She’s quaint and philosophical, but despite being the walking archetype of French insouciance, Juliette Binoche seems to have let Gérard Depardieu’s recent grilling under her skin
IS IT WRONG to be a teeny bit frightened of Juliette Binoche? It's not just that she has a reputation for being frosty with journalists. Like French contemporaries such as Isabelle Adjani or Isabelle Huppert, Binoche – star of The English Patient, Hiddenand Three Colours: Blue– appears wreathed in an effluvium of studied importance. Nobody is likely to mistake any Serious French Actress for Cameron Diaz (or Adam Sandler for that matter). They have a demeanour that demands respect and obedience.
Sure enough, when I am ushered into her presence she greets me with a contained hauteur. She is wearing all black: something a bit like a dinner jacket, tapered trousers, a complicated blouse. A hand is extended politely. A vague smile crosses her lips. She’s extremely polite, but it doesn’t feel as if we’ll be playing Twister any time soon.
Binoche is in London to promote a complex, intriguing film entitled Certified Copy. The first European work by Abbas Kiarostami, an Iranian master, the picture stars Binoche as an antique dealer escorting a visiting author around the prettier corners of Tuscany. A treatise on fakery and impersonation, Certified Copy(check out that title, irony fans) is the sort of film that urges questions but defies lucid explanation.
“Yes. I haven’t talked about it since the Cannes film festival,” she says. “You never know what’s real in the film and in life too, I think. There is that famous Chinese story about the man who dreams of being a butterfly, then wakes and wonders if he is now a butterfly dreaming of being a man.” She does this sort of thing quite well. Ask her a question and she’ll meander up a philosophical byroad rarely travelled by American stars.
Adjani and Huppert should take note. Binoche pulls off the scary French thespian thing. When she won the best actress prize at Cannes this year – for Certified Copy– she made a point of protesting the continued imprisonment of the Iranian director Jafar Panahi. "There's not much revolution in the air in France these days, that's for sure," she says. "I didn't decide to do it until that very night. They actually had this sign with his name on it on an empty chair. So I took it up with me."
The image of Binoche brandishing a sign with Panahi’s name upon it greatly increased the hubbub around his detention. Sure enough, within 48 hours the Iranian authorities set the film-maker free.
Binoche is sensible enough not to claim her actions precipitated Panahi’s release. It was, however, a cool and disciplined gesture of protest. Her behaviour seems all the more impressive when you consider the sort of day she’d had.
“I was in Paris and they phoned at 1.45pm to say that I should get to Cannes,” she says. “I arrived in Nice at a 5.45pm and had to be up the stairs in Cannes at 7pm. They had to send a motorbike, and then I arrived with about 15 minutes to spare.” Well, she looked quite polished and primped.
“Yes?” she says with the faintest tilt of an eyebrow. “Well, I had had quite a day.”
Now 46, Binoche was raised for this life. Her father, Jean-Marie, was a director and an actor; her mother, Monique Stalens, was also in the business. Political people, who engaged in the 1968 street protests, the couple split up when Juliette was four and ultimately decided to send the poor girl away to boarding school. In earlier interviews Binoche has indicated that she did not have a particularly happy childhood, but she says an actor can draw on early traumas when creating roles.
“You have different lives,” she says gnomically. “You have an inside life and an outside life. There are maybe other lives as well. It was difficult when I was young. But, as an artist, you draw from your lacks.”
Your lacks? "Yes, if you don't have something you build from that just as you build from your strengths. Other people may have had more stability than I did as a child, but maybe I had something they didn't have. I got inspiration from my parents, for example." Unsurprisingly, her parents reacted calmly when she decided to take up acting. After studying at the National Conservatory of Dramatic Arts, in Paris, she spent a while with a touring company and took the odd tiny part in French films. Her breakthrough came, in 1985, with a lead appearance in André Téchiné's Rendez-vous. Winner of the best director prize at Cannes, the picture catapulted her towards more high-profile projects, such as Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Beingand Léos Carax's Les Amants du Pont-Neuf.
Binoche has somehow managed to maintain a steady level of fame ever since. An occasional presence in English-language films – she won an Oscar for The English Patient– she has come to be seen as a walking archetype of enigmatic French insouciance. I can't imagine she enjoys being recognised all that much. She doesn't come across as the sort of person who'd happily pose for a snap with Max and Betty from Boise, Idaho. How, for example, did she cope with seeing her face on every poster and on the front of every programme for this year's Cannes Festival?
“As an actor you are used to that,” she says. “That doesn’t bother you, because you know you are not just a picture. I was naked on posters when I studied as an actress, and that was a bit of a scandal in my family. There’s my name – my grandmother’s name – on a poster and I am buck naked. But if you put your heart into the work you have to risk exposing yourself.”
Maybe so. But Binoche has done a good job of keeping the exposure within defined boundaries. She has two children: the elder by André Halle, a scuba diver; the younger by the actor Benoît Magimel. But she somehow steers interviews away from questions about her boyfriends. She is more forthcoming about the challenges of raising children while living the life of an international movie star.
“Do I get the balance right?” she ponders. “What you always feel is that to be really balanced you have to question yourself all the time. I could not live without being a mother. I could not live without being an artist. You survive as best you can. I’ve made mistakes. But I look at the kids and they seem pretty much okay. I try to take them with me as much as I can. So they went to different schools all over the world. They went to South Africa, San Francisco, London. That’s an education.” Binoche says the kids are quite blase about their mother’s career. If they take after her, that is quite easy to believe.
When she laughs, she does so slightly guiltily. Enthusiasm is conveyed by a furrowed brow rather than any sort of gesticulation. Yet she looked genuinely thrilled when she won that Oscar back in 1996. The announcement has become one of the most viewed clips in recent Oscar history – not for Binoche’s fervour but for the fury that crossed the face of her fellow nominee Lauren Bacall.
“I talked to her and she was very warm,” she says. “Of course she would have liked to have won it. She had a long career and wanted to win one before they had to give her an honorary one. I was looking for her when I won, and I would have given it to her. Everyone was expecting it. So I would happily have given it to her.”
That success opened a great many doors for Binoche. She remained, however, cautious about accepting too many roles in too many idiotic American films. After all, few French actors make that transition successfully. Appear in a glut of mainstream pictures and you risk dispelling the Gallic mystique. “I am good at forgetting things,” she says. “So if I have made bad decisions, if I turned down the wrong film, then I forget that. I make sure I just remember the things I accepted.”
Very sensible. I think we have now become good enough chums for me to raise the issue of equivocal attitudes to Binoche in her homeland. She has, in previous interviews, acknowledged not everybody loves her in France. The issue came to a head last week when Gérard Depardieu, during a festive-sounding interview with an Austrian magazine, laid into his compatriot with ungentlemanly gusto. “I would really like to know why she has been so esteemed for so many years. She has nothing. Absolutely nothing!” the big man said.
For the first time in our conversation Binoche looks genuinely fragile. She wags her head in dismay. “I don’t know what that was about,” she murmurs. “It didn’t reach me or hurt me, because I don’t understand it. I thought maybe it’s jealousy. But I thought it’s weird to be jealous of me in that way. He has the right to say that – to feel that. But why does he feel the need to go public?” She leans in and I realise that the question is not quite rhetorical. She genuinely wants an answer.
Well, Depardieu is always trying to attract attention in interviews. Isn’t he? He enjoys causing a fuss. “He wants publicity? Maybe that’s what it is. I just don’t know.”
Anyway, never mind all that. She’s got an Oscar and he hasn’t. Moreover, for all her reserved poise she radiates a certain optimism about the future. Depardieu’s whinges won’t get her down.
“It’s a contemplation time for me now,” she says. “I am taking care of my family. But you have to wait and see what life gives you. Life will find a way. That’s how it all happens.”
How quaint. How philosophical.
She is still a littlescary, though.
