Isabelle Huppert, 2024’s Lumière Award Winner: An Appreciation

Useful as it may be for facts and stats, an actor’s Wikipedia page isn’t ever the go-to place for a complete, nuanced description of their thespian essence, and so it proves for Isabelle Huppert. “Known for her portrayals of cold, austere women devoid of morality, she is considered one of the greatest actresses of her generation,” states the introduction, in a strikingly selective encapsulation of over half a century on screen. Huppert can certainly do froideur and severity with flair — she’s imposing beyond the bounds of her diminutive frame in such rigorous, chill-carrying films as Claude Chabrol’s “La Cérémonie,” Michael Haneke’s “The Piano Teacher” and of course Paul Verhoeven’s “Elle,” though whether these complex, conflicted women are “devoid of morality” isn’t a call for any one web editor to make. 

But it does Huppert an injustice to paint her, however admiringly, as some kind of quintessential cinematic ice queen. Her precision and perceptiveness as a performer have worked to many a temperature: she can be angrily righteous, daffily comic, racked with hot-blooded desire or, on occasion, disarmingly ordinary. Viewers only acquainted with Huppert’s more recent filmography might be startled by the girlish vulnerability she displays in Claude Goretta’s 1977 drama “The Lacemaker” — the performance that announced her, after a run of head-turning supporting roles in films like “Going Places” and “Aloïse,” as a new standard-bearer among France’s leading ladies, and won her a BAFTA for best newcomer. Playing a virginal, introverted teenage salon worker beset with mental health troubles, she was quietly heart-rending, while showing the foundations of the controlled self-possession she’d later bring to her work. 

The very next year, she won the first of her two Best Actress awards at the Cannes Film Festival for her haunting portrayal of a real-life teen parricide in “Violette Nozière,” the first of her seven collaborations with Chabrol — a director who drew out multiple facets of Huppert’s star persona over the years. By the time she teamed with him a decade later, stoically and empathetically playing the executed abortionist Marie-Louise Giraud in “Story of Women,” she exerted a maturely careworn air on screen, and won Best Actress at Venice; in 1991, she was Chabrol’s febrile, yearning “Madame Bovary,” the best screen incarnation to date of Gustave Flaubert’s tragic heroine. But it was her sly, brittle murderess in Chabrol’s aforementioned Ruth Rendell adaptation “La Cérémonie” that ushered Huppert with style into the cold-steel mode with which she’s most popularly associated. 

Hollywood beckoned as early as 1980, with a dewily romantic lead opposite Kris Kristofferson in Michael Cimino’s supersized western “Heaven’s Gate” — like a sort of hothouse flower, she was at once radiant and out of place, and if the film hadn’t infamously bombed, it’s hard to say what place the U.S. industry might have found for her. (Her subsequent dips into American cinema — Hal Hartley’s “Amateur” and David O. Russell’s “I Heart Huckabee’s” among them — have been sporadic and mostly indie-oriented.)  

After all, she’s always drawn toward auteurs as distinctive and uncompromising as she is: After her ferocious, emotionally exposed and Cannes-laureled turn as the masochistic, untethered Erika Kohut in “The Piano Teacher,” it seemed Michael Haneke might become her new Chabrol, and indeed they collaborated several times more. But Huppert casts her net too wide to be defined by any director; she is ever the auteur of her own career. This century alone, we’ve seen her stretch into heightened camp excess for François Ozon in “8 Women” and “The Crime is Mine,” revert into terse last-nerve desperation for Claire Denis in “White Material,” revel in riotously demented villainy for Neil Jordan in “Greta,” and demonstrate a mellowed, airy, slightly self-mocking drollness in multiple team-ups with the singularly prolific Korean director Hong Sang-soo. 

In 2016, she gave two of the finest performances of her career within months of each other, earning a long-overdue Oscar nomination for her intrepid, funny, wickedly perverse characterisation of a raped woman who brazenly resists being a victim in the pitch-black provocation “Elle.” But she was just as worthy, in a far gentler register, in Mia Hansen-Løve’s exquisite divorcee portrait “Things to Come”: wistfully pained and tender and finally resilient, by a path very different to her character in “Elle.” Such is the duality of Huppert, and what makes her one of the very greatest — that much, at least, Wikipedia has quite correct.