The divine Ms H

I regret to this day having not gone to see the great French actress Isabelle Huppert on stage in New York City in 2019 in a production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Mother, when I had the perfect opportunity. It looks like the closest I will now get to her presence is the cinema she owns in Paris, Christine Cinéma Club. I’ve long been a fan of this exceptional actress, whose roles have been highly varied and whose execution in them comes with alarming ease. Acting since 1972 (she’s now 70) she has starred in more than 120 films and worked with France’s greatest post-war and New Wave directors, along with a wide assortment of others including in many American films. I had occasion recently to do a little retrospective of her work on the Criterion Channel. But I was astonished at how much I didn’t know about the personas she adapted and indeed her physical changes as she grew older. While I’ve seen many Huppert films over the years these have mainly been ones from the past two decades when she was fully “matured” as an adult woman, and assumed the personage we now know of her, the high cheek bones and soft sculpted (freckled) face with strawberry blond hair. Her much earlier films showed an image that was entirely different, unrecognizable from today. In Jean-Luc Godard’s Every Man for Himself (1980), she indeed plays a totally unrecognizable schoolgirl, a film I had to turn off because of its pedophile overtones. (Leave it to Godard.) In Joseph Losey’s La Truite (The Trout) from 1982 she still looks childlike, with fleshy face and teenage countenance. Appropriately her character intones, “I never wanted to grow up.” In Bertrand Tavernier’s Coup de Torchon (Clean Slate) (1981), now as an adult she looks entirely different with permed hair, yet playing an irascible character, often a theme in her films. In Diane Kurys's 1983 Entre Nous she is again unrecognizable in look and demeanor as a 1950s conventional housewife in a story about mid-century female friendship.   In films like Hal Hartley’s Amateur (1994) and Claude Chabrol’s La Cérémonie (1995) she again reverts to a younger demeanor as an enfant terrible or even sociopath. In Chabrol’s The Story of Women (1988), the Huppert image we know today starts to emerge, facial chubbiness transformed into slimmed sculpted beauty. In 2009’s The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke), Huppert plays a transgressive character whose outer shell exudes intellectual coldness. In Claire Denis’s 2009 White Material she’s the fearless matriarch of a coffee plantation caught in the middle of an African civil war. “This is ridiculous!” she yells at her cowed farm hands who abandon the harvest, leaving her almost singlehandedly to bring it in. In Mia Hansen-Løve's 2016 Things to Come, Huppert is in full maturity, now as a grandmother, whose life unspools in several ways yet ultimately finding freedom and serenity. In many of the films I’ve listed Huppert plays assertive outsiders independent of spirit and who can’t be reined in, legally or illegally. But it’s her utter plasticity, the ease by which she transforms from character to character, which makes her an actress a viewer can’t take their eyes off of.