Hidden

Unearthly powers

Source: The Telegraph, January 1, 2006

Juliette Binoche is eerily composed and highly combustible in Hidden, her award-winning new thriller - and she's not so different in real life, as Catherine Shoard discovers

Berlin, 2004. Ice on the autobahn, frost in the air. Juliette Binoche is conducting a group interview with 20 journalists gathered for the film festival. An Australian woman dominates, keen to quiz Binoche on her skirt and lipstick and whether Richard Gere (with whom she was then working) really is all that.

The other journos huff, frustrated. One of them manages a question, then the Aussie cuts in with another: was it always obvious Binoche would become an actress, what with both her parents being in the business?

'I don't know,' came the reply. 'Was it always obvious you'd be a bitch?'

Paris, 2005. The sun's blazing and the boulevards sparkle, but one could be forgiven a shiver climbing the marble staircase for a one-on-one in Binoche's hotel suite.

France's top-earning actress has a formidable reputation for Gallic froideur. She stopped doing press altogether a few years ago; since starting again her motto has been 'As soon as I can, I go to court' (and she has, successfully). She is very withering, always has been - aged 17, she quit her place at the Paris Conservatoire, citing an allergy to her fellow students.

But not today. If not benign, exactly, she's certainly on the benevolent side of professional; kind, almost. She rattles off enigmatic theories on Art, punctuates them with a laugh that arrives out of nowhere, lasts ages, then disappears almost as abruptly. It's quite something, this - it starts off as a simple filthy giggle, then expands into something longer, louder, like a flock of seagulls spying some chips.

She's curled up on a chaise-longue, puffing cigarillos. She looks supple; she does a lot of stretching, she says. 'When your work is so mental you need to meditate, to be with your physical self. I like to spend time breathing, to say ''hi'' to my body.'

She's wearing slim jeans and a lace blouse that appears to have been fashioned from old balls of Kleenex. Few could carry it off; I'm not even sure she does.

She's here to promote Hidden (original French title Caché), a new film by the Austrian director Michael Haneke, with whom she worked five years ago on Code Unknown.

Binoche and Daniel Auteuil star as Anne and Georges Laurent, the middle-class Parisian parents of Pierrot, 12. Georges presents an upmarket arts show on TV; Anne works in publishing. They start receiving packages in the mail: surveillance footage of their home, wrapped round grisly little drawings. Who is sending them? And why? Georges admits he's hiding something, but won't say what.

Then Pierrot goes missing, and the marriage swiftly disintegrates. It's a brilliant thriller, fascinating on guilt and integrity (in particular with relation to France's involvement in Algeria), and, despite clocking in at over two hours, very jittery. Long spells of bubbling calm are shattered by sudden flares of emotion. Binoche is an old pro at this: composure crumbling into damp-nosed distress, and she explodes very memorably a couple of times. Is she this volatile off-screen?

'I can be patient,' she says, thoughtfully, 'until I'm not patient at all! Ha ha ha ha!'

That huge laugh, then dead serious. 'The lack of recognition of the other makes me impatient. But often I wish I was more able to put thought before words.'

Though there's an obvious post-9/11 subtext to Hidden (Georges tells one man, 'Terrorise me or my family and you'll regret it'), Binoche herself professes to have lost patience with conventional politics.

'It's horrible at the moment. The only solution in this shitty world is to turn back to the wisdom of those who have had to bring up children in a place of starvation. You dig deeper if you have less materialistically. But instead we impose what we think is best, and use our charity as a disguise to hide something else.'

Binoche has herself done her bit for charity - donating her fee as the face of Lancôme to a Cambodian orphanage - but the main way she consoles herself, she says, is to seek solace in spirituality. She studies the Bible and the Koran, but subscribes to no one religion.

'Let's say I believe in the Invisible, because as soon as you put words on those feelings it's so dangerous; it puts you in boxes I'm not comfortable with. Instead, I have a relationship with the Invisible. I have a vertical relationship.'

I ask for a gloss. 'A linking of earth to sky. Here on Earth we are very horizontal; we travel a lot, we use cars and boats, we constantly look along, not up. That's not healthy.'

Binoche employs this qualification - 'here on Earth' - a lot, at one point mentioning that her optimistic nature has been soured by 'living a little on Earth'. One wonders where she lived before.

This otherworldly aspect is crucial to her appeal. As Roger Ebert said of her performance in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1986), 'she's almost ethereal in her beauty and innocence'. In his review of The English Patient (1996), for which Binoche picked up an Oscar, Anthony Lane raved about those 'switchback moods that have always kept audiences guessing … there is an arousing, pale-faced pride in her own volatility'.

David Thomson anatomised her mysterious beauty: 'Are her cheeks carved by love's gaze? Did that hair fall on her head like night? And the eyes - are they part of her life or their own living creatures?'

As far as we know, Binoche was born in Paris in 1964 to Jean-Marie Binoche, a theatre director, and Monique Stalens, a sculptress and drama teacher. She vividly remembers much of her childhood, right back to being in her pram and needing her nappy changed. No, she doesn't think that strange. 'These are the memories I need as an actress. It's like a sculptor needs his own earth to create, my sensations are my soil.'

When Juliette, an only child, was four, her parents divorced and she was shipped off to boarding school, which she hated. She scraped her Baccalaureate and won that place at the Conservatoire. After she quit, she worked in the evenings to fund her way through daytime auditions. It wasn't long before her first big break, from Jean-Luc Godard, no less, who wrote a part for her in his latest play after a barnstorming audition in which she had to walk naked around a chair while reading a poem and brushing her hair.

She found fame early and young. Her troubles with the papers may be in part due to the blurry nature of on- and off-screen romantic attachments.

After 'a little affair' with Daniel Day-Lewis, whom she met on The Unbearable Lightness of Being, she had a four-year fling with Leos Carax, who first directed her on Mauvais Sang (1986). It was on the set of Carax's 1991 film Les Amants du Pont-Neuf that she met André Halle, a scuba-diver with whom she had a son, Raphael, now 12.

Four years later, she took up with another actor, Olivier Martinez (now Kylie Minogue's other half), whom she acted opposite in The Horseman on the Roof. He was replaced in 1999 by Benoît Magimel, her young co-star on Les Enfants du Siècle, and the father of her daughter, Hana, five. They split up in 2003 and Binoche's current paramour remains a mystery.

Although Binoche is unhappy to reveal his identity, personal relationships are what seem to intrigue her. What most interested her about Hidden was its exploration of how withheld information, once revealed, can change one's opinion of someone so quickly and so comprehensively.

Had she been in Georges' position, she thinks she would have confided her secret long before.

'I would, I would. The need for truth and confidence is quite paramount. I think that your partner is the person who knows you best - some people would choose to talk to a psychiatrist, some their sister, some their children, but [if I were in that position] I would choose my husband. That's the person that I've chosen to live with, to share with. In a relationship communication is the most important thing. In life, too. And even though I love silence it can be dangerous. We need words.' She looks soulful. 'No more lies, no more lies.'

Really? Does she never fib, then? 'It can happen. But rarely. It's a struggle. You have to be so careful with the words you use. But the reason we lie is because we have this reflex of wanting to protect ourselves which we learn in childhood. We are destined to repeat this, unless, as adults, we try to rediscover our innocence. Often we react because we're reminded of something deep inside us. So we must reconcile ourselves with our childhood selves.'

Sounds like quite a task. 'I think we can try. It is easiest when I am with my own children.'

These children are famously off-limits for an interviewer, but today Binoche seems happy to reveal that she likes to play puppets with them, that they all enjoy looking at paintings and imagining what the figures are saying to one another.

'I love to be with my children but when I'm only with my children I feel like I really need to get back to work. It's endless! As mothers I think we're all on the same page. When we work we feel it's not right, when we stop it's not right either!' Does she ever feel smothered? 'I can. You can only take each moment by each moment. If you think forward you get vertigo. You need oxygen. It's hard. How do you stand up on the boat in a tempest?' She pauses, then laughs again, so loud you can be in little doubt: she'll manage.

iercely private, flawlessly beautiful and famed for inhabiting her characters completely in both French and English-speaking films, Juliette Binoche believes in graft over glamour. The quintessential Gallic actress talks to James Mottram about her past roles, her forthcoming films and life as an indefinable Hollywood star

Strolling into the French Riviera hotel suite, Juliette Binoche arrives for our interview dressed for business in a black trouser suit and heels. Entirely co-ordinated to match her deep brown eyes and shoulder-length dark hair, it’s an elegant but modest dress code – but one entirely apt for the actress the French media simply call ‘La Binoche’. Now 41, it’s 20 years since she made her breakthrough in André Téchiné’s erotic drama Rendez-vous but she has aged remarkably well. “I’m not obsessed by looks,” she says, “I think you can become a prisoner of your own image.” In possession of an effortless beauty, while she may no longer be the face Lancôme reputedly paid $1 million a year to advertise their perfume Poême, it hardly matters. That the spray’s name is a pun on “peau-aime”, with the suggestion of “lovely skin”, becomes clear when you meet her. If there’s one word to describe her, it’s flawless.

Yet Binoche is not an actress entranced by the superficial elements of her profession, for acting to her is about graft rather than glamour. One who internalises her characters until their emotions literally seep from her pores – as demonstrated by her definitive role as a woman grief-stricken from the simultaneous loss of her daughter and husband in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours: Blue – Binoche is a performer who conveys pain like few others. Not that it comes without some cost to her. “I never felt being an actor or making a movie was an easy thing to do,” she says. “I’ve never seen it as something entertaining and easy. For me, it requires effort, dedication, inspiration, love – with your mind, your feet, your arms, everything in your possession, and out of your possession sometimes. You have to just have faith that it’s going to work. I don’t think I’ve ever been on an easy film, like a commercial film – which would be very difficult for me.”

This month sees the release of two films starring Binoche that express the dual nature of her career. Michael Haneke’s Hidden is the most critically revered movie of the last 12 months. Winner of three prizes in Cannes, including Best Director for the Austrian Haneke, the film was voted Best European Film at the recent European Film Awards with Binoche’s co-star Daniel Auteuil claiming the acting honours. Meanwhile, the US-set Bee Season, which casts Binoche opposite Richard Gere, is another example of the difficulty she has had with English-language projects before and after she won an Oscar for The English Patient in 1997.

That night, elated at being awarded Best Supporting Actress when everyone roundly expected Lauren Bacall to win for The Mirror Has Two Faces, she stammered to the world, “It’s like a dream. It must be a French dream!” And certainly her role as the nurse in Anthony Minghella’s sweeping epic felt like a hallucination next to the troubled reality of her other non-French roles. In 1992, she went from playing a stiff Cathy to Ralph Fiennes’ Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights to a woman who cheats on her fiancé with his father (played by Jeremy Irons) in Louis Malle’s Damage. The latter was particularly problematic, notably when she fell out with Irons after he reputedly stuck his tongue in her mouth during one of the numerous violent love scenes. “Sometimes in life things are not easy, and it changes you,” she says, rather elusively, of her time on the film.

This decade she veered from the sickly confection Chocolat (2000) to the laboured Country Of My Skull, the South African-set story of the Truth and Reconciliation Hearings that remains unreleased in the UK two years after premiering at the Berlin Film Festival. Only her bookish rural Czech girl, Tereza, back in her 1988 English debut The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, has gone any way to indicate her innate talent. Binoche admits acting in another language is not her forte. “When I don’t think about it, it’s okay. When I think about, it’s not so. Some specific words come more to me in English, and it’s very confusing. I remember when I was working in English all the time, and I had to do an interview with Elle magazine, and I couldn’t make a sentence. I was caught in the middle, not knowing which way to go.”

One can rather imagine Binoche feeling the same when it comes to sifting through scripts from her homeland and abroad. Bee Season is one such project that might have been better left untouched. Adapted from the novel by Myla Goldberg by Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal (mother to actor siblings Jake and Maggie), it’s a muddled attempt to draw comparisons with the mystical cult religion of Kabbalah and, of all things, spelling. Giving a full-blooded performance that deserves a better film, Binoche plays Miriam, a wife and mother-of-two on the verge of emotional collapse. As her Jewish husband scholar (played by Gere) becomes obsessed with their youngest child’s success in the National Spelling Bee, Miriam quietly implodes. “It was an interesting part,” says Binoche. “She’s covering up everything, but there’s a lot going on underneath.”

With the film helmed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, this was the first time Binoche has ever been co-directed. “I was wondering how it was going to be, because I’ve never had this experience before,” she says. “I was wondering who am I supposed to talk to! I said that to this one but now I have to say it to that one!” She calls them “like brothers”, though she admits she first thought they were lovers. “I thought something was going on, but it wasn’t! One’s straight – and straight is such a strange expression in English – and one’s homosexual!” It’s at this point that Binoche, throwing her head back, lets out that earthy chuckle of hers. “She’s got an amazing laugh. One of the great laughs of our modern times,” admits McGehee. “It might be the greatest laugh I’ve ever heard,” adds Siegel. “It’s so deep and real.”

Calling her both “serious-minded” and “gregarious”, they both admit that Binoche warmed to them only after the shoot finished. “There was a subdued thing that she stayed in a little bit over the course of making the movie,” says McGehee. “She is a very psychologically based actress in her preparation. She is very thorough, and she really digs deep into what motivates her character and why.” In other words, once she’s working, she inhabits the emotional landscape of her characters – which, given her choice of roles, is no doubt why she can be seen to be detached and reserved.

“I think the characters I play go through tunnels, like in Three Colours: Blue, for example, where she’s lost everything,” Binoche says. “In The English Patient, she loses her best friend; this patient is dying in front of her – there’s no hope, so she’s going to start from the bottom. In films we see extremes, because it’s where you have turning points. Before I thought there was a common denominator between my films – as if all my characters were sisters – but I’m not so sure now.”

That said, Binoche can certainly see why she chose her other new film, Hidden. Set in contemporary Paris, she and Auteuil play a suburban middle-class couple who begin to receive anonymous packages containing videotape footage of their house. Who is sending them and why is the core of what is a deeply disconcerting film that deftly tackles its heavyweight socio-political themes. The last time Binoche worked with Haneke was five years ago on Code Unknown. Another Parisian-set drama dealing with xenophobia and victimisation, it saw Binoche – who played an actress – deliver one of the most powerful scenes of her career as she crumbles to tears after two Arab teenagers verbally abuse her on the subway. “What I love about Michael is that he has a specific vision,” says Binoche. “Instead of doing charcoal, you’re doing oil painting and then drawing. It’s the same purpose somehow for an actress, but with a different vision.”

In Hidden, which references the infamous 1961 Massacre of Algerians in Paris, Binoche yet again found her conscience pricked. “The hope for me is to relate to the past today,” she says, “And that for me is the real question of the movie and the real hope of it.” Back in 2002, she attended a screening of a documentary L’Ennemi Intimé by her friend Patrick Rotman, about the French perpetrators working in the military during the Algerian war. Also attended by various journalists, Binoche wound up being invited by a French radio station to travel to Algeria to participate in a series of interviews programmed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the liberation of the country. “We have to go and say, ‘Forgive me, I’m sorry!’ It’s important as French people,” she says. “There’s been so much damage there and it hasn’t been talked about or shared. Not enough anyway.”

I ask her if she sees herself as political. “I would say I’m humanly engaged,” she replies, an answer that comes as no surprise given her background. An only child whose parents – theatre director Jean-Marie Binoche and actress Monique Stalens – divorced when she was four, Binoche was raised with a conscience. When I previously met her on the set of Country Of My Skull, outside Cape Town, she told me she knew about Apartheid from an early age “because my parents were communists”. “We listened to Belafonte and Makeba singing together when I was a baby, so I know all those songs by heart. That was my favourite record. So I know all these tribal songs, without knowing the meaning of the word, and that’s because I was brought up with this music.”

A headstrong child, Binoche was sent away to a Catholic boarding school after her parents separated, and it was during these early years that she developed her love for acting. “The desire came, first when I was in school, in the courtyard playing with my friends. It was my way to survive school. There was probably something as a child I wanted to express, something unsaid that I needed to share,” she explains. Returning to live with her mother, when she was 15 she attended a specialised arts school in Paris and three years later began to study acting at the National School of Dramatic Art of Paris and the Paris Conservatoire. While she briefly considered a career as an artist, she turned her attentions fully towards her profession when she got an agent through a friend and joined a theatre troupe that toured France, Belgium and Switzerland. Eventually following in her mother’s footsteps, and heading for the stage, she began to take work in film – notably in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1983 controversial retelling of the Virgin Birth, Hail Mary.

While she has had her periods living abroad – be it London or New York – during extended theatre runs, Binoche has always kept a house in Paris. She now lives in the suburbs with her two children – 11-year-old Raphaël from a brief relationship with a professional scuba diver named Andre Halle, and five-year-old Hannah from her time with actor Benoît Magimel, who starred opposite Binoche in 1999’s Les Enfants du Siècle. She has begun to show Raphaël her more family-oriented films – Chocolat and French comedy Jet Lag. “I’m waiting for him to ask to see films. I don’t want to impose it. He sees a lot of different films, but I think because I’m his mother, there’s something different about seeing your mother go through so many stages.” Being a mother evidently occupies what free time Binoche has to the point where she no longer paints as she used to. “My life is too busy,” she shrugs. “Having children, you have to spend time with them, otherwise why would you have them?”

As domesticated as she sounds, Binoche has had her share of on-set romances. She had a long affair with director Leos Carax, whom she met on his 1986 romantic thriller Mauvais Sang. They reunited for Les Amants du Pont-Neuf in 1991 for Binoche to play a role Carax wrote for her, complete with eye-patch and smudged cheeks. In between, she grew intimate on and off screen with Daniel Day-Lewis in The Unbearable Lightness Of Being before hooking up with Olivier Martinez, her handsome co-star from The Horseman On The Roof (and now the partner of Kylie Minogue) in 1995. I wonder how she copes with media intrusion into her life. “I’m just living my life and I try to have a normal life,” she says. She stops for a second to process the thought. “‘Normal’ doesn’t mean right to me! I don’t know what’s normal.”

Naturally aloof and a woman who guards her private life with a steely resolve, it’s here that Binoche starts to become a little more truculent as an interviewee. It takes three questions to pin her down on whether she would like her children to enter her profession. After a long, evasive digression about how theatre as a 17-year-old filled her with a burning desire to open up and express herself, she finally answers: “They choose whatever they want to. I don’t know.” As she notes that “the paparazzi is just the outside of something unreal”, it’s hard to imagine opening an edition of Paris Match and finding her kicking back in a photo spread with her children by her side. “Discretion is necessary,” she says, “because we’re so exposed and we talk about very intimate things.”

Binoche recently completed Breaking And Entering in London which reunites her with The English Patient director Anthony Minghella. Starring opposite Jude Law, who plays a landscape architect whose Kings Cross-based offices are repeatedly burgled, Binoche features as a Bosnian named Amira whose path intersects with Law’s character. Binoche’s research took her to Sarajevo to meet with people who had lived through the “terrible war” that tore the city apart.

“Just being there and seeing the damage … even though the city has been rebuilt it’s still very damaged and the hearts are damaged. I talked to a student of the time, and I said, ‘How did you feel when you had to go to school?’ Sometimes he ran and sometimes he didn’t; so I asked him why he didn’t. He said, ‘Well, because I didn’t care. It was too much stress. I’d been running without being shot for many days, so why should I care about today?’ There’s a moment when you have to say, ‘I’ll live my life and see what happens’.”

While the film might finally show audiences what she is capable of in English, sadly this was not the case in Abel Ferrara’s Mary, which made its bow at last year’s Venice Film Festival. Starring as an actress who plays Mary Magdalene in a Passion Of The Christ-like production, it further signals Binoche’s desire to work with maverick directors such as Ferrara, but it’s yet another film where her style looks out of kilter with what’s going on around her. It’s no coincidence that those capable of getting the best out of her – Kieslowski, Carax, Haneke and Téchiné, who reunited with her in 1998 for Alice et Martin – built their films around Binoche rather than simply shoe-horning her in. The question is, does she see herself acting for the rest of her life?

“I don’t know,” she answers, slowly. “I sometimes feel like I could do another job. Anything. Maybe because as an actress you’re playing different characters, everything feels possible. Everything is possible – and life can change” – she clicks her fingers – “like that”.

Hidden and Bee Season are released on January 27

Woman on the edge of desire

Source: The Age - December 19, 2005

By Philippa Hawker.

It's hard to believe that Juliette Binoche, a vivid, quicksilver presence, ever felt like simply giving up. There's a directness and intensity about her: she's a forcefield of energy, eye contact, responsiveness.

Yet, she says, she recently emerged from a time when she simply didn't want to work. "My desire had left me."

This hadn't happened to her before and it was difficult to deal with. "Yeah, yeah, I was worried. It wasn't a pleasant moment."

But it's behind her now. So what brought her back?

"Well, I wonder," she says simply, and shrugs, but doesn't linger on the thought.

"It's necessary … You need the cycles. It's a back and forth thing: you've got to leave in order to come back. You can come back in a stronger way, or a different way, or" — she says, giving a quick, throaty laugh — "a worse way. Who knows? But at least you've felt something.

"It's like in love. It's the same thing. You've got to go away in order to come back or you suffocate."

In fact — and it makes sense, somehow, that she dealt with not wanting to work by working — she kept making movies. During this time, she appeared in a short film and in Austrian director Michael Haneke's Cache (Hidden), which will be released in Australia next year.

Binoche, who speaks perfect English, has built a strong career in two languages. She has made big-budget and independent films in French, with the likes of Kieslowski, Andre Techine, Leos Carax, Godard and Jean-Pierre Rappeneuu. While her English-speaking roles include The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Damage, The English Patient (she won an Oscar for best supporting actress) and The Bee Season, now on release.

Juliette Binoche only plays characters with whom she can feel a connection, she tells Philippa Hawker.

And, in a new film, Mary, which premiered in Venice this year, she plays an actress who becomes obsessed with her role as Mary Magdalen.

Mary was directed by Abel Ferrara, a maverick whose vision she is full of praise for — although she says, talking about the nature of acting and making movies, that she has a bit of trouble with the world "director" and its implications for certain stages of the production process. When they work with actors, she says, it's "indication or invitation" that better describes what directors do. During casting and editing they are in charge and in control.

Cache is her second movie with Haneke: she had contacted him, asking if he had a project for her. What came out of this was Code Unknown (2000), a film of interlocking stories and virtuoso long takes, a story of urban encounters and political and emotional complexities.

Haneke, she says, knew a little of the difficulties she was going through during Cache, but she felt no need to tell her fellow cast members about it. And being in the film somehow helped, she says.

"While I was in the work, I was in the work and I loved it because I love the experience of acting. It's so amazing. It's like playing ping pong. It's so in the movement and alive and interesting."

But, she adds, in her role, "I had to reach those terrible feelings of being betrayed and angry. It's not an easy journey. You don't feel good about yourself."

Cache is the story of lives disrupted by a mystery. An upper-middle-class Parisian couple — Binoche plays the wife, Daniel Auteuil is the husband — discover that they are under video surveillance. Videotapes are left of the exterior of their house. The videos are accompanied by stark childlike drawings.

It begins to look as if the surveillance is related to something in the husband's past: the focus of the film is on him. Yet there are ambiguities, too, in the role of the wife. Had she been having an affair, had she not? The viewer can decide either way, but it's more interesting to play it as if she had, says Binoche, with another quick burst of laughter, and so in one scene, she did.

Her wish to work with Haneke came from seeing three of his films. "For me, there was a vision, a clear voice somehow, with a complexity about the world we live in as Westerners. He's picky; he's a little provocative."

His movies are confronting, she knows: "Horrific, but necessary, because they are about the contemporary condition."

"They're like mirrors." They reflect, but they also force us to reflect, she believes, on "the materialistic world that imprisons us" and the impossibility "if we continue like that, just a suicidal way of looking at life".

It becomes apparent, as the story unfolds, that Cache is dealing, subtly and obliquely, with the legacy of guilt and shame over France's colonial past in Algeria. The 40th anniversary of Algerian independence took place shortly before Haneke started filming, and Binoche decided to accept an invitation to visit the country.

"I went there with some journalists, because I wanted to address the need for forgiveness. I felt that me — Juliette — I needed to do that."

There are times, she believes, when she must engage with the world that she is entering into as an actress. This can take different forms.

"Like when I was in Les Amants du Pont Neuf" — Leos Carax's extravagant, lyrical, 1991, love story of a relationship between two homeless people — "I lived outside with the tramps because I needed to go where they go. Otherwise, why would you do it?

"There has to be some kind of personal and mysterious relationship between you and the intimacy of the characters you play, otherwise what's the deal?"