Isabelle Huppert has a way of inspiring intrigue – even without trying. On the red carpet at Cannes last month, she raised eyebrows with her choice of footwear: a pair of Balenciaga Anatomic heels, whose tips are moulded to look like human toes. It seemed like quintessential Huppert: an arch joke about the furore over the festival’s insistence on heels for women at events, rising above the idiotic dictate and the barefoot rebels who have recently flouted it.
Except apparently I’m overthinking it: “People were looking at my shoes?” asks the actor, in her soigné tones, on the phone from Paris. Yes, those weird ones with toes. “No, I wasn’t making any statement. Though they were very comfortable, so I was able to climb the steps very pleasantly.” She probably has that nonplussed expression she does so well. It seems very Huppert to deny everything, too.
In recent years, she has become something of a fashion totem, moving on from decades of embodying classic French style to fronting outre campaigns for Balenciaga and Adidas. It’s all quite curious for someone who has claimed to have “no style”. But all the same Huppert remains preternaturally attuned to the importance of surfaces and appearance, as shown by her new role in the corporate drama La Syndicaliste (The Sitting Duck). Playing real-life Irish whistleblower Maureen Kearney, at one point she reapplies her lipstick with an almost blithe sangfroid following a gynaecological examination after a horrific rape. “When I read it in the script, I found it created a kind of confusion. There’s something incongruous, unusual about it. It’s a gesture we can’t explain very easily.”
It’s yet another example of Huppert’s peerless attention to detail, mining externalities to suggest compartmentalised and troubling depths. Kearney was an English tutor and union rep for the energy firm Areva, who was assaulted in 2012 by masked assailants when she tried to alert the French government to the sale of nuclear technology to China. They carved a letter A into her stomach and inserted the knife handle into her vagina. Huppert didn’t meet the whistleblower until shooting had started, but spent much time divining her character from photographs. There was something almost overly insistent in her clothes, her glasses, the fact she always had the same hairbun, she says. “You could feel she maybe wanted to resemble the women around her. So she laid on a kind of elegance that was sometimes a bit awkward.”
Within Kearney’s corporate cosplay, Huppert filled in the lines with the opaqueness that is her stock in trade – and was what fascinated her most about Kearney’s story. The unionist was accused of having staged the assault to smear Areva. She was subsequently convicted, and then later acquitted on appeal. “It’s what I call her double sentence,” says Huppert. “It’s the violence she underwent, but at the same time the fact that no one believed her. What was interesting was to lend a face that lets us understand why we didn’t believe her. One that had a certain complicity, a certain ambiguity.” Part of this unknowability may have been the result of the need in the business world for Kearney to constantly have her game face on. But part of it was the result of her refusing to act her expected part; of not being – as Huppert puts it – “a good victim”. That’s where La Syndicaliste joins up with Elle, the 2016 rape-revenge drama that reaffirmed Huppert as a fearless acting maverick.
Huppert says the film took on a more feminist accent after #MeToo. Six year on from that movement’s launch, it’s also timely how La Syndicaliste shows that collective action can’t resolve or protect against every instance of individual oppression. Huppert acknowledges that group advocacy is important, pointing out the record number of women in competition at Cannes this year: “[The movement] has ended up entering people’s minds.” But if her on-screen indomitability has made her a feminist icon, her engagement with it seems conditional. Without joining a French contingent, including Catherine Deneuve, who say “Bof!” to #MeToo, she prioritises her personal creativity as where the most meaningful statements are made. “The act of making a film remains something solitary and individual. There’s no rulebook, you can’t say: you must absolutely talk about certain things and in such a way. It has to remain a free and individual act.”
Her reputation is founded on a towering record of playing woman who are “at the centre [of their films] and whom we see in their totality”, from her parent-murderer in Claude Chabrol’s 1978 film Violette Nozière, to a discontented wife philandering with Gérard Depardieu’s bit of rough in 1980’s Loulou and her lacerating turn as a sexually repressed teacher in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, in 2001. She says she has always sought to work with female directors, such as Márta Mészáros, Diane Kurys and her sister Caroline. Yet at this stage in her career, she is a self-directing force.
But what about those without her pedigree, without the power to drag the industry round to their ways of thinking and standards? I mention Portrait of a Girl on Fire’s Adèle Haenel, who recently quit cinema, saying she could no longer work within a corrupt and abusive system. What does Huppert think of her stance? She sounds irritated: “I’m here to talk about the film I’ve made. If every time we do an interview these days, we have to go over everything in the news, then we’ll never talk about cinema.” But doesn’t cinema exist in relation to daily life? Isn’t Haenel’s position an interesting one? “All positions are interesting,” she says, with a curt laugh. “They always tell you something. Luckily, we all have different positions.”
Hers is that it is still worth working in the film industry. “Obviously, because otherwise, I wouldn’t continue. I’m not going to quit making films overnight, that’s for sure. Cinema still seems to me like a place where we try to say things with a certain faith, a certain ethic. I still want to be part of it. I certainly don’t want to exclude myself from it and condemn the whole of it. I can condemn small parts, but not all of it.”
It’s in keeping with the introspection and elusiveness of her acting that Huppert’s take on the industry is individualist, not politicised. That conviction has allowed her to forge long partnerships with three directors: seven films with Chabrol, who helped launch her career and with whom she made 1995’s frighteningly controlled thriller La Cérémonie; a six-film collaboration with Benoît Jacquot; and four with Haneke, most recently 2017’s Happy End. Despite the existential abysses she and Haneke have crossed together, she says – and contrary to his reputation – he likes a laugh: “He’s really funny. It astonishes everyone.”
Meanwhile, she has a fourth collaboration in the works with La Syndicaliste’s Jean-Paul Salomé, with whom she made 2020’s Mama Weed. A caper about a police translator who becomes a drug dealer, it showed how Huppert’s enigmatic suppleness and poker face can be harnessed for comedy too. But she already sees salient themes emerging in her work with Salomé: “They’re characters who are masked, who wander a bit inside themselves, try out different identities. Which lets us play around and let the characters go off on the wrong tracks. It’s like being given the possibility, inside the official film, of digging out your own film.”
It sounds as if you’d need five heads to juggle this as an actor. But frequently, she appears unabashed in interviews about how easy she finds the work – perhaps to deflect attention from the places she must go to achieve it. “Yes, of course,” she says, with a chuckle. “Maybe I don’t want to overdramatise the subject, so I prefer to say that it’s easy. Obviously, you can’t just reduce it to only saying it’s easy, but it’s not difficult either. So I don’t know … there’s a place where it’s fascinating more than anything, which is difficult to describe because you fall quickly into cliches. But it’s a kind of work in which you’re not always just at play.”
After six decades in the public eye, she draws a similar gauzy veil over her private life and the intimacies of her upbringing in suburban bourgeois Paris. As in so many of Huppert’s films where perversity and destructiveness erupt out of the most benign settings, there is little indication where these preoccupations in her work stem from.
Interestingly, her father, Raymond – who died in 2003 and from whom she has spoken about inheriting a certain tendency towards silence – ran a company that made safes. Given many of her characters’ impenetrability, is a capacity for secrecy a Huppert family trait? “What a funny question,” she says. “It’s a bit manufactured as an idea. Sorry. It’s true that it’s a possible thread, one that maybe I’ve jokingly looked into myself. When you’re an actor, you keep secrets, but at the same time, not entirely for yourself. You reveal them to the entire world.” But there’s one secret that resists safe-breaking the most of all: “Evil. That’s the mystery that unfortunately we see too often, every day. The origins of evil will always be a mystery.”
• La Syndicaliste is released on 30 June
