smh.com.au
A chameleon's eloquent gaze
July 10, 2007
One look from French actress Isabelle Huppert can speak volumes, writes Sandra Hall.
The story of how Isabelle Huppert scored a starring role in Michael Cimino's epic western, Heaven's Gate, has become a celebrated episode in Hollywood corporate history.
Cimino's backer, United Artists, was vehemently opposed to casting her. As he confesses in his book Final Cut, Steven Bach, one of the studio's senior executives, thought she had a face like a potato. But Cimino, true to form, stood firm and Bach and a few of his colleagues duly flew to Paris to take another look at the actress he wanted so much.
At this meeting, Bach changed his mind. She didn't look like a potato, after all - more like a freckled 13-year-old. But as the evening wore on and more drinks were consumed, he began to concede that she did have charm. Two days later, Cimino was grudgingly given the OK to tell her she had the part.
The next time Bach really looked at her she was on the screen and there, to his amazement, he found her incandescent … she glowed in lamplight and had a sweetly seductive quality that had been entirely absent in Paris.
The phrase the camera loves her is one of those cliches that is supposed to defy analysis, but in Huppert's case it's worth a try, for her long and ardent relationship with the lens is one where there has never been any doubt as to who's in control. Great screen actors know exactly what their faces can and can't do. They have scrutinised them from every angle and are precisely aware of the radical alterations to be effected with lighting and make-up. It's an art in itself and Huppert has perfected it to the point where she can infuse a single frown or a smile with the impact of a small emotional earthquake.
She is 54 now and it's often said that she's barely aged during her 35-year screen career, but if you look back at the stills of her made up and costumed for the remarkable range of roles she's had during those years, you see a woman who's transformed herself a hundred times over.
The puppy fat that worried Bach so much nearly 28 years ago has vanished and the delicate jawline and cheekbones have made her eyes seem larger and her mouth more shapely. It's a strong, pale, symmetrical face, which Huppert uses like a canvas, adding colour when she needs it, subtracting it when she doesn't. The freckles are gone in one film only to reappear in the next. Even her eyes change colour, shifting from grey-green to chestnut, according to the light. Above all, it's a face that is at its most eloquent when its owner is saying absolutely nothing.
It's this affinity with silence that has helped turn Huppert into French cinema's most adaptable enigma. The rest has been down to her willingness to do just about anything on screen if she feels she can trust the director in question not to make a fool of her. "Acting is a way of living out one's insanity," she says - a pithily appropriate quote that is being used to promote the Huppert retrospective opening this week at Sydney's Chauvel Cinema. And the thing is, she really means it.
She first made her name internationally in The Lacemaker, by the Swiss director Claude Goretta, as an introverted young hairdressing apprentice crushed by a doomed love affair with a boy who fancies himself an intellectual. Since then, she has made a study of discontent in its most extreme guises. And it's led to her becoming one of the world's busiest actresses. In the US, she never really caught on - although one or two adventurous talents have shared Cimino's admiration for her. Hal Hartley wrote Amateur for her and David O. Russell came up with a gloriously idiosyncratic role for her in his comedy, I Love Huckabees. She also made it to Australia in 1986 to star in Paul Cox's Cactus.
But Europe has been her base. Maurice Pialat, Diane Kurys and Olivier Dahan (La Vie en Rose) have all sought her, as have Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol, with whom she's made six films. I suppose this entitles her to be called his muse. Certainly he's given her every opportunity to exercise her famous froideur since their collaboration has produced some particularly cool customers, three of them homicidal. But the frosty Austrian subversive Michael Haneke is the one who has tapped most deeply into her capacity to unnerve an audience by casting her in The Piano Teacher as a sexually repressed professor of music driven to acts of self-mutilation. Not surprisingly, Huppert carried out these excruciating procedures with the detachment another woman might bring to the job of shaving her legs. It's a performance of cat-like composure - so much so, that there's a genuine sense of shock when, at the film's end, she crumples into despair.
In some of her films, she has drifted into self-parody. All I can remember of her role as a prostitute in Godard's Sauve qui peut (la vie) is the group sex scene which she approaches as clinically as if it were an unusually knotty game of Twister. Then again, she could have been sending herself up. With Huppert, it's always possible. In an industry where an actress can be saluted for being brave if she dares to look her age, her lack of vanity is a miracle in itself.
Best of all is her refusal to sentimentalise her characters.
She tries for empathy, she says, not sympathy. It's their contradictions which interest her - the tantalising fact that good and evil can coexist in the same body.
The Isabelle Huppert Retrospective is at the Chauvel Cinema, Paddington, from Thursday to July 18. For details go to http://www.chauvelcinema.net.au.
