Deneuve plays herself in Lebanese journey

By James Mackenzie

CANNES, France (Reuters) - Catherine Deneuve plays herself as a famous actress visiting a war-ravaged Lebanon in a new film shown at the Cannes festival that mixes fiction and documentary.

"Je veux voir" ("I want to see"), made by little known Lebanese directors Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, is an unusual project for one of the great names in European cinema and a fixture at Cannes since the 1960s.

"They had a little script, 15 minutes with no dialogue and they asked if I would do it and I said yes," she told Reuters in an interview.

The film, which comes out a time of renewed tension in Lebanon, grew to over an hour as Deneuve and Lebanese actor Rabih Mroue improvised dialogue as they drove past buildings smashed and riddled with bullets after the 2006 war.

Filming is occasionally interrupted as unseen men intervene and Deneuve shows a sometimes amusing preoccupation with seatbelts as they negotiate the Beirut traffic.

"I had a lot of faith in the artists doing the film, that it would be well organised and they wouldn't make me do anything unreasonable or take any risks. But still, it was a difficult situation," she said.

"We worked in some places where you can only go when Hezbollah allows you to but it was very well organised."

The picture is one of two films at Cannes starring Deneuve who became famous as long ago as 1964 in Jacques Demy's musical "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg", which won the main festival prize, the Palme d'Or that year.