CROZE FINDS PLACE IN IQALUIT
Brings natural ease to difficult role
Ever since winning the best actress award for Les Invasions Barbares in 2003, Marie-Josée Croze has been riding a wave of momentum that has taken her across the world.
Over the years, she has worked with Steven Spielberg, Denis Villeneuve and Wim Wenders. She has performed in films from America, Portugal and France. New countries and new opportunities always seem on the horizon.
Her latest project, Iqaluit, is a return to Canada, but in the cold and unfamiliar North: The film was shot in Nunavut, another new experience.
“It’s funny how you can come from Canada and never have been there,” she says.
Speaking with Marie-Josée Croze in her hotel room, she is full of energy and happy to be in Montreal accompanied by her cat, Oscar (after Oscar Wilde). Unlike her film persona, who is serious and sombre, in person, Croze is often laughing. She sees her success as a conflation of openness and opportunity.
Explaining how everything has to be just right for a film to come together, she says, “I have never had a baby, but sometimes, you have to make love many years before a baby comes, you know?”
For her role as Carmen in Iqaluit, she was involved from the beginning. Director Benoît Pilon said he always had her in mind for the wife journeying north to solve the mystery surrounding her husband, Gilles (François Papineau): Serious injury has left him in a coma.
In some ways, Iqaluit is a return to familiar territory for Croze. Accustomed to playing serious and tortured women in films like Maelström or The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, she is in her element; the difference was in the process. Normally when she is attached to a project, the script is “already done, and then they can adjust for you.”
Croze and Pilon had conversations over the phone, then in person, allowing the role to evolve. She felt they communicated comfortably, always working toward something more true and subtle.
“It’s a responsibility, but it’s a joy at the same time,” she says. “(It’s) very fun to have someone who wants you specifically in front of his camera.”
She liked working with Pilon: “We tried different possibilities all the time, he never restrained us.”
The long nights of the northern region play an integral role in the distortion of reality in the film. Like a waking dream, Carmen seems dazed by the otherworldliness of Iqaluit. Though she was married to her husband for 20 years, it was only after he falls into a coma that she ventures north to where he lived and worked for half the year.
“Those people who go there to work, they’re working a lot,” Carmen explains. “It’s not a place to bring family and lovers.”
But Croze interprets Carmen’s refusal to visit her husband’s work as turning her back on where he spent half of his life. While many seem to believe what happens to Gilles was an accident, Carmen is sure something more sinister happened. In trying to untangle the story, she begins to discover her husband’s other life.
“It’s a way, maybe, to fix something from the past that she should have done and she never did, in terms of being interested in him.”
Croze brings a natural ease to a difficult role. Her performance lies in reacting to things that represent how little she knew about the man she loved. In moving around this world, “everything became very ceremonial” for Carmen, she explained. Objects and people reflect the absence of her husband. In what becomes a new variant of the Canadian survival story, Carmen’s emotional journey takes her from paranoia to self-discovery.
Croze has worked with some of the world’s most respected directors, but mostly credits this to chance.
“I’m open to meet people wherever they are, it could be young directors doing their first film, or a very iconic director like Wim Wenders.”
Making it work with a director requires chemistry, she says.
“Sometimes it’s sense of humour. I notice when you have the same sense of humour as the director, it’s a good sign.”
Croze has many possible roles lined up: Independent projects in Greece, America and France are in the works. She jokes they can all fall through, or she might suddenly find herself caught with three films shooting at the same time.
Her openness to projects means she’s almost always working, but it has at least one drawback: to the people around her, “sometimes I feel like I could be the craziest liar.”
As schedules evolve and dissolve, people might expect her to be someplace like Australia when she’s at home. “Sometimes I show them the emails: See, I was supposed to go!”
I have never had a baby, but sometimes, you have to make love many years before a baby comes, you know?