Isabelle Huppert:
'We are losing the right
to ambiguity and complexity'
Isabelle Huppert huffs and puffs and expostulates as only a French actress can. Uphfffff! she exhales. Pffff! and Offf! Her manner is far from the haughty froideur suggested by her formidable film roles — a woman who avenges a rape in Elle, a sadomasochistic professor in The Piano Teacher — and cuttings from previous interviews. “Clinical.” “Silent.” “Intimidating.”
Certainly her look on a sunny morning in Paris is Angel of Vengeance: dark glasses, leather jacket, silk T-shirt, dark jeans, black boots with dagger heels. At 65, she is gamine as a teenager. She is 20 minutes late, but far from being offhand, she is mortified. She cannot apologise enough. At the end of the interview she will run down the street to return my pen.
What might be taken for iciness or disdain is caution or old-fashioned reserve. She does not simper or gush. She is an intellectuelle in Louis Vuitton, happier talking about Manichaeism than about whether actresses should or shouldn’t have plastic surgery. (This is the only question that gets a Medusa stare.)
She is precise and will pause for several unnerving seconds while searching for le bon mot. She speaks confident, voluptuously accented English. It is a pleasure to hear her say “Instagrrramme”. Pleasure — and pain — are her current obsession. Over green tea in a Saint-Sulpice hotel, Huppert explains what drew her to the characters of Justine, who lives by virtue, and her sister Juliette, who lives for vice. She will play both in a solo show at the Southbank Centreon Saturday. Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791), a novel by the Marquis de Sade, tells in excruciating detail the sexual humiliations of an innocent young woman subjected to rapes and sexual slavery. In Juliette, or Vice Amply Rewarded (1797) the libertine Juliette gives herself up to torture, murder and cannibalism.
“Juliette doesn’t have any morals, that’s for sure,” says Huppert. “Intellectually it’s very exciting. She’s a cynical character. She doesn’t care about anything except immediate pleasure. Whereas Justine has faith. And that faith gives her hope.” The question Sade asks is: is it better to be Justine, striving to be good and virtuous — and suffering for it — or to be Juliette who revels in sin? Huppert says it’s a question she cannot answer. “I couldn’t choose. I wouldn’t want to choose.”
Napoleon imprisoned Sade and had copies of the books destroyed. Are we entering a new age of puritanism and censorship? “In a way, yes,” says Huppert. “Absolutely. I mean, you wouldn’t go to jail for 30 years like Sade did…” She is guarded when speaking publicly. “What I find difficult is that we are losing the right to ambiguity and the right to complexity. That’s very, very difficult. I don’t know if it comes from social media. Maybe because things are so summarised, and everything is so commented on, too. It is difficult to be subtle. You have to be like this, or like that.”Film and stage allow subtlety, nuance, the creation of complex, ambiguous characters. It was what drew her towards the part of Michèle in Elle, for which she was Oscar-nominated and won a Golden Globe. “She [Michèle] probably has read Sade. She doesn’t want to be a victim. She has a plan from the beginning. She wants to take revenge in her own way.”
The #metoo or #moiaussi debate has been particularly poisonous in France, with feminists of the 1970s pitted against millennials and Catherine Deneuve caricatured as an out-of-date ogre. “Needless to say the whole phenomenon is positive in general,” says Huppert. “But having said that, it can go too far.” Are men uncertain how to flirt or pay a compliment? “That would be, let’s say, the side effect. The slightly wrong side effect. Because how can you define going too far? I don’t know.”
She says she has not been “personally harmed” by harassment in her career. No Harvey Weinstein horror stories. She has taken on tough roles (I twice slammed the laptop lid down watching the rape flashback scenes in Elle), but says she regrets nothing and has never been forced or coerced by a director. “Then I wouldn’t have done it. I think that any role I did, I always very strongly felt that it spoke for women. Of course I hear those kind of comments about a role. ‘Oh, she takes on very demanding roles.’ Even a certain number of words are attached, like ‘perversion’. But I never saw that in what I did.”
She acknowledges that actresses are expected to look eternally youthful, but dismisses questions about the rights or wrongs of Botox with: “I never saw frozen good actresses.”
I ask if she thinks a London audience will be more stereotypically prudish, more shockable than a Parisian one? “Non!” There wasn’t so much as a tut of disapproval when she did Phaedra(s) at the Barbican in 2016. She is bemused by Brexit. “The funny thing is that after it happened, it seemed incomprehensible for the English themselves. But they voted for it. So it’s kind of weird. It was as if, as soon as it was there, people regretted it, non?”As for whether President Macron will break the strikes — it is another day of demonstrations and gridlock in Paris — and reform France’s economy: “Pffff! I hope so. It has to come to an end. But I don’t know… Uffff!”
She prefers art — she is on her way to a photography exhibition at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson — and cinema to politics. “Sometimes when I go to one of those little movie theatres, I feel like an archaeologist. There are only two or three people in the audience, and I imagine what people will think cinemas were for in 2,000 years.”
She says that the worst of social media is “the time you lose. You’d better read. It’s more pleasant.” What does she read for pleasure? “Offf! I have, how do you say, ‘un embarras du choix’. Shakespeare, Proust, Philip Roth...”
Huppert loves London except for the Tube. You won’t spot her reading Roth on the Bakerloo line. She suffers appalling claustrophobia. “It’s just… I can’t… You are between two walls of a tunnel. Ufff! Non!” Reassuring to know that even this most fearless of actresses is afraid of something.
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