She glides into the film as the nihilist thinker Caterine Vauban, the sworn nemesis of the “existential detectives” hired by a burnt-out environmentalist (Jason Schwartzman) to solve a set of unsettling coincidences in his life. Where the detectives (brilliantly played by Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman) had evangelised an Eastern-sounding credo of harmony and interconnectedness, her business card guarantees “cruelty, manipulation, meaninglessness”. She is an icy priestess of moral relativity who seduces Schwartzman, rolling around in the mud and having them dunk each other’s faces into a puddle, all the better to relish the grubbiness of it all: y’know, l’éxistence.
Their sex scene actually goes one tawdry stage further than this and Huppert, a tiny-boned, finely beautiful 51-year-old woman, told Russell that she thought it was a bit de trop. Other than that, she had fun with the film, sending up her country’s philosophical penchant. “It’s always fun to be ironical about yourself and where you come from,” she says in her lightly accented English. “The movie carries a great sense of humour, and I think it’ s as critical of its own country as it is of others.”
We are sitting in an anonymous room in the Dorchester hotel, London, at 9am; enough to induce an existential crisis in anyone. Dressed in a pristine grey suit, Huppert warms to her theme, picking out choice words in French.
She didn’t have any particular philosophers in mind when she was deadpanning it up as Vauban, but says she gravitates naturally towards her character’s standpoint. “Obviously I come from France, I’m European, so I’m certainly closer to some kind of sceptical system of thought rather than being totally empathetic with the world and always smiling.” It is much more than a barroom stance for her; she talks with feeling about Derrida’s recent death and in 1995 she edited an edition of Cahiers du Cinéma in which, among the philosophers and writers on her hitlist, she interviewed the rationalists’ bugbear, Jean Baudrillard.
“He certainly doesn’t think like the existential detectives,” she laughs. “For me, to be a philosopher doesn’t mean you’re not trying to give an optimistic view of the world. But in the first place, it has something to do with deconstruction and scepticism. Especially now. On one hand, we’ve come so far in our world through all our scientific discoveries. But on the other, we’re so primitive and archaic in our compulsions . . . I guess if I were a philosopher, I would be sceptical. (Quietly) It’s hard to be really optimistic about our world.”
So Huppert’s performance in I ♥ Huckabees may be strict caricature, but she was cast to be the gloomy end of the scale with good reason. Her best performances — as the girl who murders her parents in Claude Chabrol’s Violette Nozière (1978) or, more recently, as the sexually repressed teacher in Michael Haneke’s La Pianiste (2001) — consistently subscribe to the more complex, bleak view of life. “I know I have this capacity — or tendency, shall we say — to create characters who draw out mixed feelings about who they are. They are certainly always the results of some negative situation that they’ve had to survive . . . I don’t try to idealise — they’re just the way they are. And the way people are.
She certainly has ideals in her sights when it comes to the standards of her craft, though. “Acting is a quest for truth, for being as true as possible,” she says, and to this end, Huppert tries to play “people”, not characters. “If you think you play a fictional character, then you don’t make it real. But if you think you play a person, then this person, automatically, is you. And it’s more real. A character doesn’t exist and can’t exist.” Drawing on your emotional stockpile to build a portrayal is, of course, one of the tenets of Method actors and Huppert acknowledges Dustin Hoffman, her co-star on Huckabees, as one of the great contributors to the tradition.
When, after 20 movies, La Dentelliere (1977) established Huppert as one of France’s greatest actresses, she was still only 22. She’s now appeared in 80 or so films, and is confident that audiences can rarely spot the telltale cracks visible in so many performances in her own work. “Most of the time, performances pretend to be true, but they are not true, because you can see the little tricks, how it imitates reality. I don’t like imitations.”
Allowed the freedom she needs, she has thrived under certain collaborators. She made six films with Chabrol, three with Bertrand Tavernier and her most recent partner-in-crime is the caustic Austrian director, Haneke. In last year’s Le Temps du Loup she played a mother who seemed to be struggling to hold together nothing less than the Western family unit itself, in a Europe ravaged by some unnamed apocalypse. But she holds up Michael Haneke’s La Pianiste as her career-revitalising experience. “I was amazed at how much he captured of me . . . it was so authentic. When you meet someone like this, you just want to do it again, because you feel like there’s so much interprojection between the two of you.”
It was an extremely exposing role — she played a Viennese piano instructor who finds outlets for her morbid sexual longings by slicing her genitals and visiting peepshows — and she had waited until conditions were right to work with Haneke. The director had originally come to London in 1996, while Huppert was playing Mary Stuart at the National Theatre, to offer her a role in an earlier drama, the sadistic Funny Games. Huppert considered it, decided it was too violent and left “no space for imagination”; on holiday in Ullapool with her children, she rang Haneke from a phone box to decline. But she was encouraged by the script for La Pianiste, which had a “character” for her to bite into, and always had a gut feeling that they would work together. “We started by not doing a movie together, which is a nice way of building a relationship, y’know, ’cos you do things for the right reasons.”
It gives you an optimistic feeling (sorry, Isabelle!) to hear someone, after 30 years in film, talking passionately about there being a right approach. And Huppert still finds reasons to be enthusiastic, both in her own projects and elsewhere. Her 21-year-old daughter, Lolita Chammah (the eldest of three children by the director Ronald Chammah), is also an actress. With almost bashful pleasure, Huppert says her daughter’s style is different from her own, that she wouldn’t dream of trying to influence her (being an actress is all to do with “how you can impose how different you are from other people”) and praises Lolita’s work in her latest film, L’Intrus, directed by Claire Denis. The development of the art, it seems, is what matters. “It’s always possible to go further and to be more truthful . . . and that’s what I like about acting.”
I ♥ Huckabees goes on general release on Friday
