The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘At the time, you don’t know how terrifying you’re going to be’
Isabelle Huppert’s face is the most powerful precision instrument in film – and she uses it on roles Hollywood actresses daren’t touch
A few years ago, Isabelle Huppert made a guest appearance in Call My Agent!, a suave show-business farce set at a talent firm in Paris. The comedy series is famous in part for its self-satirising cameos from French cinema’s great and good, and in Huppert’s episode, the 68-year-old actress gamely sent up her workaholic image, injecting herself with adrenaline as she shuttled between two simultaneous film shoots.
Syringe aside, this was, if anything, an understatement. When I call Huppert at home in Paris, she has just finished the final readthrough for a production of The Glass Menagerie opening at the city’s Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe the following evening, and is about to start work on a production of The Cherry Orchard for the Festival d’Avignon this coming July. For the next month it is Anton Chekhov in the afternoons and Tennessee Williams in the evenings six days a week, with Mondays off. A welcome productive patch after lockdown? Not a bit of it: in the past 12 months, she somehow also shot four new films in Italy, Hungary, Ireland and France.
“Ah, non!” she tuts, when I suggest this schedule isn’t especially different from the one she played for laughs on television. “Well… oui, perhaps a little bit.”
While talking to Huppert on the telephone, it is impossible not to picture her face, which is contemporary cinema’s most powerful precision instrument. Cool, pale and drawn, it is a face on which the slightest flicker can signal the end of the world – or a steely, perhaps quietly amused determination to stave off meltdown for a little while longer at least.
Some movie stars have the kind of looks you can sit back and bask in, but with Huppert, the magnetic charge is reversed. She draws the viewer in; forcing you to constantly puzzle, interpret and scrutinise, while her characters traverse the kind of psychological terrain that would – and in fact has – caused her English-speaking contemporaries to flee in fright.
For starters, take her 2016 film Elle, whose title could easily be preceded with bloomin’, blinkin’, or any other expletive of your choice. In this incendiary thriller from Paul Verhoeven, Huppert played a driven, domineering businesswoman who is drawn into an alarming, sexually-charged game of cat and mouse after she is raped by a masked intruder in her home. As the director of Basic Instinct and Showgirls, Verhoeven is no stranger to glossy provocation. But when he tried to make Elle in the United States, the various Hollywood actresses he approached – Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Charlize Theron among them – all turned down the role.
Finally, he turned to Huppert. She won’t be drawn on the part’s apparently untouchable status among her US-based peers – “I’m not supposed to know any of that,” she bristles – but adds that, when Verhoeven said the part demanded her “amorality”, she took it as the highest of compliments.
“Movies are not meant to be moral,” she declares. “Art is not the place for moralising – otherwise we would have no painting, no books, no nothing. It’s where we explore all the thoughts and acts we could never confess to in normal life.”
Even so, did she feel the project required a certain fearlessness?
“I don’t think any role is disturbing in itself,” she says. “It can be a disturbing experience for an actor, or disturbing for the audience to watch, but these are two completely unrelated things. I can assure you that with Paul Verhoeven, or Michael Haneke, or anyone else, I have never felt diminished or in danger. I don’t think I’ve ever felt, ‘Oh my God, I’m losing my soul, I’m losing my body.’ Never. I’ve always felt these things have been preserved.”
Her latest film, Frankie, is an unusually easygoing entry in the Huppert oeuvre, but it is still one that only she could have made. A tender ensemble piece shot in the postcard-perfect Portuguese hill town of Sintra, it is about a famous French actress of impeccable standing and unparalleled hauteur – ring any bells? – who is having to reckon with her mortality a little sooner than she had hoped.
Frankie summons her family to this idyllic spot so they can thrash out their future without her: perhaps unsurprisingly, Huppert loved the “complete lack of sentimentality” in the script, which was written by the American filmmaker Ira Sachs, who also directed.
Huppert herself is married to the Beirut-born French director Ronald Chammah, with whom she has a 37-year-old daughter, the actress Lolita Chammah, and two younger sons, Lorenzo and Angelo. She notes that she is “hopefully by no means close to Frankie’s parwhose ticular destiny,” but otherwise, the part was otherwise obviously written with her in mind.
A typical peak Huppert moment occurs towards the end, as Frankie watches her family trudge up the hill towards her to watch the sun set (it is the one group activity on which she has insisted). The look on her face seems to express at least six conflicting emotions at once with extraordinary subtlety and precision. What was she thinking at the time?
“Ah, the trick is to do your thinking beforehand,” she says. “Otherwise the thinking itself would be visible. And besides,” she demurs, “it’s really very easy when the staging, scenery and direction are of such quality.”
Come on, I say. I think you are selling yourself short.
“Bof!” she counters, with an eyeroll I can hear down the phone. “I would say instead that I am selling cinema high.”
Sachs is one of a small but growing coterie of English-speaking directors to have worked with Huppert: other notables include Hal Hartley, Curtis Hanson, David O Russell, Neil Jordan, and, most notoriously, Michael Cimino, in
epic western Heaven’s Gate she starred opposite Kris Kristofferson and Christopher Walken.
This was her first Hollywood role, and must have felt like her last: on its release in 1980, Heaven’s Gate cost so much and made so little that it all but destroyed United Artists, the venerable studio that funded it, and brought an abrupt end to the creative freedoms of the 1970s, in America at least. For Cimino the experience was scarring – certainly until he was able to complete a far more warmly received director’s cut shortly before his death in 2016. But Huppert talks about this legendary, industry-changing fiasco at an unruffled remove, as if recalling a time she had once popped into a leisure centre where a children’s party was going badly off the rails.
“From the very beginning, it was known as a great failure,” she breezes. “It was received as a disaster in New York, and then again at Cannes, which was a source of huge suffering for Michael.” What about for her? “It was just the identity of the film. Its rejection was a part of what it was.”
Great directors – or rather great creative allies – are the threads that run through Huppert’s extraordinary 50-year career, which began on the Paris stage in her teens before quickly expanding into television and film. Her breakthrough role at 18 was as the innocent, taciturn young heroine of Claude Goretta’s The Lacemaker – then a year later she played a mercenary teenage prostitute in Violette Nozière; the first of her seven films with Claude Chabrol, the New Wave pioneer turned master moral-thriller technician often referred to as France’s Hitchcock. The two clicked, she says, “because he liked to show people as neither good nor bad, but just the way they are – and my way of acting, my way of being, fitted this kind of vision”.
There are tingly notes of those Chabrol-Huppert films – not least their supremely unsettling La Cérémonie, in which Huppert played a sociopathic postmistress – in the work of Michael Haneke, another of her favourite collaborators. The daunting Austrian initially sought her out to star in Funny Games, his 1997 film about a family of holidaymakers who are relentlessly terrorised by two prim young men in tennis whites.
Huppert read the script while on holiday in Ullapool in the Scottish Highlands and ended up calling Haneke from a telephone box on the seafront, Local Hero-style, to say it was just too tough for her to contemplate. “The concept of using such violence as a mechanism on the audience – brrr,” she shivers. “Compared to that, the film we made together a few years later was a nice romantic story.”
That film was The Piano Teacher: the “nice romantic story” of a calculating, sexually dysfunctional tutor at a Viennese conservatory who embarks on a destructive relationship with a gifted young student.
“Michael told me, ‘This is the last time – if you say no, I won’t do it with anybody else,’” she recalls. “I had only skimmed the script but told him, ‘Michael, of course I will do it.’ Then I read it more precisely and thought, ‘Oh my God.’”
It is a reaction that has been echoed by many in the 20 years since its release. I tell Huppert about my own first encounter with the film on a date with my wife, and specifically the moment during an especially punishing scene of genital mutilation that she had to leave the cinema because she was worried she was going to be sick.
“You can tell your wife it was enchanting for me to play these scenes,” she laughs.
“I don’t want to diminish the film, but we were all having a really great time. It’s down to Haneke’s genius – to be able to project such terror on screen, he’s a master. But,” – and here there is a sigh of the mildest irritation – “it can often be hard to understand at the time just how terrifying you’re going to be.”
‘I said I’d do The Piano Teacher. Then I read the script and thought, “Oh my God…”’