Juliette Binoche plays Maria Enders, a revered French actor in pensive middle age.
Juliette Binoche plays Maria Enders, a revered French actor in pensive middle age.
In her latest film, French star Juliette Binoche is virtually playing herself. She talks to Xan Brooks about starring in Clouds of Sils Maria, opposite Kirsten Stewart.
Clouds of Sils Maria is a handsome backstage melodrama that scampers in and out of the wings with such gusto that it's hard to tell where the rehearsal ends and the performance begins. Juliette Binoche plays Maria Enders, a revered French actor in pensive middle age.
Enders is a woman at a crossroads - forced to confront her own legacy and adapt to an industry increasingly in thrall to the teen demographic.
It's a hazardous business to draw facile parallels between actor and character, yet Olivier Assayas' film virtually stipulates that viewers do. It assures us that Enders is Binoche and that Binoche is Enders - at least up to a point, for the purpose of the drama. "I don't take it personally," the actor insists with a shrug. "Except that maybe I should, because that's totally what it is."
We meet in a Eurotrash bar on the French Riviera. The walls are lined with monochrome portraits of movie stars, each so airbrushed they verge on anonymity. Binoche turned 51 last birthday; she is no longer the tremulous ingenue who graced the likes of Three Colours Blue or Les amants du Pont-Neuf. The years have warmed and weathered her. Her new film provides her with ample opportunity to reflect on how far she has come.
Her relationship with the director takes us right back to the start. It was Assayas who co-wrote what would become Binoche's breakthrough role as the impulsive young actor in 1985's Rendez-vous and the pair have stayed friends ever since. Clouds of Sils Maria was not so much inspired by Binoche as devised from the ground up with her specifically in mind.
Juliette Binoche is warmed and weathered in Clouds of Sils Maria
"I didn't set out with the idea of writing a great part for Juliette," Assayas says. "It was never, 'Oh, let's have her as a headmistress in a dangerous suburban school', or 'let's have her as a trader in Singapore' or anything like that. No - I deliberately set out to have Juliette as she is, as the person that she is. That's more interesting than any fiction I could invent around her."
Assayas paints a portrait of an earnest, committed artist who takes her work so seriously that she sometimes worries its demands are beyond her. We learn that Maria achieved fame in an acclaimed stage play about the life-changing affair between a girl of 18 and a woman in her 40s. Now she is being asked to reprise the production, this time taking the role of the bitter, brittle older lover. She is further challenged by the presence of her formidable young assistant, Valentine (played by Kristen Stewart, who, in February, won a Cesar for the role). Passing a cigarette back and forth, the two women argue the merits of Hollywood blockbuster versus European arthouse and rehearse the lines of the play to the point where it comes to define and to channel the tension between them.
This creative friction was not exclusively confined to the screen. Binoche explains that she likes to rehearse whereas her co-star does not. Instead, she says, the 25-year-old Stewart would read over the scene a few minutes before the camera rolled and that this worked best for the character; it kept Valentine feeling fresh and spontaneous. "It was her way of dealing with her fear," she adds.
Somewhere around the middle of the film there is a telling moment when the women bathe in a secluded Swiss lake. Binoche strips off and strolls into the water without a care in the world. But Stewart is mindful to keep her underwear on. It strikes me that this scene might highlight another difference between their approaches - pitting uninhibited France against image- conscious Hollywood.
Binoche laughs; she's not entirely sure. "We didn't discuss any of that beforehand. I didn't know whether Kristen was going to be naked or not. But I think the choice was more natural than you think it was. The characters are alone by the lake. There's some kind of seduction going on. My character is more free so it was not right being cautious. But maybe the assistant wants to protect herself. So her decision made sense to me. I can explain it that way." She concedes, however, that they arrived at the film from vastly different directions. Stewart remains best remembered for her role as Bella Swan in the Twilight franchise. Binoche, by contrast, famously turned down Jurassic Park in order to work with the Polish film-maker Krzysztof Kieslowski.
Born in Paris to an artistic, middle-class family, Binoche longed to act from an early age. "I believed in myself, even if nobody else did. There was a confidence in me. My need to express myself was so big. I would call it my fire. My drive. My desire to attack."
She was still in her teens when she landed a supporting role in Jean-Luc Godard's Hail Mary, a contemporary retelling of the virgin birth. From there she bounded through the jolting romances of Rendez-vous, painted the Seine with fireworks in Les amants du Pont-Neuf and collected the best supporting actress Oscar for her work on Anthony Minghella's The English Patient.
Undeniably, her list of credits is dappled with the odd eccentric choice, yet she waves these away as though they are distant cousins, barely related to her at all. Where she differs from Maria is that she dislikes looking back. The past, she insists, is only important to the extent that it can be mined to fuel the work of the present. "So yes, I do use memories and moments. I'll use anything I can of my emotional baggage or previous actions. But that's only because the more experience you have, the better you are." She says that's why she's a better actor today than she was at 18.
Since completing work on Clouds of Sils Maria, Binoche has moved on yet again. She will next be seen driving huskies across the Arctic tundra in Isabel Coixet's period saga Nobody Wants the Night, and played Antigone on the London stage, a role she will reprise at the Edinburgh festival in August.
At home, she's the closest thing the French republic has to royalty. They call her "La Binoche", as though she has become her own brand, an inviolate definite article..
Gerard Depardieu once confessed he was entirely stumped as to what anyone saw in her. "She has nothing, absolutely nothing," he told one interviewer. "Please can you explain to me what the secret of this actress is meant to be."
"What's the secret?" Binoche frowns and appears to give the question deep thought. "There is a secret, I think. When you are front of a camera there is something that happens. Some relationship, some movement, some strange kind of suspension. That's where you find the layer in yourself that is duplicated in everyone. And when you get it right, if you can imagine all the hearts beating in one beat, it's like that. It's beautiful."
Who: Juliette Binoche What:Clouds of Sils Maria Where and When: At the New Zealand International Film Festival, July 23 and July 26
