HOWZAT

Her own parents were in showbusiness; her mother an actress, her father a theatrical director. She was four when they divorced, had an unhappy time at a Catholic boarding school, got into the highly competitive Conservatoire de Paris, quit the course, and started working with a boyfriend, Leos Carax, on small French movies; by 23 she was in the film version of the Milan Kundera novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, directed by Philip Kaufman, and that was that. The world was binoché, from the loftiest critic to the basest gawper. Praise was heaped on her in clichés, but for every “gamine” there was a “sultry,” so that she was, as she remains, hard to categorise; she could handle romantic comedy such as A Couch in New York as naturally as she could take on the heavyweight challenge of the French literary giant George Sand in Children of the Century.

In teaming up with 34-year-old Khan, she has found a similarly single-minded working partner: London-born to Bangladeshi parents; cast in Peter Brook’s Mahabharata at 14; fought off parental opposition to pursue a career in dance; founder of his own company; collaborations with author Hanif Kureishi, composer Nitin Sawhney and artist Anish Kapoor, the designer of in-i. The way Khan tells it, the two of them had started from nothing. “I filmed her a little, and we started getting to know each other. She said it should be like an exchange, breathing in and breathing out. So we met the next day, warmed up separately and thought about how we could start. It became an imitative game. It’s what a child does. My sister’s son is one year old, and tries to say everything in your accent.” Khan is married, has no children yet, but would like some. “We ended up, through improvising, with one becoming the voice and the head of the other, almost like an angel. The other person becomes your own inner voice.”

It is as intense as it sounds; if anything, more so. “We haven’t touched all the surfaces of getting to know each other,” he says. “We have to show each other our demons. If I can reveal mine to her, then she can reveal hers to me. It means that there is an intimacy. The way I am with her is not the way I would be in front of you.” If we are talking of love, it sounds as though they have plenty of the stuff for each other. It’s a bourgeois question, but doesn’t a professional relationship as profound as this one pose problems for the husband or wife? And aren’t the problems exacerbated by one of the performers looking like Juliette Binoche?

Khan has seen this one coming, and is unthrown. “I said to her [my wife]: when she and I kiss, how would you feel about that? She said, ‘You’ll know when to stop. I trust you. If you bring her into your real life, you’ll know where the line is drawn.’ That gave me the confidence.” But these are difficult areas, aren’t they, when play-acting is conducted with such conviction? “You mean it blurs the line?” asks Binoche. There would seem to be that danger. “It’s very interesting,” she replies. “This is a first for me, this finding of a balance between us. It’s almost like getting married, then learning to know each other after the contract is made.” More circling, entangling, analysing. Does she ever surprise you, I ask her sister, who replies: “I think she is working hard at surprising herself.”

A month on, they’ve come to London and are rehearsing at the National. With five weeks to go, the talking has all but stopped. “It’s contradictory to talk about it,” she says. “Like painting, it’s not about talking, it’s about doing it.” She looks smaller than she did in Paris, and appears to have lost more weight through these eight-hour days of movement. She’s tense and controlled, as if the whole weather of her has changed. Asked how she feels, she replies: “Erm, there’s no escape.” They’re opening at this theatre because its artistic director, Nicholas Hytner, has long been a fan of both artists. “When we produce a play,” he says, “we know exactly what that play is. When you put a choreographer into a theatre, you have no idea what he is going to ‘write’. This exists somewhere in-between, and these devised shows are always nerve-racking. It would be idle to pretend it’s not alluring to have such a great movie star here, but this came about because of her relationship with Akram.”

Su-Man is with them today. How does she think Binoche is doing? “Better than I had imagined,” she smiles, “technically and artistically. Juliette is a marathon runner, not a sprinter. She tries; she gives it everything she has. She is very open.” Then she and everyone else looks at Binoche as they always do, private and public alike, waiting for the next thing to happen on her face. And she, just for a moment, looks at the ground.

in-i opens at the National Theatre in London on September 6. The British Film Institute’s Binoche season runs from September 1 to October 5

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