Belle de Jour

”What kind of parts were you being offered?“

”Average, conventional, not important enough. I think you can play a small part in a film if it’s interesting, if it adds something special. But otherwise . . .“

I ask Deneuve what she‘s working on now, and she tells me that she’s just finishing a film in which she plays the Queen of France.

”You are,“ I suggest, ”a bit like the Queen of France. Or the Queen of French cinema, at any rate.“

”No, no, no, I don‘t want to be a queen,“ Deneuve protests, laughing. ”I don’t want that. I don‘t want to be somehow looked at or talked to as a queen. It’s a democratic work, being an actress. It‘s one of the few professions where your values and your skills are more important than who you are, where you come from -- at least in France.“

”And do you have any anonymity in France?“

”People leave me quite alone, you know. I live in a very nice part of Paris where I can do a lot of things. I can go to the movies, I can go to the bookstores, I can go to my gym lessons, the Luxembourg Gardens are close, it’s a very nice area. It‘s a long time I’ve been living in this apartment there, so people are used to seeing me.“

Our hour is almost up. Someone from Fine Line Features, the company releasing Dancer in the Dark, comes through the door. I decide to give Deneuve a little surprise. ”I hear you like gardening,“ I say. ”And that you go to a gardening show at a place called Courson twice a year.“

”How did you know that?“ she demands in a lovely trill of startled amusement. I explain that my mother lives in France, is an avid gardener herself and has seen her at the show.

”Ah ha, yes, it‘s true!“ Deneuve says, relaxing back in her chair. Then she tells me how, almost every weekend, she takes off from Paris to work on the garden at her house in the country. ”I like plants, I like nature, more than anything, I think. It’s very interesting to make a garden. It‘s very hard work. That’s why working in the factory in Dancer in the Dark was not such a problem for me. Because when you garden, and you have a hat, you are used to the physical things. So when people say to me, ‘You in a factory! With gloves!’ That‘s what I do every weekend. It’s heavy duty, you know, gardening. Sometimes I come back after the weekend and I‘m more tired than when I left on Friday night.“