San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
We talk to Isabelle Huppert (left) about her new film, Neil Jordan’s “Greta.”
It’s no surprise to hear Isabelle Huppert say that she “enjoys irony. Really, I do,” given the emotional complexity and moral ambiguity of many of the French actress’ career-defining roles, including her famously sadomasochistic heroine in Michael Haneke’s “The Piano Teacher” (2001) and her rape victim-turned-vanquisher in Paul Verhoeven’s “Elle” (2016), for which Huppert won numerous awards, including a Golden Globe and Cesar (France’s equivalent of the Oscars).
“There has been a lot of irony in many of my characters, a distance from certain things and sometimes an unexpected humor that adds an important mystery to them and to the story,” Huppert said recently by phone about her title role in Neil Jordan’s dark psychological thriller “Greta.”
Throughout her career, stretching back across five decades and more than 120 films, Huppert, 65, has never seen the point, she says, in stories with easy-toswallow, feel-good messages, or facile answers for what motivates the emotionally layered
“Greta”
(R) opens Friday, March 1, at Bay Area theaters.
women she plays, women whose behavior can push into some dark, disquieting terrain.
“Think of Greta,” she said. “We know certain things about her past, but, more importantly, this woman is a mystery, a kind of almost cubist character I enjoy playing who has multiple dimensions. She is a monster, a psychopath, and I didn’t want to give any kind of simple psychological justification for her. It is up to the audience to make up their own minds who she is. I didn’t try to orient that perception.”
Huppert said it was this enigmatic quality, and the opportunity to work with Academy Award-winning Irish director Jordan (“The Crying Game,” “The End of the Affair”), that drew her to the unsettling “Greta.” With her European grace and manners, Huppert’s Greta appears to be an eccentric but unassuming French piano teacher who lives a quiet life in a Brooklyn carriage house. When she leaves her chic handbag on the subway, a young Good Samaritan waitress,
“We know certain things about (Greta’s) past, but, more importantly, this woman is a mystery, a kind of almost cubist character I enjoy playing who has multiple dimensions. She is a monster, a psychopath.”
Isabelle Huppert Frances (played by Chloë Grace Moretz), tracks her down to return it. As the two become friends, they bond over their shared sense of loneliness in the big city. (Frances is grieving the loss of her mother, and Greta, a widow, misses her faraway grown daughter.) When Greta’s doting concern turns to obsessive stalking (and then far worse), we still never suspect this elegant older woman in her nice sweaters and silk scarves, playing Liszt’s “Liebesträume” at her piano, would be capable of such brutality.
“We’ve all heard of these stories of psychopaths hiding in plain sight in a big city,” Jordan said by phone from his home in Dublin. The prolific director hasn’t directed a feature film in seven years, instead keeping busy over the past decade with his Showtime series “The Borgias” (which ran through 2013) and writing fiction. He is working on adapting his surreal 2016 novel “The Drowned Detective” — “a ghost story set in Budapest”— into a screenplay.
But Jordan said he fell in love immediately with the original “Greta” script, then titled “The Widow,” by Ray Wright, and eagerly collaborated with him on co-writing what would become “Greta.”
“The story had this delightful, deceptively simple hook about the handbag, which leads to Greta and Frances’ encounter, but it presented what I thought was an entrancing possibility to make what’s really a little horror movie about the need for company,” said Jordan. “It’s about the lengths people will go in order to not be alone.
“So many horror movies now deal with supernatural entities, and it was lovely to construct a piece of terror with just these characters who are very real, a young woman who misses her mother and an older woman longing for connection.”
If it sounds like the premise of a dark fable, it’s not surprising, given Jordan’s penchant for classic myths and fairy tales. His 1984 movie “The Company of Wolves,” starring Angela Lansbury, was a retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood”; his fantasy romance “Ondine” (2009) featured Colin Farrell as a County Cork seaman who finds a selkie; and “Byzantium” (2012) was about mother-daughter vampires.
“I was probably drawn to ‘Greta’ in the first place because it has the simplicity and absur-
dity of a fairy tale,” Jordan said. “It’s closest to ‘Hansel and Gretel.’ An older woman who’s revealed to be a witch from a East European forest is in her strange little house where she confines children and terrible things happen.”
Jordan and Huppert compared “Greta” to thrillers such as “Fatal Attraction” and “Misery,” “which keep audiences guessing just how absurd and bizarre things will get,” Jordan said. And they agreed that the irony, a kind of winking humor, throughout the movie is essential to it working with audiences.
“During one particularly monstrous scene, I asked Isabelle, ‘Why don’t you try and play this as a kind of a dance?’ Very few actors would actually embrace that idea because it’s comical as well as grotesque, but she took to it immediately and made it rather chilling. She’s got the sophistication and intelligence to deliver on an outrageous idea like that.”
“We laughed a lot, Chlöe and I, while making this,” said Huppert, who lives in Paris, but is in New York to perform in the new Florian Zeller play “The Mother” at the Atlantic Theater Company. “Being an actor and a spectator are two such different things. The scenes that were funniest, most enjoyable to film, were the ones that are the most horrible, frightening ones to watch.”
Jessica Zack is a Bay Area freelance writer.