Isabelle Huppert at Cannes: On Parallel Tales, Farhadi, and What It Means to Play Someone Who Watches
She arrived on the Croisette in a dramatic red Valentino gown and gave the most precise interview of the festival. Her new film — Asghar Farhadi's Parallel Tales — earned a seven-minute standing ovation. Here is what she said about the work, the watching, and why she finds the question of age in cinema mildly beneath her
“She receives roles now that she did not receive at forty because she is more interesting now to the directors who find complicated women interesting. The directors who do not have never given her good roles at any age. That has always been the division.”
The premiere of Asghar Farhadi's Parallel Tales at the 79th Cannes Film Festival produced one of the more extraordinary scenes of the two-week event: a seven-minute standing ovation in which Farhadi blew kisses to the crowd while Catherine Deneuve, Virginie Efira, and Vincent Cassel — each extraordinary in their own right — stood beside Isabelle Huppert, who wore a dramatic red Valentino gown and remained politely, precisely smiling throughout. Not performing gratitude. Receiving it.
In the Farhadi film, Huppert plays Sylvie, a French novelist whose better days are behind her. She lives in a stately Paris apartment that has started to fray at the seams. In search of inspiration, she begins spying on her neighbours across the street — a voyeurism that becomes, as Farhadi's plots always do, a trap of her own making. The film is freely inspired by the sixth episode of Kieslowski's Dekalog, and Huppert in it is, by the consensus of those who found it among the competition's best, extraordinary: dressed in vintage nightgowns and velvet jackets, typewriting at an ancient Olivetti, her cool intelligence deployed not in opposition to the character's recklessness but in perfect, uncomfortable concert with it.
We spoke with her the morning after the premiere at the Hotel Martinez, where she had arrived from Shanghai — she had just received a Magnolia award, the Chinese equivalent of a Tony, for her stage production of The Cherry Orchard — and was already in what she described as Cannes mode, which looked from the outside like the absence of any mode at all. She was simply present, which is, in a festival context, the most unusual quality available.
On the character: She plays a novelist who invents fiction more compelling than reality and then finds reality catching up. It is a specifically Farhadi trap — the story where the ordinary life turns out to be the dangerous one — and Huppert describes it as the most natural role he could have cast her in. She has always been interested, she says, in characters who observe before they act. Who watch rather than simply see.
On working with Farhadi: The match between the two of them is not accidental. Farhadi makes films about people who believe they understand the situation they are in — who are confident in their reading of the room — and who discover, incrementally and painfully, that they have misread everything. Huppert specialises in the specific quality of intelligence that produces this misreading: not stupidity, not naivety, but the particular blindness of the person whose intelligence has become a form of control. She is the ideal subject for his films and has apparently known this for some time.
On Cannes, on the red carpet, on the week's specific social electricity: She is affectionate about the festival and entirely unromantic about what it is. A market, she says, with a beautiful setting. She has been coming since the early 1970s. She no longer counts the times.
On the question of age and the roles she is receiving: She looks at the question the way she looks at all questions that are really statements in disguise. Her answer is that she receives roles now that she did not receive at forty because she is more interesting now to the directors who find complicated women interesting. The directors who do not have never given her good roles at any age. That has always been the division.
Parallel Tales is in French theatres now. No US or UK distribution confirmed at press time. Watch for it.
BY OONA CHANEL
