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Jun 19, 2009
« Les voleurs » : better « j » than « m ». (9/10)
Like everything in the film, its audience-friendliness is a matter of the smaller details : Alex, Ivan, Justin, Victor, Jimmy, Marie... Short names, two syllables, easy to remember, difficult to mistake for one another, which participate in defining, sometimes ironically or like a reversed image, their assigned characters.
Justin’s grandfather is called Victor, like Victor Hugo, who wrote « L’art d’être grand-père » -the art of being a grand-father-, but was less talented as a father, particularly to his daughter Adèle, and did not anticipate the art of car robbery.
Victor the grandfather is also Victor the « victorious », who christens his two sons Alexandre, -shortened to Alex : to indicate its recipient did not live up to his full name ?-, after the Greek conqueror, and Ivan, after the « terrible » Russian star.
Victor’s last name is Noël : Christmas ; the family chalet and the surrounding landscape of snowy mountains evoke the atmosphere of the holy day. Noël, too, like in « Père Noël », the French Santa Claus, who brings children toys, even if they are stolen, and drives them ultimately either to their death or out of the family home.
« Le Père Noël est une ordure » -Santa Claus is a scumbag- warned a wise French cult comedy, fourteen years before « Les voleurs ».
Juliette, Marie : check Shakespeare and the Gospels for further explanation.
Marie’s last name is Leblanc, she is literally « Marie the white » : one more evocation of the snow, Christmas, even a « White Christmas » ; the name also hints at a perilous form of purity that the character shall hide to its tragic death.
(But is Leblanc her maiden name or did she retain her husband’s name, like Germaine Dulac, because she used it professionally ? If so, it would increase her former husband’s responsibility in her death.)
Juliette, Jimmy : two names starting with the same letter, to remind us the characters are sister and brother.
Juliette, Jimmy, Justin : three names starting with the same letter, j like in « jeune », the French word for young.
Marie, by contrast, starts with m, like in « mûre », « ripe » for a fruit, but « past her prime » for a woman, particularly one earlier famous for her peach skin : Catherine Deneuve never pretended to enjoy the process of growing older.
She was thirty-nine when Téchiné chose her for « Hôtel des Amériques » : a significant vote of confidence at an age when they were likely to become rarer -Charlotte Rampling was fifty-five, when François Ozon resurrected her acting career with « Sous le sable » : the exception to the rule-.
In « Les voleurs », Téchiné once more tries and makes ageing a little easier for his « fétiche » actress : like him, she shall gain in freedom what she loses in youth.
As Marie, Catherine Deneuve earns the right to shatter her own icon : she is free to be drunk, take pills, speak crudely, quote philosophers, and even fall in love with a younger woman without bringing to despair her, also ageing, male fans -most of whom have probably deserted her for some of her younger colleagues-.
Téchiné even offers her the ultimate freedom and catharsis : to commit suicide through Marie, not to be tempted to commit it for real.
Téchiné does not film Marie’s suicide : he shows Catherine Deneuve the respect owed to a star and does not exhibit her as a broken corpse ; his close-ups similarly do justice to her still beautiful face, while his camera tactfully spares her thickened silhouette.
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