“The Greeks already understood that there was more interest in portraying an unusual character than a usual character – that is the purpose of films and theatre.” — Isabelle Huppert

It’s her birthday today.

Nobody like her. She’s almost in her own category. Her work is mysterious. It feels like she gives the wheel over totally to her subconscious. You never feel the puppet-strings of the actress. She never even seems to be “giving a performance”. It’s something ELSE, whatever it is she is doing. She can go deep – as deep as the Mariana Trench – but she can also present the surface – an equally important skill. Not every performance requires in-depth backstory. For example: La Ceremonie, the chilling film by Claude Chabrol, which is my favorite Chabrol, and one of Huppert’s best – most eerie performances. (She is often VERY eerie.). In La Ceremonie, she is all surface. And this is by design. Jeanne is shallow. The way psychopaths are shallow. She is what she seems to be. A perky mischievous young woman. Free-spirited and impulsive. Fun. Huppert doesn’t add anything to it.

Same with Sandrine Bonnaire, her extraordinary co-star. She is what she seems to be, too, a submissive easily-flattered lonely young woman, a bit dazzled by her new friend, pleased to have someone so glamorous and fun be interested in her. The two meet, and then flit along on the surface, having coffee, watching television, talking about nothing (again: seemingly: when you watch it again, you can practically HEAR the subterranean level of inchoate communication going on). Nothing seems to be happening, for most of it. You pick up on undercurrents, but nothing comes to the surface. Nothing is verbalized.

There isn’t even a conversation about deeper subjects, their resentments, their feelings of being stuck or wanting more, all the things you FEEL but they never say. They don’t say ANYthing and the terrifying final scene emerges almost like it’s a whim. It could not be scarier, since … it makes you realize: this is probably how events like this often go.

But that’s the thing about Huppert, and why she is unlike anybody else: you don’t NEED those conversations to occur, you don’t NEED to lead the audience by the hand. Besides, when you’re talking about psychopathy – which is what La Ceremonie is all about – psychology really doesn’t come into it. That’s why people are fascinated. What is it like to have … no depth? Huppert shows you.

But she can show you the opposite, too. Like Charlotte Rampling, like Theresa Russell, like Bibi Andersson – all actresses whom I consider to be in a similar category – if you can even categorize it – they don’t work IN the moment. They work way way WAY out on the far EDGE of any given moment, pushing it as far as it can go, so much so that they’re out in outer space, without oxygen. Their work is not literal in that way … they don’t work in easily-verbalized labels, they don’t take traditional routes, they don’t think traditionally. They go so much deeper “into character” that you are forced to lean forward, in awe, wondering: How … HOW … are they doing what they’re doing?

The eeriest thing about Isabelle Huppert is she doesn’t make a big deal of ANY of it. She came to Ebertfest for the screening of Elle, and during the QA following it was obvious how different she was from most other actresses. Actors want you to know how much work they’ve done. They list their research. They detail their process. This is not to say that process isn’t important and/or fascinating. If you know me, you know I love process. But Huppert … what IS her process? It doesn’t seem to exist at all. All that exists is the truth of the moment. And her ability to play make-believe within the moment. If I had to boil it down, I would say: she senses what is needed in any given script, and she devotes herself fully to that which is needed. She has no trouble excluding the things that AREN’T necessary (see, again, La Ceremonie. She is ALL surface in that. It’s why she is so tremendously frightening in it). She doesn’t worry about making herself understandable to an audience.

Think of her performance in The Piano Teacher. Now I love Meryl Streep, but it’s hard to picture her going where Huppert goes in that performance. Huppert is adorable and glamorous, and she can often be hilarious. She is very “realistic” – you never feel her “acting”. But she has zero fear about the ugliness of this world. She’s almost unwatchable in The Piano Teacher, the pain is so titanic and yet Huppert herself – the actress – breezes out of whatever role she plays un-touched. It’s like Gena Rowlands. Off-screen, Rowlands is a stable woman. She raised kids, she was supportive of her husband, she kept the house, she was responsible. But the roles Cassavetes gave her allowed her to let the panther out, the panther of her understanding of madness. Something similar happens with Huppert.

The woman I saw at Ebertfest saw Elle as a lark. That movie erupted a controversy – does the film endorse or condone rape? – one of those tiresome controversies it’s hard to avoid. I don’t mean to criticize those who hated the film. If you hated it, that’s of course fine. But I can think of nothing more tiresome than worrying over whether or not a movie condones bad behavior. I prefer to leave that to PTA groups and Christian family values organizations. I want no part of that. For such an upsetting movie, with such a bizarre central character (played by Huppert), the way Huppert discussed it really struck me. She had fun doing it.

She understood Paul Verhoeven. She understood that the film was not meant to be realistic AND that she wasn’t playing a strictly realistic character. “You’re not going to meet this person on the subway,” said Huppert.

And so she didn’t sweat it.

This is the thing I find so amazing about Huppert’s work, which is amazingly consistent in its excellence, and it’s just gotten more and more interesting as the years have gone by.

Some of the things I’ve written about Huppert:

I was going to write about La Ceremonie for my column at Film Comment (sob), but the movie was somewhat hard to find a couple of years ago. It’s now streaming on the Criterion Channel. Huzzah! I wrote about “folie a deux” films recently on my Substack, and of course, wrote about La Ceremonie, among other films.

Then there was Elle, which I adored. And to all the female film critics on Twitter who said things like, “No one who has been assaulted could like Elle“: How about you come up with an actual argument for why you didn’t like the film? You know, like, do your job, instead of attacking the women who did love the film – and there were many of us – in such a DISGUSTING way. I’ve been assaulted and I loved Elle. How DARE you. Only women do this to each other, by the way. I’ve been dealing with it since I was in high school. They draw lines, set up borders, police each other: You’re the RIGHT kind of woman, you’re one of us, and you’re the WRONG kind of woman, and so we don’t include you in our charmed circle. I think the film is brilliant on the concept of consent. I got into that in my Ebert review.

I also reviewed Mia Hansen-Løve’s wonderful film Things to Come (more on Hansen-Love here), which came out on the heels of Elle, and together they can be a master-class in why she is so unique. Things to Come is the epitome of down to earth and realistic. Elle is extremely stylized.

She can do both. Without breaking a sweat.

 
 
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