ISABELLE HUPPERT

01. - 15. Januar

25 FILMS 

Isabelle Huppert, the French actress of a truly global cinema

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THIS FRIDAY

Free Friday: Isabelle Huppert: Malina

On the occasion of this retrospective, we celebrate the work of Isabelle Huppert, a major figure of contemporary cinema whose career-spanning more than fifty years of creation-has crossed borders, genres, and artistic experimentation.

Beyond her film work, she has also graced the stages of the greatest Parisian theaters, most recently embodying Bérénice in Jean Racine’s play. And as if the breadth of her talents were not enough, Isabelle Huppert has also made her mark in fashion and in photography.

One might think of the project “La femme aux portraits” (2005), in which she became the muse of some of the greatest photographers (Boubat, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Nan Goldin…), a project that later became the subject of a retrospective at MoMA in New York.

Renowned for her boldness, Isabelle Huppert has built a filmography where literary classicism, radical auteur cinema, acerbic comedy, political drama, and formal experimentation coexist.

Today, she is one of the rare French actresses to have achieved a truly international stature, working with major European, American, and Asian filmmakers while remaining firmly rooted in the French cinematic landscape.

“I don’t try to be reassuring. What interests me is discomfort, displacement, the unknown.” Isabelle Huppert

Already in her first leading role in The Lacemaker (1977), an intimate and poetic masterpiece by Claude Goretta, Isabelle Huppert - only 23 years old at the time - lent her face to what would become her first immense success. In it, she unfolds her mastery of the art of silence…

“I find it harder to play roles where you have to talk a lot than roles where you have to be silent. Because in cinema, you can express so much through looks and silences. It’s the art of silence.”
From the very beginning, Isabelle Huppert seemed destined for a remarkably eclectic career…
“…Now I would really like to play more combative roles, roles where I assert myself a bit more, because you mustn’t allow yourself to be trapped in that kind of character.”

The following year marked her meeting with Claude Chabrol—the most beautiful and fruitful collaboration of her cinematic life, to which this retrospective gives a central place. Together, Isabelle Huppert and Claude Chabrol explored the murky zones of bourgeois morality, social violence (of class and gender), and the ambiguities of desire, shaping multifaceted female characters.

Chabrol found in Huppert his ideal protean performer: from the “villainous” Violette Nozière (1978) to the vengeful Sophie in The Ceremony (1995), via the suspicious calm of Marie-Claire Muller in Nightcap (2000). And, of course, in the sublime Story of Women (1988), a militant film imbued with profound pessimism, portraying Marie’s fierce yet naïve aspiration to independence, crushed by the violence of women’s condition under the Vichy regime.

“Isabelle is a mystery the camera loves. She never gives everything away, and that is precisely why she is fascinating.” Claude Chabrol

Her role as Sophie in The Ceremony, an exhilarating film of class revenge, earned her one of her two César Awards for Best Actress - the second coming in 2017 for Elle by Paul Verhoeven.

An actress of a thousand faces and certainly one of the most widely traveled - if not the most international - of contemporary French actresses.
From Michael Haneke (The Piano Teacher) to Claire Denis (White Material), from Marco Bellocchio, Liliana Cavani, Andrzej Żuławski, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder to Paul Verhoeven, Ursula Meier (Home), Hong Sang-soo (Traveler’s Need), Neil Jordan (Greta), or Michael Cimino in Heaven’s Gate, where she seduces Kris Kristofferson during a memorable dance—Isabelle Huppert has always chosen her roles as experiences, refusing any form of categorization.

This attraction to travel also translates into a desire to open herself to more marginal and/or emerging filmmakers. Hidden within this retrospective are two rare gems: Home by Franco-Swiss director Ursula Meier and Bella addormentata by Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio. Here, the modernity and topicality of the themes (confinement, borders, family, mourning) are rendered poetic through precise editing and mise-en-scène. Two virtuosic political fables not to be missed.

“Isabelle doesn’t play a character; she lets it come into being. She is an actress of absolute radicality.” — Michael Haneke

The range of her acting and her mastery of metamorphosis allow her to move with equal intensity through melodrama (the dark poeticism of Lady of the Camellias by Mauro Bolognini), historical films (Madame Bovary, The Brontë Sisters), political cinema ( Comedy of Power, White Material), comedy (8 Women, My Best Friend’s Wife), psychological thrillers (Elle), and even experimental cinema, with Werner Schroeter in an opaque and hypnotic adaptation of Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel Malina.

“Isabelle Huppert is free. And that freedom is visible on screen.” Paul Verhoeven

This retrospective seeks to show how profoundly Isabelle Huppert has redefined the place of the actress in modern cinema: neither muse nor frozen icon, but a creative force, a partner in staging, and in a perpetual search for roles that open up new ways of exploring the human soul.

“Cinema is a territory without borders. Isabelle is one of its greatest travelers.” Claire Denis