Report: Isabelle Huppert in Conversation

Last night I was lucky enough to be at the National Film Theatre to see Isabelle Huppert give a career interview and receive the BFI Fellowship. As you may know, Huppert is one of my great heroes, I consider her if not the finest actress alive one of the top two, and my admiration for her is prompted to grow every time a new film of hers comes out (which, happily, tends to be frequently, as she's a workaholic).

Huppert; small, but not delicate, appeared in a stylish dark suit with red stripes, with minimal make up and, contrary to her reputation as difficult interview subject, seemed open and ready to discuss her 40 year career.

Despite being a big fan I've done little real research about Isabelle Huppert (perhaps to preserve the illusion when she's on screen), and so it was a surprise to get some insight into her process, or rather her lack of one. A recurring theme of the evening was the ease with which she approaches acting; she does no real research (even for, say, A Story of Women, in which she was playing a character inspired by a real woman) or reading around her subject, relying instead on herself to conjure the character, seemingly from within. Frequently she repeated 'acting is imagination' and that she sees film, even that closely inspired by real life, as fantasy.

This laid back nature seems to carry through into her choices and on set habits. She spoke of getting a feeling about the many first time directors she has worked with (and that the director is always the most important aspect in getting her to sign up for a film). She noted that she has no preference about how a director works 'that's his problem', and that she's only really been taken aback by someone's methods once; she described how, on La Truite, Joseph Losey would almost always do only one take, even for complex tracking shots, and recalled asking him what would happen if there were a technical problem 'are we going to come back to Japan?'

She spoke only briefly about Claude Chabrol, and the emotion of his relatively recent death still seemed quite raw. She offered the tantalising morsel (never picked up, sadly) that she had been about to work with him again, and described her relationship with him as that of a Father and Daughter, and suggested that they each understood, at a cinematic level, the other's tastes and needs. There was more detail, and a couple of stories, about Michael Haneke. She told a funny story about calling him from a phone booth in Scotland ('My kingdom', she called it, as she had been doing Mary Stuart at the National around the time of this holiday) to turn him down for Funny Games, and later detailed how, anxious to work with him after years of not working together, she only read the screenplay for The Piano Teacher closely on the plane the day before starting work, and was shocked at what she'd agreed to do.

Haneke also came up in discussion when what is 'real' in film was discussed. Huppert said that film is realistic, rather than real (a distinction I've been talking about for years, incidentally), and used an example from The Piano Teacher of Haneke (who, she noted, often does a lot of takes) making her drag Annie Girardot by the hair over and over again, because it didn't yet feel real on film, and that she only really saw what he meant on seeing, rather than playing, the scene. Another topic that came up in terms of realism was Huppert's gift for silence on screen. She was, perhaps, a little dismissive of this skill that she has, the ability to listen, and tell us something by listening, on screen. She put it down to the director, to the editor, and to cinema itself, which, she said, 'makes silence audible'. This was another recurring theme; any suggestion of technique or skill seemed to get slapped down, often with slight bafflement, with the notion that it's all a combination of her imagination and the technique of film.

As Huppert seemed to become more playful as the interview went on it is perhaps hard to say how sincere what seemed to be an exclusive revelation may have been, but here it is anyway... She said that she had, that day, thought of directing a film for the very first time, that she had read a story in the newspaper on the Eurostar and thought that there was a great role to play, and then thought 'I should direct'. I hope this turns out to be true, and to happen.

Perhaps the biggest running theme of the evening, and something that came through in every answer, whether or not it was explicitly spoken, was Huppert's love of her work; she seems still to find it exciting, and spoke of every film as doing it again for the first time, self-deprecatingly noting that she doesn't feel she has learned anything in her career, and that, to me, seems to be at the heart of her daring as an actress.

The audience Q and A was a typically mixed bag, the best question came towards the end when someone asked which directors Huppert might have liked to work with, she said Hitchcock, sharing, I'm sure, a desire with the audience, and also noted that she had never worked with a British director, which must have had budding filmmakers in the audience champing at the bit. I got the mic for the last question, but sadly she went into that story about not reading The Piano Teacher, and I never got to ask about the experience of making Heaven's Gate and what she now makes of the film, because we had run out of time. Still, though that, and the fact that I wasn't able to meet her, was a shame, it was a fascinating interview with one of the great talents in cinema, and it was an absolute pleasure just to listen to her.

The Greatest? Part 4: Huppert Double

Two heavily contrasting films today, one an uncharacteristic foray into comedy, the other one of the most famous tragedies in literature.

I ♥ HUCKABEES
DIR: David O Russell
CAST: Jason Schwartzman, Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin,
Mark Wahlberg, Naomi Watts, Isabelle Huppert, Jude Law



I ♥ HUCKABEES is one of the strangest films of recent years. It's described as an existential comedy, but to me it seems more like an absurdist art exercise, and frankly I'm not entirely sure whether I like that or not.

The story is an odd proposition, in that I've seen the film three times now and I'm not certain to what degree it has a story. It basically revolves around Albert Markovsky (Schwartzman), who is having an existential crisis brought on by a coincidence involving a tall African man. Wanting to discover the meaning of this coincidence, and perhaps by extension his life, Albert enlists existential detectives Bernard (Hoffman) and Vivian (Tomlin). They pair Albert up with another client, Tommy (Wahlberg) who introduces Albert to French philosopher Catherine Vauban (Huppert), whose insistence that life is a collection of disconnected, meaningless cruelties stands in direct opposition to Bernard's blanket theory.

That's an awful lot to process in 90 minutes, and that's not even half of the movie, because we haven't covered Huckabees middle manager Brad Stand (Law), his model girlfriend (Watts), who rebels against her looks and begins dressing in a bonnet or how Shania Twain fits in to this whole mess. A mess is what I ♥ HUCKABEES is, for much of the running time it feels more like Catherine Vauban's vision of the world; a bunch of meaningless scenes and moments, thrown together and struggling to find form and purpose.

It's a scattershot film, and the rumoured chaos and bad feeling of the set seems to bleed through into the film at times, but among the confused (and, frankly, dime store) philosphy there are images and moments that stick. Some of these moments stay in the memory due to their sheer balls out wierdness, none more so than the disturbing, but undeniably funny image of Schwartzman suckling at Law's breasts (I'm not even going to attempt to explain it, so don't ask). The fact that the film doesn't entirely come together isn't the fault of its starry cast. Schwartzman has a weak role, and an unsypathetic one, at the end of the day his Albert Markovsky comes off as a whiner who never grew up, that said, the film and Schwartzman are aware of this, and it's mined for laughs in several of the film's best scenes including a lovely one in which Catherine Vauban all but breaks in to Albert's parents' house and proceeds to scold them for the way they responded when a nine year old Albert was upset when his cat died. I never really warmed to Albert, but it's a testament to Schwartzman's likability that I didn't want to punch him either.

Among the rest of the cast Hoffman and Tomlin, who had long wanted to work together, seem to be having a lot of fun, and Jude Law is appropriately slimy, but the biggest impressions are made by Mark Wahlberg, who is very funny as Tommy, a firefighter whose existential crisis began on September 11th and by Naomi Watts, who seems to enjoy sending up her dazzling beauty.

Isabelle Huppert is an interesting case here, she's perhaps still too limted in her English to be as effective as she is in French, but she nevertheless almost steals the film as Catherine Vauban. Part of it is the casting; she's known (wrongly, I'd say) as an impassive and cold presence, and here she seems to parody that stereotype. Of all the cast she's the one who never winks at the camera, who never lets on that what's going on is supposed to be absurd and funny, and that seriousness makes her even funnier. She's also, at 50, tremendously sexy. Catherine uses sex as part of her method to teach Tommy and Albert (mostly Tommy) about life's random cruelties. The first sex scene is especially strange, as Huppert and Schwartzman take turns dunking each other in a puddle of mud. In interviews at the time a typically nonchalant Huppert remenisced that, when he was a baby, she'd held Jason Schwartzman in her arms (she's friends with his mother, Talia Shire), and now she was doing it again.

At the end of the day I'm not sure how I feel about I ♥ HUCKABEES. It's a bizzare film, but for all its pretensions to philosophical ideas its conclusions seem obvious and half hearted and for all its discussion of meaning I'm not sure that, at the end of the day, it really has one. As a collection of scenes it is strange enough to engage and amuse, at least for the most part, but many scenes fall flat (especially those laying out the film's various competeting philosophies, which often feel like readings from C grade Philosophy 101 papers) and though the odd image and the odd scene stick, the whole feels ephemeral. Of course that may be David O Russell's point, but I'm not sure even he knows whether that's the case.


MADAME BOVARY
DIR: Claude Chabrol
CAST: Isabelle Huppert, Jean-François Balmer, Christophe Malavoy,
Jean Yanne, Lucas Belvaux



Chabrol's apparently reverent adaptation of Flaubert's classic novel is a strange beast. I must admit that I haven't read the book, and so some of the tonal issues may come directly from the source, but whether or not that is the case, this film is still a wierdly mixed bag.

By 1991 Claude Chabrol was in his early 60's, and had made roughly 45 feature films, in short he was one of cinema's great craftsmen, having long since established a regular crew and a comfortable way of working. It is, then, odd to see how cowed, how intimidated he sometimes seems by the burden of MADAME BOVARY. I really can't think of any other reason that a great director like Chabrol, who could do so much with silent images (see, especially, LE BOUCHER) would have reams of dry narration, seemingly lifted directly from Flaubert, describing characters emotional states which, given his talented cast, it would be easier and more satisfying to portray.

Frustratingly there are times when Chabrol's grasp on his film seems as strong and sure as ever. Especially strong is the scene in which a newly married Emma Bovary (Huppert) spends a blissful night at her first society ball. Here Chabrol steps back; he lets the scene play largely through the actors' body language be it Huppert's fleeting, but real, happiness or Jean-François Balmer's proud regard of his beautiful wife, blissfully unaware that she'd happily cuckold him with any one of the men at this party. The sense of period is also strong, Chabrol brings home the squalor that many poor people lived in during the mid 19th century just as well as he portrays the beautifully put together exclusivity of high society, in capturing these two contrasting worlds so well, Chabrol also lets us understand Emma Bovary. She's irresponsible with her husband's limited fortune, but you can see why she wants to put herself across as belonging to a higher social class, because it means more than just status.

All this good work makes the moments that don't play even more disappointing. The dry narration is a problem, but not so much so as the many incredibly overwrought, melodramatic scenes. These have to be Charol's fault, and the cast, notably Huppert, seem visibly uncomfortable. The scenes Huppert shares with Emma's various lovers can be excruciatingly hammy. Melodrama's not a bad thing in and of itself, but it's just not how Huppert acts, and it shows. Her death scene is perhaps the worst work I've ever seen her do, endlessly long and scenery chewing; a performance more suited to amateur theatre.

The reason I think that's Chabrol's fault is simple. First of all, there's little need for these scenes to be so overwrought and, secondly, in the other scenes Huppert is simply sensational. Emma Bovary strikes me as a character who is all but incapable of happiness, and wants to fill her life with things, be they pretty dresses or pretty lovers, to distract her from her misery. As this Emma Bovary, Huppert is perfectly cast. At 35 she's also at the height of her very individual beauty, and convinces on a physical level as the ultimate trophy wife. She's hugely effective when Emma has to hold her emotions in check (as when she meets Leon (Belvaux) at the opera, but is accompanied by her husband), this has always been a great strength of Huppert's,; the ability to let you see the many different emotions that are going on under that practiced, put together, exterior.

The rest of the cast suffer similar fates, all of them are outstanding when the film is more dialled back (particularly Jean Yanne as the pharmacist M. Homais), but when Chabrol cranks the melodrama up to 11, they all struggle.

MADAME BOVARY is a difficult and frustrating film, some of it is brilliant, and some of it is spectacularly over the top. It works perhaps seventy percent of the time, and is still well worth a look for those moments, but the melodrama does become wearing, and I found myself wishing that Chabrol could have had a little more confidence in himself here, and been a little less wedded to the book, however brilliant it may be.

The Greatest? Part 3: Leigh – The Big Picture / Huppert – A Story of Women

The next selections in this series find Jennifer Jason Leigh and Isabelle Huppert working in almost opposite circumstances; UNE AFFAIRE DE FEMMES sees Huppert in an acclaimed period piece, with Claude Chabrol, a favourite director with whom she has worked regularly since 1978’s VIOLETTE) at the helm. On the other hand THE BIG PICTURE finds Jennifer Jason Leigh in a small role in an atypical film from director Christopher Guest and working in broad comedy, which really can’t be described as her comfort zone.

THE BIG PICTURE [1989]
DIR: Christopher Guest
CAST: Kevin Bacon, Emily Longstreth, Michael McKean,
J.T. Walsh, Teri Hatcher, Jennifer Jason Leigh


If there is one thing that is evident from THE BIG PICTURE it is that Christopher Guest thrives as a filmmaker when his work is largely improvised. This film, unlike the subsequent BEST IN SHOW and A MIGHTY WIND, feels very closely scripted and thanks to that it also feels very stiff, bereft of the dazzling comic energy of THIS IS SPINAL TAP and Guest’s other directorial work.

There are several big problems with THE BIG PICTURE, but the most pressing, obviously, is that it’s just not very funny. It’s hard to put your finger on the problem, but to me it felt like the film was just too on the nose, the jokes far too obvious. It’s the story of Nick Chapman (Bacon) who wins an award for his student film and finds himself courted by producer JT Walsh, who sets about allowing Nick to make his dream project… with just a few changes. The head slapping obviousness reaches its zenith in a late scene in which Walsh, whose ‘creativity’ has ended up taking Nick’s black and white film about a love triangle between three middle-aged people and turning it into a pitch called Beachnuts, is in a set that’s clearly supposed to be Hell; the studio head as Satan. It’s not just that though, everything feels rote and lazy, from the opening spoof student films and their makers (one, a conceptual artist, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh) to the sub-plot in which a starlet (Hatcher) attempts to seduce the hot young director, right up to the so predictable that you’ve already guessed it closing shot.

The story clanks through the expected moments. Nick gets a whiff of success then cheats on his girlfriend (the lovely Emily Longstreth), leases a Porsche, begins ignoring his best friend and cinematographer (McKean). Then his deal evaporates, which leads to the hugely unconvincing last half hour, in which Nick reforms, and gets another shot thanks to a homemade music video for a band called Pez People. If anything in this movie should have been a home run it’s this, but the song isn’t funny, the video (despite Leigh’s energetic oddness as a dancer) is terrible, and also not funny. This, as much as the awfulness of Nick’s student film, seriously undermines the whole plot of the film. Ultimately it’s marooned in a wilderness between being believable enough for us to be interested in Nick and his journey and crazy enough to work as comedy.

The cast don’t help very much. Kevin Bacon is uncharacteristically bland as Chapman, Martin Short is at his nigh insufferable worst as Nick’s sycophantic agent (a joke that runs far too long to work in the same way that Spinal Tap’s Artie Fufkin did) and Michael McKean seems as ill at ease as Guest with the heavily written dialogue. On the plus side, Emily Longstreth (who, sadly, hasn’t made a film since 1994) is charming as Bacon’s girlfriend, and she’s fun in a sequence in which Bacon fantasises her as a film noir femme fatale and JT Walsh, despite the fact that all of his character’s actions are the most obvious pieces of ‘satire’ you can imagine, is great value as the slimy producer.

If this weren’t part of a series on Jennifer Jason Leigh her participation in THE BIG PICTURE would hardly rate a mention. She’s on screen for perhaps five minutes in total, and has very little to do. That said, she’s clearly having a good time and even with very little to work with she manages to give Lydia a real identity, and a very particular nervous energy; she moves like she’s being repeatedly electrocuted. It’s not much, I’d really like to see what she could do in one of Guest’s improvised films, but here she’s one of the better and funnier things in what is a disappointing film.


UNE AFFAIRE DE FEMMES
DIR: Claude Chabrol
CAST: Isabelle Huppert, Francois Cluzet, Marie Trintignant


The English language title for this film, A STORY OF WOMEN, may fit it to a certain degree, but what it doesn’t capture is the implication in the original title (explicitly stated in the film) that what its central character, Marie Latour (Huppert) does is essentially a woman’s affair, women’s business.

The film is set in the midst of the second world war, with France occupied and ruled by the Vichy government. As the film begins we find Marie and her two young children living in poverty, but an opportunity comes when Marie’s neighbour asks for help aborting her pregnancy. When the neighbour pays by giving Marie a record player she seems to see the opportunity, and to become determined that she, her children and her wounded husband will begin living better, war or no war. She begins offering further abortions, and letting a room in her house to Lulu (Trintignant), a friend, and one of the local prostitutes. Marie Latour is based on Marie Louise Giraud, who was one of the last women in France to be executed by guillotine.

Though its title is plural A STORY OF WOMEN is overwhelmingly the story of this one woman, of her attempt to keep her family (or at least her children, she shuns her returning husband) in some comfort and, equally, of her intoxication at being able to live well when so many weren’t. Marie isn’t a sympathetic character, Huppert plays her as opportunistic, an emotionally neglectful wife and mother, and not a little manipulative, but while it’s hard to feel for her you do understand her. You see the desperate poverty of the opening (in which she’s raggedly dressed and she and her children pick nettles for a very thin soup) and you can understand why, when she gets a little glimpse of what material goods and money can do, especially in the times she’s living, she becomes somewhat drunk on it, and pursues it greedily.

It’s a challenging balancing act for Huppert (whose performance won her the Best Actress prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1988, and a Cesar nomination). She’s spectacular, she never courts sympathy for Marie and, as ever, she’s extremely effective when her character is at her coldest. She’s especially strong in a scene that draws a contrast between the two sides of her life; coldly and dispassionately handing a client over to her ‘trained assistant’ (actually her housekeeper) before becoming sunny and lively on joining her lover (Nils Tavernier) in the next room. Good as she is throughout, it is in the film’s last half hour that Huppert is truly extraordinary. Once Marie is arrested all her facades slip away, both the coldness with her clients and her husband and the freewheeling, flighty woman we see with her lover and with Lulu are gone. Huppert seems tiny in these late scenes, as if the simple act of stripping her of her makeup and hairdressing has shrunk her. She’s also more delicate than ever, this once hard woman, now seemingly made of porcelain. The sheer emotion that Huppert puts across in the scenes in prison and leading up to Marie’s execution will really stick with you, none more so, surely, than her final prayer; crying, she says “Hail Mary, full of shit”. It’s a moment that resonates long after the credits, as does the performance itself.

This is a slightly atypical effort from Claude Chabrol. It lacks the stylisation that marks much of his work, and though his clear fascination with women (and Huppert in particular) persists, few of his other trademarks make it into this film. However, it’s a lean work, with every scene cut right to the bone (many are played with just a couple of images or a handful of sentences) and an expectation that we are intelligent enough to fill in what isn’t explicitly stated. The great advantage of Chabrol’s choices here, which are much more observational than usual, is that he really lets us in to Marie Latour’s world. The period detail isn’t played up, but it’s convincing, and along with Huppert’s and the rest of the cast’s naturalistic performances (Francois Cluzet is especially good as Marie’s frustrated husband) he allows us to forget that we’re watching a film and instead become invested in this woman’s journey to its bitter end. He does put in a little explicit social commentary, having Marie ask of her ‘crime’ “How could a man understand?” and dedicating the film to the children of the condemned (in a very odd late touch, that completely fails to work, he adds narration from Marie’s son, looking back as an adult at his Mother’s arrest and execution). But these are small things, and only the narration detracts (and then very briefly) from what is, overall, one of Chabrol’s and Huppert’s best efforts. This is a sadly underseen film, and well worth looking out.

The Greatest? Part 1: Huppert – Introduction / The Bedroom Window

Why Isabelle Huppert? Of all the many hundreds of actresses out there, what makes her one of my two finalists when deciding who the greatest working actress is? Well, here are a few examples of the first thing that comes to mind…


In cinema, beauty is commonplace, even expected, especially in women. Even if you don’t think Isabelle Huppert is beautiful (for the record, I certainly do, in fact I’d suggest hers is among the most beautiful faces ever to appear on the big screen) one thing you can’t deny is that her face is fascinating. It is fascinating because it shouldn’t work, but the mass of freckles, the angular structure, the slight bump in the nose, the small, slightly tired eyes and the downturned mouth somehow come together to form a face that is at once completely distinctive and striking, and yet plausibly ordinary, able to fit itself to almost any part be it the rural postmistress of LA CEREMONIE, a hooker in LOULOU or an uptight pianist with secret desires in THE PIANO TEACHER.

Her face is also one of the most expressive things in cinema. Actors often speak of training as honing their instrument (a little pretentious, granted, but go with it for a moment). Huppert’s face is her instrument, and like any virtuoso player she can get almost any register from it. She can open up and let us in, she can be completely walled off, she can gives us a glimpse of what’s going on under that façade, and yet plausibly hide it from the people sharing the screen with her or she can explode with emotion, even if the moment is totally silent.

It is certain, proven beyond doubt by a career that spans almost 40 years of theatre and film, that Isabelle Huppert has been and is a great actress, but the greatest contemporary actress? Over the next month I’ll be looking at at least ten films, some I’ve seen before, some for the first time to try and answer that question, and I’m starting in an unlikely place; Curtis Hanson’s 1987 neo-noir THE BEDROOM WINDOW, which finds Huppert working in English, opposite an unexpected co-star… Steve Guttenberg. Yes. Mahoney. Really.


THE BEDROOM WINDOW [1987]
DIR: Curtis Hanson
CAST: Steve Guttenberg, Isabelle Huppert, Elizabeth McGovern


Looking at THE BEDROOM WINDOW as part of Isabelle Huppert’s career is perhaps the most interesting way to see this rather non-descript movie that is otherwise just one more not especially good generic 80’s thriller. The basic plot has Huppert’s character witness an assault while staying with her lover (Guttenberg, hilariously miscast), in order to keep their relationship secret from her husband (his boss) they report the incident to the police, after discovering that it may be connected to a murder, but say that Guttenberg was the witness. When the deception becomes obvious in court Guttenberg finds himself the prime suspect for two murders.

THE BEDROOM WINDOW is an interesting example of just how badly an actor, even one as good as Isabelle Huppert, can be hobbled by circumstance. She’s great casting as the femme fatale, but she’s hamstrung by Curtis Hanson’s very stagy dialogue, by her own still slightly broken English and by the lumpen performance given by Steve Guttenberg (smirk still firmly in place between POLICE ACADEMY movies), which gives her little to play off. Credit to Huppert though, because as the movie runs on, she’s the one aspect that gets better. She gets more and more comfortable in her character’s skin as she becomes harder and colder, and by the hour mark she’s giving a performance a good deal better than the film deserves.

Unfortunately the rest of the film fails to engage. Guttenberg is flat out awful; he looks baffled much of the time (even when he’s not supposed to), clearly completely out of his depth here and imbues his performance with all the charisma of an end table. Elizabeth McGovern, as the assault victim, is better, and probably the most consistent performer here, but her efforts are also undone by the fact that the plot ends up reducing her character to bait in a very flat ending.

Hanson’s direction is uninspired at best and the uneven, often bored seeming, performances suggest a very loose grip on his cast. The visuals aren’t a great deal better; pedestrian outside the early sequence in which Huppert witnesses the key assault and one or two shots that nod rather explicitly to Hitchcock. THE BEDROOM WIMDOW isn’t a good film, but it is an interesting one as an Isabelle Huppert fan, it’s really the only true genre film she’s made, and suggests that she’s ill at ease when boxed in by such conventions.

September: The Greatest?

Martial Arts Month is winding down, and despite getting sidetracked when I was under the weather, it's been fun and I think we've covered a lot of interesting films (and there are a few more to come, including SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD and a couple of Sammo Hung films). I'm going to attempt to run a special series every month, so here's September's



In September I'm going to try to answer, for myself, the question of who is the greatest working actress. Now I can't spend the whole month going through contenders, I'd never watch enough films for it to be a fair choice. But that's not really a problem. To me it is pretty clear that there are only two real contenders.

From France there is Isabelle Huppert. She's 57 years old, and next year marks her 40th anniversary as an actress. She first came to notice in the mid 1970's, and though she's not especially famous otside of France she's generally regarded as one of the world's finest actresses, and works constantly on film and on stage.

From America there is Jennifer Jason Leigh. A decade younger at 48, she's currently in her 30th year as an actress, and first gained acclaim at 19 as an anorexic teenager in TV Movie THE BEST LITTLE GIRL IN THE WORLD. She's an acclaimed actress, hugely respected in the industry and famous for her incredibly detailed research for roles.

It's interesting to me that Huppert and Leigh have a lot in common. Both shun the limelight, giving only rare and often reluctant interviews, and both are extremely reticent to talk about themselves or their private lives (Huppert won't even confirm whether she is married, or her exact date of birth). Both, too, are breathlessly acclaimed by critics and peers alike, and neither has ever even been nominated for an Oscar.

So, I'm going to look at ten films featuring Isabelle Huppert and another ten with Jennifer Jason Leigh (it's a crying shame they've never worked together, but I guess I can dream). That will make twenty new reviews, and hopefully by the end of the month I'll have a better idea of just who really is the greatest actress working today. I'm going to enjoy September. I hope you will too.

Two to watch

The excellent indiemoviesonline posts a huge variety of movies that you can watch for free, in full, and completely legally on their website. Unlike most free movie sites we're not just talking about old out of copyright films, and they've just posted two really interesting recent movies.

There's Home (reviewed here) with Isabelle Huppert as a mother whose unwillingness to move house, even when a motorway is built right next to the home she shares with her family, becomes ever more extreme. Huppert is, as ever, spectacular and the film is unusual and compelling.

I haven't seen the other film myself, but thanks to the presence of Deborah Francois (of The Page Turner, among others) Unmade Beds has been on my radar for some time. It's got a young international cast, all of whom apparently end up living in an artist's squat in London.

I'll be chaecking out Unmade Beds, I suggest you have a look at both these films, as well as the rest of the indiemoviesonline selection.

My favourite critic on a great actor

I've been meaning to write an article celebrating the greatness of Isabelle Huppert, but this short video blog entry from Mark Kermode may have rendered that particular exercise pointless. Give it a watch, then go and rent some Isabelle Huppert movies.

Review Post 39: Adam / Home

ADAM
DIR: Max Mayer
CAST: Hugh Dancy, Rose Byrne, Peter Gallagher,
Frankie Faison, Amy Irving



There are no new stories.  There are only new approaches to old ones, and most of the time even that seems out of reach. Adam, however, does manage to give a fresh lick of paint to what, at first glance, seems likely to be a hopelessly cliché romantic-comedy.

Adam (Dancy) is 29, and now that his father has died he’s living alone for the first time, a big challenge because Adam has Aspergers syndrome.  Aspergers is a form of autism which means that Adam doesn’t understand emotion and can’t tell what people are thinking.  One day a pretty young woman named Beth (Byrne) moves into his building, she’s attracted to Adam, even after he reveals that he has Aspergers and the two begin a relationship.  That relationship is complicated both by Adam’s condition and by the fact that Beth’s father (Gallagher) is embroiled in a court case that could send him to prison.

Adam is a rare film.  So much current genre cinema is lazy to a degree that is almost crass (The Proposal, for example).  Most of time it is just a collection of stock characters working their way through motions we’ve seen hundreds of times previously with little romance and equally little comedy.  Adam isn’t like that.  Max Mayer may unashamedly be making a genre film (and one that has several extremely unoriginal touches at that) but he does seem to care. Certainly he cares enough to make his characters people rather than just types.

It would have been easy to make Adam himself a completely one-note character, to have his illness define him.  What works really well for the script is the fact Adam has layers, it’s not so much the illness that is interesting as it is his awareness of it and his striving against it.  Beth is also well drawn; warm and supportive but never weak and simpering. Both are quirky, but not in a way that comes off as unreal or out of character.  These sensitively drawn characters are given life by two excellent performances from two lesser-known actors.

Hugh Dancy is wonderful as Adam, really getting under the skin of someone with Aspergers.  He capably portrays someone who doesn’t understand emotion he is still able to let us see what Adam does feel, even when the character doesn’t understand what he is feeling or why.  It’s a finely balanced and beautifully nuanced piece of acting in a role in which it would have been easy to simply be blank.  Rose Byrne’s Beth is as charming as she is beautiful.  Byrne also has to let a lot play under the surface, as Beth constantly has to hold her emotions in whether for the benefit of Adam or that of her mother (Irving) and father.  It’s a much less showy part, and all the harder for that, and Byrne never fails to strike the exact right note.  It’s also worth mentioning that Dancy is British and Byrne Australian, but both show off completely natural American accents.

When the focus shifts from this burgeoning relationship Adam impresses less.  This is especially true of the storyline featuring Peter Gallagher, which is an almost beat for beat lift from Say Anything.  It’s never a good idea to emulate classics; you’ll always come off second best, and such is very much the case with this unnecessary subplot.  The only other major stumble is the way that (as all rom-coms must) the film breaks the couple up at the end of act two.  This obligatory scene seldom fails to ring false, and in that regard Adam is no exception. That aside though, this is a film remarkably resistant to cliché, and all the better for it.

Adam is a sweet, funny and touching film, with characters you can relate to and fall just a little in love with.  It will make a fine date movie, and comes highly recommended.


HOME
DIR: Ursula Meir
CAST: Isabelle Huppert, Olivier Gourmet, Madeleine Budd,
Kacey Mottet Klein, Adélaïde Leroux



I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again: Isabelle Huppert is among the best actresses ever to grace a cinema screen, and it is tragic that she’s not better known outside France.

Home is a small, low key film, perhaps best described as a road movie that goes nowhere.  It has just five characters, and centres on a single location. A family - mother (Huppert), father (Gourmet) two teenage daughters (Leroux, Budd) and an eight-year-old son (Klein) - have spent ten years living at the side of an incomplete motorway.  Their lives are disrupted when, suddenly, the road is finished and opened to traffic.

That’s it, and that’s not much to hang 98 minutes on.  The story, such as it is, is hardly the most eventful but the film remains engaging because the five central performances are all outstanding.  Isabelle Huppert is a low-key actress, and in that respect Home suits her perfectly.  She doesn’t, on the face of it, have a lot to do here as a normal housewife and mother, but what’s impressive is how little she has to do to convince us of her role as matriarch.  There’s no sense of acting in Huppert’s work, if it weren’t for the fact that she looked so much like Isabelle Huppert it would be easy to believe that this is simply a middle aged woman whose work is as a stay at home parent.  Even as we learn more about Marthe, and that she may be less stable than she seems, Huppert still keeps everything small, subtle and completely real.  It’s a masterclass in being real on screen.

That’s not to say that the rest of the cast fail to match Huppert, indeed this is a true ensemble piece, because we have to believe in the dynamics of this slightly fractious family.  That ends up being one of the strongest suits of Home.  Ursula Meir has managed to find some remarkable young actors to play the children, none of them with much experience.  The dynamic between the three kids is utterly convincing, the way they shout over each other, fight, but ultimately seem to love one another is much more redolent of what family life actually feels like than what you usually see in movies.  There is also a strong chemistry between Huppert and Olivier Gourmet; the sort of affection between them that speaks of two people who have been together and in love for a very long time.  The way that the actors all gel holds what could easily have been a rather dull film together.

A lot of audiences won’t like Home, because they won’t be able to get past its uneventful nature.  Those people will miss out, because there is much to enjoy in the performances and in the beautiful imagery put together by Meir and DP Agnes Godard.  It’s surprising how attractive the film looks, given that it is set entirely on the verge next to a motorway.  It begins to lose steam in the last twenty minutes, when the tone changes quite sharply, but otherwise Home is a low key treat, if you’ve the patience for it.