She gives you time to think. For the best part of four decades, Catherine Deneuve has majored in those kinds of madonna/whore roles that have helped consign women's sex lives to the tiresome exercise of being hauled on and off pedestals by gentlemen who, in any case, needed little encouragement with their emotional aberrations. That most abiding image, for which I trawled a dozen Deneuve films in the forlorn hope that I'd made it up, is of her most exquisite self clad in virgin muslin, tied to a post in the middle of a field while assorted rough fellows throw farmyard humus at her face. What clings, though, what really seeps into the pores, is the cinematic insistence that what we are looking at is a woman's fantasy. Not the writer's, not the tough fellows', not the director's, but archetypal woman's authentic depiction of the sado-masochistic parameters of the female psyche.
Belle de Jour, the Bunuel confection in which that scene was created, continues to be cited these 30-odd years on as the greatest jewel in the Deneuve crown. Belle de Jour was Deneuve, Deneuve was Belle de Jour: a frigid, middle-class wife in a posh frock who nips out in the afternoons to act out her fantasies of prostituting herself - all very pragmatically done in the best traditions of Gallic stylishness. Deneuve's contribution to the film's indelible impact was her indefatigable impassivity, the unflinching vapidity that never, not once, interferes with the observer's conviction that what he sees in her is the embodiment of the woman of his dreams.
In this dark and windowless place, a couple of art-deco lamp ladies arch their backs and bend their knees to hold aloft globes of low wattage. It is noon.
And she arrives an hour and a quarter later. Meanwhile, the film business-folk have arrived and put their spoke in, snapping into top gear when the star finally appears. Deneuve seats herself obliquely across the table from me. I cannot see her face. The butterscotch eyes, forehead, cheekbones and half her nose are concealed by wraparound sunglasses; her hair, loose and pale, drapes most of her jaw and neck.
I can discern a square centimetre of naked skin in the vicinity of her right cheek, and it is pure camellia in colour and texture. When she makes her grand entrance in Time Regained, Raul Ruiz's Proustian epic (soon at a cinema near you), a voice announces her imminence, another says "She has aged", and a third trumpets the truth: "She is magnificent." Someone ought to say something now, but the extras have retired with their phones to the other end of the bar. By way of explanation or apology for the glasses, the lateness or both, Deneuve offers that she is fatigued. Last night she couldn't sleep, so she took something that she shouldn't have done, and this morning she couldn't wake up and if she is looking well it is merely because she is wearing pink. She talks fast and copiously, but I fear she is fighting the old ennui and I am never to turn and see her face. Nor, come to that, does she wish to see mine. She orders a decaffeinated coffee for herself and, as an afterthought, wonders if I'd like a glass of water or something. I fancy I catch a glimpse of life behind the brown-glass mask before she turns away.
Perhaps this isn't a gross self-protection racket, a premeditated habit of shielding her inner self with a wall of words and her ageing processes from spiteful assessment. It's more mythic. She is protecting me from my desire for a very large vodka. Better yet, she is a basilisk. She knows that, if I look into her eyes, I will be turned to polished jade. The only person who can approach a basilisk and live is one who carries a mirror and looks only at its reflection. A photographer, say, would be safe as houses, so long as he kept his eye on the focus-finder. I look away. Sod it. I do my job, she does hers.
Her launch-pad is the word "No". I set up potential talking points and she reacts. "No." No, no, no, no, as a sort of invigorating runup. No, she is not a workaholic. She has made two or two-and-a-half films every year since she was 18, but, no, she is not workaholic. This year she made four, but three were small parts. But this year was special. It might look workaholic, but it wasn't. She just couldn't give up the projects with all the people involved and the schedules that couldn't be moved and the commitments that couldn't be broken and it's hard but she couldn't resist the projects, no, even though it was too, too much. She would rather be in her garden. She will stop now and dig and prune and plant and weed. It is too hard to go from one film to another.
No, she does not have an acting technique that could be described as outside-in or inside-out. No, no, no, no. She understands what I'm saying, though. There is an inside and an outside, but she protects the inside, you see. The secret, private, quiet part of herself she must protect, not to spoil it, and she will use it only when it's really needed, only when she has to. And the outside is also a protection, because you are what you are on the outside, in a way. The appearance, she thinks, is something you can always work on to improve.
No. No, no, no, no. She has never worked in the theatre, never been on the stage. Her parents were at the Comedie Francaise, though. Her mother was a child actress. But Deneuve doesn't like to be looked at, even on location, when people crowd around and stare. She doesn't like that. No. She was on the stage once, in a film. A play inside a film, and she felt very strange; very, very strange, even though the other actors were only extras. The stage is a bad dream for her, a nightmare that keeps coming back - to have to go on the stage and not know the lines properly - which is odd, because she's never been on the stage in real life. Neither have I, I say companionably. "Oh yes?" she says politely. And people are going to look at her and she doesn't know what to do and she panics. It's an inadequacy dream, I tell her. In mine, I always miss the train home as well, and then I don't know where I live and this huge wheel comes . . . No, she says, she doesn't miss a train in her dream; she just has to go on the stage with people looking at her and they haven't rehearsed, you see . . .
I back off because I know it doesn't do to get her wrong. She has a reputation for being a tad litigious. She sued Roger Vadim, the father of her son, for writing a somewhat sleazy memoir of his sexual conquests in which he allegedly opined that she hardly spoke a word in the course of their affair. That cost him. Then there were the united lesbians of America, who were so entranced by her role as a lesbian vampire in Tony Scott's perfectly sickening The Hunger that they named their magazine after her. They didn't come off too well, either.
There is a door to her left that has just been left open by a hotel employee, doubtless to entice some air or light into the bar. Deneuve glances at it from time to time, and her small, white hands fidget with each other. Are we expecting an intruder? No, no, no. She can't stand doors being open, that is all. It comes from her childhood, when there were four of them, four little girls all talking at once, all wanting attention and privacy and all the other things you can't have when there are so many of you all jammed up together. It's funny what you take with you from the past, she says. In her case it's a liking for closed doors and a tendency to interrupt people and talk too fast.
Was she convent-educated? No. No, no, no, no. She went to a school with nuns merely as a matter of geographic convenience. She and her sisters were day girls and, though they were a Catholic family, religion was not something that impinged on them. But the nuns impressed her. She becomes monosyllabic. She doesn't want to say more, lest there are repercussions. The Vatican will come down on her like a ton of bricks. "Impressed?" I ask, as if we're having a language problem. As in what? Marked? Scarred? Yes, she says, she was very impressed. They made her feel very small and low; a poor little human being, full of guilt and sin. It wasn't until she went to the public school that she realised how shy and afraid she was, how "removed from humanity". She did not baptise her children. She thought she'd let them make up their own minds.
Being beautiful was no help. Or "goodlooking", as she puts it. They were all "goodlooking", she and her sisters. They knew this because their father said so. He was so effusive, so full of admiration for his bevy of beautiful daughters that it worried the life out of their mother. She thought it was wrong to be praised for something you couldn't help, something you haven't achieved. Admiration would spoil her, she knew that, and she believes it to this day. Her daughter, Chiara Mastroianni, from the Italian actor of the same surname, complains of her inconsistency in this matter. Chiara grew up in the family tradition of not being gushed over for her beauty, and now she has a son with big, blue eyes and incredibly long lashes whose grandmother verbalises her admiration at every opportunity. "You never told me I looked good," Chiara says. "But you don't have to tell someone they're beautiful if you love them," Deneuve argues, "because if you love them they feel beautiful, anyway."
This "poor little human being" felt the pinch before she was adolescent. Wanting nothing more than to be one of a group, to be the same as other girls, to belong, she felt the ostracism of her singularity and she didn't know why she was, as she puts it, "singled out". At 14, 15, she felt isolated but family-sheltered. There were no boys at her school, no boys at home. She could see herself in the mirror and be sanguine about what she saw there, but when she started to go out with her older sisters she saw something else. Something changed. "You see it in people's eyes," she says. "Something freezes. There is just this moment of . . . halt." Is there a sweet smell, or is it only the dawning awareness that this infuriating, enigmatic, barely visible middle-aged lady has taken her revenge? Certainly the world has paid handsomely for the quality that isolates. As an international supermodel for the promotion of prohibitively expensive merchandise, as a film star with a magical affinity with celluloid, she has never been obliged to give an inch in any direction more than she considered strictly necessary. It is as though, over the years, she has empowered herself by re-imposing the original toll of isolation, calling the shots in her own voice, nominating the distance between herself and others, and occupying that space with wilful resolution. She is pleased to point out that she chose to have her children out of wedlock at a time when it was not considered a respectable thing to do. She did it her way and she did it publicly, yet when the French nation was called upon to select the model for its Marianne - the Spirit of the Revolution, La Belle France, their symbol of all that is acceptable, admirable and thrilling - they chose Catherine Deneuve. She of the flagrant denial of bourgeois convention was also the face of the stamps they stuck on their postcards and the statuette they passed in the front portals of their town halls. It is clearly a paradox she cherishes, while at the same time being completely unsurprised by it. She is and is not her own image.
Given that she's long perfected the outward and visible manifestation of the madonna/whore syndrome, it is touching to realise that Deneuve can perceive nothing apocryphal in what she has created. She heads off on another riotous word-spree in defence of her own mythology. She truly believes that the madonna/whore is her inner self. Because duality is the essence of all human beings - men as well as women, except that men are less complicated and less interesting than woman. Whatever is true, the opposite is also true. You cannot just be the whore and you cannot just be the madonna. There is always a bit of the whore in the madonna and a bit of the madonna in the whore. Always there is that opposition between what you think and what you feel and what you would like to be, and no, no, no, no, no, the madonna/whore is not a male construct, she has not been obedient, no. She is a woman who has always been in charge of herself. She has the power. And if that was not true, what difference would it make? We are living in a man's world, but a man needs a woman much more than a woman needs a man. Her inner self, her madonna/whore, gives them their worst fears and their best hopes, she concludes, and laughs an unladylike laugh.
That sweet smell of revenge is almost overpowering. Across the bar, the business-folk are growing restive. In deference to their salaries we exchange a few desultory remarks about her latest role in Place Ven- dome. She's quite interesting, we agree, in terms of romance and the older woman. You know the kind of thing. She has been desperately disappointed in lust, taken to the bottle and celibacy, and learns to settle for the love of a good, kind and sexually not very compelling man. Is that what can happen to us all, we wonder, and, if so, would it be a bad thing? Goodbye to the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue; welcome to the king-size with a decent mattress? Let our hearts dictate, not our hormones? No, she says. No, no, no. She's still far too young for that. She's not laughing. She's not even smiling. She knows exactly what she's talking about.
Place de Vendome is running at the IFC, Dublin