She is a diva. The greatest that she has given French cinema. And she last night she received a lifetime achievement award for her from a queen. Doña Letizia presented Isabelle Huppert with the Master of Cinema in the Misericordia courtyard in Palma de Mallorca. An award given by the Atlàntida Film Fest to the great protagonists of the history of cinema.
"It is an honor to participate in a contest focused on promoting new talents and directors", assured the French actress, who also had another much closer reason for traveling to Mallorca and the contest, her daughter Lolita Chammah is part of the cast of one of the films in competition at this 12th edition of the festival, Soul of beast , by Lorenz Merz, which won the Audience Award.
In addition to accompanying his daughter and supporting emerging auteur cinema, Huppert had some time for the press. The protagonist of Madame Bovary or The Ceremony (both directed by Claude Chabrol in the 90s) defended her choice of roles of strong women on the edge:
“They have never been risky choices. They are rewarding roles that have given me a lot. Since the Greek tragedy, impressive characters like Medea are the most attractive for the actor and the public, because the mission of cinema is to make us ask ourselves questions and these types of characters help us to consider many things”, Huppert said at a press conference in the Atlantida Film Fest. "There's nothing risky in what I've done so far," he insisted, "I've never been on a trapeze."
Huppert has not done the triple somersault in a literal way, but she has allowed herself to be pushed to the limits by the hand of directors like Michael Haneke, who in The Pianist (2001) turned her into that sexually repressed piano teacher who ends up mutilating herself. .
The actress is very clear that she prefers "to work with great directors, with geniuses, like Haneke or Chabrol, who are the ones who make the performers feel free, because they give them enough confidence to express themselves." And it is that for Huppert, freedom is fundamental and “it has always been what has guided me in my career, the freedom to be able to choose the role that I liked and to work with the director that I wanted”.
Free and seductive. This is how she has felt since she made her debut as the protagonist in Aloïse (Liliane de Kermadec, 1975), where she played a schizophrenic painter. Or with The Lacemaker (Claude Goretta, 1977), the film that gave her international fame, where she played a delicate Dan hairdresser who washed heads as if she were making lace.
Sweet or perverse, Huppert has always tried to seduce with his characters, because "I love exercising the art of seduction", which "is really what you work with in cinema, because it allows you to lead to emotion, ambiguity and the invisibility of what is hidden”, added the actress who faced the hot, almost infernal, afternoon in Palma de Mallorca dressed in rigorous white, pants and silk shirt.
Among her most recent villains, the protagonist of The Widow (Neil Jordan, 2018) stands out, a lonely woman (again a pianist by profession) who is truly terrifying. Huppert was delighted that "Jordan was inspired by me to write the part, because he is great and very extreme, although it is true that he is a monstrous character and Neil and I were in that monstrosity until the end."
Among those directors that the Hupperts have been able to choose, international names stand out such as Michael Cimino, Otto Preminger, Andrzej Wajda, the Taviani brothers, Ursula Meier or Joachim Trier, but the actress yesterday wanted to highlight her work with the South Korean Hong Sang-soo, with who shot In another country in 2012 and Claire's camera in 2017, because "I love shooting with him because of the imagination, diversity and way of making his films, which is also very political."
Huppert, who already received the honorary award at the last edition of the Berlinale, although she could not collect it because she tested positive for covid, is now 69 years old, has acted in about 100 films, has received many awards and is considered one of the best actresses of the 21st century. A race to show off and from which no moment is not thought to get off. When asked if she shares the feeling that older women don't get good roles in movies, she answered with a resounding "no."
