It’s nearly midnight in Amiens, the city below the ghostly battlefields of the Somme. The dark streets are deserted, France’s largest gothic cathedral looms in all its gargoyled glory and a woman famous for embodying self-mutilating, murderous, tortured misfits has just sped through the night from a castle to meet me.
Impervious to the eeriness, Isabelle Huppert, French cinema’s glacial femme fatale, is not the impassive, purse-lipped dragon she can be on screen, but gently animated under the too-bright lights of a hotel closing up for the night. She has been on set at the castle for more than 10 hours, in a comedy shot across northeastern France yet called Copacabana.
True to her reputation for staying up late and barely ever stopping work, Huppert will finish the film just in time for today’s launch of the Cannes film festival, where she is heading the jury — only the fourth woman president in 60 years, after Liv Ullmann, Jeanne Moureau and writer Francoise Sagan.
Huppert has been pointedly reserved about how she will judge this year’s illustrious offerings — which are dominated by a group of big names including Pedro Almodovar, Lars von Trier, Quentin Tarantino and Ken Loach — or how she intends to run a jury including British novelist and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi and award-winning Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. When she steps out to give an opening speech today, expectations will be high — in France, Huppert is known as the “anti-star,” a philosophizing Baudrillard fan and art-house intellectual who says the fact she is a woman has no relevance and will make no difference to her choices .
In three decades of acting, Huppert has made almost 90 films, with legends from Jean-Luc Godard to Claude Chabrol. Her pared-down portrayals of tortured and twisted women who exist under the surface of everyday French life has made her a Cannes fixture. She has won two best actress awards, most recently in 2001 for her masterly and agonizing portrayal of a self-harming, voyeuristic pianist trapped by her domineering mother in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher. With dozens of films at Cannes and two stints on the jury, her red hair and freckles have long been one of the festival’s defining faces.
In 2001, she appeared on the red carpet with a tattoo across her back and arms, quoting the Romanian writer Emil Cioran, “God can thank Bach because Bach is the proof of God’s existence.” In 1978, when she won her first best actress award for Violette Noziere (a desolate, syphilitic teenage seducer of older men who exacted the ultimate revenge on her bourgeois parents), security guards tried to bar Huppert from the ceremony as they didn’t know who she was.
Huppert is not fazed by having to judge this year’s exceptional line-up of directors, insisting she will not get bogged down in their reputations. “One discovers a film for what it is. And a great director tries to renew themself each time. An artist by definition reinvents themself with each new work.”
That said, she adds: “Perhaps one year we shouldn’t tell the jury who made the films they are watching. Cover their eyes and ears for 10 days.” To her, Cannes is about waiting for the great surprise, the anonymous masterpiece. “Something you least expect. That curiosity and openness, I don’t think Cannes could be any other way. It’s a place that celebrates the intrinsic value of film.”
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