Isabelle Huppert’s Art
of Expression
Michael Schulman
November 4, 2019
Isabelle Huppert, the French movie star, marched across the little bridge from Madison Avenue into the Met Breuer, opened and shut her handbag for a security guard, and disappeared into a stairwell. The filmmaker Ira Sachs tried to keep up. “The stairwells here are famous,” he called out. Up a few flights, Huppert frowned at a taped-off door. “This floor is closed,” she said, then continued upward.
They emerged into an uncrowded gallery, containing a retrospective of the Latvian-American artist Vija Celmins, known for her photo-realistic renderings of spider webs, star fields, and desert floors. Sachs had wanted to show them to Huppert, he said, because “I felt that there was a relationship to the infinite.” The theme put him in mind of his new film, “Frankie,” set amid the bluffs and forests of Sintra, Portugal. Huppert plays the title character, a French movie star who reacts to a life-threatening diagnosis with what might be called the Huppert Shrug. (Recall the opening scenes of “Elle,” in which her character is violently raped by an intruder, then brushes herself off and goes about her day.)
Huppert, who wore a gray tartan trenchcoat and nude lipstick, read the wall text. “Oh, Death Valley,” she said, picking out a familiar phrase. “I did a movie in the Death Valley. It’s called ‘Valley of Love,’ by a French director named Guillaume Nicloux. We shot four years ago, with Gérard Depardieu and myself. It’s a beautiful film. Nothing to do with Ira’s, but it also deals with death.” She approached a graphite drawing of rippling waves: “Untitled (Ocean),” from 1977. Sachs remarked, “Vija paints so you have a sense that there’s a world outside the frame, which is always my intention when shooting a film.”
Huppert nodded, and they moved on to a painting of a porcelain surface. “Is that a relief?” she said. “How do you say relief? It means you think it’s not flat. You think there is another dimension.”
“Well, we use the French word ‘trompe-l’oeil,’ ” Sachs offered, as Huppert checked Google Translate on her phone. “Voilà!” she said: the English word was also “relief.” “You feel that the ink is thicker here.” She pointed back toward the painted porcelain.
“Do you feel that acting is an illusion?” Sachs asked.
“Not really, no,” she said. “It’s hard, for me, to connect acting to painting or images. Only rhythm and music.” In 2005, she collaborated with the artist Roni Horn on a series of a hundred photographs. “She wanted to have very different expressions on my face,” Huppert recalled. “I had no makeup, nothing. And she wrote the names of several of my films, put them in a hat, and each morning I would take a little paper and choose a film, and she would ask me to remember the main feeling which irrigated my performance in the film.” She tensed her lips. “For the first five minutes I thought, What is she talking about? But it made perfect sense.”
“I want to play that game!” Sachs said, then called out names of Huppert’s films: “ ‘Loulou’! ‘La Cérémonie’! ‘Heaven’s Gate’!”
Huppert smiled at the mention of “La Cérémonie,” in which she plays a blasé murderess. “That is certainly different from ‘Frankie,’ ” she allowed. “If you ask an actress to play an actress, it creates a feeling of reality, of course—much more than if I was playing a nurse or a butcher.”
“She’s not as famous as you are,” Sachs said, of his protagonist. “Frankie’s doing much more television than Isabelle.”
“But she has a beautiful bracelet,” Huppert countered. “She has some kind of exterior sign of being wealthy and successful. So with those little indices—how do you say indice?” She returned to Google Translate. Voilà: “A clue.”
“That’s a lot of what filmmaking is,” Sachs said. “How many clues do you need to give to get the audience to know the characters intimately?”
A couple approached Huppert, starstruck. The man mentioned a friend who, in 2003, had a chance to buy one of Celmins’s works for fifteen hundred dollars, but couldn’t afford it. His companion said, “The same thing happened to me, with a James Castle.”
“Eggleston, for me,” Sachs chimed in. “Everybody’s got their one.”
Huppert gave the Shrug. She’s not a collector, she said. “I have this little painting of a tree, which I bought on a big boulevard in Moscow. It isn’t worth anything, but I just love it. I have my own barometer of what’s worth and what’s not worth.” She circled back to where she had started and snapped a photo of “Untitled (Ocean).” She did not explain why. But it was, perhaps, a clue. ♦
Published in the print edition of the November 11, 2019, issue, with the headline “The Shrug.”
Michael Schulman, a staff writer, has contributed to The New Yorker since 2006. He is the author of “Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears” and “Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep.”
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