Amour and more

The Carlton Hotel suite in Cannes is like Ali Baba’s cave. TV camera lights wink, jewel-like, everywhere. In the half-lit areas in between, people scurry conspiratorially, publicists briefing journalists, waiters bringing drinks. An oriental carpet here, a giant vase or two there, are strewn about like orderly plunder. And at the cave’s heart sits the centre of attention, the bandit chief himself, or herself, who is pausing between audiences.

The 65th Cannes Film Festival was amazing for Isabelle Huppert. The French actress stole every stealable headline. She co-starred in the Palme d’Or winner Michael Haneke’s “Amour”, and played three characters in another film, Korea’s “In Another Country”. (Four roles in a single competition is a record and not one likely to be beaten.) Shortly before Cannes, she had a hit at the Berlin festival as a terrorist hostage in the vivid, harrowing Filipino film “Captive”. In recent years she has “starred”, too, in her own touring exhibition, a collection of portraits by multiple photographers, a tribute to the woman once called the best screen actress in the world.

“It was quite deeter — how do you say it? — deeter-mining” (pronounced to suggest an extraction industry for people called Dieter) “in getting the Korean film, because I came to Korea with the exhibition and met Hong Sang-soo.”

But Huppert’s English soon grows flawless and fluent.

Hong, a rising Seoul filmmaker, said to her: why not play three French tourists called Anne in successive stories? Thus began “In Another Country”, for which Huppert, typically, fashioned much of the characterisation herself. She sent Hong her own costume sketches. Lightly, they defined the differentiations between roles: blue-casual for filmmaking Anne, red and geekishly chic for self-conscious Anne Two, and finally a maturer dark green for the last Anne, the most subtly conflicted of the three heroines in this wry, sly culture-shock comedy.

What is the fascination for an actor, I ask, of being all these different people?

“What, in the same film?”

No, in an entire career. I build into my question, unspoken, the hundred Hupperts I and the world know, from her affectless but affecting murderers (“Violette Noziere”, “La Cérémonie”) to her reckless but adored-by-some (including me) Hollywood adventure, “Heaven’s Gate”, to her unblinking embrace of complex dramatic roles such as Madame Bovary or, earlier for Haneke, the dominant, cruel, vulnerable title character of “The Piano Teacher”.

“It’s not being somebody else, it’s not about that,” Huppert says. “It’s more having a relationship with each great director. It’s the experience of working with Chabrol, or Godard, or Michael Haneke. If you take the same kind of role as the daughter in ‘Amour’ with someone else, there’s nothing exceptional about it. It’s because it’s Michael’s vision.”

Maybe that is why Huppert is so searing — the Haneke effect — in her short scenes as the married daughter in “Amour”, tearfully chiding her father or desperately communicating with her stroke-afflicted mother. “When you know how to do something, nothing is difficult,” she responds. “A baker knows how to bake bread, an actor knows how to act. Even the technique is easy, and the emotion that goes with it.

“I don’t think of something from my own life” — the Method technique for finding a personal correlative for your character’s grief, joy or anger. “It’s more a general feeling. As a human being you have these emotions in you all the time. You bring them out.”

I am amazed to learn that no scene was improvised in “Amour”. Some moments and character responses have the kind of lacerating immediacy you think couldn’t be scripted or rehearsed. “Everything was scripted,” she says. “But at the same time there’s an expression, ‘Acting is by definition improvisation.’ What you do must always seem freshly thought or felt.”

I point her to “Captive”, for which director Brillante Mendoza encouraged and demanded improvisation. The film owes its jolts of power, or seems to, to the fact that the cast had to act and react as if they were terrorist hostages: dragged from jungle to jungle in a re-enactment of a true-life incident. Back in 2001, a group of tourists was abducted and held for 18 months by activists seeking independence for Mindanao.

“Yes, all the scenes were improvised because that is what Mendoza’s cinema is about. To have people react to events like guns shooting and rain and cold and hunger. He creates a kind of chaos around you, and you react to the chaos, and he grabs these moments.”

Cue pillage and violent battles between cops and kidnappers; cue storms, snakes, mudslides. Even so, some reports of Method madness in the hills outside Manila were exaggerated. “Let’s put things back in reality. We didn’t sleep in the jungle. We slept in hotels, a bit shabby. We sometimes got bitten by ants. And like the hostages we were constantly moved from place to place. How do you say? ‘Displaced’? That was one of the hardships and demoralising things for the hostages. So in a reduced way we went through their experience. We ended up north of Manila, in the jungles where Coppola shot some of ‘Apocalypse Now’.”

There are actors, I suggest, who wouldn’t have signed up for even the limited discomforts of “Captive”. Some Hollywood stars ...

“Oh I think American actors are very daring!” she breaks in. “They’re very hardworking, don’t you think?” She reinvokes “Apocalypse Now”, reminding me that Huppert’s own romance with American filmmaking happened in the last epoch when filmmaking was a romance: the late 1970s, age of epic auteurism and location adventurism. The age of Coppola and Cimino.

Those were the days. Which gives me the tentative courage to ask Huppert about her days, present and future. She is 59. “Amour” is about the terrors of ageing. Do Huppert’s more modestly advancing years hold fears? She works in a business said to be cruel in the roles it offers, or doesn’t, to no-longer-young actresses. Yet judged by her present achievements, the good roles still come?

“Apparently. It seems so.”

Full stop. Oh dear. I realise I have hit that dreaded interviewer moment when one receives an answer six times shorter than the question. Make mental note: don’t ask actresses about time’s winged limousine.

Huppert is a game girl, though. She gets back in the loop. Never mind roles not coming to her; what about the roles she actively pushed away in a long career that must, inevitably, have contained a few “No, I won’t play that”.

Amazingly, she refused the first lead role that was offered her by Haneke. It was that of the tortured mother in the famous/infamous drama-thriller “Funny Games”.

“I read the script, I was terrified by it. I felt — rightly, I think — that there was no space for fiction. It was too real, like a documentary. Compared to this material, “The Piano Teacher” was a romantic piece of work! Now maybe I would do it. I don’t know.

“When I say there was no place for fiction, for fantasy, it’s because that is the subject of the film. He wanted to do something pared down. I think he achieved that in ‘Love’. That’s what I like about Michael. When I say ‘no’, or critics say ‘no’ to one of his films, he just goes on. We keep saying that our relationship started by our not doing a film together. Now we have done three together [including the 2003 “The Time of the Wolf”]. I like that process. That’s so much Michael. He never gives up.”

–Financial Times

Amour is released across Europe from September 2; Captive is released in France on September 19; In Another Country is released in France on October 17