Cheap Place Vendome (DVD) (Catherine Deneuve) (Nicole Garcia) Price

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Customer Reviews of Place Vendome

ok melodrama
Maybe it's just me misled by the movie descrption of some kind of mistery. This movie has nothing to do with mistery even though stolen diamonds play important role in its plot. It's rather a melodrama about love that can survive anything, including betrayal. Catherine Deneuve is very very good but it was just too slow for me. I believe that this movie was intended to have some suspense to it, which is totally absent. It's not so bad though that a real fan of french movies cannot still enjoy it.

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Diamonds and Memories
Catherine Deneuve gives one of her finest performances in this elegantly crafted film from director Nicole Garcia. It is beautifully shot in the diamond district of France, even the rain glistening on the sidewalks like fine jewels. This is a complex film of intrigue and personal demons in a world where people love each other a little and use each other a lot, cutting the heart like a diamond, in a swift, irreversible stroke.

Marianne (Catherine Deneuve) is the alcoholic wife of a respected jeweler who is only brought out on special occasions, spending most of her life in a rehab for the wealthy which is her primary home. She is forced to pull herself together when her husband Vincent Malivert kills himself, leaving behind a fortune in diamonds that have a questionable history. When she attempts to find a buyer for them she discovers the cache was stolen in it's uncut form from the Russian Mafia. As the intrigue escalates, Marianne's own past in the world of diamond dealers is revealed, including the betrayel which blacklisted her as a jewel dealer and drove her to the bottle.

She will be forced to confront the demons in her past when her betrayer and his new protege come into the picture. Stunning beauty Emmanuelle Seigner has a pivotal role as the mirror image of Marianne 20 years before, unaware that history may be repeating itself. Marianne will have to choose between revenge and redemption to discover if love really does mean getting lied to and betrayed.

Deneuve, one of the world's finest actersses and greatest beauties, lets her hair down and imbues her character with a subtle vulnerability that won her Best Actress honors at the Venice Film Festival, and had it been a little less foreign and a bit more flashy, could easily have garnered an Oscar as well.

If you like foreign films, or Catherine Deneuve, or both, this is definitely one you'll want to add to your collection.

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Fun French romantic thriller centered around the jewel trade
This is one of those French film that is really about the complexities of interaction between characters and their interactions with the story and milieu that surrounds them. The milieu here is the fine jewelry trade, about as elite and luxurious as you can get and, as a result, prone to intrigue and corruption. Caught in the vortex is Catherine Deneuve as the alcoholic wife of the head of the prestigious house of Malivert. Her husband and brother-in-law have gotten themselves involved in trading stolen jewels which could send them to jail and destroy their house. When Deneuve's husband commits suicide by driving himself into a logging truck, Deneuve has to sobber up a bit and contemplate a few precious diamonds that he spoke to her about the day before. Turns out that Deneuve's character has a past and it involves the original distributor of the stolen gems, a man who left her high and dry years before. The characters and setting make for a sumptuous tale punctuated with real romantic, nostalgic and regretful, longing, the obligatory chills of a thriller and fine acting. This is the perfect example of the kind of emotionally centered yet still genre formulaic film the French do so well. It's fun.