Anne Parillaud, the original Nikita, who loses herself in her roles, is now playing the philosopher of love, writes Stuart Jeffries
Anne Parillaud bursts through the door to the hotel room. She's wearing a small black dress and high heels. Her stockings are ruined and a rivulet of blood trickles from one of her knees. She's holding a big gun in both hands and her full, pouting lips are downturned a little at the edges. Suddenly, she rolls across the carpet and, lying on her front, fires a round of bullets straight into my heart. I fall, asking pitifully, "Pourquoi? Pourquoi?" She climbs to her feet, smooths her gym-toned stomach, fixes me with those beautiful eyes and says: "Parce que je t'deteste, connard!"
If only.
Instead, Anne Parillaud isn't playing the sexy assassin Nikita today. She hung up that little black dress a decade ago. Rather, she's doing another role from her repertoire, the philosopher of love. It's a masterpiece of bafflement and banality, consisting of borderline barking pseudo-philosophical speechifying.
"There is something to change in humanity," says Parillaud, by way of an opener. "Something is obviously not functioning. All the taboos, the love problems. You have to live like your parents love you. It's not that you're the best, but you can live that way."
Reclining in her chair and wearing jeans, a denim jacket, a T-shirt and a hairdo that could be an unwitting homage to Shirley Williams, Parillaud holds forth. She's part Shetland pony, part fading supervixen, and nine-tenths incomprehensible. It's hard not to warm to her game wrangle with sense and nonsense, especially when she says these words: "I think that people don't do that because when they arrived they are brainwashed. Our mission is not completely finished. Mother is amazing." She looks at me with big, wide eyes as though she had clarified something.
Ostensibly we're sitting in this sumptuous Parisian hotel room to discuss her performance in Catherine Breillat's new film, Sex is Comedy. The picture's narrative essentially describes how to film a sex scene. It's a title that loses a lot in the translation and gains only a characteristically Gallic whiff of pretentiousness. Not "Sex Is Comic", not "The Comedy of Sex", but Sex is Comedy, an assertion undone by the frequently po-faced and unremittingly self-regarding nature of the film. True, Breillat strives, sometimes effectively, to show the dialectic of shame and desire at work when film-makers shoot a sex scene (and perhaps whenever sex crosses the minds of repressed Westerners), but she doesn't do funny in any recognisable way.
Anne Parillaud plays the director dealing with the vulnerabilities and vanities of her two actors as they prepare to be on-screen lovers. It inevitably recalls an earlier film about making a film, François Truffaut's Day for Night. Truffaut played a film director on an emotionally fraught shoot, trying to stroke the sensibilities of Jean-Pierre Leaud's leading man in a creative way. In Sex Is Comedy, Parillaud's character has to buff the ego of her male lead, particularly when he feels his masculinity impugned by having to wear a prosthetic penis for the key scene. But she's a bully as well as a charmer. "The director is a predator," growls Parillaud towards the end of the film. "You have to drag the emotion out of them." How she does that is the film's unexpected denouement.
Sex Is Comedy echoes sex scenes from Breillat's previous films, Romance and À Ma Soeur. The former, about a sexually unsatisfied woman who goes on a quest for better sex, featuring cunnilingus, fellatio, anal rape and sado-masochism, was the first to depict an erect penis in a mainstream movie. It was banned in several countries. À Ma Soeur also dealt with sexual themes.
Some critics have taken Parillaud's performance to be a depiction of Breillat, the director who regards making films as a "pleasurable torture" and loves/hates filming sex. Parillaud baulks at this suggestion: "I'm frustrated with people who are going to say it's a movie about Catherine. It's going to be reductive if you talk that way." Breillat claimed she treated her actors just as appallingly as Parillaud's character does in Sex Is Comedy: "I sometimes spoke atrociously to her \ as I did to everyone else, but she was all right because it was for the film. So she got a lot of pleasure out of it."
I ask Parillaud if this is true. "Catherine is very demanding and obsessive and very professional. I certainly did not feel exploited. It is not real abuse. It is work. What is important is the film. I understand that completely. It's about the heart of doing movies, and not just making movies, but like there's something fundamental about it, not something pleasurable or agreeable. It's about needs." Parillaud lowers her voice confidentially: "I'm completely dysfunctional in this world, so I need a rival world where I can flourish and this is film-making."
Does this rival world involve abandoning yourself to your roles? After all, Breillat has said it is essential for an actress to surrender to take direction, and added: "And this surrender is, like in love, an absolute delight." Parillaud reflects: "I don't think I would call it an absolute delight. But for me, it is true that to abandon is essential when I act. I was once working with Leonardo DiCaprio on the Man in the Iron Mask. Here was someone who definitely has an aura of a star. But there is no abandonment. What comes across when you work with him is a facility and even easiness. I am not like that. I am not easy, I do not have the star's aura. I give myself to my roles, lose myself in them. When I played a vampire in Innocent Blood, I was not really a vampire. I don't even like them very much.
"But, just as I did not decide to be a vampire, none of us has power to decide who we are. I am like a vampire, an outsider, different in society."
Anne Parillaud was born in Paris in 1960. While still at school, she made her film debut as "the girl with the kitten" in the 1977 film, Un Amour de Sable, following it up the next year with a performance in Michel Lang's teen comedy, L'Hôtel de la Plage. She abandoned her law studies to become typecast as a promiscuous teenager in such films as Écoute Voir, Girls, and Patrizia. In 1985, she decided to take a break from acting to reinvent her image, and met director Luc Besson at a Paris film festival.
They moved in together and had a daughter in 1987. Then Besson wrote Nikita, the story of a drug-addicted murderess who is transformed into a hotsy-totsy political assassin by some shadowy government agency. He cast Parillaud in the role and filmed her for hours running around in a sexy black dress, shooting, fighting, writhing and pouting. "I have said before that I am nothing like Nikita," says Parillaud. "I hate guns. But for a while she was in me like a demon. I lost myself in the role of Nikita. I was her and I was not her. There was a cohabitation between me and the role."
Soon after Nikita became an international success, Besson and Parillaud separated. "I went to America to work. Nikita was a strong image, perhaps too strong. I went to try to break the stereotype."
She certainly gave it a good shot: there were no big guns, no ripped stockings and no judo chops in her American roles. In Innocent Blood she was a French vampire; in Map of the Human Heart, made the same year, she was a half-French Inuit who appeared in two memorable romantic scenes - one on top of a barrage balloon, the other inside the hollow ceiling of London's Royal Albert Hall.
What was that all about? Parillaud takes a big breath. "It was about love and sex. They are different, it is true. I think sex is OK, but sex is fun. It's about being revelatory about yourself, plunging yourself in. That is what the film is about - sex. It's about the game of desire, but it's a game. People think it's much more than that. And that's why there are problems. If you don't talk about sex, there will be problems."
Is this distinction between love and sex also at the heart of Sex Is Comedy? "I think so yes. I think there's sex. That is one thing, while love is about accepting somebody for the way she is. We don't understand this, and as a result the key is missing. We miss our key. The key of being happy. The key of serenity." - (Guardian service)
Sex is Comedy opens next Friday at the IFC, Dublin