Femme fatale
Most of the French celluloid doyennes who took part in Francois Ozon's 8 Women four years ago would consider their roles as a step beyond the mainstream. After all, it's a film that, with an all-female cast and all-indoors shooting, touches on disquieting issues of internecine warfare, class struggle and incest - all beneath the saccharine sheen of an all-dancing, all-singing musical.
For Isabelle Huppert, however, 8 Women is probably the least twisted material she has tackled. What's so misshapen about playing a bookish and sexually repressed aunt when her career boasts roles such as a highly strung, masochistic pianist (The Piano Teacher), a cheeky clerk-turned-murderer (A Judgment in Stone) and a stuttering factory worker trying to whip up a mutiny on the shop floor (Passion)?
The way Le French May's retrospective of Huppert's oeuvre is titled, The Art of Passion, is misleading - explicit fervour has never been the 51-year-old actress's favoured game. Unlike Catherine Deneuve and Emmanuelle Beart - her co-stars in 8 Women - Huppert has never traded in glamour or overt sexuality.
It's difficult to underestimate the impact Huppert has had on French film. Deneuve and Beart thrive on the mythical symbols that people still attach to French actresses - in their latest films, Deneuve plays a withering queen in Palais Royal!, and Beart plays a young mother seduced by a teenager in Andre Techine's Strayed. By contrast, Huppert continues to defy the stereotype of French femininity.
The physical and emotional extremes she's willing to plumb for her roles would probably unnerve even Lars von Trier, who cast Deneuve for Dancer in the Dark and is well-known for putting his female protagonists through hell. Those who saw her in Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher would probably agree. In one of the most staggering scenes, she cuts herself between her legs - the pleasure of pain over, she cleans up the bloody mess and races downstairs to join her mother for dinner.
It's a performance that makes her only the second to win two best actress awards at Cannes (her first was for Claude Chabrol's Violette Noziere in 1977). Her ability to carry such roles with aplomb has made her more the darling of cinematic auteurs than blockbuster producers. Throughout her career she has worked mostly for directors keen for the off-kilter, such as Haneke (with whom she would work again in 2002 in Time of the Wolf) and Jean-Luc Godard (she plays unruly in both Slow Motion, above, and Passion).