Probing questions, no answers

Juliette Binoche agrees to meet me at her home in Vaucresson, a wealthy suburb on a hill outside Paris full of beautiful houses peering solemnly over high fences. Pale and ascetic-looking in a baggy hooded cardigan and no make-up, the 48-year-old actress is a blur of energetic motion, scraping together a fire in the huge grate and marching out to the kitchen as the long white room behind her begins to fill with smoke. When I ask cautiously if this is meant to happen, she streaks back through and half-vanishes up the chimney, clanging the vent back and forth and tossing flaming logs about with her bare hands before coiling herself demurely on the sofa.

We are here to talk about Elles, a deliberately controversial film by the Polish director Malgoska Szumowska. In it, Binoche plays a journalist and mother-of-two who suffers a kind of midlife crisis while writing an article on two teenage girls funding their studies through prostitution. But she is only just back from another shoot playing Camille Claudel, the sculptor and artist who spent 30 years in a mental hospital, and it is tempting to see a residue of that part's intensity in a manner that mixes austere formality with some formidably dense answers. Within minutes, she is telling me about how performance "really is incarnation" and how acting can physically transform human cells, "a transformation that's being made with the opening of your heart, the awareness of your spirit and the openness of your body".

Just as I begin to worry that our whole conversation will consist of learned observations on theatrical representation, though, the strangest thing happens: Struck by some funny comment, she tilts her small frame back, and lets loose one of the most infectious, abandoned laughs I have ever heard. It all goes uphill from there.

Elles is an odd film, not least because it wears its provocation so overtly. It juxtaposes the life of Binoche's troubled bourgeoise, enfettered to her ghastly family and going to pieces in a beautiful Parisian apartment, with those of the two glamorous young prostitutes she interviews, each of whom appears for much of the film to be enjoying a lifestyle without significant emotional fallout.

These days, Binoche can pick and choose the parts she wants. Szumowska came recommended by the cinematographer Slavomir Idziak, with whom she worked on Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blue. "I liked her energy," Binoche says. "She was a little provocative, but she was really saying what was going on in her. She said to me, I don't think we're going to get along, because you have a very strong personality and I have a very strong personality, and I don't think it's going to work. I said, well, if you say that we'll see!"

An adventurous approach to casting, I say. "Actually we got on very well! We're going to make another film together."

She shies away at first when I ask about the moral dimensions to the film. "I think when a film's trying to give a moral answer, it's a catastrophe. Films are not there to give solutions," she says. Eventually, though, she goes a little further. "I have friends who went through this kind of circumstance when I was a student," she admits. "A girlfriend in college and two other friends later on. I didn't judge them. I felt sorry, of course, because I think when you have to make your body a condition of earning money and making love, I find it's sad. It belongs to another realm, for me. You don't buy things with your body."

Most of the character's probing questions, in fact, were her own invention. "There were questions I felt like asking that weren't in the script, and Malgoska said, yeah, go ahead. She's very open to anything you want to come up with."

Binoche has a busy summer ahead. She is reprising her title role in last year's production of Strindberg's Miss Julie, which will run in Paris before transferring to the Barbican in London. She is going to Cannes this month — "just popping in and out quickly" — to promote David Cronenberg's new film Cosmopolis.