'Who the hell is Isabelle Huppert?"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/video/2010/jul/01/claire-denis-isabelle-huppert
The question rang through the offices of United Artists nearly 30 years ago, when Michael Cimino tried to cast the role of Ella in Heaven's Gate. The executive in charge of production, Steven Bach, later wrote: "I knew Huppert only by reputation and had never seen her on screen She was a minor French actress with a flat, peasantlike face that was agreeable in stills without being notably pretty."
Bach (who died earlier this year and was my great friend) admitted to what a Hollywood executive knew in 1980. He had difficulty seeing a French actress take the female lead in a picture as large as Heaven's Gate was meant to be. Well, Heaven's Gate did not turn out well, but no one ever blamed Isabelle Huppert. Indeed, I suspect Bach would have led the way now in saying that no American actress would have handled the nude scenes so casually. And perhaps no other actress would have registered her hideous rape in that film as such a gross intrusion on liberty. The Frenchness or the peasant look hardly mattered unless you believe a peasant look invariably brings eloquence to beauty, just as in Huppert it brought unusual understanding of that story about human rights.
Today things are different. All over the filmgoing world it is a matter of general consent that Isabelle Huppert is one of our great actresses. Of course, she looks 56 because she is part of a culture horrified at the idea of cosmetic self-betrayal. It takes a moment to realise she is only two years younger than Meryl Streep, and from the same moment as two English actresses I would place in the same class Miranda Richardson and Juliet Stevenson.
It's not a casual thing, putting these four in the same group. Indeed, I doubt that in the history of the movies we've ever had women in their 50s standing above all others. Is that chance, or one of the fruits of feminism the idea (once hostile to the ideology of the movies) that as women grow older, they become more interesting?
Huppert has flirted with American movies: apart from Heaven's Gate, she made The Bedroom Window, for Curtis Hanson, playing a nasty, self-concerned woman; she was an ex-nun in Hal Hartley's Amateur; and she had a small piece of I Heart Huckabees. She also made The Trout for Joseph Losey in France. But she always stuck with France, and has put together a body of work only rivalled in modern times by Jeanne Moreau or Catherine Deneuve: Les Valseuses, for Bertrand Blier; The Judge and the Assassin for Bertrand Tavernier; Claude Goretta's The Lacemaker; and her first great coup, as Violette Nozière, for Claude Chabrol. That was a key part an abused teenager becoming a dangerous woman, a criminal yet a freedom-seeker, too.
Still, as she reached 40, grandeur or defiance took over: Madame Bovary for Chabrol, where she is not quite right for the part; with Sandrine Bonnaire in La Ceremonie; for Kiarostami in Lumière et Compagnie; Elective Affinities for the Taviani Brothers. Her masterpiece, I think, is Michael Haneke's La Pianiste. It is the story of a fiercely solitary woman who teaches music and pursues masochistic sexual violence. It is not easy to watch, and it cannot have been easy to play. But it helped establish Haneke as a great director and Huppert as an uncommonly courageous actress.
Huppert may be short on comedy (in that respect Streep has her edged), but it may be another sign of her loyalty to France that she is committed to projects that see it as no laughing matter to be a woman. In 2006, there was a tribute season to Huppert at the BFI Southbank. In introducing it, Geoff Andrew of the BFI quoted the critic Tom Milne, who spoke of Huppert's "mysterious inner radiance glowing behind her patient suffering". That described The Lacemaker, but it covers the range from wistful alienation to extraordinary intelligence that makes Isabelle Huppert the essential peasant of our age who has somehow aspired to the loftiest roles.
The Sea Wall
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0931285/
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Heaven's Gate - USA 1980by JahanChannel7,596 views
Such an incredible actress - her performance as Erika in 'The Piano Teacher' was one of the greatest and most powerful performances I have ever seen.
GayGeisha 2 years ago 5
she is something special
n5473c 11 months ago 3