Despite international success as an actor and director, Sandrine Bonnaire has never lost touch with her unorthodox Parisian background, and the perspective on humanity that it gives her, writes LARA MARLOWE
THE CHARACTER played by Sandrine Bonnaire in Safy Nebbou's latest film, Mark of an Angel, is a pretty blonde housewife living in the eastern suburbs of Paris with her husband and two children. In real life, Bonnaire lives in a two-storey 19th-century house facing the Bois de Vincennes, in the eastern suburbs of Paris, with her husband, screenwriter Guillaume Laurant (who won fame and fortune with the screenplay of Amélie) and her two daughters. With its overgrown flowering shrubs and lazy sheepdog, their home exudes well-being.
A photograph of Bonnaire's four year-old daughter sits on a table in the entry. She resembles Lola, the six-year-old girl at the centre of an emotional struggle in Mark of an Angel. Like the women who appealed to King Solomon in the Old Testament, Claire (Bonnaire) and Elsa, played by Catherine Frot, both claim the same child. It is a powerful, disturbing film about maternal instinct.
The film’s title refers to the small indentation between the nose and mouth. Myth says that babies are born knowing all the secrets of life, but an angel presses a finger on the upper lip, saying “shhhh” and leaving an imprint. The baby forgets as it grows up. At the end of the film, speaking of the events surrounding her birth, Lola says: “I don’t remember.”
Bonnaire arrives for our interview wearing blue jeans, high heels and a red-chequered blouse, looking for all the world like a pretty blonde housewife. Life imitating art? I cannot shake the impression that Bonnaire, like Claire in the film, hides secrets.
Bonnaire is so natural, her presence so luminous, that for much of the film, the viewer is convinced she’s just a fresh-faced girl next door. Elsa (Frot) disrupts the domestic idyll with her obsession over Claire’s (Bonnaire) six year-old daughter. Frot seems neurotic, even mad; Bonnaire healthy and normal. For much of the film, Bonnaire leaves the more complex, challenging role to Frot; a generous sacrifice for such an accomplished actor. “What was difficult was playing all those banalities,” says Bonnaire. “At the same time, I knew there were interesting things to come later in the film.”
The turning point comes when Bonnaire, destabilised by Frot’s intrusion into her family life, spins out of control at high speed. “Safy told me he wanted a scream of pain and despair, and he wanted my face to be disfigured, to contrast with the happy, smiling woman that I was up to then,” Bonnaire explains. “It’s a scream of anger and suffering. I thought of physical pain. It comes from the stomach, from the womb.”
Bonnaire was 15 when she went along to an audition with a sister who was answering a newspaper advertisement. The director Maurice Pialat was looking for a teenage girl to play the lead in To Our Loves. Her sister didn't mind losing the role to Sandrine because: "It was between me and a middle-class girl who'd taken theatre courses. We were from a working-class background, and we tended to be sectarian about les bourgeois.We were so proud to beat the bourgeoisethat my sister was very happy."
In To Our Loves,Bonnaire played a teenage girl who seeks to define herself through the men she encounters. She won a César for most promising actress, France's equivalent of an Oscar, for the role. "Pialat taught me how to act," says Bonnaire. "I still use his method, which is to try to keep as much as one can until the last moment, to concentrate one's energy where it is needed."
Bonnaire has made an astonishing 45 films in 26 years. Directors obviously love working with her, because they keep coming back. She shot three films with Pialat, three with Jacques Rivette, two each with Claude Chabrol, Agnès Varda and now Safy Nebbou. Varda's Vagabond(1985), in which Bonnaire played a young woman who is fatally seduced by the freedom of homelessness, won her a second César and the Los Angeles Film Critics Award for Best Actress, and firmly established her as the new French film star of the 1980s.
Bonnaire met the US actor William Hurt in 1991 while shooting La Peste, Luis Puenzo's adaptation of the Camus novel The Plague.They stayed together for four-and-a-half years, and had a daughter who is now 15. Bonnaire travelled often to New York to be with Hurt, and he obtained French residence. "I absolutely could not live in America, because I feel too French," says Bonnaire. "It's in my genes. I love France, the culture, the countryside, the food, the wine. The US for me is a country where everything is too big, too noisy. I don't know how to explain it. I feel very lost there, very small."
Bonnaire might have tried to break through in Hollywood, as Audrey Tautou and Marion Cotillard did after their respective successes in Amélieand La Vie en Rose. "It's true. The French fantasise a lot about America," says Bonnaire. "But not me. I don't reject it, but I don't dream about it. It's not easy to pursue a career in the US. For Hollywood, we'll always be the Frenchies."
IN JUNE 2003, Bonnaire went to Cabourg, Normandy, to receive a prize at the Festival du film Romantique for her role as a woman who falls in love at first sight in Philippe Lioret's Mademoiselle. Life imitated art. She met and fell in love with Guillaume Laurant, who was at the festival to accept an award for Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the director of Amélie.
Bonnaire has played drifters, ingénues and vamps, a vengeful illiterate maid who murders her employers, and female heroines, including Joan of Arc in two Rivette films and a brave French woman who is determined to escape from Stalin's Soviet Union in Régis Wargnier's East/West. In 2007, Bonnaire directed her first film, a documentary about her disabled sister Sabine. Making the film was a kind of deliverance, Bonnaire says. "I acted as a witness, to repair something." Sabine was diagnosed with psychological infantilism and autistic behaviour. Her condition deteriorated during five years in a mental hospital. But Bonnaire's film helped Sabine immeasurably, and she now lives in one of three centres for autistic people that Bonnaire helped establish.
"The success of the film opened everything up, and Sabine understood that she shouldn't be hidden away. She felt useful, regarded, and not only by me. We locked her up when she was a child, because we felt ashamed. Symbolically, I showed her to the world, which is the reason for the title, Her Name is Sabine. It's a way of saying, 'Look. We're not hiding her anymore. I'm introducing her to you'."
More than three-and-a-half million people watched Sabineon prime time French television. After a successful run in cinemas, the documentary won the Critics' Prize in Cannes.
Bonnaire intends to continue acting and directing. Her next film will be based on a man she met as a child, who could not get over his love for her mother and eventually became homeless. The seventh of 11 siblings, Bonnaire grew up in Grigny, an immigrant suburb of Paris. Her father was a metal worker and her mother a devout Jehovah’s Witness. Her success has complicated her relations with her family. “Some of them are very jealous, that is certain,” she says. “Others understand and are very happy for me. What I’ve earned, I have used to help my family. I bought houses for my mother and sister. None of them lives in public housing any more, thanks to me.”
Her family relationships were “intensely close, passionate”, Bonnaire says. “You can never leave your family, and at the same time, you’re permanently leaving them. You need a certain distance to feel at ease with them, and to be able to lead your own life.”
Bonnaire believes her unorthodox background enriches her acting. Through her family, she remains in contact with the least privileged members of French society.
“I have a sister who is paid €8 an hour for caring for the elderly. I’m connected with a certain reality, which I don’t want to forget. Because I’m from there. It’s my foundation, what enables me to remain balanced and to work. The job of an actor is to bring unknown characters to life. If you aren’t connected with life, you can’t do that.”
opens at the Irish Film Institute on May 22nd
Mark of an Angel