The Films: Every Man For Himself || Loulou || Entre Nous || Saint-Cyr || La Ceremonie

Tickets $11 / $9 (Students and Conc.) Season Pass $25

ISABELLE

HUPPERT

Guided by her intelligence and intuition, Isabelle Huppert is the most daring of contemporary French actresses in her choices in both the cinema and the theatre.

Her strength of character unfailingly leads her to the most risky slopes.Which is what seduces us, as well as her almost childlike perseverance in creating an actress's destiny. She approaches the most diverse filmmakers and gives them the impression they have chosen her, when it is often she who chooses them.Without cheating or lying, she lets people believe... Her acting career is not confined to French cinema; it extends to the rest of Europe and the wider world. She is absolutely fearless.

A distinguished career at the service of her lofty admiration for the cinema has not stopped Isabelle Huppert from living her life. She belongs to the world, knows how to look at it and grasp it and constantly invites us to share her intimacy. Isabelle Huppert has a highly sophisticated way of bringing us close to her, while maintaining distance. She does not confuse intimacy with familiarity, a nuance that the media often ignores or abuses. It is within that space (and within her intimate and secret persona) that her acting emerges and develops, works and does its work.

How does Isabelle Huppert serve the characters she plays? The answer is always mysterious. Metamorphosis. Cool vampirism. A natural sisterly bond between herself and her double. Never with violence or force, because the border between herself and the character is invisible, and always located within herself. Isabelle Huppert makes the audience look inside the soul, inside the body, inside the silences and blanks in her acting. If Isabelle is an actress who catches the light, then her light is inside herself.What she asks of the audience, the actress requires first of herself, only accepting a role that she is confident of being able to inhabit, to slip into, body and soul.With Isabelle Huppert, cinema is mystery.Which is its very origin.
SERGE TOUBIANA
Director, Cinémathèque Francaise

"It's easy to overlook the hugeness of her achievement ... Imagine the last quarter-century of cinema without her." Michael Atkinson, Village Voice

"Building a career like Isabelle's involves a very subtle understanding of all things human." Olivier Assayas

The Films: Every Man For Himself || Loulou || Entre Nous || Saint-Cyr || La Ceremonie

3pm Sat 4 August

Sauve qui peut (la vie)

aka: Every Man for Himself or Slow Motion (18+)

Director: Jean-Luc Godard France/Switzerland 1980 35mm, in French with English subtitles. 87 mins.
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Jacques Dutronc, Nathalie Baye, Roland Amstutz, Anna Baldaccini

Jean-Luc Godard's superbly acted and inventive parody of modern life revolves around three characters who are all at turning points in their lives.

The all-star cast features Isabelle Huppert as a country girl who comes to the city to become a prostitute; Nathalie Baye as a woman who decides to give up her city job to pursue an idyllic life in the country; and Jacques Dutronc as a television director, seperated from his wife and daughter, and at the end of his tether.

The film is stunning to look at and makes striking use of stop-motion photography. After several years away from commercial film-making, Slow Motion marked Godard's return to the cinema and was rapturously received, reaffirming the director's place at the forefront of innovative film-making.

 

"Magnificent (and mandatory!): a new 35mm print of a pantheon work which Godard considered his 'second first film.' Sauve qui peut marked Godard's re-emergence into the world of narrative and beauty after the political films of the Maoist and Dziga Vertov period, and after a serious motorcycle accident (which figures centrally in the film).

Setting the tone for his subsequent work with its blend of Swiss pastoralism, blunt sexuality, and severe vision of human relations, Sauve qui peut charts the intertwined lives of three characters: Paul Godard (Jacques Dutronc), a filmmaker whose marriage is on the rocks; his ex-girlfriend Denise Rimbaud (Nathalie Baye), who wants to escape to the country; and Isabelle Rivière (Isabelle Huppert), a prostitute who sells her body to live a free life (an echo of Anna Karina in Vivre sa vie). Jaggedly witty and woundingly beautiful, Sauve qui peut suggests that capitalism has so distorted modern life that 'we cannot seem to touch without bruising'" (James Quandt, Cinematheque Ontario).

"A stunning, original work ... breathtakingly beautiful and often very funny ... I trust it will outlive us all" (Vincent Canby, New York Times).

It was on the set of Heavens' Gate, Godard brought Isabelle out for lunch, and offered her the role with one sentence - "She has a face of suffering"

Official Selection at Cannes International Film Festival, May 1980
Official Selection in New York Film Festival, October 1980
Best Actress Nomination for Cesar, 1981

6pm Sat 4 August

Loulou

Director: Maurice Pialat France 1980  Colour, 35mm, in French with English subtitles. 110 mins. (M)

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Gérard Depardieu, Guy Marchand, Humbert Balsan, Bernard Tronczyk

Directed by the late, great Maurice Pialat, this unsettling tale of erotic obsession led American critic Andrew Sarris to proclaim leads Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu "the sexiest couple in the history of cinema."

Huppert plays Nelly, a refined bourgeois woman who dumps her respectable partner for wild sex and utter irresponsibility with Loulou, a loutish layabout played by Depardieu. Guy Marchand co-stars as the spurned André, an advertising executive at a loss to understand what Nelly and Loulou could possibly have in common.

Pialat's gift for combining story-telling and social observation has drawn frequent comparisons to Zola; Loulou demonstrates why.

"No other French film is such a mine of information about class, living arrangements, clothes, what people earn, and family relationships" (Le Monde).

"Electrifying ... All the time that Huppert and Depardieu are on the screen, they radiate the most dangerously anarchic sexuality one can imagine" (Sarris).

"As fresh and unsettling today as it was in 1980 ... To see the movie again is to realize how few filmmakers in the intervening years have even attempted to chart the vast intricacies, the sparks and synapses, of sexual passion and the particular nature of women's desire" (Molly Haskell, Film Comment).

The film took long time to make, almost two years. Both Isabelle and Gerard knew Pialat was a hard director. During the shooting, He once disappeared for three days, and let his first assitant continue working.

Isabelle Huppert " La Vie d'Actrice", Studio N° 181, September, 2002:

" It's Maurice Pialat! To him, one said a lot. When I respond to it, one had extraordinary liberty in this film. It's good. There was a scene Gerard Depardieu and I nude on a bed. The bed was collapsed under the weight of Gerard! If it needed rehearsal, one would be still there!... This is the cinema of Pialat, welcome the improvisation, when it was not improvisible. As for Depardieu ... the great actor who forget who he is. I only remember Loulou, his force and his softness."

After finishing Loulou, Isabelle left for USA for"Heave's Gate", then went back to Godard's Passion. There was one scene - in which Isabelle nude in bed receiving a morning telephone from Guy Marchand, that Pialat wanted to re-shoot but never made it. (Cahier du Cinema, March, 1994)

3pm Sun 5 August

Entre Nous / At First Sight

aka Coup de foudre (15+)

Director: Diane Kurys France 1983 Colour, 35mm, in French with English subtitles. 110 mins.

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Miou-Miou, Guy Marchand, Jean-Pierre Bacri, Robin Renucci

Smart, intimate and emotionally insightful, the third feature by writer-director Diane Kurys (after Peppermint Soda and Cocktail Molotov) was a big art-house hit in North America, and an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film.

Based on the experiences of Kurys's mother, Entre Nous charts the close bond and friendship – rendered with a subtle but definite lesbian undercurrent – between two women in 1950s Lyons.

Léna (Isabelle Huppert) is a Jew of Russian origin who escaped deportation from France during the war by marrying Michel, now the boorish proprietor of a garage. Madeleine (Miou-Miou) is an artist married to immature Costa. Both women find themselves strongly drawn to each other; neither loves her oafish husband anymore. Their close friendship, and their plans to open up a boutique together, begins to threaten both marriages.

"Written, directed and acted with a touch usually seen only in the films of Renoir, Pagnol, or Truffaut ... Entre Nous is intelligent, adult cinema" (James Monaco, The Movie Guide).

Nominated best foreign Film Academy Awards 1984

6pm Sun 5 August

Saint-Cyr (The King's Daughters)

Director: Patricia Mazuy France 2000 Colour, 35mm, in French with English subtitles. 119 mins. 18+

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Simon Reggiani, Jean-François Balmer, Anne Marev

Featuring Isabelle Huppert in the lead, Patricia Mazuy's handsome historical drama, set in 17th-century France, is based on the true story of Madame de Maintenon, a commoner who climbed the social ladder to become courtesan to, and then wife of, King Louis XIV.

Determined to atone for her past indiscretions, Maintenon, with her husband's patronage, opens Saint-Cyr, a boarding school for the daughters of impoverished nobility, on the outskirts of Paris. Her goal is to impart respectable manners, erudition, appreciation for truth and beauty, and independence of thought; when her passionate charges take independence too far – and, more alarmingly to Maintenon, begin to discover the power of their own budding sexuality — a battle of wills develops, and the headmistress's enlightened regime turns increasingly repressive.

"Absorbing ... a study in power, pride, fear and error .. [with] a compelling central performance from Isabelle Huppert ... [She] quietly commands attention as she slides from worldly poise and absolute certainty about her mission to increasingly fearful behaviour" (David Rooney, Variety).

The soundtrack is by John Cale. The film won the César for costume design, and received the prestigious Prix Jean Vigo, awarded for independence of spirit and quality of directing.

7pm Wed 8 August

La Ceremonie

A Judgement in Stone/The Ceremony) (M)

Director: Claude Chabrol France/Germany 1995. Colour, 35mm, in French with English subtitles. 112 mins.
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Sandrine Bonnaire, Jacqueline Bisset, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Virginie Ledoyen

A mesmerizing psychological thriller, Claude Chabrol's La Cérémonie was widely hailed as the French master's best film in years, and was recently cited as "one of the great films of the last decade" (James Quandt, Cinematheque Ontario).

A formidable trio of actresses heads the cast: Isabelle Huppert, who works frequently with Chabrol; Sandrine Bonnaire, another of French cinema's finest; and Jacqueline Bisset. The latter plays Catherine, a well-off art dealer who lives with her somewhat snobby family in an elegant country home. Bonnaire is Sophie, the new housekeeper Catherine hires. Introverted and somewhat unusual, Sophie is nonetheless accepted and well-liked by the family — until, that is, she befriends Jeanne (Huppert), the impertinent local postmistress, whom Catherine's husband suspects of opening his mail. A growing bond between the two blue-collar women pits them against the privileged family, with explosive results.

"[La Cérémonie] benefits from the director's immaculate sense of social and psychological detail ... Chabrol's flair for characterisation, careful pacing and solid evocation of bourgeois complacency and anti-bourgeois hatred creates a palpable sense of unease that fully justifies the shockingly violent finale" (Geoff Andrew, Time Out).

Huppert won a French César for her performance, and shared Best Actress honours with Bonnaire at Venice.