How do you catch hold of a Miles Davis riff? A Maria Callas aria? The ethereal post-rock ostinato of Sigur Ros?
It exists, but you cannot grasp its sound and emotion in your hands. The very fact of its ineffability, its mystery, is part of what makes it sublime. Such is the acting skill of French cinema icon, Isabelle Huppert.
Arguably the greatest actress of her generation, French or otherwise, for over forty years Huppert has appeared in ninety-odd films and television shows, as well as countless plays from the classical to the cutting edge. She disappears into her roles so completely, and speaks so little of her personal life, that it is almost impossible to find out who she is. While many so-called actors are hired personalities, paid a fortune to beam their pearly whites or to play a type over and over again, Mademoiselle Huppert utterly becomes someone else. There are other actors who display extraordinary versatility, but whose virtuosity seems to point to itself, shouting, “Look at my great feats of vocal and physical costuming!” Huppert is whatever character she plays. My high school theater teacher used to distinguish between Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire this way: “When you see Gene Kelly dance, you think, ‘What a great dancer.’ When you see Fred Astaire dance, you think, ‘I can do that.’”
For Huppert, acting is easy. “Acting is just about ‘Do it’,” she says. Before our recent phone conversation, with her in Paris and me in Miami, I read that Huppert has cultivated an almost Garbo-esque reputation for privacy. But she generously offers me an hour of her time and answers my questions true to her acting style — simply, honestly, profoundly. I begin, “Are you tired of people telling you they’re honored to meet you?”
“No,” she replies, without a trace of false modesty. “You can say that to me.”
Friendly and polite, Huppert nonetheless possesses a quintessentially French lack of schmaltz: “No, no, no. I don’t learn anything from my characters,” she says. “You just become them for a while and then you leave them aside.” If she learns nothing from her characters, I ask her, then how does she choose her roles? “I choose roles for the director… That’s my only criteria.”
When I ask if she derives inspiration from any actresses past or present, she replies, “No. I might admire their work. But there is no one who inspires me, no.”
“You do your own thing,” I respond.
“Yes, I do,” she says, then qualifies her statement: “I try.”
That little glimmer of self-doubt betrays the vulnerability one sees in even her iciest characters. As the title character in Claude Chabrol’s 1978 film, Violette Nozière, a stoic, baby-faced Isabelle Huppert lies to her parents with the ease of a sociopath. Yet she plays her defenseless love for the character of Jean Dabin, played by Jean-François Garreaud, with an almost unbearably naked sensitivity. She won Best Actress at Cannes for that performance. She won again in 2000 for her title role in Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke’s La Pianiste, based on Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek’s novel Die Klavierspielerin (The Piano Teacher), in which meticulous piano teacher Erika Kohut’s emotionally sadistic exterior and physically masochistic hidden life play out the psychodrama of an overgrown little girl who, in her late forties, still sleeps with her controlling mother and desperately wants, but is incapable of experiencing, real intimacy with her young student. La Pianiste swept all of Cannes’ major awards that year, including the Palme d’Or. Huppert reunited with Haneke again on Time of the Wolf’ (2003) and last year’s Foreign Film Oscar winner, Amour.
[blockquote author=”-Isabelle Huppert”]”Sometimes the most difficult movies to film, are the most fun to perform.”[/blockquote].
Huppert transforms herself so completely that I wonder if she must make herself egoless: “No, no, it’s not a matter of ego,” she says. It’s two different things. I have an ego like anyone. Even more so. It’s not a matter of ego. It’s a matter of managing to do an exact mixture, almost chemical, between what you are and the character… It isn’t that I disappeared. It’s more likely that I appeared.”
She appears to me, in glimpses. Her curt demeanor in answering artistic and professional questions melts into warm ebullience when I speak of my own children. In French, she asks, “How old are they? One and three? They must be so cute! What are their names? Italian? Oh your mother is Italian? Parla Italiano? Di dove nell’Italia viene tua madre?”
I ask Huppert how it was as an in-demand actress to raise her three children (by husband of thirty-one years, filmmaker Ronald Chammah), when she was working virtually non-stop throughout their childhoods: “You do the best you could [sic]. You always have to sacrifice something.” She wants me to know one of her daughters, Lolita Chammah, who first played her mother’s daughter when she was four in Les Affaires de Femmes, did so again in Marc Fitoussi’s 2010 Copacabana.
For this one moment, we are two moms bragging about our daughters and commiserating over the challenges of the work-life balance. I almost forget that I am speaking to a woman who has made what she agrees is a legendary career out of taking on immoral, even psychotic, roles.
And yet, no matter how extreme the psyche Mademoiselle Huppert conveys, she always manages to make you fall in love with her character: the adulterous abortionist in Les Affaires des Femmes, the animated, homicidal postal worker in La Cérémonie, the literally poisonous stepmother in Merçi Pour le Chocolat. It’s not just that she defies the common perception of a grande dame of stage and screen, with her wiry, youthful, prismatic beauty that can come, go, or transform, as the role dictates. “Is it your true nature shining through that makes your most impossible-to-love characters so likable?” I ask. “Yes, because I’m so nice,” she quips dryly, continuing:
No, no, but maybe in a way it is me coming through. It is the situation that is negative, not the person. They are trying to make their way out of a negative situation… You have to be like a lawyer having to defend [your character]. You’re obliged to find the reasons and the legitimacy for rebellion or revolt. Your reasons are in the conditions, in the world, or in their background. Then what makes them likable, as you say, can show through.
In La Pianiste for instance, Huppert achieves a riveting tour de force that is nonetheless painful to witness. “Sometimes the most difficult films to watch,” Huppert tells me, “are the most fun to perform… It looks like such hard work. And it was. But not for me. For me it’s was fun to do… I like to act in any direction, to be funny, to be dark, to be light. It’s like music. You like to play the high notes, but you like to play the low notes as well. You are like a musical instrument.”
She refers again to music when I ask if she has ever taught acting. “No. I was asked this year . . . to teach at the main national school in Paris [Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique (CNSAD), which Huppert herself attended]… but it would take too much time.” She suddenly sounds intrigued, “I think I would have the students listen to music… It would teach them about the different interpretations of a piece, piano, violin, the voice… I also like to listen to silence.”
She has brought her music and her silence to the stage, in everything from French classics by the likes of Marivaux and Molière to controversial contemporary roles, as in a 2005 French production of 4.48 Psychosis by theater’s late enfante terrible, Sarah Kane, who killed herself shortly after writing the play in 1999. One critic called it “an hour-and-a-half-long suicide note,” which Mlle. Huppert agrees it more or less is.
“What was Sarah Kane working to achieve in the play? How did you make it active?” I ask.
“It is a very special text,” she answers. “And the director, I did 4.4.8 with [the great Claude Régy,] was trying to do theater by breaking convention, which is the only way to do theater. He knows that it can only live by killing itself. I was still for two hours, as if rooted to the ground. I performed it like a poem of life and death.”
“Is there a difference between acting for film and acting for theater?” I ask her. “There is, I guess,” she responds: “But I try to forget about it.” In other words, Huppert brings a kind of filmic naturalism to the stage.
She cherishes simplicity not merely in execution, but in her collaboration with a director. Her greatest and longest artistic relationship was with one of the French New Wave’s pioneers, Claude Chabrol. They began working together early in Huppert’s career, with Violette Nozière in 1978, and continued right up until Chabrol’s death in 2010. The last film they completed together was 2009’s L’ivresse de Pouvoir (Comedy of Power).
“Our relationship was very rich and deep, yet very easy,” she muses. “It is very hard to find a relationship like that,” continues Huppert. “He was able to say a lot of things in these films. And I was also able to say things. But it was so easy, so profound.”
When I ask her if she misses him, she says simply, her sadness palpable: “It was a great loss.”
I mention that Chabrol’s films seem to combine social commentary on France’s class system with Hitchcock’s morbid sense of humor. Huppert agrees fervently: “There was always a multiplicity of layers, of different feelings. Like all great directors, he was very simple, but very complex and very deep. To get to that simplicity is [sic] a great intelligence. He was in control of what he was doing.”
No wonder they enjoyed creative chemistry. Isabelle Huppert possesses that same “great intelligence,” which allows her to express something very rich and complex about human existence with exceptional economy.
She’s at it again in incendiary novelist and filmmaker Catherine Breillat’s L’abus de Faiblesse (Abuse of Weakness), chronicling the auteur’s experience after an aneurysm: “She only partly recovered. It was her own story of meeting this crook, who owed her money, but in the first place, building this very ambiguous relationship… The more he was giving her, the more he was taking from her.” The film will be released in France in February, “and I hope in the States, as well,” the actress quickly adds.
She seems pleasantly taken aback when I ask her about working on two American films, Hal Hartley’s Amateur (1994) and David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees (2004): “I wouldn’t have put them together, but it’s interesting that you did. They have some things in common, dealing with off the track characters, slightly on the side of the road. Amateur was like a cross between the Bible and a cartoon. David also [combined existential exploration with a cartoonish sense of humor]… Each of them is very personal.”
The American actors she admires are “the great [ones]: Robert De Niro, Al Pacino. Bradley Cooper.” Perhaps her failure to mention any actresses finds its roots in an earlier answer about the difference between working with male and female directors: “Sometimes women don’t get on so well together, even not as well as women and men [do].” She adds with her characteristic simplicity, “I like good actors in good roles, in good movies.”
As for a great actress in a lifetime of great roles in great movies: “Was there ever a time you wanted to stop acting?” I ask.
“Every day. When you really like to do something, you also can feel very dependent. Precisely because you like it so much.
Because it can feel like an addiction.”