Juliette Binoche refuses to discuss her private life because, she says, she already reveals so much in her various roles: from acting in her latest film Paris, to painting, writing poetry, starring in a dance collaboration, or disrobing for Playboy, says Hephzibar Anderson

By Hephzibar Anderson
Sunday August 03 2008

JULIETTE Binoche’s 25-year-long career has cast her variously as gamine seductress and dispossessed single mum. She has appeared as a beautician, an actress obsessed with Mary Magdalene and avant-garde novelist George Sand. She weathered her looks to play the down-and-out, artistic heroine of Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, she learnt to make chocolate for the film adaptation of Joanne Harris’s sticky-sweet bestseller and she teased the camera with smiles and smouldering looks to advertise Lancome scent.

Binoche is a contradictory character. She is a supremely serious actress who has worked with the likes of Jean-Luc Godard and Andre Techine, yet also made Hollywood movies such as Dan in Real Life, which saw her play Steve Carell’s exasperatingly blithe love interest last year. Renowned for her full-frontal soul-baring, she has created cinematic moments so raw that the viewer almost wants to look away. Remember that scene at the start of Three Colours: Blue? She has survived the car crash that killed her husband and young daughter, and as she receives the news, we’re brought so close to her beat-up face on its crumpled hospital pillow that we can almost feel her ragged breath stir the air around us. At the same time, she guards her off-camera private life with notorious intensity. In person, she is a porcelain-skinned miniature of the heroines with whom she’s made her name, but when she laughs, it’s the laugh of a far larger woman — a saucy, throaty cackle that bubbles up from deep in the stomach and erupts with shoulder-shaking, throw- your-head-back glee.

She laughs that laugh in her two latest films, both released last month. Olivier Assayas’s Summer Hours sees her play one of three adult siblings whose mother suddenly dies, leaving them with a fine 19th-century art collection to dispose of. In Cedric Klapisch’s Paris — a superior Love Actually — she is a single mother (again), harried social worker and sister to a seriously-ill man. There is nothing risky about these roles, but that isn’t to say Binoche has abandoned the career thrill-seeking that led her to work alongside the likes of Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien (and turn down Steven Spielberg); she has merely found a new outlet.

While filming Minghella’s Breaking and Entering in London, in 2006, she was asked by her shiatsu masseuse, a friend of the choreographer Akram Khan, if she wanted to learn to dance. Binoche did, and loved what she’d seen of Khan’s work. Her masseuse introduced them and they spent three days working in his studio. Next month will see the premiere of In-I, a dance work the pair have created. Was it chance, I suggest. “Intuition,” she prefers. “I see life as being a movement in you that has a certain certainty, but you can’t hang on. It’s like a healthy earth, you’ve got to put air in it, you’ve got to ask questions and move it in order not to become stuck in your thinking.”

Binoche has no real dancing experience. In Klapisch’s Paris, she performs an ironic, hip-shimmying striptease in one scene, but in another she is a wallflower who has to be dragged on to the dancefloor. For his part, Khan was cast in Peter Brook’s Mahabharata when he was just 14, and has collaborated with everyone from Nitin Sawhney and Antony Gormley to Kylie Minogue. The pair got to know each other through dance, an uncomfortably intimate intimacy, you’d have thought. “I’m used to it,” she breezes. “In film, we have to get intimate very quickly. You’re showing your soul — you have to get naked, sometimes physically but mostly emotionally. Dancers don’t really get involved emotionally that much, because it would be too much — they’re so close physically all the time, the body becomes like a tool.” She and Khan, she says, are aiming for both kinds of closeness. “To put emotion and body together — it’s a weird experience because it’s a very intimate relationship.” She has lost weight during rehearsals, and the actress sitting across the table from me, in the shade to ease a headache but framed by the loveliness of a summer’s day, is a shadow of the almost matronly figure she cut in Michael Haneke’s Hidden a couple of years ago. Dressed in torn jeans, Birkenstocks and a creamy linen tunic edged with embroidery, she has a new-found wiry strength thanks to the dancing. It’s all about stamina, she explains.

Of all the directors she has encountered, Binoche describes Taiwanese Hou Hsiao-Hsien, with whom she worked on last year’s Flight of the Red Balloon, as being the most significant to her development as an actress. “He gave me so much freedom that I needed to be even more creative, because there was no set-up, no lines, it was just an improvisation on the moment. When you start, you think it’s the directors who are the ones making the decisions, but for Hou Hsiao-Hsien it doesn’t happen like this, it’s shaped by those he’s working with, or by the sky, the cars, the birds coming into shot. Suddenly, you see creation in a different way. With Michael Haneke I’d say it’s the opposite — it’s intense energy determined by a decision he made on his own in his little house in Austria.”

Unsurprisingly, she describes her training at Paris’ elitist National Conservatory of Dramatic Arts as painful — “Painful in the sense that it was too rigid for me. I was already an independent atom.”

When I ask her if she has any plans to step behind the camera, she brushes off the question. “The collaboration is so close with some directors that I feel like even though I’m not in the editing room, I’m in the middle of it, I’m proposing things.” This wilfulness has not always gone down well. Claude Berri, for instance, replaced her in the title role of Lucie Aubrac after she reportedly queried some of the character’s lines.

Binoche’s parents were both in the business and one of her first memories is of being taken backstage at a production of Romeo and Juliet. She was two years old and overwhelmed by the smell of the corridors, the intimacy of the dressing rooms, the enormity of the proportions. Torn between painting and acting, she made her decision aged 17, when she directed and played in a production of Ionesco’s Le Roi Se Meurt, though she still paints whenever she can and a series of self-portraitswill go on show alongside a British Film Institute retrospective of her career at the South Bank in London next month. The portraits capture her in character playing Hana the nurse, her Oscar-winning role in Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient, for instance. Then there are her poems. “I wrote the poems because I wanted to write letters to the directors — I wanted to leave a trace of what had happened.”

Here she is on Minghella and the making of The English Patient, for instance: “Searching in the battle of being/We attempted to glimpse the other side/Dance took us in its arms/Bliss of green nature in the land of oil and vine.” It’s the impressionistic style that poetry permits that appeals to her. “I think in acting it’s that also — what can be said is between the words.” When she reads a script, the response she is waiting for is purely emotional. “I need to feel at the end that, ‘Aaaargh! I want to do it!’” Actually, she doesn’t say “want to” but “wanna”, a word that peppers her American-English, barely accented yet brushed with a distinctively Parisian hauteur.

At 44, unmarried but with a son by scuba diver Andre Halle and a daughter by actor Benoit Magimel, Binoche seems to have attained a liberating self-acceptance that can only be described as wisdom. Her relationship with success, for instance, is unabashed. “I embrace it, because it’s a sign of outside recognition. It’s not about you personally, but allowing it to come through you is a very touching thing. It gives you a sort of humility. If you take it personally it’s another story — then you need more and more and more and it’s never enough.” Last year, she even posed for French Playboy, though she initially refused to do nude shots and later agreed only if they were suitably abstracted. At the shoot, she disrobed and danced.

‘IT’S not that I’m taking more risks but I’m less fearful,” she tells me. “I stopped being the nice little obedient girl. When I started as an actress, I wanted to please so much. I think we all need to be loved. When we fail, we’re very, very hurt and behave in such a way that nobody is going to love us. There’s a moment when you’re jumping into the trust and you don’t know if you’ll be loved or not. You’ve got to dare to allow for not being loved — if you don’t dare that, you’re not an artist.” She brings it swinging back round to acting, but for a moment, it feels like we aren’t discussing that at all. Earlier this year, Parisian tittle-tattle went into overdrive at the suggestion that Binoche might have been left by Santiago Amigorena, the Argentinean screenwriter with whom she’s been romantically linked since 2006.

“I don’t speak about my private life. I’m very intimate in my way of working, and I reveal a lot in me in films, so I don’t need to reveal my private life because I’m giving enough. I give so much on screen I can’t give everything to the public. I’m very good at being the keeper of my privacy.”

There are other things she doesn’t really want to talk about. She doesn’t want to talk about the dwindling supply of roles for women over 40. When it comes to future ambitions, she says, gnomically, “I am in the moment.” There is something profoundly Gallic about the way she shrugs off questions, picking at a bunch of purple grapes and tossing her tousled, chin-length auburn curls.

Trying to pin down the nature of her own life’s role, she comes up with the analogy of actors as therapists. “We help people heal themselves, think about themselves, get their emotions back into them,” she says. “It’s the connection between your body and your heart. You’ve got to make a connection — some people are disconnected, or else between their head and their body there’s not a heart. By subliming life into film, we actors condense all the questions that a human being can go through.”

It’s a theory that neatly ties up her retrospective with her new departure as a dancer, but Binoche’s power as an actress rests in the spaces between the lines, between the movements that Khan has choreographed for her, and between her own brush strokes. For all that she strips down emotionally on screen, it’s what remains hidden and unvoiced that is most compelling — that corner of her self she guards so fiercely, even as the camera zooms in.

© Observer

Source: Independent.ie

• Binoche’s career path knows no boundaries