Saturday, May 30, 2009

A life in writing / Marilynne Robinson

'I'm dependent on the emergence of a voice. I can't make them'
Poster by T.A.
A life in writing: Marilynne Robinson
The Orange prize favourite explains why 'the small drama of conversation' is more interesting to her than adventures writers 'have read about in a brochure'
Interview by Emma Brockes
Saturday 30 May 2009 00.01 BST



T
he small town of Gilead, in which two of Marilynne Robinson's three novels are set, is "a dogged little outpost" in Iowa, where her characters live modestly and scorn themselves for staying put. They don't go anywhere, do anything, see anyone besides their neighbours, and the town itself doesn't change - an odd choice of set-up for a novelist, but one that permits her to make a suggestion: that it is people in their kitchens, devastating each other softly and for the most part without intent, that constitutes life at its most indivisible.

Robinson's sporadic output - three novels and two books of non-fiction in 28 years, with a 24-year gap between the first and second novels - is assumed to be a function of ambition, of her painstaking attempt to tell stories through thought and not action. But it's not that at all, she says. When she opens her door in Iowa City, a leafy college town where she teaches creative writing, the 65-year-old doesn't look agonised, or reclusive, or - an expectation raised by her enthusiasm for 18th-century theology and books with the word "Trinitarianism" in the title - in the Joyce Carol Oates school of brittle academics. She is robust, with a steady, amused gaze propped up on high cheekbones and a poodle fussing around her called Otis, so named, she says, because it didn't "seem very poodleish".
If Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping, published in 1980, hadn't been such a huge hit, her reticence would be unremarkable. In light of it, her follow-ups seemed wilfully eccentric: a book about the British nuclear industry, researched while teaching for a year at the University of Kent, and, finally, a second novel, Gilead, told from the point of view of an ailing 76-year-old pastor, considering his mortal and spiritual life. The Reverend Ames is a perversely unmarketable hero - creaking, insular, tormented with unwanted salads left on his porch by the faithful - but Robinson wasn't consciously defying anything in her choice of subject, she says; it was a matter, rather, of not having the "concentration" to behave otherwise. She follows her will. When she writes, she writes quickly, but everything she tried after Housekeeping sounded too similar to interest her. "It might seem a strange thing for me to say, having written Home. But it has to have a central originality in my mind. I'm dependent on the emergence of a voice. I can't make them, they have to come to me. There's no point in my worrying about it."
Home, her third novel, revisits some of the peripheral characters of Gilead. They are not sequential, but companion pieces held together by the friendship of the Reverend Ames and his neighbour, the Reverend Boughton. Structurally, Home is the more conventional novel, the story of Jack, the black sheep of the Boughton family, on his return to his childhood home some 20 years after leaving. His agonising efforts to appease his dying father and establish a relationship with his sister, Glory, are so finely grained, so trembling with a sense of life unlived, and without the neat, redemptive ending of the previous novel, that it is a much stronger and more radical piece.
Robinson's brilliance is in seeing the gaps between words as forcefully as the words themselves; all those rapid calculations as people test an exchange for hidden content, condescension, disingenuousness beyond polite necessity. So few are the external references that it's a while before you realise when the novels are set - in the mid-1950s - and larger themes slowly emerge: civil rights, women's rights, faith and its failure. Gilead won the Pulitzer prize and Home is the favourite for the Orange, announced on Wednesday. "She is one of the most intellectually ambitious novelists in English," says Sarah Churchwell, a lecturer in American literature at the University of East Anglia and one of the Orange judges. "She trusts her readers to be able to think, to appreciate language for its own sake; and while she is morally serious, she is never humourless."
Still, it takes nerve to circumscribe the action of a novel so drastically, and one imagines Robinson reading Gilead back and, with a sudden plunge, thinking what does this amount to? Doesn't she worry at the lack of explosions? She laughs. "There's something in my temperament . . . I have a problem with explosions in the sense that many very fine books are written about things that do, in fact, explode. But if the explosion is something that's supposed to make the novel interesting as opposed to being something that it's essentially about, I think it's very much to be avoided."
It was only after Robinson had finished her PhD that she became aware of "the essential shallowness" of her education. "I would try to write something," she says, "and I would think: I don't know if I really believe that. I don't know what this language means." Before she could even think of attempting fiction, she went on a "very long and intentional" programme of reading, around the Origin of Species, the Decline of the West and the history of political thought. Typically, after reading Das Kapital, she ploughed through Marx's entire bibliography, because she "wanted to see how well he used his sources. And people were just aghast that I would somehow seem to question his authority. It was very odd." Her eyebrows rise in mock incredulity.
She wrote Housekeeping assuming it was too odd to be published, a "liberating" experience. At the time, she was working on a dissertation on Shakespeare's early history plays and would break off to scribble random images on scraps of paper. "I was interested in writing extended metaphors. And so I kept writing these little things and just putting them in a drawer." Somehow, the metaphors proliferated behind her back so that, when she went back to them, they suggested a novel to her; of three generations of women in a town called Fingerbone, grief-stricken, at constant risk of flooding and the resurgence of things long forgotten. "I took out this stack of things and they cohered. I could see what they implied, I could see where the voice was."
Housekeeping is now regarded as a classic. The novel is so disciplined, so full of suppressed longing, that a woman's name whispered under a bridge in the final pages is such a seismic breach of the surface tension that it breaks the reader's heart. Unlike a lot of self-consciously lyrical novels, it forfeits nothing in terms of humour or suspense, although no one goes anywhere in Housekeeping, either. "It seems to me that the small drama of conversation and thought and reflection, that is so much more individual, so much less clichéd than - I mean when people set out on an adventure, I think 90 times out of 100, they've read about it in a brochure. That's not the part of life that interests me." The novel wasn't an instant hit. "It got very good reviews - protective reviews. But the first edition was 3,500 copies and it finely straggled into paperback - there was one bidder. It could have expired."
Through word of mouth Housekeeping grew in popularity and then, in 1987, it was made into a film, directed by Bill Forsyth, with which Robinson was pleased. The novel's origins remain mysterious; the metaphors-in-a-drawer explanation is a hard one to swallow. She won't be more specific. "If I know where an idea's from, I don't use it. It means it has a synthetic quality, rather than something organic to my thinking." The most she will say is that, since the book was written at night while her two young sons slept (she and their father subsequently divorced), she supposes motherhood had some influence. "It changes your sense of life, your sense of yourself." Was it hard to combine the two jobs? "No. I really enjoyed my kids. They were good boys, you know, and interesting. And they didn't wear me out."
Fingerbone was based on the town where she grew up in Idaho, where her father was in the timber business. For the first few years of Robinson's life they lived in the wilds, a vastness of landscape that she is sure "had a huge religious implication for me". Her parents were conventionally religious, no more, and must have been surprised by their daughter's interest in theology. She bursts out laughing. "I think an interest in theology surprises most people. But it was just like a fish to water. It has always been so natural to me."
Robinson made her first attempt at Moby-Dick at the age of nine - people mocked her for carting it around and she finished it to spite them - and then "read my way down the shelf in the library". She did her degree at Brown University and graduate studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. Making a good living wasn't something that concerned her. "I've never aspired in the way people are supposed to aspire. Which is really an enormous help, if you want to write." She still talks to her mother five days a week, for an hour at a time. "She's articulate. She's very funny. She's taller than me. She always had a certain aura - these women who for one reason or another identify with glamour as their native dialect or something."
Robinson says she can't live in a place without knowing "the narrative" behind it, which was a problem when she came to Iowa, as people would say "it has no history. And, you know, you just can't have two or three people gathered together without generating history. So I started reading everything I could find. These little colleges that were founded by abolitionists are often unaware of their origins - that they were integrated schools before the civil war."
This was the basis for Gilead; the historical liberalism of these maligned small towns in the middle west (she eschews the "midwest" shortening, with its snobby baggage) and the casually despised people who live there. It's a fault of language, she suggests, that we allow definitions to take hold - of what constitutes progress, success, happiness - and judge everyone and ourselves by them accordingly. When Robinson talks about relevance, it is in the religious sense that no one person is inherently more valuable than another. She has, from time to time, preached at her Congregationalist church - unsuccessfully to her mind; she gets very nervous. She feels her church is more liberal than the culture around it. "They ordained their first woman in 1853. Before the supreme court decision [to allow gay marriage in Iowa] we blessed gay unions, which is typical of my denomination."
Her novels don't flatter the faithful. Boughton, a sweet man in most respects, whose hair puffs off his head like "the endless work of dreaming", has wholly the wrong opinions about civil rights. A character's childish sense of God as the person who "lived in the attic and paid for the groceries" can never be entirely dispelled, and Glory, Boughton's daughter, describes her faith touchingly in terms of interior decor: "For her, church was an airy white room with tall windows looking out on God's good world, with God's good sunlight pouring in through those windows and falling across the pulpit where her father stood, straight and strong, parsing the broken heart of humankind and praising the loving heart of Christ. That was church." Meanwhile, Ames says, "for me, writing has always felt like praying".
The resurgent science versus religion debate is something Robinson finds absurdly simplistic. She has written on both subjects. Mother Country, her book about Sellafield, seemed like a bizarre change of genre, but she was always interested in the environment. She read a lot of science and economics texts - "the most eccentric passage of my life" - and the resulting polemic, about the dumping of nuclear waste, attracted some cranky reviews in the science press, although she says her findings were hardly startling. "I think they were embarrassed to have a novelist point it out."
In any case, she likes a good fight. Her review of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, in Harper's magazine, accuses him of, among other things, philistinism: "He has turned the full force of his intellect against religion, and all his verbal skills as well, and his humane learning, too, which is capacious enough to include some deeply minor poetry." As she told the Paris Review: "He acts as if the physical world that is manifest to us describes reality exhaustively."
Now she says: "I'm not impressed by the quality of Dawkins's writing, or of Christopher Hitchens's writing. If you are up to speed on subjects that they raise, questions come crashing to mind." The religionists haven't helped themselves, though; surely the new atheism is in part a reaction to the rise of, say, Islamic extremism? "Not just Islamic. A lot of Christian extremism has done a great deal to discredit religion; the main religious traditions have abandoned their own intellectual cultures so drastically that no one has any sense of it other than the fringe. These people that attack religion are not attacking any sort of informed cultural sense of religion. They're attacking the crudest." She has never had a live encounter with Dawkins. "I'm a little nervous about live encounters, because everything's a shouting match. I'm thinking of television of course [she doesn't own a television], but so much of it is who can bully, in effect. Not that I couldn't." She smiles dangerously.
She got rather cross with Simon Schama recently for what she saw, in his writings about early Dutch culture, as a faulty sense of Calvinism - "the dear old song of Renaissance Europe" as she calls it - and confronted him on a panel in New York for characterising Calvinists as a bunch of joyless busybodies. "I said, what did you mean by 'Calvinist orthodoxy'? And he said something like 'well I sort of hurried over that part'. You really can't expect everybody to be up to date on Calvin; but at the same time, if you're writing about the Dutch Republic, you ought." Was he embarrassed? "He was serene."

Her rigour is terrifying. In her book of essays, The Death of Adam, Robinson takes issue with the lack of mettle in modern women compared to their antecedents, all the forgotten heroines of the 19th century of whom only Harriet Beecher Stowe is really remembered. What, she says, of orators and abolitionists such as Lydia Maria Child, Lydia Sigourney and Angelina Grimke, all hugely revered and now forgotten? "These women who had so many strikes against them seemed to have so much more self-possession. People will trip over the smallest obstacle now." She continues: "People are enabled by a sense that there is a heritage of women orators. And somehow or other people conspire in erasing history that would be very valuable for them to have."
On a shelf in Robinson's living room is a large framed poster of a quote by President Obama: "For as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible." It is important to be aware of these things, she says. Look at Iowa, glibly characterised as reactionary but which "had all these splendid deep impulses in its legal system that just sort of got papered over". And on a national scale, too. "Look at major documents and the implications are very large and generous." To remember without over-explaining is the spirit of Robinson's art.

Robinson on Robinson

"If there had been snow I would have made a statue, a woman to stand along the path, among the trees. The children would have come close, to look at her. Lot's wife was salt and barren, because she was full of loss and mourning, and looked back. But here rare flowers would gleam in her hair, and on her breast, and in her hands, and there would be children all around her, to love and marvel at her for her beauty, and to laugh at her extravagant adornments, as if they had set the flowers in her hair and thrown down all the flowers at her feet, and they would forgive her, eagerly and lavishly, for turning away, though she never asked to be forgiven. Though her hands were ice and did not touch them, she would be more than mother to them, she so calm, so still, and they such wild and orphan things." 

From Housekeeping, published by Faber

It feels to me as though the image in Ruth's mind expresses her sense of the world, as I understand it, very closely. I'm interested in the figural quality of thought, its affinity to myth and dream, first of all in its emotional density and its indifference to time. In this instance the language did more than I intended or anticipated. When a passage carries the memory of this experience, especially vivid for someone relatively new to the writing of fiction, it never ceases to have a certain incandescence whatever its merits may be, objectively considered.


Sunday, May 24, 2009

Joan Rivers / This much I Know / I hate my body


Joan Rivers


This much I know



I hate my body. Every morning I wake up and say: "What have you done to me now, God?"

Joan Rivers, comedian, 75, London

Elizabeth Day
Sunday 24 May 2009



Funny is all in the genes. You can't learn funny. My father was hilarious. He was a physician and his patients would laugh until they died. Literally.
I was the outcast of the family. We were very education oriented. If I'd said I wanted to be a physicist or the president, my parents would have said: "Absolutely." When I said: "Show business" they went out of their minds. They thought I'd end up in the circus performing in bad tights.
I'm a total pessimist. It's not that the glass is half empty. Someone stole the glass.
A lot of Hollywood stars aren't aware that adopting a child isn't just a photo op. I was at a dinner party where one actress had adopted a child from Africa and she was saying: "I want my children to know their heritage." I said: "Lock them in a room and throw them a jar of flies."
I think my daughter and I are close because we live 3,000 miles apart.Melissa is totally the opposite of me in many ways, but I know she's got my back and I've got hers.
I love being recognised. It makes the whole world your home town. When my husband committed suicide [Rivers's second husband, the film producer Edgar Rosenberg, overdosed on prescription drugs in 1987] I went to New York and a man collecting the garbage would say: "Hey Joanie! You'll get through this." People in the grocery store would say: "I lit a candle for you last night." I thought: "My God, the whole city cares." People can be a great comfort.
I didn't feel guilty [when Rosenberg died]. I was as good a wife as I could have been to him. He was such a complicated man. He'd been going to a psychiatrist, and after he killed himself the psychiatrist came to my house and said: "I had no idea." That's how closed off he was.
The New York Times says you can have six great loves in your life. I still have two to go, and they better hurry. I like a man my age. But a man my age likes a 25-year-old centrefold.
There's nothing nice about getting older. You do not get wiser - you just forget how stupid you are.
I've never been happy with how I look. I hate my body. Every morning I wake up and say: "What have you done to me now, God?" These days I wear a miniskirt and my breasts hang out from under the hems. But then if I were good-looking I might never have been funny.
If plastic surgery makes you feel better, do it. All women in our business do it. They say: "I've never had anything done." Meanwhile they go to the bathroom and shit through their ears.
When I get heckled, I play the age card: "I've been doing this for 45 years and I don't want to destroy your life now", whereas in truth I have nothing to say.
I lived for nine years with a man who lost one leg in the second world war. It took him a good four months before he took his leg off in front of me. Then after a while you're stepping over it to get to the bathroom.
I'm very formal. I have finger bowls. My apartment looks like the Ritz. The only thing you are allowed to point at over the dinner table is French pastries.
I voted for Obama but I'm getting sick of Michelle's arms. OK, so you work out. Even Jackie O wore a jacket.
I don't believe in an afterlife. I think it will be like when they put you under for an operation and it's a black, velvet sleep. Wonderful.
THE GUARDIAN



THIS MUCH I KNOW


2004

2005

2013

2014

2016


Saturday, May 16, 2009

Ten of the best / Femme fatales



Ten of the best 

Femme fatales

John Mullan
Saturday 16 may 2009


Circe
One of the earliest femmes fatales in western literature is also one of the few to be tamed. Having turned Odysseus's men into pigs, the lovely sorceress beckons the hero into her bed in Homer's Odyssey. However, he has been armed by Hermes with the protective herb Moly and told how to guard his manhood from her wiles.
Acrasia
The most alluring of the various deadly females in Spenser's The Faerie Queene. "Upon a bed of Roses she was layd, / ... / And was arayd, or rather disarayd, / All in a vele of silke and silver thin". The virtuous Sir Guyon resists her.
La Belle Dame Sans Merci
Somehow knights are especially susceptible to the spellbinding charms of a deadly woman. Long after she has abandoned him "on the cold hill's side", Keats's "palely loitering" hero is still in thrall to the beautiful, pitiless "faery's child". A few hours – or is it minutes? – in her "elfin grot", and he is lost forever.
Geraldine
In Coleridge's unfinished narrative poem "Christabel", the heroine meets the lovely Geraldine in the woods. "Her stately neck, and arms were bare; / Her blue-veined feet unsandaled were; / And wildly glittered here and there / The gems entangled in her hair." Look in Geraldine's "serpent's eye" and you will see what she is up to ...



Carmilla
Sheridan Le Fanu's tale of a female vampire predates Dracula and established the character of the supernaturally beautiful young woman who is after your blood – literally. Living in a castle with her father, lonely Laura is befriended by the moody, mysterious Carmilla, who seems to sleep most of the day. Bad dreams and bite marks follow. Will Laura discover her lovely companion's true identity in time?

Lady Audley
Victorian novelists liked to make you feel sorry for their femmes fatales. Mary Elizabeth Braddon's bestselling sensation novel Lady Audley's Secret featured a beautiful anti-heroine who manages to entrap a doting aristocrat. She has (of course) a past, and when a previous husband turns up to reclaim her she shoves him down a well. Madness and doom await her.


Salome
Taken from the gospels of Matthew and Mark, Herod's seductive step-daughter is famous from Oscar Wilde's play (in turn made into an opera by Richard Strauss). Wilde's Salome fancies John the Baptist and confronts him with her unambiguous desires. After she has demanded the prophet's decapitation, she amorously kisses the head that is brought to her on a silver platter.


Nana
First appearing on the Paris stage in the part of Venus, the eponymous protagonist of Zola's novel becomes a courtesan who bewitches men and drives them to folly or disaster. One of them kills himself (with a pair of scissors) when she rejects him. She leaves a trail of male egos and corpses in her wake, on her way to a very nasty end indeed.
Lulu
At the end of the 19th century audiences were deliciously shocked by the sexy heroine/villainess of an infamous pair of plays by Frank Wedekind, Earth Spirit and Pandora's Box. Lulu sexually intoxicates her lovers, before destroying or abandoning them. She ends up confronting Jack the Ripper.


Brigid O'Shaughnessy
In Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, Brigid has hired private eye Sam Spade to protect her. Spade sleeps with Brigid even though he knows that she killed his former partner, Miles Archer. In the end, he turns her in.


Friday, May 8, 2009

Isabelle Huppert / Madame président


French actress Isabelle Huppert
 Isabelle Huppert has become a fantasy of the femme fatale masochist,
winning a Cannes best actress award for The Piano Teacher.
 Photograph: Tiziana Fabi/
CANNES 2009

Madame président

Next week, Isabelle Huppert heads the jury of the Cannes film festival. How will the 'anti-star' of French arthouse cinema manage the fights, the egos and the pressure of choosing a winner?

Angelique Chrisafis
Friday 8 May 2009



I
t's nearly midnight in Amiens, the city below the ghostly battlefields of the Somme. The dark streets are deserted, France's largest gothic cathedral looms in all its gargoyled glory and a woman famous for embodying self-mutilating, murderous, tortured misfits has just sped through the night from a castle to meet me.
Impervious to the eeriness, Isabelle Huppert, French cinema's glacial femme fatale, is not the impassive, purse-lipped dragon she can be on screen, but gently animated under the too-bright lights of a hotel closing up for the night. She has been on set at the castle for more than 10 hours, in a comedy shot across north eastern France yet called Copacabana.
True to her reputation for staying up late and barely ever stopping work, Huppert will finish the film just in time for Wednesday's launch of the Cannes film festival, where she is heading the jury – only the fourth woman president in 60 years, after Liv Ullmann, Jeanne Moureau and writer Françoise Sagan.
Huppert has been pointedly reserved about how she will judge this year's illustrious offerings – which are dominated by a group of big names including Pedro Almodóvar, Lars von Trier, Quentin Tarantino and Ken Loach – or how she intends to run a jury including British novelist and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi and award-winning Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. When she steps out to give an opening speech on Wednesday, expectations will be high – in France, Huppert is known as the "anti-star", a philosophising Baudrillard fan and art-house intellectual who says the fact she is a woman has no relevance and will make no difference to her choices .
In three decades of acting, Huppert has made almost 90 films, with legends from Jean-Luc Godard to Claude Chabrol. Her pared-down portrayals of tortured and twisted women who exist under the surface of everyday French life has made her a Cannes fixture. She has won two best actress awards, most recently in 2001 for her masterly and agonising portrayal of a self-harming, voyeuristic pianist trapped by her domineering mother in Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher. With dozens of films at Cannes and two stints on the jury, her red hair and freckles have long been one of the festival's defining faces.
In 2001 she appeared on the red carpet with a tattoo across her back and arms, quoting the Romanian writer Emil Cioran, "God can thank Bach because Bach is the proof of God's existence." In 1978, when she won her first best actress award for Violette Nozière (a desolate, syphilitic teenage seducer of older men who exacted the ultimate revenge on her bourgeois parents) security guards tried to bar Huppert from the ceremony as they didn't know who she was.
Huppert is not fazed by having to judge this year's exceptional line-up of directors, insisting she will not get bogged down in their reputations. "One discovers a film for what it is. And a great director tries to renew themself each time. An artist by definition reinvents themself with each new work."
That said, she adds: "Perhaps one year we shouldn't tell the jury who made the films they are watching. Cover their eyes and ears for 10 days." To her, Cannes is about waiting for the great surprise, the anonymous masterpiece. "Something you least expect … That curiosity and openness, I don't think Cannes could be any other way. It's a place that celebrates the intrinsic value of film."
But politics always hovers just above the palm fronds. Amid the chaos of May 1968, the festival was cancelled as Godard, François Truffaut, Louis Malle and other new wave greats led a rebellion over the government's attempts to sack the founder of the Cinématèque Française. Then, France was in social meltdown but the economy was buoyant and the protesters had dreams. Today, desperate workers across France are manning picket lines, and the nation is watching to see if the first Cannes festival since the crisis will reflect the world's new dread of money and markets. "It will be interesting to see if cinema is already reflecting that," says Huppert. "We might be surprised, maybe film will ignore it, maybe it will move away from it, or tackle it. I don't know. The crisis is so recent, I don't know if films can spontaneously reflect that."
Huppert, whose own roles have touched on murder, abortion, incest and violence, is very conscious of following Sean Penn, last year's jury president, who stressed the importance of cinema's social and political dimension, handing the Palme d'Or to the complete outsider, The Class, a film about life in a Paris classroom. The year before, Stephen Frears's jury gave the prize to a Romanian drama about abortion, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. "I don't think Sean Penn used the world politics in a narrow sense: it's in the widest sense where a film offers a reflection on the world," Huppert says. She doesn't think politics has a role to play apart from in its sense of "an individual's struggle for a place in society."
Nor does she think Cannes's Boulevard de la Croisette will tone down its red-carpet glamour for crisis-hit times. Huppert knows better than most that the cinema industry is no stranger to crisis and ruin, and the producers often sipping cocktails on the hotel terraces are trading compromises and thwarted projects. "Even in the good times, cinema's defining characteristic has always been to fall somewhere between prosperity and a relentless struggle."
And she thinks television's 24-hour obsession with the red carpet has changed the whole festival. "When I started, TV wasn't as all-powerful as it is now. Then it was photography that was crucial." Does she mean the constant scramble to drum up controversy and fights at Cannes? "No, it's just the constant, gigantic media coverage. The fights – they were always there." Huppert has been privy to some of the best Cannes rows, such as the auteur Maurice Pialat's V-sign to the audience when he was booed collecting his prize for Under Satan's Sun, and his later spat with Gérard Depardieu, whom he called "a Rolls with a 2CV engine."

She cut her teeth at Cannes with the best, and was once part of a jury headed by Dirk Bogarde. "He was very kind, very serious. Very nonchalant – I mean that as a compliment." It makes sense that Huppert, a deadpan actor who prides herself on hiding more than she shows on film, prizes nonchalance. This is why her heading the jury intrigues France, which is both enchanted by her intensity and scared by it. I once interviewed Catherine Deneuve after she headed the jury at the Venice film festival, where she found the responsibility so troubling that she lost sleep and almost fell ill, escaping alone from Venice's Lido island by boat for a brief break to eat ice cream in the street "like a child". It's harder to picture the steely Huppert doing that.

She was born in Paris in 1953 to a father who made safes and an English teacher mother. Her great-grandmother and grand aunt were the Callot sisters, lacemakers who became hugely successful Paris couturiers in the 1920s, but went bust in the 1929 crash. France fell in love with the young Huppert's freckled face in the early 70s when she played a teenager deflowered by a brutish Gérard Depardieu in Les Valseuses. She went on to define French arthouse in work for directors such as Chabrol, for whom her roles ranged from a wronged housewife and secret abortionist in the second world war to Madame Bovary. Married to director Ronald Chammah, she has three children, including young actor Lolita Chammah, with whom she is currently filming in Amiens. It's her first time starring opposite her daughter in a mother-daughter plot, but perhaps a fitting end to a string of recent films she has made about childlike, hard and brutal mothers, from the taboos of a mother's close relationship with her son in Ma Mère to her recent portrayal of Marguerite Duras's mother in The Sea Wall.
Huppert has become a fantasy of the femme fatale masochist, the damaged soul, someone who so often and so understatedly plays pain and violence that you wonder what effect it has had on her. "Leave a mark? Not at all!" she says, eyes widening when I ask if she was damaged by playing the repressed lead character in The Piano Teacher, lifting her skirt to cut herself. "A role like that is cathartic, it's a way of getting rid of something. To act or to do something you love is a way to make yourself lighter, to rid yourself of things that weigh you down. When I play a very sombre, very dramatic role, it's pleasant, because it's something I can release."
She once said acting was a way of living out your insanity, but insists on playing her characters as unnervingly normal, even when they are disturbingly childlike. She said she likes to refer back to a child's innocence and irresponsibility when she plays adults who find it difficult fitting into their world. Shooting the light comedy in Amiens is "1,000 times more difficult" than her tragic roles, she says. She likes playing people and emotions, not "characters" and while she regards each role as a kind of self-portrait, she says she learns nothing new about herself, "though others might do."
Huppert is meticulous about selecting her roles, and feels she has never chosen a dud. "Unfortunately, it's becoming harder and harder. There are lots of films we made a while back that we couldn't make now. There is definitely an impoverishment. Everyone knows that there's a decline. Maybe it can be explained by fear. Fear makes us less curious. People want to earn money; they think to earn more money you must dumb down."
She believes there are still big names out there, but the conditions for making good cinema has become tougher, and chances for new talent more limited.
She hopes Cannes will surprise her. But how do you judge a film? "I don't think we're there to judge, we're there to love films," she says of the jury. "And that's the problem. What do we do if we love them all?" She admits the choice of a winning film is totally subjective, and is troubled by the fact that some great films never won prizes. "And how many times have you heard someone say, 'I really liked that film at that moment in time but I just watched it again and it wasn't up to it'?" She worries about choosing a winner at Cannes that's not just good for now but for always.
"To appreciate films that will last – that's what's so difficult. You have to allow subjectivity to reign. But at the same time you have to be clairvoyant." And she heads off to at last get some sleep, a long run of filming ahead of her before she reaches la Croisette.