MA SAISON PREFEREE: Drama. Starring Catherine Deneuve and Daniel Auteuil.
Directed by Andre Techine. Written by Techine and Pascal Bonitzer. (Not
rated. 124 minutes. In French with English subtitles. At the Clay, the
Albany in Albany, Guild in Menlo Park and Camera 3 in San Jose.)
Worshiped for her beauty but often dismissed as an actress,
Catherine Deneuve carries a myth wherever she goes. It doesn’t matter that
she’s proved herself in 30 years of films, or that she won an Oscar
nomination for her passionate work in “Indochine” — the notion persists
that she’s cold and inscrutable, an ice queen hiding lack of substance
behind a flawless mask.
Now, in “Ma Saison Preferee” (My Favorite Season), a 1993 French film
opening today at the Clay and other Bay Area theaters, Deneuve gives a
performance that should silence her detractors for good. Playing Emilie, an
attorney, wife and mother in southwest France, Deneuve offers a rigorous,
complex look at middle-
age loneliness, regret and self-deception.
Directed and written by Andre Techine, “Ma Saison Preferee” is a
beautifully written character drama that focuses on Deneuve’s relationship
with her
younger brother, a brilliant, mentally unstable brain surgeon (catch that
irony?) played by the
great French actor Daniel Auteuil (“Jean de Florette”).
For three years, brother and
sister haven’t seen each other. Now, after their caustic, widowed mother
(Marthe Villalonga) suf
fers a stroke, they’re forced not only to make decisions on her behalf but
also to review a lifetime of rivalries, attachments, recriminations and
profound love.
It’s the kind of symbiosis that never plays itself out. Antoine is
unmarried, and even though he claims to disdain marriage, his real block to
relationships is his infatuation with his sister. “Without you,” he tells
her, “I wouldn’t enjoy living.”
Emilie, for her part, can’t bear her brother’s intensity and
confrontations — she prefers the safety of her life’s various charades.
After a huge fight over the mother’s estate, Emilie leaves her husband
(Jean-Pierre Bouvier) and takes a wrenching, much-delayed look at herself.
Her children, played by Anthony Prada and Deneuve’s real-life daughter
Chiara Mastroianni, are growing and don’t need her, and the emp
ty pieties of her home, profession and social status no longer hold.
Deneuve is great, especially in the scenes with Auteuil when they
remember their childhood, the distant father who concealed his doubts and
the way they used to talk endlessly into the night. It’s a different Deneuve
here: open, emotionally naked, a woman who finds the courage to confront her
loneliness and pride but refuses the cushion of self-pity.
It’s unusual for an actress to survive as long in films as Deneuve has
– the French tolerate aging better than we do — and fascinating to see how
Deneuve has not only prospered but also improved and deepened with the
years, embarking on emotional journeys that weren’t available to her when
she was younger.
Techine, who co-wrote the script with Pascal Bonitzer, brings out the
best in Deneuve and Auteuil and directs in a straightforward, no-frills
style that favors the actors and fixes our attention on their complicated
relationship.
Full of absorbing talk and surprising insights, “Ma Saison Preferee” is
the kind of psychological drama that comes along much too rarely.
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