IF I never knew of Catherine Deneuve’s quotidian habits, despite her being one of the world’s most famous beautiful and intelligent actresses, I might have been surprised to pass her, looking tired and unglamorous yet distinctly beautiful, around 8:30 one morning crossing one of those bridges over the Tiber around Via Condotti and Via Del Corso in Rome’s sleepless downtown.

This, of course, was after I had seen about half-a-dozen of her films made between the 1960s and 80s, but just as important, was coming to the realization that Deneuve’s acting on screen was not disconnected from her wider creative attitude and activities, which can be described as her art of living.
                                             
Early identity
Deneuve’s creative spark, which grew to casting light on the dark corners of the feminine psyche and its simplified attractiveness to men in numerous films, is no doubt linked to actual decisions made when a precocious 17-year-old teenager who met and liked Roger Vadim, a young film director twice her age, and decided to live with him.
To interpret such an act as merely immoral or scandalous without respecting Deneuve’s early intelligence and creative interests which drew her to Vadim — a man immersed in the creative powers and pleasures of body and mind — would be to wallow in intellectual shallowness and debased aspersions masquerading as uprightness.
                                             
‘Repulsion’
By the time Deneuve, at age twenty-two, appeared in ‘REPULSION’ in 1965 under Roman Polanski’s brilliantly focused and probing direction, she had also posed nude for Playboy Magazine in the same year.
It is both interesting and revelatory to equate Deneuve’s Playboy photo-eroticism with her intensely focused and profound skill in exploring a young woman’s mental estrangement from her body’s erotic compulsion in ‘Repulsion’.
The singularity of Deneuve’s intense role in ‘Repulsion’ was a lucky break early in her screen career, since it gave her the chance to prove one of her best acting qualities: The ability to explore the complex duality of mind and body. Deneuve’s self-conscious expression of physical and mental qualities, mostly isolated in a house in ‘Repulsion’, is the equivalent of those endlessly probing characterizations found in first-person novels by Proust or Samuel Beckett.
But her creative qualities, being multi-faceted, achieve such a singular expression that we are pleased by her fashion sense, her attention to the natural world (plants, flowers, gardening), reading, music, antiques and art decoration, brought to her film roles. Such colourful qualities are present in another of her best early films, ‘THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG’, made in 1964 before ‘Repulsion’.
There is no other film like this in French cinematic history; it is an astonishing display of colour, shape, mood and cool fashion, via objects, in a romantic story told through music. This is one of Deneuve’s greatest ‘art’ films, which she called one of her personal favourites, probably because it captures the beauty of a lifestyle inseparable from the art of movie-making.
                                       
Deneuve and values
This brings us to one of Deneuve’s key creative screen qualities: Her ability and almost natural skill at casting her ray of kaleidoscopic beauty from the screen into the receptive potential of our lives. Of course, it is not a matter of us gazing at her on screen as an image of what we are NOT, if you are a woman; or if you are a man, what you could never attain, but rather an often surprising and shocking revelation of what, if  we are  women, we can be beneath the social veneer of modesty; or if we are men, what obstacles we can jump towards attaining heterosexual satisfaction, fulfillment, or love.
This is why the question and interpretation of ‘freedom’ holds a central spot in Deneuve’s professional career as an actress and spokeswoman for numerous humanitarian causes.
                                     
Deneuve’s freedom
Deneuve’s freedom finds expression in film roles where experience is the key to satisfaction, as well as liberation from ideas or dogmas propagated as inevitable necessities, which are, in turn, determined by unquestioned habits.
Obviously, film directors she works with must offer scripts and roles which permit her to explore the experience of   such freedom. In 1969, such a chance came with the notoriously individualistic and original Spanish film director, Luis Bunuel, in whose outstanding film classic, ‘BELLE DE JOUR’, Deneuve plays a beautiful, pampered, affluent European housewife, who nevertheless dresses incognito as a prostitute, but without material necessity, and secretly gives herself to a variety of male characters she never otherwise would become intimate with.
This is a creative example of liberation from preordained necessity, determinacy, or inevitability which Deneuve’s housewife character in ‘Belle de Jour’ is subjected to, and rebels against. The film is a cinematic masterpiece critical of Man’s enslavement to satisfaction of his materialistic progressions and possessiveness, which leads to the enslavement of his fellow-man and woman.
Deneuve’s theme of creative freedom echoes the primitive origin of European woman, where the flesh remains neutral and attractively weak; the receptacle of romantic love as a primal pleasure, where the development of history’s male-dominated achievements (so-called) has little power of persuasion over a more innate sense of developed feminine identity and freedom, unaffected or un-impressed by the coercive pedestal she is often placed upon.