Benvenuta (1983)
Directed by André Delvaux

Film Review

Benvenuta, one of the last films from the great Belgian auteur filmmaker André Delvaux, starts out as a haunting essay in the power of fiction to alter our perceptions and shape our lives.  As a writer revisits the defining work of her career, her fictional creation literally takes on a life of her own and, with no clear demarcation between imagination and reality, an imaginary life becomes just as tangible and affecting as the one lived in the 'real' world.  As in his earlier film, the magical realist masterpiece Un soir, un train (1968), Delvaux merges fantasy and reality and delivers a work of spellbinding power, in which an amorous passion assumes the status of a sacred rite, one that is every bit as potent on the printed page as it is in the real world.

One of the leading figures in new Belgium cinema of the 60s and 70s, and a forerunner of today's highly regarded Belgian film auteurs, André Delvaux first distinguished himself with L'Homme au crâne rasé (1966), a film which marked a decisive turning point for Belgian cinema.  He subsequently received the Prix Louis-Delluc for Rendez-vous à Bray (1971) and remained one of Belgium's most revered film directors up until his final film L'Oeuvre au noir (1988).  Over the decades that followed, Delvaux soon fell into obscurity and is remembered today only by devoted admirers of his work.  With its rich lyricism and dreamlike mystical quality, his idiosyncratic style of cinema has long gone out of fashion, but the alluring power of his work is still there for those who are willing to give it a chance.

Benvenuta is a film with a seductively Proustian character, in which two romantic encounters - one real (possibly), the other fictional (maybe) - are intertwined, a present day lukewarm romance between two writers interrupted by snatches of a far more passionate liaison which is played out in a parallel reality, where imagination and memory are locked in an amorous embrace.  Fire is a recurring motif in the quasi-fictional strand of the drama, an apt metaphor for the all-consuming passion that purges and transforms the human soul, its impact every bit as real and enduring as the devastation wrought by Vesuvius on Pompeii.

The ruins of the doomed Italian city are seen midway through the drama and prefigure the desolation of the titular heroine once the inferno Cupid hurls in her direction has done its work.  The cold artificiality of Delvaux's mise-en-scène could have made this a sterile exercise in style, were it not for the scorchingly sensual presence of Fanny Ardant.  Between the two films she made for François Truffaut, her partner at the time, Ardant was at her most mesmerising and mysterious, and it is through her arresting presence that Benvenuta becomes a far more profound and darker work than Delvaux probably intended, a cinematic poem that revels in the mystique of the female sex.

Film Synopsis

François, a young screenwriter in search of material for his next film, visits the reclusive writer Jeanne at her home in Ghent, Belgium.  At first, Jeanne is reluctant to talk about her most famous novel, a work that has continually fascinated François, but, prompted by the writer, she is forced to confront the painful reality that she and her fictional heroine, Benvenuta, may well be the same person.  As she succumbs to François's charms, Jeanne replays in her mind the tortured romance of her novel, in which a successful Belgian pianist falls in love with an older man, an Italian magistrate...