How do you catch hold of a Miles Davis riff? A Maria Callas aria? The ethereal post-rock ostinato of Sigur Ros?<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 Such is the acting skill of French cinema icon, Isabelle Huppert.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 <\/span>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.\u00a0 <\/span>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.\u00a0 <\/span>There are other actors who display extraordinary versatility, but whose virtuosity seems to point to itself, shouting, \u201cLook at my great feats of vocal and physical costuming!\u201d \u00a0 <\/span>Huppert is whatever character she plays.\u00a0 <\/span>My high school theater teacher used to distinguish between Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire this way: \u201cWhen you see Gene Kelly dance, you think, \u2018What a great dancer.\u2019 When you see Fred Astaire dance, you think, \u2018I can do that.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n For Huppert, acting is easy.\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cActing is just about \u2018Do it\u2019,\u201d she says.\u00a0 <\/span>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.\u00a0 <\/span>But she generously offers me an hour of her time and answers my questions true to her acting style — simply, honestly, profoundly.\u00a0 <\/span>I begin, \u201cAre you tired of people telling you they\u2019re honored to meet you?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNo,\u201d she replies, without a trace of false modesty.\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cYou can say that to me.\u201d<\/p>\n Friendly and polite, Huppert nonetheless possesses a quintessentially French lack of schmaltz: \u201cNo, no, no.\u00a0 <\/span>I don\u2019t learn anything from my characters,\u201d she says.\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cYou just become them for a while and then you leave them aside.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>If she learns nothing from her characters, I ask her, then how does she choose her roles?\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cI choose roles for the director… That\u2019s my only criteria.\u201d<\/p>\n When I ask if she derives inspiration from any actresses past or present, she replies, \u201cNo.\u00a0 <\/span>I might admire their work.\u00a0 <\/span>But there is no one who inspires me, no.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou do your own thing,\u201d I respond.<\/p>\n \u201cYes, I do,\u201d she says, then qualifies her statement: \u201cI try.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n That little glimmer of self-doubt betrays the vulnerability one sees in even her iciest characters.\u00a0 <\/span>As the title character in Claude Chabrol\u2019s 1978 film, Violette Nozi\u00e8re<\/i>, a stoic, baby-faced Isabelle Huppert lies to her parents with the ease of a sociopath.\u00a0 <\/span>Yet she plays her defenseless love for the character of Jean Dabin, played by Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Garreaud, with an almost unbearably naked sensitivity.\u00a0 <\/span>She won Best Actress at Cannes for that performance.\u00a0 <\/span>She won again in 2000 for her title role in Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke\u2019s La Pianiste<\/i>, based on Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek\u2019s novel Die Klavierspielerin<\/i> (The Piano Teacher<\/i>), in which meticulous piano teacher Erika Kohut\u2019s 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.\u00a0 <\/span>La Pianiste<\/i> swept all of Cannes\u2019 major awards that year, including the Palme d\u2019Or.\u00a0 <\/span>Huppert reunited with Haneke again on Time of the Wolf<\/i>\u2019 (2003) and last year\u2019s Foreign Film Oscar winner, Amour<\/i>.<\/p>\n [blockquote author=”-Isabelle Huppert”]”Sometimes the most difficult movies to film, are the most fun to perform.”[\/blockquote].<\/p>\n Huppert transforms herself so completely that I wonder if she must make herself egoless: \u201cNo, no, it\u2019s not a matter of ego,\u201d she says.\u00a0 <\/span>It\u2019s two different things.\u00a0 <\/span>I have an ego like anyone.\u00a0 <\/span>Even more so.\u00a0 <\/span>It\u2019s not a matter of ego.\u00a0 <\/span>It\u2019s a matter of managing to do an exact mixture, almost chemical, between what you are and the character… It isn\u2019t that I disappeared.\u00a0 <\/span>It\u2019s more likely that I appeared.\u201d<\/p>\n She appears to me, in glimpses.\u00a0 <\/span>Her curt demeanor in answering artistic and professional questions melts into warm ebullience when I speak of my own children.\u00a0 <\/span>In French, she asks, \u201cHow old are they? One and three?\u00a0 <\/span>They must be so cute! What are their names? Italian? Oh your mother is Italian?\u00a0 <\/span>Parla Italiano? Di dove nell\u2019Italia viene tua madre?\u201d<\/p>\n 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: \u201cYou do the best you could [sic].\u00a0 <\/span>You always have to sacrifice something.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>She wants me to know one of her daughters, Lolita Chammah, who first played her mother\u2019s daughter when she was four in Les Affaires de Femmes<\/i>, did so again in Marc Fitoussi\u2019s 2010 Copacabana<\/i>.<\/p>\n For this one moment, we are two moms bragging about our daughters and commiserating over the challenges of the work-life balance.\u00a0 <\/span>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.<\/p>\n 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<\/i>, the animated, homicidal postal worker in La C\u00e9r\u00e9monie<\/i>, the literally poisonous stepmother in Mer\u00e7i Pour le Chocolat<\/i>.\u00a0 <\/span>It\u2019s 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. \u201cIs it your true nature shining through that makes your most impossible-to-love characters so likable?\u201d I ask.\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cYes, because I\u2019m so nice,\u201d she quips dryly, continuing:<\/p>\n No, no, but maybe in a way it is me coming through.\u00a0 <\/span>It is the situation that is negative, not the person.\u00a0 <\/span>They are trying to make their way out of a negative situation… You have to be like a lawyer having to defend [your character].\u00a0 <\/span>You\u2019re obliged to find the reasons and the legitimacy for rebellion or revolt.\u00a0 <\/span>Your reasons are in the conditions, in the world, or in their background. Then what makes them likable, as you say, can show through.<\/p>\n In La Pianiste<\/i> for instance, Huppert achieves a riveting tour de force that is nonetheless painful to witness.\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cSometimes the most difficult films to watch,\u201d Huppert tells me, \u201care the most fun to perform… It looks like such hard work.\u00a0 <\/span>And it was.\u00a0 <\/span>But not for me.\u00a0 <\/span>For me it\u2019s was fun to do… I like to act in any direction, to be funny, to be dark, to be light.\u00a0 <\/span>It\u2019s like music. You like to play the high notes, but you like to play the low notes as well.\u00a0 <\/span>You are like a musical instrument.\u201d<\/p>\n She refers again to music when I ask if she has ever taught acting.\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cNo.\u00a0 <\/span>I was asked this year . . . to teach at the main national school in Paris [Conservatoire National Sup\u00e9rieur d\u2019Art Dramatique<\/i> (CNSAD), which Huppert herself attended]… but it would take too much time.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>She suddenly sounds intrigued, \u201cI think I would have the students listen to music…\u00a0It would teach them about the different interpretations of a piece, piano, violin, the voice… I also like to listen to silence.\u201d<\/p>\n She has brought her music and her silence to the stage, in everything from French classics by the likes of Marivaux and Moli\u00e8re to controversial contemporary roles, as in a 2005 French production of 4.48 Psychosis<\/i> by theater\u2019s late enfante terrible, Sarah Kane, who killed herself shortly after writing the play in 1999.\u00a0 <\/span>One critic called it \u201can hour-and-a-half-long suicide note,\u201d which Mlle. Huppert agrees it more or less is.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat was Sarah Kane working to achieve in the play? How did you make it active?\u201d I ask.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is a very special text,\u201d she answers.\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cAnd the director, I did 4.4.8<\/i> with [the great Claude R\u00e9gy,] was trying to do theater by breaking convention, which is the only way to do theater. \u00a0He knows that it can only live by killing itself. \u00a0I was still for two hours, as if rooted to the ground. \u00a0I performed it like a poem of life and death.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIs there a difference between acting for film and acting for theater?\u201d I ask her. \u201cThere is, I guess,\u201d she responds: \u201cBut I try to forget about it.\u201d In other words, Huppert brings a kind of filmic naturalism to the stage.<\/p>\n She cherishes simplicity not merely in execution, but in her collaboration with a director.\u00a0 <\/span>Her greatest and longest artistic relationship was with one of the French New Wave\u2019s pioneers, Claude Chabrol.\u00a0 <\/span>They began working together early in Huppert\u2019s career, with Violette Nozi\u00e8re<\/i> in 1978, and continued right up until Chabrol\u2019s death in 2010.\u00a0 <\/span>The last film they completed together was 2009\u2019s L\u2019ivresse de Pouvoir<\/i> (Comedy of Power<\/i>).<\/p>\n \u201cOur relationship was very rich and deep, yet very easy,\u201d she muses.\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cIt is very hard to find a relationship like that,\u201d continues Huppert.\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cHe was able to say a lot of things in these films. \u00a0And I was also able to say things. \u00a0But it was so easy, so profound.\u201d<\/p>\n When I ask her if she misses him, she says simply, her sadness palpable: \u201cIt was a great loss.\u201d<\/p>\n I mention that Chabrol\u2019s films seem to combine social commentary on France\u2019s class system with Hitchcock\u2019s morbid sense of humor.\u00a0 <\/span>Huppert agrees fervently: \u201cThere 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.\u201d<\/p>\n No wonder they enjoyed creative chemistry.\u00a0 <\/span>Isabelle Huppert possesses that same \u201cgreat intelligence,\u201d which allows her to express something very rich and complex about human existence with exceptional economy.<\/p>\n She\u2019s at it again in incendiary novelist and filmmaker Catherine Breillat\u2019s L\u2019abus de Faiblesse<\/i> (Abuse of Weakness<\/i>), chronicling the auteur\u2019s experience after an aneurysm: \u201cShe only partly recovered. \u00a0It 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.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>The film will be released in France in February, \u201cand I hope in the States, as well,\u201d the actress quickly adds.<\/p>\n She seems pleasantly taken aback when I ask her about working on two American films, Hal Hartley\u2019s Amateur<\/i> (1994) and David O. Russell\u2019s I Heart Huckabees<\/i> (2004): \u201cI wouldn\u2019t have put them together, but it\u2019s interesting that you did.\u00a0 <\/span>They have some things in common, dealing with off the track characters, slightly on the side of the road. Amateur<\/i> was like a cross between the Bible and a cartoon. \u00a0David also\u00a0 <\/span>[combined existential exploration with a cartoonish sense of humor]… Each of them is very personal.\u201d<\/p>\n The American actors she admires are \u201cthe great [ones]: Robert De Niro, Al Pacino.\u00a0 <\/span>Bradley Cooper.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>Perhaps her failure to mention any actresses finds its roots in an earlier answer about the difference between working with male and female directors: \u201cSometimes women don\u2019t get on so well together, even not as well as women and men [do].\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>She adds with her characteristic simplicity, \u201cI like good actors in good roles, in good movies.\u201d<\/p>\n As for a great actress in a lifetime of great roles in great movies: \u201cWas there ever a time you wanted to stop acting?\u201d I ask.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery day. \u00a0When you really like to do something, you also can feel very dependent.\u00a0 <\/span>Precisely because you like it so much.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Because it can feel like an addiction.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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.\u00a0 Such is the acting skill of French cinema icon, Isabelle Huppert. 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