for a dish at almost unfathomable length, she is in a housewifely trance. There is nothing very sensual about it. Perhaps she is the mound of minced beef in the hands of her customers. We never see her face in closeup, although it comes nearer to the camera in the final act, and we only glimpse her smiling briefly, and in profile, when she makes polite conversation with shop assistants. What explicit guide there is to her life comes from a letter from her sister Fernande, who lives in Canada, which Jeanne reads aloud and which informs the audience Jeanne has been a widow for six years. The title – as well as naturally representing Jeanne's placid bourgeois existence – is in fact Jeanne's postal address, the words which Fernande will have written on the envelope. In a clothes shop, Jeanne will recount the story of when Fernande came to stay when Sylvain was just six years old and mother, father and son slept in the same bed. Another expository set piece comes when Sylvain, just before sleep, asks his mother about her sex life and confesses that a friend once told him sex was so painful for the woman that he would, as a child, fake bad dreams at night to rescue his mother from this ordeal. Jeanne is coolly disapproving of this, but tells him that his father's ugliness was of no account: 'Sleeping with him was just a detail.' Sleeping with these men is just a detail in the film as well. But then, after the second man on the second day, it becomes more than a detail. Something happens in the bedroom. Jeanne becomes subtly discomposed: forgetful and in almost infinitesimal, but escalating disarray. Was there a moment of violence? Have Sylvain's puberty and his newly impertinent and hurtful comments on sex suddenly opened Jeanne's eyes to the truth? Or something else, something suggested by the director herself, that Jeanne is shocked by feeling pleasure, perhaps for the first time, and by the feelings of disloyalty to her late husband and disloyalty to her whole sense of self. Watching this again, I'm reminded of the brutal line from David Mamet's 1991 movie Homicide: 'It's like the old whore says: 'Once you start coming with the customers, it's time to quit.'' This is not the climactic truth about Jeanne. It is not that her sex work is the secret beneath her respectable image; it is perhaps more that her respectable image is the secret beneath the sex work. And when did Jeanne begin this sideline anyway? Presumably after her husband died; but not necessarily. It is not entirely out of the question that it started before her widowhood. The vision that she gives us of herself and her sister just after the war shows how transactional sex could be; her sister went with a GI and married him. As attractive young women they had that sexual capital and nothing else in the chaos of war. The wartime memories are very real; this film is much closer to the end of the war than it is to our present day. The framed photograph of Jeanne's parents on the bedside table is another glacially sad touch. From our 21st-century perspective, we can see how Akerman's film has influenced Jaime Rosales's The Hours of the Day from 2003 or Michael Haneke's Hidden from 2005, although perhaps there aren't many film-makers who can or wish to imitate it. The modern conversation around ASD and ADHD perhaps sheds a new diagnostic light on Jeanne's behaviour and the film's own procedure. The silence of Jeanne Dielman is the film's weather and its atmosphere. It is a silence of terrible loneliness, and a silence in which a storm is gathering. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is in UK and Irish cinemas from 7 February.
