Isabelle Huppert has already received a number of awards in her career. Twice as best actress in Cannes, for example. She has also won a bear in Berlin (as part of the ensemble in François Ozon’s “8 Women”). Does such a superstar still need the Honorary Golden Bear at the Berlinale? Or is it rather the Berlinale that she needs, the great French actress?
In this travel-hostile year, the Berlinale has to rely even more than usual on the European, and especially the French, greats, including Juliette Binoche and Charlotte Gainsbourg. But Huppert also seems to be attached to the festival, and to German-language cinema anyway. She admires directors like Werner Schroeter and Michael Haneke as her great allies, with whom she has worked just as intensively as with compatriots like Claude Chabrol.
Unfortunately, at the beginning of the week, the message came that Huppert had tested positive for Covid-19. She of all people, who was one of the first to come back to Berlin for the face-to-face interview during the first lockdown. At the presentation of the Honorary Golden Bear on Tuesday, she was only connected virtually on the screen in the Berlinale Palace. Serious, composed, as a great actress, she masters pulling herself together, holding back her feelings, only allowing them to leak through in a well-dosed manner. It’s not clear how badly she got it, but she confesses that she feels very alone right now.
“I look into your eyes and see hate, love, life and death”
Her fellow actor Lars Eidinger, with whom she stood in front of the camera in “À propos de Joan”, plays with the absurdity of the award ceremony without a prizewinner in his laudatory speech. That is exactly the same situation as when he saw Huppert for the first time. She up on the screen as a “piano player”, he down in the cinema. Even if he couldn’t talk to her at the time, she spoke to him intensely. It was a very heartfelt and personal laudatory speech, in which Eidinger derived the nature of the profession, which is also his own, from her playing. “It seems like you’re doing nothing, like you’re just standing still, while at the same time everything is there, the whole range of ambivalence. I look into your eyes and I see hate, love, life and death, hope and hopelessness. I see being and non-being.”
You big on the screen, he as a small spectator in front of it – like in the cinema. Lars Eidinger held the laudatory speech for Isabelle Huppert in the Berlinale Palast.
(Photo: Sebastian Reuter/Getty Images)
He learned from her that in front of the camera and on stage it’s not about the art of lying, but about absolute truthfulness in the moment: “That’s what makes your game so real. Instead of forcing things, let it be you they happen. That’s why you’re the actress of the moment. So, who’s there? It’s Huppert.”
It’s true, the 68-year-old is not one of the chameleon actresses, in every role she remains herself to a large extent. Isabelle Huppert has often emphasized how lucky she was at the beginning of her career, when she entrusted existential roles to her very early on that focused on the inner workings of the characters rather than on the outer stimuli. From the beginning she has explored the extremes of human existence, lust and desire, loneliness and grief, relationship and separation.
Of course it’s nice that Isabelle Huppert could at least be connected while she’s being celebrated in the Berlinale Palast. But of course it’s still a workaround. She is cheered at the end, but unlike other events like this, there is no standing ovation. And not a beaming winner either, just the famous, composed face, with the subtle twitch around the corners of the mouth, in which everything can lie, from irony to mockery, from harshness to condescension. Her new film “À propos de Joan”, which was shown afterwards, is a small one Best of Huppert in all moods. Love and separation, happiness and pain, lightness and heaviness, compressed into a 100-minute film. And again, as a viewer, you can sort through all the contradictions.