Isabelle Huppert: Stardom, Performance, Authorship 9781501348914, 9781501372438, 9781501348945, 9781501348938

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Isabelle Huppert

ii

Isabelle Huppert Stardom, Performance, Authorship Edited by Nick Rees-Roberts and Darren Waldron

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2021 Volume Editor’s Part of the Work © Nick Rees-Roberts and Darren Waldron Each chapter © of Contributors For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image © Philip Gay / Art Partner Licensing All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rees-Roberts, Nick, editor. | Waldron, Darren, editor. Title: Isabelle Huppert : stardom, performance, authorship / edited by Nick Rees-Roberts and Darren Waldron. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020031414 (print) | LCCN 2020031415 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501348914 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501372438 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501348921 (epub) | ISBN 9781501348938 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Huppert, Isabelle–Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PN2638.H76 I85 2020 (print) | LCC PN2638.H76 (ebook) | DDC 791.4302/8092 [B]–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020031414 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020031415 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4891-4 PB: 978-1-5013-7243-8 ePDF: 978-1-5013-4893-8 eBook: 978-1-5013-4892-1 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Notes on the Authors vii List of Figuresx Acknowledgments xii Introduction—Against Type: Isabelle Huppert’s Unorthodox Stardom  Nick Rees-Roberts and Darren Waldron1 1 2

3 4 5 6

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Intimate Distance: The Face of Isabelle Huppert  Darren Waldron21 The Calculated Maladresse: Isabelle Huppert’s Dual Performance Style  41 Pedro Guimarães Women in Extremis: Isabelle Huppert in the Director’s Theatre  59 George Sampatakakis Enduring Extremity: On Isabelle Huppert’s Intertextual Body  79 Jules O’Dwyer Maternal Eroticism: Queering Isabelle Huppert  99 Emma Wilson Huppert’s Public: Audience Reception and the Cinema of Michael Haneke  117 Joseph McGonagle Huppert and Chabrol: Opacity, Dissonance, and the Crystal-Character  137 Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze Embodying the White (Colonial) Woman: Isabelle Huppert’s Roles in Postcolonial Film  157 Kaya Davies Hayon Acting Funny: A Counter-Reading of Huppert’s Star Persona  177 Raphaëlle Moine

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10 “Who the Hell is Isabelle Huppert?”: A French Star in America  Alison Taylor 11 After Elle: Isabelle Huppert’s Performance of Fame, Fashion, and Feminism  Nick Rees-Roberts

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Index241

Notes on the Authors Editors Nick Rees-Roberts is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris, France. His research spans fashion, film, and mediaculture and he is the author of French Queer Cinema (2008) and Fashion Film: Art and Advertising in the Digital Age (2018), co-author of Homo exoticus: race, classe et critique queer (2010), and co-editor of Alain Delon: Style, Stardom and Masculinity (2015). Darren Waldron is Senior Lecturer in French and European Screen Studies at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Jacques Demy (2014), Queering Contemporary French Popular Cinema (2009), co-author of French and Spanish Queer Cinema: Audiences, Communities and Cultural Exchange (2016), and coeditor of Alain Delon: Style, Stardom and Masculinity (2015) and France at the Flicks: Trends in Contemporary French Popular Cinema (2007).

Contributors Kaya Davies Hayon is Research and Development Manager at Belong: The Cohesion and Integration Network and Honorary Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Lincoln. Her research focuses on representations of gender, sexuality, and corporeality in contemporary Maghrebi films and visual culture. Her monograph, Sensuous Cinema: The Body in Contemporary Maghrebi Film, was published with Bloomsbury in 2018. Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze is Professor of French at Durham University, UK. She specializes in ninteeenth-century literature and French Cinema. She is the author of Claude Chabrol’s Aesthetics of Opacity (2017). She is also the author of the novel La Logique de l’amanite, published by Grasset in 2015, which won the Prix André Dubreuil du Premier Roman awarded by the Société des Gens

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de Lettres in 2015 and the Prix Fondation Prince de Monaco ‘coup de coeur des lycéens’ in 2016. Pedro Guimarães is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communications and the Graduate Program in Multimedia in the Institute of Arts at the University of Campinas, Brazil. He is the author of Helena Ignez, actrice expérimentale  (ACCRA/University de Strasbourg/France, 2018) and researches film theory, history and aesthetics, acting, and film genres. Joseph McGonagle is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies in the French-speaking World at the University of Manchester, UK. He is the author of Representing Ethnicity in Contemporary French Visual Culture (2016) and co-author of Contesting Views: The Visual Economy of France and Algeria (2013). Raphaëlle Moine is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris, France. She is the author of Les Genres du cinéma (2002), translated into English as Cinema Genre (2008), Remakes: les films français à Hollywood (2007), Les Femmes d’action (2010), and Vies héroïques: biopics masculins, biopics féminins (2017), and co-editor of A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema (2015). Jules O’Dwyer is PhD candidate in Film Studies and French at the University of Cambridge, UK, and Director of Studies in Modern and Medieval Languages at Corpus Christi College. He has published widely on topics related to French and Francophone visual culture, film theory, and queer theory in journals, including Screen, Discourse, and Studies in French Cinema. George Sampatakakis is Assistant Professor of Drama and Performance in the Department of Theatre Studies, Univeristy of Patras, Greece. His areas of interest include the theories of theatre, theatre acting and directing, queer theory, and the reception of Greek Drama. Alison Taylor teaches at Bond University, Australia. She is the author of Troubled Everyday: The Aesthetics of Violence and the Everyday in European Art Cinema and has a forthcoming monograph on Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession. She is currently co-writing a book with Jason Jacobs on the work of Nicolas Winding Refn for the SUNY Press Horizons of Cinema Series. 

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Emma Wilson is Professor of French Literature and the Visual Arts at the University of Cambridge, UK. She has research interests in questions of affect, memory, the  senses, love, and desire. Her numerous books include Cinema’s Missing Children (2003) and Love, Mortality and the Moving Image (2012) as well as studies of directors Alain Resnais and Atom Egoyan. Her most recent books are The Reclining Nude (2019) and Céline Sciamma: Girlhoods (2020).

List of Figures 0.1

Huppert with Sandrine Bonnaire as the murderous postmistress in 6 La Cérémonie (Claude Chabrol 1995) 0.2 Huppert as Nathalie (with Roman Kolinka) in L’Avenir/Things to 8 Come (Mia Hansen-Løve 2016) 0.3 Huppert’s award-winning performance as Michèle in Elle (Paul Verhoeven 2016) 15 1.1 Isabelle Huppert addressing the audience with Pomme’s alienation in the closing shot of La Dentellière (Claude Goretta 1977) 24 1.2 Isabelle Huppert as Violette Nozière coolly rebuffing the policeman’s endeavors to find a motive for her murderous act in 28 Violette Nozière (Claude Chabrol 1978) 1.3 Isabelle Huppert as Anne nonchalantly telling husband Pierre (Daniel Auteuil) what she appreciates about her extramarital lover 33 in La Séparation (Christian Vincent 1994)  2.1–2.4 Huppert’s musical close-up in Huit Femmes/8 Women (François Ozon 2002) 50 2.5 Huppert (with Lillian Gish and Bette Davis) in Violette Nozière (Claude Chabrol 1978) 51 2.6 Huppert and her double in Deux (Werner Schroeter 2002) 54 4.1 Lying prostrate: Abus de faiblesse (Catherine Breillat 2013) 92 4.2 Disembodiment and digital avatars: Elle (Paul Verhoeven 2016) 94 5.1 Huppert in Ma mère (Christophe Honoré 2004) with her body laid out to be looked at 107 5.2 Mother and son: Huppert with Louis Garrel in Ma mère 109 (Christophe Honoré 2004) 6.1 Scores awarded by Allociné reviewers for La Pianiste/ 121 The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke 2001) 6.2 Huppert sniffing a soiled tissue in La Pianiste (Michael Haneke 2001) 126 6.3 Presence and absence: Huppert in La Pianiste (Michael Haneke 2001) 129

List of Figures

From Huppert’s perspective: as the mother in Un Barrage contre le Pacifique (Rithy Panh 2006) 8.2 Huppert as Maria taking on conventionally “male” duties in White Material (Claire Denis 2009) 9.1 and 9.2 The body out of whack: Huppert in Tip Top (Serge Bozon 2013) 9.3 Huppert as the anti-conformist Babou with her lover Bart (Jurgen Delnaet) in Copacabana (Marc Fitoussi 2010) 10.1 Huppert as an erotic writer in Amateur (Hal Hartley 1994) 10.2 Huppert teasing the audience as the psychopath in Greta (Neil Jordan 2018) 10.3 Huppert as the unhinged director Jacqueline in The Romanoffs 11.1 Mommie dearest: Huppert as the abusive Hanna in My Little Princess (Eva Ionesco 2011) 11.2 Huppert at a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019 (credit Silvano Mendes) 11.3 Huppert as Isabelle, a fictional film star, here with Gérard Depardieu in Valley of Love (Guillaume Nicloux 2015) 11.4 Huppert as the glamorous dying star in Frankie (Ira Sachs 2019)

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161 170 186 191 205 210 211 222 224

231 233

Acknowledgments We would like to express our thanks and gratitude to Philip Gay for generously giving us permission to reproduce his striking image of Isabelle Huppert on the cover and to Tim Rees-Roberts for tirelessly assisting us with the stills inside the book.

Introduction—Against Type: Isabelle Huppert’s Unorthodox Stardom Nick Rees-Roberts and Darren Waldron

The prolific star of over one hundred films, the multi-award-winning French actor Isabelle Huppert is yet to receive the critical attention of academic Film Studies. The winner in 2017 of the Golden Globe award for best actress in a dramatic role for her performance in Elle (Paul Verhoeven 2016), Huppert is now widely recognized as one of the most distinguished actors working today in international cinema. Paradoxically, despite being Oscar-nominated and winning prizes at the BAFTA awards and the festivals of Cannes, Venice, and Berlin, there is very little coverage of her acting career or any in-depth critical consideration of her star persona beyond the gaze of popular media. This book seeks to remedy this absence by scrutinizing Huppert’s unorthodox public image through sustained analysis of her many stage and screen roles. Of the two main books on French stardom in English (Vincendeau 2000; Austin 2003), only one, by Ginette Vincendeau, mentions her, albeit in passing (2000, vii, 21, 29). Such relative absence might be explained by Huppert’s strong association with “European Art-house” cinema, which is conventionally seen as falling outside of the parameters of commercial filmmaking, of which the star figure is considered a key component. Categorizing Huppert in such a way, though, overlooks the complexities of a career that has seen her—albeit occasionally— venture into other forms of cinema, including more mainstream and genre films. More importantly, however, it ignores the possible contribution to the discipline of Star Studies that an academic discussion of Huppert may engender. The essential questions such an investigation should raise—and which we intend to address in this introduction and throughout this book—are not only how a sustained study of Huppert might enrich our knowledge of her as a star figure, but also, and perhaps more importantly, how a collection of scholarly discussions of Huppert can contribute to a broadening of the parameters of Star Studies itself.

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Isabelle Huppert: Stardom, Performance, Authorship

Ambiguity and Transgression: What Huppert Brings to Star Studies In the case of Huppert, that pushing of the existing boundaries of such an established field of inquiry is firstly enabled by the fact that she and others invested in her have made the two discourses of ambiguity and transgression central to her public image. Before going further, it is important to clarify what is meant by these terms in relation to Huppert. While Huppert is often positioned and promoted as a certain type of actor associated with a particular kind of filmmaking— “European Art-house,” “auteur” or “cerebral” cinema, for example—her actions and words occasionally trouble, defy, and even falsify such categorizations. And one key way in which Huppert transmits such noncompliance with type is by placing herself outside of the very notion of an image altogether. From this, then, we derive the idea of transgression, which resonates with the notion of behaving in ways that seek to challenge, reject, and exceed a certain paradigm, in this case that of star images. The categorizing of stars has always been fundamental to the very idea of stardom. Huppert’s nonconformity to expectation and her consistent resistance to the very idea of a star image undoubtedly figure among the reasons why she has largely escaped the attention of scholarly inquiry within Star Studies, in France and beyond. And yet, at least since the turn of the new millennium, a star she is, and what she might be said to embody and represent in terms of that stardom requires scrutiny. Those two discourses of ambiguity and transgression were in evidence in a short piece she wrote for British Vogue’s October 2018 edition and which focused, not on her acting, career, or image, but on that most Gallic of myths of femininity, la parisienne. At the end of the first paragraph, she writes: “ambiguity, for me, is the salt of life.” The transformation of the more familiar metaphor by replacing “variety” with “ambiguity” and “spice” with “life” serves to figure ambiguity as a fundamental and essential ingredient necessary to give life any flavor at all. This modified metaphor reaffirms the resistance to interpretation and categorization she conveys throughout the piece. Questioning the myth of la parisienne, which she describes as a “uniformly chic phantom,” she observes that she has “never been interested in precise definitions” (Huppert 2018).1 Here, we derive a sense of the insouciance with which Huppert approaches these themes; hers tends not to be the strategy of virulent defensiveness, but a concise declaration of what she projects as fact or truth. Shortly after, she uses cultural variations in fashion to reaffirm her interest in forms of expression that transcend time-bound trends

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and vogues. For Huppert, “if British fashion is about capturing and reflecting a particular moment, French fashion is about transcending it” (2018). In her short piece for British Vogue, then, Huppert’s comments can be said to tell us something about her perspective and how she might wish to be perceived by others. Where Huppert’s resistance to categorization becomes potentially enriching for Star Studies is that the projection of ambiguity and transgression as markers of her persona speaks of an approach that not only differs from, but also exceeds, Richard Dyer’s observation that ideological analyses of stars “stress their structured polysemy”—“the finite multiplicity of meanings and affects they embody and the attempt so to structure them that some meanings and affects are fore-grounded and others are masked or displaced” (1979, 3). Dyer’s description conjures a visual image in which some “meanings and affects” are depicted in sharp focus while others are obscured within the blurry depths of the background. By conveying a desire to position herself outside of any sense of an image, Huppert ruptures that particular conceptualization of stardom, much like an actor who, deploying the Brechtian technique of demonstration and de-familiarization, breaks the fourth wall by “showing” the character, thereby refusing to allow the spectator to identity with it (Brecht [1935], 1964, 192–4). In fact, that Brechtian posture is something she has repeatedly adopted in her performances, at least since her breakthrough role as Pomme/Béatrice in La Dentellière/The Lacemaker (Claude Goretta 1977). Rather than allowing herself to be “wholly transformed into the character” (Brecht [1935], 1964, 193), she has recurrently stood between the spectator and the character. Huppert often “shows” her characters as characters, holding them up for our scrutiny, and thus disallowing the suspension of our disbelief by making clear that what we see is simply an actor portraying either a fictional character or a character inspired by an actual person. Similarly, in interviews, she imposes herself between the audience and the image we attempt to construct of her. She de-familiarizes that externally projected image by exposing it as, in the very least, speculation. As such, her words and actions serve not to foreground certain “meanings and affects” while “masking and displacing” others, but to attempt to deconstruct the very notion of an assemblage of “meanings and affects” within a structured image, however polysemic they may be. The sense of resistance to an image consonant with such behavior is more explicitly articulated in words attributed to her in another article, this time in The Independent. When asked how she feels about the “professional obligation” to craft and promote an image of herself, Huppert points—more emphatically this time—to what she characterizes as

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the absurdity of such a concept: “an image is always inaccurate. A true image is impossible. It’s especially impossible of an actress. And it ought not to exist anyway” (Romney 2005). We might argue that Huppert’s inclination toward ambiguity and transgression is part of a performative strategy, and one that has run throughout the five decades in which she has appeared on stage and screen at the time of writing. The understanding of performativity relevant here does not chime so much with that expressed by Sabrina Qiong Yu in her introduction to Revisiting Star Studies for whom it is based on masquerade and constitutes “a central notion of stardom” (2017, 3). It is more in line with Judith Butler’s interpretation of performativity, which she sees as constituting the mundane and banal ways in which identities—in her case gender identities—are appropriated and enacted (1990, 173–80). Like the nonconformist gender performances of which Butler writes, which expose heterosexuality as a construct, Huppert’s strategies of ambiguity and transgression reveal how the very notion of the star image is also a fabrication. Of course, many audiences know that the star image attached to an actor is largely based in fiction and is the product of processes of association and extrapolation, amplification and/or reduction. And yet, audiences are nonetheless compelled to invest in that image, to buy into it, and reviews and interviews with stars are instrumental in that process. There is much pleasure in suspending our disbelief and investing in those images, of which escape and projection might be but two. Huppert makes such investments difficult, however, precisely because she fails to confirm interpretations and resists what she characterizes as “precise definitions.”

Huppert’s Reception: Talent, Versatility, and Risk The discussion thus far may prompt the reader to wonder why we are even bothering to think of a star image in the context of Huppert given such resistance. Yet, just because Huppert may reject any sense of an image being attached to her does not prevent her from representing and embodying a certain persona and signifying certain meanings. Star images are not just constructs fabricated by the film industry and through which films can be promoted and sold; they also take shape and are confirmed within the imaginaries of those spectators who go to watch those stars. As Dean Gaffney and Diana Holmes have argued in their introduction to their edited collection on stardom in France in the 1950s and

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1960s, “what a star signifies for her or his public is not simply predetermined. Like the film spectator, the consumer of the star image brings his or her own hopes, desires and dreams to the encounter, and plays an active role in selecting which aspects of the star matter” (2007, 9). Dyer similarly recognizes that “stars matter because they act out aspects of life that matter to us; and performers get to be stars when what they act out matters to enough people” ([1986] 2004, 17). And that early pioneer of Star Studies, Edgar Morin, also recognized the role of the public in creating and confirming the star, arguing that “it is neither talent nor the absence of talent, nor even the film industry or publicity, it’s the needs we have of them that create stars” ([1957] 1972, 91).2 A way to illuminate what Huppert might mean in terms of her star persona is to examine popular written accounts of her career. A number of recent French publications all underline Huppert’s technical expertise and versatility, thereby consecrating her as one of contemporary cinema’s “greatest” actors. For instance, in the novel Tiens ferme ta couronne (Haenel 2017) the cinéphile narrator, who is obsessed with Michael Cimino’s film Heaven’s Gate (1980), recounts a meeting with (the fictional) Isabelle Huppert, whose appearance brings back scenes “in which her youth lit up this film with a tragic softness. She was quite simply extraordinary: childlike like an amazon, professional like a brothel owner, at once wise and intrepid; she alone gave the film its shade of lost love” (Haenel 2017, 203).3 A number of recent “trade” publications on the star also opt for the celebratory language of hagiography—Alain Bergala’s introduction to a volume of Carole Bellaïche’s photos of Huppert taken since the early 1990s is grandly entitled “The Great Actress and Her Photographer Friend” (Bergala 2019), and the novelist and essayist Richard Millet’s effusive meditation Huppert et moi (2019) vainly traces his own trajectory by closely following, in parallel, the star’s career. In Isabelle Huppert: Vivre ne nous regarde pas—the portentous subtitle (living is not our priority) is attributed to the journals of Gustave Flaubert— Murielle Joudet (2018) writes a chronological history of Huppert’s roles from her first fleeting appearance on film (credited as student no. 2) in Faustine et le bel été (Nina Companeez 1972) onward. Of a more academic register is Vincendeau’s concise piece on Huppert for the UK film magazine Sight & Sound (2006), in which she maps out a thematic narrative of Huppert’s career focusing, in particular, on her ubiquitous presence in French cinema and her seemingly ageless appearance. Vincendeau broadly divides Huppert’s career between the parallel strands of monstrous perversity and blank impassivity. From her small early roles as rebellious teenagers in Les

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Figure 0.1  Huppert with Sandrine Bonnaire as the murderous postmistress in La Cérémonie (Claude Chabrol 1995).

Valseuses/Going Places (Bertrand Blier 1974) and Docteur Françoise Gailland (Jean-Louis Bertuccelli 1976), Huppert first achieved critical acclaim for the lead roles as the painfully shy hairdresser’s apprentice in La Dentellière in 1977, for which she won a BAFTA award for best newcomer, and as the cool murderer in Violette Nozière (Claude Chabrol 1978), a role for which she won a Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival—the first of a series of often celebrated collaborations with Chabrol that punctuated her career until his death in 2010. Cast against type alongside Sandrine Bonnaire, Huppert’s jumpy performance as the homicidal postmistress in La Cérémonie (1995) is surely one of her most memorable for its disruptive patterns of speech and behavior. Huppert’s talent as an actor is the focus of Alison Taylor’s academic discussion of another of the star’s celebrated performances—as Erika Kohut in La Pianiste/The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke 2001)—who pinpoints not only the actor’s “capacity for both cold impassivity and impulsive flashes of emotion,” but also her ability to render complexity in performance by “alternating between registers” (Taylor 2018, 218–19)—by, in effect, playing characters who are doing one thing while thinking about another. Huppert’s calculated combination of impassiveness and expressivity has become the dominant trademark of her persona. Far from denying Huppert’s technical skill as an actor, our intention here is to go beyond the simple recognition of her “greatness” to provide a more

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complex and varied account of her image by emphasizing her own ambivalent and challenging negotiation of stardom. Born in Paris in 1953, Huppert was raised in a large middle-class family in Ville-d’Avray in the affluent Western inner-suburb of the Hauts-de-Seine. The youngest of five children, Huppert was encouraged early on to act and attended a regional drama school (the Conservatoire à rayonnement régional de Versailles) before later securing a place at France’s national drama academy in Paris, the CNSAD (the Conservatoire national supérieur d’art dramatique). Huppert made her screen début aged eighteen in 1971 in a TV movie titled Le Prussien (The Prussian) and went on to accumulate film roles through the mid-1970s that brought her attention including her small but significant role in the popular controversial comedy of sexual mores, Les Valseuses/Going Places (Bertrand Blier 1974), in which she played Jacqueline, an unruly middle-class sixteen-yearold who ditches her reactionary parents to lose her virginity to a delinquent trio. From the late 1970s, Huppert has combined a consistent and long-lasting engagement with established auteur cinema with roles in more popular genres, and an equally consistent collaboration with a number of female directors. Following her breakout role in La Dentellière in 1977, Huppert went on to work with a host of celebrated auteurs in both French and international cinema, including Claude Chabrol, Maurice Pialat, Benoît Jacquot, Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Cimino, Joseph Losey, Werner Schroeter, and Hal Hartley. From the early 1980s she also acted in more popular genres in films directed by Bertrand Blier and Bertrand Tavernier, as well as working with women directors Josiane Balasko and Diane Kurys—a collaboration that began with her very first film role in 1972 in Nina Companeez’s Faustine et le bel été and that has accelerated since the 2000s with roles in films directed by Catherine Breillat, Claire Denis, Laurence Ferreira Barbosa, Anne Fontaine, Mia Hansen-Løve, Eva Ionesco, Alexandra Leclère, Ursula Meier, and Laura Schroeder. Luz, a release date for which is projected for 2020/2021, a film for the Hong Kong director Flora Lau, marks the latest of the actor’s ongoing collaborations with some of the prestigious names of world cinema, including multi-language productions with Brillante Mendoza, Joachim Trier, and Hong Sang-soo, whose playful film In Another Country (2012) wittily interrogates the illusion of performance as well as de-territorializing the French icon and denaturalizing her fame and beauty. Huppert’s ability to take risks and mix things up is further visible through collaboration with less-established or first-time directors such as Hansen-Løve, Leclère, Meier, Guillaume Nicloux, Marc Fitoussi, and Joachim Lafosse, whose

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film Nue Propriété/Private Property (2006) showcased Huppert’s hypnotic control of her character Pascale, described by the critic Andrew Sarris as a perfect role for an “actress who has become more implacably mysterious as she has gotten older. Her characters never plead for our sympathy or understanding. […] She remains one of the most sensual and erotic presences in the cinema, despite a persistent inscrutability of expression” (Sarris 2007). Similarly, of her performance as a guillotined abortionist in Une affaire de femmes/Story of Women (Claude Chabrol 1988), for which she won the Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival, another revered critic Roger Ebert wrote: “It is the unique ability of Isabelle Huppert to betray almost nothing to the camera, when she chooses to. Some of the best moments in her performances come when she regards the camera as if daring us to guess what she is thinking” (Ebert 1990). Elsewhere, Huppert’s performances sometimes actively challenge the received wisdom of her as a cerebral or distanced performer by surprising audiences with an ironic complicity and by unexpectedly playing around with tone. In L’ Avenir/Things to Come (Mia Hansen-Løve 2016) as Nathalie the philosophy professor who rebuilds her life after her husband leaves her and her mother dies, Huppert is filmed crying in a bus following the funeral. When Nathalie suddenly catches sight of her husband out in public with his new girlfriend, she bursts out laughing, thus rupturing the emotional cohesion of the scene with unexpected realness. At other moments, Huppert also discards her trademark

Figure 0.2  Huppert as Nathalie (with Roman Kolinka) in L’Avenir/Things to Come (Mia Hansen-Løve 2016).

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ironic distance for the more transparent or humane performance of “pure” affect: in her supporting role as Solveig in Tout de suite maintenant (Pascal Bonitzer 2016) Huppert brings the expected ironic style to her initial presentation of character through her jerky shifts in tone and clipped delivery of lines but adds in authentic emotion—expressing the character’s inherent vulnerability—in one scene where Solveig visits her ex Serge (Jean-Pierre Bacri) who has been released from hospital following a sudden collapse. As he recounts the incident, Huppert cries—discreetly and continuously—as she follows his account. Commenting on her performance, she explains her choice and emphasizes her emotional connection to the role: I adored that character with this reunited couple—it’s their shared past, a lost love, that comes out in her flow of tears. I didn’t really think about it; it was a scene that moved me. When it comes down to it, as an actor, you act as a viewer. We are readers and spectators before we become actors. And as a reader of the scene, it moved me so I decided just to act the emotion. (Delorme 2016, 13)4

Performances such as these, although they may not be as well known as her other roles, nonetheless convey Huppert’s consistent propensity for acting in ways that challenge preconceptions and work against the external image projected onto her.

Troubling Type: Huppert’s Image and Nonconformity In the light of this recognition that Huppert embodies a particular image for her audiences, we might begin to discern what we see here as key characteristics that could combine to create that image. Rather than adopting Dyer’s concept of an “irreducible core” which he uses to interpret Elizabeth Taylor’s changing looks across her career and which gives an impression of unity ([1986] 2004, 9), it is perhaps more appropriate in the context of Huppert to think of recurring qualities that can be said to traverse her career. Such qualities might include her repeated casting in roles as “sociopaths” and “psychopaths,” her association with so-called “cerebral” and erudite cinema, and her active defiance of typical forms of publicity that seek to uncover details about her private life. Huppert’s readiness to play what might be seen as unseemly or problematic characters that other actors might baulk at is well known, and is addressed on numerous occasions throughout this book, albeit in different ways and with distinct foci, and so we

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Isabelle Huppert: Stardom, Performance, Authorship

won’t dwell on this now. Those other characteristics listed, though, merit more detailed consideration here, not least because in each one we witness a further mobilization of those prominent discourses of ambiguity and transgression. As such, they enable us to think more precisely about the ways in which considering Huppert in relation to understandings of a star image might enable us to forge new thinking in the area of stardom. If a frequent defiance of categorization and rejection of an external image feed into and shape what Huppert might mean, then, she demonstrates the extent to which star images are so much more than their external theorization might suggest. Arguably the most dominant association of Huppert is with a cerebral mode of filmmaking given that she has been frequently cast in erudite and philosophical films, made by seemingly intellectual directors, such as Godard and Haneke, among others. Such an association has already been implied through the aforementioned references to her deployment of Brechtian techniques, both in her “demonstration” of her characters and in her endeavors to “de-familiarize” her image. By acting in such films as Sauve qui peut (la vie)/Every Man for Himself (Godard 1980) and La Pianiste/The Piano Teacher (Haneke 2001), and also through her casting in adaptations of surrealist or modernist literary texts, including Georges Bataille’s Ma Mère (Christophe Honoré 2004), and Marguerite Duras’s Un barrage contre le Pacifique/The Sea Wall (Rithy Panh 2008), Huppert clearly aligns herself with this seemingly esoteric and in some ways experimental cinema. It is an association she has reinforced in her acts outside of her performances, most notably in the interviews she conducted with leading French post-structuralist philosopher Jean Baudrillard and French new-novelist Nathalie Sarraute for the March 1994 edition of the scholarly film journal Cahiers du cinéma. And yet, although evidence might align Huppert with an intellectual cinema, she inserts affirmations that trouble such a view. For instance, in an interview following the release of La Pianiste, she describes the image people have of her as cultivated as both true and false: “I’m perhaps a bit more cultured than I think, but a bit less than people think generally. What has amused me, from the beginning, is establishing bridges between genres. That must look like culture although it’s just simple curiosity”5 (in Guichard and Loiseau 2001). Elsewhere, in an interview following the release of Hansen Løve’s L’ Avenir/Things to Come, for which her role as a philosophy professor was perhaps tellingly written with her in mind (see Felsenthal 2016), she claims she does not read “hard philosophy,” nor has her role in the film inspired her to do so (in Jenkins 2016). One comment to one journalist and critic is thus partially

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undermined by another to a different journalist and critic, thereby enabling her to—perhaps playfully in this case—reassert those key discourses of ambiguity and transgression and defy any notion of a fixed image. Ambiguity and transgression can also be applied to Huppert’s theatre career when it is considered alongside her film performances. Her reputation as a serious theatre actor has no doubt contributed to the solidifying of her association with perceptions of legitimate, highbrow culture. As we have seen, Huppert was trained in the theatre, having studied at the conservatoire, although she later claimed that she did not remember it as a good experience because she didn’t do much (in Daney 1981, 106). Theatre is considered to be a more legitimate and culturally valued art form than cinema, perhaps even in France where cinema has nonetheless acceded to the hallowed status as the seventh art. In his examination of how what he terms “prestige stars” in Hollywood “gain kudos” through their theatre performances, Paul McDonald invokes the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who considered theatre alongside “painting, sculpture, literature and classical music” as one of the “fully consecrated arts” ([1990, 96] in McDonald 2013, 222). The somewhat elitist perception that theatre acting requires more skill than screen acting is also explored by Barry King for whom the view that “stage acting provides a yardstick against which to evaluate acting on screen is widespread among actors” ([1985] 1991, 127). Also basing his argument on Bourdieu, King notes that one reason for such a hierarchical judgment is that it is “on the stage that the actor is best placed to realise his or her ‘creative intentions’ in character portrayal,” which demands “of the actor a more sustained exercise of skills and commitment than is the case where an editable medium is used” ([1985] 1991, 128). Again, Huppert—consciously or subconsciously—enacts that familiar play on such perceptions, in one interview undermining them whereas, in another, she corroborates them. While she is quoted as saying that she “never get[s] nervous” on stage (in Romney 2005), she later describes theatre as a “hold-up” that differs from cinema, which she characterizes as relaxing, restorative, and soothing; according to Huppert “[the theatre] sucks the lifeblood out of you, it takes everything from you”6 (in Guichard et Loiseau 2001). Similarly, in a piece accompanying her appearance in Ivo Van Hove’s adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1944) in Paris in March 2020 she recounts approaching the performance with “immense fatigue and fear,” adding that “theatre really is like climbing a very painful mountain. Of course, once you reach the summit, the view is beautiful. By comparison, cinema is just a nice, effortless stroll” (in Cappelle 2020).

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Isabelle Huppert: Stardom, Performance, Authorship

The scale of that mountain is amplified when we consider the kind of theatrical roles that Huppert has played. Huppert has recurrently performed in plays considered as belonging to the pantheon of highbrow classical and experimental theatre. Those performances span both Molière (Les Précieuses ridicules/The Affected Young Ladies (1971–2) and L’ Avare/The Miser [1973]) and Shakespeare (Measure for Measure [1991]), and she has played leading roles in an adaptation of Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando (1993 to 1995), Eurypedes’s Medea (including at the prestigious Avignon festival in 2000), Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis (2002–3 and 2005), and Jean Genet’s Les Bonnes/The Maids (2013–14). Her recent avant-garde stage roles have included the triptych Phèdre(s) with texts by Wajdi Mouawad, Sarah Kane and J. M. Coetzee, directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski (2016), and Mary She Said conceived by Robert Wilson (2019). While reviews of Phèdre(s) criticized the production for being “incomprehensible” and “pretentious,” they praised Huppert’s star performance as “radiant” (Pascaud 2016), and Wilson’s impressionistic conceptual monologue recounting the fate of Mary Queen of Scots was lauded for the performer’s immense technical skill and ability to “radiate grace and versatility” (Brown 2019). For Vincendeau, film actors working in the theatre is a commonplace of French stardom because of the “extraordinary closeness of cinema and stage in France,” although she adds that actors tend to move away from the stage altogether when they reach the peak of their film stardom (2000, 7). Huppert once again bucks such trends in that her theatre work has intensified relatively since the turn of the millennium, arguably the time when her fame and renown entered their peak years; she performed in eight plays between 2000 and 2010 and seven between 2010 and 2020. And yet, that unorthodox dose of noncompliance with type or expectation then returns to spoil the mixture when we consider that it is also during this period as well that she appeared in some of her most famous film comedies—8 femmes/8 Women (François Ozon 2002), Les Sœurs fachées/Me and My Sister (Alexandra Leclère 2004), and Copacabana (Marc Fitoussi 2010). Although such appearances in screen comedies are minimal when compared to the majority of her more serious film and theatre performances, that she takes on both kinds of roles is a further manifestation of a resistance to categorization since, in so doing, she transcends what Vincendeau notes in relation to the stage are broadly “two strands of […] spectacle”: the “comic, singing and more proletarian” and the “serious and culturally respectable” (2000, 5). While they may not completely falsify Huppert’s general association with serious acting, such ventures into an arguably more commercial form of cultural expression serve at least to blur the perception of her as a purely cerebral or art-house actor.

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That sense of ambiguity and transgression also extends to those very ways in which types of acting are evaluated according to whether they are performed on stage or on screen. In his work on stardom, King identifies two acting modes of impersonation and personification ([1985] 1991, 130). Impersonation refers to when the actor gets lost in the character while in personification the actor’s personality and image are visible in the performance ([1985] 1991, 130). For Martin Shingler, the seemingly lower-quality personification mode is attached to film acting (2012, 32–3), thus echoing Morin, who noted in 1957 how cinema “de-theatricalized” the actor’s performance style and the technical and aesthetic qualities of film tended to “atrophy” or weaken them ([1957] 1972, 105). According to Karen Hollinger, though, some scholars—including McDonald (1998, 32)—have questioned this binary, arguing that “the two are not exclusive acting types at all, but rather are combined in acting performances” (2006, 48). However, Huppert’s behavior exceeds such binary evaluations of acting techniques. And she does this in familiar ways, as seen earlier when we noted how she frequently performs that aforementioned Brechtian stance with regard to her acting. We might say that this style frequently shifts away from what James Naremore termed the “representational” mode, in which the actor performs as if the audience is not present, to a more “presentational” mode that shows awareness that they are performing for an audience (1988, 28–9). While for Naremore, pure presentational acting cannot be achieved in film because “the existential bond between audience and performer is broken” (1988, 29), Huppert’s performance style in many of her screen roles might be interpreted as pushing the limits of the medium as far as they can go. In these film performances, she illustrates perhaps Andrew Higson’s discussion of the film acting technique of distanciation in independent cinema, in which “the actor is present only as an image [that] can be stylised to such an extent that it falls out of the flow of the narrative, halting that flow and resisting the struggle to contain it as character, in role” ([1986] 1991, 171—his emphasis). What makes Huppert interesting and potentially transformative for how we conceptualize stars and stardom is that she can be said to deploy that same process with regard to how she manages and promotes herself as an actor outside of her performances. As such, she consistently imposes a place for stars that refuse to disappear into an image that others have constructed of them. Of course, this does not mean that we do not see Huppert as a star when she plays her different roles, as suggested, but it does serve as a reminder that performance styles and star images cannot be easily reduced to established categories.

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Isabelle Huppert: Stardom, Performance, Authorship

However she approaches her craft or indeed seeks to convey an impression of herself, though, we can certainly say that Huppert transmits a rejection of the personification mode because, as seen, she articulates such skepticism about the very idea of a star image. And that resistance is amplified and extended in her refusal to engage with the kinds of celebrity culture that we come to expect of stars, manifested in her frequent attempts to curtail endeavors by journalists to pry into her private life. In this, she transcends generalized understandings of stars that, because they are working in the service of the industry, are understood to respond to or even court publicity. For Christine Gledhill, a shift in interest from an actor’s talent to their private life is a fundamental indicator that they have evolved into a star: “actors become stars when their off-screen lifestyles and personalities equal or surpass acting ability in importance” (1991, xiv). It is by closely guarding her private life that Huppert resists engaging in the promotion of self-image that aligns with the personification mode of acting. And, by way of illustration, we might return to the British Vogue piece mentioned near the beginning of this introduction. Here, Huppert concludes by recounting: “I have made more than 100 films, shot a lot of magazine covers, and walked endless red carpets; yet there is still nobody outside my inner circle who could tell you what I do on a Saturday night.” “In an age of overexposure,” she continues, “there is something decidedly powerful about keeping something to yourself ” (Huppert 2018). In this she might align with traditions within stardom in France where, as Vincendeau notes, privacy is “stringently protected” by law (2000, 22). And yet, unlike her peers, including Alain Delon, Gérard Depardieu, Catherine Deneuve, and Isabelle Adjani, she has neither been implicated in criminal activities nor taken out lawsuits against newspapers, magazines, or social groups (see Vincendeau 2000, 22), for doing so might invite the kind of scrutiny of her private life that she seems keen to avoid. Huppert has—at the point of writing at least—avoided such actions partly because her “actorly” status has outweighed her celebrity and also because, as mentioned, she casually curtails such curiosity through the playful strategies of evasion and contradiction. Those strategies, which connect to the discourses of ambiguity and transgression that, as we have seen, shape how Huppert projects herself through her discussions of her career and status, are not about transmitting an inflated sense of self as essentially superior to her peers. They are, as argued, mobilized to deflect categorization. By becoming recurrent tropes of her image, they remind us that a star such as Huppert does not require

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Figure 0.3  Huppert’s award-winning performance as Michèle in Elle (Paul Verhoeven 2016).

scholarly attention to elevate their standing and bring them to a new academic audience; rather, the academic field of Star Studies needs stars like Huppert to reflect more closely the diversity of screen stardom today. She illustrates that stars are not just the preserve of the mainstream, that they emerge and flourish in and through a range of different kinds of cinema and theatre, and that their status and appeal cannot always be fully understood within established academic parameters. That Huppert can be considered a star is certainly not in question here; however, what she represents and signifies for star images—even as someone who actively rejects such an entity—is very much of interest in this volume. The first three chapters of this book examine Huppert from the perspective of performance. Darren Waldron analyzes the role of the actor’s face as a signifier of her image and acting style, and how it operates as an important marker of her “star-authorship” through the range of unorthodox and “perverse” characters that she has played over the years. Pedro Guimarães argues that Huppert undermines the classical construction of characterization in realist cinema through her deployment of a dual acting strategy by inserting in her performances—even the most naturalistic ones—artificial touches that comment on the process of acting and the conditions of representation. And in his analysis of Huppert’s stage roles,

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George Sampatakakis argues that theatre has reinforced the star’s subversive image through her roles as women in extreme states of mind, roles that liberate her from the dominant characteristics—blankness and minimalism—of her screen acting. The following four chapters examine some of the dominant strands of Huppert’s screen persona—notably sexual transgression and “perversion”— and some of her most celebrated roles to date. Jules O’Dwyer turns to Huppert’s award-winning roles in La Pianiste and Elle, arguing that the bodily, psychic, and star presence of Huppert both troubles and extends existing critical debates on the cinéma du corps, as well as the theoretical framework with which it has been widely associated. Drawing on her performance in Christophe Honoré’s Ma mère (2004), an adaptation of an erotic novel by Georges Bataille, Emma Wilson queers the Huppert persona through analysis of the film’s focus on maternal incest. And, going beyond textual practice to audience reception, Joseph McGonagle analyzes a detailed corpus of print and online commentaries of La Pianiste alongside the findings of audience research, to probe how Huppert’s star persona mediates reception of her acting and whether and how her performance both facilitates and impedes viewer identification. Alongside her notable performances for Michael Haneke, Huppert also acted in no fewer than seven films by Claude Chabrol. In her chapter on these collaborations, Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze argues that beyond at times casting her against type, Chabrol exploited Huppert’s technical proficiency to explore the idea of ordinary evil processed through the director’s own aesthetics of opacity. The final section opens out discussion to more thematic questions of race and post-colonialism; comedy and popular cinema; English language and de-territorialization; and fame, fashion, and feminism. Kaya Davies Hayon examines Huppert’s roles in films that focus on (post)colonial settings and spaces such as White Material (Claire Denis 2009) and Un Barrage contre le Pacifique (Rithy Panh 2008) to consider whether the casting of an international film star undermines or reinforces their political critique. Celebrated for her versatility, Huppert has acted in a number of popular comedies, an important strand of her career that is analyzed in detail by Raphaëlle Moine, who explains how her comic roles over the last twenty years provide a counter-reading of her persona beyond the dominant image of her as the star of cerebral art-house cinema. Going beyond France, Alison Taylor traces Huppert’s performances in the English language (from her ill-fated Hollywood début in Heaven’s Gate to

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recent roles in US TV productions) that simultaneously draw on and depart from her established image. Concluding the volume, Nick Rees-Roberts examines Huppert’s public image since her award-winning role in Elle. Over the last decade she has accumulated roles that interrogate the nature of notoriety as well as appearing on Hollywood red carpets and at fashion shows the world over. Bringing the book’s coverage of Huppert’s career up to the present day, Rees-Roberts examines the star’s auto-referential role in Frankie (Ira Sachs 2019), a refined, low-key film that provides a muted commentary on stardom by stripping away some of the artifice of Huppert’s now considerable international fame.

Notes 1

Huppert’s observations on la parisienne are interesting given the breadth of the roles she has played on screen. Where the parisienne myth is based on a cliché of a white bourgeois femininity (of effortless chic and timeless sophistication), Huppert’s performances transgress such fixed social categorizations or pigeon-holing of her as middle class in how they straddle the full spectrum of class positions: from CEO to sex worker (multiple times); from industrialist to postmistress; teacher to prosecutor; and in more artistic contexts: designer, photographer, filmmaker, singer, musician, and actor. Huppert has played a CEO in Elle (Paul Verhoeven 2016) and industrialists in Merci pour le chocolat (Claude Chabrol 2000) and Happy End (Michael Haneke 2017), a prosecutor in Comedy of Power (L’ Ivresse du pouvoir Claude Chabrol, 2006); a postmistress in La Cérémonie (Claude Chabrol 1995); teachers in L’Avenir/Things to Come (Mia Hansen-Løve 2016), La Caméra de Claire/ Claire’s Camera (Hong Sang-soo 2017), and Madame Hyde (Serge Bozon 2017); sex workers in Sauve qui peut (La vie)/Every Man For Himself (Jean-Luc Godard 1980), Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino 1980), La Vie promise (Olivier Dahan 2002), Sans Queue ni tête (Jeanne Labrune 2010), and Eva (Benoît Jacquot 2018). In the creative professions, Huppert has played photographers in My Little Princess (Eva Ionesco 2011) and Louder Than Bombs (Joachim Trier 2015); filmmakers in In Another Country (Hong Sang-soo 2012) and Abus de faiblesse (Catherine Breillat 2013); a musician in Villa Amalia (Benoît Jacquot 2009); writers in Les Sœurs Brontë (André Téchiné 1979) and Malina (Werner Schroeter 1991); a fashion designer in L’ École de la chair/The School of Flesh (Benoît Jacquot 1998); and actors in The Story of Piera (Marco Ferreri 1983), Asphalte (Samuel Benchetrit 2015), Valley of Love (Guillaume Nicloux 2015), and Frankie (Ira Sachs 2019).

18 2 3

4

5

6

Isabelle Huppert: Stardom, Performance, Authorship “Ce n’est ni le talent ni l’ absence du talent, ni même l’ industrie cinématographique ou la publicité, c’est le besoin qu’on a d’elle qui crée la star.” “Je regardais Isabelle Huppert, et plusieurs scènes de La Porte du paradis me renvinrent—des scènes où sa jeunesse éclairait ce film d’une douceur tragique. Elle y était tout simplement extraordinaire: enfantine come une amazone, professionnelle comme une patronne de bordel, à la fois sage et intrépide; à elle seule elle prodiguait au film la couleur de l’ amour perdu.” “J’avais adoré ce personage avec ce couple qui se retrouve: dans ce flot de larmes il y a tout ce passé, c’est un amour perdu. Je n’ai pas trop réfléchi, c’est une scène qui me bouleversait. Au fond quand on est acteur, on joue aussi comme spectateur. On est lecteur et spectateur avant même d’être acteur. En tant que lectrice la scène m’a émue donc j’ai joué l’émotion.” “Je suis peut-être un peu plus cultivée que je ne le crois, mais un peu moins qu’on ne le pense généralement. Ce qui m’amuse, depuis toujours, c’est d’établir des passerelles entre les genres. Ça doit ressembler à de la culture alors que ce n’est que simple curiosité.” “ça vous vampirise, ça vous prend tout.”

References Austin, Guy. 2003. Stars in Modern French Film. London: Arnold. Bergala, Alain. 2019. “La grande actrice et l’amie photographe.” In Isabelle Huppert par Carole Bellaïche, edited by Carole Bellaïche, 7–12. Paris: Editions de la Matinière. Brecht, Bertolt. 1935. “The A-Effect as Procedure in Everyday Life.” In Brecht on Theatre: the Development of an Aesthetic, translated and edited by John Willett. 1964, 143–5. New York: Hill and Wang. Brown, Mark. 2019. “Mary Said What She Said, Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, review.” The Daily Telegraph, July 13, 2019: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/ what-to-see/mary-said-said-centro-cultural-de-belem-lisbon-review-isabelle/. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. London and New York: Routledge. Cappelle, Laura. 2020. “‘I Don’t Conform’: Backstage with the Indomitable Isabelle Huppert.” The Guardian, March 24, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/ mar/24/isabelle-huppert-interview-french-film-industry-metoo. Daney, Serge. 1981. “Entretien avec Isabelle Huppert.” Cahiers du cinéma 323–4, May 1981: 99–109. Delorme, Stéphane. 2016. “L’ Instant présent: Entretien avec Isabelle Huppert.” Cahiers du cinéma 723: 6–16. Dyer, Richard. 1979. Stars. London: BFI Publishing.

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Dyer, Richard. [1986] 2004. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge. Ebert, Roger. 1990. “Story of Women.” The Chicago Sun-Times, February 14, 1990. Felsenthal, Julia. 2016. “Mia Hansen-Løve on Mining Her Mother’s Life in Things to Come.” December 2, 2016. https://www.vogue.com/article/things-to-come-miahansen-love-interview. Gaffney, Dean and Homes Diana. (eds). 2005. Stardom in Postwar France. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Gledhill, Christine. 1991. Stardom, Industry of Desire. London and New York: Routledge. Guichard, Louis and Jean-Claude Loiseau. 2001. “Entretien avec Isabelle Huppert: ‘je suis plus curieuse qu’intello’.” Télérama, September 5, 2001. Haenel, Yannick. 2017. Tiens ferme ta couronne. Paris: Gallimard. Higson, A. 1986. “Film Acting and Independent Cinema.” In Star Texts: Image and Performance in Film and Television, edited by Jeremy. G. Butler, 155–81. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Reprinted in 1991. Hollinger, Karen. 2006. The Actress: Hollywood Acting and the Female Star. London and New York: Routledge. Huppert, Isabelle. 2018. “One from the Archive: Isabelle Huppert on the Secret to Mastering French Style.” October 2018, reprinted in Vogue. March 3, 2020. https://www.vogue.co.uk/fashion/article/isabelle-huppert-style. Jenkins, David. 2016. “An Acting Class with Isabelle Huppert.” Little White Lies, August 24, 2016: https://lwlies.com/articles/isabelle-huppert-mia-hansen-love-michaelhaneke/. Joudet, Murielle. 2018. Isabelle Huppert: Vivre ne nous regarde pas. Paris: Capricci. King, Barry. 1985. “Articulating Stardom.” In Star Texts: Image and Performance in Film and Television, edited by Jeremy. G. Butler, 125–54. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. reprinted in 1991. McDonald, Paul. 1998. “Film Acting.” In The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, edited by John Hill and Pamela Church-Gibson, 30–5. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McDonald, Paul. 2013. Hollywood Stardom. Malden, MA and Oxford: WileyBlackwell. Millet, Richard. 2019. Huppert et moi. Paris: Pierre-Guillaume de Roux. Morin, Edgar. 1957. Les Stars. Paris: Editions du Seuil, third edition printed in 1972. Naremore, James. 1988. Acting in the Cinema. Berkeley Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Pascaud, Fabienne. 2016. “Malgré une Isabelle Huppert radieuse, un ‘Phèdre(s)’ incompréhensible et prétentieux.” Télérama, April 1, 2016: https://www.telerama. fr/sortir/malgre-une-isabelle-huppert-radieuse-un-phedre-s-incomprehensible-etpretentieux,140276.php.

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Qiong Yu, Sabrina. and Guy Austin. (eds). 2017. Revisiting Star Studies: Cultures, Themes and Methods. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Romney, Jonathan. “Isabelle Huppert: Mysterious? Moi?” The Independent, February 27th, 2005: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/ isabelle-huppert-mysterious-moi-485092.html. Sarris, Andrew. 2007. “Family Affair.” The New York Observer, May 29, 2007. Shingler, Marttin. 2012. Star Studies: A Critical Guide. London and New York: BFI/ Palgrave Macmillan. Taylor, Alison. 2018. “Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher.” In Close-Up: Great Cinematic Performances Volume 2: International, edited by Murray Pomerance and Kyle Stevens, 217–27. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Vincendeau, Ginette. 2000. Stars and Stardom in French Cinema. London and New York: Continuum. Vincendeau, Ginette. 2006. “Isabelle Huppert: The Big Chill.” Sight & Sound 16 (12): 36–9.

1

Intimate Distance: The Face of Isabelle Huppert Darren Waldron

A “face that regards the void with blankness” (Ebert 2011) has come to symbolize Isabelle Huppert since its early incarnations in La Dentellière/The Lacemaker (Claude Goretta 1977) and Violette Nozière (Claude Chabrol 1978). Little wonder, then, that the effusive actor who collected the Golden Globe for Best Actress for her performance in Elle (Paul Verhoeven 2016) in February 2017 surprised some. Huppert thanked Verhoeven for “letting me be what I am.”1 What—or rather who—she was, though, was hard to determine: was she the removed figure in Elle or the impassioned recipient of a prestigious acting award standing before us? The answer is both, or more. Impassivity has become a cliché frequently used to describe, categorize, and, occasionally, denigrate Huppert, but, as many have noted, it fails to capture the intricacies and ambiguities of her acting style, and how that style is expressed in her face. This chapter examines key roles that have given rise to such a cliché, beginning with La Dentellière and continuing with Violette Nozière, Loulou (Maurice Pialat 1980), Coup de Foudre/Entre nous (Diane Kurys 1983), La Séparation/The Separation (Christian Vincent 1994), Gabrielle (Patrice Leconte 2005), and Elle. It builds on more sophisticated discussions of Huppert’s performance style in such roles that recognize that she simultaneously combines impassivity with “flashes of emotion” (Taylor 2018, 218), that she reveals everything but also avoids opening out to interpretation (Jelinek 2005, 22–4), and that though we are often brought physically close to her, we are nonetheless kept separate from her (Toubiana 2005, 9). More specifically, it reveals how such techniques raise provocative questions for how we understand Self/Other relations within the context of film acting and stardom. Huppert’s pared down expressiveness, I argue, serves to remind us of our ethical responsibility toward the Other, that the Other is separate from us and thus ultimately unknowable. This is important because cinema, including

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star appreciation, can be characterized simplistically as inviting modes of relating that encourage the impression of self-sameness, creating the conditions in which spectators are able to imagine themselves as characters on-screen and project themselves into the star bodies they see before them. Inviting proximity while maintaining distance recalls the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas,2 which provides a theoretical base for interpreting Huppert’s facial display. Reference will also be made to Georges Didi-Huberman, Walter Benjamin, and Bertolt Brecht, scholarship on the face in the cinema by Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes, Paul Coates, and Noa Steimatsky, and contributions to star studies by Richard Dyer and Christine Gledhill. Via performance and film analysis, occasionally supported by reviews and interviews, and informed by the aforementioned critical interventions, I will consider how Huppert invites peculiar modes of looking that complicate assumptions about how stars can function as figures of identification or objects of admiration and desire (see Dyer 1979, 19–22; Gledhill 1991, xiii). Little mention of Huppert can be found in key writings on the face in the cinema (Aumont 1992; Coates 2012; Steimatsky 2017) and so I aim to begin to address this gap in the field. Such an intervention is important because Huppert differs from the classical film star, such as Greta Garbo (Barthes 1957, 71),3 because she routinely plays ordinary characters and/or characters marked by their “deviancy,” and because she has never retired from the screen, having appeared in films since the early 1970s. Moreover, her facial display does not fully comply with the “flat affect” that, according to Jackie Stacey drawing on Lauren Berlant, is a register that Tilda Swinton consistently deploys across her work (2015, 247), precisely because a fixed stare, the direction of her look, refocusing of a gaze, or flickering of a tearful eye index an emotional intensity beyond the physiognomic form before us.

Crafting Otherness: Béatrice/Pomme One of the most impactful early examples of what Ginette Vincendeau has described as Huppert’s “dull, vacant stare” (2006, 37) comes in her performance of Béatrice, nicknamed Pomme, the “shampoo girl” in La Dentellière, Claude Goretta’s adaptation of Pascal Lainé’s Goncourt Prize–winning novel about a alienated young woman. La Dentellière is a doomed love story between Pomme and François (Yves Beneyton), a student she meets while holidaying

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in Cabourg with her friend Marylène (Florence Giorgetti). After they return to Paris, François ends the relationship because she does not correspond to his expectations of how a partner should be, and the film ends with Pomme interned in a psychiatric clinic. While appearing in almost all the shots, Pomme appears lost in her world, watching from the sidelines as Marylène endures romantic disappointments or observing François and his friends’ ruminations on modern life. She thus illustrates the description François bestows upon her when justifying the breakup as being both present and absent.4 It is in the film’s arresting closing sequence, though, that the ethical resonances of this limited facial display are most explicitly articulated. By this point, we have witnessed Pomme’s final encounter with François and are alone with her. She is filmed from behind in a tracking shot, the camera moving slowly forward before gently panning around to film her in profile while she knits, her head held slightly downward as she stares, as if lost in a trance, at the table in front of her. When the camera tracks closer to her, she turns to face it, and us, head on, her eyes wide open, the corners of her mouth downturned. Her turn toward us stops the forward movement of the camera. Her expression appears more as a “reflecting surface” than a site of “intensive micro-movements,” which Gilles Deleuze describes as the two poles of the face as it appears on screen ([1983] 1986, 90). No movement of the mouth, no narrowing of the eyes, no raising of an eyebrow nor twitching of a cheek appears to shed light on her inner emotions, illustrating Noa Steimatsky’s observation that the face on film can be “most memorable when withdrawn, when it resists, when it is sensed as a barrier” (2017, 1). It is her fixed stare that confronts us with such withdrawal, transmitting her alienation caused by François’s refusal to encounter her on her terms, as confirmed by the film’s title and closing citation, which interprets his behavior through the prism of the art of Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, of which The Lacemaker is the most relevant painting in this case. Opening his discussion of Vermeer’s work with the observation that painting “will never cease to be there in front of us, like a horizon or a potential act, but never quite like the act itself ” (1989, 135), Georges Didi-Huberman examines how art-historians and semioticians strive to “see” the artist’s works “in detail” in order to know them well. To know an artwork in detail is to know all its components as well as to know it as a whole. “The picture” according to Didi-Huberman is “considered to be a ciphered text, and the cipher, like a treasure-chest, or skeleton hidden in a cupboard, is always to be found, somehow behind the painting, not enclosed within the material density of the paint” (1989, 137—his emphasis).

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Isabelle Huppert: Stardom, Performance, Authorship

Figure 1.1  Isabelle Huppert addressing the audience with Pomme’s alienation in the closing shot of La Dentellière (Claude Goretta 1977).

The formal qualities of the final sequence of La Dentellière maximize our desire to look behind the image, behind the seemingly immobile surface of the face before us. Yet, they also intensify frustration at being able to notice everything, while not being able to see Pomme. The high-key lighting that bounces off the pale walls renders visible every object in the room, the slow tracking shot falsely promises proximity to the character, while the continuous take and the camera that stops disallow fragmentation of the face into individual components. We may thus argue that the sequence gestures toward what Walter Benjamin termed the aura, the “unique phenomenon of a distance, however close [an object] may be” (1968, 222). Composed of tracking and pan shots, time is expanded, immersion is encouraged and the spectator experiences Pomme’s return gaze “in the here and now” of their viewing. For Benjamin, the decline of the aura came about because of “the desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly” (1968, 223). Applying Benjamin to film, Mary Ann Doane observes that this “decay […] finds its perfect embodiment in the close-up” in which “closeness is allied with possession, possessiveness, the desire to ‘get hold of an object’” (2003, 92–3). It is that “possession” of the Other and a sense of unmediated access to the Other’s inner world that is frustrated by the turn to the camera and the immutable face in these concluding images of La Dentellière.

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What we are really looking at in these closing images is, of course, Huppert, the “behind-the-image” that is indexed being Huppert the actor. It is Huppert who addresses Pomme’s otherness to the spectator directly. Her face, to adapt Steimatsky, communicates “only up to a point,” its “constitutive illegibility” rendering it “inscrutable to the point of hostility” (2017, 13). We might argue that, in breaking the fourth wall, aspects of Bertolt Brecht’s verfremdungseffekt are mobilized. This concept, translated as detachment, reorientation, and defamiliarization (Willet 1977, 177), “consists in turning the object […] from something ordinary, familiar, immediately accessible, into something peculiar, striking and unexpected” (Brecht [1935] 1964, 143). However, to read the gesture purely in these terms would only allow a partial interpretation. While, to adapt Willett in his study of Brecht, Huppert stands “between the audience and the part” and keeps “the spectator out” (1977, 179)— she later remarked how her roles include critical commentary on what’s being recounted (in Daney 1981, 99)—her act of asserting herself through the character blurs the boundary between actor and character, allowing her to channel aspects of her persona to the audience and simultaneously endow that persona with the features she reads into the character. Huppert refers to the film as a turning point (Gaspéri 1977), recounting how her strategy of deploying silence— characterized here by limited amounts of what James Naremore describes as ostensiveness (1988, 34)—enabled her to gradually transform Pomme into a big role.5 Huppert thus endows herself with semi-authorial status with regard to the film’s production,6 adding her creative voice to those of both Goretta and Lainé, who, in addition to penning the original novel, wrote the screenplay. If the point is that, although we may look at the character and actor, we may not see or know her, we might then say that Huppert in La Dentellière transmits an ethics of Self-Other relations akin to that described by Levinas, staged partly in his discussion of the face-to-face encounter. For Levinas in Totality and Infinity, the face “breaks through the form that nevertheless delimits it” (1969, 198): the face is present in its refusal to be contained. In this sense, it cannot be comprehended, that is, encompassed. It is neither seen nor touched—for in visual or tactile sensation the identity of the I envelops the alterity of the object, which becomes precisely a content. (1969, 194)

Describing Levinas’s perspective as “somewhat iconophobic” (2017, 13), Steimatsky notes the face’s “oblique relationship to vision” and usefully questions whether “such freedom of the face can be signaled from within the image”

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(2017, 13—her emphasis). I would suggest that consistent manifestation of what Steimatsky lists as the face’s “nonobjective” qualities—“ambiguity,” “mystery,” “promise of inwardness,” which hinges on “its irreducibility to iconographic paraphrase […], its resistance to the command of coded interpretation, […] its refusal to be contained in the visual” (2017, 146)—are techniques Huppert adopts to remind us that the Other exceeds the physical form before us. For Levinas, the face of the Other signals a consciousness we cannot access, thereby reminding us that they cannot be contained by our vision. The Self is, as Colin Davis summarizes, neither “different from nor opposed to the Other, but separate from it” (1996, 42). According to Levinas, the Other represents “not a force of resistance, but the very unforseeableness of his [sic] reaction,” which “already resists us in his [sic] face” (1969, 199—his emphasis). As Davis writes, for Levinas “the infinite is the Other; its alterity is also transcendence and exteriority because it is outside, above and beyond the powers of the subject” (Davis 1996, 40). In his critique of Totality and Infinity, Jacques Derrida describes the Other in Levinas as “infinitely Other because by essence no enrichment of his [sic] profile can give to me the subjective face of his [sic] experience, from his perspective, such as he [sic] has lived it” (2005, 155—his emphasis). However, while for Levinas the Other represents hospitality, not hostility (1969, 27; Rae 2016, 283), Huppert’s facial expression in this concluding shot has been interpreted as accusatory (Leroux 1977). She might thus be said to break the terms of Levinas’s call for separateness between Self and Other by redirecting blame from François to the spectator and, in the process, overriding our alterity. However we interpret it, though, Huppert’s gesture reminds us that we will never encounter the Other if we seek to incorporate them within our determining worldview. Such a postulation may seem strange, since in incarnating Pomme, Huppert appropriates and takes possession of her. Herein may reside the paradox that inheres in actors using their performance to project separateness. But since fictional characters are mainly imagined constructs, what is done with the character, how it is adapted through the performance is significant. Huppert’s transformation of the literary character includes holding her up as a symbol of the negative impact of self-sameness. Read this way, she gestures toward Levinas’s observation that the relation with the Other is a “relation without relation.” As Davis explains “it is a relation because an encounter does take place; but it is ‘without relation’ because that encounter does not establish parity or understanding, the Other remains resolutely Other” (1996, 45). Huppert here symbolizes our ethical responsibility toward the Other,

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which, as Levinas argues in Otherwise Than Being, precedes our existence; “[b]efore I am even myself, I am responsible for the Other, absolutely and without appeal” (Davis 1996, 77). Such an ethical posture calls for distinct modes of spectator-star engagement. Rather than a known entity, a “social sign […] inviting desire and identification” (Gledhill 1991, xiii), Huppert, as mentioned, prevents us from taking possession of her. Conventional forms of identification, which, as Anna Friedberg noted “can only be made through recognition [which] enforces a collapse of the subject onto the normative demands for sameness” (1982, 53), are rendered difficult. Her restrained facial markers frustrate modes of reception that, according to Carl Plantinga, arise from the scene of empathy—“affective mimicry, facial feedback, and emotional contagion” (1999, 240). They inhibit what Anna Gibbs terms as “mimetic communication”—the “corporeally based forms of imitation, both voluntary and involuntary” that we read from faces (2010, 186–91). And they limit the “‘co-feeling’  ” or “reciprocal recognition” enabled by mirror neurons that Abraham Geil has observed, drawing on Paolo Virno (2007), in his application of neuroscience to facial display on screen (2013, 154–5).7 What is there to feedback, mime, or reciprocate beyond disaffection? Of course, audiences may view Pomme as unable or reluctant to convey her emotions and relate to this. Yet, such an interpretation would read her through the prism of their knowledge and experience rather than recognizing her as separate consciousness, a separateness Huppert routinely stages in other key roles across her career, as will be seen.

Cultivating Otherness: Violette, Nelly, Léna, Anne, Gabrielle, and Michèle One way in which Huppert might be said to withstand self-sameness is by playing characters that are not easily likeable and, to adapt Levinas, who behave in “unforeseeable” ways. In Violette Nozière she portrays the eponymous eighteenyear-old who poisons her adoptive father Baptiste (Jean Carmet) and attempts to poison her biological mother Germaine (Stéphane Audran) on January 21, 1933; in Loulou she incarnates a well-to-do urbanite who leaves her partner André (Guy Marchand) for an ex-convict Loulou (Gérard Depardieu); Léna, in Coup de Foudre, similarly abandons her husband (also played by Marchand) and begins a relationship with Madeleine (Miou-Miou); adultery returns in her role as Anne,

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in La Séparation, who has an affair while living with her husband and father of her child (Daniel Auteuil); as Gabrielle, in Gabrielle, she attempts to leave her husband Jean (Pascal Greggory) for another man; and as Michèle, in Elle, she wittingly enters a sexual relationship with her rapist. In each narrative, Huppert embodies a character that attempts to escape the kind of incarceration to which Pomme is subjected, and which, through repetition across different roles, we might relate to her own attempts to resist categorization of her by the audience. We recall that for Levinas the face of the Other can never be understood, encompassed, engulfed, and incorporated: “if the Other becomes an object of knowledge or experience (my knowledge, my experience) then immediately its alterity has been overwhelmed” (Davis 1996, 45—his emphasis). This is verbally articulated in a key scene in Violette Nozière when a policeman probes Violette’s motives, to which she replies, her face once again displaying limited expressivity, “there is nothing to understand.”8 Her statement has contextual pertinence in that the motive of the real Violette was never confirmed.9 By not corroborating the motive, the film avoids explaining Violette to the audience. That sense of separateness is amplified by the mise-en-scène. Huppert as Violette is filmed in medium shot and occupies the right side of the screen. She appears in focus, while a large white lamp, positioned closer to the lens, occupies the left of the screen, but is blurred. Consequently, while focus draws our attention to Huppert,

Figure 1.2  Isabelle Huppert as Violette Nozière coolly rebuffing the policeman’s endeavors to find a motive for her murderous act in Violette Nozière (Claude Chabrol 1978).

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character position keeps us at a mid-distance, perhaps in a reworking of how her turn toward the camera as Pomme keeps us out, even though we are physically close to her. Through facial display and film form, then, Violette Nozière links the qualities of separateness and alterity back to Huppert’s role in La Dentellière. And once again, it is the final sequence that serves to visually ascribe this separateness to Huppert, and this is again achieved through the filming of her face. Just as in the closing images of La Dentellière, she is shot sewing at a table, though here in a prison cell and embroidering rather than knitting. Her face is expressionless once more, even when her cellmate supposes that she may be guillotined. By contrast to La Dentellière, though, she is filmed head-on from the start and though she turns toward the camera, she looks up, to a point beyond the top-left-hand corner of the frame. For the spectator familiar with Huppert’s portrayal of Pomme, the sequence might reaffirm the indecipherable face as a marker of her performance style by triggering memories of La Dentellière. Drawing on Henri Bergson, Deleuze in Time-Cinema notes the distinction between the present or “actual image” and the past or “virtual image” with which it enters into a circuit (1985, 45). Deleuze differentiates between attentive and automatic or habitual recognition (1985, 45). In attentive recognition, as D. N. Rodowick summarizes, “[p]erception withdraws from the outer world” and a “given object” in front of us “passes through or relates different planes or levels of recollected experience” (1997, 89). We might read this intervention of the virtual image in our engagement with the actual image in the light of Deleuze’s concept of the “crystal-image” (1985, 67). The crystal-image “has two definite sides which are not to be confused”: the actual image we are watching now and its virtual image (1985, 68). These are “distinct, but indiscernible,” in “continual exchange” (1985, 68). For Deleuze, “when the virtual image becomes actual, it is then visible and limpid” but “the actual image becomes virtual in its turn, referred elsewhere, invisible, opaque and shadowy” (1985, 68). Deleuze continues that only a “modification of conditions” is required “for the limpid face to darken, and for the opaque face to acquire or rediscover its limpidity” (1985, 68). According to Rodowick, however, “[e]ach time a virtual image is called up in relation to an actual description, the object depicted is de-formed and created anew, widening and deepening the mental picture it inspires” (1997, 90). Huppert’s performance of Violette is a variation on a theme that, because it resembles the earlier film, affirms what would become a signature style. The similarities in formal qualities and facial expressions in the closing shots are so strong that the present image of Violette’s face might be rendered opaque by the

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past image of Pomme’s face. Consequently, though some formal qualities and contexts might differ, the prominence of those differences can be undermined by the dominance of the past image in the present mind of the spectator. There are ethical implications here since the mapping onto Violette of memories of Pomme may result in the alterity of one character being overwhelmed by the other, and, as mentioned above, the otherness of the character risks being overwhelmed by an actor via their repeated performance style. This is arguably a limitation of actors deploying the same techniques across a range of different roles, but seemingly to similar effects, since it could be argued that respecting separateness is violated. However, what is being recalled here is a barrier to possession and self-sameness; physical proximity is enabled, but the look directed beyond the frame affirms distance, maintaining separateness. Memories of previous performances may also be triggered in Huppert’s role as Nelly in Loulou. After sleeping with Loulou (Depardieu), Nelly returns home to her partner André (Guy Marchand) who orders her to leave. Huppert mainly performs Nelly with a semi-blank face, nonchalantly continuing to put on her white roll-neck jumper and remaining relatively expressionless when André begins to throw her clothes on the floor. The actual images of Huppert as Nelly dressing might conjure memories of Huppert as Pomme packing her suitcase, although as Nelly she is filmed in a medium long shot, whereas as Pomme she was shot in medium close-up, and while both are in profile, where Pomme faced the right of the screen, Nelly faces left. However, as mentioned, because of their increasing frequency, these images invite us to think beyond the narrative and consider the actor, whose facial display and performance style refer to each other interchangeably, constructing a perception—albeit of ambiguity and lack of disclosure—in our minds. However, to adopt Rodowick’s terminology, the Huppert we see in Loulou is a de-formation and then re-creation of the Huppert we have previously observed. Her acting style is sometimes hyper-expressive; she yells at André during their row in the apartment, her body doubled-up, her hair mane-like and framing a face contorted with rage. And yet, each display of intense emotion is portrayed as a reaction to André’s jealous outbursts. By initially not rising to André, Nelly places herself beyond the emotional charge of his invectives, which in turn exposes his jealousy as an overreaction, thus forcing a redistribution of hysteria from the domain of women to that of men, as noted by Vincendeau (2006, 37). Some might argue that André’s crime is to love a woman ungoverned by monogamy. Nelly might thus be said to act with little regard for the feelings

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of others. Yet, to interpret Nelly in this way overlooks how the role fits within Huppert’s previous performances, in which the freedom to be Other is what is being affirmed. The visceral force of Nelly’s anger articulates her refusal to conform to André’s morals and underscores the ascription of such resistance to Huppert, thus reaffirming otherness as a marker of her performance practice. Memories of Huppert in Loulou return in Diane Kurys’s Coup de foudre (1983), which once again casts her as the unfaithful partner in a relationship with Marchand, though this time with Madeleine, played by Miou-Miou, the actor with whom she had appeared briefly in Les Valseuses/Going Places (1972). Although the shots of Huppert as Léna with Miou-Miou may elicit memories of that earlier collaboration, the disintegration of the Huppert-Marchand couple could also trigger memories of Loulou. Marchand as Michel is again seen in destructive mode, wrecking Léna’s shop, tearing clothes from hangers and overturning furniture. It is the ending, though, that is once more pivotal in reaffirming Huppert’s association with characters who impose their otherness. As Michel sobs, Léna’s eyes moisten slightly and she asks his forgiveness. However, her tone swiftly hardens as she offers him the possibility of sleeping on her sofa on condition that he leaves before the children wake up. Her face is mainly filmed in profile, her look directed beyond the frame, to the ocean. When she turns toward Michel, it is only slightly—hers is not quite the “three-quarter face” that Paul Coates reads as transmitting interaction “with other characters” (2012, 29)—so that it still remains largely in profile. Léna’s look outward visually inscribes the refusal to succumb to external morality that we have seen throughout the performances discussed thus far. It is as if she is attempting to escape the exchange and avoid empathizing with Michel’s situation, for to empathize would be to allow herself to be incorporated within his narrative of a wasted life. Moreover, the exchange has a witness—Léna’s daughter, her face seemingly expressionless bar the slightly downturned corners of her mouth. Although the expression on both the child’s and Léna’s faces might conjure memories of Pomme, they could also index the kind of spectatorial look Huppert seems to encourage in these performances: one that does not confuse proximity with possession, but which recognizes that the Other—Léna/Huppert—will always act in unpredictable ways. La Séparation extends this notion of Huppert imposing separateness and alterity via her performances. La Séparation is an adaptation of a novel by Dan Franck, which won the Renaudot Prize in 1991. Familiar qualities are in evidence from Huppert’s first scene. She is set apart from the characters around

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her who engage in a lively discussion in a restaurant, underlined by the shots and editing, which shift rapidly through shot/reverse-shot medium close-ups of Pierre (Daniel Auteuil), Victor (Jérôme Deschamps) and Claire (Karin Viard). The camera lingers in a long take of Huppert’s face in close-up, smiling politely, her eyes glancing downward and then shifting right and left as if feigning interest in the conversation. She is silent, her pale skin and freckles, framed by her red hair and green check blazer, illuminated by the front lighting. She seems to float over the conversation in a visual allusion back to Pomme’s presence/absence in La Dentellière. Moreover, given that she has not yet been introduced as Anne, our attention is drawn to Huppert, her distracted look facilitating recollections of previous roles. The film’s title—which explicitly describes Anne and Pierre’s separation—might implicitly point to Huppert’s separation from the other characters conveyed here and throughout the whole film. That separateness concludes the scene; while, as if to guide our look, a reverse shot shows Pierre timidly yet insistently staring at Anne, as if in awe but also in need of attention, Anne casually returns his look with a polite half-smile and suggests they leave. Like Violette, Nelly and Léna, Anne acts according to her rules, depicted when she confesses to her affair, but still expects Pierre to continue living with her. Later, she casually tells him that her lover listens to her, insinuating that he does not. Filmed in close-up from above, her face insouciant and detached, her look directed beyond the top frame, she transmits the central narrative that she seems to embody in many of her performances mentioned: that her partner has endeavored to mold her into something that has meaning for him. Dialogue here echoes and reworks meanings communicated by Huppert in distinct narrative contexts in other films and thus reinforces her associations with resistance to the determining gaze of the onlooker. Violette’s aforementioned affirmation about the futility of attempting to understand the Other is interestingly reshaped into a criticism when Anne tells Pierre “you haven’t understood me”10 after he accuses her of blaming him for her infidelity. The meaning is similar; Pierre’s crime is that he has formed his interpretations of how she is and how he thinks she should be, rather than accepting her as separate consciousness. As with the other actual images that conjure memories of past performances, Huppert is revised in La Séparation, in that inner emotional intensity occasionally pierces the seemingly calm surface of her face. When she accuses Pierre of surveying her, she yells at him and, in the ensuing close-up, tears form in her eyes. When Pierre recommends they separate, she turns toward him, the tears now streaming down her cheeks, her eyes red, and denies she

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Figure 1.3  Isabelle Huppert as Anne nonchalantly telling husband Pierre (Daniel Auteuil) what she appreciates about her extramarital lover in La Séparation (Christian Vincent 1994).

wants him to leave. However, when Pierre suggests that she leave their home, her tears dry and her facial display becomes limited again. In her discussion of La Passion de Jeanne d’ Arc/The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer 1928), Steimatsky argues that “even tears cannot be altogether sublimated […] into psychological or metaphysical meaning” (2017, 63). If there is any psychological meaning to be gleaned from Huppert’s tears as she performs Anne, we are given but a fleeting glimpse of it11 before opacity returns, as Huppert is then filmed in profile, with half of her face turned toward the back kitchen wall, and therefore obscured from our view. If Pierre’s admiring gaze at Anne is intended to guide the look of the spectator, that same device is deployed more forcefully in Gabrielle, where Gabrielle’s male partner’s admiration is reinforced through monologue voice-over. Gabrielle is the adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s short story The Return and Huppert won a Golden Lion award at Venice for her performance. Our first sighting of Huppert’s face as Gabrielle is a glimpse in long shot between guests and waiting staff at the head of a long dinner table. As the voice-over articulates Jean’s (Pascal Greggory) thoughts, the camera lingers on her as she chats politely with their guests. Her face is explicitly aligned with paleness, exacerbated visually by the bright down lighting and green dress. And as if to ensure that such an association does not go unnoticed, Jean tells us that her paleness has always been one of her most attractive features—words that function as a commentary

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on Huppert’s physiognomy as much as the character’s physical attributes. That commentary is extended when Jean describes her as immutable and having the same impassive smile that she had ten years earlier. Accompanying these words, we see shots of Gabrielle that recall Huppert’s previous roles as Pomme and Anne, feigning interest in the conversations that unfold around her. Of course, to perceive someone as immutable is a means of defining them within the subjective language and vision of the Self rather than attempting to encounter them as separate consciousness—and this points extra-diegetically to the very problems with the cliché of blankness that has been ascribed to Huppert. The guests share in this practice, with Gabrielle functioning as a fetishized object: when she speaks, they listen, and when she rises, they stand. Jean tells us that her skin reflects her thoughts, thereby characterizing her as content, known to him, one of his possessions, a point extended when he recounts that he trusts her completely, that she is faithful and that he knows her thoughts and dreams. And yet, again Huppert plays a role in which she withstands such efforts to possess her, her adultery manifesting the unpredictability of her actions, a gesture that conjures memories of former roles and may orient thoughts to actor over character. Awareness of this seems inscribed within the narrative when a dinner party guest asks what it means to know someone. After fellow guests imply that Gabrielle is known to them, she retorts “it is not necessary to know each other to experience pleasure in being together,”12 as if expressing in words the ethical gesture that, as I have argued, typify so many of Huppert’s performances. The unpredictability of the Other’s (re)actions is the premise of Elle, the adaptation of Philippe Djian’s Interallié Prize–winning novel Oh!, for which, in addition to receiving the Golden Globe, Huppert was nominated for an Oscar. Indifference to external morality is here figured in Huppert’s seemingly immutable face as we see her, shortly after having been violently raped, calmly taking a bath and then casually ordering sushi and receiving a visit from her son. That same face is subsequently seen castigating a team of videogame developers for being too cautious in creating scenes that depict an ogre violating a woman or calmly informing her ex-husband Richard (Charles Berling) and friends Anna (Anna Consigny) and Robert (Christian Berkel) that she has been raped. Elle offers some justification for her decision not to report the rape to the police given her implication in the crimes of her serial killer father. But this does not explain some of her most unforeseeable acts, the most controversial of which include an affair with her rapist, Patrick (Laurent Lafitte), during which

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she descends into a cellar with him and commands him to hit her in the face. This act might elicit memories of the famous scene in La Pianiste/The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke 2001) in which she implores her student to hit her (see endnote 11). Robert’s self-description that a big part of his personality consists in his unpredictability is narratively ascribed to Michèle and, through extratextual associations and the conjuring of memories of previous performances, is affirmed as a marker of Huppert herself. In June 1978, days after having won the prize for best actress at the Cannes Film Festival for Violette Nozière, Huppert was heralded in the L’ Est républicain newspaper as leading the pack of the young stars of French cinema (Anon 1978). The article ends by quoting from an interview in Cinéma français in which she states that “stardom is quite destabilizing” and that she wants “to maintain a certain distance” with regard to what she does (Anon 1978).13 That distance, we might say, is afforded visual form in her facial display in the roles discussed here. A face seemingly limited in expressivity, but which signals emotional intensity beyond its physical form. A face that variously confronts us head-on, that looks up to a point beyond the frame, out to the ocean, away to a wall, away from the camera and the spectator. In these performances, hers is a facial display that, while allowing proximity, imposes separation. That actual audiences may interpret her face and relate to it is their prerogative, but the grounds for such projections are often unsubstantiated by an actor who consistently evades fixing inner meaning. We might thus argue that the kind of relation with Huppert elicited in these films is one that actively encourages respect for otherness. That otherness is reaffirmed by the unpredictability of Huppert’s actions, both diegetically and non-diegetically. As we have seen, Huppert ruptures Pomme’s passivity by directly looking at us in the concluding shots of La Dentellière, as Violette she dismisses attempts to understand her motives, as Nelly, Léna, Anne and Gabrielle she attempts to escape ownership by her male partner, and as Michèle she defies expectations by having an affair with her rapist. Huppert in these roles resists possession and self-sameness, equivocates interpretation, and embodies separateness. That separateness is reaffirmed in her selection of roles—not only the “deviant” but also the comic—a reminder, perhaps, that our responsibility to approach the Other as Other precedes our encounter with them. It was a display of alterity in evidence in her unexpectedly hyperemotional acceptance speech at the Golden Globes in which, as mentioned, she alluded to who she was, which remains as opaque today as it has ever been. Huppert thus incarnates more than the “structured polysemy” that, according

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to Dyer, pertains to ideological analyses of star images (1979, 3). Her acts and performance style signal resistance to the determinism that can inhere in the concept of a star image, a resistance often figured in her face.

Notes 1

https://www.indiewire.com/2017/01/isabelle-huppert-wins-golden-globes-bestactress-drama-1201766140/. 2 Sarah Cooper’s application of Levinas in her discussion of the films of the Dardennes brothers prompted me to think about Levinas in relation to Huppert’s performance style and techniques, particularly her observation that their films create a space “for distance within […] proximity” (2007, 84). 3 The comparison of Huppert to Garbo was made by director Patrice Chéreau— an association Huppert is said to have agreed with (2005, 37). I am not wholly convinced by such a comparison, not least because it subordinates Huppert to an already-known entity. Garbo’s facial display, in my view, differs from that of Huppert. In the famous closing sequence of Queen Cristina (Rouben Mamoulian 1933), for instance, Garbo’s acting style gives greater indication of her character’s state of mind than Huppert’s, which tends toward a stronger equivocation of interpretation. 4 “Là et ailleurs.” 5 See also: https://fresques.ina.fr/festival-de-cannes-en/fiche-media/Cannes00177/ isabelle-huppert-regarding-the-lacemaker-and-the-indians-are-still-far-away.html. 6 Jacques Siclier described La Dentellière as Isabelle Huppert’s film, observing how she takes total responsibility for how she transmits Pomme to the audience (1977), while Riou Rouvet describes the film as an encounter between the literary author, director and actor (1977). 7 I am grateful to Jules O’Dwyer for very kindly suggesting Geil’s work. 8 “Il n’y a rien à comprendre.” 9 Huppert recalls in an interview that they could not depict the unexplainable—what pushed Violette to commit the crime (in Montaigne 1978). 10 “Tu ne m’as pas comprise.” 11 This technique is perhaps over-determined in the long take that concludes Claude Chabrol’s Merci pour le chocolat/Nightcap (2000). Huppert as Marie-Claire is filmed in close-up, her red slightly flickering eyes welling with tears that stream down her cheeks before she adopts the fetal position. Tears return in her performance as Erika Kohut in Michael Haneke’s La Pianiste (2001) when her young prodigy Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel) reads her letter detailing her masochistic

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fantasies. Here interiority flows forward in the form of her most private desires being read aloud, and is visually expressed in contained gestures such as Huppert’s teary, flickering eyes, red cheeks, and light gulping. 12 “Il n’est pas nécessaire de se connaître pour éprouver le plaisir d’être ensemble” 13 “Le vedettariat est assez perturbant et […] je veux quelque recul par rapport aux choses que je fais.”

References Anon. 1978. “La Revanche d’Isabelle Huppert.” L’ Est républicain, June 4, 1978. Aumont, Jacques. 1992. Du visage au cinema. Paris: Éditions de l’ Étoile/Cahiers du cinéma. Barthes, Roland. 1957. Mythologies. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Benjamin, Walter. 1968. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by H. Arendt. New York: Schocken Books. Berlant, Lauren. 2015. “Structures of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin.” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 28: 191–213. Brecht, Bertolt. 1935. “The A-Effect as Procedure in Everyday Life.” In Brecht on Theatre: the Development of an Aesthetic, translated and edited by J. Willett, 1964, 143–5. New York: Hill and Wang. Bunbury, Stephanie. 2017. “‘It’s Not Difficult’: Isabelle Huppert on the Role No American Would Touch.” The Sydney Morning Herald, April 11, 2017. https://www. smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/it-is-not-difficult-isabelle-huppert-on-the-roleno-american-would-touch-20170410-gvi3yj.html. Chéreau, Patrice. 2005. “Le Gouffre comme page blanche.” In Isabelle Huppert: la femme aux portraits, edited by R. Chammah and J. Fouchet, 35–7. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Coates, Paul. 2012. Screening the Face. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cooper, Sarah. 2007. “Mortal Ethics: Reading Levinas with the Dardennes Brothers.” Film Philosophy 11 (2): 66–87. Daney, Serge. 1981. “Entretien avec Isabelle Huppert.” Cahiers du cinéma 323, May 4, 1981. Davis, Colin. 1996. Levinas: An Introduction. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement Image, translated by H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. London and New York: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, translated by H. Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London and New York: Continuum. Derrida, Jacques. 2005. Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass. London and New York: Routledge. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 1985. “The Art of Not Describing—the Detail and the Patch.” History of the Human Sciences 2 (2): 135–69.

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Doane, Mary-Ann. 2003. “The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema.” Differences: a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14 (3): 89–111. Dyer, Richard. 1979. Stars. London: BFI Publishing. Ebert, Robert. 2011. “Hidden Love.” https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/hiddenlove-2011. Friedberg, Anna. 1982. “Identification and the Star: A Refusal of Difference.” In Star Signs: Papers from a Weekend Workshop. London: British Film Institute. Gaspéri, A. 1977. “Isabelle Huppert: On n’est pas impunément ce que l’on représente à l’écran.” Le Quotidien de Paris, May 16, 1977. Geil, Abraham. 2013. Plastic Recognition: The Politics and Aesthetics of Facial Representation from Silent Cinema to Cognitive Neuroscience. Thesis submitted at Duke University. Gibbs, Anna. 2010. “After Affect: Sympathy, Synchrony, and Mimetic Communication.” In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by M. Gregg and G. Seigworth, 186–205. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Gledhill, Christine. 1991. Stardom, Industry of Desire. London and New York: Routledge. Jelinek, Elfriede. 2005 “Le Visage sans défense.” In Isabelle Huppert: la femme aux portraits, edited by R. Chammah and J. Fouchet, 9–14. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Leroux, A. (1977), “La Dentellière ou la force bouleversante du silence.” Le Devoir, August 12, 1977. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh PA: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1999. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh PA: Duquesne University Press. Montaigne, P. 1978. “Avec Isabelle Huppert … le cinéma français descend dans l’arène.” Le Figaro, May 19, 1978. Naremore, James. 1988. Acting in the Cinema. Berkeley Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Plantinga, Carl. 1999. “The Scene of Empathy and the Human Face on Film.” In Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, edited by Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith. Baltimore MA and London: The Johns Hopkins Press. Rae, Gavin. 2016. “The Political Significance of the Face: Deleuze’s Critique of Levinas.” in Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory 17 (3–4): 279–303. Rodowick, D. N. 1997. Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Rouvet, R. 1977. “Un triomphe: ‘La Dentellière’.” Le Provençal, May 17, 1977. Siclier, Jacques. 1977. “Festival de Cannes: sur la vie, la mort, l’amour.” Le Monde, May 1977. Stacey, Jackie. 2015. “Crossing over with Tilda Swinton.” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 28: 243–71. Steimatsky, Noa. 2017. The Face on Film. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

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Taylor, Alison. 2018. “Isabelle Huppert in the Piano Teacher.” In Close-Up: Great Cinematic Performances Volume 2: International, edited by Murray Pommerance and Kyle Stevens, 217–27. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Toubiana, Serge. 2005. “Préface.” In Isabelle Huppert: la femme aux portraits, edited by R. Chammah and J. Fouchet, 9–14. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Vincendeau, Ginette. 2006. “Isabelle Huppert: The Big Chill.” Sight & Sound 16 (12) (December 2006): 36–9. Virno, Paolo. 2007. Multitude between Innovation and Negation. Los Angeles, CA; Cambridge, MA; Semiotext(e): Distributed by The MIT Press, 176. Willett, John. 1977. The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht: A Study from Eight Aspects. London: Eyre Methuen.

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2

The Calculated Maladresse: Isabelle Huppert’s Dual Performance Style Pedro Guimarães

In the range of roles portrayed by Isabelle Huppert, Mika from Merci pour le chocolat (Claude Chabrol 2000) is particularly representative of all the other “huppertian” women as well as the epitome of her acting style. A sophisticated bourgeoise, she is the director of a well-reputed Swiss chocolate factory and is married to the famous pianist André Polonski (Jacques Dutronc). Together they raise a child from his first marriage, Guillaume (Rodolphe Pauly). Mika is constantly manifesting her clumsy personality, dropping hot chocolate, breaking house objects, and causing small domestic accidents because of her lack of dexterity. Awkwardness is the character’s proclaimed leitmotiv: “I’m so clumsy,”1 she professes many times. However, behind such uncoordinated gestures and her apparent struggle to manage the smallest of tasks, Mika hides a particular fastidiousness regarding her attitudes that could even camouflage a murderous instinct. We are told that Guillaume’s mother had died in a car accident, which many characters believe was indirectly caused by Mika through her poisoned chocolates. Now, Mika is determined to keep away her husband’s alleged biological daughter (Anna Mouglalis), who was supposedly swapped at the hospital for the boy they now raise, as well as the girl’s mother (Brigitte Catillon). Thus, she plots a web of intrigue in order to achieve her goals; she acts surreptitiously within the large rooms of the family mansion, feigns intimacy and preoccupation with the two women and with Guillaume, lies, and shuts out her enemies by expressing an apparent politeness to the people around her. The awkwardness of Mika’s actions seems to hide the conduct of someone who is savvy in calculating the results of her actions. Therein lies the programed awkwardness that seems to contaminate all of Huppert’s characters in regard to the actor’s dual performance style.

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Two of the film’s sequences are central to comprehending the acting style that Huppert deploys in her characters and which will nourish some of her later work. In the first, Mika gently talks on the phone with the mother of the young pianist, a rival for her husband’s attention. In a traditional shot/ reverse-shot that shows the two women, each inside her own house and on the phone, Huppert’s full body is initially in the frame, she is leaning slightly on the stand, and her head is slightly tilted to the left. The character’s posture would seem insignificant if Mika did not insist on shaking her leg, denoting her relaxation. Mika’s apparently innocent posture disguises a frightening perfidiousness. During the second sequence, Guillaume is watching a television show that explains the creation of an aroma that has the prerogative of emulating a natural scent, despite being created by professional chemists and being entirely artificial. He watches the show, smiles, smokes, and pets the cat. A cut follows to a shot of Mika/Huppert unloading the groceries from the trunk of the car. This montage, by analogy, guides the spectator to the real object of the artificiality seen a moment before. It could be understood as a commentary on the character’s dubious behavior. She displays something but is in reality something else, or, more in line with the actor’s physical work: there is a disconnect between the character’s external appearance and her internal persona. Such duplicity summarizes an acting strategy that Huppert will transform into her own style: always inserting in her roles, even the most naturalistic ones, something artificial and ostensibly fabricated that could even be comprehended as a gestural or vocal commentary on the particularities of acting, on the creative process of acting and on the condition of acknowledging oneself as being seen—a condition that almost all classical film characters ignore. It could also be a way of troubling the psychological construction of the character, which is built on the full identification between actor and character, obeying a logic of behavioral verisimilitude and operating from the actor’s interior— the characters are born from inside out, as is taught by the guidebook on the American Method that has become dominant in film.2 In place of maintaining a blind affiliation to the naturalistic tendency a style emerges that combines psychological naturalism to a regime based on exteriority, or in detachment, in constant commentary through gesture and body language. In other words, Huppert permeates her performances with an ability to be both inside and outside her characters at all times. Likewise, she deploys three different—but simultaneous—tactics: first, she comments (or provides a commentary) on her

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acting process; second, she acknowledges the condition of being watched; and third, she uses her own persona as a secondary communicational element. In short, she makes explicit the conflict between naturalism and anti-naturalism, between Drama and Epic, as defined by Aristotle, in order to disrupt the performance—based on affection and identification—that hides the tools of its own making. This chapter investigates the moments of this dual acting strategy in films from different points in the actor’s career.

Expressive Coherence and Performance within Performance The strategy adopted by Huppert to create Mika, in consonance with Chabrol’s screenplay, has been theorized by James Naremore as “expressive coherence and the performance within performance” (1988, 68), a procedure that predicts that a character’s course of action may vary, even by contradictory actions, without altering the wholeness of the character. According to Naremore, such a procedure is inherent to all characters, whether theatrical or filmic, and is more easily noticeable among the naturalistic traditions that cinema borrowed from theatre in the nineteenth century. Naremore’s classical textbook on a character’s expressive coherence tolerates this sort of behavioral “deviation,” naming it—as seen above—“performance within performance,” in which characters conceal their true intentions through meta-acting.3 A performance within performance is therefore a possibility of modulating the attitudes that a character employs in order to disguise its true intentions and desires. As such, it aims to hide its true feelings in favor of a larger goal: in the case of Mika, to get rid of her rivals without drawing suspicion. It could even be because of social imposition, as exemplified by Naremore in the character of Susie, played by Lillian Gish in the film True Heart Susie (Griffith 1919), when the girl pretends to be happy with the marriage of the man she loves to another woman (1988, 99–113). We see she is crying behind her fan through a close-up; the spectator can only recognize the sadness when watching the tearful face. This cinematic procedure is indebted to theatre, where actors detach themselves from the fictional universe and confide to the audience—usually positioning themselves in the pro-scenium— the truthfulness behind their acts or gestures, or to comment on the action that is being performed on stage. This procedure is called an aside through which “the audience is taken as a witness or information is given to viewers by the character” (Surger 2012, 28).

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Susie/Gish dissimulates her feelings, like Mika/Huppert does in Merci pour le chocolat, and like Greta Garbo in Camille (George Cukor 1936), another example studied by Naremore. Or even like Harriet Andersson in Summer with Monika (Ingmar Bergman 1953), perhaps the most disturbing aside in the history of cinema—at least according to the former Cahiers du cinéma film critics Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, both of whom saw the film before they became filmmakers and referenced it in their respective works. Monika’s aside is accompanied by the straight-to-camera look, an acting strategy that makes apparent the artificiality of filmic narrative, which, in the theatre, is equivalent to looking directly at the audience. Quite common in renaissance theatre, it has become discredited in naturalist theatre precisely for “making it unlikely that one character will not hear the other character next to him on stage” (Surger 2012, 28). What makes this strategy—of double dissimulation or ostentation through commentary—a style trait of Huppert but only an incidental occurrence of Gish, Garbo, and Andersson is the recurrence of this meta-acting to the point of it being developed into the structure of some of her works. The recurrence of oscillation between acting styles contaminates the film as a whole and determines the elaboration of the mise-en-scène. Therefore, Huppert transforms a common procedure embraced by classical cinema, spearheading a type of acting that—without repudiating the premises of identification, affectivity, and the character’s psychological creation—proposes a cohabitation of two vastly different acting styles in the composition of the actor’s work. Without always having to make a commentary as disruptive or “violent” as the direct-to-camera look of Andersson/Monika, she is able in certain narratives to free herself of the character’s naturalistic impositions in order to allow her own body and face, disguised under fictional cloaks, to emerge, and, from there, to speak as an actor, commenting on her craft and on its conditions.

Crafting a Persona and Counter-Persona Instead of proposing a chronological investigation of Huppert’s acting through the maturing of the work as an actor, it is preferable—methodologically—to highlight films and characters that permit the display of this double acting procedure. Such an approach doesn’t hinder the observation of Huppert’s style of acting. Maturity has granted the actor a physical and gestural

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self-awareness that only time and experience can bolster. As much as the inception of an actor willing to break acting barriers can be felt in the films La Dentellière (Claude Goretta 1977), Loulou (Maurice Pialat 1980), Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Jean Luc Godard 1980), and La Truite (Joseph Losey 1982), maturity was needed for her to command her acting technique in a manner that was self-aware and would allow the style of Huppert to flourish. Likewise, the establishment and/or intensification of professional relationships—from her forties onward—with auteurs like Claude Chabrol, Michael Haneke, Werner Schroeter, or Hong Sang-soo have categorially helped her to craft her acting style.4 Along with maturity came the establishment of a well-defined acting persona5 that was able to influence the writing of characters that were offered to her, and was even able to influence the entire filmmaking process, such as her collaboration with Paul Verhoeven in Elle (2016), in the role of an elegant sociopath in Greta (Neil Jordan 2018) or as the bad queen in Blanche comme neige (Anne Fontaine 2019). Such a persona serves as the shifting terrain where the filmmakers who choose to work with the actor will search for symbolical and practical substance, in the sense of reinforcing the actor’s public image (cases of which will be further analyzed in this chapter) or in the sense of counter-using the persona. In the latter are the lighter films, comedies, or dramatic comedies, which will attempt to provide for the actor a laid-back, hyperbolical, and even comical acting style, and, as such, oppose the density of gestural actions and contentions that characterize her predominant style. Such films include 8 Femmes/8 Women (François Ozon 2002), Copacabana (Marc Fitoussi 2010), and La Ritournelle (Marc Fitoussi 2014). The instance of 8 Femmes is the most exemplary if we consider how it satirizes the oldmaid characters, in the vein of Erika Kohut, the character Huppert plays in La Pianiste (Michael Haneke 2001). This counter-use of the persona also appears in films made by celebrated directors in order to cultivate the enigmatic and contrived Huppert. La Cérémonie (Claude Chabrol 1995) is a typical illustration. In the role of Jeanne, the Post Office worker, Huppert employs a style similar to the ones in the comedies Copacabana and La Ritournelle. The counter-use of the persona was proposed by the filmmaker, who already knew the actor and had created with her the characters that are the embryos of Huppert’s later public image, for example, in Violette Nozière (1978). In La Cérémonie, Huppert’s performance is full of informalities such as chewing gum with her mouth open and then placing it

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underneath the table. The character is ironic and funny, and shaped by postadolescent behavior—she speaks rapidly, challenges people through dialogue, and moves with agility. Playfully, the film’s role that would have suited Huppert’s persona like a glove went to Sandrine Bonnaire, who arms herself with a style similar to the numerous other roles played by Huppert, in order to create her sociopathic house-keeper character. In this panorama of a dual naturalistic/non-naturalistic acting strategy, a notion of physical and mainly gestural awareness is indispensable. Within classical acting, it is up to the actor to control the body in order to create— through gestural style—the singularities of each role following a well-defined social-psychological typology, as defined by the Stanislavskian style of acting. The actor is thereby supplanted by the role, making the former disappear or, ideally, annul itself so that the spectator sees the character, a figure supposedly made of flesh and bone.6 In this configuration, the spectator shouldn’t gaze at the actor-playing-the-character, or at the twists of the fictional creation. That is the touchstone of classical Hollywood performances, the basis for the reputation of actors such as Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Christian Bale. On the other hand, some directors allow—and even demand—that their actors also appear alongside their characters—take, for example, how JeanPierre Léaud was used by different filmmakers to bring his previous characters to the movie. As such, they cherish certain aspects of the persona or even make the performance strategy explicit in their concrete (body, gesture, voice) or symbolical particularities (the personal interests of the actor, its biography). It is in this context that Huppert’s filmography may be understood. As advocated by Luc Moullet (1993), some actors have gestural charts that repeat themselves film after film, without necessarily attaching themselves to the character’s psychological profile or to the filmmaker’s directions: “they determine a particular kind of character, and a thematic (even an aesthetic) linked to it” (Moullet 1993, 87).7 That is what defines an actor as an auteur. The actor-auteur that is Huppert makes the procedure of emptying out exterior stimuli of feeling (fright, repulsion, distress) as one of her trademarks. Surrogate to that, the actor gives a lot of attention to micro-gestures, as well as to her meticulous positioning within the frame. La Pianiste (Michael Haneke 2001) is the film where this is most explicit. Let’s take into account the scene where the teacher Erika Kohut kisses her student Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel) in the theatre’s restroom. Walter bursts into the room, unlocks the teacher’s stall, and feverishly grabs her. She allows herself to be seized, not knowing how to react

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to such sexual ravishment. In the moment when he opens his pants and raises her skirt, Erika and Walter fall to the floor. We see the back of the boy while she is facing the camera, her leg slightly bent backward, exposing her thick grey pantyhose. Much more than anodyne, the gesture of falling with her leg bent backward summarizes the piano teacher’s standing opposite the boy’s sexual outburst. She is troubled by the situation, not knowing how to react—this gesture shows explicitly a bodily discomfort and hardness. She waits for the right moment to reverse the situation, going from prey to orchestrator of the sexual encounter, which is the great bind of the character’s psychology. The gesture, given its fleeting nature, could have gone unnoticed, although the image was chosen for some of the film’s publicity posters, and it is conceived inside a conventional semiotic gestural expression: it means something. But what distinguishes this moment of lack of dexterity (again, Mika’s motif from Merci pour le chocolat returns to haunt Huppert’s acting) is the complete inversion it triggers in the character’s posture. The moment she admits to being passionate, Erika feels comfortable to present herself as the owner of her own desire and as ready to “direct” their physical encounters. In short, she assumes the demiurgic authority of a director. At this point, she demands of Walter clear gestures and stances of what she understands to be a sexual encounter. The epitome of this moment is the reading of a letter in which Erika describes how she wishes the young man to behave during intercourse. Locked inside her room, Erika asks Walter to read her instructions. As he is reading the letter and acknowledging the role he will have to execute—she asks to be tied up and spanked during sex—an unequivocal difference of style can be seen between the two actors. Whereas Magimel acts from inside out, “speaking” clearly through gesture, Huppert remains unperturbed. However, could it not be argued that she is also “speaking” through the recurrence of her gestures? In a close shot, she bites and slightly raises her lower lip, outlines a smile, makes microscopic movements with her head, while he is visibly shaken, scratches his nose and eyes, is a little tearful, lowers his head, and even laughs nervously. In spite of the fact that the sequence is transformed by Huppert into a form of gestural and facial expression that might seem closer to Magimel’s psychological expression (her eyes are also tearful and she becomes more talkative), then, the otherwise seemingly contained procedure is what dominates Erika’s public appearances, which may be considered one of Huppert’s greatest style traits. When she is evaluating the students, reprehending them, or just observing

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Isabelle Huppert: Stardom, Performance, Authorship

their musical performances—just like during the moments when she is at sex-clubs or spying on other couples having sex—Erika/Huppert refuses to engage in much movement, albeit facial or corporeal. Privately—during the domestic scenes with the mother—her approach is more carefree, similar to a more naturalistic informality. The oppression of her public personality is transformed into rage during her nocturnal attack on her mother in which Erika jumps on her, violently kissing her, or during their early fight scene when she digs her nails into her mother’s head. Erika/Huppert is, therefore, always breaking away from a balanced naturalistic acting style, which foresees a kind of restraint in gestures and in the employment of the actor’s voice to overact through the excess of movement or to underact during moments of physical and visual inertia. Hence, oscillating between two acting styles, the character in Haneke’s film evolves at the same time as it has recourse to dubiousness as the main drive of its actions.8

Expressing the Actor’s Subjectivity To allow an actor to be displayed—beneath the fictional robes of the character— also entails commentary on the craft of acting and on the act of being observed by both filmmakers and spectators alike. While writing about Summer with Monika, Alain Bergala (2005, 13) describes the moments when the character, portrayed by Bergman’s then wife, Harriet Andersson, seems to be aware of the camera’s gaze, as well as the lustful gaze of her husband. Monika/Andersson would, therefore, have the prerogative that is usually taken from most filmic characters: of feeling herself being observed and the ability to respond to the director’s fetishistic gaze. Something of the awareness of being seen by the camera and of being admired by the filmmaker and spectator appears to transpire in a few moments of Huppert’s performances. During her choreography in 8 Women (when she performs her musical number), instead of staging a sensual dance like Fanny Ardant, Catherine Deneuve, and Emmanuelle Béart, or a childlike play as in those of Ludivine Saigner and Virginie Ledoyen, Ozon turns the camera almost entirely to the face of Huppert. In the second half of the choreography, Huppert is standing, positioning herself to the intra-diegetic spectator (four of the eight actors). She uses her hands in order to mimic the framing procedures of an actor’s face: the opening and closing of the camera’s diaphragm; the

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concealing of the gaze; making a super-close up of her eyes; the framing of the face in different camera positions—all in the name of the photogenic expression of intimate feelings. Similarly, Huppert uses her strategy to comment on the adulation that has been made by filmmakers since the beginning of cinema: glorifying an actor’s face through the proximity of the camera and through the slowing down of movement.

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Figures 2.1–2.4  Huppert’s musical close-up in Huit Femmes/8 Women (François Ozon 2002).

Another instance of the awareness of being observed and the offering of face and body to the camera—within a narrative that cherishes transparency— emerges during the end of La Comédie de l’innocence/Comedy of Innocence (Raúl Ruiz 2000). In this film, taking advantage of an intra-diegetic cue (the digital camera used by the character’s son throughout), the actor offers her gaze to the boy’s camera. It is apparent that she is also offering her gaze to Ruiz’s camera, and she plays with it, performing seductive acts seemingly foreign to the character’s modest personality.

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A different outlook on the exposition of acting singularities is in the act of choosing a performer to portray oneself, or to portray a character that is a clear reference to the actor’s career. An example of the latter can be seen in Valley of Love (Guillaume Nicloux 2015), in which the first encounter between Huppert’s and Gérard Depardieu’s characters produces a dialogue that could have been voiced by the two actors: “how long has it been?” / “didn’t we see each other in Venice?”/“don’t you think I’ve gained some weight?”9 As in Marvin ou la belle éducation/Reinventing Marvin (Anne Fontaine 2017), she portrays (a version of) herself as an actor who counsels a young performer. Beyond the suggestion that the actor is playing a version of herself in both films, we could also argue that this kind of performance makes a broader commentary on acting in the cinema. One of the first instances of that kind of commentary can be found in films in which professional actors are named within the text. In Violette Nozière, this commentary is made through framing and composition. The mirror—placed in the room where the character welcomes her clients (she’s a prostitute)—holds the pictures of two great actors: Lillian Gish and Bette Davis.

Figure 2.5  Huppert (with Lillian Gish and Bette Davis) in Violette Nozière (Claude Chabrol 1978).

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The image can be understood only as quotation, given that the character shows no special sign of attachment to the life of celebrities and actors. Also, the choice of Gish and Davis isn’t by chance. Both of them embody the two main acting typologies from early cinema: the first represents a “romanesque and pathetic eroticism” (Bourget 2000, 198), while the second represents the “blonde sex bomb” (from the Hays Code Era) performing from “wickedness to criminality” (Siclier 1956, 59).10 There couldn’t be more distinct standards for women in Hollywood than the ones embodied by the two actors; as roads that lead to different paths, their personas are built from opposite foundations. Again, the combination of registers is apparent when we speak of Huppert’s acting. There is something of the “innocent virgin” and of the “harlot” in many of Huppert’s roles, almost as if the angelical faces from the girls in La Truite or La Dentellière were already concealing the tough and decisive women from Elle or La Pianiste. Had the young Bette Davis lived through women’s liberation and the relaxing of censorship, the key dialogue in Ma mère (Christophe Honoré 2004) would have been perfect for her: “I am a slut, a bitch and nobody respects me.”11 In the light of this, Chabrol’s conception for Violette’s room in Violette Nozière could already be interpreted as an indication of such duplicity in relation to Huppert, long before she became an established actor.

Deux: An Epic Star Vehicle In Deux (Werner Schroeter 2002), there is a similar shot that also provides commentary on Huppert’s acting. Through the means of montage, a photograph of Marlon Brando is shown, occupying the entire frame. As Schroeter’s film isn’t just made with Isabelle Huppert, but for Isabelle Huppert, the reference to the actor could be understood in the same way as with Chabrol. This film is one of the most challenging films made by the actor, a pure star vehicle, which, in the context of Hollywood cinema, for Richard Dyer “provides continuities of iconography (e.g. how they are dressed, made-up and coiffed, performance mannerisms, the settings with which they are associated), visual style (e.g. how they are lit, photographed, placed within the frame) and structure (e.g. their role in the plot, their function in the film’s symbolic pattern)” (Dyer 1998, 62). Obviously, there were financial imperatives in classical Hollywood star vehicles that simply do not apply to Schroeter’s small and independent film. In the same

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way, while Deux does not reinforce the dramatic canons linked to transparency and to the full identification between character and actor, it could be understood as a star vehicle from epic cinema, where the importance is placed on the viewing of an actor playing a role—in the case of Huppert, an actor that has transformed her acting technique into an acting style. In this film, Huppert embodies two roles: the twin sisters Maria and Magdalena, daughters of a Portuguese mother in exile (Bulle Ogier). In striking opposition to mainstream narratives, where twin characters invest into singular expressivity pertaining to each twin (e.g., Good Twin/Evil Twin, Introvert Twin/ Extrovert Twin), there is not a single acting trait that distinguishes the two women, which at times leads to a voluntary confusion in regard to the miseen-scène. The filmic text does not invest in their differentiation, not through distinctive visual signs, nor through singular personalities. They are the two sides of the same Isabelle Huppert. Besides this drastic subversion of a narrative canon involving twin characters, Deux also breaks with the conventions of how the actor’s body is represented. One of the sisters often dresses as a school girl and is shown in class with other teenagers. At another moment, the twins are clothed as children wearing a ruffled and colorful dress. Nevertheless, during filming, Huppert—who was then forty-eight years old—acts in these scenes without resorting to makeup or special effects to appear younger. Neither does the film try to change the actor for a younger one in a more naturalist tradition. As such, Isabelle transmutes herself into a theatrical actor (the film flirts with the rules of the stage, as one of the sisters works as an actor and singer) to whom there is bigger freedom in using her own body in order to portray characters that don’t fit within her age group—without, however, compromising on narrative verisimilitude.12 Various instances of the film make it a commentary on the work of an actor and on the style traits of Huppert. At a certain point, Huppert can be seen in front of a three-sided mirror, acting to herself and changing the tone of her voice when responding. The scene seems like a lonely rehearsal, when one of the actors has to memorize its own role as well as all others. Further into the story, the body (of one of the sisters) turns into a marionette being manipulated by puppeteers of Asian inspirations. In other moments, the close-shots of her face look like a smoky asteroid gliding through dark skies, resembling the close-ups of actors in silent films as well as the images and portraits of actors in Philippe Garrel’s Les Hautes Solitudes (1974).

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Figure 2.6  Huppert and her double in Deux (Werner Schroeter 2002).

Making such duality explicit—in this case, it is more intertwined with the doubling of the actor—one of the sisters pronounces: “the truth is what is inside of me, the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ are always at the same distance. I speak to myself and tell myself ‘you’. Sometimes, the ‘I’ appears, but it is not a game, it is a necessity.”13 This speaking of oneself as the “other” is also a keystone to epic performance style and to the Brechtian distancing effect.14 The actor must never be confused with the character, but should always allow their face to be seen under the garb of the character, talk to themselves and commenting on their actions. The actor is the narrator of his or her own drama and not only an agent.

Expressing the Persona through Artifice and Repetition Isabelle Huppert’s recent work with South Korean director Hong Sang-soo gives us the latest kind of epic commentary on the actor’s performance style. In Another Country (2012) and La Caméra de Claire/Claire’s Camera (2017) are similar in structure as they are both based on the interaction of the actor with Korean characters in ordinary situations and trivial conversations. Far from the director’s ambition is the idea of creating a psychologically structured character that will provide the actor with a physical and symbolic foundation. In

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La Caméra de Claire, the presence of Huppert is already a commentary on the fact that the actor is playing a role. “It is my first time in Cannes,” she says while walking on the streets of the city. Clearly, the dialogue speaks mostly to film critics and moviegoers as an ironic cue to start the film, but it also summarizes Hong’s ambition to bring Huppert to the film with her personal and professional baggage, to produce events—mostly ironically—from her presence. Behind the apparent triteness of In Another Country’s dialogues and situations hides an intricate game of dramaturgy and acting. Its dialogues seem to have come out of a basic English-language manual, something of which Huppert makes a point of saying—in a stereotypically heavy French accent. These trivial games of simplicity transform naturalist scenes into commentaries about the actor’s creative process. The repetitive scenes of In Another Country (the search for the lighthouse, the encounter with the lifeguard, the compliments on the balcony) are explained by the fact that the filmic narrative is composed through fragments of short stories written by one of the characters, and whose writing gradually materializes into images. In one of those scenes from the second story, the moments of reunion between Anne (Huppert) and Soo (Mun Seong-kun) at the beach bring out the core of Huppert’s investigation of acting. At first, she dreams—while in front of the lighthouse—about the arrival of her lover, Soo. In an openly artificial tone, an exaggeratedly mellow voice, she cheers the surprise arrival of the man and runs for his embrace. When we become aware that it was only her imagination, Anne/Huppert finds herself alone at the beach again. Another man comes close, this time a stranger, and she repeats her artificial tone of the imagined encounter and quickly runs away. Later, the real encounter with Soo at a different beach repeats the artificial precepts of that sequence. They meet over again and fervently kiss one another. Suddenly, she pushes him away and slaps him. Passionately, she resumes the kiss, only to push and slap him again, all the while pretending she is flabbergasted for doing it. Although it is a very artificial scene in terms of Huppert’s action and dialogue, it still reiterates a semiotically defined gesture around the representation of a romantic encounter. During the kiss, her body is transformed into a damsel in love, her voice is childishly nasal, and her head leans back. When she slaps him, Huppert’s body becomes rigid; her gaze stays on her partner’s face, as if she was a robot. Importantly, the kissing and slapping are repeated in succession. It is impossible not to see something like a low-key audition between actors in these moments, a rehearsal among set colleagues while they await the real director to say action; it goes beyond any possibility of expressing feelings between the

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characters. These sequences are built on the possibility of abrupt shifts in style (loving/violent; engaging/distanced) and the establishment of an ostensibly artificial acting style that would be avoided in more naturalist settings. Much more than creating a character, what Huppert is interested in, in these films, is the fact that she is being asked to openly show herself acting. Parallel to that, the path of arriving at a character is made explicit in the actor’s actions, as are the exploration of an actor’s technique, the conscious use of her voice and body, and how the expression of her persona are worth a lot more than psychological verisimilitude. The collaboration between Huppert and Hong sums up the dominant strand of Huppert’s acting style: her ability to create characters that escape naturalism and where the path of a character’s emergence becomes more important than the creative end-result. A style that spells out Huppert’s way of acting, the physical and vocal ways of defining character, is more ambitious than simply creating an “effect of a human person” (Pavis 1997, 173)15 with “psychological consistency” (Barthes 1966, 16) that is far from the actor’s own being. Huppert’s acting style, we could argue, is dynamic, based on keeping conflict in play in the process of acting. By working in different ways—either by maintaining conflict or by showing herself as playing a role rather than offering a complete character— Huppert’s rare performance style revises many of the conventional dynamics of acting that have been practiced throughout the history of the cinema. Translated from Portuguese by Pedro Tinen

Notes 1 2

3

“Je suis d’ une maladresse!” François Albera evokes the aesthetics of the Kulechovian actor, against the psychological acting founded on the expression of an interiority that would be precisely the dominant conception of the actor’s acting in the cinema until the present day (Amiel et al. 2012, 134). Lee Strasberg also reminds us of the experience of Stanislavski that he applied on film: “what the actor feels and experiences inwardly that expresses himself in what the character says and his outward reactions” (my translation from the original Portuguese), Um sonho de paixão, Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1987. “Thus, we could say that realist acting amounts to an effort at sustaining opposing attitudes toward the self, on the one hand trying to create the illusion of unified, individualized personality, but on the other suggesting that character is subject to division or dissolution into a variety of social roles” (Naremore 1988, 72).

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7 8

9 10 11 12

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Although Huppert had begun her collaboration with Chabrol in 1978 in Violette Nozière, their collaboration intensified from the 1990s onward. Persona is here understood, according to Jungian thinking, as the social façade of every individual. In the case of the actor, the public image is shaped by both filmic and para-filmic discourses (publicity, social and political engagements), which are not to be confused with the actual actor, nor with the characters he or she might play—in fact, the persona is fed by them. In theatre, persona is the mask of the ancient actor. Such affirmation entails some methodological problems when we think that Hollywood’s star-system aimed precisely at transforming actors into box-office currency. In other words, erasing the actors was always the goal, but not entirely, as it is in an actor’s transformational abilities that a film’s entire promotion can be made. “Ils déterminent chacun un genre particulier de personnage, et une thématique (voir une esthétique) qui lui est liée.” Haneke creates, with Huppert, another moment of emptied out reaction in Le Temps du loup (2003), during the scene of the husband’s death, executed by the intruder. In a static close shot, Huppert cleans the fallen husband’s blood that has spilled near her mouth, she looks at the killers and—slightly nauseated—vomits. During these three restrained gestures, Haneke and Huppert reexamine the entirety of Bresson’s school of acting and reacting, which is based in a constrained and sometimes stoic expression. “Ça fait longtemps? / On s’est pas vu à Venise? / Tu crois pas que j’ai pris du poids?” “Bette Davis passe de la méchanceté au crime.” “Je suis une salope, je suis une chienne, personne ne me respecte.” The impression of reality in the theatre admits that actors are employed in roles whose ages differ from their own, even in realistic bias, cf. the different ages of the roles in different montages of the Tennessee Williams play, A Streetcar called Desire. I refer here to the presentation by Corinne François-Denève, “Les âges de Blanche” at the “L’âge du role” colloquium at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, October 18 and 19, 2019. “la vérité est dans moi, le ‘je’ et le ‘tu’ sont à la même distance. Je me parle et je dis ‘tu’. Parfois, le ‘je’ apparaît, mais ce n’est pas un jeu, c’est une nécessité.” In French language, there’s a play on words between the I (je) and the game (jeu), which is lost in the English translation. One of the three procedures employed by the actor to create a distancing effect includes transposing the text to the third person; in other words, the actor is not the character and so she should talk as if quoting the utterances of another (Brecht 1999, 137). “effet de personne humaine.”

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References Amiel, Vincent, Gérard-Denis Farcy, Sophie Lucet and Sellier Généviève. 2012. Dictionnaire Critique de l’acteur—théâtre et cinema. Rennes: PUR. Barthes, Roland. 1966. “Introduction à l’analyse strcuturale du récit.” Communications 8: 1–27. Bergala, Alain. 2005. Monika, de Ingmar Bergman. Paris: Crisnée/Yellow Now. Bourget, Jean-Loup. 2000. “Naissance, évolution et décadence du star system américain.” In Stars au féminin, edited by Jean-Loup Passek, 198–203. Paris: Centre Pompidou. Brecht, Bertolt. 1999. L’ Art du comédien. Paris: l’Arche. Dyer, Richard. 1998. Stars. London: BFI. Moullet, Luc. 1993. Politique des acteurs. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma. Naremore, James. 1988. Acting in the Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pavis, Patrice. 1997. “Le personnage romanesque, théatrale, filmique.” Iris 24: 171–83. Siclier, Jacques. 1956. Le Mythe de la Femme dans le cinema americain: de la Divine à Blanche Dubois. Paris: Ed. Du Cerf. Surger, Anne. 2012. “Aparté.” In Dictionnaire Critique de l’Acteur: Théâtre et Cinéma, edited by Vincent Amiel et al., 28. Rennes: PUR.

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Women in Extremis: Isabelle Huppert in the Director’s Theatre George Sampatakakis

Ursula Tidd writes that the cinematic Huppert “incarnates the existential ambiguity of women’s situation in post-war western patriarchy as a twisting path between … transgression and convention” (2012, 33). The actor is therefore seen as a powerful cultural icon that refused to comply with the “conscious conspiracy” of a commercial cinema, which came under close scrutiny as feminist theoretical interventions aimed to expose its sexist investments and the construction of women as sex objects (McCabe 2004, 8). Huppert as an actor sees no difference between her careers in cinema and in theatre, understanding them as a continuum of activities that anchor her to the duty of acting: “I have gone around the world differently. I did it in 80 shows or 80 movies. I include movies in this as I do not differentiate between playing theatre and playing movies, which surprises even me each time I say it, but it is true, that’s how it is, I see no difference between the two” (Huppert 2017, 2). Is there, however, a real difference between Huppert’s stage and screen careers? Many famous actors who return to the theatre after a major career in cinema understand this dangerous leap to live performance as a gesture of personal and artistic development, and sometimes take extreme risks that can benefit and challenge their public image and cultural identity. And although theatre and other forms of live performance compete directly with mediatized forms and the escalating dominance of the media,1 when film stars appear on stage, they bring along the “magical” quality of their myth. Compared to other film stars, such as Juliette Binoche as a naturalistic Antigone,2 or Glenn Close as a moving Blanche DuBois, the theatrical Huppert is more daring and deconstructive in reinventing her acting and, according to the critics, her always mesmerizing self.

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Often labeled the “French Meryl Streep,”3 the actor is not “selling” her stardom and marketability to large-scale industries (such as Broadway or the West End), but rather offers herself as a performing device, an über-marionette, to directors and the process of theatrical negotiation. In doing so, Huppert challenges stardom as an “easily put on,” or “changed and manipulated masquerade” (Qiong Yu 2017, 3), in favor of a theatrical performativity that privileges dilation and extreme stylization, or even deformation. She thus challenges the wellestablished view that “the loss of such qualities as looks, voice and glamour … may account for a decline in popularity” (Shingler 2012, 91) or an acute blurring of the iconic image. The theatrical Huppert has never been afraid to lose her recognizable face and this new radical appearance of the actor may be said to become part of the process of theatricalization and “the process of making theatre in a contemporary era where directors … ask questions with which to provoke … and disarm an audience” (Delgado and Rebellato 2010, 19). Along these lines, this chapter will examine two major case studies: Quartet by Heiner Müller, directed by Robert Wilson in 2006 and performed at the Odéon Théâtre de l’ Europe in Paris; and Phèdre(s), directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski in 2016 and performed at the same theatre, in order to argue that the theatrical Huppert reaffirms the “archetypal” concept of theatre acting as an act of self-sacrifice,4 offering herself as raw material to Regietheater, the type of theatre where the director is the principal meaning-maker and the star of the performance.5

Prehistory and Repertoire Choices After a short career in mainstream theatre between 1971 and 1976 in which she mostly played minor roles in classical French plays,6 Huppert enjoyed dramatic success in 1977 as the devastated ingénue Camille in Alfred de Musset’s On ne badine pas avec l’amour/No Trifling with Love at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord. The performance was adapted for television at the end of the same year, directed by the actor’s sister Caroline Huppert, and provided evidence of the young performer’s emotional measure and stamina. The breadth of her theatrical range and the appeal of her elegance on stage were seen in her flowing movements, which were “sculptured” by the Empire Style white pleated dress, and in her naturally sensitive intonations. For the next ten years Huppert was exclusively devoted to film and she returned to the theatre only in 1989. Playing Natalya Petrovna, the wife of a rich

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landowner in Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country (Théâtre Édouard VII, Paris), Huppert conveyed in a realistic manner the playful sadism of Natalya’s love game with three men, which finally leaves her lost in the existential boredom of the Russian countryside. Early in the 1990s Huppert started an international career in the theatre, collaborating with major theatre directors of the international avant-garde and the post-Brechtian German tradition, working outside the realism of the “French practice” (Carlson 2009, 39). This second career in European theatre began with Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure directed by Peter Zadek at the Théâtre de l’Odéon in 1991, where Huppert played the pure and moral Isabella in a way that emphasized “psychological depth” (Carlson 2009, 39) torn between a disgust for crimes and the Christian love for mankind. This quasi-psychological realism was obstructed by the alienating effect of the huge backdrop of an Alpine setting, equipped with rocks and waterfalls, painted in the detailed late nineteenthcentury style and designed by Johannes Grützke. Following further experimentation, Huppert’s theatrical “herstory” can be divided into two distinct periods: before and after Robert Wilson and the legendary production of Orlando. In the adaptation of Virginia Woolf ’s novel Orlando (Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne, 1993), the actor was introduced to rigorous stylization with mechanical and angular poses, taking acting as a free negotiation between the real physical self and the dynamics of dilation, which is the process of transforming the everyday body into a powerful theatrical artefact (Barba 2006, 54–63): Taking your freedom takes time. [Wilson is] the one, nevertheless, who gave me the possibility of taking my freedom when I did. He didn’t tell me to take it. But he made it possible for me to do so … [B]ecause he put up barriers and constraints, which means that you find your freedom inside them. Obviously, I would have felt much less free without all these constraints. I would have felt lost. Being free does not mean being lost … Often, when one works with great directors, the work of the director comes first to the detriment of the person involved. I don’t mean the character. I mean the person. (Huppert in Shevtsova 1995, 74–5)

Huppert returned to the stage seven years later with a canonical Medea that was safeguarded in a formal, albeit minimalist, realism. Jacques Lassalle’s exoticized Medea, which premiered in 2000 at the Festival of Avignon (Cour d’Honneur du Palais des Papes), reimagined the ancient Colchis as a water-land with caves traversed by footbridges, and Medea as a “non-heroic … abandoned wife, furious and glacial” (Capitini 2014, 145), like “the monster who lives in us,”—“familiar”

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and “heartbreaking” (Lasalle 2011, 356). The production was said to focus “more on what is being said than on what is being done or felt” (Riding 2001), indicating that the director intended the text to be clearly heard and understood (mainly as an ancient melodrama). Nevertheless, Medea was for Huppert a major role that presented her with the challenge of exploring the theatrical archetype of the woman in extremis from “the vantage point of the sacrificial victim” (Radulescu 2002, 90) in a phallocentric society. After this turning point, Huppert has been drawn to extreme roles that have allowed her to question and reinvent her theatrical identity. The New York Times theatre critic described her presence in Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, commenting that the “Ice Queen” Huppert had “shattered” her icy image (Bellafante 2005). Clearly, the American critic was unfamiliar with the actor’s varied trajectory, characterizing theatre as a site of truthfulness, where actors are meant to imitate real postures and normal vocal structures: Of all the things it’s hard to imagine Isabelle Huppert doing—dressing injudiciously, championing veganism, giggling her way through a pedicure—the most unthinkable is willfully committing a crime against posture. At 52, Ms. Huppert surely possesses the most regal carriage of any actress working today. It provides the platform for the impassivity that has marked her film career for more than three decades. In recent years, Ms. Huppert has used this presence to portray characters with a perilously misguided idea of how much they can control. (Bellafante 2005)

Yet, this description brings us to the core of Huppert’s technique, which calls upon adaptation and specificity in order to create an efficacious theatrical figure of physical plasticity and an affective expressiveness that avoids deliberateness and sentimentalism.7 The actor adapts herself to the specific requirements of a mise-en-scène, bringing at times an imbalance to the performance due to an extreme specificity that other actors cannot follow. An example of this was Éric Lacascade’s abstract modernization of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler at the Ateliers Berthier in Paris in 2005, a performance that was heavily influenced by Thomas Ostermeier’s earlier wild Nora (A Doll House) at the Schaubühne in 2003: And it is Isabelle Huppert who brings to the show its imbalance, its discomfort and its strength. A theatre actress, she shows her extreme art of cold fusion, both familiar and distant, stubbornly refusing to pull the sentimental rope. Rarely as in this case has she given the impression of being overwhelmed by her character to the point of losing herself in it. The more the show goes on, the more she seems to embrace Hedda’s desolation, this radical inaptitude for happiness, which

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carries her with a force impossible to master. So, the stainless actress becomes unfathomably fragile.8 (Solis 2005)

Huppert’s expressiveness is not naturalistic but plastic in the sense of a physical transfiguration into the form of the character she portrays, achieving flexibility in the logic and the outline of the feelings9 (sometimes with a measured external coldness that prevents exaggeration). This is not exactly a minimalist technique, but an effort to portray a character in measured outlines that challenge the descriptiveness of a commonsensical emotionalism, in the tradition of which the young Huppert had begun her theatrical career. Perhaps the best example of Huppert’s interest in even more extreme dramaturgical conditions was the Bouffes du Nord’s aforementioned production of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis in the fall of 2002, directed by Claude Régy. Described by critics as an “audacious performance” (Harries 2017, 8), it was praised for Huppert’s disciplined adherence to an outstanding plastic stillness, “a principled critique of what it means to be still on stage,” lying under “the director’s will, and the phantasm of a freedom of movement that denies other sources that determine movement” (Harries 2017, 13).

Wilson’s Glance, Embedded Stardom and Transfiguration In the documentary film Absolute Wilson directed by Katharina Otto-Bernstein (2006), there is a shot of Robert Wilson directing Huppert during the rehearsals for the 1993 French version of Orlando. At first, she is clearly creating a natural performance according to the text; but having observed her spontaneous gestures, the director physically adjusts her raised right hand and open fingers in an unnatural angular posture resembling the beak of a swan. This clip exemplifies the method of the director and his extreme demands upon the actor who is used as a living artefact and an anti-realist Kunstfigur (or artistic figure). In the hands of the sculptor-director, the artistic human figure turns out to be an automaton and also a marionette (Schlemmer 1961a, 28) treated like a dancer that becomes a functional part of the stage and conveys meaning and emotional as well as kinetic tonalities. The expressionistic artistic figure is “a space-bewitched creature … each gesture or movement” of which “is translated in meaningful terms into a unique sphere of activity” (Schlemmer 1961b, 92), reconstructing the role as a

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moving installation beyond psychological characterization. What is immediately obvious in the case of Wilson’s Huppert is the quality of the movement itself and the reduction of the actor “to a surface Gestalt” (Brecht 1994, 241) that is integrated in the director’s dream-like landscapes of hypnotic beauty. If we now turn to the 2006 production of Quartet in which Huppert played the ruthless Marquise de Merteuil,10 we need first to consider Heiner Müller’s postdramatic dramaturgical technique, which bears clear similarities to Wilson’s understanding of theatre. Müller’s Quartet, inspired by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s letter novel Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), is situated in a postapocalyptic no man’s land, in which the heroes revive a drama of seduction as a double endgame before the French Revolution and after the Third World War. The suicide of the libertine Valmont symbolizes the decadence and subsequent devastation of the French aristocracy before the Revolution; but, as David Roberts argues, “equally we are invited to read Valmont’s abdication as the satyr play to the self-destruction of the patriarchal world Order” (Roberts 1995, 97). The ruthless Marquise de Merteuil, Valmont’s rival in these dangerous liaisons, is also brought down by her destruction of Valmont, showing nonetheless that women can conquer the phallic male. Although the avenging woman (Merteuil) and the self-destruction of the male principal (Valmont) are themes which Müller takes directly from Laclos, he reduces the complex intrigues of Les Liaisons dangereuses to the archetypical theme of the war of the sexes, leaving nothing for Valmont and Merteuil but “to turn the game against themselves by assuming the roles of torturer and victim” (Roberts 1995, 110). For Müller, death and destruction guarantee the continuity of literature and theatre; thus, his “consumption” of Laclos’ masterpiece ensures the existence of his own text that is not an adaptation or an interpretation of the model-novel, but a “monument-devouring machine” (Williams 2006, 188). Similarly, Müller found in the work of Robert Wilson a common modus operandi, since they are both eager “to strip things to their skeleton” (Müller quoted in Williams 2006, 188) in order to find their essence in new structural forms: Wilson never interprets and I find that an absolutely essential quality, and that interests me. There is a text and it is delivered, but not evaluated and not colored and not interpreted. It is there. In exactly the same way an image is there and the image is not interpreted, it is just there to begin with. Then there is a sound and that is also there and is not interpreted. I find that important. It is a democratic conception of the theater. (Müller in Wood 2017, 4–5)

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Accordingly, in the “democratic” theatre of Wilson everything that the director has created is freely there for the spectator to interpret and decodify, since everything is a product of abstraction and extreme stylization. The “thereness” of Wilson’s stage elements is something that Huppert also mentions, arguing that “working with Wilson has a quality of its own because he is completely there, and I am completely there” (Huppert in Shevtsova 1995, 74). But what is “thereness” in the case of Huppert and Wilson? In Quartet the director treated Huppert as an iconic actor, sculpturing her body and voice in extremely unhuman postures and fluctuations, but leaving her face intact by light and grotesque makeup, and her body free from heavy costumes that could violate the “seductiveness” of her presence. Huppert’s face remained lit in a glacial white, often through the use of pin-spot lighting in the style of cinematic close-ups, although lights of many colors painted “the alltoo-mortal flesh of the figures” in a “reptilian green” or a “satanic red,” as Ben Brantley interpreted the symbolisms of Wilson’s colorology in his review for the New York Times under the revealing title “A Minuet Between Sexual Predators” (November 5, 2009). Huppert’s performance in Quartet was used as a seamless theatrical machine at the service of a visual, sonic, and kinetic iconography. Although theatre for Wilson is “something totally artificial” (Schechner 2003, 120) which aims to eliminate all signs of “apparent emotion” (Lessachaeve 1977, 224), the force of Wilson’s performances is expressed in the rhythmic visual structure and the hypnotic dream-like beauty of the mise-en-scène. The actor in that sense becomes an embedded artifact that privileges the integrity of the mise-en-scène, presenting rather than expressing emotion (Shevtsova 2007, 57). In presenting technical precision, rigor in movement, rhythmical perfection, and dreamlike stylization,11 Wilson’s Huppert was, above all, the perfect Kunstfigur of theatricality and seductiveness. The title of Le Monde’s review was typical of the expectations of an audience devoted to realist theatre and emotional acting: “Isabelle Huppert warms Bob Wilson’s icy universe” (Darge 2006). Wilson’s priority to construct images, in which the technical precision of each movement is essential, destroys the sense of a living natural presence, reconstructing “the world as allusive, concentrated, and poetic” (Pavis 2013, 9). Wilson’s lyrical iconolatry in Quartet was fulfilled and reinforced by the angular, unnatural postures of the actors and the diagonal choreography of movements, which both lent a visual rigorousness to the intensity of the performance. Still, some critics came to a performance by Robert Wilson with

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different psychological expectations, arguing that the “acting was in contrast to the austere opulence of Wilson’s staging […] leaving little room for psychology and nuance” (Lutterbie 2010, 452). Quartet opened with a projection of Frans Wouters’s seventeenth-century painting, Le Concert champêtre, showing three people engaged in alfresco music making and one other woman pouring water into a marble basin. In front of that image stood a large modern table with five frame-chairs, which created a sharp contrast with the pastoral lyricism of the painting. In building a hybrid atmosphere between idealness and nightmare, Wilson introduced to the play three anonymous silent roles,12 which seemed to be nightmarish reflections of former youth and future old age of both Merteuil and Valmont. As all the actors assembled around the table in a blasphemous predatory Last Supper, Huppert was building the Gestalt, the living schema of Marquise de Merteuil, following a slow walk from stage left to stage right with her two hands in diagonal opposition. Stopping, she curves backward in a gesture of astonishment and puts her right palm in front of her face like a mirror, making a silent scream. After putting her arm like a noose around her neck, she leans her head smoothly toward her left palm and closes her eyes in a symbolic confirmation that theatre, for Wilson, is the landscape of a Traumarbeit, namely, a visual dream-work on a dead author’s text. The elegant thanatographic “dance” of the actor and the breathtaking precision of movement not only call the audience to a ritualist entrancement but also show how Huppert submits unconditionally to the plan of the director as the perfect Kunstfigur. In the first part of the performance Huppert is “trapped” sitting in a stage construction that resembled a reversed blade of a guillotine with her left hand resting parallel to the diagonal blade. The guillotine travels slowly from stage left to stage right as Huppert delivers the text rapidly in a passive declaration. She first becomes chillingly cold when she introduces Valmont (Ariel Garcia Valdès) as her love, her death. Her purple-blue satin dress leaves her left shoulder open, and her athletic arm leans on both the blade and a stripe of white light. Metaphorically speaking, the actual mise-en-scène falls in love with the actor, who is treated like a visual icon and a machine of technical prowess. Unlike the other actors, Huppert is surrounded by waves of white light that seem to worship the stardom and seductiveness of an iconic celluloid idol. With the long satin dress embracing her silhouette, Huppert’s movements acquire an extraordinary plastic quality as she is either walking ritualistically in angular “hieroglyphic” postures or moving her hips comically.

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During the second part of the play, in which Merteuil begins to speak as if she were Valmont pleading Madame de Tourvel not “to die partly unused” (Müller 1984, 80), Huppert delivers the text in a comic lightness, pretending to put on makeup with her left hand held high like a mirror. The precision of movement and voice control are noticeable, given that Valmont is standing behind the actress as a Doppelgänger following her movements and gesticulation. In doing so, Wilson establishes the idea of the double as the basic visual “motif ” of a performance “dialectic” (Lutterbie 2010, 452) that uses the actors as living bipolar installations inscribed on the structural plan of the mise-en-scène. However, the central metaphor of the performance comes from a neoclassical statue of the nineteenth century. Johann Heinrich von Dannecker’s sculpture Ariadne on the Panther (1803–14, Liebieghaus, marble, 146 cm) that depicts the Cretan princess Ariadne, wife of the god of ecstasy Dionysus, seated on a panther in a relaxed pose, was reproduced on the program cover and in a central part of the performance. In the middle of the stage, a large black circle split the space in two as Valmont and Merteuil were moving around it, enacting another scenario in which Valmont plays himself and Merteuil plays the innocent niece. Reaching an ultimate culpability, Valdès’ highly emotional Valmont confesses, “On your knees, sinner. […] Repent and I will transform your punishment into grace” (Müller 1984, 86). Straight after, Valdès crouches on all fours and starts “walking” with Huppert who is seated like a tombstone on his back, ironically re-portraying the idea of wildness tamed by beauty as seen in Dannecker’s model sculpture.13 The actual sculpturing of a moving frieze highlights the pictographic quality of the mise-en-scène and the constructivism of the acting process as an event of plastic transfiguration in the co-presence of Huppert’s stardom. It is a commonly accepted view that Wilson “asserts his directorial control by effacing the psychological actor” (Innes and Shevtsova 2013, 164) and constructing highly stylized artistic figures. In the light of this, it is perhaps not totally unanticipated that some American critics, raised on the realist tradition of Broadway, commented that the Quartet succeeded “in abstract terms, but Ms. Huppert’s Merteuil, as baroquely stylized as she is, suggests a real, specific person” (Brantley 2009). However, I would argue that Quartet does not succeed in abstract terms but rather follows the masquerades and scenarios of the two heroes until their final deadly metamorphosis. Accordingly, in the last part, Merteuil-as-Valmont offers a deadly glass of wine to Valmont-as-Tourvel and he “perorates heroically like a shamed heroine from sentimental tragedy” (Kalb 1998, 180). Wilson chooses a very

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static and unsentimental atmosphere for the last scene, with the two actors pointing shoes at each other—their instruments of metamorphosis. The fall of the aristocracy and the existential fall of the two predators are depicted in the image of the final set where a batten with gauze curtains that flow in, creating a diagonal from downstage right to upstage left. But after that finale, Wilson installs another one: Huppert is shown lying still in the front of the stage and a peculiar machine is scanning her from above like a CT scanner or the blade of a photocopier. She passively repeats the last and very ambiguous lines until the curtain falls, delivering an intensely anguished finale as a devouring installation of de-humanization: “Death of a whore. Now we are alone. Cancer, my love” (Müller 1984, 90).

Double Vision: From the Periphery to the Center The theatre of the Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski is symptomatic of the performative turn in eastern European theatre from communist to postsocialist aesthetics, and from the poor theatre of Grotowski to rich mediatized theatre. Heavily influenced by the deconstructive German stage and the wave of the New Media theatre, Warlikowski follows the political-artistic tradition of the independent Polish theatres, instead of the anthropological-artistic direction that was less socially critical and not always politically engaged.14 Accordingly, Warlikowski’s work signals a material change that was marked by a shift from the “self-expression of the marginalised identity” of communism to “massmediatisation” (Pusca 2016, xii) and the capitalist theatre industry of digital advances and superstars. The process of change in theatre is thus related to material economies, where progress is used to support, confirm, and legitimate the turn to a “freer” theatre, and according to Anna Pusca (2008, 370), an expert on post-communist aesthetics: With any process of radical social and political change, there is an expectation that this change will be positively and significantly reflected in the material horizon. The relationship between social change and material change is often mediated through the visual—and the visual horizon of particular communities.

In that sense, the theatre of Warlikowski is a product of a hybrid modernization, dealing with such themes as “cultural dispossession, spiritual atrophy, adeficiency of collective identity, internal chaos and immaturity” (Lease

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2016, 11). As a director, Warlikowski “eschewed texts and directing styles that rely on assimilationist or exclusionary cultural strategies,” disrupting at the same time “frustrated dominant cultural discourses and commentaries” (Lease 2016, 11) on sexuality, nationality, and theatre itself. Through the 2010s, the director’s material obsession with video projections and glass showcases adheres to the almost old-fashioned exhibitionism of a last century theatre that Polish artists were not allowed to follow and has now become mainstream. Accordingly, it was the “play with gender, use of nudity, bold video close-ups and exposure of non-normative bodies that signified one of the key symptoms of the corporeal turn in Polish theatre” (Lease 2016, 89), introducing new possibilities of subject formation.15 Ever since Un tramway (A Streetcar),16 an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, conceived and directed by Warlikowski for the Odéon–Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris in 2010, it seems clear that the director views Huppert as a celluloid icon to be willingly deconstructed. In Streetcar, Huppert’s (and Warlikowski’s) Blanche is first seen sitting on a stool placed on a platform on the stage, stripped down to a black slip. In a “prologue” written by the director, Blanche narrates her story anxiously in a series of “jumbled declarations delivered with impatient rapidity,” as Varney (2017, 329) observes, while a webcam projects a stream of black-and-white close-ups of her face. In a gesture presumably pointing to Huppert’s celluloid iconicity, the actor’s facial expressions remain relatively blank even as she talks quite tensely. At the same time, she is eating an apple and scratching her skin, translating the psychological state of Blanche as one of uneasiness and distress. By the end and after a tango with Stanley Kowalski (Andrzej Chyra) that is followed by rape, Huppert morphs into a hysterical being. As Varney observes: Huppert skips around the stage in a baby doll dress, dances, flirts with Stanley, and chatters, jerks, and shudders. These gests confirm the social and historical inferiority of the homeless, penniless woman in the narrative of the play. Her body writhes and howls with alternating intensity and abandonment throughout the performance. (Varney 2017, 331)

Overall, this “alternating intensity” was designed to create a troubling stream of emotions, instead of an immediate identification with the spectacle, due to video interruptions and the onstage costume changes, which both functioned as a basic Verfremdungseffekt:

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Isabelle Huppert: Stardom, Performance, Authorship Warlikowski’s direction seems driven to overcome the prospect of an audience at a distance from the actors, cut-off and out-of-touch. Tiny interactions and minute gestures are retrieved by video from inaccessible spaces—in the bathroom, under the bed, beside the couch—and magnified with projection to amplify their presence on such an expansive stage. Transformations in the actors’ portrayals of their characters’ emotional trajectories are “telegraphed” with an intricate plot of wig and costume changes (Bollen 2012, 10)

Even in his most recent performances, Warlikowski understands directing as an alignment of layer upon layer, which creates a polyphonic composition of meaning or an informational chaos, recapturing the proto-postmodern style of performance, which in the 1990s sought to evade or disrupt the conventions of the coherent work of art.17 And by employing new media on the stage, Warlikowski does not simply follow “current Western European trends” (Sakowska 2011, 328), but employs these borrowed elements as prosthetic operations, seeking to modernize his artistic image and make his marketability coincide with current trends. In Warlikowski’s later multimedial Phèdre(s) at the Odéon Théâtre de l’Europe (Paris, 2016)18 Huppert plays three modern “versions” of the mythic Greek queen who fell in an unbearable love with her stepson Hippolytus. The dramaturgy of the three-and-a-half-hour performance derives from a collage of Wajdi Mouawad’s Une chienne (A Bitch), Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love and J. M. Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello, which hopes to de-mythicize and violently sexualize the eclipsing tragic grandeur of Phaedra as a reflection of a permanently lost and outdated (theatrical and ideological) reality. If the deconstruction of tragedy “permits us to confront the distress of the present” (Critchley 2001, 152), Phèdre(s) explores the trauma of love as a traumatized womanhood in extremis, but with Huppert standing contrastingly as a mesmerizing “magnetic force” (Baker 2016). And despite the debasement of Phaedra, Huppert seems to never lose her iconic state even if she acts like a “psycho” in perhaps “the worst theater director’s idea ever,” thereby exhibiting “terrific commitment, to little avail” (Isherwood 2016). The performance of Phèdre(s) opens with a singer and a guitarist, dressed in black leather and vinyl, rocking an alluring and nervy Umm Kulthum tune as a dancer (Rosalba Torres Guerrero) spins around in a black bra and stilettos. Colorful lights and shadows, as if from a striptease show, ripple across the stage, creating an atmosphere of dark euphoria. In front of the stark, yellowtiled set (the ancient palace of Knossos?) there is a sink, an iron bed, and an

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industrial showerhead attached to the wall. Huppert as the goddess Aphrodite walks in slowly, looking like a high-heeled, fur-coated dominatrix who sadistically controls the illicit desires of humans. When she turns into Phaedra, she becomes the embodiment of female devastation, clawing the walls of the set, scrambling helplessly across the floor and crying “J’aime” with bloodchilling desperation. One of the most interesting parts of the performance is when Kane’s version takes over inside a giant glass chamber platform. Huppert turns into an office worker submitting to her illicit desire for her stepson (Andrzej Chyra), a selfabsorbed adolescent who spends his days eating hamburgers, playing with electric trains and watching a tyrannical loop of the shower-scene from Psycho. Huppert’s Phaedra, in walking anxiously inside the glass chamber, follows an interesting crescendo (from a nervous moral reserve to bursts of short shouting), portraying the ancient queen as a distraught modern woman. Even when she is called to perform oral sex on Hippolytus, the white-faced Phaedra looks more morally decent in a marcelled red wig, a pale skirt, and a delicate shirt with a bow collar. Interestingly, the hilarious sexual acrobatics where Huppert pulls her legs behind her head lying on the floor in front of a sitting Hippolytus de-humanize this scene of disjunctive styles between quiet realism and extreme ironic theatricalization. The play ends with a lighter final section, drawn from J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003), where a quietly passive Huppert appears as the eponymous novelist being interviewed about her lecture on Eros, in which she praised the sexual relations between gods and humans. With a cathartic calmness she responds to the reading of a poem about Cupid and Psyche, arguing that the gods envied humans for their capacity for orgasmic, physical ecstasy and finite mortality. In a large part of the performance, Huppert’s face was back and side-projected on the walls of the stage through invisible cameras that magnified her presence emblematically and worked as a footnote to her celluloid magnitude, perhaps in an attempt to make the actor’s elusive (and marketable) face dominant in the minds of the audience. But when the presence of the double takes is placed through mediated duplication it can indeed create “an uncanny experience, a making material of split subjectivity” (Causey 2006, 17), which, in this case, stands as a double identification: Huppert the famous film star and Huppert the deconstructed theatre subject. In so doing, Warlikowski treated Huppert like a visual fetish to be amplified and duplicated, returning at the same time to a paleo-postmodern concept of the deconstructive actor who “refuses to become a readable and stable bearer of signs,” a performer that “prefers to remain in

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an abstract configuration” (Pavis 2013, 163–4) or in a state of uncontrolled excitement, transforming the dramatic hero into a “psycho,” which was how the New York Times described Huppert’s Phaedra.

Conclusion: The Actor in Extremis In the case of the theatrical career of Isabelle Huppert, there are two elements that outline an attitude toward the art of theatre as a field of transgression and radical transformation. First, her repertoire choices focus on plays that portray womanhood in extremis and even in tremendous existential conditions; and second, the de-humanizing stylization or the extremity of her acting and the miseen-scène eliminate the representational perspective in favor of a more radical theatricalization. But even if the actor tends to go for extreme theatricality, the critics always see her upholding “her mesmerizing ability to enact extreme states without ever veering into excess” (Katz 2016). This is indicative of the hold the “mythologized” actor has over critics and audiences alike, even at the moments when the mise-en-scène pushes her beyond a reiteration of her star image. Nonetheless, Huppert on stage is liberated from the dominance of her captivating and “blank sheet of paper” face (Mayne 2000, 31), precisely because close-ups, unless they are mediated, are not possible in theatre. Even if some directors like Warlikowski take her back to her celluloid image, in the theatre Huppert is compelled to a more holistic acting, choosing roles and representations that are not all about the face19 and that involve transfiguration. As a result, theatre for Huppert extends and enriches her artistic identity as a performer by challenging the safe narcissism of stardom, precisely because she declares herself extremely versatile and malleable in the hands of the director. By offering herself to new corporealities, the actor discards the stereotype of the glamorous film star on stage, presenting images of traumatized womanhood, which even question the actual coherence of Huppert’s iconic image rooted in the myths of beauty and elegance. And it is the power of transformability that undermines the fetishistic gaze that seeks feminine glamour and sex appeal. Nevertheless, the theatrical Huppert does not seem to follow any one distinctive performance style in as much as the degree of expressivity and stylization clearly depends on the mise-en-scène and the method of the director. The fact that she started her career as an elegant ingénue and today she thrives throughout Europe as the muse of directors of the theatrical avant-garde makes

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Huppert the ultimate tool of a director’s theatre that does not tend to afford much sense of agency to the actor. However deconstructed or alienated through avant-garde staging, Huppert’s iconicity is inevitably present in all her theatrical performances, ultimately supporting and consolidating her screen stardom.

Notes 1 2 3

See Blau (1992, 76). See Rodosthenous (2018, 75). For example, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and the video titled “Isabelle Huppert is The French Meryl Streep,” https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=3zDkTX3t2yI, February 8, 2017. 4 “Sacrifice occurs when the actor reveals something precious and personal as a gift to the audience through detailed work on structure and self ” (my emphasis), Slowiak and Cuesta (2007, 16). 5 Although Peter Boenisch (2008) makes it clear that Regietheater (director’s theatre that puts the Regie above or beyond the text) should be treated as a historical category in German theatre associated in particular with the work of certain directors during the 1960s (Peter Stein in Munich, Peter Zadek in Bremen, and Claus Peymann in Frankfurt), I use the term quite literally, but with some historical significance in relation to the productions discussed. 6 A list of Huppert’s performances in Les Archives du Spectacle (https://www. lesarchivesduspectacle.net/?IDX_Personne=2444). 7 According to Richard Schechner (2005, 120), to be efficacious means “to effect transformations.” 8 “Et c’est Isabelle Huppert qui apporte au spectacle son déséquilibre, son malaise et sa force. Actrice de théâtre, elle y montre à l’extrême son art de la fusion froide, à la fois familière et distante, refusant obstinément de tirer sur la corde sentimentale. Rarement comme ici elle aura donné l’impression de se laisser envahir par son personnage au point de se perdre avec lui. Plus le spectacle avance, plus elle semble faire sienne la désolation de Hedda, cette radicale inaptitude au bonheur, qui l’emporte avec une force impossible à maîtriser. Alors, l’actrice inoxydable devient d’une insondable fragilité.” 9 For theatrical plasticity, see Vakhtangov (2011, 120). 10 I saw the performance in Athens (Olympia Theatre, July 2–8, 2007, Greek Festival) and am grateful to the Greek Festival Archive for the video. 11 Wilson had also directed the Quartet for the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1988, where he “wanted uniformity of rigor in

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14 15 16 17 18

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Isabelle Huppert: Stardom, Performance, Authorship movement, speech and design, but had to make do with an imperfect cast and crew” (Kalb 1998, 193). These ghostly figures were performed by Louis Beyler, Rachel Eberhart, and Benoît Maréchal. Especially Louis Beyler, who incarnated the role of a silent old man in a state of dementia, brought a comic darkness to the performance. See the description in the catalogue of Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung, “Ariadne on the Panther: Johann Heinrich von Dannecker,” http://www.liebieghaus.de/en/ renaissance-bis-klassizismus/ariadne-panther. These two directions were distinctively eminent in Poland from the 1960s onward according to Hensel (2017, 194). See Velicu (2012, 139). I saw the performance in Athens (Pireos 260, Greek Festival, July 9–10, 2010) and the video of the performance at the archive of the Greek Festival. See Kaye (1994, 3–5). I am mainly referring to the performance in Athens, which I saw at the Stegi of the Onassis Foundation (December 20–22, 2016). I’m also grateful to the Onassis Foundation for the video of the performance. For the obsession with Huppert’s face in films, see Jefferson-Kline (2015, 493).

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Enduring Extremity: On Isabelle Huppert’s Intertextual Body Jules O’Dwyer

Despite proving resistant to typecasting, Isabelle Huppert has been closely bound to French cinema’s sustained exploration of sexuality since even her earliest onscreen appearances. Her first performances trafficked in fantasies of virginal purity, consigning her largely to the role of erotic curiosity. We might recall, for instance, her appearance in Bertrand Blier’s Les Valseuses/Going Places (1974) as the sixteen-year-old Jacqueline, a carefree adolescent who becomes entangled in the film’s coarse culture of libertinage, or her subsequent role as the suggestively named Brigitte, the reclining nude whose sunbathing we intrude upon in the similarly bucolic setting of Yves Boisset’s Dupont Lajoie/The Common Man (1975). Following her cinematic breakthrough, which is typically understood to have occurred in the late 1970s with the successive releases of La Dentellière/ The Lacemaker (Claude Goretta 1977) and Violette Nozière (Claude Chabrol 1978), her protagonists have only grown in complexity and psychosexual depth. If, from our contemporary vantage point, we might situate Huppert among French cinema’s most enduring objects of desire, then many of her roles in post-millennial cinema demand us to clarify exactly what it is that we mean by endurance, addressing not only questions of time, periodization, and historicity (durée) but also the more implicit notions of bodily performance, strain, and vulnerability that are also suggested by the term. The sheer breadth of Huppert’s filmography means that to trace a given theme across her oeuvre is, by extension, to follow the grain of French cinema over the last forty years. However, while this body of film yields a rich and compelling repository, a number of factors confound typical markers of time or indices of historicity—not least her oft-remarked “agelessness” and the affective ties that her characters entertain with younger men (L’École de la chair/The School of

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Flesh (Benoît Jacquot 1998), La Pianiste/The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke 2001), and Ma mère/My Mother (Christophe Honoré 2004)). When considering Huppert’s stardom as the aggregate of past roles and performances a paradox becomes apparent: the very elements that assure a coherence and stability to her star persona seem characterized by a fundamental instability. Moreover, critics have often described her overarching on-screen presence according to a negative logic, a self-effacing persona figured as “blankness” (Álvarez López and Martin 2017; LaSalle 2012, 80). In this chapter, I consider Huppert’s association with a recent tendency in art cinema to put bodies and psyches under duress. While the themes and characteristics with which she has widely become associated—sexuality, transgression, anti-psychology—resonate with a key trend in recent French filmmaking, she nonetheless occupies an uneasy relation to the cinematic zeitgeist known in French as the cinéma du corps or “European extremity” more generally. I want therefore to explore the various ways in which the bodily, psychic, and star presence of Huppert both trouble and extend existing debates on cinematic extremity, as well as the concomitant theoretical framework through which this trend has been read. The example of Isabelle Huppert offers us a rare opportunity to bring into dialogue two distinct areas of film studies that seem on the surface to have little to say to one another: accounts of cinematic affect and extremity on the one hand, and the field of star studies on the other. Considering these discourses in tandem, I explore how the imperiled star’s body accrues an intertextual weight across an evergrowing body of film. It is perhaps first worth noting the frequency with which critics have circled around these questions in previous accounts of the star. In a 2016 interview for Film Comment, Violet Lucca posed Huppert a series of questions about the physical and emotional burden of her past film performances. More specifically, she was interested in ascertaining whether the actor had ever experienced problems maintaining the distance between her many performances or if she ever sensed what film scholar Troy Bordun (2017, 194–5) has termed an “affective bleed” between discrete roles: Lucca: When you are taking on a new part, are you reminded of all the women you played? … Do they keep inhabiting you? Do they become engrained in your being as soon as you have brought them to life? Or do you kind of have to leave them behind to move on and start afresh?

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Huppert: Well, it’s not that I have to leave them behind it’s more that they are behind, you know? I think it’s a perception of the spectator what you describe. It’s not like you are piling roles in yourself, like there were layers of sensations from having, giving life to all of these characters. It’s not more than the sea on the beach going back to where it was. It’s completely volatil [sic], it doesn’t remain. (Film Comment 2016, author’s transcription)

This question, while preceded by a discussion of Huppert’s long-standing collaboration with Claude Chabrol, might just as well be informed by her predisposition toward the extreme edge of contemporary art cinema. Huppert’s response, however, declines the premise of the question by situating this impression firmly on the side of the spectator. If this exchange seems on the surface to have misfired, its constituent parts are nonetheless engaged in a curious symbiosis. Appearing so convinced by Huppert’s performances, Lucca misplaces the affective force that she describes in the actor herself, blurring the line between reality and diegesis, suggesting a slippage “from reel to real” (Gledhill 1991, 27). Yet though the literalism of Huppert’s response purports, in turn, to demystify her acting process, it actually works to cultivate the myth of her singular aura. Playing into dominant accounts of Huppert’s alluring opacity, interiority here is once again withheld from view. Not only is it the case that the “sea returns to its prior place” but the proverbial shoreline is shorn of its flotsam and jetsam, its intertextual baggage. As Murielle Joudet goes on to note in the only monograph dedicated to Huppert, “characters are little more than a light veil thrown on to her, which flies away at the first gust of wind” (2018, 205).1 The exchange in this interview raises pressing questions about the intertextual dimensions of Huppert’s acting. Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin note that “[m]ore than with most actors, the border between actor and role seems to evaporate swiftly … It is almost impossible to distinguish Huppert’s ‘characterization’ from one performance to the next” (2017, 23). Lucca’s question also bespeaks a broader strain of commentary surrounding how the recursiveness of Huppert’s casting choices probe at ethical and representational considerations. For example, if we survey the critical reaction of Paul Verhoeven’s Elle (2016) it is instructive to note that Catherine Wheatley’s critique of the film’s sexual politics hinges on the director’s casting choices. Part of the problem, Wheatley suggests, is that the role cannot be fully dissociated from that of Erika Kohut in La Pianiste/The Piano Teacher, a film that also gained notoriety due to the stark depiction of sexual violence (Sight & Sound 2017). In a move that typifies

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dominant discourses surrounding Huppert, the evocation of earlier films is seen to lend a further extra-textual dimension to her later work, inflecting our understanding of Elle’s sexual politics—a film in which the boundaries between the real and the fantasmatic are far from assured, even within the closed economy of its narrative. Joudet similarly privileges her portrayal of Erika in Haneke’s film in her retrospective of her career, writing that “from La Pianiste onwards, Isabelle Huppert will ritualize the suffering that she undergoes” (2018, 146). But what is most striking in Joudet’s account is not that this performance represents a powerful iteration of the sexual dynamics that contour Huppert’s more recent work, but that it comes to stand in for the function of acting tout court: A paroxysmal, convulsive illustration of what an actor is, [La Pianiste] also represents, in its most pared-back form, a synthesis of all the characters that Huppert has so far embodied. The film juggles with the themes that punctuate her filmography: to be bored—to do harm—to harm oneself. (2018, 146; emphasis added)

Of note here is how Joudet edges incrementally from the particular to a register of generality: from La Pianiste, to Huppert’s filmography, and then to performance more generally. In this chapter, I am indeed interested in using Huppert’s performances as a case study for “what an actor is” and to account for the ways in which these performances problematize questions of actor labor in “extreme” cinema.2 In what follows, I will consider the discursive parameters of recent extreme arts cinema and discuss the adjacent relation that Huppert occupies in relation to it. I subsequently take as my focus three films, Michael Haneke’s La Pianiste, Catherine Breillat’s Abus de faiblesse (2013), and Paul Verhoeven’s Elle (2016), which, while tarrying with questions of sex and violence, nonetheless resist easy absorption into the overarching narrative of the cinéma du corps. This common assessment, I wager, is due in part to the constitutive role played by Huppert.

Extremity, Stardom, Methodological Antagonism The rise in graphic depictions of violence and the vicissitudes of sexuality in French cinema since the early 2000s has been named and discussed under a number of often-interchangeable designations, including the “New French Extremity” (Quandt 2011 [2004]), “new extremism” (Horeck and Kendall 2011, 5) and “cinema of sensation” (Beugnet 2007, 14). In keeping with the corporeal focus

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of this chapter, I adopt the label cinéma du corps to name a filmmaking mode whose agenda is, to draw on Tim Palmer’s oft-cited formulation, “an on-screen interrogation of physicality in brutally intimate terms” (2011, 57). While debates surrounding which films and directors fall squarely within the designation of hair-raising cinema has often amounted to hair splitting (discussions which quite tellingly reveal the subjective dimension of cinematic “transgression”), the primary fault line in scholarship has been whether to organize this corpus according to profilmic content—Quandt (2011 [2004], 18) furnishes us with the obligatory keywords: “flesh and blood, sex and violence”—or whether to admit into this fold a broader corpus of films that induce affective discomfort, revel in visual excess, and whose mode of address is predicated on sensory immediacy. More recently, scholars have started to challenge the fundamental tenets of the cinéma du corps—namely, the idea that the body of the spectator is synergistically intertwined with the “body” of the film—by calling into question the potentially tautological proximity between film theory and its objects. Affect, a term that is routinely deployed in earlier writing, often through a phenomenological or Deleuzian lens, has been the subject of Eugenie Brinkema’s incisive study, The Forms of the Affects, which charts the waning of formal analysis and the concomitant ascendance of spectatorial sensation as a guiding force behind film scholarship (see Brinkema 2014, 26–36). For his part, Mauro Resmini has voiced skepticism about how the cinéma du corps promises “a phenomenology of immediacy (in contrast with the mediating character typically associated with reason)” (2015, 163–4) and how such films purport to “access this pure realm of sensation by divesting themselves of the framing of formal mediation between the spectator and the real” (2015, 164). The suggestion is that by emphasizing spectatorial affect as our heuristic—a force commonly understood as immediate or pre-discursive—we fail to register both the generic framing of the film object and how it figures within a wider textual system. Given that the “‘cinema of sensation’ exceeds any existing code or taxonomy” as Resmini notes, genre is thus rendered “an obsolete and ineffective epistemological category” (2015, 166). To broach questions of casting, performance, and consumption in relation to the cinéma du corps would be to awkwardly reinstate the diegetic event qua construction. Such a move would appear as retrograde insofar as it would return us to the supposedly “obsolescent” categories of conventional film analysis (genre, narrative, context) that the cinematic phenomenon originally sought to eschew. Another recent study, Mattias Frey’s Extreme Cinema (2016), offers a different, but not unrelated, critique of this tendency in art cinema. He argues

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that while the cinéma du corps is often subtended by discourses of transgression, exceptionalism, and is buoyed by its countercultural cachet, it is nonetheless beholden to the same economic imperatives as commercial cinema. This fact, he argues, has been routinely disavowed in order to uphold its claims to aesthetic autonomy and philosophical seriousness. In their respective investigations into the framing, mediation, and discursive construction of cinematic extremity both Resmini and Frey invoke Steve Neale’s seminal essay “Art Cinema as Institution” (1981), an important piece of criticism with the express aim of demystifying the exclusive label of “art cinema” and questioning its propensity toward generic exceptionalism (Frey 2016, 6–16; Resmini 2015, 167). Questions of casting, commerce,—and, by extension, the subdiscipline of star studies—clearly fit uneasily in relation to the picture sketched above. The concept of the film star is paradigmatically understood as an aggregate of onscreen selves, “an intertextual construction produced across a range of media and cultural practices” (Gledhill 1991, xiv), a “repertoire of gestures, intonations, etc. that a star establishes over a number of films” (Dyer 1979, 142). Given that this is a phenomenon that signifies between discrete performances, exceeding the boundaries of any given film text, it implicitly threatens the closed textual circuit within which the cinéma du corps is understood to operate. A holistic approach to star studies, attentive to context and paratext, exists at a considerable distance from the cinéma du corps’ promise of pure sensation because it threatens, as Bordun puts it, to “break spectatorship from pre-discursive immanence” (2017, 195). This incompatibility begs a fairly simple question. Does the fact that this methodological antagonism has been under-discussed not simply suggest that there is little necessity to do so? While very few prominent actors demonstrate a willingness to tarry with the nexus of sex and violence for fear of either generic pigeonholing or reputational damage, Isabelle Huppert clearly figures as a notable exception. Her collaboration with filmmakers such as Catherine Breillat, Claire Denis, Michael Haneke, and Christophe Honoré suggests a proximity to the genre of cinematic extremity but her work also highlights some of its limitations. Not only does her filmic presence complicate common accounts of the cinéma du corps, but her extensive archive of daring performances serves also to question the increasingly untenable “newness” imputed to the “new French extremity.” This argument also runs in the opposite direction. Among the hallmarks of Huppert’s performance are her much-lauded impassivity and emotional opacity. Huppert’s subversion of common understandings of the film star as a vessel for

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spectatorial identification has led critics to dub her French cinema’s “anti-star” and associate her with affectlessness and de-dramatization (Boussageon 2014). Moreover, while scholars of stardom writing in the wake of Richard Dyer have typically foregrounded ephemera, contingency, lifestyle details, and gossip as constitutive parts of the star’s paratext, it is difficult to locate such instances of personal disclosure or willed loquacity in the discourses that surround Huppert’s off-screen persona. While I have suggested above that there is little to connect studies of stardom and extremity, perhaps their common concerns converge around the site of the body. On the one hand, Neale notes that “the tradition of Art Cinema” (within which the tradition of the cinéma du corps is now comfortably nestled) “has always been concerned with the inscription of representations of the body” (1981, 31; emphasis added), while Gledhill, writing in a very different register, notes that “[s]tars reach their audiences primarily through their bodies” (1991, 214; emphasis added). Although proponents of the cinéma du corps have encouraged a theoretical shift from the realm of the profilmic toward the embodied site of reception, Huppert invites us to return to the former register given that her dramatic style ruptures the link between emotionally legible on-screen subjects and the empathic reaction of the spectator. Moreover, the status, stardom, and cultural weight of Huppert bring a supplementary layer of mediation that, I argue, inflects our reading of her on-screen performances. Before discussing three examples from Huppert’s post-2000 filmography, which complicate discourses of extreme cinema, I briefly want to revisit a previous reading of her image to tackle a pressing question prompted by the critiques surveyed above. Much early writing on the cinéma du corps has, by virtue of the putative philosophical import of its object, eschewed questions of cultural reception (Resmini’s so-called “ineffective” analytic categories), which are the mainstay of more traditional film scholarship. It is therefore telling to note that the most striking piece of scholarship to call into question these presuppositions—Tina Kendall’s contribution to The New Extremisms—opens by centering on a picture of Isabelle Huppert. Commenting on the promotional poster of Christophe Honoré’s Ma mère (2004), a Bataille adaptation that Nick Rees-Roberts (2008, 97) aptly situates within a “much-lauded cultural package of transcendence through perverse sexuality,” Kendall notes how in some versions of the poster the film’s eponymous mother (Hélène, played by Huppert) is pictured with a cigarette, while in posters destined for French and British audiences this detail has been airbrushed out. The omitted detail speaks powerfully in Kendall’s

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analysis, signaling “the contradictory status of transgression in our era of global consumer capitalism” (2011, 43). It also suggests the primacy that film censorship takes over any narrative infraction of the symbolic Law (namely, Honoré’s exploration of incest), which starts to reveal the hollowness of the film’s political and philosophical discourse. The roles of the film star and cinematic paratexts are clearly instructive here. Throughout the rest of this chapter, I explore further how Huppert demands us to qualify these discourses. My aim is to trace the gestural economy of the imperiled body across Huppert’s more recent body of films, which unmoors the zeitgeist of the cinéma du corps from a fixed space and time, as well as from its conceptual certitudes.

Exacting Punishment: La Pianiste The film that cemented Isabelle Huppert’s reputation for extremity, Michael Haneke’s La Pianiste (2001), entertains a close but complicated relation to the cinéma du corps. While the film clearly engages with questions of embodiment and transgression, critics have noted how it is marked by a restraint and asceticism. For Catherine Wheatley, the film operates according to principles of minimalism, precision, and distanciation (2011, 182), while Brigitte Peucker writes that it exhibits “the formal rigor of [its] modernist sources” (2007, 131). Haneke’s adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek’s 1983 novel, Die Klavierspielerin, presents the story of Erika Kohut, an austere and psychosexually troubled woman in her late thirties who teaches piano at the Vienna Conservatoire and who lives in a fraught oedipal proximity to her mother (Annie Girardot). La Pianiste is underwritten by a dialectic of desire and restraint; while we might at first assume that Erika’s desires find their expression and fulfillment in her musical virtuosity, an unsublimated remainder spills over into acts of perversity, jealousy, and sadomasochism that are relentlessly catalogued as the film unfolds. Between Erika’s teaching duties at the Conservatoire and the nightly return to her overbearing mother a narrow window of time exists in which she takes calculated detours throughout the city. The first excursion is to the video booth of a sex shop where Erika fumbles around for used tissues, sniffing the postmasturbatory detritus of the cubicle’s previous occupants. Later, we witness Erika attending an outdoor cinema screening. She hovers by a car window in order to spy on a young couple who are engaged mid-coitus, and as she edges toward them in her distinctive Burberry mac (a garment that carries aptly

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contradictory connotations of demureness and exhibitionism), she starts to urinate uncontrollably. The beginning of the film thus dedicates itself to the indexing of Erika’s drives. These paraphilic acts are—to adopt the psychoanalytic idiom conveniently provided to us by virtue of the film’s setting—indicative of polymorphous perversion. Although Erika works assiduously to maintain a hygienic distance between work life and her increasingly unmanageable sexual proclivities, the two become increasingly entangled when she reluctantly takes on the tutelage of Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel), a persistent young student who initiates the transgression of the pedagogical relation. We later learn that Erika will only engage with Walter sexually in accordance with a set of sadomasochistic strictures that she has dictated beforehand and which are communicated—or rather notated—by way of letter. Erika’s epistolary mode of address signals a double transgression relating to both the film’s content and its genre. The film’s impropriety inheres not only in the panoply of punishments that constitute its violent contents itself, but it is also lodged in its mode of communication. In opposition to the contingency, and messiness of the cinéma du corps, its “informe” (Beugnet 2007, 65), the character of Erika entertains the fantasy, which we will later learn to be a categorical error, that the vicissitudes of sex and violence can be marshalled and choreographed in a manner akin to a musical score or stage direction. At the point of initial conception, Michael Haneke informed Huppert that he would only pursue the film project if she agreed to the role of Erika; a choice that would thus necessitate the linguistic transposition of Jelinek’s German source text into French, all the while remaining in Vienna. This dual affiliation represents more than mere happenstance, however, as the casting of Huppert allows for two different intellectual and artistic genealogies to come to the fore. John Champagne (2002) has suggested that the Austro-French origins of La Pianiste invoke two traditions of psychoanalytic discourse, those stemming back to Freud and to Lacan (although we might also evoke two avatars of psychosexual perversion here: Sacher Masoch and Sade). But while it might be tempting to read Huppert’s presence here as metonymically bound up with notions of “Frenchness,” her running commentary in the film demonstrates a capacious grasp of the histories of artistic transgression in the film’s site-specific context. Early on in the film we witness Erika enclosed in her bathroom, taking a razor blade to her sex before ritualistically cleaning her bath with water and returning the sharpened implement to a bag. Tempting though it may be to frame the scene of auto-mutilation in the contemporary frame of extremity, Huppert’s comments

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gesture further back to a “politico-aesthetic movement” in the Austrian avantgarde of the 1970s, which I take here to be an oblique reference to Viennese actionism. Her astute rejoinder offers a more apposite relation between the film’s visual tactics and the bourgeois mores that it seeks to repudiate. While extreme cinema aims to dissimulate national and contextual consideration, “attempting to shift from representation to pure presentation” (Resmini 2015, 171), Haneke and Huppert’s co-constituted project is a more ambitious project that plays with cultural registers—the pornographic, vernacular, modernist, and classical—in order to reconfigure relations between pre-discursive sensation and cultural signification. Moreover, the film’s recalibration of affect is also tied to Huppert’s performance style; Haneke’s distinctive way of framing bodies, combined with the precision of Huppert’s postural and gestural repertoire, helps to distinguish La Pianiste from the more gratuitous films that we might otherwise count among its contemporaries. Extreme close-ups are eschewed in favor of mid-length shots (plans américains) that register the movement of Erika’s body through time and space. As we follow her seamless passage from a chamber recital through to a sex shop (set to the sound of Schubert’s Piano Trio No. 2 in E flat major, bleeding from a diegetic to extra-diegetic soundscape), Haneke’s choreography limns the border between spaces of respectability and impropriety, the culturally sanctioned and socially maligned. The precise geometry of the film, with its recurring patterns of black and white grids (flooring, piano keys, elevator grills), brings the tension between Erika’s interior drives, physical body, and her environs into stark relief. Such a tension is emblematized in the film’s promotional poster, which depicts Erika and Walter’s passionate embrace; the forms of their bodies contrast with the sterile rectilinearity of the bathroom surroundings, suggesting the obduracy of bodies whose desires and materiality cannot be properly contained. Rather than succumbing to corporeal hyperbole, La Pianiste focuses painstakingly on small gestures. The wiping of Erika’s hands on her shoulders before she enters the sex shop, the frequent rearrangement of clothing, and even mid-length shots of her back achieve a remarkable force in spite of their contentlessness. What we might otherwise read as contingent or asignifying details seem to index Erika’s various affective states: ennui, discomfort, her willed composure in the face of threat. For Alison Taylor, such “microgestures” demonstrate “Huppert’s mastery, intuitively recruiting the vocabulary of the agitated body and preoccupied mind: the latter’s tension necessarily expelled through the former” (2018, 222). This cathexis of, and overinvestment in, the

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detail (a form of metonymic reading which, we must remember, is a methodological touchstone for star studies from Barthes through to Dyer) thus helps us to grasp at the film’s opaque sexual politics. Moreover, Huppert’s calculated minimalism corresponds with Haneke’s own ambition in this film to extract the greatest affect by disclosing the least; a logic of inverse proportionality that exists in contradistinction to what James Quandt has diagnosed as the cinéma du corps’ visual politics of excess and gratuity (Quandt 2011 [2004], 18–19). Yet, it is the final scene of La Pianiste that offers its most pointed reversal of how affect and embodiment has been understood to interact in much existing film scholarship. Following a grueling scene in which Erika is subject to battery and rape, we revisit the space of the Conservatoire to witness her final recital. Continuing Haneke’s strategy of disclosing acts of violence in advance—and thereby evacuating them of their narrative contingency or “shock value”—we watch Erika take a knife from her kitchen and place it in her bag. She lingers in the entrance lobby of the Konzerthaus before passing Walter Klemmer with two younger women. She reaches into her bag and plunges the knife into her chest, emitting a small grimace. The cut to the body is followed by the film’s final cut: a pool of blood starts to swell into a deliquescent pattern on her chiffon blouse before the camera jumps to a frontal shot of the building’s imposing edifice. Disrupting the symmetry of the architectural shot, we watch Erika escape to the right of the frame. Although there is a near analogy between both “cuts,” suggesting a concordance between the finitude of the on-screen body and the metaphoric “body” of the film, this ought not to be confused with the way in which affect, embodiment, and filmic violence have heretofore been understood in much recent film theory. In the denouement of La Pianiste, the rectilinearity of the architecture (with its attendant connotations of moral rectitude) and the affectlessness of Huppert offer little to the spectator in terms of effective reprieve or affective catharsis. The relation between on- and off-screen bodies is severed decisively.3 Lisa Courthald (2011, 180) has written of how Haneke works to problematize clear-cut delineations between violence and non-violence, and I have sought to argue that Huppert’s style of performance further cultivates this ambiguity. On the occasions that the film offers us respite from ostensibly graphic violence, it lingers with scenes of rehearsal—or to adopt the more fittingly polyvalent French word: répetitions. The notion of repetition in La Pianiste speaks both to an understanding of traumatic repetition in the Freudian schema to which I alluded earlier and naming the processual character of Erika’s transgression.

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Interweaving the twin demands of Erika’s musical and sexual training, which run in parallel throughout the narrative, Joudet writes that Huppert’s body “must fold to the exigencies of her art” (2018, 134).4 While La Pianiste deftly explores these multifaceted themes of mastery—whether artistic, pedagogic, erotic, or sadomasochistic—through a visual appeal to the pliability and dexterity of Huppert’s body, these dynamics have been taken in a very different direction in her later work. In a more recent performance as the protagonist of Catherine Breillat’s Abus de faiblesse/Abuse of Weakness (2013), Huppert once again portrays “a woman who is out of sync with her body, but has to train it” (Joudet 2018, 190). The thematic territory of Breillat’s film is markedly different though, given that Huppert offers a harrowing portrayal of a stroke-addled body. While clear risks exist in extending the remit of the cinéma du corps, charting a continuum between the new extremity into a recent foregrounding of the disabled body (not least because of the pitfalls of conflating subjects keyed in very different ethical registers), Kath Dooley notes how this film contains a thematic appeal to the contiguous relations between sexuality and power while pushing the limits of the body (2018, 3–4), and Bordun similarly notes a broader tendency in contemporary art cinema to “turn[…] to another type of body in the throes of ecstatic states, namely, the ill or suffering body” (2017, 226). In Breillat’s film, the body of Huppert undergoes further processes of training and remastery, yet in this performance this focus on gesture and repetition serves a reparative function.

From Repetition to Reparation: Abus de faiblesse Abus de faiblesse provides a loosely autobiographical account of the French director Catherine Breillat’s experience of a stroke that rendered her partially paralyzed and susceptible to the exploitation of the high-profile con man, Christophe Rocancourt. The story was originally recounted in Breillat’s 2009 memoir, but in the film her characters assume pseudonyms (Huppert plays protagonist Maud Shainberg, and the conman Vilko Piran is played by Kool Shen). Following a lengthy convalescence and ongoing physiotherapy treatment, Maud resumes her next film project entitled Bad Love, a feature about a film star’s infatuation with a “common man,” which escalates into a violent relationship with fatal consequences. While watching late-night television in a state of drowsiness and fatigue, Maud is captivated by dangerous airs of the man on-screen, Vilko.

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She rings her producer and demands to meet the rugged neophyte. Vilko fits the bill for her project and he swiftly agrees to the role on the understanding that he is not forced to undergo the indignity of a screen test. The film documents their intimate yet fraught entanglement before the start of the film shoot. While the steadfast, resolute Maud attempts to assert her independence and agency, she is taken advantage of financially and emotionally, which leads her to launch a prosecution against Vilko on the grounds of the titular “abuse of weakness.” The film figures a mise en abyme at three levels, comprising Breillat’s own experience, Huppert’s portrayal in the film, as well as the mention of the film project Bad Love, which, despite only a cursory synopsis, fits squarely into the “extreme” mode of filmmaking for which the earlier Breillat is better known. Though the cinema of Catherine Breillat has been afforded a central position within the French extremity, a closer look starts to reveal fault-lines in respect to the overarching discussion that I sketched out above. While frequently adopting the extreme close-up, a cinematographic trope which we might understand as opening up a plane of “pre-discursive immanence,” Bordun notes also Breillat’s reflexive breaking of the fourth wall (2017, 195). Her filmography constitutes a complex intertextual whole, with prior projects feeding directly into future ones (the on-set dynamics of À ma soeur!/Fat Girl (2001) spurred the genesis of her later film Sex Is Comedy (2002) for example), as well as interrogating the role and signification of her actors outside of the diegetically contained scenes that she constructs. Quite contrary to the dominant account of extreme cinema set out earlier, then, the extratextual connotations of performers are not dissimulated by Breillat. Rather, as Emilija Talijan (2018) has recently argued, they are routinely enfolded into the fabric of her narratives; cinematic bodies attain their own reflexive currency. The strategy attains a particular significance with regard to Isabelle Huppert, whom Breillat had known intimately for the previous four decades, even though their long-standing relationship was punctuated by a string of missed encounters at the level of filmography (Joudet 2018, 189). In a discussion of the film’s casting, Breillat called Huppert “the most intellectual French actress,” noting the contradictions of her star persona: “simultaneously hard and child-like” (Entrée libre 2015). Continuing this somewhat discomfiting triage of minds and bodies, Breillat explained that in order to accentuate Huppert’s star presence, she had to be cast against a “cinematographic virgin” (Kool Shen), a body that is not in—or of— the cinema. This film’s sexual politics therefore draw reflexively on the corporeal codes of its actors, the material and symbolic forces accreting around their bodies.

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The film opens with a sparse soundscape: the steady meter of a heartbeat, a drone and the foreboding whisper of tremolo strings. A medium-length shot tracks an upward motion through the folds of white bedsheets to reveal a frail Maud lying in bed before her eyes gradually open. Her left hand starts to touch her right arm, which appears weak, contorted, unresponsive. An increasingly panicked look in her eye, coupled with her unsteady gestures of auto-affection, suggests that she has undergone a stroke. She loses balance as she attempts to get up from the bed and her slight, frail body is framed in contradistinction to the oil painting of a reclining nude that hangs opposite her. The following shot captures her lying prostrate on the floor, and the subtle desaturation of this image suggests a lack of vitality. Subsequent scenes follow the routines of Maud painstakingly. The camera tracks her physical and speech-based therapy often in voyeuristic close-up, while the period of convalescence in the hospital ward is relayed in a flat, observational mode with minimal cinematographic intervention. Breillat’s use of the long take, a now-ubiquitous staple of art cinema intended to attune spectators to the hefty lag of uneventful time, evokes a very different calibration of embodiment. As with La Pianiste, Huppert plays a character that directs other bodies, but is also susceptible to weakness herself. Haneke and Breillat both marshal Huppert’s performance style in order to trace the contiguous relation between

Figure 4.1  Lying prostrate: Abus de faiblesse (Catherine Breillat 2013).

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sex and pain, agency and embodiment. In a visual echo to this comparison, striking similarities exist in the promotional posters for both films. When read against the bias of Huppert’s stardom, the gendered dynamics of both images are by no means clear-cut; while she is shown in both images to be holding onto her male counterpart, they are nonetheless figured as a “support” in the physical and narrative sense. Given that the cinéma du corps has typically explored the interrelated nexus of interpersonal violence, embodiment, and sexual politics in a generically limited sense, Abus de faiblesse suggests alternative ways of figuring psychic and physical vulnerability. Huppert’s extensive filmography and the myriad intertextual resonances between her films seem to signal a more general shift beyond the limits of the normative body as well as moving her own performances, as well as Catherine Breillat’s oeuvre, into fresh thematic terrain.

Elle, the Imperiled Body, and the Graphic Image In closing, I want to briefly turn to Huppert’s performance in Paul Verhoeven’s 2016 thriller Elle, which in many ways crystalizes the ideas that I have discussed above. While I risk belaboring these connections, we can again note that Huppert explores the corporeal and psychic dimensions of sexual violence while occupying ambivalent positions of maturity, seniority, and vulnerability in relation to her younger male counterparts. (For this performance, she was the recipient of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists 2016 prize for “Actress Defying Age and Ageism.”) Adapted from Philippe Djian’s novel Oh!, Elle follows the life of an executive, Michèle, who works as the creative director of a Parisian computer game company that caters to its (overwhelmingly male) audience by specializing with graphic, fantastical fare. The film opens with particular brutality as we bear witness to the rape of Michèle by a masked assailant in her home. The narrative then proceeds to explore the repercussions of the unreported attack, while also exploring the professional, social, and familial milieus of bourgeois Paris with an improbable, and to many critics unpalatable, combination of violence and suspense, humor and satire. The film offers a meditation on the visual economy of violence in the world of videogaming—a fantasy world cut to the measure of male desire—yet these dynamics appear unsettlingly consubstantial with the central plot.5 While perhaps marking the furthest remove from the aforementioned cinema of extremity in terms of genre and periodization,

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Verhoeven’s film contains a number of elements that recall Huppert’s earlier work. Like both aforementioned films, Elle limns an ethically tricky terrain between sex and violence, and its narrative is conversant in, though not fully commensurate with, the language of psychoanalysis. And once more, her body—falling, prone, or supine—resurfaces throughout as a key visual motif, a gestural refrain. Much of the commentary sparked by the film has centered on the ethics of representing sexual violence. Critics have focused particularly on the illegibility of Michèle’s paroxysms, seemingly oscillating between the throes of pain and pleasure, as she choreographs violent encounters with her attacker as the film reaches its denouement. Yet, the frame that I want to linger on in closing focuses not on the materiality of Huppert’s body, but rather the abstraction of her face. The narrative intrigue of the thriller revolves around the undisclosed identity of the masked attacker. Though we later learn this to be Michèle’s neighbor, Patrick (played by Laurent Lafitte), we first suspect that the rapist works in her office. In the scene that cements this ruse, we witness the computer screens in Michèle’s office being momentarily seized and collectively overridden by a graphic image. (Graphic is intended here to connote both the explicit and the computer generated.) Michèle’s face is superposed over that of a female video game character who is being penetrated violently by an ogre. The wireframe mesh of this digital rendering further underscores the claustrophobic dimension of the image. While the sequence serves a clear plot function, either as threat or as premonition, the potency of the image arises from the fact that it signifies in excess of the immediate narrative level. By dislocating,

Figure 4.2  Disembodiment and digital avatars: Elle (Paul Verhoeven 2016).

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and thus decontextualizing, the photograph of Michèle from the digital environs in which the image circulates, Verhoeven also effects a rupture in the film’s diegetic fabric. What we are plainly confronted with here is also an image of Huppert’s face, an icon which, as so many critics have argued, has attained metacinematic status and cultural currency. While Verhoeven’s film does seek to explore the limits of the body in material, palpable, and “brutally intimate” terms (Palmer 2011, 57), the casting of Huppert once again effects a move beyond the immediacy of the profilmic plane. The graphic sequence points reflexively to the remediation of photographic images. By turning the face of the star into an avatar, it gestures implicitly to the broader archive of Huppert’s performances in which her face has also attained, to use the term Brigitte Peucker deploys in her analysis of La Pianiste, “the impassive expression of a mask” (2007, 152). Returning to the contention at the beginning of this chapter, Huppert’s predisposition for roles that tarry with questions of sex and violence often attains a troublingly intertextual quality. Or as Mick LaSalle notes, “[s]he presents us with perversity and dares us to make a personal” [which is to say: extra-diegetic] “connection” (2012, 80). Indeed, the subtitle of LaSalle’s study, “What Hollywood Can Learn from Contemporary French Actresses,” ought to be taken as particularly instructive here. To extend this formulation, I wish to suggest that contemporary French actresses tell us much about the omissions of film theory, too. Put simply, the “daring” of Huppert, by which I mean her unflinching attitude toward performance and casting, ought to prompt further discussion about exactly which questions have (and, more importantly, haven’t) found themselves discussed within the remit of star studies. Taking Isabelle Huppert as my case study, I have sought to signal a friction between diverging ways of theorizing performance, embodiment, and extremity in contemporary cinema. While Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall have traced the origins of the “new extremism” back to France (2011, 2–5), and the “intellectual,” “cerebral,” and “transgressive” Huppert is frequently held up as an exemplar of what has been euphemistically described as “French” discourses on sexuality, a closer interrogation of her performances in post-2000s art cinema suggests a certain resistance to national and generic pigeonholes. The overdetermination of her star image, coupled with her subversion of the visual codes of the cinéma du corps, frequently moves us out of the conceptual myopia that scholars such as Resmini and Frey have so brilliantly diagnosed. Huppert’s extensive archive also invites us to trace affinities through her body of work and back to her earlier performances, in ways that trouble film studies’ penchant for premature periodization. Joudet’s

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(2018, 15–20) impassioned account of her relation to Breillat—a reading that frequently succumbs to creative anachronism by speculating just as much about those many paths not taken—offers just one illustration of this tendency. Critical accounts of Elle, and particularly those that invoke La Pianiste as a cinematic touchstone, raise further questions still about the ethical dimension of intertextual signification. Yet, while it might ultimately be tempting to conclude that the lesson that Huppert offers to film studies is to jettison overarching theories and neat periodizations with the very air of insouciance that she has made her hallmark, we ought not to lose sight of the ways in which her own—often vocal, often opaque—rejection of the “theoretical” tenor of film criticism is intellectually motivated itself. Or, as she put it in her characteristically slippery idiom for a February 2019 interview in The Independent: “I don’t play a character. I just play an encounter between me and certain states of mind. Is that clear?” My gratitude to Emma Wilson, for stimulating discussions in the early stages of research and Kyle Stevens, who made invaluable secondary material available to me at a moment’s notice.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

“Le ‘personnage’ n’est plus qu’un léger voile jeté sur elle et qui s’envoie au premier coup de vent” Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from French are my own. On the relation between cinematic form and embodied injury in La Pianiste, see Fleishman (2019, 186–8). “une femme qui ne coïncide pas avec son corps mais qui doit le trainer” Djian’s novel is set in the industry of film production, rather than video game entertainment. This transposition of media is interesting given that it reanimates continued debates surrounding the supposedly mimetic logic of video game violence.

References Álvarez López, Cristina. and Adrian Martin. 2017. “Isabelle Huppert: The Absent One.” Third Rail 10: 21–6. Beugnet, Martine. 2007. Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Bordun, Troy. 2017. Genre Trouble and Extreme Cinema: Film Theory at the Fringes of Contemporary Art Cinema. Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan. Boussageon, Alexandre. 2014. “Isabelle Huppert, actrice-caméléon et anti-star.” Nouvel Observateur. October 23, 2014. https://www.nouvelobs.com/culture/20090102. OBS7987/isabelle-huppert-actrice-cameleon-et-anti-star.html. Brinkema, Eugenie. 2014. The Forms of the Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Champagne, John. 2002. “Undoing Oedipus: Feminism and Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher.” Bright Lights. brightlightsfilm.com/wp-content/cache/all/undoing-oedipusfeminism-michael-hanekes-piano-teacher. Dooley, Kath. 2018. “C’était moi mais ce n’était pas moi’: Portrayal of the Disabled Body in Catherine Breillat’s Abus de faiblesse.” Studies in French Cinema 19 (2): 1–15. Dyer, Richard. 1979. Stars. London: BFI. Entrée libre. 2015. “Catherine Breillat, Anatomie d’une réalisatrice.” April 14, 2014. Video, 4:14. www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6TNZfrIBgE. Film Comment. 2016. “Representing History + Isabelle Huppert Interview.” March 8, 2016. Audio, 65:39. http://www.filmcomment.com/blog/representing-historyisabelle-huppert-interview. Fleishman, Ian. 2018. An Aesthetics of Injury: The Narrative Wound from Baudelaire to Tarantino. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Frey, Mattias. 2016. Extreme Cinema: The Transgressive Rhetoric of Today’s Art Film Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Gledhill, Christine. 1991. Stardom: Industry of Desire. London; New York: Routledge. Joudet, Murielle. 2018. Isabelle Huppert: Vivre ne nous regarde pas. Paris: Capricci. Kendall, Tina. 2011. “Reframing Bataille: On Tacky Spectatorship in the New European Extremism.” In The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe, edited by Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall, 43–54. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. LaSalle, Mick. 2012. The Beauty of the Real: What Hollywood Can Learn from Contemporary French Actresses. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Neale, Steve. 1981. “Art Cinema as Institution.” Screen 22 (1): 11–40. Palmer, Tim. 2007. “Under Your Skin: Marina de Van and the Contemporary French cinéma du corps.” Studies in French Cinema 6 (3): 171–81. Palmer, Tim. 2011. Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Peucker, Brigitte. 2007. The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Quandt, James. 2011 [2004]. “Flesh and Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema.” In The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe, edited by Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall, 18–28. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rees-Roberts, Nick. 2008. French Queer Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Resmini, Mauro. 2015. “Reframing the New French Extremity: Cinema, Theory, Mediation.” Camera Obscura 30 (3): 161–87.

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Royer, Michelle. 2015. “Mystère, intellectualisme, authenticité et impertinence: Isabelle Huppert en jeu.” Australian Journal of French Studies 52 (2): 149–61. Sight & Sound. 2017. “Certain Women, Elle, Moonlight and Nocturama—Four 2016 Highlights, Debated.” January 5, 2017. Audio, 33:53. https://www.bfi.org.uk/newsopinion/sight-sound-magazine/podcast-certain-women-elle-moonlight-nocturama2016-london-film-festival. Talijan, Emilija. 2018. “Les Petits Bruits: Little Noises and Lower Volumes in Catherine Breillat’s Romance (1999) and Anatomie de l’enfer (2004).” Studies in French Cinema 18 (4): 310–25. Taylor, Alison. 2018. “Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher.” In Close-Up: Great Cinematic Performances Volume 2: International, edited by Murray Pomerance and Kyle Stevens, 217–27. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wheatley, Catherine. 2011. “Unseen/Obscene: The (Non-)Framing of the Sexual Act in Michael Haneke’s La Pianiste.” In New Austrian Film, edited by Robert Von Dassanowsky and Oliver C. Speck, 177–88. Oxford; New York: Berghahn.

5

Maternal Eroticism: Queering Isabelle Huppert Emma Wilson

The touring exhibition “Isabelle Huppert: Woman of Many Faces” includes four pictures of Huppert taken by American photographer Nan Goldin. In the film Nan Goldin, In My Life, Goldin illuminates her own working methods as an artist. She says of her photography: “It’s about love and wanting to show the person how beautiful they are and wanting to give them access to parts of themselves they might not see in themselves.” These words stick to the images of Huppert in the exhibition. The first is in a nighttime bar. It is blurry and a candle burns. Huppert is smiling. The image is casual. It glows. In the second, Huppert is in an apartment. Incandescent light is in the frame. She is in a scarlet chair in the foreground. Her fringe falls in her eyes and her cheek rests on her hand. She looks tired and real. In the third, she lies serene in bed—Goldin often photographs her friends and lovers like this. Huppert is in a mauvish rose lingerie top, with feathers, red satin and crushed velvet around her. In the last shot, Huppert is in a fluorescent coat and dark glasses. She sits on a public bench. The contrast between these femme Parisian pictures, their relaxed capture of elation, labile moods, real locations, and the other images in the exhibition is extreme. Goldin shows libido, charisma, and exhaustion. She touches silkiness in Huppert. The images date from 2004. Christophe Honoré indexes this same nocturnal Huppert in his 2004 film Ma mère, a loose adaptation of Georges Bataille’s novel of the same name, and my focus here for thinking about Huppert and maternal eroticism.1 Ma mère, three years after Michael Haneke’s La Pianiste/The Piano Teacher (2001), comes at that stage of Huppert’s career when in some of her choices, up to and including Paul Verhoeven’s Elle (2016) and her stage role in Phaedra(s) (2016), Huppert asserts a lucid interest in eroticism and taboo. Looking at Goldin’s and Honoré’s images together, I open one vein of this work, seeing a feminist, queer, sensual, sex-positive Huppert, whose artistic vision yields new apprehensions of taboo-breaking, freedom, and release.

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In the catalogue Isabelle Huppert: Woman of Many Faces, Serge Toubiana writes: “Isabelle Huppert is highly skilled at inviting us to come very close to her, while at the same time keeping her distance. She does not confuse intimacy with familiarity” (Toubiana 2005, 9).2 He retains his sense of her chimerical qualities when he finds in her “a strange, singular relationship between control, or self control, on the one hand and the unconscious and impulsive on the other” (2005, 10). Patrice Chéreau, who directed her in Gabrielle (2005), writes, “there is something in her that devours and at the same time devours itself ” (2005, 36). He says, if we look Huppert closely in the face, “sometimes we see there another Isabelle—a more fragile person whom it is possible to destabilize” (2005, 36).3 Intimacy, the unconscious, and impulsiveness are all qualities I identify in Huppert’s work with Honoré. Yet Honoré seems more relaxed than Toubiana about Huppert’s self-control, and less intent than Chéreau on letting it be undone. Susan Sontag, in the same volume, speaks about “her fearlessness as an artist, as an actor” (2005, 43), “something that contains a large element of ferocity, avidity, appetite, availability, risk taking” (2005, 43). In Honoré’s work there is the fearlessness Sontag identities, but it is not only rooted in strength, a phallic hardness, and ferocity. Huppert is soft here too, sensuous, labile, as Honoré queers the association of hardness with strength, finding beauty and psychedelic appeal in Huppert’s deliquescence, her erotic tenderness, her mortal frailty. Ma mère engages a series of images of Huppert as silky and pliable. She has the blur and glow of Goldin’s images. Softness, a queer maternal eroticism, seizes and destabilizes the viewer. This is an unfelt aspect of her fearlessness, her Bataillean softness without fragility. She is febrile, burning, and also as liquid as a pool of water. I am concerned here with how her performance, her moves between agency and abandonment, embracing maternal eroticism, realizes the queer and feminist potential of the film.

Huppert, Louvart, Duras: Queer Collaborations Huppert’s consent, her agreement to take this role, is part of Ma mère and its feminism. In a DVD interview Honoré says that she was the only actress of her generation who could get away with making this film (2005). Huppert uses this privilege liberally. Through her embodiment of the incestuous mother, she breaks taboos surrounding maternal eroticism, intergenerational sex, the libido of “ageing” women and the exposure of their bodies.4 She takes the

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film into this darkness, primacy, and savagery, with softness and hedonism. Across the surfaces of her body and in its interior, through her sensual physical performance, she allows a cathartic apprehension of death, pleasure, and horror. The textures and avidity of her body, the way she lives in it, animate the film. As Alain Resnais writes in a letter to Delphine Seyrig: “an actor can create like a painter or a sculptor” (Brangé 2018, 233).5 Huppert’s collaboration with Honoré in Ma mère is important and for me underscores the alliance of queer and feminist sensibilities of the film. One part of this collaboration comes in the choice of part. As Honoré implies, she has the aura and talent to choose to act in this highly sexualized adaptation of Bataille’s novel of mother and son incest, among her other erotic roles. Incest is perhaps her most taboo subject, Ma mère marking an extreme in her oeuvre, but it is part of a continuum with her other sexual work. As Gillian Harkins writes: “incest has long symbolized sexual taboo; the word ‘incest’ has been used to denote any and all inappropriate or unsanctioned sexual liaisons” (2009, xii). If Huppert has chosen parts that involve “inappropriate or unsanctioned” eroticism and love, she has also specifically approached roles about mothers and their sexuality. This has been an aspect of her work with women directors, from the exploration of the beaching of a woman’s sexual life in Mia Hansen-Løve’s L’Avenir (2016), to the portrait of a mother’s abuse of her daughter and manipulation of her sexualized image in Eva Ionesco’s My Little Princess (2011), to her role as the rapacious, driven mother trying to retain her farm, her colonial control, in Claire Denis’s White Material (2009). Connections between these roles allow the maternal eroticism of Ma mère to be seen in this broader female-authored context. Huppert has also taken queer roles, showing the pianist Erica’s sexual tryst with her mother in La Pianiste (adapted from the novel by Elfride Jelinek), and Léa’s awakening as she experiences sensual feelings for her friend Madeleine (Miou-Miou) in Diane Kurys’s Coup de foudre (Entre Nous) (1983). Girl-ongirl sexuality is also enmeshed in Ma Mère where, following Bataille’s text, the mother has a girlfriend, Réa (Joana Preiss), and has also been erotically involved with a younger woman, Hansi (Emma de Caunes), whom she provides as a lover for her son (played by Louis Garrel).6 In Ma mère the shots of Huppert and Preiss together, drinking champagne, deep kissing in a taxi, walking the precincts around a club in the Yumbo Centre and lying embraced, Huppert pressed against Preiss’s naked body, all open a hedonistic world of youngness, non-preference, and sexual freedom.7

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Joana Preiss is a regular in Honoré’s films, appearing as the sensual mother of Marcel’s friend, Yvan, in the TV film Tout contre Léo (Close to Léo) (2002), and as Anna, the girlfriend who leaves Paul (Romain Duris), in Dans Paris (2006).8 Preiss is also one of Goldin’s returning models, appearing extensively in her work from 1999 onward when she and her partner moved into Goldin’s New York apartment. Goldin’s volume The Devil’s Playground (2001) collects images from this period. Guido Costa writes that Goldin finds in Preiss “a perfect example of seductive power that comes […] from the irregularity of her features and the magnetism of her persona” (2001, 116). Goldin’s images show Preiss in darkness laughing, resembling Béatrice Dalle (Honoré’s star in his 2002 film 17 fois Cécile Cassard (Seventeen Times Cécile Cassard)). In Eden and After, Goldin’s collection of images of childhood, Preiss appears with her partner Aurèle Ricard and their son Lou. In Lou Laughing in the tub, Sag Harbor, 2000 they are naked in the bath, Preiss’s body half out the water. There is some closeness between these liquid, sexy, family shots and Honoré’s images. Preiss’s role as Réa takes Huppert too into this. Her sexuality and bodily ease rub off on Huppert. The return of Preiss brings Goldin’s and Honoré’s projects incidentally closer. But their proximity is not simply one of bohemian milieu, fashion, and taste in models. While Goldin experiments with family forms, the slideshow, the snapshot, and intimate images of bed, the bath, the beach, bringing to the surface hidden truths, erotic attachments, Honoré too explores vivid family complexities. This comes out in his adaptation of Ma mère, his most feminine film.9 Critical to this film, and to Huppert’s materiality, and the film’s feminine vision, is the work of female director of photography Hélène Louvart. Ma mère is her only collaboration with Honoré. In it, Louvart’s gaze on Huppert, like Goldin’s, is radical and tender. Her work, its milkiness and pallor, its alignment with strong emotions, its attention to tactility, to shadow—close spaces of bed, cuddling, physical tending—speaks of intimacy and a vision in the feminine. She has worked recently on the films of director Alice Rohrwacher, attending to young girls in rural spaces in Italy. Previously Louvart worked with Sandrine Veysset on her films of maternal disturbance, the hayloft images at the start of Y aura-t-il de la neige à Noël?/Will It Snow for Christmas? (1996), with their sunlit, home movie quality and physicality, being signature shots. In Mariana Otero’s documentary about the death of her mother, Histoire d’un secret/History of a Secret (2003), Louvart showed filmy interior spaces, and close-up painted images, by Otero’s mother, of naked women. She has worked with Dominique

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Cabrera, Claire Denis, Mia Hansen-Løve, and Agnès Varda. Her work filming Huppert for Honoré offers a materially feminine vision of the incestuous mother, one that associates the film with Louvart’s other cinematographic approaches to pathos, mourning, and eroticism. Here the pallor and over-exposure that are familiar in her shots serve the solar, burning white light of Honoré’s vision of Bataille.10 They help create a formally unified, absorbing, almost amniotic space. As Philippe Azoury writes: “Ma mère is like a bubble outside time, a place where one never sleeps, and where the blinding summer never ends” (Azoury 2004a).11 Honoré also draws on other feminine points of reference, notably Marguerite Duras. In a DVD interview he refers to Duras’s definition of morality in Hiroshima mon amour (1959): morality is doubting the morality of others. Film critic JeanLuc Douin picks up the reflections of Duras in the film, describing Huppert as “splendid, absolutely splendid” (2004),12 so echoing Duras’s 1985 Libération article about the mother of the murdered child, Grégory, Christine Villemin, “Sublime, forcément sublime Christine V.” Beyond Bataille, Huppert is a Durassian figure in Ma mère. Brangé’s connection between Seyrig and Huppert, in her biography (see endnote 5) is in line with this. In the fashioning of the mother, her physical and psychic presence that Huppert, Louvart, and Honoré achieve between them, the lability and prostration, the silkiness, pallor, and humidity of Seyrig’s AnneMarie Stretter, in Duras’s India Song (1975), are not far. To speak of feminine vision, and to find feminist impulses in Huppert’s appearance in the film, are not to ignore the queer impulse behind Honoré’s works, and here specifically his queering of Bataille, and his sensitive vision of the place and eroticism of la mamma morta for queer sensibilities. It is rather to try to see feminist and queer sensibilities as interlocking here. It is to bring out the ways in which the work of an imaginative actor, Huppert, and visionary director of photography, Louvart, opens Honoré’s film still further to the feminine.13 But before exploring this further, I want to look more closely at the place of Ma mère in Honoré’s work, to see the world Huppert enters in this project, and the director she chooses to work with.

Honoré and Sexual Mothers In an interview with Libération, Honoré sets Ma mère in the context of his early film viewing and also his own affective history. He creates a cinematic primal scene for his own cinema, revealing: “Coming across Visconti’s The Damned

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when I was about 11, I had the very strong feeling that it was dangerous watching certain films” (Azoury 2004c).14 Visconti’s film shows the erotic encounter between Sophie von Essenbeck (Ingrid Thulin) and her son Martin (Helmut Berger) within the broader frame of the Third Reich and the fall of a corrupt capitalist family. Azoury comments that Fassbinder and Pasolini, as well as Visconti, inspired Honoré’s taste for “cruel beauty,”15 placing him in a further queer, contestatory aesthetic line. Honoré pauses over the erotic relation of The Damned, recalling: “I had an amorous passion for my mother before the death of my father” (Azoury 2004c).16 Azoury speaks too of Honoré’s association of his mother with Jacques Demy’s Lola (Anouk Aimé), adding a further queer link to mother/son love.17 In line with Azoury’s thinking about Visconti, Fassbinder, and Pasolini, Nick Rees-Roberts further identifies Honoré’s homages to Pasolini in Ma mère, arguing aptly for the way in which Honoré thus adds a “queer dimension to the European epistemology of death and desire” (2008, 98). In interview in L’Humanité, Honoré reflects on why he chose to turn to Bataille: “In an era which is very liberal in terms of mores and the economy, it seemed urgent and interesting to me to bring back his libertarian message” (Melinard 2004).18 He asks for a return to Bataille’s literature of transgression, his vision of the disorder and darkness of the world. Despite describing the idea of filming Bataille as quasi impossible,19 Douin writes in Le Monde: “Christophe Honoré’s success comes from his perspective, his understanding that Bataille’s prose reflects fantasies and mental humiliations rather than erotic sketches, and that his characters are made the object of a dissolution of forms in which a chaos, an infinity can be seen” (2004).20 As Douin implies, Ma mère is true to Bataille’s sense of “the contaminating force of the pornographic as a way of accessing fundamental but hidden dimensions of subjectivity” (Best and Crowley 2007, 5). Honoré has, through his work, offered a queer re-imagining of family and kinship. In his text Ton père (2017) and his stage play Les Idoles (2019), he offers politically charged reflections on queer parenthood and paternity. While this is an important opening beyond the heteronormative family, one particular aspect of the work is its emphasis on the sexuality of parents. He is not concerned here with incestuous feelings with relation to children, but with the social perception that adult queer sexuality is in some way damaging to children raised in its proximity. His films and writing have opened to more multidirectional mutual fascination between children and adults respecting the autonomy and affective lives of each. In an interview, Julian Nahmias comments: “The families in your films most often function on the verge of sexual promiscuity” (Gerstner and

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Nahmias 2015, 190). Acknowledging that most of his stories take place in a family landscape, Honoré replies: “I have this idea that the family is a privileged locus for talking about one’s sexuality rather than a place where one defines one’s sexuality. Obviously this is exactly the opposite of what most people think” (2015, 190).21 His approach in Ma mère is close to Bataille in the way he brings out and parades incestuous desire as a hidden aspect of subjectivity. Ma mère releases sensations about the mother as erotic and as desiring. Honoré confronts what is feared and surmised, by children and by women themselves. He experiments with film as an alluring space for letting these scenarios play out, for dramatizing a story that breaks sacred rules, that has a queasy, vertiginous sexual charge.22 I argue for this as liberatory, as part of a sex-positive queer embrace of sexual fantasy, of extreme sex, an apprehension of the weirdness and mess of sexuality in the family. Releasing this, looking at it, feeling it, is oddly stringent, cathartic, freeing. It is made possible through the unique properties of Huppert.

Adapting Bataille A strangeness of Honoré’s adaptation is the way it realizes the bodily acts Bataille imagines across the bodies of real actors. Hélène, the erotic mother of Bataille’s text, is more than a fantasy, embodied by Huppert. Her assumption of the role, and involvement in its acts, the familiarity of her image and her body, draw more attention to the mother, and her desire, than does Bataille’s text. Huppert’s magnetism organizes the film around her agony and ecstasy, her drama of ageing, her libido, her sex act with her child, her eating of earth, and dying. Honoré makes this a film about female physicality, about her mortal coil.23 His take on Bataille, with Huppert, queerly approaches feminist discussions of maternal subjectivity. This is an important part of the feminist and queer alliance this film makes possible, through the collaborative work on Honoré and Huppert. Here it is useful to draw in thought about maternal subjectivity and materiality. For psychoanalyst Anne Dufourmantelle: “Every mother is savage. Savage in that she belongs to a memory that is far older than her, to a body that is more originary than her own body, mud, sand, water, matter, liquid, blood, humours, to a body of death, rotting and war, to a celestial virgin body too” (2001, 11).24 Dufourmantelle sees the child abandoned to this savage part of the mother

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when they come into the world. She sees the mother having no control over this savagery, in its primeval origins and bodily, material urgency. This savagery stretches the mother between extreme feelings for her child, as Dufourmantelle explains, it is a form of madness rendering a mother capable of infanticide and also of the greatest, self-sacrificing love for her child (2001, 24). Dufourmantelle feels maternity as morass, as sexual, mythological, immemorial tumult of feeling. Her terms of reference are material, elemental.25 Such feminist thinking stretches out to a forgiving and liberal understanding of maternal intensities, eroticism, and madness.26 This is by no means to license sexual relations with children, but to shed light on hidden, repressed areas of psychic life. I see Honoré, Bataille, and such feminist thinking in queer accord. Huppert, her soft fearlessness, helps this alignment. This comes in her choice of role, and in the ways she is pictured by Louvart, but also, mercurially, in the very material qualities she can bring into her performance. Huppert meets the challenge of embodying a figure, the mother in Bataille, who dissolves form and boundaries. Her charisma and seductiveness, her very desirable pliability, allow attachment to her and a feminine, feminist apprehension of all her performance as the desiring mother frees up and makes felt. Bataille’s text imagines a mother whose qualities are associated with softness, liquidity, and fire. Several times the text returns, echoing Proust’s bedtime drama, to the mother’s “extreme softness” (1966, 11, 38).27 The son refers to the erotic world he knows with his mother as “our realm of tenderness” (81).28 His mother is seen as liquid, deforming: “Suddenly her features deformed. Like melting wax, they grew soft, for an instant the lower lip disappearing into the mouth” (17).29 When she asks her son to kiss her, “she was red, she had what’s called a face on fire” (26).30 It would seem hard to capture such metamorphosis and deliquescence, the soft morphing of feeling on film, but these states and images flow through the material imagining and modeling of Huppert, and the versatility and ambiguity of her acting, in Ma mère. If Honoré is interested in metamorphosis and shapeshifting, an elasticity of affect, he borrows too from Bataille the expressivity of the mother’s states of dress and undress, her elegance, and the slipperiness of her clothes. The son narrates: “We covered each other with kisses. Her blouse had slid off her shoulders such that I clasped her semi-naked body in my arms” (19).31 The falling clothes express the slide into eroticism, what the son describes as “the mad sensuality we were slipping into” (79).32 He notices his mother’s makeup and low-cut dresses and particularly a dress “the colour of flesh” (70).33 In this rose dress, he says,

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“my mother seemed tiny to me, light, all shoulders and celestial glances” (70).34 Her dress undresses her (recalling Gautier’s poem “A une robe rose”). In the final erotic scenes of the text, the mother undresses herself: “My mother took off her blouse and trousers. She came naked into bed” (125).35 In Bataille, the mother’s melting, deforming, and liquidity, the specter of her face, melding jouissance and horror, looks back to the “swamp of obscenity” (29),36 the rape of the mother by the father that is the son’s origin, and also looks on to the mother’s delirium and final death. As he looks at her face seeming to melt the son avows: “It seemed to me in my anguish that the void was engulfing me” (19).37 Honoré takes Huppert into this void, a swamp of maternal savagery, of eroticism, obscenity, and death. His film, feeling for Huppert’s textures, moving through her states of being, runs, like Bataille, between eroticism and the void. Huppert gives her body over, she yields, and is moved and stretched, engulfed, and she seems to embrace, allow, enjoy every twist. She is concerted, delirious, solar, and unfearing. Huppert brings her own peculiar erotic sureness and invulnerability to this. She delivers herself calmly, blithely, opening space for enjoyment and for new apprehensions of eroticism and subjectivity. Key to what is achieved in the film, to what Huppert’s engagement makes possible, is a type of material and gestural imagining, where varying poses and images of Huppert allow a serial, unfixed apprehension of her. Throughout

Figure 5.1  Huppert in Ma mère (Christophe Honoré 2004) with her body laid out to be looked at.

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Ma mère she is arranged across the frame, falling, prone, like the figures of Dalí’s Le Phénomène de l’extase/The Phenomenon of Ecstasy (1933). The film also foreshadows Nan Goldin’s grid pictures in her Scopophilia project (2010–), initially inspired by a commission from Patrice Chéreau (see Wilson 2019). In these images Goldin co-positions photographs of prone and naked bodies, intimate images from her own back catalogue, with photographs she took in the Louvre and other French museums of details from paintings and sculpture. Goldin re-invests in the act of looking, championing pleasure, for women, in viewing and being viewed, as ecstatic, nurturing, and transformative. Such work is initiated also by Huppert in the ways in which she gives over and exposes her own body seemingly fearlessly, and with pleasure. Honoré and Louvart offer variations on a recumbent Huppert, the images running between death and ecstasy. Huppert in Ma mère lays out her body to be looked at. She is sinuous and silken, pallid like Louvart’s cinematography. She seems to take pleasure in her own lazy, erotic image. She first appears coming home out of the darkness in a cream silk charmeuse dress with a lustrous surface. She is like an apparition, the light on her dress conjuring day at night. In further shots, she is in a similarly pale shirt after she has fallen on the terrace of the family house. She lies prone, her unconscious image looking forward to shots of her tended corpse at the end of the film. An ensuing frame shows her wrapped in pale sheets, her naked feet emerging. Her face cocooned on a pillow, her body wrapped in pale sheets, and the white curtains behind—characteristic billowing shots from Louvart—conjure images of coma, of death, of marriage, of the Vestal Virgins. In further horizontal images she swims in her villa pool. It is night, her dress is dark, but the illuminated pool holds her in crystalline turquoise water, shadows, and reflections playing across her pale limbs. She throws herself into this aquatic world. Her liquidity is further emphasized as she lies in a blue dance frock, her legs bared, and stretches back her head, fully prone, her body extended. Her flexibility, her arcing, traced here in these various gestures and framings, shadow the sequence where she wears her rose colored dress. Here the film reaches its more explicit reckonings with maternal eroticism. Huppert’s material presence, her yielding performance, her fearlessness and pleasure are key. The characters return from the Yumbo Centre. Hélène’s dress is pink silk like a petticoat. Once home she lies prone in an inverted shot, her hand on her sex below the dress. The cream folds of the sheets, the pallor of her skin, the creases in her dress, and shade where her nipples show create an infinitely soft image. Pierre tries to make love to Réa who is naked and at first resisting him. He moves

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to nuzzle his mother’s knees, licking her calves as he moves with Réa. Although the actors are unrelated, the force of the fiction creates shock as Garrel’s lips reach Huppert’s skin. She moves her leg away like an animal brushing at a fly. In the next frame her torso is visible, and the soft drapes of the rose dress, folds of the muslin curtain behind her, and her hand with pale pearl nails. She moves to sit up on her shoulder, reclining. She seems avid, impervious, watching Pierre and Réa outside the frame. Hélène’s head moves just a little and the shot cuts to Pierre, entering Réa, and looking straight at Hélène. His view of her makes him come, which he does under her gaze. He hides his head in his arms. Hélène now lies around Réa, rubbing along her skin like a cat. Réa’s naked torso is shadowed by Hélène’s in the rose dress. Hélène lifts the fabric baring her rear, caressing Réa. The reclining, prostrate shots find their culmination in this strange, silent, balletic sequence. Maternal eroticism is pictured in this image of soft reclining, of Huppert’s apparent imperviousness. These excesses do lead Hélène to leave Pierre, saying they went too far. She is missing for half an hour in the film, a gap Honoré describes, on the DVD interview, as a sort of black hole. She re-emerges in a hotel room with Réa, but now Hélène refuses to party saying all is burnt out. She contemplates her son, knowing that he has forgotten her in the arms of Hansi. Hélène exits past billowing white curtains onto the balcony. She is silhouetted with palm fronds behind her. In her hands she picks up soil, loose earth. It is soft as it runs through

Figure 5.2  Mother and son: Huppert with Louis Garrel in Ma mère (Christophe Honoré 2004).

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her hands like sand. She places the soil on her wet tongue, her mouth open to receive it, her lips closing. She holds in her mouth the rough earth, its intrusion erotic, creating a spasm of feeling and horror for the viewer.38 Huppert herself seems untouched, unfazed. Hélène returns to Pierre as the film reaches its agony. In a fever dream, as a suicidal act, she invites him to sleep with her. The shots are in darkness with close-up lit images of their faces. Her hands unzip his fly and feel down for his cock. It is like this, cutting herself, letting out her blood, that she chooses to die, her head thrown back, arced, like Saint Theresa. Huppert, returning in these last stages of the film, soft, erotic, death-bound, is magisterial. Ma mère is a loose, indulgent film, extended, sometimes uncontrolled. Huppert’s performance and its channeling of Hélène’s desire for her son, her luxuriating in her own waning sensuality, and her labile softness are never less than rapturous. She gives a recognizable presence and agency, as well as material realness and sensuality to the more ungraspable, projected, fantasy mother image of Bataille’s text. Huppert’s choice to take this part, and in playing it her control, her intelligence, and her desire all saturate Honoré’s film adaptation and bring his libertarian message in closer alignment with feminine and feminist reckonings with eroticism and maternal subjectivity. Her willingness to give over her body, to lay it out, to expose its lability, explored through the film in a series of poses and in a play of textures and surfaces, further opens the sensuality of the project, making it Bataillean in its extensions and deliquescent images, but always also something more, something feminine, and freeing.

Huppert and Angot I began by evoking images of Huppert by Nan Goldin, a photographer who, like Honoré, has made feminist and queer art out of erotic extremes. Huppert’s association with Goldin, her appearance in her pictures, echoes and adds texture to her commitment to realizing a feminist, queer maternal eroticism with Honoré. I want to close with reference to another ally of Huppert’s, similarly engaged with contemporary perspectives on sexuality, writer Christine Angot. In 2012 Les Inrockuptibles published a conversation between Isabelle Huppert and Angot. Angot’s work has developed radical writing of the self, following in the line of Marguerite Duras and Hervé Guibert. Angot has been startling in particular in her denunciation of her father’s sexual acts when she was a teenager and in her explicit detailing of these, as well as her painful evocation of

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her parents’ love affair, and of her own erotic and maternal life. She has brought a new extremism to life-writing. She offers a reckoning with the damage of abuse, yet at the same time a candid, sex-positive, feminist defense of female agency and pleasure. In this her art comes close to Honoré and Goldin. She also offers an example of an author who puts herself at stake, serenely, forcefully in her writing and performance. In this Huppert seems to find something of herself. In her discussion of the self and writing with Angot, Huppert says: “An accepted idea is that actors explore lives other than their own, that they would come out of themselves … For me, cinema is quite the reverse. It links me back all the time to myself. Fiction is only a pretext, the cord that attaches me to this centre” (Lalanne 2012).39 In this umbilical image she sees film taking her back to herself. Huppert’s work with Honoré, her plunge into maternity, eroticism, annihilation, the authenticity and realness she achieves involve her autonomy, her physical giving over of herself, her approach to an undisclosed truth. She opens herself, the film, the viewer, to maternal eroticism, its savagery and madness, neither phallic nor destabilized, but liquid and burning all at once. She makes of this an opportunity to open, to contemplate extremes of self, body, and love, drawing attention to the mother, her sensuality, her queer desire.

Notes 1 2 3

4

5

Ma mère was produced by Paolo Branco, who also curated seasons of films to accompany the touring Huppert exhibition. “Isabelle Huppert a un art très sophistiqué à nous convier au plus près d’elle, tout en maintenant une distance. Elle ne confond pas l’intimité avec la familiarité.” In her monograph on Huppert, Murielle Joudet comments: “le personage qu’elle incarne doit être sacrifié” (“the character she plays must be sacrificed”) (2018, 12); she notes disturbingly that already in 1976 Huppert was described as “la comédienne la plus violée du cinéma français” (“the actress who has been most frequently raped in French cinema”) (2018, 12). Translations from the French are my own. The mother in Bataille’s text is only thirty-two. Honoré and Huppert stage a mother of a different age, addressing ageing and desirability. In Honoré’s film Hélène wants to go out with her young son so that people will take him for her younger lover. “un acteur peut créer comme un peintre ou un sculpteur.” In this biography of Seyrig, Mireille Brangé briefly compares the actor of L’ Année dernière à Marienbad (1961) and Isabelle Huppert, seeing them in the same lineage (182).

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Garrel’s various roles as sons in incestuous families would merit longer discussion. In Valéria Bruni Tedeschi’s Un château en Italie/A Castle in Italy (2013), his character, Nathan, reacts with horror when his mother, played by Marie Rivière, recalls having an orgasm as she was giving birth to him. 7 Here my reading differs from that of Nick Rees-Roberts who argues that “[t]he pair’s collaborative—rather than amorous—relationship follows the novel’s ambivalence on lesbianism, and the film forecloses the development of female same-sex attachment beyond titillating provocation” (2008, 98). 8 Azoury writes: “Joana possède l’animalité qu’appelait le rôle de Réa” (“Joana has the animality Réa’s part called for”) (2004a). She has also played the mother of the family of flesh-eaters in Julia Ducournau’s Grave (Raw) (2016). See Rees-Roberts (2008, 99) for further discussion of the casting of Preiss. 9 Honoré is a wonderful director of women, not least of the actor Chiara Mastroianni, who appears in many of his films and most recently as an erotically active law professor in Chambre 212 (On a Magical Night) (2019). 10 Jean-Luc Douin describes Ma mère as a “film solaire, à la lumière aveuglante” (“solar film, with blinding light”) (2004). He goes on to speak of the film’s white nights, its soiling and over-exposure, and its (Bataillean) sky blue diluted in swimming pool water. 11 “Ma mère ressemble à une bulle hors du temps, un endroit où l’on ne dort jamais, et où l’été aveuglant serait infini.” 12 “splendide, forcément splendide.” 13 Justine Malle, the director’s daughter, reveals that Louis Malle had planned to adapt Bataille’s text. Listing her father’s unrealized adaptations, she includes “une autre de Ma mère de Georges Bataille, première ébauche du Souffle au Coeur” (“another of Georges Bataille’s My Mother, a first version of Murmur of the Heart”) (2005, 104). Malle goes on to make a film of maternal eroticism, with Lea Massari in the role of the mother. Her performance is rapturous, but the film focuses far less on her subjectivity and her materiality than does Honoré’s Ma mère with Huppert. 14 “En tombant vers 11 ans sur Les Damnés de Visconti, j’ai eu le sentiment très fort qu’il y avait un danger à voir certains films.” 15 “la beauté cruelle.” 16 “j’avais une passion amoureuse pour ma mère avant la mort de mon père.” Honoré’s father died in 1985 when the filmmaker was fifteen. In Ma mère the erotic relations between mother and son flower after the accidental death of the father. 17 Honoré writes about Demy’s queerness in the text Ton Père (2017). 18 “Dans une époque très libérale au niveau des moeurs et de l’économie, il m’a semblé urgent et intéressant de faire réentendre son message libertaire.” 19 Azoury too speaks of Honoré’s folie in attempting this (2004b).

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20 “La réussite de Christophe Honoré tient justement à son regard, sa compréhension que la prose de Bataille reflète fantasmes et humiliations mentales plus que des saynètes érotiques, et que ses personnages font l’objet d’une dissolution des formes où s’entrevoit un chaos, un infini.” 21 He comments as well at this juncture: “From a cinematic standpoint, I seem to deal with beds as if they were dining tables” (Gerstner and Nahmias 2015, 190–1). This brings him close to the beds of Nan Goldin. 22 Elisabeth Lequeret argues in Cahiers du cinéma: “la jouissance, ici, ne naît pas des étreintes mais du sentiment de leur interdiction, des tabous qu’elles pulvérisent, du dégoût absolu de soi qu’elles engendrent” (“jouissance here doesn’t come from the embraces but from the feeling that they are forebidden, from the taboos they break, from the absolute self-disgust they engender”) (2004, 71). While this draws apt attention to the breaking of taboos, I argue that there is also sensory pleasure from the materiality of Honoré’s film. 23 Joudet offers strong discussion of Huppert’s work on female ageing with Catherine Breillat (2018, 189). 24 “Toute mère est sauvage. Sauvage en ce qu’elle appartient à une mémoire plus ancienne qu’elle, à un corps plus originel que son propre corps, boue, sable, eau, matière, liquide, sang, humeurs, à un corps de mort, de pourriture et de guerre, à un corps de vierge céleste aussi.” 25 Joudet looking at Huppert’s sexual roles since the late 1990s finds in her work “un désir qui fait désordre” (“a desire which creates disorder”) and “une sensualité sauvage” (“a savage sensuality”) (2018, 191). 26 Jacqueline Rose, in her 2018 volume, looking at the idealization and scapegoating of mothers, also further focuses in on maternal feeling as consuming and unspeakable. She explores in particular, like Honoré, the taboos around parents (here, mothers) having a sexual life and the further taboos surrounding any sexual aspect to a mother’s intense feeling for her child. 27 “extrême douceur.” 28 “notre royaume de tendresse.” 29 “Soudain ses traits se déformèrent. Comme une cire coule, ils mollissaient, un instant la lèvre inférieure entra dans la bouche.” 30 “elle était rouge, elle avait, comme on dit, le visage en feu.” 31 “Nous nous couvrions de baisers. Sa chemise aux épaules avait glissé, si bien que, dans mes bras, je serrai son corps demi-nu.” 32 “la folle sensualité où nous glissions.” 33 “la couleur de la chair.” 34 “ma mère me paraissait infime, légère, toute en épaules, en regards célestes.” 35 “Ma mère retira devant moi sa chemise et son pantalon. Elle se coucha nue.” 36 “marécage de l’obscénité.”

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37 “Il me sembla dans mon angoisse que le vide m’envahissait.” 38 For Douin, this scene “symbolise son inexorable marche vers la tombe. Passant de l’ébriété à la mélancolie avec la légèreté d’une absente, elle est un corps d’où la vie se retire, un cadavre en sursis” (“symbolises her inexorable path towards the tomb. Moving from inebriation to melancholy with the lightness of someone missing, she is a body whose life is draining out, a corpse on borrowed time”) (2004). 39 “Une idée reçue veut que les acteurs exploreraient d’autres vies que la leur, sortiraient d’eux-mêmes … Pour moi, le cinéma c’est tout le contraire. Ça me relie tout le temps à moi-même. La fiction n’est qu’un prétexte, un cordon qui me rattache à ce centre.”

References Azoury, Philippe. 2004a. “Honoré au champ de Bataille.” Libération, January 21. Azoury, Philippe. 2004b. “C’est ‘Ma mère’, son Bataille.” Libération, May 12. Azoury, Philippe. 2004c. “Un art de famille.” Libération, May 19. Bataille, Georges. 1966 and 1994. Ma mère. Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert. Best, Victoria and Martin Crowley. 2007. The New Pornographies: Explicit Sex in Recent French Fiction and Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Brangé, Mireille. 2018. Delphine Seyrig: Une vie. Paris: Nouveau Monde Editions. Chammah, Ronald. (ed). 2005. Isabelle Huppert: Woman of Many Faces. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Costa, Guido. 2001. Nan Goldin. London and New York: Phaidon. Douin, Jean-Luc. 2004. “L’ abîme du désir interdit porté à l’écran.” Le Monde, May 19. Dufourmantelle, Anne. 2001 and 2016. La Sauvagerie maternelle. Paris: Calmann-Lévy; paperback edition Paris: Editions Payot & Rivages. Gerstner, David A. and Julian Nahmias. 2015. Christophe Honoré: A Critical Introduction. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press. Goldin, Nan. 2001. The Devil’s Playground. London and New York: Phaidon. Harkins, Gillian. 2009. Everybody’s Family Romance: Reading Incest in Neoliberal America. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Honoré, Christophe. 2017. Ton père. Paris: Mercure de France. Joudet, Murielle 2018. Isabelle Huppert: Vivre ne nous regarde pas. Paris: Capricci. Lalanne, Jean-Marc. 2012. “Isabelle Huppert et Christine Angot, rencontre intime.” Les Inrockuptibles, October 23, 2012. https://www.lesinrocks.com/2012/10/23/cinema/ huppert-angot-rencontre-11314855/. Lequeret, Elisabeth. 2004. “Ma mère.” Cahiers du cinema, May 2004, 70–1. Malle, Justine. 2005. “Amère victoire: Les projets non réalisés de Louis Malle.” Positif 538 (December): 103–6.

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Melinard, Michaël. 2004. “Interview with Christophe Honoré.” L’ Humanité, May 22. Rees-Roberts, Nick. 2008. French Queer Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rose, Jacqueline. 2018. Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty. London: Faber and Faber. Toubiana, Serge. 2005. Preface to Ronald Chammah. (ed.) Isabelle Huppert: Woman of Many Faces, 9–14. New York: Harry N. Abram. Wilson, Emma. 2019. The Reclining Nude: Agnès Varda, Catherine Breillat and Nan Goldin. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

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Huppert’s Public: Audience Reception and the Cinema of Michael Haneke Joseph McGonagle

Widely seen as French cinema’s greatest female actor, the appeal of Isabelle Huppert to filmmakers is clear. For her long-standing collaborator, the leading Austrian director Michael Haneke, her talent is simply without equal, declaring that she “has such professionalism, the way she is able to represent suffering. At one end you have the extreme of her suffering and then you have her icy intellectualism. No other actor can combine the two” (quoted in Tidd 2012, 33). Despite the longevity of Huppert’s career and considerable critical acclaim she has garnered, however, the lack of scholarship addressing how audiences have received her remains glaring. This absence seems all the more conspicuous for two further key reasons. First, as Dyer (2004) and Stacey (1994) established, audiences play a fundamental role in helping construct a star’s image. Yet critics have arguably ignored the voices of such audiences regarding Huppert. Second, as Vincendeau argued: “in France […], stars are absolutely central to the film industry in determining and influencing projects and in attracting spectators to the cinema (as well as the video shop). They are equally central to the identity of the films for the audience” (2000, 40). Building on works that have considered aspects of online reviewer responses, such as Waldron (2010) and Pasquier et al. (2014), this chapter seeks to contribute to French film studies by focusing specifically on how such audiences have received a leading star. In doing so, it addresses this curious lacuna within existing literature on Huppert, providing the first study of its kind on the actor. Huppert’s prolific filmography, however, presents its own problem: many of her performances could merit inclusion. In order to begin identifying the chief contours of her reception via detailed critical analysis, selecting a single film where she has a major starring role, which also has attracted a significant number of audience reviews, seemed logical. Several

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contenders could have been chosen, but as a point of departure for such research on Huppert, attention centers purposely on audience responses to one of her most acclaimed and notorious roles, that of Erika Kohut in Haneke’s La Pianiste/ The Piano Teacher (2001). The importance of audiences to Huppert’s own practice and vision of cinema makes her an especially intriguing actor to study. She has defined her own approach to acting precisely in terms of spectatorship, arguing that (by dint of reading a film’s script beforehand): “Ultimately, as an actor, you also act as a spectator. You are a reader and spectator even before being an actor […]. That’s also what being an actor entails: reproducing your feelings as a spectator” (quoted in Delorme 2016, 13).1 Moreover, Huppert considers the audience as fundamental to cinema production generally, revealing that: “For me moviemaking is really about the present time, nothing before and not much after it’s done. It doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to the audience” (quoted in Meza 2019). The selection of La Pianiste as case study for such research is also particularly apposite. Earning Huppert her Best Actress award at Cannes for the second time, it constitutes one of her most famous roles, and as nearly twenty years have elapsed since the film’s release, a significant number of audience reviewers have articulated their responses to it online. Furthermore, Haneke himself is a director who also defines his approach to cinema as explicitly audience-centered, explaining that: I am always thinking about the audience in my films, and how they will react. You have to think about them if you write a screenplay. If you write a novel, a reader can put it away and pick it up again later. But in the theater or cinema, if you lose the viewer, it’s over. You have to always think what you can do that will keep them with you. (quoted in Goodridge 2012, 137)

In order to gauge precisely how the public has responded to Huppert in La Pianiste, this chapter scrutinizes a dataset of audience reviews collated from the leading French film website Allociné, posted between 2001 and 2018. Using such material comprises distinct advantages: in contrast to other reception sources such as bespoke questionnaires or structured focus groups, where responses are incited by specific points, online reviews are spontaneously authored and then uploaded. Their content is therefore ostensibly generated without regard to any researcher’s agenda, and its inherent mediation. Caution must be expressed, however, concerning quite how unprompted, or representative of reviewer opinions, such comments may seem: the reasons for making them

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may be multiple, and ultimately rest opaque. Moreover, researchers should, in any case, “avoid the danger of assuming that people say what they mean in any simple sense” (Thomas 2002, 71) and as casting aspersions upon the motivations behind reviews or their veracity would be “contentious and unethical” (Perriam and Waldron 2016, 10), reviews must therefore be taken on their own terms within this particular context. Accordingly, it is this approach that guides analysis throughout. Nevertheless, even though online reviews readily reveal a rich amount of detail, as Rose argues, “the full act of audiencing […], is an embodied and social experience” (2016, 279). Analyzing such reviews without further knowledge of the precise contexts in which they were written, or the films themselves watched, necessarily limits the scope of enquiry. Equally, although the reviews pre-date this project and were created independently of it, as Waldron and Murray argue, the influence of the researcher on the collation of fields of data, how they are analyzed, and therefore the “discursive production of audiences” must also be acknowledged (2014, 63). The choice to prioritize reviews that dwell on Huppert is therefore a necessary corollary of this chapter’s focus but, as the data analysis below demonstrates, it also reflects the undeniable desire of many reviewers to discuss the actor and her performance. Probing such an area does, however, present ethical challenges. As Buchanan notes, within the field of internet research ethics, “a common assumption holds that the greater the acknowledged publicity of the venue, the less obligation there may be to protect individual privacy, confidentiality, and rights to informed consent” (2011, 95). Although the comments cited here are freely available online, the material considered is not sensitive, and the nature of the research poses no apparent risk to human subjects, these data were evidently not solicited explicitly for this project, and informed consent was not sought. By way of mitigation, reviewer aliases are therefore replaced by numerical codes, and review publication dates are not disclosed. Furthermore, for clarification’s sake, no interaction regarding this research has taken place with any reviewers, and only material accessed publicly has been analyzed and cited. While, as Wilkinson and Thelwall (2011, 397) argue, it may be preferential from a privacy perspective to paraphrase reviewer comments rather than cite them verbatim, as Sixsmith and Murray point out when discussing research ethics regarding email posts and archives, “for qualitative researchers, such an approach can be seen to impoverish the data because paraphrasing the content of email posts may undermine the researcher’s interpretive purchase” (2001, 428). This represents a further ethical dilemma, but as this chapter explores and demonstrates precisely

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how audience reviewers articulate their responses written electronically to Huppert in Haneke’s film, retaining such textual detail is paramount. Given that these data have otherwise been anonymized as outlined, reviewer excerpts are therefore reproduced throughout, and—aside from the use of ellipsis to aid concision and grammar, and the adjusting of spacing relative to punctuation marks to conform to typographic style—transcribed exactly, with original spelling and grammatical errors maintained. In order to delineate the defining features of this public reception of Huppert, the following sections analyze these data by exploring three main research questions: first, how reviewers position themselves with regard to Huppert and her performance; secondly, how crucial Huppert is for reviewers’ experience of the film; and, finally, which insights such research can yield more broadly on a figure such as Huppert. Before looking in detail in qualitative terms at the comments made regarding Huppert’s performance in La Pianiste, quantitative analysis of how Haneke’s film overall was rated proves enlightening. As Barker et al. (2008, 9) argue, combining qualitative and quantitative methods enables both the individual specificities of discrete audience responses to be retained and much wider generalizations to be made, allowing a broader and more detailed picture to be established than using one approach alone. Given the amount of numerical and textual information that this dataset comprises, adopting such a mixed-methods approach is the most optimal way to capture as much of its richness and complexity as possible, while capitalizing on the benefits of triangulation, illumination, and diversification that such methodology affords (Bergin 2018, 180–3). As Allociné ratings are awarded to a film as a whole, however, rather than individually to starring actors, analysis of such data here remains comparatively brief. Close scrutiny nevertheless reveals just how much the film divided reviewers. On this dataset’s census date of July 22, 2019, La Pianiste’s landing page listed the score from “spectators” as 3.2/5.0, derived from a total of 2121 ratings. In terms of how this compared globally on the website, no numerical rankings were provided but the fictional feature film listed with the highest score (4.6, from over 87,000 ratings) was Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994). Even if Haneke’s film might appeal to contrasting tastes, the score of 3.2 for La Pianiste suggests a rather lukewarm response from reviewers, albeit one not wholly negative. Statistical analysis of ratings for the film uncovers further insights. For clarity, out of these 2121 ratings, only those accompanied by a review are listed individually on the website, so subsequent statistical analysis of reviewer

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Figure 6.1  Scores awarded by Allociné reviewers for La Pianiste/The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke 2001).

ratings relates exclusively to these data. Based upon the 218 ratings published from reviewers, calculations reveal that their overall mean score coincidentally is also 3.2, suggesting broad agreement between Allociné users whether they posted a review or not. In contrast, further calculations expose a notably mixed picture. The mode of 5.0 (with a standard deviation of 1.5) is the highest score possible but the median of 3.8 is considerably lower. As Figure 6.1 indicates, reviewer scores spike distinctively at 1.0, 2.5, 4.0, and 5.0, indicating the film’s divisiveness. There is clearly a lack of consensus with regard to individual reviewer ratings. In order to probe how these relate to the reception of Huppert and her performance and thereby establish a more granular picture of meaning in the accompanying audience reviews, qualitative research methods are needed. By deploying a combination of content, discourse, and narrative analysis, a supple methodological framework was therefore devised that helped identify recurring patterns and prevalent themes, while also facilitating scrutiny of the linguistic intricacies of different reviews. In order to assist categorization, reviews were initially coded in terms of the following predetermined criteria: first, whether actors or acting in La Pianiste are mentioned; second, whether Huppert or her

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performance are specifically cited; and, finally, whether the terms used to discuss Huppert or her performance are mainly positive, negative, neutral, or unclear. This preliminary stage of analysis immediately identified a compelling series of patterns. First, the overwhelming majority of reviewers (166/218, or 76.15 percent) do mention the actors or acting generally: evidence that this constitutes a significant aspect of the audience experience for them. Moreover, Huppert and her performance here play a particularly important role: a significant majority of these reviews (123/166 or 74.10 percent) cite one or both of these aspects, totaling over half of all reviews posted (123/218, or 56.42 percent). Clearly Huppert and her performance are topics that many reviewers want to discuss, but, given such interest, a close examination of the reasons they advance is needed. Before delving further into detailed qualitative analysis, initial coding revealed a distinctive finding: 83.74 percent (103/123) use generally positive terms; 13 percent (16/123) use generally neutral or unclear terms; and only 3.25 percent (4/123) use generally negative terms. While reviewers not enamored with Huppert or her performance may be less inclined to mention such aspects— especially if, as Larceneux (2007) has shown, Allociné reviewers are more likely to post positive reviews than negative ones—the stark disparity between these percentages signifies emphatic approval for Huppert and her performance: a result all the more striking given the marked variance in how La Pianiste is rated overall. In addition, by calculating the means of reviewer scores within these coding categories, a further pattern emerges: the group with the highest mean (3.78; with a median of 4.00 and standard deviation of 1.16, n=103) is those who use generally positive terms to describe Huppert and her performance. Moreover, this significantly exceeds the film’s overall mean score of 3.20 from both reviewers and non-reviewers alike. Conversely, the lowest mean for the film (0.88; with a median of 0.75 and standard deviation of 0.48, n=4) derives from the very small minority who generally use negative terms instead. While direct causality between these variables cannot be assumed—the rationale for awarding ratings is evidently determined by multiple criteria—this association between scores and attitudes toward Huppert and her performance gestures again toward her importance for reviewers. Indeed, among those who dislike the film, Huppert’s performance is the only reason some award a rating at all, as demonstrated by the following reviewer’s (164) description of La Pianiste as a “film dont le seul véritable intérêt est la magistrale interprétation d’Isabelle Huppert […]. Je ne vois pas d’autre réel intérêt à cette réalisation que le jeu époustouflant d’Isabelle Huppert pour laquelle je mets 2 étoiles” (“film whose

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only real interest is Isabelle Huppert’s masterly acting […]. I don’t see any other real interest in this film apart from the astounding acting by Isabelle Huppert for which I’m putting two stars”). Close detailed analysis of the reviews posted illuminates further Huppert’s significance for reviewers, tellingly revealing the use of a recurrent series of key words and lexical fields to confer praise on Huppert. The impressiveness of her performance is frequently highlighted (117; 166; 207) and seen as a prominent strength of the film. Hence in the words of one reviewer (97): “Dans ‘La Pianiste’, le jeu d’acteur est absolument remarquable. C’est ce qui fait, selon moi, la plus grande force de cette oeuvre. Isabelle Huppert en prof de piano, vieille fille, sèche et autoritaire, en apparence coincée, attirée par des pratiques sadomaso, est vraiment impressionnante” (“In La Pianiste, the acting is absolutely remarkable. It’s what constitutes, for me, the greatest strength of this work. Isabelle Huppert as piano teacher, spinster, cold and authoritarian, appearing uptight, attracted to S&M practices, is really impressive”). For another (73), her performance is so crucial to the film’s success that: “cette oeuvre ne serait rien sans la prestation phénoménale d’Isabelle Huppert, qui incarne une Erika terrifiante. Aucune actrice n’avait été aussi impressionnante depuis Meryl Streep dans ‘Le choix de Sophie’” (“this work would be nothing without the phenomenal acting of Isabelle Huppert, who incarnates a terrifying Erika. No actress has been as impressive since Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice”). By making such a comparison, the reviewer happens to echo Haneke’s own opinion that Huppert “as she has grown older, […] has attained a level of acting that few actors can reach. Except perhaps Helen Mirren or Meryl Streep” (quoted in Cieutat and Rouyer 2012, 215).2 For both the director and reviewer, Huppert clearly belongs to an elite pantheon of actors, and such comments chime with the more widespread critical view that her perceived talent is so exceptional that it forms a key distinctiveness of Huppert’s practice. Accordingly, Allociné reviewers also describe Huppert as magnificent (39; 144) and deem her to have performed magnificently (94; 116). Moreover, several more qualify the actor and her performance as masterful (90; 100; 107; 123; 127; 150). In this respect, the reviewer (70) who argues that Huppert’s performance overshadowed all others by stating that “La pianiste est une grande oeuvre dominée par la prestation magistrale d’ Isabelle Huppert” (“La Pianiste is a great work dominated by the masterly acting of Isabelle Huppert”) also mirrors the towering presence it constitutes across many reviews. For another reviewer (74), such mastery of this role also extends to the effect the film has

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on audiences, asserting that “la folie du personnage que campe magistralement Isabelle Hupert [sic] nous envoie une claque magistrale” (“the madness of the character portrayed brilliantly by Isabelle Huppert gives us a resounding slap”). By positioning Huppert as having such agency—the use of “magistralement” underlining a sense of superior power and control, combined with the use of an active voice (“envoie”)—the rhetorical force of this slap, and its connotations of violence, shock-value, and physicality, is only further reinforced. This sense of dominance is also vividly evoked in another reviewer’s (69) comments, which describe Huppert’s performance as “une Isabelle Huppert encore plus forte que d’habitude, encore plus grandiose, encore plus dominante. C’est un monstre, une claque tellement elle réussit à incarner son personnage avec tellement de justesse, de finesse, de beauté, de force … Personne ne pourrait faire mieux! Impossible!” (“an even stronger Isabelle Huppert than usual, even more grandiose, even more dominant. She’s a monster, and it’s such a slap in the face how she succeeds in incarnating her character with so much accuracy, subtlety, beauty and strength … No one could do better! Impossible!”). Such use of anaphora (“encore plus”) and the accompanying triumvirate of adjectives connoting impressive strength also heightens the impression that, although the reviewer already held Huppert in high esteem, she is considered to have surpassed herself in this performance. The attendant sense of superlativeness is duly reinforced first by the number and variety of nouns used to characterize Huppert’s acting, which together encompass an admirable range of skills, and second, by the conviction with which her unequaled status is asserted, as the two exclamation marks accentuate. Crucially, the admiration so frequently expressed by reviewers is such that, even if they dislike the film as a whole or display a marked antipathy toward the character of Erika Kohut, many dissociate Huppert from these aspects to commend her performance. Several illustrative examples can be cited. First, where a reviewer heavily criticizes the film: “si l’interprétation d’Isabelle Huppert est impressionnante, le film est vraiment dérangeant, dans le mauvais sens du terme. C’est noir, sordide” (117) (“while Isabelle Huppert’s acting is impressive, the film is really disturbing, in the bad sense of the word. It’s dark, sordid”). Second, where reviewers are perplexed by the film: “J’ai trouvé ce film complètement affligeant, sûrement parce que je n’y ai pas compris grand chose au mal-être de Isabelle Huppert qui joue quand même super bien, elle est très crédible dans ce rôle très complexe” (156) (“I found this film completely distressing, surely because I didn’t really understand much about the unhappiness of Isabelle Huppert, who even so acts really well, she is very credible in this very complex role”). Finally, where

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the film is considered unworthy of such adulation: “Bon, Isabelle Huppert joue très bien et ce film a de très bonnes critiques mais moi je ne vais pas dire qu’il est bien sous prétexte que tout le monde le pense […]. Je crois que ce film a été trop sollicité par la presse alors qu’il ne vaut pas grand chose. En revanche, bravo à Isabelle Huppert!” (25) (“Well, Isabelle Huppert acts really well and this film has received very good reviews but me, I’m not going to say it’s good just because everyone thinks so […]. I think that the film has received too much praise by the press but it isn’t that worthy. On the other hand, bravo Isabelle Huppert!”). The notable counter-position adopted by this reviewer also infers that such dissent is the exception that proves the rule: reaffirming that the wider critical consensus on the film and Huppert is overwhelming acclaim. For Huppert’s performance to have conquered so many misgivings is certainly indicative of how well reviewers received it. Such near unanimity of opinion also tellingly aligns with the reaction to the film’s Cannes premiere and Huppert’s award win, as reported by the major French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma: “Isabelle Huppert is frightening. This acting prize, she didn’t just take it but earned it, and what’s more it wasn’t only the jury that unanimously praised the actress’s talent: everyone at Cannes was literally impressed by her work in La Pianiste, whether one likes the film or not. If not a compulsory reaction, it’s one that goes without saying” (Larcher 2001, 24; Larcher’s italics).3 The sheer prevalence of praise in reviews therefore suggests widespread adherence to this dominant norm and a broad synergy in judgment between Cannes attendees and Allociné reviewers: a finding all the more striking given the vehement contempt some reviewers express for the film festival’s choice of programming and prize-giving, labeled elitist and aloof from popular tastes. A further key characteristic of reviewer responses is the repeated description of Huppert’s performance as emblematic of the excellent acting she is deemed to have delivered throughout her career (112; 169; 189; 194), as demonstrated by one reviewer’s (102) declaration that: “comme toujours, la troublante Isabelle Huppert brille de tous feux peu importe le rôle choisi. Celle-ci excelle en tant que manipulatrice machiavélique portée sur le sado-masochisme” (“as ever, the troubling Isabelle Huppert shines brightest no matter the role chosen. She excels as a Machiavellian manipulator focused on sado-masochism”). No further elaboration is provided as to why she excels in this precise role—or quite why she is “troublante”—but thanks to the number of explicit references made to Huppert’s star persona and wider career, other reviewers more readily provide clues as to how the alignment between Huppert as actor and the role of Erika

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Kohut has been identified. Given that Allociné reviewers—many of whom may be located in France and consider themselves cinephiles—may be more likely to be familiar with Huppert and her career than audiences beyond France, for only just over a fifth of reviews that cite her or her performance (29/123, or 23.57 percent) to mention such career-related elements explicitly may nevertheless seem low. Moreover, this constitutes only 13.30 percent (29/218) of reviews overall. This seems a consequence of the understandable tendency of many reviewers to concentrate chiefly on the specificities of Haneke’s film, rather than place La Pianiste into the wider context of Huppert’s career and public reception. For some reviewers, it could be that such elements are deemed common knowledge for those consulting the website, thereby obviating their evocation. Leaving aside this conundrum, the fact that nearly a quarter of reviews that cite Huppert do clearly focus on these areas marks such aspects as key mediating factors in the experience of many reviewers, and thereby worthy of greater scrutiny. Furthermore, La Pianiste is a highly apt film to cite in this regard, given that, as one reviewer argues (210), La Pianiste is “LE film par lequel Huppert est si connue’ (‘THE film for which Huppert is so well-known”).

Figure 6.2  Huppert sniffing a soiled tissue in La Pianiste (Michael Haneke 2001).

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Such renown is certainly not lost on many reviewers, and frequently there is a sense that the role of Erika Kohut—described by one reviewer (209) as “un rôle de perverse sur mesure pour Isabelle Huppert” (“a role as a pervert tailormade for Isabelle Huppert”)—is simply perfect for the actor. Referring to the striking moment where Huppert retrieves a discarded, and presumably semensoaked, tissue in a pornography booth before raising it to her nose and inhaling deeply, another reviewer declares that: “[i]l n’y a qu’elle pour sniffer des kleenex tachés de sperme dans une cabine de videoclub porno sans être ridicule. Elle ose tout. Chapeau!” (“only she could sniff semen-stained tissues in a porno video booth without appearing ridiculous. She’ll do anything. Bravo!”) (107). Neither reviewer develops these precise points further but they evoke a clear association between such roles and the actor: her credibility in inhabiting characters whose sexual desires differ from normative conventions seems beyond doubt for both. An additional reviewer (113) further confirms this link by referring to additional elements of Huppert’s star persona and her work with auteur directors: Les acteurs sont EXCELLENT [sic], ils jouent à la perfection en particulier l’immense Isabelle Huppert la reine du cinéma d’auteur […], c’est très certainement la meilleur interprétation que j’ai peu [sic] voir de ma vie avec Cottilard [sic] dans la môme alors je sais qu’il y en à [sic] qui ne seront pas d’accord avec moi mais Isabelle Huppert ma [sic] tellement bluffé dans ce film, alors certes dans la 1er [sic] partit [sic] Huppert fait du Huppert où elle joue souvent cette femme frigide détestable et dans la 2eme parties [sic] elle est EPOUSTOUFLANTE!!!! (The actors are EXCELLENT, they act with perfection in particular the immense Isabelle Huppert the queen of auteur cinema […], it’s very much the best acting that I have ever seen in my life along with Cotillard in La Vie en rose so I know that some people won’t agree with me but Isabelle Huppert blew my mind so much in this film, though while in the first part Huppert does a Huppert by often playing this frigid hateful woman and in the second part she is ASTOUNDING!!!).

By claiming that not everyone will agree with such an opinion due to the ways in which aspects of Huppert’s role conform to the type described (“cette femme frigide détestable”), the reviewer’s comments suggest that Huppert as actor can be a more divisive figure among audiences than previously cited reviews might imply. For those who dislike her, the expression “Huppert fait du Huppert” can therefore presumably have only negative connotations, and such a formula of words certainly suggests that the actor is well known for playing such parts. As Royer (2015) discusses, these have comprised challenging, complex, and provocative roles,

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where character behavior is typically positioned as rebellious, sexually deviant, and transgressive. In other rare instances where Huppert and her performance are viewed negatively, this notoriety resurfaces in the backhanded compliment that “Huppert est la reine du sourire à l’envers” (85) (“Huppert is the queen of frowning”)—perhaps an example of her “anticipated gesturality” (Hayward 2017, 4) as star—and in open weariness at her typecasting: “I. Huppert devient lassante dans ses rôles de détraquée. (Mais c’est une démonstration de talent, j’en conviens)” (106) (“I. Huppert is becoming wearing with all these unhinged roles. [But they’re proof of her talent, admittedly]”). The curt abbreviation here of Huppert’s first name arguably compounds such disdain. Whether reviewers see Huppert positively or negatively, many evidently do associate such roles with her, and the latter reviewer’s concession in brackets to Huppert’s perceived talent in such roles ultimately reinforces the pattern of praise identified above. Moreover, it is telling that even such a critical reviewer seems compelled to add such a statement: thereby acknowledging that such criticism runs counter to the majority view and potentially further signaling the power of the dominant reception of Huppert’s image on individual reviewer responses. Furthermore, for many reviewers, the role of Erika Kohut itself allows Huppert to affirm what they adjudge to be her acting prowess. In the words of one, her performance “confirme une fois de plus son énorme talent” (“confirms once again her enormous talent”) (76), while another states that: “si elle avait encore besoin de le prouver, Isabelle Huppert confirme qu’elle est une des actrices les plus audacieuses et courageuses. Elle s’investit corps et âme dans ce film douloureux” (“if she still needed to prove it, Isabelle Huppert confirms that she is one of the most audacious and courageous actresses. She invests her body and soul into this painful film”) (77). Added acclaim is bestowed due to the role’s perceived complexity too: one reviewer states that “Isabelle HUPPERT tient certainement là le role [sic] le plus complexe de sa magnifique carrière” (“Isabelle Huppert certainly plays there the most complex role of her magnificent career”) (91) while another declares that “on ne peut qu’etre [sic] admiratif de l’interpretation [sic] d’isabelle hupert [sic] qui se surpasse dans ce role [sic] difficile” (“one can only admire the acting of Isabelle Huppert who excels herself in this difficult role”) (118). In addition, several reviews argue that Huppert’s performance is successful because she can embody seemingly contradictory qualities. For one reviewer (31), this is her ability to be “tantôt froide comme son existence dévouée à une mère possessive […], tantôt fiévreuse comme les tréfonds de ses désirs charnels, sado-masochistes, exacerbés au contact d’un jeune élève brillant et amoureux”

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(“sometimes cold like her life devoted to her possessive mother […], at others feverish like the depths of her carnal and sado-masochistic desires, exacerbated by contact with a brilliant young student in love”), while for others the contradiction hinges on how she can be “sévère et fragile à la fois” (“both severe and fragile”) (54), or “une femme à la fois rigide et fragile” (“a woman both rigid and fragile”) (93). Two particularly intriguing comments explore these aspects further within the film’s wider meaning. The first (49) sees this opposition as pivotal to the film’s enigma, arguing that: “tout le mystère du film réside dans le fait que rien de ce qui agite l’esprit d’Erika n’est jamais dévoilé. Le jeu tout entier d’Isabelle Huppert va dans ce sens. Etrangeté d’une femme déjà morte et pourtant désirable, désirée” (“all the film’s mystery lies in the fact that nothing of what troubles Erika’s spirit is ever revealed. All Isabelle Huppert’s acting follows this logic. The strangeness of a women already dead and yet desirable and desired”). According to this rationale, Huppert’s acting accentuates the inscrutability of Erika Kohut’s character by reinforcing this contrast between elements of death and desire. A binary opposition of presence versus absence is also apparent here, strengthening yet further the sense of mystery surrounding what remains unrevealed, and the strangeness of what is discernable. The use of “jeu” to

Figure 6.3  Presence and absence: Huppert in La Pianiste (Michael Haneke 2001).

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describe Huppert’s acting therefore seems particularly evocative, connoting a sense of playing and toying in her performance, while also underlining her agency as an actor. Such references to Huppert also strongly recall elements of her star image and the qualities perennially attributed to her—including enigma, simultaneous fragility and strength, and an intellectual persona—as evidenced by Royer (2015) and epitomized by Joudet (2018) and Toubiana (1989, 2005). Another review (207) reads her performance initially more in terms of warmth and coldness—also terms frequently associated with Huppert, as Taylor (2018) evinces—but then as part of a wider pattern of confounding appearances by contradiction: Tout démarre par la musique puisque le film se dénomme ainsi: Schubert, son point faible, c’est son for intérieur, c’est le contraire de ce qu’elle est: cette froideur extérieure, c’est une “chaleur” de la musique inexprimée. On peut tout à fait être le contraire de ce qu’on paraît. Et pour ça IH est impressionnante: elle possède ce double jeu qui la trahit par exemple dans cette scène de la répétition où elle doit s’en aller pour ne pas que l’on voie ses yeux rouges. Il y a aussi bien entendu cette folie perverse assez atroce et cette jouissance de la douleur: elle ne fait pas ce qu’elle aime et fait ce qu’elle n’aime pas. Haneke filme comme un témoin: il pose la caméra et laisse tourner. C’est aussi quelque chose de fort, mais moins que cette fin implacable assez douloureuse. (Everything starts with the music given the film’s name: Schubert, her weak spot, it’s her inner self and a contrast to who she is: this exterior coldness, it’s a “warmth” not expressed in the music. One can absolutely be the contradiction of one’s appearance. And for that IH is impressive: she plays this double game that gives her away for example in the rehearsal scene where she has to go out so that no one sees her red eyes. There is also of course this quite atrocious and perverse madness and this intense pleasure in pain: she does not do what she loves and does what she does not enjoy. Haneke films as if he were a witness: he places the camera and lets it roll. It’s something very strong too, but less than the implacable and quite painful ending.)

Note here how the reviewer oscillates between discussing the character of Erika Kohut and the performance of Huppert herself. The specific citing of Huppert (“Et pour ça IH est impressionnante”) indicates high praise for her professional expertise, while the repeated use of “elle”—somewhat blurring the boundaries between role and actor—could be seen as evidence of Huppert’s perceived skill in entirely immersing herself in the role: so much so that, as the penultimate sentence contends, Haneke apparently need only let the camera roll and merely observe rather than direct. Once again, a key skill emphasized is a play identified

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between presence and absence, mediated by desire, and it is the mastery of the ability to convey this contradiction and inner torment as attributed to Huppert that is seen as so laudatory. The enthusiasm expressed is such, however, that the more oxymoronic comments, such as “cette froideur extérieure, c’est une chaleur de la musique inexprimée”—despite the double inverted commas inferring awareness of this contradiction in terms—risk impeding the argument’s clarity. In fact, Huppert’s ostensible qualities are considered so distinct by one reviewer (47) that her craft is judged unparalleled in French cinema, declaring that: “l’art d’Isabelle Huppert est unique, aussi bien dans le registre de la suggestion que dans celui de l’hystérie: c’est notre meilleure actrice!” (“Isabelle Huppert’s artistry is unique, as much in signaling suggestiveness as hysteria: she’s our best actress!”). This characterization is notable too for the way in which, again, two potentially opposing qualities are highlighted: the power of suggestion alongside that of conveying hysteria. The precise sense intended of the latter term, which given the historical associations of female hysteria might seem somewhat loaded, remains undefined but its position here in opposition to the register of “suggestion” once again contends that Huppert possesses a singular ability to simultaneously combine contrasting moods and states within her practice. A further review (111) also underlines this distinctiveness as accorded to Huppert, and provides a fitting final example to cite given its embodiment of several aforementioned findings: Un film très brutal, très dur. Vraiment pas tendre avec ses personnages. Mais c’est boulversant [sic], tout simplement. Isabel [sic] Hupert [sic] est vraiment une actrice unique, pour avoir accepté ce rôle et l’avoir porté avec tant de puissance. Ce personage [sic] finit par nous dégoûter nous aussi mais pourtant il est terriblement atachante [sic] et attendrissant. (A very brutal film, very hard to watch. Really not tender towards its characters. But it’s quite simply deeply moving. Isabelle Huppert is really a unique actress for having accepted this role and having carried it with such power. This character ends up disgusting us as well but nevertheless she [the character] is terribly endearing and moving.)

The acclaim for Huppert as actor here is readily evident, and such comments certainly infer that no one else in this role could have surpassed her. The proximity of words that convey both repulsion (“dégoûter”) and attraction (“atachante et attendrissante”) is conspicuous, and redolent of the contrasting qualities of Huppert’s performance that reviewers identify and extol, as well as the strong emotions that Allociné reviews more widely evidence. Given the cinephilic associations of the website, this may seem counterintuitive: the use of

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more objective and distant terms may have been expected as the means to signal connoissorship. Several reviews certainly do prefer them; however, Allociné’s website clearly attracts reviewers with a diverse range of opinions and reviewing styles, not to mention cinematic preferences and tastes. This is undoubtedly another reason why the film as a whole proves so divisive. While the above reviewer’s apparent disgust toward Erika Kohut is tempered by how “attachante [sic] et attendrissant” Huppert’s performance renders the character, the use of “terriblement” as adverb nonetheless raises a foreboding specter, connoting force but also fearsomeness. The inclusion of “nous aussi,” which risks assuming that disgust toward the character is total and widespread, remains enigmatic: who else, according to the reviewer, might be disgusted by her, and why? The initial comments suggest this may be the characters within the film’s diegesis, but an explanation as to why the reviewer shares such sentiments is left unsaid. The emphasis rests instead on conveying the conflicting emotions that Huppert’s performance as Erika Kohut evokes, which demonstrably forms a key part of the experience recounted. Ultimately, the sense of being left shattered, disturbed or deeply moved by the film inherent in the comment “mais c’est boulversant, tout simplement”—“bouleversant” connoting a strong sense of being subjected to movement—coupled with the positioning of Huppert’s performance as pivotal to La Pianiste neatly encapsulate reviewer responses overall. To conclude, while critics may speculate about how audiences generally have reacted to Huppert’s performances, star persona and wider career, unless audience responses are interrogated in detail, convincing empirical evidence remains elusive. While studying a single website’s reviews on one film alone may constitute a limited corpus, as the richness and diversity of these comments indicate, it nevertheless provides significant material for analysis. Moreover, scrutinizing reviewer responses, rather than solely analyzing Huppert’s performance itself, has yielded multiple insights. First, it established that reviewers see Huppert as crucial to La Pianiste’s success, and the lexical field deployed attributes a profound sense of agency to her. Moreover, it was intriguing to note how Huppert and her role are described. The reviewers’ choice of words reveal much about their own personal responses to, and interpretations of, the role’s characterization as well as their wider perceptions of Huppert’s star persona, thereby recalling Schrøder et al.’s argument that “the activity of audiences is […] a discursive activity that implicates audience members in the construction of social, political and cultural identities, and the collective production of social reality”

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(2003, 124). Furthermore, and chiming with Haneke’s comments cited earlier, several reviewers see Huppert as simply the only actor who could play Erika Kohut. By constructing Huppert as an actor who plays challenging and controversial roles—an aspect of her star mythology to which Huppert herself has arguably contributed as much as her critics—such reviewers strongly echo dominant constructions of her image, further cementing the impression that many readings are informed by them, thereby belying the impression of spontaneity such reviews often convey. This is reinforced by the specific qualities also attached to Huppert’s performance, including mastery, power, and the simultaneous display of contradictory qualities. While many reviews recall received opinion, some divergent views were nevertheless identified—and yet, even here, when reviewers respond negatively to what is perceived as Huppert conforming to type in terms of casting and performance style, they qualify their comments by stating how impressive they nevertheless find her performance. Given how divisive the film otherwise is—as the quantitative data analysis established—this near unanimity of praise for Huppert is especially striking, and noticeably aligns with the revered status she enjoys more broadly among French cinema critics. Such a correlation could suggest that by commending Huppert, some reviewers may seek tacitly—or even feel compelled—to signal agreement with this critical consensus. It thereby gestures toward some of the implicit interpersonal dynamics here at play, serving as a reminder that, in posting such comments, reviewers not only pass judgment on cinema but also project a certain image of themselves, may assume a particular persona, and—self-consciously or not—enter into dialogue with fellow reviewers. In this instance, adopting the hagiographical tone via which Huppert has often been perceived critically provides a means to signal individual cultural capital, connoisseurship, and cinephilic credentials: all essential criteria for reviewer comments to appear informed and authoritative. As the introduction demonstrated, both Huppert and Haneke have cited audiences as central to their practice. By focusing on the reception of Huppert in La Pianiste, the mixed-methods approach adopted has established key ways in which online reviewers articulate, position, and understand her performance and star persona. In doing so, this chapter has sought to begin tracing the contours of Huppert’s public, and thereby enrich understanding of the compelling ways in which audiences have responded to one of France’s most famous actors.

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Notes 1

2 3

“au fond qu’on est acteur, on joue aussi comme spectateur. On est lecteur et spectateur avant même d’être acteur […]. C’est ça aussi être acteur: restituer le sentiment qu’on a comme spectateur.” “avec l’âge, [elle] a atteint un niveau de jeu que peu d’ interprètes peuvent atteindre. Sauf peut-être Helen Mirren ou Meryl Streep.” “Isabelle Huppert fait peur. Ce prix d’interprétation, elle ne l’aura pas volé, et d’ailleurs il n’y a pas que le jury pour avoir salué unanimement le talent de l’actrice: tout le monde, à Cannes, était littéralement impressionné par son travail dans La Pianiste, que l’on aime ou non le film. Ce qui est évident, sinon obligatoire.”

References Barker, Martin, Kate Egan, Stan Jones and Ernest Mathijs. 2008. “Introduction: Researching The Lord of the Rings: Audiences and Contexts.” In Watching The Lord of the Rings: Tolkien’s World Audiences, edited by Martin Barker and Ernest Mathijs, 1–20. New York: Peter Lang. Bergin, Tiffany. 2018. An Introduction to Data Analysis: Quantitative, Qualitative and Mixed Methods. London: SAGE. Buchanan, Elizabeth A. 2011. “Internet Research Ethics: Past, Present, and Future.” In The Handbook of Internet Studies, edited by Mia Consalvo and Charles Ess, 83–108. Oxford: Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444314861.ch5. Cieutat, Michel and Philippe Rouyer. 2012. Haneke par Haneke: Entretiens avec Michel Cieutat et Philippe Rouyer. Paris: Stock. Delorme, Stéphane. 2016. “L’Instant présent: Entretien avec Isabelle Huppert.” Cahiers du cinéma 723 (June): 6–16. Dyer, Richard. 2004. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Goodridge, Mike. 2012. Filmcraft: Directing. Lewes: Ilex Press. Hayward, Susan. 2017. Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts, 5th ed. London: Routledge. Joudet, Murielle. 2018. Isabelle Huppert: vivre ne nous regarde pas. Paris: Capricci. Larceneux, Fabrice. 2007. “Buzz et recommandations sur Internet: quels effets sur le box-office?” Recherche et Applications en Marketing 22 (3): 45–64. Larcher, Jérôme. 2001. “Éloge de … Isabelle Huppert.” Cahiers du cinéma 558 (June): 24. Meza, Ed. 2019. “Isabelle Huppert on Fateful Encounters, the Nature of Acting and Judging a Good Script.” Last modified August 19, 2019. https://variety.com/2019/ film/global/isabelle-huppert-sarajevo-1203306709/. Pasquier, Dominique, Valérie Beaudouin and Tomas Legon. 2014. “Moi, je lui donne 5/5.” Paradoxes de la critique amateur en ligne. Paris: Presses des Mines.

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Perriam, Chris and Darren Waldron. 2016. French and Spanish Queer Film: Audiences, Communities and Cultural Exchange. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rose, Gillian. 2016. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials, 4th ed. London: SAGE. Royer, Michelle. 2015. “Mystère, intellectualisme, authenticité et impertinence: Isabelle Huppert en jeu.” Australian Journal of French Studies 52 (2): 149–61. Schrøder, Kim, Kirsten Drotner, Stephen Kline and Catherine Murray. (eds). 2003. Researching Audiences. London: Hodder. Sixsmith, Judith and Craig D. Murray. 2001. “Ethical Issues in the Documentary Data Analysis of Internet Posts and Archives.” Qualitative Health Research 11 (3): 423–32. Stacey, Jackie. 1994. Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. London: Routledge. Taylor, Alison. 2018. “Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher.” In Close-Up: Great Cinematic Performances Volume 2: International, edited by Murray Pomerance and Kyle Stevens, 217–27. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Thomas, Lyn. 2002. Fans, Feminisms and “Quality” Media. London: Routledge. Tidd, Ursula. 2012. “Devenir Mère: Trajectories of the Maternal Bond in Recent Films Starring Isabelle Huppert.” In Existentialism and Contemporary Cinema: A Beauvoirian Perspective, edited by Jean-Pierre Boulé and Ursula Tidd, 33–51. New York: Berghahn. Toubiana, Serge. 1989. “Isabelle vue par Serge Toubiana.” In Isabelle vue par …, edited by Marc Ruscart, 4–7. Quimper: Calligrammes. Toubiana, Serge. 2005. “Préface.” In Isabelle Huppert. La Femme aux portraits, edited by Ronald Chammah and Jeanne Foucher, 9–14. Paris: Seuil. Vincendeau, Ginette. 2000. Stars and Stardom in French Cinema. London: Bloomsbury. Waldron, Darren. 2010. “‘Une mine d’or inépuisable’: The Queer Pleasures of François Ozon’s 8 femmes/8 Women (2002).” Studies in French Cinema 10 (1): 69–82. Waldron, Darren and Ros Murray. 2014. “Troubling Transformations: Pedro Almodóvar’s La piel que habito/The Skin I Live In (2011) and Its Reception.” Transnational Cinemas 5 (1): 57–71. Wilkinson, David and Mike Thelwall. 2011. “Researching Personal Information on the Public Web: Methods and Ethics.” Social Science Computer Review 29 (4): 387–401.

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Huppert and Chabrol: Opacity, Dissonance, and the Crystal-Character Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze

Isabelle Huppert played the lead role in seven films by Claude Chabrol (more than with any other director at the time of writing), from her remarkable performance in Violette Nozière in 1977 to L’ Ivresse du pouvoir in 2006. Together with Stéphane Audran and, to a lesser extent, Bernadette Lafont, Isabelle Huppert is widely regarded as one of Chabrol’s “muses” or key actresses (Austin 1999, 5–6) and the two of them enjoyed a close collaboration until the director’s death in September 2010, at a time when they were preparing the adaptation of a Simenon novel: L’ Escalier de fer/The Iron Staircase (Delorme 2010, 23). Huppert was not confined to a single genre or type of role in Chabrol’s films: she acted in (costume) dramas (Madame Bovary (1991), Une Affaire de femmes/A Story of Women (1988)); political dramas (L’ Ivresse du pouvoir/Comedy of Power (2006)); thrillers (Violette Nozière (1978), La Cérémonie (1995), Merci pour le chocolat (2000)); comedies (Rien ne va plus (1997)). Moreover, Chabrol fully explored the versatility of her acting palette by sometimes going against typecast: he famously let her choose the role of the chatty postal clerk in La Cérémonie, leaving what seemed like the more “Huppertian” part of the cool, silent, inscrutable maid to Sandrine Bonnaire (Guerin and Taboulay 1997, 69). The heroines portrayed by Huppert in Chabrol’s films share the following features to a greater or lesser degree: they all hide a great potential for anger and violence and try to escape from some form of oppression (be it social, family, or gender related). However, as Huppert has pointed out during an interview, more than the physical or psychological resemblances between the characters, it is the performances themselves that present similarities (Delorme 2010, 22).1 And in another interview, published in 2012 by Michel Pascal for his book on Chabrol, Huppert identified a main thread running through the seven films:

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“For him, I represented the idea of ordinary evil. (…) We opened Pandora’s box together” (Pascal 2012, 201).2 It is this ability to represent the repressed violence of the ordinary monster, its ultimate unreadability or opacity, and the selfreflexive quality of the performances that this chapter will explore. In order to analyze what might be called Huppert’s art of dissonance in greater detail, and by drawing on Deleuze’s concept of the crystal-image (Deleuze 1985), I shall resort to the notion of “the crystal-character.” Although this varies in intensity, I will argue that Huppert’s performances are always self-reflexive: she injects a certain rigidity or “falseness” into her characters, which at times lends them an automaton-like quality. This self-reflexivity or second-degree acting introduces cracks into the diegetic fabric, which give psychological depth and ambivalence to Chabrol’s world(s) and encourage a reframing not only of the notion of evil but of representation itself. The inscrutability, incongruity, and (self)reflexivity, which define many of Huppert’s performances (this is especially true in Violette Nozière, La Cérémonie and Merci pour le chocolat), are pivotal in shaping the director’s fragmented, dark, and nuanced representation of women, and his own “aesthetics of opacity” (Dousteyssier-Khoze 2018). Finally, and in order to explore further the dynamics of this symbiotic bond between Huppert and Chabrol, the chapter will also focus on the odd-one out in the Huppert–Chabrol filmography: Rien ne va plus, a playful and somewhat bewildering faux caper story that can be construed as a mystifying film à clef or myth in the making on the pair’s partnership.

Huppert and Chabrol: A Symbiotic Collaboration Huppert and Chabrol enjoyed a long, rare professional partnership that ran for more than thirty years and was interrupted in mid-sentence, so to say, by the director’s death. There are few comparable collaborations in the history of cinema between a male director and a female actor who is not the director’s wife or lover. Beyond the well-known director-“muse” couples of DietrichSternberg, Chabrol-Audran, Godard-Karina, Bergman-Rosselini, or AntonioniVitti, to give but a few examples, it is somewhat difficult to find a match for the Huppert–Chabrol team. One may think, however, of gay/queer male-director long-standing collaborations with a favorite actress: Derek Jarman and Tilda Swinton; Todd Haynes and Julianne Moore;3 Pedro Almodóvar and Carmen Maura (although the relationship did not run smoothly), or Almodóvar and

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Penélope Cruz who have developed a very close working bond over decades and a number of films (and still counting). Chabrol did not “discover” Huppert of course. By the time she acted in Violette Nozière in 1977, she had already featured in close to twenty films, including some by Claude Sautet (César et Rosalie/César and Rosalie, 1972), Bertrand Blier (Les Valseuses/Going Places, 1974), Otto Preminger (Rosebud, 1975), and Bertrand Tavernier (Le Juge et l’Assassin/The Judge and the Assassin, 1976). Les Valseuses, which was a popular success (with a whiff of scandal) in France, brought her wide attention, although her first major breakthrough came when she took up the lead role in the adaptation of Pascal Lainé’s novel La Dentellière/The Lacemaker (1977) by Claude Goretta, for which she won the BAFTA Award for “Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles” and in which she played the part of a young working-class woman, Pomme—the shy, pathologically withdrawn lace-maker of the title. However, Chabrol can be credited for being the first director to cast Huppert as a full-fledged antiheroine. Indeed, Violette Nozière, which tells the true story of an eighteen-yearold empoisonneuse who tried to kill her parents in 1933 Paris, provided Huppert with her first role as an inscrutable killer. Chabrol later gave a somewhat casual account of this first collaboration that pointed to a strong mutual interest in working together at an early stage: “at the time, I was keen to work with Isabelle and I heard that, on her end, she wanted to get the part” (Jousse and Nevers 1994, 53).4 The film is widely regarded by critics as a passing of the baton from one of Chabrol’s muses to the other: Audran (who, significantly, plays Violette Nozière’s mother) and Huppert. And both Audran and Huppert endorsed that interpretation with Huppert agreeing when it was put to her: “Yes, absolutely. All the more so as we were mother and daughter in the film” (Guerin and Taboulay 1997, 69).5 Violette Nozière is also a crucial film for Chabrol at a time when his career was at one of its all-time lows. After the early Nouvelle Vague successes of Le Beau Serge (1958) and Les Cousins/The Cousins (1959) in the late 1950s, and his reinvention with the masterpieces of the “Hélène cycle” (Austin 1999, 42) in the late 1960s and early 1970s —featuring Audran as a main character, and ranging from Les Biches (1967) to Juste avant la nuit/Just Before Nightfall (1971) via La Femme infidèle/The Unfaithful Wife (1969) and Le Boucher (1969)—Chabrol was again going through a dry patch (or, more accurately, making a number of mostly uninspired films) in the 1970s. In this regard, the success of Violette Nozière, for which Huppert received the Best Actress

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award at Cannes and Audran a César for Best Supporting Actress, was equally crucial for Chabrol as a seasoned director as for an up-and-coming actor such as Huppert. By the time they were working again together on Une affaire de femmes (1988), ten years had elapsed, during which Huppert had worked with Godard, Pialat, Tavernier, and Blier, among others, and established herself as one of France’s leading actors, albeit not yet the international star of the twenty-first century (her foray into Hollywood with the epic western Heaven’s Gate in 1980 had been a resounding flop). Huppert had considerably matured as an actor and their relationship had moved to one of friends and equals (as in equally recognized and self-confident in their art), despite their twenty-three-year age difference.6 In 2000, Huppert documented in further detail the evolution of her relationship with Chabrol over the years: In the beginning, I had the impression that we spoke to each other very little. There was a sort of status quo between him and me, a little as if he wanted to maintain a role as an observer. From film to film, perhaps because we know each other better and that gives him a kind of freedom, we say more things to each other […] Working together in that way and over such a long time together, it’s unique. In the life of an actor, we mainly work with a director once and for all. The contrary is rare. That creates a singular relationship, which is both very exciting and very reassuring, with the feeling that things never repeat themselves and that it’s a story without an ending. It’s therefore happiness. (Liban 2000).7

As was made clear in a number of interviews,8 the Huppert–Chabrol symbiotic partnership is the enviable and rare encounter of two highly compatible minds, two professionals with a mutual respect for each other, who clearly enjoyed collaborating. Both shared the same cultural mind-set (including a passion for literature) and a dry sense of humor. And when asked if she chooses a specific script or a Chabrol film, Huppert immediately replies: “un Chabrol.” “When he asks me to make a film with him, I make a film with him but generally it’s the right script” (La Cérémonie 1995, DVD extras). Indeed, Huppert fully subscribes to an auteurist approach to cinema; she has always admitted that the “essential rule” for her was following the orders of the director: “I tend to be guided. I don’t mind at all being an instrument.”9 Huppert uses a striking metaphor of entrapment, that of the butterfly and the entomologist, to describe the complicated power dynamics between director and actor, during the making of La Cérémonie: “When I

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make films with Chabrol, I feel like I am a butterfly caught in a net. And his camera is the net. The way in which he observes his characters” (La Cérémonie 1995, DVD extras).10 She then goes on to mention Chabrol’s entomologist’s eye.11 Huppert’s somewhat masochistic approach to the mechanics of performance seems to imply that freedom as an actor can be achieved only via surrendering power to the director’s gaze. She enjoys letting go of control in the “safe” environment that the Chabrol set provides for her. In order to thrive, she needs some constraints. And such a pact is entirely based on a relationship of trust between actor and director. This dialectics of entrapment and freedom, inherent in the Huppert–Chabrol dynamics, in turn, echoes both the controlled violence that most of her characters embody, from Violette Nozière to Emma Bovary, to Marie (Une affaire de femmes), Mika (Merci pour le chocolat) and both Jeannes (La Cérémonie and L’ Ivresse du pouvoir), and Chabrol’s own approach to filmmaking: as he himself admitted, he particularly thrives when under constraints (whether technical or financial).12 Interestingly, the butterfly/entomologist metaphor is, if not reversed, at least shared in L’ Ivresse du pouvoir through a mise en abyme of the dynamics of the gaze. This was to be, perhaps fittingly, Huppert’s last appearance in a Chabrol film. Huppert, as Judge Jeanne Charmant-Killman (an oxymoronic pun of the type favored by Chabrol), is a director-like figure who exercises her power in order to investigate a deep-rooted web of corruption in the political and business world. She studies in depth and plays somewhat cruelly with each of the corrupt specimens who end up being interrogated in her office. The ferocity and relentlessness of the “entomological”/cinematic gaze seem to be shared here between director and actor/character, but not equally insofar as the gaze is also applied to the character of the judge herself. As it turns out, she is, ironically, the main character under scrutiny in the film. Her character is ultimately punished for her seemingly hubristic approach to power. The judge’s quasi entomological investigation into an evil and corrupted world does not get anywhere; corruption breeds corruption and Charmant-Killman (Huppert) ends up losing the battle on both professional and personal fronts. The judge’s position of absolute power is but an illusion as, ultimately, she is the one who is subjected to Chabrol’s gaze. While the camera remains a convincing, satirical tool for studying the mechanics of evil in L’ Ivresse du pouvoir, Charmant-Killman’s gaze is ultimately powerless and she ends up being yet another butterfly in Chabrol’s diverse collection.

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The Opacity of Evil Huppert bluntly admitted during an interview for French magazine Télérama in 2000, “I like exploring monstrous instincts.”13 This allowed for considerable overlap with Chabrol whose cinema is marked by a fascination for madness, impulses, and the various figures of the “monstrous” with a view to rethinking the boundaries of normality (Dousteyssier-Khoze 2018, 72–103). This “encounter” saw Huppert undoubtedly encouraged by Chabrol to focus more specifically on the female monster, a figure which he had only started sketching in Les Biches and Les Liens de sang/Blood relatives (1978). Indeed, although Audran, like Huppert, often played the part of an outwardly cold, self-contained, “silent,” unreadable female character, she had never been cast by Chabrol as a killer. In Huppert, Chabrol the entomologist had found a new lead actor who was willing to let him conduct his study of rare specimens or “butterflies” as he saw fit and was prepared to go very far in their joint exploration of the deranged female psyche. Huppert’s early performance as a cold-blooded killer in Violette Nozière is a defining moment in her career. From then onward, Huppert made a trademark of this combination of blank, opaque, distanced expression and underlying, contained violence. As Violette, she had already honed the art of ellipsis to perfection. Many of her subsequent performances (in Rien ne va plus, Merci pour le chocolat et L’Ivresse du pouvoir for Chabrol but also, famously, in Haneke’s La Pianiste/The Piano Teacher or Verhoeven’s Elle) follow the motto: show less in order to suggest more. And much has been written about Huppert as an internalized actor (see, for instance, Pierre Murat’s reference to her blank performance,14 and Delorme’s to “the mystery of her performance”15), to the point that it has become a clichéd default persona. But this was certainly one of the appeals for Chabrol insofar as it coincided with his own elliptical approach and aesthetics of opacity. The close-up shots on Violette/Huppert’s mask-like face (as in other films) are therefore used to conceal more than reveal. Chabrol might well have remembered Renoir’s lesson from La Règle du jeu/The Rules of the Game (1939)—a favorite film of his that he had watched more than eighty times—in that the close-up is often used by Renoir when a character withdraws within itself or a role and becomes a cipher (Dousteyssier-Khoze 2018, 84). Huppert’s opaque performance captures to perfection the beast-orsaint opposition that is at stake in the film.16 Violette/Huppert carefully and

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remorselessly watches her father swallow the lethal drink. Just like Mika in Merci pour le chocolat, she does not display any emotions. The extreme closeup on the father’s blurry profile, with Violette’s face in focus in the background, is exceptionally powerful: the hint of a smile on Violette’s lips while she calmly stares at her father signing his death warrant (she had numerous occasions to “abort the mission” during the evening and repeatedly failed to do so) is the epitome of Violette as a “monster.” But due to the very slow buildup toward the evening of the murder (the narrative is constantly distorted by a dizzying series of prolepses, ellipses, and flashbacks), the murder as defining moment and real core of the film occurs rather late (when the film is three-quarters through), at a time when the prolepsis of the prison and trial period is already far advanced. Thus, ironically, it is precisely at the point in the narrative when Violette reaches ultimate “monster status” that the other narrative (the prison/trial one) starts the opposite process of redemption and portrays Violette as a victim and a saint, thereby making the viewer’s position decidedly uncomfortable. And indeed, the montage could not be more brutal: the shot right after the disturbing rôti/roast scene (in which there is a powerful medium shot of Violette/Huppert sitting at the dining table, holding the rare meat in her hands and tearing it with her teeth, while the bodies of her dead father and would-be-dead mother lie about in the apartment)17 shows a humble, repentant-looking Violette, sitting on her prison bed, refusing to eat the modest prison grub. Thanks to the distorted, dual narrative, Chabrol is able to switch within a few seconds from the iconography of the female Ogre or Monster to that of the Saint or Martyr (Violette/Huppert giving away her possessions and washing her cellmate’s feet in prison). The perspectives on Violette/Huppert are therefore constantly shifting and constitute two paradoxical readings of Huppert/Violette’s blankness of expression. Stéphane Delorme stated that in the 1980s Chabrol’s films were marked by “a cinema that is falsely simple, traversed by perversity and madness” and “Huppert’s dissonant and detached performance incarnates this moment” (Delorme 2010, 1).18 This insightful comment could actually be said to apply beyond that timeframe and to pinpoint both a staple of Huppert’s performances and of Chabrol’s cinema. We have just seen two examples of the so-called detached performance, a well-known aspect of Huppert’s persona. Let us now focus on a more overlooked but no less significant marker of Huppert’s performances in Chabrol’s films: dissonance, namely, the touch of falseness, incongruity, and rigidity that Huppert injects into her characters.

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Huppert’s Art of Dissonance or the Crystal-Character An essential feature of Huppert’s performances is indeed the uncanny sense of falseness, or out-of-tuneness, that seems to emanate from her characters. Although Jeanne (La Cérémonie) and Mika (Merci pour le chocolat) are very different (the former is chatty while the latter is, detached), they function equally well as examples of dissonant characters. They introduce cracks in the diegetic world and de-realize ever so subtly the narrative by making it more self-reflexive. Huppert’s Chabrolean anti-heroines might indeed be referred to as “crystalcharacters” in the sense that they are often highly reflexive and can contribute to the making of what Deleuze famously termed “crystal-images,” that is, images in which actual and virtual interact: “automata and living beings, objects and reflections enter into a circuit of coexistence and exchange which constitutes a ‘theatricality in the pure state’” (Deleuze 1985, 88). This is a key aspect of Huppert’s performances and a significant vehicle for the opacity of evil so central to Chabrol’s aesthetics. Two interconnected and complementary strategies of dissonance can be identified: the automaton or puppet-like character; and second-degree acting in self-reflexive performances. Both are used in order to provide a complex, nuanced, and, ultimately, blurred representation of evil and madness. Stéphane Delorme, who interviewed Huppert for Cahiers du cinéma right after Chabrol’s death in 2010, pointed out that in Merci pour le chocolat her character “seems almost like an automaton”19 (Delorme 2010, 24). Huppert replied that it was indeed a key component of Chabrol’s vision, one she had tried to replicate through her performance as Mika because she was willing, above all else, to adhere to the director’s vision and understanding of the character: ([Chabrol] said: “if we want [Mika] to climb up the curtain, she’ll climb up the curtain.” I was infinitely docile. That’s my nature as an actor in a way. I tend to be empathic towards the character that is opposite me. I understood this mixture of control, of laissez-faire, of cruelty that he had in his way of seeing stories. And I am very porous, mimetic. It was a means of resembling him. In front of a strong director, actors are mimetic. (Delorme 2010, 24)20

This type of mechanical, puppet-like performance is a recurring facet in Chabrol’s œuvre: Landru/Charles Denner (Landru [1963]) is perhaps an extreme example of it but one could also think of Serrault’s wonderfully incongruous and jerky performance as Labbé in Les Fantômes du chapelier/The

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Hatter’s Ghost (1982) and of Sandrine Bonnaire/Sophie in La Cérémonie. Such theatricality (and self-reflexivity) exemplified by the puppet/human dialectics is an intrinsic part of a Chabrolean aesthetics that constantly seeks to blur the border between illusion and reality, actual and virtual (Dousteyssier-Khoze 2018, 81). It makes it all the more difficult to read the characters who seem to be locked into the prison of their own subjectivities or pathologies and are ultimately unreadable, opaque. This automaton-like, mechanical quality treasured by Chabrol chimes perfectly well with Huppert’s acting style and she will remember some aspects of it when playing in films directed by other directors. Huppert, for instance, confessed that Chabrol’s advice on how to perform the role of the abortionist in Une Affaire de femmes (with utter, mechanical detachment, as if she were a plumber21) fed into her role in Haneke’s La Pianiste (Pascal 2012, 201). Huppert is perfectly aware of portraying complex, reflexive characters that we will refer to as “crystal-characters”: “they are characters that become spectators on everything that happens to them. In all the films I have made with Claude, I am Chabrol’s gaze on the film” (Delorme 2010, 23).22 In this type of self-reflexive or meta-performance, it becomes difficult to pin down and unpack the different layers of subjectivities. This detached performance often translates as a masklike blankness through which the character acquires a reflecting/reflexive, elliptical, iceberg-like quality: there seems to be so much more happening beneath the surface, or, in that case, the face. The “crystal-characters” acquire what Deleuze, in his analysis of the close-up or the “affection-image,” called a “reflexive or reflecting face”: “We are before a reflexive or reflecting face as long as the features remain grouped under the domination of a thought which is fixed or terrible, but immutable and without becoming, in a way eternal” (Deleuze 1983, 100). These reflecting/reflexive crystal-characters, which are a key vehicle for the director’s own gaze or vision, become the site of the exchange or interplay between “the actual and the virtual, the limpid and the opaque” (Deleuze 1985, 77), that is, for the dialectics that is at the heart of Deleuze’s definition of the crystal-image, and Chabrol’s cinema. In this respect, one could also think of Audran’s performance at the end of Le Boucher, which has a decidedly reflecting/reflexive, “Huppertian” quality.23 More seriously, and less anachronistically perhaps, one could indeed trace a genealogy of female ciphers or crystal-characters in Chabrol’s filmography, with Audran and Huppert as key performers or agents of his aforementioned aesthetics of opacity.

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Deleuze identified the concept of acting, and second-degree acting, as another key example of crystal structure. According to him, the actor is by essence a “monster”: [The actor] makes the virtual image of the role actual, so that the role becomes visible and luminous. The actor is a “monster,” or rather monsters are born actors […] because they find a role in the excess or shortcoming that affects them. But the more the virtual image of the role becomes actual and limpid, the more the actual image of the actor moves into the shadows and becomes opaque. (Deleuze 1985, 75)

There are numerous examples in Chabrol’s filmography of crystal-characters (and actual “monsters”) appearing to act or over-act; they indulge in pure theatricality through quasi-parodic performances (as we shall see, this is the case of Huppert/Jeanne in La Cérémonie). The line between the actual and the virtual is blurred. This kind of reflexive, second-degree performance raises questions about representation: to be and to appear become inextricably linked. Thus, Mika/Huppert in Merci pour le chocolat is a polished hostess who is holding the Polonski household together. She is also running a chocolate factory and various charitable funds with efficiency and decorum; she masters the social codes and conventions of Swiss upper-middle class to such perfection that nobody would ever think of her as a (serial) killer. Appearances and superficial engagement with others are what allow her to keep up with the masquerade for so long undetected: the numerous close-up shots on her face only reveal a smooth, blank, contained canvas/mask (Dousteyssier-Khoze 2018, 112). But as Mika/Huppert confesses at the end, family relationships and love are nothing to her but performances or play-roles: “I, instead of loving, say ‘I love you’ and people believe me.”24 In Merci pour le chocolat, the “real” is inseparable from the role, from the theatrical and Huppert, as a hyper reflective, intellectually driven actor, is ideal for the part. She devised specific strategies in order to make Mika look and sound slightly unnatural, incongruous, out of tune: besides the automaton-like gestures previously mentioned, Huppert also relied on her voice to help convey the controlled violence and madness of the character. As she explained during an interview with Stéphane Delorme, she resorted right from the beginning to what she called “intonations fausses”: Ah yes, I found the tone from the start. I had said to Claude: I will speak like that. I had to find a kind of entrance into the film, and from the very first takes, I heard myself speak in a kind of way, with this slightly strange intonation that

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didn’t really belong to me completely. I spoke with a slight Swiss accent, for example, in the middle of a scene that is not about her, she comes back from the market and says a little too loudly: “I bought some salmon.” It was a performance that was attacked from above, a bit too strong. It was also a means a little fixed of playing madness. (Delorme 2010, 23)25

By giving Mika these slightly off or false intonations, Huppert provides a clue to the artificial, performative nature of her character’s actions and utterances. In Merci pour le chocolat, a form of over-coding or second-degree acting takes place, but it is difficult to identify where Mika’s performance lies because there is nothing behind the mask or the role. And Chabrol’s expressionistic mise-en-scène is the perfect complement to Huppert’s dissonant performance. See, for instance, the magnificent, uncanny, painting-like shot of Mika/Huppert at the very end of the film. She is lying on the sofa next to a spider web–shaped shawl. Mika is clearly assimilated to a spider; the shot serves to reveal her venomous nature, something that her facial expressions can only allude to. This expressionistic dimension, which de-realizes the diegetic world and imbues it with a form of uncanny or defuse Gothic, pervades many of Chabrol’s film (Dousteyssier-Khoze 2018, 26–7 and 132–7). But in Merci pour le chocolat Huppert’s self-reflective performance, with its subtle “wrong notes,” and Chabrol’s expressionistic mise-en-scène are tuned to perfection in order to explore the depths and elusive nature of evil. Huppert’s memorable and slightly zany performance as Jeanne, the murderous postal clerk in La Cérémonie, allowed her to experiment with another form of dissonance. As mentioned in the introduction, it was Huppert’s own decision to play the part of the chatty, vivacious postal clerk rather than the more prominent role of the silent, automaton-like maid, Sophie (played by Sandrine Bonnaire).26 La Cérémonie is the only Chabrol film in which she did not play the lead role, and it shows her willingness not to be typecast as an exclusively introverted character. La Cérémonie remains one the most significant films for Huppert (she won a César for Best Actress, which she dedicated to Chabrol (Guerin and Taboulay 1997, 71)), as well as for Chabrol himself—the resounding success of the film, with critics and audiences alike, helped him re-launch his career, yet again, in the mid-1990s. Huppert/Jeanne is a complex, working-class, possibly lesbian, character who hides a great potential for violence, and a deep-rooted hatred for the wealthy Lelièvre family, behind a bubbly, assertive, and superficially friendly manner. Huppert seems to have constructed her performance as Jeanne around incongruous details. Firstly, her character talks too much; Jeanne’s speedy speech

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tempo sounds somewhat false, out of tune. Thus, when she tells Sophie the story of the death of her child during the last car journey to the Lelièvre house, it feels somewhat unconvincing, rehearsed, performed. Is this the truth or lies? Was the death of her daughter really due to an unfortunate accident or did she kill her? Unlike Mika, Jeanne is very talkative but words do not “explain” her character; far from it, they only serve to reinforce her opacity. Moreover, in a similar quest for dissonance, Huppert decided to wear girly pigtails and performs a little-girl act (Delorme 2010, 22): Jeanne ostensibly chews gum and wears short skirts, which clash with her character’s inner violence. Such incongruous touches make the character of Jeanne all the more destabilizing and difficult to read for the viewer. They are the outward signs that Jeanne is playing a part, hiding behind a mask. Indeed, there is a false playfulness about Jeanne, Huppert’s over-emphatic and self-reflexive performance veering toward parody, giving her character an edgy, chilling dimension. Her slight incongruousness and chattiness, combined with Sophie/Bonnaire’s stiffly mechanical performance, give the film an eerie sense of menace. Both are ultimately dissonant, enigmatic characters who remain unreadable until the very end.

Rien ne va plus or the Making of a Myth Rien ne va plus stands out in the Huppert–Chabrol filmography for its sheer playfulness (it is a comedy) and reflexivity—not even the darker undertones quite manage to overshadow the unbearable lightness of mood of this faux caper movie. However, the reason for devoting a separate section to it rather lies in its unique status as Romanticized film à clef about the Chabrol/Huppert collaboration. According to Chabrol, the film functions as a self-contained bubble, or parallel universe; and it is at first hard to figure out what it is ultimately about, as Huppert pointed out (Guerin and Taboulay 1997, 68). Chabrol playfully described it at the time as his most “autobiographical” film (he would later say the same of Bellamy, his last film). Although it is half intended as a joke or riddle (and the notion of “game” is indeed central to the film, as its title implies), Huppert tends to buy into the same idea: “[In Rien ne va plus] he recounts lots of things about his relationship with the cinema” (Delorme 2010, 22).27 As Jacob Leigh points out, “[f]ilms about con artists offer ample opportunities to evoke the process of cinema; Rien ne va plus takes full advantage of these. Its selfreflexivity about film acting and film directing is explicit” (Leigh 2017, 65).

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What is perhaps less explicit is that, through the film, Chabrol and Huppert are constructing a myth (in Barthes’ sense of the word) about their own brand of filmmaking and performance: that of the mysterious, unspoken bond between two ultimately inseparable individuals. Indeed, it is especially tempting to see in Rien ne va plus an allegory of filmmaking in which the Betty-Victor duo functions as a distorted, idealized (and therefore mystifying) reflection of the Huppert–Chabrol pair. Through the collapse of the boundaries between reality and illusion, the film seems to revolve around the notion of mask and (false) identity. The plot is so full of red herrings that the film becomes overtly self-reflexive. Betty/Huppert is perhaps the ultimate crystal-character in that she lacks any depth and is only defined via her different roles or performances. She has no stable personality or fixed hair color: as Huppert puts it, “it’s when she’s supposed to be real that she is false, and vice-versa. I was false when I was a redhead, I was masked beneath my own [hair] color” (Guerin and Taboulay 1997, 68).28 This can be seen as Chabrol’s way of playing with Huppert’s persona (Huppert, by saying “my own hair color,” shows that she is fully aware of this) in a dizzying game of mirrors that constantly blurs the limits between character and actor; performance and “reality” (diegetic and extradiegetic); between actual and virtual. Betty has a collection of passports (and roles) but no real name; she is the ultimate actor and, as such, a distorted reflection of Huppert herself. Her only “real” or, at least, more genuine bond (with Victor/Michel Serrault), which is at the heart of the film, is the most mysterious of all. Indeed, it is impossible to pin down the relationship between Betty/Huppert and Victor/Serrault: they might be either father and daughter or lovers or associates, or a mix of the two. Chabrol was keen for this to remain a riddle, and it is worth noting that the relationship between Jeanne/Huppert and Félix (played by Chabrol’s own son, Thomas Chabrol) in L’Ivresse du pouvoir is also perversely ambivalent.29 Betty is the sum of her “performances” or masks. Only Chabrol’s alter ego, Victor/Serrault, provides her with a sense of belonging and identity. Interestingly, during an interview entitled “Collusion” (“La connivence”) for Cahiers du cinéma in October 1997, Huppert confirmed that her relationship with Chabrol got even stronger after Rien ne va plus. It is worth noting the interesting use of the term “connivence” (collusion) instead of the more neutral “complicité” (complicity). Huppert and Chabrol, it is playfully implied, are up to no good. They are joyful, witty partners-in-crime, just like Betty and Victor in Rien ne va plus. They speak the same language; they enjoy the same kind of

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mysterious, elliptical but close bond. As between Betty and Victor, there is also much that remains unsaid between Huppert and Chabrol, according to Huppert: “what characterizes our relationship is really a kind of tacit agreement, a deep understanding” (Guerin and Taboulay 1997, 68).30 Jean-Michel Frodon, who commented on their rare alchemy, or bought into this somewhat Romanticized discourse,31 pointed out that there is much at stake in Rien ne va plus for the Huppert–Chabrol partnership: Rien ne va plus […] marks the veritable jump forward of the relation between the filmmaker and the actor, the exact opposite of the most fertile of the films they made together, Madame Bovary—Flaubert, Renoir, a performance-title like an interminable piece of bravery, costumes, accessories, culture, all that to hinder the freedom of working together. In Rien ne va plus, so few issues (with regards to its subject, story, references of all kinds) give way completely to the invention of something original between the filmmaker and the actor, including in the shadow of the delightful Michel Serrault. (Frodon 2006, 27)32

While we may subscribe to some of Frodon’s views, including his harsh judgment on Madame Bovary, it seems that he is doing precisely what Chabrol and Huppert want the viewer to believe: that the relationship between the mysterious Huppert-Serrault characters helps shed light on the Huppert– Chabrol chemistry. Huppert herself endorses this mystifying Romantic discourse: “this quite mysterious relationship between Serrault and myself also expresses the magnetic, ambiguous rapport between a filmmaker and his actor, with all that this can bring in terms of desire, affection and performance/ playfulness” (Guerin and Taboulay 1997, 69).33 Rien ne va plus is nothing short of a myth in the making that complements and cements the various comments by Huppert and Chabrol on their partnership during interviews. Huppert openly resorts to the language of the myth when discussing the relationship between Victor and Betty: it defies temporality; it is “eternal,” as she put it (Guerin and Taboulay 1997, 69). She has perfectly decoded and actively endorsed Chabrol’s subliminal message in Rien ne va plus. The film, which constantly moves across different genres (caper movie, comedy, thriller), ends on a parody of fairy tale: all is well that ends well, Victor and Betty are reunited. The snowy, chocolate-boxy, shimmering Swiss landscape is perfectly fitting for this hyper-reflexive film. It emphasizes the overall dream-like, artificial, timeless quality of the diegesis. Betty-Victor, just like Huppert-Chabrol, will always be ready for new adventures together: namely, to trick the gullible bourgeois in the diegetic world, and film viewers in the extradiegetic one. But this light, fairy-

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tale note also serves to hide what the film is really about. Chabrol and Huppert both want Rien ne va plus to be seen as a mise en abyme of the unique and “enigmatic” relationship between an aging film director and his favorite partner. In other words, hiding behind the playful and light comedic elements, Chabrol and Huppert are creating together a Romantic myth about their own practices of auteurship and performance.

Conclusion Right from Violette Nozière, by adopting a resolutely auteurist approach to performance, Huppert had unreservedly agreed to enter Chabrol’s imaginary and to help him bring to the screen strong, rebellious, multifaceted female characters. Together, they explored the ordinariness and opacity of human impulses and pathologies, and found a new visual grammar to express repressed violence. Huppert’s dissonant and self-reflexive performances play no small part in making the Chabrolean representation of reality flicker and in revealing its uncanny quality. As we have seen, mask-like faces, theatrical undertones, incongruous intonations, or automaton-like gestures all contribute to the formation of “crystal-characters.” Although they can vary in style and tone, these performances help shape and are ideal vehicles for Chabrol’s own Human Comedy and aesthetics of opacity. And Huppert gave some of her strongest performances to date as Violette (Violette Nozière), Marie (Une affaire de femmes), Jeanne (La Cérémonie), and Mika (Merci pour le chocolat). The exploration of madness, violence, and transgressive behaviors in those films provided her with experiences on which she could build when playing extreme characters for Haneke and Verhoeven, for instance. When Chabrol died in 2010, Huppert was due to feature in his next project, an adaptation of L’ Escalier de fer by Simenon, as a cold, sex-crazed homicidal maniac. They had already discussed the character in some detail. As Huppert recalls: “he had told me, for example, that in the novel, the character owns a bookshop/papershop, and he wanted to make of her a mechanic. That already told me a lot. He gave me the colors that I could arrange in my own way” (Delorme 2010, 23).34 So, painter and his most trusted colorist/collaborator? Entomologist and butterfly? The metaphors abound but what Rien ne va plus and surrounding discourses in interviews have revealed, interestingly, is that both Huppert and Chabrol were particularly committed to presenting their

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collaboration as a strong, mysterious bond and an unwritten pact and, in so doing, they invested together into a Romanticized, auteurist narrative about filmmaking. We can only lament the fact that we are unlikely ever to see Huppert on screen as a deranged car mechanic. Given a shared fascination for repression, ellipsis, the monstrous in all its guises and self-reflexivity, Huppert and Chabrol were undoubtedly a perfect match, and they forged one of the most fascinating and unforgettable partnerships in French cinema and beyond.

Notes 1

2 3 4 5 6

7

8 9

“The common ground is to be found in the performances rather than in the characters. There was a connection between us [Chabrol and Huppert] that would last from film to film” (“Il y a des constantes dans l’ interprétation, plus que dans les personnages. Quelque chose nous reliait et perdurait tout au long des films”). “Je correspondais pour lui à l’idée du mal ordinaire. […] Nous avons ouvert ensemble la boîte de Pandore.” Thank you to the editors for attracting my attention to these two collaborations. “A l’époque, j’avais envie de travailler avec Isabelle, et j’ai su que de son côté, elle souhaitait interpréter le rôle.” “Oui, absolument. D’autant que dans le film nous étions mère et fille.” Huppert said: “Our friendship really took off from Une affaire de femmes onwards” (“Notre amitié s’est vraiment scellée plutôt à partir d’Une affaire de femmes”) (Guerin and Taboulay 1997, 66). “Au début, j’avais l’impression qu’on se parlait très peu. Il y avait une sorte de statu quo entre lui et moi, un peu comme s’il se tenait à un poste d’observation. De film en film, peut-être parce qu’on se connaît mieux et que cela lui donne une sorte de liberté, on se dit plus de choses. […] Travailler ainsi et depuis si longtemps avec quelqu’un, c’est unique. Dans une vie d’acteur, on travaille la plupart du temps pour la première et quelquefois pour la dernière fois avec un réalisateur. Le contraire est rare. Cela crée une relation singulière, à la fois très excitante, très rassurante, avec le sentiment que les choses ne se répètent jamais et que c’est une histoire sans fin. Le bonheur, donc….” See for instance “La Cérémonie” 1995, DVD supplement or Guerin and Taboulay (1997, 66–71). http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49340 [in English originally].

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10 “J’ai un peu l’impression d’être, quand je tourne avec Claude Chabrol, un papillon pris dans un filet. Et le filet, c’est sa caméra. La façon dont il regarde ses personnages.” 11 Interestingly, this is a metaphor that Fassbinder previously denied to Chabrol, in a scathing article entitled “Insects in a Glass Case. Random thoughts on Claude Chabrol.” For Fassbinder, Chabrol is much more like a child cruelly observing insect-like characters in a glass case than an entomologist (Fassbinder 1976, 205–6 and 252). 12 See for instance the interview with one of his producers, Marin Karmitz: “Masques et bergamasques” (Jousse and Toubiana 1997, 72 and 74). 13 http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49340 [in English]. 14 https://www.telerama.fr/cinema/films/la-dentelliere,53448.php. 15 See Delorme (2016). 16 For the next two paragraphs, see Dousteyssier-Khoze (2018, 92–3). 17 Odile Barski, who wrote the script (and departed here significantly from the book on which it is based), provided a powerful psychoanalytical/Freudian interpretation of Violette’s “abject” act (in the Kristevan sense). 18 “Un cinéma faussement simple, traversé par la perversité et la folie” / “le jeu dissonant et détaché d’Isabelle Huppert incarne ce moment.” 19 “[D]ans Merci pour le chocolat, votre personnage semble presque un automate.” 20 [Chabrol] disait: “Si on demande [à Mika] de grimper au rideau, elle grimpe au rideau. J’étais d’une docilité infinie. C’est un peu ma nature d’actrice. J’ai tendance à être empathique avec le personnage qui est en face de moi. Je comprenais ce mélange de contrôle, de laisser-faire, de cruauté qu’il y avait dans son regard sur les histoires. Et je suis très poreuse, très mimétique. C’était une manière de lui ressembler. Devant un metteur en scène fort, les acteurs sont mimétiques.” 21 Huppert recalls: “Pour Une affaire de femmes, je me souviens que j’avais du mal à imaginer les gestes d’un avortement à l’époque, et [Chabrol] m’avait dit: ‘C’est un peu comme si tu faisais de la plomberie’” (Guerin and Taboulay 1997, 68). 22 “[C]e sont des personnages spectateurs de ce qui leur arrive. Dans tous les films que j’ai faits avec Claude, je suis le regard de Chabrol sur les films.” 23 See the striking series of close-up shots and counter-shots on Hélène/Audran’s expressionless face and the flashing lift button in the hospital. The close-up on Hélène’s blind gaze is mirrored into the flashing button; she looks hypnotized and seems to have turned into a puppet or ghost. Through this reflexive/reflecting face and non-gaze, Chabrol and Audran have introduced a pause in the film, a key moment for (self-)reflection, for thinking of what has happened and what Popaul and Hélène stand for (Dousteyssier-Khoze 2018, 49–52). 24 “Moi à la place d’aimer, je dis ‘je t’aime’, et on me croit.”

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25 “Ah oui, j’ai trouvé ce ton dès le début. J’avais dit à Claude: je vais parler comme ça. Il fallait que je trouve une sorte d’entrée dans le film, et dès les premières prises, je me suis entendue parler d’une certaine manière, avec cette intonation un peu bizarre qui ne m’appartenait pas complètement. Je parlais un peu avec l’accent Suisse, par exemple, elle revient du marché et dit un peu trop fort au milieu d’une scène qui ne la concerne pas: ‘J’ai acheté du saumon!’. C’était un jeu attaqué un peu par-dessus, un peu trop fort. Elle est dans une hyper-présence. C’était aussi une manière un peu fixe de jouer la folie.” 26 Huppert claims, however, that Chabrol knew perfectly well that she would choose the part of the postal worker and that he only wanted to give her the “illusion” that the decision-making process was in her hands (Guerin and Taboulay 1997, 69). 27 “[Dans Rien ne va plus] il raconte beaucoup de choses sur son rapport au cinéma.” 28 “C’est quand elle était censée être vraie qu’elle était fausse, et vice-versa. J’étais fausse quand j’étais rousse, j’étais masquée sous ma propre couleur.” 29 Félix is Jeanne/Huppert’s husband’s nephew but there are sexual undertones to their relationship. 30 “Ce qui caractérise notre relation, c’est plutôt une sorte d’accord tacite, de compréhension profonde.” 31 “One should see them together on the set; nothing happens, barely a joke now and then, a smile, a memory. There is no ritual to speak of, even less resembling a real discussion. There is something akin to…a non-work-related rapport.” (“Il faut les voir ensemble sur le tournage, il ne se passe rien, à peine une vanne de temps en temps, un sourire, un silence, un souvenir. Il n’y a pratiquement pas de rituel, moins encore de débat de fond. Il y a quelque chose qui s’apparente à … un rapport non aliéné au travail”). 32 “Rien ne va plus […] marque le véritable saut en avant de la relation entre le cinéaste et la comédienne, à l’exact opposé du moins fécond des films faits ensemble, Madame Bovary—Flaubert, Renoir, un rôle-titre comme un interminable morceau de bravoure, des costumes, des accessoires, de la culture, tout pour entraver la liberté du travail à deux. Dans Rien ne va plus, si peu d’enjeu (quant au sujet, à l’histoire, aux références de toutes natures) donnent toute la place à l’invention de quelque chose d’inédit entre le cinéaste et l’actrice, y compris dans l’ombre du réjouissant Michel Serrault.” 33 “Cette relation un peu mystérieuse entre Serrault et moi, exprime également le rapport magnétique, ambigu entre un metteur en scène et son actrice, avec tout ce que cela peut comporter de désir, d’affection et de jeu.” 34 “Il m’avait dit, par exemple, que dans le roman, le personnage tient une librairiepapeterie, et qu’il voulait en faire une garagiste. Cela me disait déjà beaucoup de choses. Il me donnait des couleurs que je pouvais aménager à ma manière.”

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References Austin, Guy. 1999. Claude Chabrol. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1983. Cinema I: The Movement-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. 2013. London, New Delhi, New York, Sydney: Bloomsbury. Deleuze, Gilles. 1985. Cinema II: The Time-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. 2013. London, New Delhi, New York, Sydney: Bloomsbury. Delorme, Stéphane. 2010. “Le Plaisir de jouer. Entretien avec Isabelle Huppert.” Cahiers du cinéma 660 (October): 22–4. Delorme, Stéphane. 2016. “L’ instant présent. Entretien avec Isabelle Huppert.” Cahiers du cinéma 723 (June): 6–16. Dousteyssier-Khoze, Catherine. 2018. Claude Chabrol’s Aesthetics of Opacity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Fassbinder, Rainer Werner. 1976. “Insects in a Glass Case. Random thoughts on Claude Chabrol.” Sight & Sound 45 (4): 205–6; 252. Frodon, Jean-Michel. 2006. “Huppert-Chabrol, le triangle magique.” Cahiers du cinéma 609 (February): 27. Jousse, Thierry and Camille Nevers. 1994. “Claude Chabrol—Emmanuèle Bernheim.” Cahiers du cinéma 477 (March): 52–7. Jousse, Thierry and Serge Toubiana. 1997. “Masques et bergamasques. Entretien avec Marin Karmitz.” Cahiers du cinéma (numéro spécial Chabrol (October)): 72–7. La Cérémonie. 1995. A Film by Claude Chabrol (HVE—Home Vision Entertainment). DVD Supplement: “The Making of La Cérémonie: A 20-minute Documentary Featuring Claude Chabrol, Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Bonnaire.” Leigh, Jacob. 2017. The Late Films of Claude Chabrol. Genre, Visual Expressionism and Narrational Ambiguity. New York and London: Bloomsbury. Liban, Laurence. 2000. “Interview: Isabelle Huppert.” L’Express, 1 May 2000. https:// www.lexpress.fr/culture/livre/isabelle-huppert_805642.html. Marie-Anne, Guerin and Camille Taboulay 1997. “La connivence. Entretien avec Isabelle Huppert.” Cahiers du cinéma (numéro spécial Chabrol (October)): 66–71. Pascal, Michel. 2012. Claude Chabrol. Paris: Editions de la Martinière. http://old.bfi. org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49340; https://www.telerama.fr/cinema/films/ladentelliere,53448.php.

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Embodying the White (Colonial) Woman: Isabelle Huppert’s Roles in Postcolonial Film Kaya Davies Hayon

In a recent photographic portrait that accompanies the film Eva (Benoît Jacquot 2018) on the 2018 Berlinale Film Festival website, Isabelle Huppert wears a long-sleeved black polo-neck dress underneath a black silk vest that reflects the light of the camera. The slightly high angle of the shot accentuates her petite frame and centers attention on her face, which stares out at the viewer with a characteristically icy gaze. Huppert’s face, framed by her trademark auburn hair, is so heavily lit by frontal lighting that it looks startlingly white. The whiteness of Huppert’s complexion is further accentuated by her bright red lips and dark clothing, and by her encasement within the grey-black background of the frame. This image attests to the important, yet overlooked, role that race plays in Huppert’s star image. In her films, photographs, and publicity materials, Huppert’s whiteness is signified via her pale complexion, blue-green eyes, and that striking auburn hair. However, unlike many of her white French female peers, Huppert rarely embodies characters that conform to idealized definitions of white femininity as virtuous, good, maternal, and kind (Shome 2014, 5). Rather, Huppert’s roles offer complex articulations of white female identity that foreground perversity and moral ambiguity, and that challenge dominant patriarchal ideals around gender and sexuality (Álvarez López and Martin 2017). Despite its centrality to her star image, Huppert’s race is often invisible in her films, which tend to place her in white European spaces that are populated by white European characters. In this chapter, I examine two films that form an exception to this trend by casting Huppert in (post)colonial spaces and settings that call attention to her whiteness and star status: Rithy Panh’s Un Barrage contre le Pacifique/The Sea Wall (2006) and Claire Denis’s White Material (2010). In the first film, Huppert plays a white French widow and rice

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plantation owner who encourages local Cambodian farmers to protest against the French colonial authorities when her land floods each year. In the second, Huppert plays a white French coffee plantation manager who refuses to leave an unidentified postcolonial African country, despite the threat of an impending civil war. Though different in terms of time period and context, I argue that both of these films use Huppert’s characterization, physicality, and impassive acting style to mediate the (post)colonial encounter and to explore and deconstruct the category of white (colonial) femininity. Drawing upon whiteness studies, postcolonial and star theories, I argue that Huppert’s presence in these films adds to their meaning, but also functions to organize their visual structures and narrative trajectories. I ultimately conclude that these films operate as star vehicles for Huppert, and that this function undermines their criticisms of the French colonial system and its legacy.

Embodying the White Colonial Woman Based on Marguerite Duras’s novel inspired by her childhood, Un Barrage contre le Pacifique adopts a linear narrative and conventional filming style to tell the story of an unnamed widow and mother (played by Huppert) who lives in colonial Indochina with her two adolescent children Suzanne (Astrid Bergès-Frisby) and Joseph (Gaspard Ulliel) (Duras 1985). Prior to the start of the film, the mother is sold an unprofitable plot of land that floods every year, leaving her at the mercy of the French colonial administration who are trying to re-appropriate it and use it for personal profit. After a number of failed attempts to fight the colonial authorities, the mother mobilizes the support of the local people who build a wall around her plantation to stop it from being flooded by the Pacific Ocean. Un Barrage contre le Pacifique thus offers a critical re-evaluation of the lived and material conditions for a poor white French woman and her family living under colonial rule. In contrast to other French films set in colonial Indochina (such as L’ Amant/The Lover (Jean-Jacques Annaud 1992), Indochine (Régis Wargnier 1993), or Dien Bien Phu (Pierre Schoendoerffer 1992)), it does not offer a completely romanticized or celebratory vision of the past and, instead, shows the colonial system to be corrupt, corrosive, and exploitative for all involved. In a DVD interview about Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, the film’s director Rithy Panh states that he had envisioned Huppert for the role of the mother because of her ability to communicate a depth of emotion without the need for

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dialogue or an exaggerated performance style. Despite the fact that Huppert is physically very different from the mother in Duras’s book,1 Panh claims that he cast her in the leading role as he believed that she would be able to express the internal conflicts the mother experiences in the novel with a silent “grace” and “reserve.” As he states: I had Isabelle Huppert in mind early on, but it wasn’t easy getting her! […] What she possesses above most of us is a unique grace, which can portray a powerful reserve and internal conflict […] She takes on the role with a kind of alchemy, delivering a performance with great respect to time and silence, expressing a lot by doing very little. That’s the brilliance of actors like her. (2006)

Panh’s comments in this DVD interview reinforce common perceptions about Huppert’s star persona as intellectual and reserved, and about Huppert as unrivalled in terms of artistic talent. Importantly, Panh also appears to suggest here that Huppert was not only central to his conceptualization of Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, but also played a key role in influencing the construction and development of his film. Meanwhile, his use of the word “alchemy” to describe Huppert’s performance suggests that she transformed the role of the mother for Panh. The director’s remarks in this interview thus hint at the impact that Huppert’s participation in Un Barrage contre le Pacifique had not just on the character of the mother, but on Panh’s conceptualization of the film as a whole. In his work on stardom and race, Richard Dyer argues that the presence of white (women) stars in films and television series has tended to order their narrative structures (1993, 152). He takes a particular interest in the ways in which films and television series create modes of identification and affiliation that privilege white woman stars and that align the spectator with their point of view. In his pioneering text White, Dyer builds upon this approach to discuss the ways in which lighting and framing techniques have been used to assume, prioritize, and give advantage to white women stars by separating them out from their surroundings and by illuminating their bodies and faces (2017b, 122). According to Dyer, white women stars are often lit and framed in ways that not only emphasize them and befit their star status, but that also associate them with certain traits, such as virtue, superiority, and goodness (2017b, 122). Dyer thus concludes that films and television series privilege white women stars not just through their visual structures, but also through lighting and framing devices that prioritize their place in the mise-en-scène.

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While not explicitly in dialogue with Dyer’s work, Panivong Norindr identifies similar tropes in his examination of French films set in Indochina. Like Dyer, Norindr encourages us to pay closer attention to the ways in which these films not only construct space and address us as spectators, but also situate the white female star. In Indochine, in particular, Norindr argues that the central star, Catherine Deneuve, “exerts complete control over the filmic narration, its development, its resolution” (1996, 123), and that the director “emulates every cinematic convention of classical Hollywood cinema, including plot linearity, the reliance upon an axis of action and upon the love story, [and] the use of the protagonist as the principal causal agent and chief object of identification” (1996, 124). Though Un Barrage contre le Pacifique differs in many ways to Indochine, Norindr’s arguments can help us to understand its visual structure. The film focuses almost exclusively on Huppert and includes an accompanying voice-over account of letters written from her character’s perspective. This representational strategy departs from the structure of the original novel to focus more on the mother and to imbue Huppert’s character with an unparalleled degree of control over the film. Huppert becomes the focal point of the film to such an extent that Panh marginalizes the experiences of the local characters and neglects to attend to the racial politics of colonialism in French Indochina. Panh arguably mobilizes the conventions of traditional narrative cinema (i.e., the close-up, linear structure, and the use of a star as the driving force) to place Huppert in control of the narrative and to visualize events from her character’s perspective. Though the film does not offer an entirely idealized vision of white colonial femininity, it does risk reinforcing neocolonial hierarchies of power by recounting the history of colonialism in Indochina from the point of view of its white French female star. Panh focuses on the struggles of a poor white woman within what is portrayed as a fundamentally corrupt system, but his fascination with Huppert means that he ends up sidelining the experiences of the locals and offering yet another white French view of the colonial project in Indochina. The opening sequence encapsulates the above arguments about the film’s prioritization of its star’s importance and perspective. The first shot of a dark grey cloudy sky is accompanied by a melancholic orchestral score and provides the background against which the opening credits roll. Isabelle Huppert’s name appears in bold yellow print in the center of the screen, followed by the names of the other cast members and crew. After the credits have finished rolling, the camera cuts to a long shot of a flooded rice paddy field with two figures placed at either end of the frame. The music builds and the camera cuts to a frontal closeup of Huppert’s impassive face as she surveys her character’s ruined plantation.

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In Heavenly Bodies, Dyer argues that the close-up is a key shot in films featuring major stars as it is “separated out from the action and interaction of a scene, and not seen by other characters but only by us, thus disclosing for us the star’s face, the intimate, transparent window to the soul” (2017a, 11). Building upon Dyer’s work, Michelle Royer states that the proximity created by the close-up intensifies the relationship between spectator and star to such an extent that it “invites us to live a strongly empathic relationship with the actress and the character, which have become inseparable” (2015, 156).2 Here, the lingering frontal close-up signals Huppert’s importance in the film and positions her character as our main point of spectatorial identification. This point is confirmed in the next sequence, in which Panh’s camera follows Huppert into a hut where she washes her face in front of a mirror and verbally laments her character’s exploitation by the colonial profiteers. The camera tracks Huppert as she moves around the room, until it eventually settles on a medium shot from behind her back that privileges her reflected face in the mirror. The presence of a mirror here sutures the audience’s gaze to that of the central protagonist and establishes Huppert as our primary visual mediator. In fact, from this point onward, the film prioritizes Huppert’s role and perspective, and the spectator is encouraged to empathize with her character’s plight as a poor white woman in colonial Indochina.

Figure 8.1  From Huppert’s perspective: as the mother in Un Barrage contre le Pacifique (Rithy Panh 2006).

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Panh’s decision to position Huppert as our primary point of spectatorial identification effectively leads him to recount the history of colonialism in Indochina from a white French female perspective. The problems with this representational strategy can be understood through Jane Haggis’s work, in which she critiques the proliferation of studies of white women’s (literary) histories in colonial contexts (1998, 45). While Haggis recognizes the general value of such studies for deconstructing stereotypes of white women and restoring their presence to existing historical accounts of the past, she criticizes them for “continuing the colonising and Eurocentric discourses of mainstream colonial and imperial histories” (1998, 45). According to Haggis, these studies often perform a “recuperative” function insofar as they privilege the analytical category of gender, limit white women’s culpability for colonial wrongdoings, and fail to adequately examine the relations between the colonizer and the colonized (1998, 48). She thus concludes that such “recuperative histories of white women risk colonising gender for white men and women rather than gendering colonialism as a historical process” (1998, 48). Un Barrage contre le Pacifique could arguably be seen to offer a recuperative narrative of colonialism in Indochina precisely because Panh fetishizes his white French female star to the extent that her character’s voice and perspective are prioritized over those of the local people. Panh does show the suffering of the colonized people, as well as the mother’s awareness of their mistreatment, particularly in the scenes in which she offers water to the chained prisoners or helps diagnose a local child with a fever. However, these scenes are marginal to the film’s plot and often function to contrast the mother’s paternalism with the brutality of the colonial authorities. For instance, in the scene in which the mother attempts to galvanize the support of the Cambodian people, she draws an explicit distinction between herself and the colonial administration, who she accuses of celebrating the depletion of the Cambodian population and re-appropriating local land. This scene thus illustrates Haggis’s argument that recuperative narratives of white women often render them “irresponsible, a victim of the white male colonising adventure,” or show them to possess the capacity to “forge a different, more benevolent, colonial relation” with the colonised people (1998, 48). Throughout, Panh not only prioritizes his main star, but also constructs her character in paternalistic terms that juxtapose her more caring approach with the callousness of the colonial administration. Panh’s prioritization of his star’s role and perspective is problematic. However, as Florence Jacobowitz has observed, Huppert’s casting as the mother also adds

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to the film’s meaning because it reinforces the narrative’s sexual dimensions and strengthens some of its criticisms of the limiting roles offered to poor white women in colonial society (Jacobowitz 2009). As outlined earlier, Huppert’s characters are often used to explore the complexities of women’s existence in patriarchal societies and to challenge the traditional attributes attached to dominant gender roles. Here, Huppert plays a white French widow who is being exploited by the French colonial authorities because of her gender and her class. Not only does her character challenge male patriarchal authority, but she also subverts the discourse of white colonial femininity, which de-politicized women and confined them to the domestic sphere (Ha 2014, 17). Following the death of her husband, the mother adopts the traditionally masculine positions of property owner and financial negotiator and uses her intellect and acumen to outwit the French colonial authorities. In one early scene, she refuses to allow herself to be threatened or intimidated by the male colonial administrators who visit her property, telling them in no uncertain terms that she views their attempts to re-appropriate her land as callous and manipulative. Elsewhere, she outsmarts the bank managers who have repeatedly refused her a loan by befriending the powerful Chinese businessman, Monsieur Jo (Randal Douc), and using her relationship with him to upset the power balance in the capitalist colonial system. Although the mother lacks power and status, she is unafraid to confront the gendered and economic disempowerment of white women within the colonial matrix of power. The mother is thus portrayed as a woman who does not subscribe to dominant definitions of white colonial femininity and who refuses to remain confined to the domain of the domestic sphere. Huppert’s casting in the role of the mother also complicates traditional definitions of white (colonial) women as nurturing and maternal. Ursula Tidd has observed that many of Huppert’s recent roles have confronted the patriarchal assumption that the “mother-child bond is an idyll of maternal fulfilment and protective, unconditional nurture” (2012, 34). Instead, writes Tidd, the films that Huppert has chosen to appear in often represent “mothering as a site of violent attachment and loss” and offer “fresh new insights into the dynamics of the mother-child bond” (2012, 34). In Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, Huppert’s character is primarily identified by her maternal status (as emphasized by the fact that she is not given a name and is referred to throughout as la mère). However, the film does not represent motherhood in idyllic terms and, instead, portrays her relationship with her children as suffocating, particularly for the son Joseph, who is shown to be the mother’s priority from the outset. In an early scene, we

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see the mother fussing over Joseph: she tells him he must eat a substantial meal as he is still growing, but neglects to show the same concern to her daughter, who asks sullenly whether it matters or not if she eats. Later, the mother is shown to be visibly upset when Joseph leaves for Saigon with his wealthy mistress, retorting melodramatically to her daughter that she wishes that Joseph had shot her dead before he left. Finally, the mother’s health enters into a sharp decline after Joseph leaves for the second time, which illustrates the extent to which her identity is tied to her maternal status and conflicted relationship with her son. While Huppert’s acting style and star image contribute to the film’s exploration of white maternal femininity, Panh’s consistent prioritization of her character’s role could arguably be seen to undermine his criticisms of colonialism in Indochina. This argument is illustrated clearly in the final scenes of the film, which once again privilege the narrative voice and perspective of the white French female star. In a voice-over, the mother reads out a letter to the Résident Général, accusing him of exploiting her and her children. In the letter, the mother explicitly links her colonial plantation to her maternal status when she states: for twenty years, I have sacrificed even the smallest pleasure of my life, my youth, so that I could buy this land from the government […] I gave you everything I had that morning. Everything. As if I brought to you my own body as a sacrifice. As if, from my sacrificed body, a happy furture for my children would flourish.3

Given the extent to which the mother’s body is associated with the land here, it is unsurprising that her health regresses and she dies when the sea wall collapses and her plantation floods. Following the mother’s funeral, Joseph leaves and Suzanne is pictured in the field, caressing the crops in the same way as her mother did at various points in the film. A final shot shows the thriving rice fields being worked by a cooperative of local women and is accompanied by an inter-title confirming that these are the “Rizières de la femme blanche” (white woman’s rice fields) nearly one hundred years later in 2007. In her reading of this final scene, Jacobowitz argues that Huppert’s “star image modernizes and contemporizes the source material, which is the director’s intention, as he ends the film with a shot of present day Cambodia and the legacy and results of the Mother’s tenacious struggles” (2009). Certainly, this final sequence stresses the matrilineal inheritance of the plantation and suggests that the mother’s land nourished her children and the local people for generations to come. However, it also risks representing colonialism in conciliatory and paternalistic terms as

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having brought “civilisation” and progress to Cambodia. This rather nostalgic rendering of the legacy of the colonial project is reinforced by the scene’s visual structure, which privileges the narrative and voice of the white female star, and which celebrates the endurance of her character’s achievements. Rather than questioning the success of the colonial project or foregrounding the perspective of the local inhabitants, the final scene prioritizes the white female character’s legacy and reiterates her benevolent, paternalistic approach. Despite the fact that Panh seeks to offer a criticism of the gendered and economic dimensions of colonialism in Indochina, his consistent prioritization of his white star’s narrative and perspective could be seen to reinforce the racial hierarchies his film attempts to overturn. Huppert’s presence in Un Barrage contre le Pacifique definitely strengthens the film’s criticisms of patriarchal definitions of femininity. However, Panh’s over-investment in his central star threatens to undermine his film’s politics by reinforcing a white female history of colonialism at the expense of a fuller exploration of the gendering and racialization of the colonial system. As I have argued above, the experiences of the local inhabitants are marginalized throughout and are consistently portrayed as secondary to the plight of the white French heroine. The film does show some of the suffering and exploitation experienced by the local Cambodian people. However, these scenes are often used to contrast the paternalistic approach of the mother with the cruelty and callousness of the colonial administration. In the end, the film functions as a star vehicle for Huppert, which undermines its criticisms of the colonial project, and which prevents it from engaging in a detailed exploration of the intersections of gender, class, and race in Indochina during the French colonial period.

De-Centering the White Woman’s Perspective Unlike Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, White Material adopts a disjointed narrative and dystopian aesthetic to represent the experiences of a white coffee plantation owner named Maria Vial (played by Huppert) who refuses to leave an unidentified postcolonial African country on the brink of a civil war. In a narrative that, as James Williams notes, is “centred on, and nearly always mediated by, its white French protagonist” (2014, 216), Huppert plays a delusional business woman and mother who displays a startling lack of awareness of the dangers her family faces or of her own neo-colonial status as a white French plantation manager. In contrast to the more conventionally narrated plot of Un Barrage

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contre le Pacifique, White Material is recounted through a series of disruptive flashbacks that show Maria refusing to accept the reality of her situation and attempting to return to her plantation to harvest her crops. At the end of the film, Maria gives in to the violence that surrounds her and murders her fatherin-law (Michel Subor) in an unanticipated expression of anger against the colonial system he represents. Despite differences in relation to time period and context, White Material shares many similarities with Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, not least in terms of its casting of Huppert in the role of a white female plantation manager and mother. As with Panh’s film, White Material examines the theme of (post) colonialism through the lens of the family and via the eyes and perspective of its white female star. However, to a greater extent than Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, White Material appears to be mindful of the ethical limitations of this approach and of the problems with recuperative narratives of white (colonial) women. While the film does privilege Huppert’s character’s narrative and trajectory, it also emphasizes what Patricia White has called the “partiality” of her perspective in an attempt to maintain a formal distance between spectator and star (2017, 238). In doing so, White Material demonstrates some awareness of the problems and limitations associated with its casting of a major white female star. Though the script for White Material was co-written by the director Claire Denis and the Franco-Senegalese novelist Marie N’Diaye, Huppert played a vital role in the film’s gestation. She was the one who approached Denis to adapt Doris Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing, the novel on which the film was originally going to be based (Williams 2014, 94). In an interview about the film, Denis acknowledges her debt to Huppert, but states that she decided against adapting Lessing’s novel as she did not want to return to the past or to a country (Zimbabwe) that has undergone drastic changes in recent years (Hughes 2009). Despite moving away from Huppert’s initial idea, Denis affirms the star’s importance in her narrative when she likens her to a need or an addiction: She’s a very intelligent actress. She is guessing and she’s inventing a relation with each director that creates an addiction to her. […] She creates a need for her, when she’s an addiction. Somehow the film becomes … her (emphasis in the original). (quoted in Hughes 2009)

Denis speaks of Huppert’s participation in her film as transformative not just for the narrative, but for her own experience as a director. Interestingly, she uses a

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similar lexical field to Panh to refer to Huppert as an addiction and as someone who renders the other characters in the narrative inconsequential. For Williams, “the extraordinary way that Denis talks of Huppert’s active contribution and addictive force […] suggests that the real story of White Material may actually be that which took place between director and actor during the film’s production” (2015, 94). Like Panh, Denis seems to be enraptured by her central actor and in awe of her acting capabilities. It is thus unsurprising that she privileges Huppert’s role to such an extent that it shapes her film’s narrative in both felicitous and infelicitous ways. In White, Dyer argues that we need to interrogate images of white people in Western visual media if we are to destabilize the damaging assumption that “race is […] only attributable to people who are not white” (2017b, 1). Though whiteness is hyper-visible in Western (visual) culture, Dyer argues that it becomes invisible as a marker of racial distinction as it assumes the position of “the norm, the ordinary, the standard” (2017b, 3). According to Dyer, studying images of whiteness matters as it allows us “to see the structures, tropes and perceptual habits of whiteness, to see past the illusion of infinite variety, to recognise white qua white” (emphasis in the original) (2017b, 13). He cautions against looking only at texts that represent white–black interactions as he feels that this would “[give] the impression that whiteness is only white, or only matters, when it is explicitly set against non-white” (2017b, 13). Instead, Dyer advocates an approach that “[breaks] the hold of whiteness by locating and embodying it in a particular experience of being white” (2017b, 4). While the primary focus of White Material is race relations in a postindependence African state on the verge of civil war, Denis arguably seeks to de-center and destabilize the hegemonic power of whiteness by calling attention to its remarkability and by troubling its position as ordinary and invisible.4 As mentioned already, the film casts Huppert in the role of a white woman who lives and works on her family plantation with her ex-husband (Christophe Lambert), son (Nicholas Duvauchelle), and father-in-law. The Vial family are all pale skinned and blonde haired and can therefore be seen to embody the “white material” of the film’s title. Throughout the film, their white skin color differentiates them from the black African characters that surround them and makes them seem like anomalies in the geographical landscape they inhabit. This representational strategy attempts to call attention to their whiteness. However, as with Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, Denis’s repeated prioritization of Huppert’s narrative and perspective threatens to undermine her criticisms of white privilege by reinforcing the neocolonial hierarchies of power her film condemns.

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The post-titular sequence gives visual expression to this argument as it highlights Maria’s physical distinction from the local people, while also positioning her as our main point of identification as a spectator. The sequence begins with a handheld medium close-up of Huppert looking in the direction of the camera, before turning around and frantically trying to flag down a passing car. The car drives past and Huppert turns to look in front of her as the jerky handheld camera tracks backward to capture her movement forward. A cut to a long shot shows Huppert running along a dirt track, before Denis shifts to a medium close-up of the back of Huppert’s head and shoulders as she crouches down in the long dry grass. The camera shows us what Huppert sees when it cuts to an image of a passing army truck obscured by the long brown reeds. Finally, a long shot tracks Huppert as she runs along the side of the road, panting heavily. As in the opening sequence of Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, Denis’s camera alternates between long shots that place Huppert in context and intimate medium close-ups that align the spectator with her point of view. Meanwhile, the ambient sound-track of breath, vehicles, and movement encourages us to share the star’s immediate sensory experiences and positions her as the film’s primary visual mediator. As a number of critics have pointed out, the casting of Huppert also adds to the meaning of this early sequence as it allows Denis to use her star’s physicality (i.e., Huppert’s petite frame, pale white skin, freckles and trademark auburn hair) to play with the tensions between outsider and insider that her character experiences (see, for instance, Caporale 2013; Asibong 2011). After several attempts to stop passing cars, Maria eventually manages to flag down a local bus, but is refused entry by the driver because of a lack of space inside. Instead, a passenger helps her up onto the back of the bus where she clings to a ladder as the driver continues his journey. Maria’s white skin and pale pink dress mark her character out as different from the other passengers, while her physical placement on the exterior of the bus signals her outsider status and, as Marzia Caporale argues, her function as a “representative of the French colonial dominance” (2013, 254). This point is reinforced by the fact that Denis purposely decided not to modify Huppert’s appearance with lighting or cosmetics. Instead, she shoots Huppert using naturalistic lighting and limited make-up, which emphasizes her pale complexion and reiterates her epidermal distinction from the local people (Caporale 2013, 253). Huppert’s whiteness is thus used to signify her difference to the local inhabitants and to indicate her displacement within the unnamed African country she inhabits.

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The representational style of this post-titular opening sequence sets the tone for the remainder of the film, which recounts its narrative of inter-racial tension from Huppert’s character’s white female perspective. However, as White explains, Denis attempts to communicate her film’s more ethical approach by “shooting [Huppert] from behind or in profile” and thereby highlighting her star’s partial perspective (White 2017, 238). Aside from the opening and closing sequences, Denis eschews the use of the static frontal close-up and shoots Huppert from angles that prevent us from gaining unmediated access to her face. This mode of representation compliments Huppert’s own approach to acting, which, as Álvarez López and Martin observe, oscillates between impassive distance and intense emotion (emphasis in the original) (2017). Unlike many of her peers, Huppert does not adopt a sentimental or exhibitionist performance style, “preferring to play a ‘series of poses’,” rather than a psychologically developed character (Álvarez López and Martin 2017). As a result, her characters are often quite unnerving to watch as they “[appear] to be in a state of internal retreat or withdrawal,” which can alienate and unsettle the spectator (Álvarez López and Martin 2017). Throughout White Material, Denis’s avoidance of static frontal close-ups combines with Huppert’s resistance to performing in a psychological manner to prevent the spectator from fully identifying with her character. This argument is illustrated clearly in the first flashback scene, in which jerky handheld closeups and extreme close-ups frame Maria from the front and the back as she rides her moped through the arid African landscape. After Maria descends from the moped, the camera alternates between low-angle shots from her perspective and aerial shots as a French soldier in a helicopter urges her to return to France. Maria gestures rudely to the departing helicopter, then walks back to her moped, closely tracked by the camera, as a disembodied voice-over criticizes the “sales Blancs” for ruining Africa. The voice-over indicates that Maria and her white relatives are not welcome in this country, while the oblique close-ups and alternating frontal and dorsal shots establish a sort of proximate distance between spectator and protagonist.5 This approach maintains our alignment with the central star, but prevents us from identifying completely with her persona by mobilizing filming techniques (i.e., dorsal close-ups, side shots) that alienate and distance us as a spectator. If the film acknowledges the partiality of Huppert’s perspective, it also uses her star persona to complicate idealized definitions of white femininity. Like the mother in Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, Maria is constructed as a woman who

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challenges limiting gender roles, but is morally ambiguous and unpredictable. She adopts traditionally masculine roles in order to survive in the male-dominated space in which she lives (Caporale 2013, 254). For instance, she single-handedly runs the family business as her ex-husband, son, and elderly father-in-law show little inclination or ability to manage it themselves. Moreover, she takes care of the plantation’s finances and directs its workforce independently. In an early sequence, we see Maria frantically trying to persuade some men to harvest her coffee after her own workers have abdicated because of the escalating civil war. In other scenes, she is shown operating heavy machinery, riding a moped, a tractor and a truck, and negotiating with armed rebel fighters. In these snapshots of Maria’s life, she emerges as a determined, albeit slightly delusional, woman who is unafraid to take on the traditionally masculine roles of plantation manager and financial negotiator. For Caporale, Maria can be understood as a woman who is forced to “embody a model of male power inherently inscribed in the patriarchal nature of the colonial experience itself ” (2013, 255). The casting of Huppert in the principal role also contributes to the film’s exploration of proprietorship and its relationship to the category of white maternal femininity. In contrast to the mother in Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, Maria vacillates between blind devotion to her son, Manuel, and a seeming indifference to his safety and well-being. For instance, in the scene in which Manuel is terrorized by two child rebel fighters, Maria displays a surprising lack of concern for her son and is more interested in securing her plantation (Caporale 2013, 257). Following

Figure 8.2  Huppert as Maria taking on conventionally “male” duties in White Material (Claire Denis 2009).

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Manuel’s disappearance, she neglects to look for her son in favor of tending to her plantation and forcefully trying to persuade her ex-husband and her workers to help her harvest her crop. In fact, throughout the film, Maria seems to care less about her (white) (French) son than the (colonial) (African) landscape they both inhabit. Like the mother in Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, Maria appears to be desperate to create and maintain a space in Africa that she can nurture and that will nurture and provide for her in return. This argument emerges most clearly in her interactions with the wounded rebel leader the Boxer (Isaach de Bankolé). When Maria discovers the Boxer on her property, she moves him into her son’s room where she feeds him and tends to his wounds. For Andrew Asibong, Maria’s misplaced maternal gestures disclose a deeper desire to “dissolve the social struggle at the heart of this neo-colonial space” and to create a sense that she is at home in Africa (2011, 162). This latter point is reaffirmed in a conversation between Maria and her worker Jean-Marie, in which she confesses that she feels that this country is her home and that she does not want to give up control of her plantation. Not only is Maria unable to accept that she is not welcome in Africa, but her maternal attachment to the land spills over into in an outdated sense of proprietorship that threatens her own existence as well as that of her son. The existential threat that Maria represents to her family reaches a deadly conclusion in the final sequence of the film, which emphasizes the devastation and destruction that are the result of the country’s colonial past and of sectarian violence in the present. Upon returning to her plantation, Maria discovers postapocalyptic sights of chaos and disorder. The house is ablaze and the ground is littered with the burnt corpses of child rebel soldiers. A long shot shows Maria’s father-in-law wandering through the destruction. The camera then cuts to a close-up of Maria’s face looking downward, before another close-up from Maria’s perspective reveals the head of her son’s burnt corpse on the ground. The next shot shows Maria’s father-in-law being brutally beaten over the head with a gun, before the camera cuts to an oblique close-up of Huppert’s blood-spattered face staring impassively at “the devastation of which she is simultaneously the recipient and perpetrator” (Caporale 2013, 261). Though Denis frustrates our desire for a clearly defined psychological motivation for this murderous act, the ending could be seen to suggest that Maria has finally gained some awareness of her own position as a white French plantation owner and of her complicity in the bloodshed that surrounds her. The murder of her father-in-law can thus be interpreted as a belated recognition of the damage that colonialism has done not just to Maria’s beloved plantation, but to her family and the country she inhabits.

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This final sequence offers a far less conciliatory and pacifying criticism of the legacy of colonialism than Un Barrage contre le Pacifique. However, the director’s self-confessed obsession with her central actor has been criticized for undermining her film’s aesthetic and ideological force. In an article about Denis’s filmic corpus, Ian Murphy contends that White Material’s “critique of postcolonial Africa and [its] narrative, audiovisual stylizations are typically potent, but […] operate within the context of a star vehicle for Huppert,” which “restricts Denis from […] pushing images and sounds as elements that carry meaning in themselves” (2012). In other words, the film prioritizes Huppert to such an extent that it eclipses some of the formal and aesthetic elements that could have been used to explore its critique of the legacy of colonialism in the contemporary era. It is certainly true that Denis’s film prioritizes the narrative and perspective of its white female star. However, it does emphasize its star’s partiality and could thereby be seen to show a greater awareness of the ethical implications of its casting choices than Un Barrage contre le Pacifique. In doing so, White Material resists offering an entirely recuperative narrative of postcolonial relations in Africa and shows some awareness of the limitations associated with the casting of a major white French female star in a film focused on postcolonial tensions.

Conclusion Un Barrage contre le Pacifique and White Material both use Huppert’s physicality and star persona to articulate her characters’ displacement and to explore the complex links between motherhood, colonialism, and proprietorship. However, as argued, the actor’s presence in these films leads their directors to narrate the history of (post)colonialism in Indochina and West Africa from the perspective of their white French female star. Throughout Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, Panh mobilizes the structural devices of traditional narrative cinema to align the spectator with the mother’s colonial perspective and to prioritize Huppert’s voice and vantage point. Likewise, Denis positions Huppert as our primary visual mediator, though she does attempt to communicate the partiality of her character’s perspective by shooting her from the back and the side. This slight difference is important as it suggests that White Material is aware of the problems associated with casting a major white French star in a postcolonial film. However, it does not negate the fact that both directors prioritize Huppert’s role and perspective to the extent that it marginalizes the other characters in the narrative. In both

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films, the local people, and particularly the local women, are relegated to the sidelines and do little to advance the plot. This representational strategy reflects the cruel disparities of the (post)colonial system, but is also highly problematic as it leads the directors to privilege their white French female star and to embed the spectator within what is essentially a (neo)colonial perspective. It is arguably difficult for postcolonial films like these to avoid functioning as star vehicles if they contain major European stars who have been associated—either explicitly or inexplicitly—with whiteness. The casting of Huppert in Un Barrage contre le Pacifique and White Material will have raised their profile and thereby contributed to their commercial viability. If a lesser-known actor had been included in the main roles, it may have lessened the films’ ideological conflicts, but it would almost certainly have meant that they were not as successful commercially. That is not to say that Panh or Denis were motivated by a commercial agenda, but rather that their decision to cast a major white star does definitely raise important questions about the continuing power of whiteness as a structuring device and about the interplay between stardom, race, and gender in purportedly anti-colonial films.

Notes 1

2 3

4 5

Despite accepting the part, Huppert initially had reservations about her suitability for role of the mother. As she explains, “[h]ad I read [the book] earlier, I wouldn’t have seen myself in the role, because, to be frank, the character depicted by Marguerite Duras is physically very different. She’s a much heavier woman, who seems more worn out, or at least I hope so! She’ s also very rural and bound to the earth” (Isabelle Huppert DVD interview). “nous invite […] à vivre une relation fortement empathique avec l’actrice et le personnage devenus inséparables.” “[…] pendant vingt ans, j’ai sacrifié jusqu’au moindre plaisir de ma vie, de ma jeunesse, pour acheter cette concession au gouvernement […] Je vous ai donné tout ce que j’avais ce matin-là. Tout. Comme si je vous ai apporté mon propre corps en sacrifice. Comme si, de mon corps sacrifié, il allait fleurir tout un avenir de bonheur pour mes enfants.” Kath Dooley also reads Denis’s films through the lens of Dyer's work on race. See Dooley (2013). I use the word “dorsal” here, in the sense developed by J. Brandon Colvin, to engender “(1) compositional defamiliarization, (2) denial of clear psychological/ emotional access to characters, and (3) the exploration of […] ‘displaced point-ofview (POV)’ alignment” (2017, 194).

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References Álvarez López, Cristina and Adrian Martin. 2017. “Isabelle Huppert: the Absent One.” The Third Rail. http://thirdrailquarterly.org/isabelle-huppert-the-absent-one/. Asibong, Andrew. 2011. “Claire Denis’s Flickering Spaces of Hospitality.” L’ Esprit Créateur 51 (1): 154–67. Caporale, Marzia. 2013. “The Aesthetic of the Unspoken: Representing Female Silence in Claire Denis’s Film White Material.” In The Unspeakable: Representations of Trauma in Francophone Literature and Art, edited by Névine El Nossery and Amy L. Hubbell, 249–64. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Dooley, Kath. 2013. “Foreign Bodies, Community and Trauma in the Films of Claire Denis: Beau Travail (1999), 35 Rhums (2008) and White Material (2009).” http:// www.screeningthepast.com/2013/09/foreign-bodies-community-and-trauma-inthe-films-of-claire-denis/. Duras, Marguerite. 1985. “Worn Out with Desire to Write.” YouTube. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=TPiv0EKzd8k. Dyer, Richard. 1993. The Matter of Images: Essays on Representation. London: Routledge. Dyer, Richard. 2017a. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. London: Routledge. Dyer, Richard. 2017b. White. London: Routledge. El Nossery, Névine and Amy L. Hubbell. (eds). 2013. The Unspeakable: Representations of Trauma in Francophone Literature and Art. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Ha, Marie-Paule. 2014. French Women and the Empire: The Case of Indochina. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haggis, Jane. 1998. “White Women and Colonialism: Towards a Non-recuperative History.” In Gender and Imperialism, edited by Clare Midgley, 45–78. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hughes, Darren. 2009. “Dancing Reveals So Much: An Interview with Claire Denis.” Senses of Cinema 50. http://sensesofcinema.com/2009/conversations-on-film/clairedenis-interview/. Huppert, Isabelle. 2006. “Interview.” In Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, directed by Rithy Panh, France/Cambodia/Belgium: Axiom Films. Jacobowitz, Florence. 2009. “Un Barrage contre le Pacifique/The Sea Wall.” CineAction. https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Un+barrage+contre+le+Pacifique/ The+Sea+Wall-a0194486562. Murphy, Ian. “Feeling and Form in the Film of Claire Denis.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 54. https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc54.2012/ IanMurphyDenis/index.html.

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Norindr, Panivong. 1996. “Filmic Memorial and Colonial Blues: Indochina in Contemporary French Cinema.” In Cinema, Colonialism, Postcolonialism: Perspectives from the French and Francophone World, edited by Dina Sherzer, 129–46. Austin: University of Texas Press. Panh, Rithy. 2006. “Interview.” In Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, directed by Rithy Panh, France/Cambodia/Belgium: Axiom Films (DVD interview). Royer, Michelle. 2015. “Mystère, intellectualisme, authenticité et impertinence: Isabelle Huppert en jeu.” Australian Journal of French Studies 52 (2): 149–61. Shome, Raka. 2014. Diana and Beyond: White Femininity, National Identity and Contemporary Media Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Tidd, Ursula. 2012. “‘Devenir Mère’: Trajectories of the Maternal Bond in Recent Films Starring Isabelle Huppert.” In Existentialism and Contemporary Cinema: A Beauvoirian Perspective, edited by Ursula Tidd and Jean-Pierre Boulé, 33–52. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Tidd, Ursula and Jean-Pierre Boulé. (eds). 2012. Existentialism and Contemporary Cinema: A Beauvoirian Perspective. Oxford: Berghahn Books. White, Patricia. 2017. “Pink Material: White Womanhood and the Colonial Imaginery of World Cinema Authorship.” In The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender, edited by Kristin Lené Hole, E. Dijana Jelača, Ann Kaplan and Patrice Petro, 232–43. London: Routledge. Williams, James S. 2014. “Beyond the Other: Grafting Relations in the Films of Claire Denis.” In The Films of Claire Denis: Intimacy on the Border, edited by Marjorie Vecchio, 91–110. New York: I.B. Tauris.

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Acting Funny: A Counter-Reading of Huppert’s Star Persona Raphaëlle Moine

Although Isabelle Huppert’s persona has mainly been constructed on the basis of her dramatic roles, the actor has occasionally performed in a range of comedies,1 as well as an episode from the television series Dix pour Cent/Call My Agent! (“Isabelle,” Season 3, episode 4, 2018), created by Fanny Herrero and Dominique Besnehard in 2016 and broadcast on the France 2 network. The presence of Huppert in the credits for this episode—and as herself, in accordance with the premise of the series—was an event of sufficient noteworthiness that the network chose to revolve the promotion of the third season around this star: together with Besnehard, she was interviewed for more than six minutes on the television news, even though the third season also featured four other stars, each of whom had an episode named after them—Jean Dujardin, Monica Bellucci, Gérard Lanvin, and Béatrice Dalle. Huppert’s excursions into comedy mark not only a change of register, but also a notable break with the type of works to which the actor is accustomed, those with which her persona is associated. The comédienne, who appears in serious productions directed by such celebrated theatre directors as Robert Wilson, Claude Régy, and Krzysztof Warlikowski, has also tackled a more popular form of cinema able to appeal (occasionally) to a broader mainstream audience. Huppert’s performances in these French comedies can seem all the more incongruous, given that such films are not widely distributed or well known outside of France, owing to their tendency to be un-exportable (Moine 2015, 236). Moreover, they rarely receive comment in academic articles on the star, with critics paying more attention to the much larger number of roles that have crystalized Huppert’s persona around notions of pallor, coldness, opacity, sexual subversion, and intellectualism. Considered in this context, the comedies

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can seem a priori like deviations in the career, the roles, and the performances of the star, possibly explained by Huppert’s “Stakhanovism”: in the portrait devoted to her by Vanity Fair in February 2019, the magazine noted that at the time of the interview, she had just finished shooting three films back-to-back in a few weeks before leaving for New York to act in the play La Mère/The Mother by Florian Zeller (Etchegoin 2018, 60). It is hardly surprising that some comedies should slip into the profile of her filmography. This chapter, though, will address this issue by examining whether or not Huppert’s comic roles represent casting against type—viewed not as casting mistakes, but, in the tradition of Richard Dyer’s Stars (1998, 129–31), as clashes and dissonances between the persona of the star and the character she plays. It will evaluate the extent to which these comic performances deliver a counter-image of Huppert, one that defies the actor’s persona consolidated in auteur cinema. To conduct this study, I shall restrict the scope of the corpus to comedies made after 2000, for three reasons. First, Huppert’s ventures into comedy before that date were sporadic, whereas since 2000 there has been a relative increase. Second, it was also during this time that a certain number of salient traits in her persona crystalized in the wake of the critical and box office success of La Pianiste/The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke 2001), including a strong association with perversion, transgression, and deviant sexuality. Third, the 2000s and 2010s saw Huppert, born in 1953, move into her fifties, and then into her sixties: significantly, certain comedies tackle the issue of aging (both of the star and of her characters), a topic that is hardly considered in her other roles.

Reception: Distancing Huppert from Comedy In the French context, in which “different criteria are used to determine who is a star, which follow a rough division between the box-office on the one hand and cinephilia on the other” (Vincendeau 2000, 24), Huppert’s stardom is clearly built upon the latter. Her persona is closely tied to her collaboration with auteurs (including, notably, Chabrol, Haneke, and Jacquot); it is based on her identity as an actor in her roles and performances on the screen and the stage because Huppert is careful not to expose her private life, and her fame is only slightly linked to the audience numbers achieved by her films. Even though, as data supplied by the CNC indicate, the films she made with Chabrol generally attracted around one million spectators in French cinemas, and despite the fact

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that La Pianiste drew close to 688,000 spectators, and Elle (Paul Verhoeven 2016) attracted 586,000, audience figures for her films remain modest: among others, 196,727 entries for Valley of Love (Guillaume Nicloux 2015), 187,000 spectators for White Material (Claire Denis 2010), 30,993 for Le Temps du loup/ Time of the Wolf (Michael Haneke 2003), and 45,026 for Happy End (Michael Haneke 2017). The comedies scarcely change this landscape. While the genre certainly includes Huppert’s three greatest successes—3.5 million entries for Huit Femmes,/Eight Women (François Ozon 2002) 1.45 million for La Femme de mon pote/My Best Friend’s Girl (Bertand Blier 1983), and 1.4 million for Les Sœurs fâchées/Me and My Sister (Alexandra Leclère 2004)—the total of 767,000 entries achieved by Mon pire cauchemar/My Worst Nightmare (Anne Fontaine 2011) is far from being exceptional given the presence in the credits of this romcom of a popular comedy heavyweight, Benoît Poelvoorde. Marc Fitoussi’s two films, Copacabana and La Ritournelle/Paris Follies (Marc Fitoussi 2014), both attracted a respectable audience of more than 300,000 spectators. Four comedies ended up being box office failures. Two of them, Sans queue ni tête/Special Treatment (Jeanne Labrune 2010), with 56,400 entries, and Tout de suite maintenant/Right Here, Right Now (Pascal Bonitzer 2016), with 176,158, are auteur comedies, while Tip Top (Serge Bozon 2013), with 82,800, and Madame Hyde/Mrs Hyde (Serge Bozon 2017), with 92,000, are more “experimental” comedies with an offbeat tone and absurd humor. Huppert, then, does not do better or worse in terms of attracting the audience to her comedies when they are compared with the rest of her films. Her star billing—by herself, in a pair, or in a group of other stars—is not a selling point for the popular audience, which is that of comedies. Just as box office returns show that the genre does not succeed in making Huppert a popular star, critical commentaries make plain the distance between Huppert’s persona and comedy, even when they praise her performance; in fact, they reiterate the actor’s association with cinephile culture, thus confirming the dichotomy noted by Vincendeau. The great majority of critics do not commend Huppert’s comic performances so much as her ability to take on anything, to move from the most demanding films to films of a much more popular type. More than for the eclecticism of her career, she is applauded, then, for her achievement as a “total actor” who has complete mastery of her art. For example, for the magazine Marianne, Huppert in Sans queue ni tête was described as “outstandingly courageous” (Heymann 2010).2 Similarly, La Ritournelle presented another opportunity to celebrate the extent of the actor’s repertoire in an article that began with a veritable panegyric:

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The moment is past when we are waiting to see what Isabelle Huppert will do in the rather unexpected role of a breeder of cattle in Normandy; what strikes one is the sheer joy she gets out of being an actress. It is probably this way of waiting for us all smiles on the threshold of a film exactly where we just did not expect her. This is not just a rather half-baked attempt to cast against type, but on the contrary, the most flamboyant and exciting way of making the fullest use of her. (Lefort 2014)3

A recurrent discursive strategy of critics is to employ the same expressions and the rhetoric used to describe the dramatic roles of this actor as a description of her comic ones. This tendency can be seen in Les Sœurs fâchées: [w]hereas Catherine Frot so often seduces through her grace as a scatterbrain, Isabelle Huppert impresses totally through the intensity that she brings to her interpretation. For her, there is no difference between great roles and lesser roles: her commitment is always maximal. Thanks to her, Les Sœurs fâchées, which is not a great film, is no longer just a minor one. (Strauss 2004)4

This strategy continues fairly systematically until Madame Hyde, in which the star plays a physics teacher called Madame Géquil, who, devoid of charisma and authority, is teased by her pupils, but becomes transformed following an electric shock into a powerful creature with a luminescent body. The review of the film in Libération, taking into account its screening at the Locarno Festival and aware of the prize for best actress awarded to Isabelle Huppert, reads: “[a] body pushes logic to the limit, an actress performs to the point of disappearing, to the point of meeting her exact opposite. Although Huppert has often shone, from henceforth she is radioactive. She does not only reflect light, she emits it” (Chessel 2017).5 Commentaries of this sort not only diminish the comic dimension of these roles and Huppert’s performances; they virtually erase it by contributing indirectly to a reinforcement of the image of the star that is crystalized by her dramatic roles. Critiques that emphasize the inadequacy of Huppert in comedy are far less common, but they, too, contribute to maintaining the image of the actor intact, and occur more at the beginning of the 2000s than the end, as, for example, in the following comment on Sœurs fâchées: “Isabelle Huppert, uptight as always with her hardened bourgeois demeanor, confirms that she and the humorous register will always be at odds” (Renault 2004).6 This distancing of her from comedy is consistent with the actor’s own statements about humor, comedy, and laughter, which are marked by a desire

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to come back to the fundamentals of her image as a “cerebral” actor. Even when Huppert is sincerely defending a comedy in which she has just acted, she displays an obvious mistrust of the genre, evident in her association of comedy with the word “oripeaux” (rags): He [Marc Fitoussi] looks at me in a way that is as justified as that of other filmmakers who operate in a more somber and complex domain. There is a real truth in what he offers me through his characters. In cinema, it is very difficult, I think, to be close to oneself and funny at the same time. Most of the time, the comic is separate from oneself and held at a distance—because it involves putting on so many masks. As in Huit femmes, in which my character was calling forth a caricature rather than a fully rounded character study. It is therefore fairly difficult to allow an actor to don the rags [oripeaux] of comedy without taking him or her a long way from himself or herself.7 (Gester 2014)

Everything thus transpires as if Huppert’s incursions into comedy have barely any impact on her image in terms of her critical reception. Although it is understandable that her comic films do not destabilize Huppert’s overall persona owing to their small number, one should nevertheless ask the question, based on textual analysis of the films, of the extent to which they inflect or modify more radically the star’s image. The answer is not plain and simple, given that, as I shall demonstrate, the comedies in the corpus exploit Huppert’s image in three different ways: cinephilic variation; stereotypical reduction; and the production of a counter-image of the star.

Cinephilic and Playful Variations on the Star’s Image Five of the comedies proffer not so much characters as playful, parodic variations on the image of the actor: the “Isabelle” episode in the Dix pour cent series, Huit femmes, Tip top, Madame Hyde, and Sans queue ni tête. The concept of the series Dix pour cent calls for Huppert to be used in this way: the series presents the activities of a prestigious talent agency called ASK, and in each episode a star plays, not without a degree of self-mockery, themselves, or, more precisely, a character who has certain points in common with themselves and bears their name. The aspect of Huppert that Dix pour cent picks up in order to construct its “Isabelle” is the actor’s bulimic work compulsion, which ends up presenting

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almost insoluble difficulties of organization for the agents. Although she has signed an exclusive contract to shoot an American film titled She Is a Femme Fatale, she has also agreed to perform in Marie de Médicis at the same time, under the direction of Cédric Kahn. Things get complicated when, after a change to the shooting schedule, she has to be present, on the same night, on the two sets, located separately and far from Paris. Thanks to the ingenuity of the ASK team and her ability to change from the mortuary shirt of Marie de’ Medici into the vivid red contemporary trench coat of the “femme fatale,” she manages to switch from the agony of the queen in a hotel in the Marais to a bitter discussion concerning the screenplay of the American film shot by the river Seine, affording herself the luxury, in the middle of the journey, of contributing to a cultural broadcast on radio in which she had also been engaged to participate. The staging of this hyper-activity, which is a running gag throughout the whole episode, provides a pretext for showing, in an original way, a mischievous, mutinous, and almost infantile Huppert, with the performance of the actor attenuating any neurotic dimension through her vivacity and naturalness. The comments of the other characters share in the same strategy of depathologization of this behavior: “Isabelle is an icon, a kind of living legend who does not want to miss out on a good role,” says one agent to justify the overlap of the two shoots. “This woman never sleeps!” concludes the boss of the agency on discovering that Huppert has been ready from daybreak to help with the Chanel fashion show in spite of her frenetic night. In Dix pour cent, then, emerges an image of the great actor who gives of herself without counting the cost, but in the positive form of the “monstre sacré” (Cocteau 1979): we see her rewriting the script of the American film that gives her too few lines and a role that is too flat, and rehearsing Hamlet, in which she undertakes the role not of Ophelia, but of Hamlet himself— which aligns her with Sarah Bernhardt interpreting Napoleon II in L’Aiglon. However, other aspects of Huppert’s image, although mentioned, are relegated to the background. Her paleness and predilection for tormented characters only appear fleetingly in her interpretation of Marie de’ Medici’s agony. Her “cerebral” dimension is only parodied in the few snippets in the radio interview given in the cultural broadcast, in which she over-exaggerates a tone of earnestness and practices long pauses, on a completely different wavelength in comparison with the whirlwind of her activities: “[t]ime is at the heart of my profession. The time of the shot … the time of the story … the time of the gaze, but also the time of the nothing … the time of the emptiness that constructs you.” Rather than

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casting against type, Dix pour cent makes a “selective use” of Huppert’s persona (Dyer 1998, 127) by eliminating the passivity, the blankness, the coldness, the association with a subversive sexuality, and by minimizing the cerebral quality and the tormented dimension: this choice is more in conformity with the general tone and the series’ target audience, which, broadcast in prime time, is aimed at a large audience (and not an audience of cinephiles). As far as cinema is concerned, the four other comedies in this first group make a different choice, either by recycling her persona more completely (Huit femmes), or by emphasizing the most subversive and neurotic aspects of it (Tip top, Madame Hyde, Sans queue ni tête). In Huit femmes, Huppert is, like the seven other female actors, both fetishized and caricatured, since the film accentuates the traits associated with the type and the performance style of each actor by underlining, in a misogynistic manner, their least sympathetic aspects. Adapted from a boulevard play by Robert Thomas (1962), but also inspired by Cukor’s The Women (1939), Ozon’s film stages eight women who find themselves shut up together in a dwelling that is cut off by snow, when the only man in the house, Marcel, has, it seems, just been murdered. Gaby (Catherine Deneuve) his wife, Mamy (Danielle Darrieux) his mother-in-law, Augustine (Isabelle Huppert) his sister-in-law, Suzon (Virginie Ledoyen) and Catherine (Ludivine Sagnier) his daughters, Pierrette (Fanny Ardant) his sister, and Louise (Emmanuelle Béart) and Chanel (Firmine Richard), the servants, engage in a settling of scores to flush the murderer. The criminal plot remains secondary since, for the filmmaker, “the aim of the film is to take the greatest actresses from each generation and make them confront one another, just like ferocious beasts in a circus” (Ozon 2002).8 Huppert is Augustine, an old embittered spinster with an austere look, a dry voice, brusque and jerky gestures, a character who manifests in a repetitive and exaggerated way Huppert’s typical pout, a pursing of the lips accompanied here by a cartoonish, wide-eyed stare. Made ugly by big glasses and dowdy clothes, she is the opposite of the beauty and sexual vitality of her sister Gaby, who, moreover, remarks on it to her. This scathing barb launched by Gaby-Deneuve “might seem like an echo of the Crawford-Shearer encounter” in The Women and also reflects a purported rivalry between the two actresses, between whom it introduces an implicit comparison: “Huppert embodies the ‘anti-star’ figure whose roles tend towards the cerebral and sexually dysfunctional […], while Deneuve transcends the constraints of experimental film-making and epitomizes a quintessentially French screen idol for a more ‘mainstream’ audience” (Waldron 2010, 75). Huit femmes also deploys the neurotic background of Huppert’s persona. She is

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humiliated by the rest of the family and often filmed a bit apart from the other characters in the group scenes. In contrast to those actresses, she is not associated with a flower in the credit sequence, but rather with a fruit covered with prickles, that of the achiote. The song that Ozon gives her to interpret, Message personnel, underlines her cerebral quality as much as her melancholy, two traits that also characterize its creator, Françoise Hardy, in the context of the French popculture of the 1970s. The text of the song, interpreted facing the camera, could be understood as a biographical revelation by the star to her audience (Royer 2015, 160), or as a thinly veiled address of a frustrated and rejected Augustine to Marcel, Gaby’s husband, who is believed to be dead: All these words that instill fear when they don’t cause laughter, Which are in too many films, songs, and books, I would like to utter them to you, And I would like to live them. I will not do so, I would like to, but I can’t. I am alone, ready to burst, and I know where you are, I am coming, wait for me, we are going to know one another.9

The melancholy is reinforced by a close-up on Huppert’s welling eyes and then her pale, tearful face, at first with her thick glasses, and then without any other accessory apart from her sadness: the melancholy that seizes Augustine, accentuated by the framing, is presented in a physical way, in the manner of Huppert’s performances in other roles in which she plays a victim, for example, with Chabrol in Madame Bovary (1991), or with Assayas in Les Destinées sentimentales/Sentimental Destinies (2000) (Vincendeau 2006, 38). Augustine is also a puritan woman and a moralist who represses less acceptable impulses: she reads romantic novels in secret, which evokes Huppert’s role as Madame Bovary in a way that discredits Huppert’s intellectual side; after having learned that her mother has killed her father, she tries to strangle her while screaming in a hoarse voice. The apparent professionalism of the actor, the eclecticism of her choices, and the control that she exercises over her image are also staged and caricatured in her transformation, when, shortly after her attempt at murder, she sheds her bun and her brown tweed clothes to reappear on the stairs with the look of a splendid femme fatale: like Veronica Lake or Rita Hayworth, with her red hair loose, she adopts lascivious poses in a blue satin dress, to the other women’s astonished and admiring gaze. Huppert’s roles in the two films by Serge Bozon, Tip Top and Madame Hyde, written for her, constitute a cinephilic homage, in a manner that is always ironic

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but falls short of being complete. In Tip Top, for example, she plays, together with Sandrine Kiberlain (Sally), a police inspector, Esther, who conducts an inquiry in a small provincial town following the suspicious death of an informant. The police comedy plays on the contrast between the two women inspectors: Sally is empathetic, listening to witnesses, while Esther is cold, implacable, and rigid, obsessed with protocol, and cuts off the words of those she is interrogating. The two women, however, have a “perverse” sexuality, known to their professional entourage, which hinders the advancement of their careers. Whereas Sally is a voyeur, Esther is sadomasochistic. The film maintains a lengthy suspense around this subject, informing us very early on, repeated several times, that Esther and her husband—a professional musician played by Sami Nacery— “like to fight.” When he joins her for a weekend in a hotel, Tip Top lets us hear their sadomasochistic frolics by means of Sally who occupies the room next door and listens to the sound of blows, and also lets us see them directly in a sequence that shows a struggle, slaps, punches, and twisting bodies, just as would occur in extreme French cinema. The consequence of these frolics, which are substituted for the sexual act, become the running gag of the film’s ending since Huppert constantly displays, apart from bruises, a drop of blood that trickles unexpectedly down her nose, which she licks with her tongue. The actor’s body thus seems like a machine a little out of whack, “on which the filmmaker programs an infinite array of actions, extending to the most strange ones”10 (Joudet 2018, 186). These films, then, do not amount to casting against type, but almost constitute commentaries on the star. The comedy functions simply as a cinephilic rereading, with winks at Huppert’s image, that has the effect of re-solidifying, and not transgressing, the star’s image. With respect to her, Jeanne Labrune’s “fantasy,”11 Sans queue ni tête, recycles, but without any parodic intention, Huppert’s coldness, her ability to give body to a deviant sexuality, and to play with appearances. In this film, which sets up fairly heavily a parallel between psychoanalysis and prostitution, Huppert is Alice, a high-class prostitute who coldly outlines her protocol to her clients and changes with professionalism from the costume of a high school girl in a kilt to that of a dominatrix or a submissive housewife to stage the fantasies of her patients. The originality of Sans queue ni tête in this corpus of reflexive films is that it touches upon the issue of Huppert’s aging. Just like the psychoanalyst who no longer finds meaning in his profession in the film, Alice is tired of prostitution at “43 years old and a little more.” A long sequence at the beginning of the film, in which we see her meticulous

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Figures 9.1 and 9.2  The body out of whack: Huppert in Tip Top (Serge Bozon 2013).

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preparations to play the young high school girl, is punctuated with a shot of Huppert, contemplating in a mirror her made-up face, which does not allow any wrinkle to show. She applies a light pressure from the tip of her fingers to her temples before saying in a loud voice: “Mmm yes … that’s starting to push it.”12

Huppert, the Frustrated Bourgeoise Comedies aimed at a broader audience exploit a different image of Huppert. Les Sœurs fâchées, Mon pire cauchemar, Tout de suite maintenant, and, to a lesser extent, Blanche comme neige incorporate the image of Huppert into their comic scenario by modifying it in two directions, often complementary. First, they highlight the dimension of Huppert that suggests class, a cultivated bourgeois woman, which is inseparable from the vast Parisian apartment in which she is regularly shown to be living.13 Second, they transform Huppert’s association with sexual transgression in international art cinema into sexual frustration, which is expressed in a refusal of conjugal sexuality, pathologized as a symptom of feminine malaise, and in resentment, a trait that was already present in Huit femmes. Even though we may be unconvinced by the transgressive nature of the figure of the frustrated, authoritarian, and embittered bourgeois woman, it is worth noting that these comedies represent a striking divergence from the stardom of Huppert as she has constructed it in auteur cinema, in which, on the contrary, the bodily staging of sexual transgression distances the character and the actor from any social characterization. In all of these films, she is a sour, frustrated woman, devoid of empathy, whose hysteria breaks out in social or solitary alcoholism, a figure who is situated more in the misogynistic tradition of the “mothers” and castrating women of comedy than that of “unruly women” (Rowe 1995). Les Sœurs fâchées depends upon a contrast between Louise (Catherine Frot) and Martine (Isabelle Huppert), two sisters who spend a few days together in Paris. Whereas the provincial Louise is a good girl, extraverted and enthusiastic, Martine is a bourgeois snob, introverted and jaded, whose expression is continually exasperated. Several shots in the credit sequence suffice to paint a portrait of the character that the subsequent story will simply repeat: after a close-up of Huppert’s expressionless face, in the midst of gargling, she is seen sitting for breakfast with her husband (François Berléand), orders him irritably to “breathe a little less loudly,” then detaches herself from the embrace of her son, who is leaving for school, complaining that she has a

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sore back. The reunion between the two sisters and their chaotic cohabitation are completely built around the contrast between the openness and laid-back manner of Louise and the closed rigidity of Martine, at both a narrative and visual level. When they go see Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette at the opera, the camera films them at length sitting side by side during Juliette’s aria “Ah, je veux vivre.” Frot’s ecstatic expression, her eyes raised to the stage, her lips murmuring the words and face expressing the emotions of the aria, contrasts with Huppert’s bleak look, whose eyes are lowered toward the floor, her face registering nothing but impassiveness and exasperation. Martine is a character who is so hard, so opaque, and so cruel that, in rather a shocking way, the marital rape to which she falls victim leaves little room for sympathy: only the point of view of her husband is presented, several times (he can no longer bear to keep on “fucking a corpse after 10 years”), but the spectator never gains access to Martine’s inner thoughts or resentment. Only once does the vice between the two sisters loosen, during a viewing of Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (Jacques Demy 1967): both sing in unison, reproduce the choreography, but Martine stops as if the harmony between Dorléac and Deneuve and the joyful world of the film trigger a renewed awareness of her own limitations: “[h]ave I been bad this evening? I frighten myself sometimes. I cannot stop myself from being cruel, it’s stronger than me.” The confession of this almost ontological cruelty refers, once again, to an essential aspect of Huppert’s persona, with the film at that moment departing briefly from its psychological and sociological approach in order to adhere to the image of the star. Mon pire cauchemar depends even more strikingly on the figure of the frustrated bourgeoise, whose contact with a boastful, boorish, macho-type speaking slang will lead back to pleasure, generosity, and love of life. This romantic comedy recounts the meeting and improbable love affair of Agathe (Huppert), the glacial, controlling director of a contemporary art foundation, who is married to a publisher and lives in an enormous and magnificent apartment in the Latin quarter, with Patrick (Benoît Poelvoorde), a macho loser who lives off odd jobs, squats in a concierge’s lodge or sleeps in his van, and dreams of owning a car wash in which he would offer an “aquarium of women” as an erotic attraction. The film associates, in a fairly reactionary way, the portrait of a powerful woman with obnoxious authority in several scenes at the art foundation where Huppert persecutes and terrifies her assistants, men who work under her orders. The “meet cute” that opens the film takes place during a meeting of the parents of pupils who attend the college that Agathe’s son attends (a dunce, predictably) and also Patrick’s son (a little genius, predictably). Here,

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Agathe’s class identity is foregrounded (her sexual frustration will appear only later in the story) from the moment she interrupts the college principal to give him a lesson on the validity of screening tests, using a forceful psycho-pedagogic vocabulary. She is interrupted unceremoniously in her disquisition, to which the other parents and head teacher are listening with palpable boredom, by Patrick, who wants people to talk about more important things, such as the pupil’s diet, which he considers insufficiently nourishing. Agathe tries to resume her speech, but Patrick interrupts by declaring: “[i]t’s obvious that food doesn’t interest you. You’re a prawn. And a prawn eats plankton.” With this comment, not only is Huppert’s thinness used as a social marker from the outset, but Patrick also sways the onlookers, who are laughing, to his side at the expense of Agathe—a dynamic that will recur throughout the film. More generally (with the exception of the two films by Fitoussi), Huppert is the target of laughter in the comedies, rather than the driving force behind laughter, because she is rather unpleasant. We laugh at her and not with her, which distances her from the unruly woman defined “as rule-breaker, jokemaker, and public, bodily spectacle” (Rowe 1995, 12). The drunken scene in Les Sœurs fâchées is a case in point: Martine nervously crumbles some bread with an arrogant air, does not make any guests laugh with the nasty remarks she addresses to her sister, even when these are well-turned witticisms, and her inebriation becomes more ridiculous than liberating. In fact, comedies often associate Huppert with another actor, who is the vector of the comic effect and with whom one laughs: Poelvoorde in Mon pire cauchemar, Frot in Les Sœurs fâchées, Kiberlain in Tip Top, Romain Duris (the high-school principal) in Madame Hyde. The comedy depends essentially on the other actor/character or is generated by the contrast between the two actors/characters that is emphasized in the images presented in the posters and the screenplay of their films. Finally, while the figure of the frustrated bourgeoise obviously leans on her age, it is striking how the theme of age is not at all exploited in any of these films, in which Isabelle Huppert retains her eternally young, elegant, and slim physique. Even better, aging in Mon pire cauchemar is displaced onto the character played by André Dussolier, Huppert’s partner at the beginning of the film, who leaves her for a young woman thirty years his junior (Virginie Efira): the later appearances of her ex-partner in the rest of the story provide a pretext for a comic treatment of male aging since he has difficulty adapting to the youth, the pulsating rhythm of life, and the sporty leisure pastimes of his new girlfriend, without Agathe’s age ever being evoked.

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Two Exceptions: Isabelle Huppert as an Actor in Feel-Good Movies Copacabana and La Ritournelle are two exceptions in Huppert’s post-2000 comedies. Both were made by Marc Fitoussi,14 who did not have the same training as the filmmakers mentioned earlier (he comes from screenwriting and was trained at the Conservatoire Européen d’Ecriture Audiovisuelle in Paris). In Copacabana, a social comedy, Huppert is Babou, an anti-conformist mother, a daughter of 1968 who, after living a bohemian lifestyle, lives in Tourcoing in the North of France. Images in the credit sequence present Huppert’s silhouette in this provincial, modest, urban brick setting, thus placing the actor from the outset into a landscape with which she is not familiar. After a life of odd jobs and various anti-conformist experiences, Babou lives on a “back-to-work” welfare benefit and has a daughter, Esméralda (played by Lolita Chammah, Huppert’s actual daughter) with whom she has an affectionate but complex relationship. Esmeralda loves her, but is angry with her for having imposed a disrupted, marginal existence on her, and she aspires to have an orderly life. During a dinner with Babou she announces that she is getting married, but does not want to invite her because she would not be able to pay her share of the reception, and because she would be ashamed of her. Determined to procure the necessary money and attend the wedding, Babou decides to leave for Ostend to sell apartments in timeshares. The plot then develops in two directions: the mother–daughter relationship, which oscillates between tenderness and incomprehension, and the portrayal of timeshare selling among a world of dropouts and members of the underclass exploited by real-estate capitalism. Although cheap clothes in garish colors and heavy makeup ascribe an unprecedented lower-class identity to Huppert, they involve a degree of eccentricity that allows the actor to seem credible in this character. In the same way, her social situation seems caused by her life choices, and not to her social origin. The transgression that is characteristic of Huppert’s persona is not transmuted into frustration as in the other comedies, but rather into anti-conformism. Babou is a whimsical and uncontrollable character, slightly immature, invasive but funny, keen and generous. Accordingly, we laugh with Huppert and not at her, making this unquestionably the only film in which she comes close to an “unruly woman” performance. Upon her arrival in Ostend, she makes friends in a bar with a kind young man who puts her up for the night, and with whom she has an affair. She does not want to live with him, however, and wishes to retain

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her freedom, which puts an end to their relationship. Once she is employed and set up in the timeshare whose units she has to sell to tourists, she helps a couple of homeless young people by giving them food and lodging them secretly in a vacant flat, thus running the risk of losing her position. It is also Babou’s ability to connect to others that allows her to get out of every bad situation and to achieve her projects: she is able to get to Ostend by borrowing a friend’s car; she learns from a young woman with whom she has spontaneously formed an acquaintance that to clinch a deal with clients it is better to go to the port of Zeebruge, where ferries full of tourists arrive, than to walk around the streets of Ostend, which are frequented only by locals; this allows her to become an unrivalled salesperson, in contrast to her colleagues. To embody a character, then, who is neither withdrawn nor cerebral, but full of spontaneity, Huppert’s acting assumes an unprecedented colorfulness: her gestures become more lively and her face loses its blankness, in order to express sadness, joy, tiredness, and enthusiasm. The sequences showing her dining with her daughter display an expressive mobility in Huppert’s face that has rarely been seen before, showing her passing successively through a number of rapidly changing expressions. These close-ups not only reveal thoughts and emotions, but also make visible the ravages of time: Huppert’s smooth, white, opaque face, which often seems to have been spared from aging in films as with photographs, is replaced in Copacabana by a face which, with its wrinkles, has a look of maturity. Age appears

Figure 9.3  Huppert as the anti-conformist Babou with her lover Bart (Jurgen Delnaet) in Copacabana (Marc Fitoussi 2010).

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visibly in the film, but it is also turned into a thematic preoccupation by the confrontation with her daughter, who, as mentioned, is Huppert’s own daughter, as well as by the professional environment in which Babou evolves in Ostend: most of the recruiting agents are older women, with two of them forced to accept this demeaning work because they have lost their job and have not been able to find an equivalent one because of their age. These aging women seem like a new lumpenproletariat in a business organization that is run, by contrast, by young executives. This configuration allows the film to present a contrast, in a fairly normative way, between two models of aging. The first is negative, exemplified in Babou’s colleague Irène, who looks very ordinary, and is constantly complaining and grousing. Irène, who wears compression socks, has no other horizon than phone calls to her grandchildren, causing Babou to compare her to “the slut in Misery.” The other is positive, exemplified in the dynamic, outward-looking aging of Babou, which is not regarded as a renunciation—of sexuality, of her way of life—since she has a casual love affair and continues her anti-conformist behavior at the end of the movie by joining a troupe of Brazilian dancers. Huppert’s sunny image, radiant and crowned with a samba dancer’s gigantic headdress of feathers at the end of Copacabana, indeed presents, then, a counterimage of Huppert that one finds again, with a few nuances, in her second collaboration with Fitoussi for La Ritournelle. This comedy of remarriage stages an aging, easy-going couple who raise cattle in Normandy (Brigitte and Xavier, played respectively by Huppert and Darroussin), whose children have left home, and who are bogged down in a routine. Under the pretext of consulting a dermatologist about eczema on her chest that she cannot get rid of, Brigitte contrives a solo stay in Paris for herself with the aim of meeting a handsome young man, Stan, with whom she had already flirted at a party in a house next to their farm. The encounters with Stan in Paris are a flop, not because of a physical age gap, but because of a clash of generations, the young man’s way of life being too removed from that of Brigitte. Her escapade ends, however, with a night spent with an elegant Danish fifty-year-old dentist staying in the same hotel. On her return to Normandy, she meets Xavier, who knows about her affair because, having suspicions, he secretly followed her to Paris. The film then offers a pastiche of the final scene of La Femme du boulanger (Marcel Pagnol 1938). In this famous monologue, Raimu welcomes his unfaithful wife and forgives her infidelity by talking to the cat, Pomponnette, who has returned to the house after having left its old tomcat for a younger cat. In La Ritournelle, Pomponnette is replaced by a dairy cow, but Xavier delivers a similar monologue to the animal.

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The epilogue shows us, however, the couple revitalized and ready to experience a second honeymoon. In reviews, critics generally overemphasized the eczema from which Huppert suffers as the sign of an insoluble mystery, of some “private issue” and on several occasions compare Brigitte to Madame Bovary on account of the location of the plot in Normandy and also because of the film by Chabrol in which Huppert acted. One notes, however, that this comparison betrays a certain sexism given that Brigitte does not suffer from “Bovarysme” in any way and that the film establishes a symmetrical relation between the husband and his wife. It depicts Brigitte’s escapade and Xavier’s distress, but it also shows us that Xavier himself had a fling several years earlier, provoking the same distress in Brigitte. Although the film is not exempt from misogyny (by including the pastiche of La Femme du boulanger, for example), it does suggest that Brigitte’s Parisian adventure is not the result of a gendered romantic aspiration, which would align it with a Bovary-like schema, but a shared event in the life of an aging couple. Throughout the film, Huppert’s face registers a range of emotions, but, in contrast to Copacabana, it looks smooth and plumped: the age presented in the film is that of the couple, not of the actor.

Conclusion The majority of these comedies present, through various strategies, a stereotypical reduction of Huppert’s image, rather than subverting the fundamental traits of her persona and her acting: certain films recycle her image as an actor who is intense, cerebral, and associated with violent and disturbed impulses in a way that is playful, cinephilic, or fetishistic, while others translate it in terms that are simultaneously psychological and social through the figure of the frustrated bourgeois woman. Only two films, Copacabana and, to a lesser degree, La Ritournelle, produce a counter-image by taking Huppert the star out of her customary world, as much at the level of the character as that of her acting style, and present, through a different procedure, a kind of liberation or emancipation of the character. Finally, in a more one-off way, several comedies develop the issue of aging, both of the actor and her characters, which remains, like the social issue, latent, or at best implicit, in the persona of Huppert presented in international art cinema. Comedy hardly destabilizes Huppert’s persona at all; it does not succeed in enlarging her palette and turning her into a comic actor, in the sense of delivering a comic performance. Instead of modifying Huppert’s

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image, certain comedies nevertheless subject it to an inflexion, contrary to the view propagated in the critical discourse, which tends rather to find in them the “normal” image of the star, sometimes in contradiction of what the film actually depicts, attributing to her roles and her performances what one might call “Huppertian” clichés. The reflexive dimension found in Huppert’s comic roles seems to apply an obvious brake to the development of a counter-image through comedy, rather than serving as a bridge leading toward another register. On this point, a comparison with Juliette Binoche is particularly illuminating. Whereas Binoche, also an international French star associated with auteur cinema, is esteemed for her cerebral roles linking elegance with passionate intensity, and while for some years she has been associated with contemporary art of different forms (cinema, theatre, dance, painting, writing), she succeeds in deconstructing this image in her incursions into comedy. Although her “ability to shift between two archetypes which seem to require French names the gamine and the femme fatale” (Vincendeau 2000, 242) is undeniably an asset to invest in her lighter roles, the choice of a form of grotesque, in a complete break with her glamorous image, allowed her to create a comic identity with several characters: an overheavily-made-up, garrulous beautician, in Décalage horaire (Danièle Thompson 2002), and a fifty-year-old platinum blond who is pregnant and in the midst of a crisis of youth in Telle mère, telle fille (Noémie Saglio 2017). In contrast, the stability of Huppert’s persona, solidified by art cinema and the most intellectual type of theatre, prevents such a metamorphosis. (translated from French by Alistair Fox)

Notes 1

2 3

La Femme de mon pote (Bertrand Blier 1983); Sac de nœuds (Josiane Balasko 1985); Les Palmes de Monsieur Schutz (Claude Pinoteau 1997); Huit femmes (François Ozon 2001); Les Sœurs fâchées (Alexandra Leclère 2004); Copacabana (Marc Fitoussi 2010); Sans queue ni tête (Jeanne Labrune 2010); Mon pire cauchemar (Anne Fontaine 2011); Tip top (Serge Bozon 2013); La Ritournelle (Marc Fitoussi 2014); Tout de suite maintenant (Pascal Bonitzer 2016); Madame Hyde (Serge Bozon 2018); Blanche comme neige (Anne Fontaine, 2019). “bluffante de vaillance.” “Passé le moment d’accoutumance où l’on attend de voir ce qu’Isabelle Huppert donne dans le rôle assez inattendu d’éleveuse de bovins en Normandie, ce qui

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5

6 7

8 9

10 11 12 13

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frappe c’est sa joie d’être actrice. Soit cette façon de nous attendre tout sourire au seuil d’un film où justement on ne l’attendait pas. Ce n’est pas tant le coup un peu foireux du contre-emploi, mais au contraire celui plus flamboyant et excitant du plein-emploi d’elle-même.” “Si Catherine Frot séduit comme souvent par sa grâce étourdie, Isabelle Huppert impressionne carrément par l’intensité qu’elle donne à son interprétation. Il n’y a pas pour elle de grands et de petits rôles: son implication est toujours maximale. Grâce à elle Les Sœurs fâchées, qui n’est pas un grand film, n’en est pas non plus un petit.” “Un corps pousse la logique jusqu’au néant, une actrice joue jusqu’à disparaître, jusqu’à rejoindre son propre négatif. Si Huppert a souvent rayonné, elle est désormais radioactive. Elle ne fait pas que renvoyer la lumière, elle émet.” “Isabelle Huppert, contrainte comme jamais en bourgeoise racornie, confirme que le registre humoristique et elle feront toujours deux.” “Il [Marc Fitoussi] porte un regard sur moi qui est aussi juste que celui d’autres cinéastes à l’univers plus sombre et plus complexe. Il y a une réelle vérité dans ce qu’il me propose à travers ses personnages. Au cinéma, c’est très difficile, je crois, d’être proche de soi et drôle à la fois. La plupart du temps, le comique éloigne de soi. Parce que c’est autant de masques que l’on revêt. Comme dans Huit femmes, où mon personnage appelait plus une caricature qu’une composition. C’est donc assez difficile de permettre à un acteur d’endosser les oripeaux de la comédie sans l’emmener loin de lui-même. C’est un pari à relever, et Marc Fitoussi s’en tire très bien, je trouve, dans les deux films qu’on a faits ensemble.” “il s’agit pour ce film de prendre les plus grandes actrices de chaque génération et de les confronter, telles des bêtes féroces dans un cirque.” “Tous ces mots qui font peur quand ils ne font pas rire/Qui sont dans trop de films, de chansons et de livres/Je voudrais vous les dire/Et je voudrais les vivre/Je ne le ferai pas/Je veux, je ne peux pas/Je suis seule à crever, et je sais où vous êtes/J’arrive, attendez-moi, nous allons nous connaître.” “sur laquelle le cinéaste programme une infinité de gestes, jusqu’aux plus étranges.” “Fantasy” (fantaisie) is the term that Jeanne Labrune has used since the 1990s to describe her comedies, including in their credit sequence. “Mouais … Ça commence à être limite” This class identity is also found in the comedies that Huppert performs in the theatre. For example, in Les Fausses confidences by Marivaux at the Odéon in 2014, Luc Bondy stages her in front of a line of stiletto shoes, as a good-looking widow engaged in tai-chi exercises, as a French bourgeois highbrow who has time to pay attention to her body and her mind through a socially elevated form of physical practice. Also the director of the “Isabelle” episode in the Dix pour cent TV series.

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References Chessel, Luc. 2017. “Locarno.” Libération, August 14–15. Cocteau, Jean. 1979. Mes monstres sacrés. Paris: Editions Encre. Dyer, Richard. 1998 [1979]. Stars. London: British Film Institute. Etchegoin, Marie-France. 2018. “L’ indomptable.” Variety 65: 58–67. Gester, Julien. 2014. “Entretien avec Isabelle Huppert.” Liberation–Next, June 7. Heymann, Danièle. 2010. “Sans queue ni tête.” Marianne, September 25. Joudet, Murielle. 2018. Isabelle Huppert: Vivre ne nous regarde pas. Paris: éditions Capricci. Lefort, Gérard. 2014. “Madame Bovin rit.” Libération, June 11. Moine, Raphaëlle. 2015. “Contemporary French Comedy as Social Laboratory.” In A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema, edited by Alistair Fox, Michel Marie, Raphaëlle Moine and Hilary Radner, 234–55. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell. Ozon, François. 2002. Studio, February. Renault, Gilles. 2004. “Fâcheusement râté.” Libération, December 22. Rowe, Kathleen. 1995. Unruly Women: Gender and the Genres of Laughter. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Royer, Michelle. 2015. “Mystère, intellectualisme, authenticité et impertinence: Isabelle en jeu.” Australian Journal of French Studies 52 (2): 149–61. Strauss, Frédéric. 2004. “Les Sœurs fâchées.” Télérama, December 22. Vincendeau, Ginette. 2000. Stars and Stardom in French Cinema. London and New York: Continuum. Vincendeau, Ginette. 2006. “Isabelle Huppert: The Big Chill.” Sight & Sound, 16–12, December: 36–9. Waldron, Darren. 2010. “‘Une mine d’or inépuisable’: the queer pleasures of François Ozon’s 8 femmes/8 Women (2002).” Studies in French Cinema 10 (1): 69–87.

10

“Who the Hell is Isabelle Huppert?”: A French Star in America Alison Taylor

“Who the hell is Isabelle Huppert?” was the question the incredulous Senior Vice-President of Domestic Distribution at United Artists (U.A.), Al Fitter, repeatedly asked when notified that Michael Cimino intended to cast her as Ella Watson in Heaven’s Gate (1980). Today, after performing in over 130 films and critically acclaimed the world over, this seems like a ludicrous question, but in 1979, Huppert was not a name recognized widely outside of France. While Heaven’s Gate failed to provide Huppert the Hollywood breakthrough expected, this may well have been for the best. As Mick LaSalle (2012, 99) notes, for most female French émigrés, Hollywood has little to offer besides “marginalization, mediocrity and disappointment,” tending to take great actresses and confine them to roles that are both bland and limited by age. Despite this ill-fated attempt at a big-budget breakthrough, Huppert has maintained a connection with the United States, working largely in independent and small-budget cinema with filmmakers including David O. Russell, Hal Hartley, and Neil Jordan. Far from the insipid roles that have befallen other French talents, small-budget filmmakers working in America have, for the most part, embraced Huppert’s capacity to convey cool intellectualism and restrained flashes of intensity in performances ranging from sweet nymphomaniac ex-nuns to alluring psychopaths. Considering her performances in American productions including Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino 1980), Amateur (Hal Hartley 1994), I Heart Huckabees (David O. Russell 2004), and The Romanoffs (Matthew Weiner 2018) as well as her persona in the US press, this chapter seeks to shed some light on the question—who the hell is Isabelle Huppert when she’s in America?

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Who Now? Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino 1980) Michael Musto: You haven’t made many American films, right? Amateur and I Heart Huckabees … Isabelle Huppert: You forgot Heaven’s Gate. Michael Musto: Everyone does. [Laughs.] (Musto 2009)

Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate is notorious, less for what is on-screen than for what was happening off of it. Cimino’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning The Deer Hunter (1978) had a disastrous production, with studio and director at each other’s throats concerning every detail. Not least of these was his intention to cast a then little-known French actor, Isabelle Huppert, as Ella Watson, a bordello madam and apex of the narrative’s love triangle. In her early twenties, Huppert already sported a lengthy list of film and television credits in Europe and had just won Best Actress at Cannes for her leading role in Claude Chabrol’s Violette Nozière (1978). To American audiences, however, she was an unknown quantity, and to studio executives, the idea of plucking her from Paris and dropping her in the Wild West seemed unfathomable. The objections raised by United Artists during negotiations were by and large predictable. Executives were uncomfortable about Huppert’s obscurity outside of France. They were also concerned about her capacity to perform in a language other than her native tongue. Unlike established American actors, casting Huppert was a gamble that the studio did not want to take on an already costly project. More pernicious, however, were the attacks on her appearance made by Senior Vice President and Head of Worldwide Production, Steven Bach. Upon meeting Huppert in Paris, Bach (1999, 190) would reflect: I revised my opinion. She didn’t have a face like a potato after all: she looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy got up in a shapeless cotton shift. Nothing about her quite registered. Her hair, her face, even her freckles were pale. Her features lacked definition and seemed padded with puppy fat. She was tiny, she was lumpish, she made no particular effort to be charming […] International stardom couldn’t have seemed more remote.

Like looking into a time capsule, such an arrogant and grotesque assessment is tempered by hindsight: Huppert would play Ella Watson, and despite Heaven’s Gate’s critical and box office failure at the time of its release, international stardom was inevitable. As David Thompson (2009) would later observe: “Heaven’s Gate did not turn out well, but no one ever blamed Isabelle Huppert.”

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I point out the above objections, not because they are fair, but because they share something that I take to be revealing about the future trajectory of Huppert’s career in American cinema. To argue that Huppert is not recognizable enough, not sexy enough, and altogether too French to make it in Hollywood is to make criticisms that pertain entirely to surface. Significantly, Huppert’s star persona today is resolutely not surface—she is known for being enigmatic, mysterious, inaccessible, and for possessing a talent to balance contradictory impulses simultaneously.1 These are the very same qualities that make her suited to play Ella Watson, Cimino deciding to cast Huppert after seeing just minutes of her role in Violette Nozière as the duplicitous teen who murders her parents. As we shall see, Huppert’s best American roles come when directors possess an acuity of vision that affords Huppert roles consonant with the specifics of her talent. Our first introduction to Ella Watson is to a young woman barely able to contain her childlike excitement at the return of her lover, Jim Averill (Kris Kristofferson). She is spritely and expressive, her features brimming with adoration. Over the course of the film, Huppert imbues Ella with great depth, crafting a complex and nuanced performance that balances this motion and theatricality with her aptitude for expression through stillness. Indeed, two of her best scenes occur midway through the film and are masterfully constructed around a series of looks rather than words. In the first, Ella is invited to view the home that her competing suitor, Nate Champion (Christopher Walken), has decorated for her. Nate has proposed marriage, a tempting offer given Jim’s reluctance to commit. She loves them both, but the security of Nate’s proposal must be weighed against the security of Jim’s wealth—for all his love, Nate is a man of feeble means, and Ella struggles to hide her disappointment on entering the single room cabin to realize the promised “wallpaper” is actually yesterday’s news repurposed. The minimal dialogue as Ella absorbs her surrounds and Nate attempts to gauge her response is not a matter of characters not having anything to say, but their inability to say it. Both Walken’s Nate and Huppert’s Ella, at different times, open their mouths to speak but neither can find the words. Instead, Cimino capitalizes on Huppert’s skill for conveying emotion with only the slightest of gestures. The parting of her lips, the hesitation of her tongue behind her teeth, the silent but abrupt intake of breath as her eyes begin to glisten with yet unformed tears all make perceptible the flurry of thoughts dancing across her mind, each as palpable as that which subsumes it. Ella turns away from Nate to contain the emotion that threatens to seize her before commanding herself anew; her facial features slackened with disappointment, now willed into a smile.

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Huppert’s command of opposing impulses is evidenced again later in the film, when Ella returns home to discover three strange men in wait. Uncertain whether she is dealing with clients or a genuine threat, Ella attempts to navigate the situation, first with an air of casual confidence. Crossing the room toward them, she removes the strangers’ hats, casting them aside. Leaning back on a lounger, a hand at her hip, her posture is self-assured; however, the quiet modulations of her expression betray her unease. Huppert’s features waver, unable to commit to the smile her pretense demands, nor willing to relinquish her composure entirely, as her eyes shift warily between the men, searching for clues as to the appropriate response. Both scenes are exemplary of the demands put on performers when mood and tension are in flux, but action and dialogue are sparse. Tonal shifts become the burden of presence and gesture, actors pressured to hold in balance the revelation and concealment of a character’s interiority. For all of Bach’s objections during the casting process (and they only grow more boorish as his memoir continues) it is worth noting that he momentarily considered the possibility that Cimino might be right in wanting Huppert for the role, conceding that perhaps the director “saw something in her our vision was not acute enough to see” (1999, 192). This statement is twofold; at once it points toward what Huppert’s performance in the finished film reveals: that despite unavoidable financial worries in casting her, concerns about her capacity to play Ella were unfounded. But moreover, it highlights the determinant of Huppert’s career in America for decades to come: her strongest performances happen when her capacity for depth, nuance, and contradiction is recognized.

Failing to Recognize Huppert: The Bedroom Window (Curtis Hanson 1987) A French actress arrives from Paris with an aura of mystery and complexity and gets fed into machinery that turns her into nothing. (LaSalle 2012, 88–9)

Lamenting a tendency for French female talent to be diluted by a Hollywood studio system that relegates even its local female performers to bland roles limited by age, LaSalle (2012) catalogues the fates of several accomplished émigrés upon arriving in America. Virginie Ledoyen’s role in The Beach (Danny Boyle 2000) is illustrative of talent wasted, as is Sophie Marceau’s appearance in

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romantic comedies like Lost & Found (Jeff Pollack 1999) and Alex & Emma (Rob Reiner 2003). Of Emmanuelle Béart’s casting in Mission: Impossible (BrianDe Palma 1996), LaSalle mourns: “Americans didn’t really get to see her, that is, not the distinct, willful, powerful screen entity that she can be. They saw a placid ornament, who could have been anybody” (2012, 88). Given this trend, LaSalle suggests, perhaps Heaven’s Gate’s failure to be the Hollywood breakthrough Huppert had hoped for is ultimately for the best (2012, 88). Huppert has maintained an intermittent presence in American low-budget and independent cinema, and yet, it is worth noting that even away from the pressures of major studio films, she is not entirely immune to the etiolating process. The same critique LaSalle makes of Béart’s transformation into a “placid ornament who could have been anybody” could easily be applied to Huppert’s next American role in Curtis Hanson’s self-consciously Hitchcockian thriller, The Bedroom Window (1987). Huppert plays Sylvia Wentworth, a glamorous French woman having an affair with one of her husband’s handsome colleagues, Terry Lambert (Steve Guttenberg). After a clandestine tryst at Terry’s apartment, Sylvia witnesses a woman being attacked in the street below. Knowing that Sylvia’s reporting the assault would expose their affair, Terry reports it as though he had been the witness, a simple plan that unravels as the revelation of Terry’s lie makes him the prime suspect in a series of murders. If Hanson’s film takes its cues from Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock 1954), its transposition of plot points misses the subtlety of its predecessor’s screenplay and awareness of its performers. Hanson seems to perceive only the framework of the genre, and the archetypes of its characters, as though assembling the requisite parts should a suspense movie make. Without consideration of their individual talents, the cast seem caught shapeless in the film’s gloss with little substance to buoy them. Hanson’s reasons for casting Huppert are illustrative. Like Ella in Heaven’s Gate, Sylvia was originally intended for an American actor before Huppert was suggested. Of this decision, Hanson remarks: “she gives the movie a little extra something, rather than just an older woman Steve [Guttenberg] has a fling with. Being French, she has a veneer of sophistication” (Russell 1987, 2F). Like the U.A. executives who couldn’t see beyond Huppert’s heritage, Hanson’s remarks are indicative of a failure to recognize her screen persona on any more than a superficial level. However, unlike Heaven’s Gate, this is not just an administrative obstacle to be overcome but is embedded in Hanson’s screenplay. Sylvia Wentworth is bland, her character reducible to paltry signifiers—wealthy, married, self-interested. With such an unsubstantial character to begin with, it

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is little wonder that Huppert’s Frenchness is conceived of as a welcome veneer of sophistication. The problem is that in The Bedroom Window, the veneer is the character. Huppert is given little to do besides glide through the film in glamorous outfits, look longingly at Terry, and hold herself in statuesque profile in various locales—in a courtroom, in an aquarium, in a theatre. Some stars are well suited to playing the veneer. In Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock 1958), Kim Novak’s Madeline Elster is queen of the statuesque profile shot, holding her posture under the scrutiny of the camera interminably. Doe-eyed and silent she is the blank screen upon which, we, as much as Scottie (James Stewart) project. In this way, she is veneer par excellence—an ethereal presence with no real referent. Likewise, in Rear Window, Grace Kelly embodies the superficiality of Lisa Fremont with ease. Possessing a classical beauty and poise that would become iconic, when she does a twirl in Jefferies’s apartment to show off a dress as though on a private catwalk, one never doubts that all is comme il faut. Hitchcock knows all too well the tightrope Kelly masterfully walks between girlish naivete and worldly experience, held taut between a childlike pout and coquettish smile. The pleasure in watching Kelly is that she threatens to, but never quite trips. The crucial difference between the Hitchcock blonde and Sylvia Wentworth is that the former’s exterior always masks something, however traumatic or trivial. Sylvia, on the other hand, is deprived of any measure of depth, leaving Huppert with nothing but soap opera cliché so at odds with her screen persona. When she first enters Terry’s apartment, Huppert’s seductress paces slowly, the unsubtle dialogue dripping from her open lips like syrup as she fixes Terry in an uncomfortably lustful gaze. At odds with Terry when their lie begins to unravel, Huppert resorts to dramatically inflated gestures as though the screenplay required the exaggerations of a silent film in order that it might be made clear. This is not a Huppert-centric problem, however. Vincent Canby (1987, C6) notes the hollowness of all characters describing them as “little more than well-dressed wraiths” made to carry the burden of weak storytelling. The solution, for the entire cast it seems, is to perform at a heightened pitch more akin to a melodrama than a thriller. As Rachel Donadio (2016) notes, “What directors love about Huppert—and she prides herself on being an auteur’s actor—is her ability to convey moral complexity in the most unique ways.” Some of her most celebrated films—Violette Nozière (Claude Chabrol 1978), La Pianiste/The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke 2001), and Elle (Paul Verhoeven 2016)—are typified by the inscrutable women at their core. It is not that she cannot embody surface—blankness is an integral part of her performance style2—but there must be something underneath. Failing

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to recognize Huppert’s capacity to navigate paradoxical emotions, or to say a great deal without using words at all, is to risk casting her as Sylvia: the bland, ornamental, could have been anybody that really should have been somebody else. To recognize these aspects of her screen persona is not to typecast her, however. On the contrary, as other American productions have shown, being perceptive to her talents can also mean discovering these talents anew.

Mutual Recognition: Amateur (Hal Hartley 1994), and I Heart Huckabees (David O. Russell 2004) Charlie Rose: From a career standpoint, is it important for you to come to the United States and sort of make it in a different way here … ? Isabelle Huppert: Yeah. I think I would lie if I would say it’s not important, it is important. But, I am privileged enough to work with great directors in Europe so I have to find the equivalent of the same directors I work in Europe, you know. But I’m ready to work with them, if they are ready to work with me. (Huppert 1991)

Sometime after this 1991 interview on the Charlie Rose talk show, Huppert would write to Hal Hartley, an independent American director she felt was equivocal to the talent she had worked with at home. Hartley was no stranger to Huppert’s work, having made her films mandatory viewing for his female actors from the beginning of his career and was eager to collaborate (Pall 1995, section 2, 15). If Cimino had seen something in Huppert that his minders were not acute enough to see, Hartley saw it too. With Huppert in mind, he crafted the role of Isabelle in a low-budget, off-beat combination of comedy, crime film and drama: Amateur. Huppert in Amateur is contradiction personified. The character Isabelle is at once pure and profane: an ex-nun-turned-pornographer, a virgin, and a self-proclaimed nymphomaniac. Having left the convent to discover her true purpose, Isabelle supports herself in the meantime with woeful attempts at writing raunchy stories for porno magazines. By chance, she encounters Thomas (Martin Donovan) a stranger who wanders into a Manhattan diner bleeding from a head wound that has rendered him amnesiac. Perceiving this to be the divine mission she has been waiting for, Isabelle takes it upon herself to help Thomas recover his lost identity and atone for his past sins as a violent criminal.

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By the early 1990s, Huppert was known in the United States, and considered a star—if not in American films, at least abroad.3 Her internationally acclaimed collaborations with Claude Chabrol: Violette Nozière (1978), Story of Women (1988), and Madame Bovary (1991), playing in turn, a teenage sex worker– turned-murderess, an abortionist, and Flaubert’s famed anti-heroine, each required a certain moral complexity and ambiguity. These films further demonstrated Huppert’s ability to carry complex and enigmatic leading roles, a reputation she had been cultivating since her breakthrough role in Claude Goretta’s The Lacemaker (1977).4 Having by now worked with some of Europe’s most well-regarded directors including, beyond Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Andrzej Wajda, and Joseph Losey, Huppert was also rapidly cultivating a persona as a discerning sophisticate, “largely associated with the cerebral cachet of auteur cinema” (Vincendeau 2006, 36). Hartley’s authorial persona as a distinctive voice in American independent film was also well established, having completed three features and several shorts. Consistent among them is the director’s approach to performance, which, as Steven Rawle (2011, 2) notes, tends toward abstraction. Hartley’s characters deliver quick-witted dialogue in a register often described as flat, impassive, and unaffecting. Actors still emote, but like Murray Smith observes of Bresson’s direction, they are “operating within a compressed amplitude” (1995, 176). For this reason, it is especially interesting to consider Huppert’s presence in Amateur; on the one hand Hartley’s style might threaten to erase the individual by placing parameters on performers’ expression to maintain a coherent authorial universe. On the other, unlike Hartley’s recurring cast of actors, several of whom were largely unknown before Hartley’s movies, Huppert’s star persona would seem to make such effacement impossible. We meet Isabelle sat at the counter in a Manhattan diner. Plainly dressed, she taps away on her laptop keyboard, stiltedly reading aloud the words she commits to the page. What begins as a pulp noir with its brooding, deterministic dialogue and portents of violence takes a comically sharp turn into the lexicon of pornography. Lighting a cigarette, and furrowing her brow with renewed focus, this unassuming woman feeds her computer words in irregular intervals. Isabelle is so absorbed in her narrative that its public dictation does not strike her as inappropriate, even as she describes the way Vera can feel Frank’s “cock … against her … like a piece of two-by-four … in his trousers.” A slight flick of her head, raise of her eyebrows, and purse of her lips as she delivers this haphazard metaphor reveal a quiet self-satisfaction. In a later scene, doe-eyed,

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Figure 10.1  Huppert as an erotic writer in Amateur (Hal Hartley 1994).

she poises herself like an obedient schoolgirl giving a class presentation of her completed story. Taking care to make occasional eye contact with her perplexed employer, in somber earnest Isabelle reads her “pornography” aloud: “[h]ow is it possible,” she asked, “that in a universe sustaining such conscientious brutality, a friend can laugh, a mother smile, a father sacrifice, or a lover kiss?” before straightening her shoulders and arching her back in a subtle expression of complacency. It is a curious combination to witness, at once quintessentially Hartley but simultaneously so very Huppert. Words relayed in a manner almost stripped of affect, and so at odds with the world into which they are enunciated lay bare Hartley’s authorship. At the same time, a certain opaque melancholy is part of Huppert’s screen presence, as are the subtle gestures we recognize as inherently her own. Indeed, Huppert presented a new challenge to Hartley who noted that both he and his cinematographer, Michael Spiller, were unable to separate the woman in front of the lens from her historical and cultural prestige in French cinema (Hartley 1994, xxxi). At last, Hartley resolved to actively draw on his appreciation of Huppert’s screen presence: “[w]hen Thomas first comes into the coffee shop, she looks over her right shoulder, and that’s a gesture she has done a lot in her career. She did it in Violette Nozière (1978), she did it in Loulou (1979). I said ‘Do it. Let’s embrace that’” (Hartley 1994, xxxi).

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Hartley proves not only perceptive to Huppert’s individual strengths but also able to mobilize them in novel ways. While during this period Huppert was most recognized for her portrayal of troubled heroines in highbrow drama films, in Amateur, Hartley makes the most of Huppert’s capacity for expression with only the slightest of modulations, recruiting it to comedic ends. The same qualities that make her an impenetrable, often tragic figure—consider Pomme’s blank expression that ends The Lacemaker (Claude Goretta 1977), or Colo’s melancholic interiority as a woman gradually retreating into blindness in Cactus (Paul Cox 1986)—are turned on their head. In Amateur, Huppert voices Hartley’s absurd dialogue with deadpan precision, her blankness conveying an endearing charm and naivete. Because much of the film’s tone revolves around Hartley’s self-conscious screenplay, it is easy to lose sight of the nuances of Huppert’s contribution. In quieter moments, however, these delicate modulations are more readily apparent. In the film’s climax, for instance, after the extent of Thomas’s past cruelty has been revealed to her, Isabelle sits, head in hand in quiet contemplation on the convent steps. Thomas, still unaware of his history, approaches from behind, and touching her shoulder, gently interrupts her absorption. Here Huppert needn’t say anything. Slowly turning to look up at Thomas she holds her gaze silently and with a pronounced blink of her eyelids languidly resumes her former posture. Huppert’s movements are heavy, her face impassive. Huppert’s blankness here is not of the impenetrable façade of a woman holding mysteries, but of one whom simply has no energy left to give. Likewise, in an earlier scene where Thomas is startled awake to discover he has been talking in his sleep, Isabelle considers how much of what she heard she ought to reveal. Huppert hesitates, averts her eyes. Opening her mouth slightly, her lip quivers as though the potential words forming there had some palpable weight to be measured, discarded, and formulated over again. Hartley (1994, xlvi) discusses this moment in particular as one that moved him: It has everything to do with Isabelle Huppert. What she allows to be seen. What she retains. The time she takes. That’s something I really learned from editing Isabelle – the time that she takes. She knows that she can sustain it. There is a state of the soul that she loans to her character. It’s almost like a physical knowledge.

Familiar though Hartley was with Huppert’s screen persona, Amateur still proved a reciprocal process of discovery. Amateur, like David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees, released a decade later, demonstrates that with the

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recognition of the specifics of Huppert’s talents, comes the freedom to utilize these talents in novel ways. Huckabees similarly rings the changes on familiar Huppert traits, turning the inscrutable coldness and perversity familiar from Violette Nozière and La Pianiste to comedic effect. While Amateur taps into the girlish innocence of La Dentellière, in Huckabees, Russell mobilizes Huppert’s stony aloofness to poke fun at a European tradition of bleak existentialist and nihilist thought. Huppert plays Caterine Vauban, an icy and seductive French philosopher, her blank visage indicative of one indurated by the world’s cruelties and versed in its carnal pleasures. With deadpan delivery and bedroom eyes, Huppert spouts acerbic and beguiling aphorisms about life’s meaninglessness, the severity of her dramatic performances channeled into absurd humor. Where Hanson’s The Bedroom Window remains shallow and cliché, Amateur and Huckabees reveal a genuine recognition of her star persona. Being attuned to Huppert’s performance style gives scope to expand and play with this style. Recently, with Huppert’s reputation in America being at its peak, her US screen persona has been more playful than ever.

Another Kind of Recognition: Greta (Neil Jordan 2018), and The Romanoffs: House of Special Purpose (Matthew Weiner 2018) Stephen Colbert: You’ve done other bold roles where you played an incestuous mother, you played a piano teacher who’s into S&M and selfmutilation … Have you ever wanted to do aIsabelle Huppert: A normal film? Stephen Colbert: A pure, what we would call “a popcorn film.” Isabelle Huppert: Why not? Stephen Colbert: That is- just like a special effects action film, like one of the Transformers films or something like that. Isabelle Huppert: Yes, ah- oui oui, sure. Stephen Colbert: Would you like to play a car that transforms into a robot that fights? Isabelle Huppert: Yes! —Isabelle Huppert interviewed on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in 2017

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At the 89th Academy Awards, Huppert was nominated for Best Actress for her starring role in Paul Verhoeven’s French-language thriller Elle (2016). Living up to her reputation for fearlessly tackling taboo characters, Huppert plays a rape victim who becomes sexually involved with her attacker. Huppert’s performance was at least nominated for every major Best Actress award and had already won several. Now recognized as one of the greatest performers of her generation, she had long been dubbed the Meryl Streep of France. Incidentally, Streep, that same year, was also nominated for the Best Actress Oscar for her role in Florence Foster Jenkins (Friers 2016). This was Streep’s twentieth Oscar nomination, and Huppert’s first. Neither of them would win. Emma Stone collected the golden statue for her role in La La Land (Chazelle 2016). Surely the irony of this defeat—two of the world’s most long-standing and lauded female performers bested by a relative newcomer—was not lost on any of them. In any case, the recognition of the Academy ensured that “who the hell is Isabelle Huppert?” was no longer a valid question. The critical acclaim for Elle marked a turning point in Huppert’s prominence in the United States. And, as comically ludicrous as Colbert’s suggestion that Huppert play a Transformer was, 2018 would see a shift in Huppert’s American screen presence toward the more popcorn-friendly. Her two American productions of that year—Greta and The Romanoffs: House of Special Purpose— share much in common; both are genre pieces in which Huppert’s character psychologically manipulates a younger female, both see Huppert inhabit a spectrum of performative levels ranging from counterfeit kindness to completely unhinged, and both push the extremes of her performance toward a comedic register. And finally, both are crafted with a self-reflexive acknowledgment of Huppert’s career and screen persona in a way that rewards her fans through playful subversion. In Neil Jordan’s Greta, Huppert plays the titular character, an aging, lonely widow residing in Manhattan. Her benign façade lures Frances (Chloë GraceMoretz), a young newcomer to the city who takes pity on Greta, befriending her after their seemingly chance meeting. In the same vein as Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne 1987) or Single White Female (Barbet Schroeder 1992), Greta’s plot adheres to the expectations of its genre; Greta is gradually revealed to harbor an unhealthy attachment to Frances, and Frances’s attempts to distance herself provoke Greta’s escalating shows of malevolence culminating in the young woman’s abduction and fight for survival. Even as a relatively underdeveloped character, Huppert’s Greta still carries some complexity. Initially softly spoken and doleful recalling her husband’s

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passing, Huppert makes her already small stature smaller by turning her shoulders slightly forward to feign vulnerability. When her pretense is discovered by Frances, however, Huppert’s demeanor shifts. Confronting an avoidant Frances at her apartment door, for instance, Greta’s mood fluctuates in response to the young woman’s mounting frustration. When her forlorn claims of loneliness and warm smile elicit not sympathy, but anger, Huppert bristles at the acerbity of Frances’s rejection. In this moment, Huppert’s frame stiffens, and with a twitch of her eyelids, her gaze takes on an intensity that betrays her otherwise calm expression. Later in the film, Huppert’s Greta will lose control entirely, overturning a table in the elegant restaurant Frances works at, and screaming until she is restrained by several wait staff. While Greta was met with a lukewarm response by critics, several noted that despite being flawed as a thriller, the film’s pleasures are to be found in Huppert’s performance.5 Katie Rifle (2019), writing for The A.V. Club, for instance, describes Greta as “a slight film, unlikely to be remembered in the long-term”; however, she notes the fun to be had watching Huppert let loose: mostly it’s a gleeful, giggle-inducing affair designed to make Huppert fans squeal with delight: Isabelle Huppert flips a table in a crowded restaurant! Isabelle Huppert dances around her apartment barefoot with a syringe in one hand! Isabelle Huppert is loaded into the back of an ambulance in a straitjacket, wriggling and screaming!

Indeed, the pleasures of Greta are largely due to the playful subversion of audience expectations around Huppert’s screen persona, combined with selfreferential acknowledgment of this persona. If we have come to know Huppert as the fearless and fearsome presence in European art cinema—the incestuous mother of Honoré’s Ma Mère (2014), the cold and perverse mistress in Haneke’s La Pianiste—there is joy to be found in the knowing winks Greta offers when Huppert’s widow professes her love for young Frances, or raps her unwilling ward over the knuckles during a piano lesson. Like the laugh out loud moment in Claire’s Camera (Sang-soo Hong 2017) when Huppert’s Claire excitedly announces: “I’ve never been to Cannes before!” Greta rewards fans of Huppert in a way that transcends the diegesis. The marketing campaign in the lead-up to Greta’s release would likewise playfully appropriate audience awareness of Huppert’s star image. Huppert’s cultivated persona as the icy French sophisticate is embraced in a camp extra-diegetic teaser for Entertainment Weekly. Sat at a chopping board, Huppert sips red wine and decapitates a series of stuffed toy

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Figure 10.2  Huppert teasing the audience as the psychopath in Greta (Neil Jordan 2018).

animals to the sounds of Chopin’s piano before goading viewers: “Come see Greta, you’ll see more of this. I promise” (Nolfi 2019). It is our “knowing” Huppert as a performer of precision and restraint in so much of her prior work that affords the pleasure of seeing this expectation overturned. When the petite Greta, by now maniacal, suddenly breaks into a delicate flurry of footsteps driving a syringe into a nosy Private Investigator’s neck, it is as hilarious as it is shocking. When she then shoots him, rewarding her victory with a series of playful twirls like a demented ballerina, one cannot help but recognize the fun Huppert is having in playing such unhinged abandon. In spite of the absurdity of some of its plot points, as A. O. Scott would remark of Greta: “[t]he point, and the fun, is the wild mischief of Huppert’s performance” (2019, C8). A related but more rewarding performance comes the same year, when Madmen (2007–15) creator Matthew Weiner, casts Huppert in the third episode of his anthology series, The Romanoffs. Entitled House of Special Purpose, the feature-length episode sees Huppert play Jacqueline, an eccentric French actor turned director filming an historical retelling of the Romanoff family’s life and murder. Over the course of the shoot, Jacqueline will torment her star, Olivia (Christina Hendricks), with her overbearing and inconsistent direction, and (it is implied—though not unambiguously) by staging a series of bizarre events to terrify her into a more authentic performance. As the eccentric auteur, Huppert is afforded a wide range, her performance built of several layers. Initially it’s a façade of sweetness, clearly contrived as both

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Figure 10.3  Huppert as the unhinged director Jacqueline in The Romanoffs.

Jacqueline and Olivia exchange pleasantries upon meeting. Compliments and their reception are always a little too saccharine, a touch too expressive, thinly veiling an underlying strain that is at best passive aggressive, at worst wanton cruelty. Huppert’s precision in navigating layers of performance is demonstrated when Olivia and Jacqueline’s dynamic of polite pretense boils over, the pair verbally sparring in a heated exchange at the hotel bar. Huppert darts back and forth between shifts in tone like a featherweight champion, throwing expressions of tenderness like fake punches, before jabbing Olivia square with scathingly honest observations about her personal life. Before Olivia can quite recognize what has happened and formulate a flustered response, Huppert has retreated behind a duplicitous smile. On set, Jacqueline is tyrannical, barking demands at her cast. Demanding Tsar Nikolai’s part be performed with more strength, she loses patience with her performer’s attempt to interpret her direction, forcefully grabbing his crotch screaming, “Use the jewels of Russia or I will take them!” At other times, Huppert’s character is perfectly deranged. A schmoozy dinner with investors is abruptly interrupted when she appears to have been possessed by an elder of the Romanoff family. This performance is deliciously unhinged; Huppert’s eyes roll back under fluttering eyelids, before turning wide, her French-accented English replaced by Russian in a whisper that gradually builds to a bellow, exhausting the fullness of her lungs.

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It is deeply pleasurable for those familiar with Huppert’s career and persona crafted over decades of mostly serious European art-house roles, to see Huppert let loose. While never shying from extremes, so often Huppert’s display of them has been paradoxically controlled. In La Pianiste, Huppert’s Erika is at odds with herself, constantly straining to quell the emotions that threaten to besiege her composure.6 In La Cérémonie, Jeanne is mischievous and impulsive, qualities that undoubtedly make her dangerous and yet Huppert’s brand of extremity still maintains a cerebral distance. Even her guest starring appearance in something as hokey as Law and Order: Special Victims Unit as a mother who goes mad after the death of her child is comparatively restrained. Huppert’s brand of extremity has always remained a far remove from the wild physical abandon of other French performers like Béatrice Dalle or Isabelle Adjani. In The Romanoffs, as in Greta, Huppert is playful in her uninhibitedness. One gets the sense that Huppert, as much as the character she embodies, is reveling in the relinquishment of control afforded by comic exaggeration. Where there is a tendency for French female performers appearing in American films to be washed out in “cookie-cutter, I’m-with-him” roles (LaSalle 2012, 89), Huppert’s American career has taken an alternate trajectory, acknowledging and playing on her image cultivated in Europe. With tongue firmly in cheek, the “French Meryl Streep” we have come to find synonymous with art cinema and theatre is having her Transformer moment and loving it. While both Greta and The Romanoffs: House of Special Purpose might easily have leant on Huppert’s Frenchness as a “veneer of sophistication,” a shorthand cue for the “eccentric widow” or the “eccentric auteur,” instead these works trade on audience familiarity with her image in very deliberate ways. The pleasure to be found in these films is in our recognizing her.

Who the Hell Is Isabelle Huppert? I like the United States very much, and I come every time I can. I’ve been every place; I know the States like my pocket. Ten years ago, I visited 30 states. I know Chicago very well: I came here first on a theatre tour, with a French company doing the classics. I remember the Michigan Lake was ice and I walked on it. I have been back since then. I walk around and nobody ever recognizes me; French movie actresses are not so well known here. I have been to lots of bars and restaurants and jazz clubs in Chicago. I could take you on a tour. —Isabelle Huppert in interview with Roger Ebert in 1984

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If the rise of Isabelle Huppert’s career in Europe has been phenomenal, her intermittent but persistent presence on American screens is surely a David and Goliath story. Around the same time that Al Fitter at U.A. was demanding to know who the hell she was, and Fitter’s colleague, Steven Bach (1999, 184) was formulating a response about her negligible profile and “flat, peasantlike face,” Lawrence O’Toole (1980) was also pondering the same question. Like several American articles during the 1980s, O’Toole’s piece for Film Comment seems to regard Huppert as an entity from a distant planet, fascinating but ineluctably foreign. Noting her heritage no fewer than four times in the opening paragraph, and taking care to explain the inflection of her surname—“pronounced as though it were some exotic concoction the French conceived with a fruit”—O’Toole is at pains to convey that Huppert is, “make no mistake about it: French,” a fact that the copy of Cahiers du cinéma in her hotel room seems to intimidatingly affirm (1980, 45). Huppert has never really fitted into the American scene. It is not only a matter of a dominant film industry regarding outsiders with suspicion, however. As LaSalle (2012, 88) notes, like other French actresses that have managed to keep ties to America albeit in bigger films—Juliette Binoche, Mélanie Laurent, and Marion Cotillard, for instance—Huppert seems to have found the key to navigating these disparate worlds. Rather than put all their chips in the middle only to be made bland, these women are discerning in the American films they take on, and diligent in the preservation of their career and identity at home. For all of the skepticism and unpleasantness Huppert was met with upon arriving in America, the triumph of her story is that even with the odds stacked against her, she never needed to prove herself. What seemed to ruffle those executives and interviewers so confounded by her presence was her selfassuredness: a young outsider steadfastly unmoved by her new surrounds. This is not insignificant in the context of a national film industry that adores David and Goliath stories, but Davina and Goliath stories less so. Seemingly immune to the pomp and pressures of Hollywood, Huppert just got on with the business of acting, as though it were America that needed to catch up with her. So, who the hell is she? In 1991, Roger Ebert reflected: “Isabelle Huppert is a great movie star, but of a type that could not flourish in Hollywood because her greatness is in her secrets, not her surfaces.” O’Toole (1980, 45) saw this too, noting that hers is “the art that would rather reveal than show. It coaxes the camera … I will show you things but you must be watchful for them.” Huppert is not the veneer. In America she might even escape notice. But when she is recognized, she is truly extraordinary.

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Notes 1

2

3

4

5 6

For some great analyses of Huppert’s star persona, see Jelinek (2005), Royer (2015), and Toubiana (2005). For example, Serge Toubiana (2005) notes Huppert’s capacity for simultaneous obfuscation and revelation: “There lie the foundations of her acting … Her many and repeated appearances do not in the end lead to greater familiarity. On the contrary: They deepen the mystery, and at the same time stimulate our curiosity anew.” Claude Chabrol noted this talent, speaking of his casting of Huppert in Madame Bovary: “She has this extraordinary gift of expressing things without changing her face” (Gray 1991, 157). Ginette Vincendeau (2006, 38) describes Huppert’s “ability to express [melancholy and a victimised passivity] through the blankness of her performance: she could make her dull, vacant stare speak volumes.” Mick LaSalle (2012, 23) argues that “no one but Huppert has used stillness and silence to such unsettling effect.” Huppert’s stardom in European cinema is certainly recognized in the United States by 1991 when Madame Bovary is released. Charlie Rose introduced Huppert as “one of France’s premier film stars” (Huppert 1991). Reviewing the film, Roger Ebert refers to her as “a great movie star” (Ebert 1991). More broadly, American press coverage of major film festivals could not help but notice her ubiquitous presence in European cinema. Violette Nozière (1978) screened at the New York Film Festival and the Chicago International Film Festival fresh from Huppert’s Best Actress prize at Cannes. Writing in 1980 for Film Comment, Lawrence O’Toole (1980, 45) noted her “three large, looming performances” (Maurice Pialat’s Loulou, Jean-Luc Godard’s Sauve qui peut (la vie), and Márta Mészáros’s Örökség) at Cannes that year alone. In his review of The Lacemaker (1977), Ebert praises the film’s “wonderfully subtle” performances, stating that “Isabelle Huppert, as Pomme, is good at the very difficult task of projecting the inner feelings of a character whose personality is based on the concealment of feeling” (Ebert 1978). Of Violette Nozière (1978), Andrew Sarris and Tom Allen state: “Huppert provides a brilliant portrait of inscrutable fatalism behind an impenetrable mask” (Allen and Sarris 1984). For examples, see Campbell (2019), Lazic (2019), Rifle (2019), Scott (2019), Seitz (2019). For a detailed consideration of the complexity of this performance, see Taylor (2018).

References Allen, Tom and Andrew Sarris. 1984. “Revivals in Focus: A Critical Guide by Andrew Sarris & Tom Allen.” Village Voice, December 11, 1984. https://cinefiles.bampfa. berkeley.edu/cinefiles/DocDetail?docId=17373.

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Bach, Steven. 1999. Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven’s Gate, the Film that Sank United Artists. New York: Newmarket Press. Campbell, Kambole. 2019. “Greta Review.” Empire Online, April 16, 2019. https://www. empireonline.com/movies/reviews/greta-review/. Canby, Vincent. 1987. “Film: ‘Bedroom Window,’ a Thriller.” New York Times, January 16, 1987. Donadio, Rachel. 2016. “The Enduring Allure of Isabelle Huppert.” New York Times Style Magazine, November 30, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/30/tmagazine/isabelle-huppert-elle-movie-interview.html. Ebert, Roger. 1978. “The Lacemaker.” RogerEbert.com, February 6, 1978. https://www. rogerebert.com/reviews/the-lacemaker–1978. Ebert, Roger. 1984. “Entre Nous: A Conversation with Isabelle Huppert.” RogerEbert. com, February 26, 1984. https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/entre-nous-aconversation-with-isabelle-huppert. Ebert, Roger. 1991. “Madame Bovary.” RogerEbert.com, December 25, 1991. https:// www.rogerebert.com/reviews/madame-bovary-1991. Gray, Francine du Plessix. “Passion in a Pastoral Ménage.” Condé Nast Traveler, November 1991. Hartley, Hal. 1994. “Being an Amateur.” In Interview by Graham Fuller in Amateur, x–xlvii. London: Faber and Faber Huppert, Isabelle. 1991. Interview by Charlie Rose. Charlie Rose, PBS, December 10, 1991. Video, 13:04. https://charlierose.com/videos/11124. Huppert, Isabelle. 2017. Interview by Stephen Colbert. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, CBS, February 7, 2017. Video, 6:47. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=3zDkTX3t2yI. Jelinek, Elfriede. 2005. “The Defenseless Face.” In Isabelle Huppert: Woman of Many Faces, edited by Nancy Cohen (translated by Steven Lindberg), 21–8. New York: Harry N. Abrams. LaSalle, Mick. 2012. The Beauty of the Real: What Hollywood Can Learn from Contemporary French Actresses. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lazic, Manuela. 2019. “The Second-Act Stardom of Isabelle Huppert.” The Ringer, February 28, 2019. https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/2/28/18243817/isabellehuppert-greta-career. Musto, Michael. 2009. “The French Meryl Streep Speaks about Her Craft!” Village Voice, November 24, 2009. Nolfi, Joey. 2019. “Watch Greta Star Isabelle Huppert Sip Wine, Mutilate Adorable Stuffed Animals.” Entertainment Weekly, February 28, 2019. https://ew.com/ movies/2019/02/28/isabelle-huppert-greta-stuffed-animals-video/. O’Toole, Lawrence. 1980. “Huppert Girl.” Film Comment 16 (5) (September–October): 45–7. Pall, Ellen. 1995. “The Elusive Women Who Inhabit the Quirky World of Hal Hartley.” New York Times, April 9, 1995.

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Rawle, Steven. 2011. Performance in the Cinema of Hal Hartley. Amherst: Cambria Press. Rifle, Katie. 2019. “Isabelle Huppert Goes High Camp in the Giddy, Demented Greta.” The AV Club, February 27, 2019. https://film.avclub.com/isabelle-huppert-goeshigh-camp-in-the-giddy-demented–1832934003. Royer, Michelle. 2015. “Mystère, intellectualisme, authenticité et impertinence: Isabelle Huppert en jeu.” Australian Journal of French Studies 52 (2) (May–August): 149–61. Russell, Candice. 1987. “‘Bedroom Window’ Director Inspired by Novel, Hitchcock.” South Florida Sun-Sentinel, March 8, 1987. Scott, A. O. 2019. “‘Greta’ Review: Isabelle Huppert as Sweet Surrogate Mom Turned Psycho Stalker.” New York Times, February 26, 2019. Seitz, Matt Zoller. 2019. “Greta.” RogerEbert.com, March 1, 2019. https://www. rogerebert.com/reviews/greta–2019. Smith, Murray. 1995. Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Alison. 2018. “Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher.” In Close Up: Great Cinematic Performances Volume 2: International, edited by Kyle Stevens and Murray Pomerance, 217–27. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Thompson, David. 2009. “Isabelle Huppert.” The Guardian, November 6, 2009. https:// www.theguardian.com/film/2009/nov/06/isabelle-huppert-david-thomson. Toubiana, Serge. 2005. “Foreword.” In Isabelle Huppert: Woman of Many Faces, edited by Nancy Cohen (translated by Simon Jones), 9–14. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Vincendeau, Ginette. 2006. “Isabelle Huppert: The Big Chill.” Sight & Sound, 16 (12) (December): 36–9.

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After Elle: Isabelle Huppert’s Performance of Fame, Fashion, and Feminism Nick Rees-Roberts

How do you want to be remembered in the future? Asked in 2018 by the multimedia artist Frederick Heyman to curate a virtual memorial for the online arts and culture video channel Nowness as part of an editorial project seeking to define beauty,1 Isabelle Huppert imagined a digital remembrance of her embalmed self.2 As the camera glides around the studio installation of the mummified icon placed in a raised cube of flowers and turf, Huppert’s editorial voice-over elaborates her posthumous fantasy. “I am Isabelle Huppert,” she declares. “I wanted something very secret like an intimate scene and situation, something that you can’t really understand. There is privacy, a kind of warmth, together with a décorum, with a certain idea of beauty.” Accompanying digital images of her corpse encased in overgrown flora and sprayed with scent, Huppert grandly claims a symbolist lineage with the artist Gustav Klimt and the poet Arthur Rimbaud. Striving to transcend time, space, and physicality, this eerie installation uses the technique of photogrammetry (3D scanning) to freezeframe the body in a digital wake at which spectators are invited—morbidly— to anticipate the defunct star in repose and to imagine a preview of her iconic legacy. In the catalogue of the monographic exhibition devoted to Huppert, Woman of Many Faces, initiated by MoMA/PS1 New York in 2005 (Chammah and Fouchet 2005), which included photographs by luminaries from Henri Cartier Bresson and Helmut Newton to Nan Goldin and Roni Horn, a consensus emerges from the contributors (the critic Serge Toubiana, the director Patrice Chéreau, the novelist Elfriede Jelinek, and the writer Susan Sontag) who comment on the work of the (film) actor as (photographic) model based on the interplay between presence and absence. In his foreword, Toubiana distinguishes Huppert’s modeling as a controlled blend of technique, distance, and the evacuation of

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personality. Out go the pillars of stardom and performance: charisma and craft. “She does not confuse intimacy with familiarity” (Chammah and Fouchet 2005, 9), he observes, suggesting that for all her considerable fame, Huppert’s public persona—and her inscription of stardom—does not overwhelm her performances in front of the camera in both still and moving image. In her acting and posing—Huppert in dynamic and static modes of performance— Toubiana locates a paradoxical relationship between “control, or self-control, on the one hand and the unconscious and impulsive on the other” (Chammah and Fouchet 2005, 10). Her misleadingly blank or ambiguously passive mode of acting is therefore considered ideal for the indexical realm of photography, which according to Roland Barthes’ theory of the medium realizes an enigmatic capture of the object of the gaze as a specter of or from the past (Barthes 1980). Commenting on Huppert’s technique of concealing “energy and strength” behind a mask of “melancholy, opacity, or neutrality,” Toubiana asks the following questions of her technique of posing: “What is she thinking about? What inner journey is she making at the exact moment the shutter is released?” (Chammah and Fouchet 2005, 13). The versatility of Huppert’s method—an acting style often characterized by the almost mechanical absence of the performer who is presented as a blank canvas—is indeed apparent in the context of her modeling in artistic settings and for more commercial forms of photography such as fashion editorials. Unlike Chéreau and Jelinek, who concur on the subject of the actor’s apparent narcissism and self-stylization, Sontag, for her part, delivers a more generous personal tribute to her friend in a brief text adapted from an earlier introduction presented at a gala honoring Huppert in 2003. Of the five qualities Sontag attributes to Huppert (beauty, expressiveness, intelligence, fearlessness, and integrity) it is the first—the virtue of beauty, in Sontag’s formulation—that I would like to probe more fully in this chapter through an examination of Huppert’s construction of fame in relation to the glamour of editorial images and red-carpet appearances, and the importance of fashion, style, and appearance to her on-screen performances and off-screen persona. Furthermore, what, I wonder, is the relationship between the two—between the roles she plays on screen and the performances she gives off screen? Sontag saw Huppert as exemplifying “an extraordinary physical beauty, something that matters to us a lot in actors; and a lot more than sometimes we are willing to acknowledge consciously” (Chammah and Fouchet 2005, 12); and elsewhere in her writings she described beauty not purely as the allure of the face and the body, but also

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as an aesthetic category of taste (2007, 8). The beautiful ideal—as represented by totems such as actors and stars—is, Sontag observed, a gendered construction paradoxically bound up in the denigration of female beauty and glamour as the frivolous “realm of the ‘merely’ feminine” (2007, 10).

Styling Huppert: Glamour from the Red Carpet to the Fashion Editorial The theatrical artifice of physical beauty—the superficial adornment and transformation of the body through costume and make-up—has, historically, been foundational to definitions of glamour. Revisiting his influential text on the subject (2008) alongside subsequent scholarly writings in glamour studies, the cultural historian Stephen Gundle notes how previous to the emergence of American glamour of the inter-war years, the dominant model had been French—and, one might add, more specifically Parisian. “France,” he notes, “stood at the forefront of developments in modern consumption, fashion, popular entertainment, elaborations of sex appeal and so on” (2019, 12). The mythical appeal of Paris personified by the figure of the parisienne (Rocamora 2009) exported a sophisticated image of spontaneity, nonchalance, and sexiness binding glamour to femininity, more specifically to a class-encoded model of a fashionable Parisian woman that is symbolically rive gauche: a bourgeois style at once sophisticated and urbane, but also—less appealingly—haughty and privileged. Interviewing Huppert for Sight & Sound, the editor Nick James (2016) mentioned that she had a contradictory reputation for being both intimidating and affable—therefore reiterating Huppert’s established image as a daunting presence. This type of performance also indicates how critics and audiences routinely tend to misread actors’ personalities off against their personas and fictional roles. In an article written for British Vogue, Huppert (2020) adopted the discourse of fashion to explain to readers how to master the secret to French style: dressed “in an elegantly understated outfit,” the picture conjures up a “uniformly chic phantom” of transcendent allure. As an actress you must recognize that every outfit is a puzzle, each sartorial detail a clue. An audience’s perception of a character can shift dramatically (and irrevocably) with the elevation of a stiletto or a slick of red lipstick. Those subtle nuances may have fascinated me – but it was only recently that I developed an

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interest in fashion away from the stage or camera. I preferred to disappear into my characters. It has taken me some time to learn to enjoy clothes for myself. All I can say is that if you sit front row at enough Chanel and Louis Vuitton shows, you cannot fail to notice the magic. (Huppert 2020)

The “magic” of high fashion that Huppert refers to has always been a formative element of glamour and central to the film star’s public performance of fame. In this context, I am drawing on Leo Braudy’s theoretical definition of renown and his insights into fame and celebrity as both historically rooted in performance (1986, 2011). Despite an outmoded demarcation between the two—problematically trivializing celebrity as fame’s “ill-begotten and cannibalizing offspring” (2011, 1071)—he does usefully draw attention to the function of the performer—the actor—in defining public interest in the “heightened form of human character” (2011, 1071) that we might call stardom. “Is there,” Braudy asks, “a useful distinction to be drawn between fame and celebrity studies and performance or theater studies, or, for that matter, visual studies?” (2011, 1071). In the highly commodified arena of commercial culture, which includes essentially visual mediums like film and fashion, creative practitioners (designers and directors) and performers (actors and models) routinely navigate between distance and proximity with their publics in their communication and interaction on legacy and social media. The commonly held—and increasingly blurred—distinction between fame and celebrity is rooted in this underlying paradox: the former plays with reticence while the latter feeds off adoration. For Braudy, whereas “fame includes such an element of turning away from us, celebrity stares us right in the face, flaunting its performance and trying desperately to keep our attention” (2011, 1072). Conversely, Huppert’s negotiation of notoriety is fashioned around a carefully guarded policing of her private life. While she is a famous French star in the landscape of world cinema, one whose international reputation was considerably bolstered by a Golden Globe award and Oscar nomination in 2017 for Elle (Paul Verhoven 2016), Huppert, however, is hardly a global media celebrity—at least not in the vernacular understanding of the term according to which stars now perform as media brands through processes of celebrification (Currid-Halkett 2010; Rojek 2001, 2012). In the context of celebrity fashion, Pamela Church Gibson (2012) has further mapped out the interrelationship between the catwalk and the red carpet and the full transformation of today’s film stars into fashion icons, which has certainly been the case for Huppert since the start of the

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millennium. How, then, to address her newly acquired fashionable sensibility, and what difference does it make to her pre-existing image? Furthermore, how does style intersect with the management of her fame within the wider discursive economy of cinema and celebrity? Until the 2010s, fashion occupied a peripheral place in Huppert’s career—this despite being the great-great-granddaughter of one of the original founders of the Sœurs Callot couture house in the early twentieth century. In an interview with fashion curator and creative director Olivier Saillard, in which she discusses her heritage, Huppert claims to be more interested in clothing than fashion per se (Saillard 2014). However, in one of her mid-career roles in L’ École de la chair/ The School of Flesh (Benoît Jacquot 1998), she played a fashion designer, who is passionately in love with a younger gigolo: the film is a pointed critique of the illusion of appearance and the empty comforts of superficial beauty and material security represented by the milieu of high fashion (Lardoux 2006, 92). Moreover, Huppert has acted in a number of historical and costume dramas, including Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino 1980), Les Possédés (Andrzej Wajda 1988), Madame Bovary (Claude Chabrol 1991), Saint-Cyr (Patricia Mazuy 2000), Les Destinées sentimentales/Sentimental Destinies (Olivier Assayas, 2000), Gabrielle (Patrice Chéreau, 2005), and Linhas de Wellington/Lines of Wellington (Valeria Sarmiento 2012). There are also a number of spectacular costume moments in her career—from the historical drama La Dame aux camélias/The Lady of the Camelias (Mauro Bolognini 1981) with exquisite designs by Piero Tosi to the autobiographical drama My Little Princess (Eva Ionesco 2011) with outlandish looks styled by Catherine Baba. The wager of Ionesco’s film was to make art out of resentment by retelling her personal tale of childhood trauma through the portrait of her monstrous mother. Set in a stylized version of the past, the film recounts the disturbed childhood of Violetta (Anamaria Vartolomei), a young girl coerced into nude modeling by her mother, Hanna (Huppert), who has ambitions to be an artistic photographer by skillfully exploiting the perverse images of her daughter and secretly selling them to underground erotic magazines. Ionesco’s de-naturalization of the photo shoot is enhanced by the generic coding of the mother–daughter relationship within a baroque horror, which is lightened by the camp design flourishes that neatly illustrate the film theorist Stella Bruzzi’s argument (1997) on spectacular costuming on screen, according to which the realist frame of vision is ruptured by inviting the audience to look at rather than through the designs. Huppert’s own brand of de-naturalization

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Figure 11.1  Mommie dearest: Huppert as the abusive Hanna in My Little Princess (Eva Ionesco 2011).

contributes to her character’s rejection of normality expressed through her preference for a macabre photographic staging of death and desire. The film’s generic encoding of maternal abuse in baroque horror imagines Hanna and Violetta as garish living dolls. Paradoxically, given Huppert’s jarring yet charismatic performance, the film’s judgment of Hanna is more ambivalently muted than intended. The subtleties and contradictions of Huppert’s performance make her ultimately more sympathetic especially following the disclosure that she too is the fruit of an incestuous relationship. By the closing scenes Huppert is shot perversely encased within the superficial trappings of childhood—the adornments of dressing up such as wigs, frills, and veils—pictured as an icon mummified by dress.3 Huppert’s ascension to the status of “fashion muse” or “French style icon” as she has been described by Grazia magazine (Firth 2017) can be indexed to the broader expansion of the global fashion economy, in particular the rise of the European luxury brands and their incursions into cinema. In 2017, for its “Women in Motion” initiative at the Cannes Film Festival, the Kering group

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(which owns labels such as Balenciaga, Gucci, and Saint Laurent) invited Huppert to be a global figurehead to promote a dynamic model of femininity. The annual initiative involves a series of talks and galas during the festival to promote women in the industry—behind and in front of the camera. Huppert is not, however, a conventional French icon of beauty: unlike Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche, or Marion Cotillard, she has rarely been hired for advertising campaigns, although she has occasionally worked as an ambassador for fashion houses (Vignoli 2017: 61–2); significantly, unlike those other actors Huppert has become a fashion icon later in her career. In 2012, she was featured in advertising for the re-launch of a limited edition of Robert Piguet’s fragrance Fracas to celebrate the 160th anniversary of the chic Bon Marché department store; Huppert’s authenticity as a symbol of bourgeois Parisian elegance explains the choice of icon for a global consumer market. She was also the face of Givenchy’s fall/winter 2014 campaign and has appeared briefly in online promos for the Italian luxury jeweler Pomellato and the Mandarin Oriental hotel group. More recently, the role of Huppert’s stylist, Jonathan Huguet, with whom she has worked since 2016 on both magazine editorials and public appearances such as awards ceremonies and movie premieres, is also central to situating the star’s interaction with the luxury industry (Chan 2017). After Elle, styling has become central to Huppert’s performance of fame, indicative of how her status as a fashion icon is framed by public displays of glamour—in particular how she is styled for red-carpet appearances at film festivals and awards ceremonies. Huppert’s second César award for Elle in February 2017—she had won earlier in her career for La Cérémonie (Claude Chabrol 1995)—was unsurprising given her prestigious Golden Globe award the previous month. Elegantly dressed on the Hollywood stage in Giorgio Armani Privé couture, Huppert was visibly moved, momentarily losing her poise, and fumbling for her lines as she accepted the award. As sincere as it was, her public show of emotion also complemented the affective sensibility of Hollywood and the personal performance of authenticity integral to global celebrity culture. For the Oscars the following month she was dressed again in Armani Privé couture in a flowing gown that transformed her into a screen goddess of yesteryear. Unlike the styling of many Hollywood stars for the red-carpet, which often trades in seduction by revealing the body through conventional sheath dresses that expose the arms and shoulders, Huppert’s styling self-consciously subverts that conventional performance of feminine masquerade—a rejection of a certain type of stardom or celebrity—by playing with the different sartorial

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codes of gender, age, and provenance. “When I’m dressing Isabelle for an awards show, I try to play both games—the French and American,” Huguet, her stylist, remarked. “It’s about finding a balance and combining just a touch of Hollywood glamour with that French effortlessness and attitude” (Bobb 2017). At the César awards she wore a bold green gown designed by Christian Dior couture befitting her domination of the event at which she won the best actress award for a film in which, she noted disingenuously in her acceptance speech, she had acted the same as usual; rather, it was the scale of the role that was critically applauded. As glamorous as Huppert’s red-carpet performance is, editorial images of the star in fashion magazines rarely denote sexiness, seduction, or desirability according to the iconographic codes of fashion and beauty promotion. Editorials featuring Huppert for the mainstream fashion press (in say Vogue, Vanity Fair, Madame Figaro, or Citizen K International) and in more rarefied style magazines (such as CAP 74024 and YES & NO) indicate an attempt to represent the starmodel as offbeat, daring, and imposing.4 There is a general absence of the lascivious clichés of conventional fashion imagery and Huppert poses in more

Figure 11.2  Huppert at a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019 (credit Silvano Mendes).

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alternative magazines in tune with what the historian of fashion photography Eugenie Shinkle has described as “the feminine awkward” (2017) denoting how strange or uncomfortable poses re-signify the affective codes of feminine representation and underline the model’s performance—part of how “fashion gesture freezes into the pose” (Evans 2017, 149). To be sure, the question of authorship is as central to (fashion) modeling as it is to (film) acting: the model’s autonomy is as conditioned by the commercial constraints—the editorial brief, type of publication, and artistic collaboration with photographers, stylists, hair, and makeup artists—as the performance of an actor, which is framed by the aesthetic vision of directors, cinematographers, and designers and ring-fenced by the material contexts of production.

Fame and Feminism If Huppert’s red carpet, fashion show, and editorial appearances inevitably draw her toward the realm of celebrity, she nevertheless remains a discreet participant in its rites and practices. For example, at the time of writing in early 2020, her Instagram feed (curated, supposedly, by her PR given its less personalized and mostly standardized content) had some modest 182k followers and displayed the most recent of her meager 328 posts that included promotional materials such as editorial images, film festival photos, and advertising for films and plays including in April 2020 a poster for a stage production of The Glass Menagerie at the Odéon theatre in Paris that was aborted following the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. At that time, along with reposts of widely shared lockdown videos, she also posted archive clips of an interview with filmmaker Jane Campion discussing the problems of sexism and misogyny in cinema. So, beyond the more routine use of social media platforms by stars for selfperformance, Huppert also uses Instagram for more varied types of promotion. These interventions came in the wake of an awkward TV interview she had given for France 2 (20h30 le dimanche, March 1, 2020) in which Huppert, while broadly supportive of the #MeToo movement, was reluctant to voice an opinion about the widely contested attribution of a César award to the blacklisted filmmaker Roman Polanski following resurging allegations of sexual assault on minors. Embarrassed by the anchor Laurent Delahousse’s question, she expressed unease at the media “lynching” of public figures. Paradoxically, however,

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Huppert’s tenuous reluctance to air her personal opinions made her appear both conservative (by refusing to call out Polanski in line with the habitus of the French cultural establishment) and progressive (by appearing nonetheless to support the Time’s Up wave of contestation represented by a younger generation of “out” feminist actors like Adèle Haenel). Huppert’s personal equivocation might therefore reveal the predicament of actors who wish to be known uniquely for their acting, and who are faced with the demands of celebrity culture, which involve not only feeding the cult of personality through publicity and promotion by legacy and social media, but also increasingly taking a stand on contentious political issues like sexism and other forms of exploitation in the industry.5 In her defense, Huppert has indeed played a range of complex and ambiguous leading roles throughout her career; moreover, she has made more films with female directors (Catherine Breillat, Claire Denis, Laurence Ferreira Barbosa, Anne Fontaine, Mia Hansen-Løve, Eva Ionesco, Flora Lau, Alexandra Leclère, Ursula Meier, and Laura Schroeder) since the start of the 2000s than any of her peers. In the wake of #MeToo, however, the expectation—at times, coercive and hypocritical—is for a star’s off-screen feminism to be more fully articulated in the public sphere—not simply in relation to her work. Huppert, on the other hand, clearly delineates her feminism through her choice of roles: In my career, I’ve never represented an all-conquering, radiant, strong femininity. But my feminism has always consisted of occupying the center-ground by turning down films where the female character was solely defined in relation to a male protagonist … Early on I played failing, fragile, insane, or suffering figures but my empowerment has always been about thrusting these characters center-stage into the limelight. (Lalanne and Morain 2016, 51)6

So, while Huppert is indeed part of the world of high fashion and red-carpet glamour now more than ever before, she still insists on her craft as an actor by underlining how it might intersect with broader issues such as gender and sexual politics. Beyond these rare guarded instances of public engagement, Huppert’s profile— her personal brand, as it were—is almost entirely professional. She may well be a regular fixture on the front row at Paris Fashion Week or be invited across the globe by the French luxury brands to attend runway shows and launches, but very little press attention is given to other facets of her personal or family life: she is married to Lebanese-born film producer and distributor Ronald Chammah and their daughter Lolita Chammah is also an actor, who has also twice played

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Huppert’s fictional daughter on screen in Copacabana (Marc Fitoussi 2010) and Barrage (Laura Schroeter 2017). Those journalists hungry for a more intimate view of the star’s domestic life are routinely given short thrift by Huppert: in an attempt to sensationalize a Vanity Fair profile in 2019, the journalist described her as “indomitable” and sought to locate “the cracks behind her mask” of performance; but by rehashing clichés of the actor’s apparent froideur with onset anecdotes of alleged narcissistic and controlling behavior (which one might simply translate as a misogynistic way of describing a demanding actor who is also a perfectionist) the piece delivered very little insight into the formation of the subject’s fame beyond consolidating the considerable aura of her established persona (Etchegoin 2019).7

As Herself: Being Isabelle Huppert Since the international media exposure from her Golden Globe win and Oscar nomination in 2017, the apparently unassailable Huppert has also begun to play herself on film and television in self-referential roles that draw attention— performatively—to the constructed dimension to her dramatic technique and star image. Here, I draw on Stella Bruzzi’s argument (2006, 197–8), in the context of documentary cinema, of an emerging mode of performativity in which performers give renditions or approximations of themselves on screen, a process that lays bare the “constructedness” of the medium—this despite the classic myths of transparency and authenticity surrounding the documentary mode of representation. Clearly, playing a version of oneself in a fiction film or series is not the same as appearing in a factual film production, however reflexive, scripted, or performed. Nonetheless, comparing and exposing the different modes of performance across fictional and nonfictional settings might well illuminate the relationship between acting and fame, between dramatic technique and public acclaim. Casting actors or stars to play versions of themselves in fictional narrative settings is more common on television than on film, a routine feature of US and UK sitcoms such as Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Entourage, Episodes, Extras, and The Larry Sanders Show. On French television, Huppert gave a cheeky parody of herself in the third series of the archly Parisian sitcom Dix pour cent/Call My Agent!, in which she ironically played up to her public image as an obsessive workaholic juggling parallel film shoots, media interviews, and fashion shows.8

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In a more serious dramatic register, in 2017 Huppert played a cameo role in Anne Fontaine’s coming-out film Marvin ou la belle éducation/Reinventing Marvin in which she gave a (supposedly) more transparent version of herself within a loose adaptation of novelist Edouard Louis’ celebrated bildungsroman Pour en finir avec Eddy Bellegueule/The End of Eddy (2014). In Fontaine’s inchoate transposition, the protagonist Marvin recasts himself as Martin to get over the traumatic homophobia of his rural childhood and sets off to make it as an actor in Paris, where he is introduced—implausibly—by his affluent mentor-cum-lover to Isabelle Huppert, who agrees to play a version of Marvin’s slovenly mother in his autobiographical stage play. He first glimpses Huppert smoking and exchanging pleasantries with his lover at a lunch, where she teasingly asks him about his craft; he later meets her at a chic roof-top party where she swigs champagne and gives him relationship advice before kicking off her heels for a dance. Following the sudden death of Marvin’s lover, Huppert steps in to mentor him. The literary critic Fredric Jameson has argued that “autoreferentiality” has for long been taken as a sign of modernist aesthetics; self-reference operates not just at the level of content but also “something like a supplementary connotation by which the work seeks to justify its own existence” (1998, 89). While it is far from modernist, the self-consciously “meta” nature of Marvin ou la belle éducation depends on Huppert’s fleeting presence to give it artistic veracity; and by underscoring the actor’s barely credible impersonation of a rural housewife in Marvin’s stage play, it naturalizes her own diegetic presentation of self as a worldly yet supportive figure—far from the dominant clichés of perversity and ambiguity drawn from Huppert’s dramatic back-catalogue. The critical question raised by the film is what difference does it make to cast Huppert as her fictional self rather than as a purely fictional character—as a real star playing a fictional star like, for example, Juliette Binoche as Maria Enders in Sils Maria/Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas 2014). Huppert has claimed in interview that playing her fictional self makes very little difference in practice: “Even if you play yourself,” she comments, “you still play a fictional role. It’s not like being in a documentary. Also if you play a fictional role, you always play a little bit of yourself, you know what I mean? So at the end of the day, it doesn’t really make any difference because … you always play yourself ” (Pollard 2018). Yet by dis-identifying with her own stardom—with her image as “Isabelle Huppert”—she is also able to perform herself as a fictional role in itself, thereby revealing nothing of her private life. Being Isabelle Huppert: her point about playing (versions of) herself rather than methodically inhabiting a character—stated plainly in interview (Delorme

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2016, 14)—is the key to Huppert’s no-nonsense, subtractive approach to film acting; it is also, in my view, her major artistic contribution to the craft of screen performance. Simultaneously being oneself and being other, Huppert’s authorial conception of her craft is, she claims, based on the performer’s evacuation of her mind and her agency or “freedom” to insert her-self (or, one might add, less rationally, in psychoanalytical terms, her ego-ideal) into the narrative’s fictional elaboration of character (Delorme 2016, 10). Nonetheless, the artifice of characterization—the supplementary role played by costume, hair and makeup—is, Huppert concedes, still fundamental in superficially differentiating the performance of a role from the actor’s own sense of self (Delorme 2016, 16).9 Quoting Huppert deriding the conventional notion of characterization as “diminishing” and “arbitrary,” Mick LaSalle views her ontological approach to acting whereby being—as much as performing—on screen simply entails the encounter between role and personality as part of “the actress’s consciousness of the medium”; unlike the chameleon method actor, her straightforward technique consists of recording “her questing, unique and indelible consciousness” (2012, 80–1). Indeed, her resistance to method through a purposeful lack of prepreparation and her control of the distance between performer and role have led her to be labeled a preeminent practitioner of Brechtian techniques of alienation—after directing her in Elle, Paul Verhoeven is credited as describing her as a “pure Brechtian actor” for her refusal to seduce the spectator (Donadio 2016)—in which the conventional psychological operation of empathy is affectively withheld from an audience to ensure realization of the ideologically constructed field of representation. Brecht described the aim of this technique to alienate the incidents enacted “to make the spectator adopt an attitude of inquiry and criticism” (1991 [1964], 68). Describing the anti-naturalist tradition of film acting—the economy of face, gesture, and body elsewhere theorized by the Soviet formalist Lev Kuleshov and the French minimalist Robert Bresson—as “doing nothing,” Andrew Higson differentiates between the mechanical performance of action for Bresson’s non-professional actors, whom he called “models” (for their capacity to be rather than to appear) in his Notes sur le cinématographe/Notes on the Cinematographer (1975, 10), from Brecht’s wish to “portray living people”: in his later theoretical propositions, Higson comments, Brecht “continually stresses the need to not simply make strange, to distance the spectator, and refuse empathy, but to create a tension between pleasure and instruction, between empathy and critical distance, between the strangely revealing and the natural” (1991 [1986], 164).

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In Sontag’s view, it was precisely this theoretical practice of a “reflective” or “critical” art—in which the “form of the work of art is present in an emphatic way” (1994 [1966], 179)—that united Brecht and Bresson. Her introduction to an essay on the latter’s spiritual style described the reflective impulse in these terms: Great reflective art is not frigid. It can exalt the spectator, it can present images that appall, it can make him [sic] weep. But its emotional power is mediated. The pull towards emotional involvement is counterbalanced by elements in the work that promote distance, disinterestedness, impartiality. Emotional involvement is always, to a greater or lesser degree, postponed. (1994 [1966], 177)

Beyond the elitist framing of “great” art made for the male spectator, Sontag’s overall point about the mediation of emotion and the postponement of affective engagement through a style of disinterested detachment is clearly relevant to our study of Huppert’s performances, many of which have been celebrated for their gestural precision and emotional impassivity. For example, one of her most memorable roles as Erika Kohut, the “perverse” professor who sheathes her body with a Burberry trench coat in La Pianiste/The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke 2001), was celebrated for her “marshalling of almost imperceptible micromovements” (McCann 2011, 31).

Stardom and Mortality Huppert’s authorial approach to screen acting—whereby she creates distance through subtraction by stripping away the artificial layering of method characterization—was given a fresh impulse in her tailor-made role as the eponymous heroine in Frankie (Ira Sachs 2019), in which she extended her auto-referential repertoire by playing a glamorous French film star. Huppert had already played an ambitious actor early in her career in an Italian film Storia di Piera/The Story of Piera (Marco Ferreri 1983), but it is only through the 2010s that she began to accumulate roles that interrogate the interrelationship between fame and performance: as well as playing a famous (fictional) war photographer in Louder Than Bombs (Joachim Trier 2015), she played fictional alter-egos of Catherine Breillat in Abus de faiblesse (Catherine Breillat 2013) and Irina Ionesco in My Little Princess (Eva Ionesco 2011); and in a behind-the-scenes

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episode (“House of Special Purpose”) of The Romanoffs, a US anthology web TV series created by Matthew Weiner for Amazon Prime Video in 2018, she played a cruel and lunatic French actor–turned-director who manipulates her star to get a more realistic performance from her. Two other roles from the mid2010s—as a forgotten pop singer–turned–factory worker making a comeback in Souvenir (Bavo Defurne 2016) and as an insecure actor down on her luck in a housing project in Asphalte (Samuel Benchetrit 2015)—are further instances of performances that deal specifically with the flipside of fame. In the intimate two-hander Valley of Love (Guillaume Nicloux 2015), which reunited Huppert with Gérard Depardieu for the first time since their tempestuous partnership in Loulou (Maurice Pialat 1980), they play fictionalized versions of themselves—Isabelle and Gérard, both divorced stars—grieving for the loss of their gay son to suicide. Billed as the reunion of two of French cinema’s leading players—the prolific accomplished actor and the controversial monstre sacré— the film invites us to scrutinize them as stars, and the screenplay references incidents from the characters’ lives, many of which resonate with the actors’ own public profiles. Huppert’s rendition of Isabelle—the fictional character— underscores her emotional vulnerability and volatility while retaining a degree of ambiguous inaccessibility, thereby stamping the role with her own persona.

Figure 11.3  Huppert as Isabelle, a fictional film star, here with Gérard Depardieu in Valley of Love (Guillaume Nicloux 2015).

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The tone of Frankie is equally somber because although Huppert plays a glamorous film star, the narrative premise is that she is suffering from terminal cancer. Françoise Crémont, familiarly known as Frankie, has assembled her extended family for a holiday gathering to bid them farewell. Despite casting a famous star to play Frankie, thereby toying with the layers of authenticity and realness through the lens of biography, her fame, the film suggests, is incidental. The point of the first sequence is to acknowledge the reflecting mirror effect of stardom and performance that the film sidesteps. The first shot is of Huppert crossing the garden of a beautiful hotel at Sintra in Portugal, where she briefly pauses to test the translucent water of the pool before removing her saffron robe to reveal a retro bikini, the top half of which she discards before diving headfirst into the pool as the title credit—her character’s name—is projected onto the screen. The cinematographer Rui Poças’s capture of the natural light and chromatic contrast between the florescent blue water and the lush green of the hillside softens the terse exchange (in English) between Frankie and a teenaged girl (her step-granddaughter) who warns her that the hotel guests might witness her topless swimming; Frankie doesn’t care—“I’m very photogenic, you know,” replies the blasé star. This knowing recognition of her physique is interesting given that—unlike many of her Hollywood peers—Huppert’s beauty has been more recognized as she has aged rather than less. Rather than use the natural surroundings as an opulent setting for the film’s treatment of fame, love, and mortality, Sachs subtly plays with tone— giving the film a mood of anticipated grief through its shows of transient beauty—to frame the family’s reckonings with life, loss, and security. Frankie’s self-centered children obsess about their finances as much as their emotions; indeed, the film can be read as a materialist critique of accumulation through the screenplay’s insistent focus on money and succession by highlighting objects of value like accessories. Embedded is, for example, explicit reference—through product placement—to the Italian luxury jeweler Pomellato. Beyond Huppert’s contextual promotion of the brand, it is “placed” within the script in two scenes that illustrate the pecuniary nature of Frankie’s son Paul (Jérémie Renier) and stepdaughter Sylvia (Vinette Robinson): a promotional close-up of a “burnished gold and champagne diamond” vintage bracelet, said to be worth forty thousand euros, which had been given to Frankie by a former lover. Sylvia gauges his love from the allure of the precious object—a hollow declaration dismissed by Frankie as mistaking money for love. Later, during a discussion about inheritance with her son, she estimates her real estate and offers him the bracelet to avoid paying

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Figure 11.4  Huppert as the glamorous dying star in Frankie (Ira Sachs 2019).

duties after her death. In a perceptive review of the film, the critic Richard Brody homes in on this material question of money and possessions—shown through the allure of the clothes, objects, and settings—to argue that the ideal of beauty acts on Frankie and her entourage “like a drug—not an intoxicant that lulls them into contented complacency but a kind of truth serum. The ideal of Frankie is the lives of artists as creations in and of themselves—which, in turn, effect transfigurations that live on in the lives of others” (Brody 2019). The anthropologist Daniel Miller has argued that clothing is far from superficial. Neither is it simply a semiotic game of language or a visual bank of images; it’s also an indicator of texture and intimacy, of affect and feeling (2010, 41). The sensual or haptic visuality of Frankie is primarily expressed through Rui Poças’s luminous cinematography—said to be under the stylistic influence of Néstor Almendros’s naturalistic lighting for Pauline à la plage/Pauline at

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the Beach (Éric Rohmer 1983) (Deruisseau and Lalanne 2019; Goldberg 2019, 16)—and Silvia Grabowski’s costume and production designs in collaboration with Huppert’s personal designer for the film Khadija Zeggaï, who styled the star and shopped for a number of the French and Italian designer labels namechecked in the film’s credits.10 In one sequence, Frankie flees an altercation with her ex-husband Michel (Pascal Greggory) by slowly walking away into the distance; Huppert is shot elegantly crossing a forest, Sachs’s mise-en-scène encasing the star (dressed in bold hues of blue and fuchsia) in lush verdant nature. In this moment, Huppert’s self-conscious style ruptures the realist frame. There is a similar disjunctive use of the fashion-editorial shot of Huppert in another film about setting and environment, Ursula Meier’s Home (2008), which uses a static long shot of her dressed spectacularly posing within an empty field for no obvious reason than to denaturalize—through emphasis— the star’s presence within the narrative. In Frankie, beyond the overall point made about the futility of fame and fortune, Huppert’s glamorous presence is enhanced by the aesthetic “magic” of cinematography and design. As Carol Dyhouse argues, glamour has not only been defined “as a visual language of seduction, but it also includes a dimension of sensuality and magic through touch, texture and scent” (2010, 6). The role of Frankie was written by Sachs and his co-screenwriter, Mauricio Zacharias, especially for Huppert. Sachs previously commented on his preference for female characters in “pictures where women take on a central role that is somehow larger than the director. You must have the right actress in this position because quite often these roles are not particularly verbal, but come from the character’s interior strength” (Wood 2014, 124). The director also encouraged Huppert purposefully to underplay Frankie to discard the traces of self-conscious irony that had been noted in many of her roles following Elle (Lalanne 2019; Sotinel 2019)—in particular, her mannered performance as the evil queen in a version of Snow White (Blanche comme neige, Anne Fontaine 2019); her burlesque turn in a re-gendered update of Robert Lewis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, called Madame Hyde/Mrs. Hyde (Serge Bozon 2017); and her camp homage to old Hollywood (think Bette Davis) as the eponymous psychopath in Greta (Neil Jordan 2018). In contrast, Frankie pushes Huppert’s subtractive mode of performance—of simply being in front of the camera—to the extreme but also manages to maintain a humanist perspective on the character’s emotional plight by subtly emphasizing her resolve. The director does this by capturing Huppert’s underplayed gestures that contrast with the

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status of the star and the artificial distance created by her acting in English—a foreign language adding another layer of performance. So, Huppert’s discreet glances and stilted intonation—both actor and character are de-territorialized— therefore work in counterpoint. On her stroll Frankie is accosted by a local fan and invited to attend her sister’s birthday gathering: the look on Huppert’s distracted face minutely registers Frankie’s embarrassed presence and awareness of her own mortality. This stripped back performance of fame achieved through an ultimate economy of means is part of Sachs’s cinematic handling of mortality to avoid what Sontag famously criticized as a false vision of cancer through metaphor; “our views about cancer, and the metaphors we have imposed on it,” she wrote, “are so much a vehicle for the large insufficiencies of this culture, for our shallow attitude toward death” (Sontag 1978, 87). Following this call to resist metaphoric thinking about illness, one might well take issue with the film’s exquisitely shot, affect-laden closing sequence, which risks sinking Sachs’s dramatic ambition simply to show someone living out their last days—after all, a star’s wealth and renown make no difference to her fate. With explicit reference to the style of Jean Renoir (particularly the treatment of perspective and theatricality), the coda is a long take of Frankie and her family gathered on a hillside to admire the sunset; shot from afar the tableau shows the actors gradually leaving the frame in pairs, thereby achieving an artistic effect described by Emma Wilson in her analysis of love, mortality and the moving image “as experiential, as sensitizing, rather than as directly expressive or symptomatic” (Wilson 2012, 13). Ultimately, Sachs’s tailor-made role for Huppert is an important contribution to her later career because in its material reflection on image, fame, and performance through the humanist lens of love, loss, and mortality, Frankie offers a variation to Huppert’s theatrical Hollywood style on the red carpet and her recent self-referential roles that perform stardom through ironic counterpoint by suggesting a sparser way for her to continue simply being (herself) on screen. Huppert’s international fame has grown exponentially since the critical success of Elle in 2016. Over the last decade she has accumulated roles that interrogate the nature of notoriety, which culminated in the critical dissection of fame in Frankie, a film that opens with a nod to the star’s appeal as an object of desire. Huppert has, of course, been photographed throughout her long career (Bellaïche 2019; Chammah and Fouchet 2005), but it is only through the 2010s that she has been embraced by the fashion/luxury industry and promoted by the media as a style icon—her petite frame, striking looks, and physical

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versatility (not to mention her ability to pose) coinciding with the zeitgeist and complementing the ethos of fashion imagery. Huppert has also continued to work through her fifties and sixties; her star recognition and rate of production have paradoxically increased rather than waned as she has aged, which is still rarely the case for actresses in international cinema. The management of her star image is clearly a complex negotiation between her own ambivalent authorship of performance and the broader media contexts of fame, celebrity, and fashion. However, the iconicity of Huppert the international film star has grown steadily through the five decades of her career so far. By way of contrast, jump back to 1978: at the age of twenty-four Huppert arrived at the Cannes Film Festival to promote Violette Nozière (Claude Chabrol 1978), for which she won the Best Actress prize, a year after her breakout performance in La Dentellière/The Lacemaker (Claude Goretta 1977). Interviewed by French television about her emerging status as an up-and-coming name in French cinema, Huppert timidly expressed her personal reservations about becoming the center of attention; commenting on how she preferred to keep her own self-performance privately hidden behind the roles she played on screen, she candidly remarked: “you have to perform yourself all of a sudden.”11

Notes 1 2 3

4

5

Launched in 2010 by the LVMH luxury goods group, Nowness has belonged to the UK Dazed Media and the Chinese luxury publisher Modern Media since 2017. https://www.nowness.com/series/define-beauty/virtual-embalming-frederik-heyman. Costume is used to signal not just sexual perversion but feminine sexuality tout court in a number of Huppert’s roles from the vamp styling and use of wigs or dyed hair as masquerade in Sac de noeuds (Josiane Balasko 1985), Rien ne va plus/The Swindle (Claude Chabrol 1997), Eva (Benoît Jacquot 2018), and Blanche comme neige (Anne Fontaine 2019). Examples of fashion editorial imagery of Huppert include CAP 74024 (no 7, 2018), Citizen K International (no 82, Spring 2017), Vanity Fair (no 65, February 2019), Vogue Hommes International (Special Issue on Fashion & Cinema, no 8, 2008– 2009), and YES & NO (3:1, 2019). Huppert’s equivocation has also been noted as symptomatic of a much broader fracturing of the French film industry around questions of sexual exploitation since Adèle Haenel’s accusations of sexual assault as a minor against director Christophe Ruggia (Joyard 2020).

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6

“Dans ma carrière, je n’ai jamais tellement représenté une féminité conquérante, épanouie, forte. Mais mon féminisme a consisté à vouloir très tôt occuper le centre, refuser les films où le personnage féminin n’était défini que par sa relation au héros masculin … J’ai très tôt joué des figures féminines défaillantes, ou fragiles, ou folles, ou en souffrance, mais mon empowerment a consisté à projeter ces figures au centre, dans la lumière” (Lalanne and Morain 2016, 51). 7 Indomitable is also how the journalist Laura Cappelle describes Huppert in her profile for The Guardian in which she followed the star backstage while preparing for a production of The Glass Menagerie at the Odéon theatre in Paris in February 2020. Cappelle claims that while Huppert was happy to discuss her stage and film work, when asked about the controversies about gender equality and power abuses in French cinema Huppert apparently showed her the door (Cappelle 2020). 8 This was not the first time Huppert had caricatured her public persona; the comic effect of her performances as Augustine, the repressed spinster with horn-rimmed glasses in 8 Femmes (François Ozon 2002) and the sexy, nihilistic philosopher in the screwball comedy I Heart Huckabees (David O. Russell 2004) relied, in part, on acknowledgment of her critically acclaimed performance as the “perverse” antiheroine of La Pianiste/The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke 2001). 9 In the same interview for Cahiers du cinéma in 2016 in which she discusses her leading roles in Elle (Paul Verhoeven 2016) and L’ Avenir/Things to Come (Mia Hansen-Løve 2016), Huppert also mentions a supporting role in Tout de suite maintenant (Pascal Bonitzer 2016), in which her dyed blond hair was a superficial instrument used to impose and differentiate the character from her previous role in Elle (Delorme 2016, 16). 10 Along with Pomellato, the end credits list high-end labels Chloé, Eres, and Forte_ Forte, with eyewear by Hervé Domar and watches by Antoine de Macédo. 11 Huppert interviewed by French television news, May 19, 1978. INA archives, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypBFaqDxZfA.

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Sotinel, Thomas. 2019. “Portrait d’une femme à un moment crucial de sa vie.” Le Monde, May 22, 2019. https://www.lemonde.fr/culture/article/2019/05/21/festivalde-cannes-2019-frankie-portrait-d-une-femme-a-un-moment-crucial-de-savie_5464914_3246.html. Vignoli, Lisa. 2017. “Le Garçon du vestiaire.” M Le Magazine du Monde, May 20, 2017: 61–2. Wilson, Emma. 2012. Love, Mortality and the Moving Image. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wood, Jason. 2014. Last Words: Considering Contemporary Cinema. London: Wallflower.

Index Absolute Wilson (Otto-Bernstein) 63 Abus de faiblesse/Abuse of Weakness (Breillat) 17 n.1, 82, 90–3, 230 Adjani, Isabelle 14, 212 Albera, François 56 n.2 Alex & Emma (Reiner) 201 Allociné reviewers 118, 120–3, 125, 126, 131, 132 Almodóvar, Pedro 138 Álvarez López, Cristina 80, 81, 157, 169 Amateur (Hartley) 197, 203–7 ambiguity 2–4, 10, 11, 13, 14, 26, 30, 59, 89, 106, 157, 204, 228 Angot, Christine 110–11 anti-naturalism 43 Ariadne on the Panther (Dannecker) 67 Art Cinema as Institution (Neale) 84 artifice 17, 54–6 Asibong, Andrew 168, 171 ASK 181, 182 Asphalte (Benchetrit) 17 n.1, 231 Assayas, Olivier 184, 221, 228 audacious performance 63 Audran, Stéphane 27, 137–9, 140, 142, 145, 153 n.23 Augustine (Isabelle Huppert) 183, 184, 237 n.8 auteur cinema 2, 7, 45, 46, 178, 187, 194, 204 auteurist approach 140, 151, 152 autoreferentiality 228 A.V. Club, The (Rifle) 209 awkwardness 41 Azoury, P. 103, 104, 112 n.8, 112 n.19 Bach, Steven 198, 200, 213 Bad Love 90, 91 BAFTA award 1, 6, 139 Balasko, Josiane 7, 194 n.1, 236 n.3 Barbosa, Laurence Ferreira 7 Barker, Martin 120

Barrage (Schroeter) 227 Barthes, Roland 22, 56 Bataille, Georges 10, 16, 85, 99–101, 103–10, 111 n.4, 112 n.13 Baudrillard, Jean 10 Beach, The (Boyle) 200–1 Le Beau Serge 139 Bedroom Window, The (Hanson) 200–3, 207 Bellaiche, Carole 5 Bellucci, Monica 177 Benjamin, Walter 22, 24 Bergala, Alain 5, 48 Berlant, Lauren 22 Besnehard, Dominique 177 Beyler, Louis 74 n.12 Binoche, Juliette 59, 194, 213, 223, 228 Blanche comme neige (Fontaine) 45, 187, 194 n.1, 234, 236 n.3 blankness 16, 21, 34 Blier, Bertrand 6, 7, 79, 139, 140, 179, 194 n.1 Boenisch, Peter M. 73 n.5 Boisset, Yves 79 Bordun, Troy 80, 84, 90, 91 Le Boucher 139, 145 Bouffes du Nord theater 60, 63 Bourdieu, Pierre 11 bourgeoise 41, 187–9 Bozon, Serge 17 n.1, 179, 184, 186, 194 n.1, 234 Braudy, Leo 220 Brecht, Bertolt 3, 10, 13, 22, 25, 54, 57 n.14, 229, 230 Breillat, Catherine 7, 17 n.1, 82, 84, 90–3, 96, 113 n.23, 226, 230 Bresson, Robert 57 n.8, 204, 229, 230 Brinkema, Eugenie 83 Bruzzi, Stella 221, 227 Buchanan, Elizabeth A. 119 Butler, Judith 4

242

Index

Cahiers du cinéma 10, 44, 113 n.22, 125, 144, 149, 213, 237 n.9 Cambodia 162, 164, 165 La Caméra de Claire/Claire’s Camera (Hong Sang-soo) 17 n.1, 54, 55, 209 Camille (Cukor) 44 Campion, Jane 225 Canby, Vincent 202 Cannes Film Festival 1, 6, 35, 55, 118, 125, 134 n.3, 140, 198, 214 n.3, 222, 224, 236 Caporale, Marzia 168, 170, 171 Cappelle, Laura 11, 237 n.7 cerebral actor 8, 12, 95, 181–4, 191, 193, 194, 204, 212 cerebral cinema 2, 9, 10 Chabrol, Claude 16, 36 n.11, 79, 81, 137, 138, 151, 152, 152 n.1, 153 n.10, 153 n.11, 153 n.20, 153 n.23, 154 n.26, 178, 184, 193, 198, 202, 204, 214 n.2, 221, 223, 236, 236 n.3 aesthetics 144–8 La Cérémonie 6, 17 n.1, 45–6, 137, 138, 140–1, 144–7, 151, 152 n.8, 212, 223 Huppert and 138–41 L’Ivresse du pouvoir/Comedy of Power 17 n.1, 137, 141, 142, 149 Madame Bovary 137, 150, 154 n.32, 184, 193, 204, 214 n.2, 214 n.3, 221 Merci pour le chocolat/Nightcap 36 n.11, 41, 44, 47, 137, 138, 141–4, 146, 147, 151, 153 n.19 opacity of evil 142–3 Rien ne va plus 148–51 Story of Women 8, 137, 140, 141, 145, 151, 152 n.6, 153 n.21, 204 Violette Nozière 6, 21, 27–9, 35, 45, 51, 52, 57 n.4, 79, 137–9, 141, 142, 151, 198, 199, 202, 204, 205, 207, 214 n.3, 214 n.4, 236 Chammah, Lolita 226 Chammah, Ronald 217, 218, 226, 235 Champagne, John 87 Charmant-Killman, Jeanne 141 Chéreau, Patrice 36 n.3, 100, 108, 217, 218, 221 Church Gibson, Pamela 220 Cimino, Michael 5, 7, 17 n.1, 197–200, 203, 221

cinéma du corps 16, 80, 82–7, 89, 90, 93, 95 cinephilic variation 131–3, 181–7, 193 Coates, Paul 22, 31 Coetzee, J. M. 12, 71 colonialism 160, 162, 164–6, 171, 172 Colvin, J. Brandon 173 n.5 La Comédie de l’innocence/Comedy of Innocence (Ruiz) 50 comédienne 177 comedy and persona 178–81 Companeez, Nina 5, 7 Le Concert champêtre (Wouters) 66 Conservatoire national supérieur d’art dramatique (CNSAD) 7 Cooper, Sarah 36 n.2 Copacabana (Fitoussi) 12, 45, 179, 190–3, 194 n.1, 227 Costa, Guido 102 Cotillard, Marion 127, 213, 223 counter-persona 44–8 Coup de Foudre/Entre nous (Kurys) 21, 27, 31, 101 Léna 27, 31, 32, 35 Courthald, Lisa 89 Cruz, Penélope 139 crystal-character 138, 144–9, 151 crystal-image 29 cultural identity 59, 132 Dalle, Béatrice 102, 177, 212 La Dame aux camélias/The Lady of the Camelias (Bolognini) 221 Dannecker, Johann Heinrich von 67 Davis, Bette 51, 52, 57 n.10 Davis, Colin 26–8 Deer Hunter, The 198 Deleuze, Gilles 22, 23, 29, 30, 138, 144–6 Delon, Alain 14 Delorme, Stéphane 9, 118, 137, 142–8, 151, 228, 229, 237 n.9 Deneuve, Catherine 14, 48, 160, 183, 188, 223 Denis, Claire 7, 16, 84, 101, 103, 157, 166–73, 173 n.4, 179, 226 La Dentellière/The Lacemaker (Goretta) 3, 6, 7, 21–5, 29, 32, 35, 36 n.6, 45, 52, 79, 139, 204, 206, 207, 214 n.4, 236 Béatrice/Pomme 3, 22–7

Index Depardieu, Gérard 14, 27, 30, 51, 231 Derrida, Jacques 26 Deux (Schroeter) 52–4 Devil’s Playground, The (Goldin) 102 Didi-Huberman, Georges 22, 23 Die Klavierspielerin (Jelinek) 86 Dior, Christian 224 dissonance 138, 143–8, 178 Dix pour cent/Call My Agent! 177, 181–3, 195 n.14, 227 Djian, Philippe 34, 93, 96 n.5 Doane, Mary Ann 24 Docteur Françoise Gailland (Bertuccelli) 6 Domar, Hervé 237 n.10 Donadio, Rachel 202, 229 Dooley, Kath 90, 173 n.4 Douin, Jean-Luc 103, 104, 112 n.10, 114 n.38 Dousteyssier-Khoze, Catherine 16 Dufourmantelle, Anne 105–6 Dujardin, Jean 177 Dupont Lajoie/The Common Man (Boisset) 79 Duras, Marguerite 10, 103, 110, 158, 159, 173 n.1 Dyer, Richard 3, 5, 9, 22, 36, 52, 85, 117, 159–61, 167, 173 n.4, 178, 183 Dyhouse, Carol 234 Eberhart, Rachel 74 n.12 Ebert, Roger 8, 21, 212, 213, 214 n.3, 214 n.4 8 Femmes/8 Women (Ozon) 12, 45, 48–50, 179, 181, 183–4, 187, 194 n.1, 195 n.7, 237 n.8 Elizabeth Costello (Coetzee) 71 Elle (Verhoeven) 1, 15–17, 17 n.1, 21, 28, 34, 45, 52, 81, 82, 93–6, 99, 142, 179, 202, 208, 220, 223, 229, 234, 235, 237 n.9 Michele 15, 28, 35 Entertainment Weekly 209 equivocation 36 n.3, 226, 236 n.5 eroticism. see maternal eroticism erudite cinema 9, 10 European Art-house cinema 1, 2 Eva (Jacquot) 17 n.1, 157, 236 n.3 Extreme Cinema (Frey) 83–4

243

facial display 22, 23, 27, 29, 30, 33, 35, 36 n.3 facial expression 26, 29, 47 fame and celebrity 220 construction of 218 and feminism 225–7 international 235–6 performance of 220, 223, 230, 235 Fatal Attraction (Lyne) 208 Faustine et le bel été (Companeez) 5, 7 Feminine Awkward (Shinkle) 225 femininity 2, 17 n.1 feminism 16, 100, 237 n.6 fame and 225–7 La Femme de mon pote/My Best Friend’s Girl (Blier) 179, 194 n.1 La Femme du boulanger (Pagnol) 192, 193 La Femme infidèle/The Unfaithful Wife 139 Film Comment 80, 213, 214 n.3 Fitoussi, Marc 7, 12, 45, 179, 181, 189, 190, 192, 194 n.1, 195 n.7, 227 Florence Foster Jenkins (Friers) 208 Fontaine, Anne 7, 45, 51, 179, 181, 189, 190, 192, 194 n.1, 195 n.7, 226, 228, 234, 236 n.3 Forms of the Affects, The (Brinkema) 83 Forrest Gump (Zemeckis) 120 Fouchet, Jeanne 217, 218, 235 4.48 Psychosis (Kane) 12, 62, 63 Franck, Dan 31 Frankie (Sachs) 17, 17 n.1, 230, 232–5 Frey, Mattias 83–4, 95 Friedberg, Anna 27 Frodon, Jean-Michel 150 Gabrielle (Chéreau) 21, 28, 33–5, 100, 221 Gaffney, Dean 4 Garbo, Greta 22, 36 n.3, 44 Garrel, Louis 101, 109, 112 n.6 Garrel, Philippe 53 Geil, Abraham 27 gestural expression 24–6, 34, 37 n.11, 41–8, 55, 57 n.8 Gibbs, Anna 27 Gish, Lillian 43, 44, 51, 52 Glass Menagerie, The 11, 225, 237 n.7 Gledhill, Christine 14, 22, 27, 85

244 Godard, Jean-Luc 7, 10, 17 n.1, 44, 45, 140, 204, 214 n.3 Golden Globe award 1, 21, 34, 35, 220, 223, 227 Goldin, Nan 99, 100, 102, 108, 110, 111, 113 n.21, 217 Goretta, Claude 3, 21, 22, 25, 45, 79, 139, 204, 206, 236 Grass Is Singing, The (Lessing) 166 Grazia 222 Great Actress and Her Photographer Friend, The (Bergala) 5 Greta (Jordan) 45, 207–12, 234 Grützke, Johannes 61 Guibert, Hervé 110 Guimarães, Pedro 15 Gundle, Stephen 219 Haenel, Adele 5, 226, 236 n.5 Haneke, Michael 6, 10, 16, 17 n.1, 35, 36 n.11, 45–6, 48, 57 n.8, 80, 82, 84, 86–9, 92, 99, 117, 118, 120, 123, 126, 129, 130, 133, 142, 145, 151, 178, 179, 202, 209, 230, 237 n.8 Hansen-Løve, Mia 7, 8, 10, 17 n.1, 101, 103, 226, 237 n.9 Hanson, Curtis 201, 207 Happy End (Haneke) 17 n.1, 179 Hardy, Françoise 184 Harkins, Gillian 101 Hartley, Hal 7, 197, 203–7 Haynes, Todd 138 Hayon, Kaya Davies 16 Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (Dyer) 161 Heaven’s Gate (Cimino) 5, 16, 17 n.1, 140, 197–201, 221 Ella Watson 197–201 Hedda Gabler 62 Herrero, Fanny 177 Heyman, Frederick 217 Higson, Andrew 13, 229 Hitchcock, Alfred 201, 202 Hollinger, Karen 13 Hollywood 11, 16, 17, 46, 52, 57 n.6, 95, 140, 160, 197, 199–201, 213, 223, 224, 232, 234, 235 Holmes, Diana 4 Home (Meier) 234

Index Hong Sang-soo 7, 17 n.1, 54 Honoré, Christophe 10, 16, 52, 84–6, 99–103, 111 n.4, 112 n.9, 112 n.13, 112 n.16, 112 n.17, 113 n.20, 113 n.22, 113 n.26, 209 Bataille’s text 105–10 Huppert and Angot 110–11 and sexual mothers 103–5 Horeck, Tanya 82, 95 Huit Femmes/8 Women. see 8 Femmes/8 Women (Ozon) Huppert, Caroline 60 Huppert et moi (Millet) 5 I Heart Huckabees (Russell) 197, 203–7, 237 n.8 image 9–17 impassivity 5, 6, 21 impersonation 13 In Another Country (Hong Sang-soo) 7, 17 n.1, 54, 55 Indochine (Wargnier) 158, 160 indomitable 227, 237 n.7 Ionesco, Eva 7, 17 n.1, 101, 221, 222, 226, 230 Isabelle Huppert: Woman of Many Faces (Toubiana) 99, 100, 217 Jacobowitz, Florence 162, 164 James, Nick 219 Jameson, Fredric 228 Jarman, Derek 138 Jelinek, Elfriede 21, 86, 87, 101, 214 n.1, 217, 218 Jordan, Neil 45, 197, 207–12, 234 Joudet, Murielle 5, 81, 82, 90, 91, 95–6, 111 n.3, 113 n.23, 113 n.25, 130, 185 Le Juge et l’Assassin/The Judge and the Assassin (Tavernier) 139 Juste avant la nuit/Just Before Nightfall 139 Kahn, Cédric 182 Kane, Sarah 12, 62, 63 Kendall, Tina 82, 85, 95 King, Barry 11, 13 Klimt, Gustav 217 Kuleshov, Lev 229 Kunstfigur (artistic figure) 63, 65, 66 Kurys, Diane 7, 21, 31, 101

Index Labrune, Jeanne 17, 179, 185, 194 n.1, 195 n.11 Lacascade, Éric 62 Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de 64 Lainé, Pascal 22, 25, 139 La La Land (Chazelle) 208 Lanvin, Gérard 177 Larceneux, Fabrice 122 LaSalle, Mick 80, 95, 197, 200, 201, 212, 213, 214 n.2, 229 Lassalle, Jacques 61, 62 Laurent, Mélanie 213 L’Avare/The Miser (Moliere) 12 L’Avenir/Things to Come (Hansen-Løve) 8, 10, 17 n.1, 101, 237 n.9 Law and Order: Special Victims Unit 212 Léaud, Jean-Pierre 46 Leclère, Alexandra 7 L’École de la chair/The School of Flesh (Jacquot) 17 n.1, 79, 221 Lequeret, Elisabeth 113 n.22 Les Biches 139, 142 Les Bonnes/The Maids (Genet) 12 L’Escalier de fer/The Iron Staircase 137, 151 Les Cousins/The Cousins 139 Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (Demy) 188 Les Destinées sentimentales/Sentimental Destinies (Assayas) 184, 221 Les Fantômes du chapelier/The Hatter’s Ghost 144–5 Les Fausses confidences (Marivaux) 195 n.13 Les Hautes Solitudes (Garrel) 53 Les Idoles (Honoré) 104 Les Liaisons dangereuses (Laclos) 64 Les Liens de sang/Blood relatives 142 Les Précieuses ridicules/TheAffected Young Ladies (Moliere) 12 Lessing, Doris 166 Les Sæurs fâchées/Me and My Sister (Leclère) 12, 17 n.1, 179, 180, 187, 189, 194 n.1, 195 n.4 Les Valseuses/Going Places (Blier) 5–7, 31, 79, 139 Levinas, Emmanuel 22, 25–8, 36 n.2 L’Humanité 104 Libération 103–4 L’Ivresse du pouvoir/Comedy of Power (Chabrol) 17 n.1, 137, 141, 142, 149

245

Losey, Joseph 7, 45, 204 Lost & Found (Pollack) 201 Louder Than Bombs (Trier) 17 n.1, 230 Louis, Edouard 228 Loulou (Pialat) 21, 27, 30, 31, 45, 205, 214 n.3, 231 Nelly 30–2, 35 Louvart, Hélene 102, 103, 106, 108 Lucca, Violet 80, 81 Luz (Flora Luz) 7 McDonald, Paul 11, 13 Macédo, Antoine de 237 n.10 McGonagle, Joseph 16 Madame Bovary (Chabrol) 137, 150, 154 n.32, 184, 193, 204, 214 n.2, 214 n.3, 221 Madame Hyde/Mrs Hyde (Bozon) 17 n.1, 179–81, 183–5, 189, 194 n.1, 234 Madmen (Weiner) 210 Magimel, Benoît 36 n.11, 46, 47 Malle, Justine 112 n.13 Ma Mère (Honoré) 10, 16, 52, 85, 99–110, 111 n.1, 112 n.10, 112 n.11, 112 n.13, 112 n.16, 209 Marceau, Sophie 200–1 Maréchal, Benoît 74 n.12 Martin, Adrian 80, 81, 169 Marvin ou la belle éducation/Reinventing Marvin (Fontaine) 51, 228 Mary She Said (Wilson) 12 maternal eroticism 99–111, 112 n.13 maturity 44–5 Maura, Carmen 138 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare) 12, 61 Medea 61 Medea (Eurypedes) 12 Meier, Ursula 7, 226, 234 Merci pour le chocolat/Nightcap (Chabrol) 17 n.1, 36 n.11, 41, 44, 47, 137, 138, 141–4, 146, 147, 151, 153 n.19 La Mère/The Mother (Zeller) 178 Merteuil, Marquise de 64, 66 Message personnel 184 #MeToo movement 225, 226 Miller, Daniel 233 Millet, Richard 5 mimetic communication 27 minimalism 16

246 Miou-Miou 27, 31 mise en abyme 91, 141, 151 mise-en-scène 28, 44, 53, 62, 65–7, 72, 147, 159, 234 misogyny 193, 225 Moine, Raphaëlle 16 Le Monde, 65, 104 Mon pire cauchemar/My Worst Nightmare (Fontaine) 179, 187–9, 194 n.1 Month in the Country, A (Turgenev) 61 Moore, Julianne 138 Morin, Edgar 5, 13 mortality 230–6 Mouawad, Wajdi 12 Moullet, Luc 46 Müller, Heiner 60, 64, 67, 68 Murphy, Ian 172 Murray, Craig D. 119 Murray, Ros 119 Musto, Michael 198 My Little Princess (Ionesco) 17 n.1, 101, 221, 222, 230 Nacery, Sami 185 Nahmias, Julian 104–5 Nan Goldin, In My Life (Goldin) 99 Naremore, James 13, 25, 43, 44, 56 n.3 Nate Champion (Walken) 199 naturalism 42, 43, 56 N’Diaye, Marie 166 Neale, Steve 84, 85 New Extremisms (Kendall) 85 nonconformity 2, 9–17 Norindr, Panivong 160 Notes sur le cinématographe/Notes on the Cinematographer (Bresson) 229 notoriety 17, 81, 128, 220, 235 Nue Propriété (2006) 8 O’Dwyer, Jules 16, 36 n.7 Oh! (Djian) 34, 93 opacity 16, 33, 81, 84, 138, 142–5, 148, 151, 177, 218 oripeaux (rags) 181 Orlando (Woolf) 12, 61, 63 Oscar nomination 1, 34, 198, 208, 220, 223, 227 Ostermeier, Thomas 62

Index Otero, Mariana 102–3 otherness 22–36 Otherwise Than Being (Levinas) 27 O’Toole, Lawrence 213, 214 n.3 Otto-Bernstein, Katharina 63 Ozon, François 12, 45, 48, 50, 179, 183, 184, 194 n.1 Palmer, Tim 83, 95 Panh, Rithy 10, 16, 157–67, 172, 173 Paris Fashion Week 226 la parisienne 2, 17 n.1, 219 Pascal, Michel 137 Pasquier, Dominique 117 La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc/The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer) 33 Pauline à la plage/Pauline at the Beach (Rohmer) 233–4 performance style 13, 21, 29, 30, 36, 36 n.2, 41, 43–4, 54, 56 persona 1, 3–6, 13, 14, 16, 25, 42–8, 54–6, 57 n.5, 177–8, 193–4, 197, 199, 201–4, 206–9, 212, 214 n.1, 218, 219, 227, 231, 237 n.8 cinephilic and playful variations 181–7 and comedy 178–81 Copacabana and La Ritournelle 190–3 frustrated bourgeoise 187–9 perversion 16 Peucker, Brigitte 86, 95 Phaedra’s Love (Kane) 70–2, 99 Phèdre(s) (Warlikowski) 12, 60, 70–1 Le Phénomène de l’extase/The Phenomenon of Ecstasy (1933) 108 La Pianiste/The Piano Teacher (Haneke) 6, 10, 16, 35, 36 n.11, 45, 46, 52, 80–2, 86–90, 92, 95, 96, 96 n.2, 99, 101, 118, 120–3, 125, 126, 129, 132, 133, 134 n.3, 142, 145, 178, 179, 202, 207, 209, 212, 230, 237 n.8 Erika Kohut 6, 36 n.11, 45, 46, 81, 86, 118, 124, 126–30, 132, 133, 230 Plantinga, Carl 27 playful variations 181–7 Poças, Rui 232, 233 Poelvoorde, Benoît 179, 188, 189 Polanski, Roman 225, 226

Index Pour en finir avec Eddy Bellegueule/The End of Eddy (Louis) 228 Preiss, Joana 101, 102, 112 n.8 Preminger, Otto 139 presentational mode 13 “prestige stars” 11 psychological depth 61, 138 psychopath 9 public image 1, 2, 17, 45, 57 n.5, 59, 227 Pusca, Anna 68 Qiong Yu, Sabrina 4 Quartet (Wilson) 60, 64–7, 73 n.11 Rawle, Steven 204 Rear Window (Hitchcock) 201, 202 red-carpet appearances 218–26 Rees-Roberts, Nick 17, 85, 112 n.7 Regietheater 60, 73 n.5 La Règle du jeu/The Rules of the Game 142 Régy, Claude 63, 177 repetition 28, 54–6 representational mode 13 Resmini, Mauro 83–5, 88, 95 Resnais, Alain 101 Revisiting Star Studies (Qiong Yu) 4 Rien ne va plus 137, 138, 142, 148–51, 154 n.27, 154 n.32, 236 n.3 Rifle, Katie 209 Rimbaud, Arthur 217 risk 7, 30 La Ritournelle/Paris Follies (Fitoussi) 45, 179, 190, 192, 193, 194 n.1 Roberts, David 64 Rodowick, D. N. 29, 30 Rohrwacher, Alice 102 Romanoffs, The: House of Special Purpose (Weiner) 197, 207–12, 231 Rosebud (Preminger) 139 Rose, Charlie 203, 214 n.3 Rose, Gillian 119 Rose, Jacqueline 113 n.26 Rouvet, Riou 36 n.6 Royer, Michelle 127–8, 130, 161, 184, 214 n.1 Ruggia, Christophe 237 n.5 Ruiz, Raúl 50 Russell, David O. 197, 203–7

247

Sachs, Ira 17, 17 n.1, 230, 232–5 Saillard, Olivier 221 Sampatakakis, George 16 Sans queue ni tête/Special Treatment (Labrune) 17 n.1, 179, 181, 183, 185, 194 n.1 Sarraute, Nathalie 10 Sarris, Andrew 8 Sautet, Claude 139 Sauve qui peut (la vie)/Every Man for Himself (Godard) 10, 17 n.1, 45 Schechner, Richard 65, 73 n.7 Schroeder, Laura 7 Schroeter, Werner 7, 17 n.1, 45, 52, 54 Scott, A. O. 210 scrutiny 2, 3, 14 self-reflexivity 138, 144, 145, 148, 149, 151, 152, 208 separateness 26–32, 35 La Séparation/The Separation (Vincent) 21, 28, 31–2 Anne 27–8, 32–5 sexism 193, 225, 226 sexuality 69, 79, 80, 82, 85, 90, 95, 101, 102, 104, 105, 110, 157, 178, 183, 185, 187, 192, 236 n.3 sexual transgression 16 Seyrig, Delphine 101, 103, 111 n.5 Shen, Kool 90, 91 Shingler, Martin 13 Shinkle, Eugenie 225 Siclier, Jacques 36 n.6 Sight & Sound 81, 219 Sils Maria/Clouds of Sils Maria (Assayas) 228 Simenon, Georges 137, 151 Single White Female (Schroeder) 208 Sixsmith, Judith 119 Smith, Murray 204 sociopath 9, 45, 46 Sontag, Susan 100, 217–19, 230, 235 Souvenir (Defurne) 231 spectatorship 3–5, 9, 22, 24–7, 29–31, 33, 35, 42, 43, 46, 48, 65, 81, 83–5, 89, 92, 117, 118, 120, 145, 159–62, 166, 168, 169, 172, 173, 178, 179, 188, 217, 229, 230 Stacey, Jackie 22, 117

248

Index

Stakhanovism 3, 22, 178 Stanislavskian style of acting 46 star image 2, 4, 5, 10, 13–15, 36 Stars (Dyer) 3, 22, 178 star’s image 117, 181–7 star studies 1–5, 15, 22 Steimatsky, Noa 22, 23, 25, 26, 33 Storia di Piera/The Story of Piera (Ferreri) 17 n.1, 230 Story of Women (Chabrol) 8, 137, 140, 141, 145, 151, 152 n.6, 153 n.21, 204 Strasberg, Lee 56 n.2 Streetcar Named Desire, A (Williams) 57 n.12, 69 structured polysemy 3, 35 subjectivity 48–52 Summer with Monika (Bergman) 44, 48 Swinton, Tilda 22, 138 talent 5, 6, 14 Talijan, Emilija 91 Tavernier, Bertrand 7, 139, 140 Taylor, Alison 6, 16, 88, 130 Télérama 142 Le Temps du loup/Time of the Wolf (Haneke) 57 n.8, 179 Thelwall, Mike 119 Thomas, Robert 183 Thompson, David 198 Tidd, Ursula 59, 117, 163 Tiens ferme ta couronne (Haenel) 5 Time-Cinema 29 Tip Top (Bozon) 179, 181, 183–6, 189, 194 n.1 Ton père (Honoré) 104, 112 n.17 Tosi, Piero 221 Totality and Infinity (Levinas) 25, 26 Toubiana, Serge 21, 100, 130, 214 n.1, 217–18 Tout de suite maintenant/Right Here, Right Now (Bonitzer) 9, 179, 187, 194 n.1, 237 n.9 transgression 2–4, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16 Traumarbeit 66 True Heart Susie (Griffith) 43 Truffaut, François 44 La Truite (Losey) 45, 52 Turgenev, Ivan 61

Un barrage contre le Pacifique/The Sea Wall (Panh) 10, 16, 157–73 Une affaire de femmes/Story of Women (Chabrol) 8, 137, 140, 141, 145, 151, 152 n.6, 153 n.21, 204 “uniformly chic phantom” 2 unpredictability 34, 35 Un tramway (A Streetcar) 69 Valdes, Ariel Garcia 66, 67 Valley of Love (Nicloux) 17 n.1, 51, 179, 231 Valmont 64, 66, 67 Vanity Fair 178, 224, 227, 236 n.4 Varney, Denise 69 verfremdungseffekt 25, 69–70 Verhoeven, Paul 1, 15, 17 n.1, 21, 45, 81, 82, 93–5, 99, 142, 151, 179, 202, 208, 229, 237 n.9 Vermeer, Johannes 23 versatility 5, 12, 16 Vertigo (Hitchcock) 202 Veysset, Sandrine 102 Vincendeau, Ginette 1, 5, 12, 14, 22, 30, 117, 178, 179, 185, 194, 204, 214 n.2 Violette Nozière (Chabrol) 6, 21, 27–9, 35, 45, 51, 52, 57 n.4, 79, 137–9, 141, 142, 151, 198, 199, 202, 204, 205, 207, 214 n.3, 214 n.4, 236 Virno, Paolo 27 Vogue 2, 3, 14, 219, 224, 236 n.4 Wajda, Andrzej 204, 221 Waldron, Darren 15, 117, 119, 184 Walken, Christopher 199 Warlikowski, Krzysztof 12, 60, 68–72, 177 Weiner, Matthew 197, 207–12, 231 Wheatley, Catherine 81, 86 White Material (Denis) 16, 101, 157, 165–7, 169, 170, 172, 173, 179 whiteness 157, 158, 167, 168, 173 white woman 158–65, 167 de-centering the 165–72 Wilkinson, David 119 Willett, John 25 Williams, James 165 Williams, Tennessee 11, 57 n.12, 69 Wilson, Emma 16, 96, 235

Index Wilson, Robert 12, 60, 61, 63–8, 73 n.11, 177 Woman of Many Faces 99, 100, 217–18 Women, The (Cukor) 183 Woolf, Virginia 12, 61

Wouters, Frans 66 Zacharias, Mauricio 234 Zadek, Peter 61 Zeller, Florian 178

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