Let's get physical
Hephzibah Anderson
HER eyes gaze into the distance, anguished and fretful despite the resignation that clings to her mouth and the unyielding angularity of those oddly expressive cheekbones. The ears are unflatteringly jug-like but the forehead radiates calm and the chin - the chin is tilted just so, suggesting steely defiance.
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 (
Lovers On The Ninth Bridge), 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 perfume.
France's highest-paid actress is set to reveal several more unseen sides of herself with the premiere of
In-I, a dance work co-created with her co-performer, the London-born choreographer Akram Khan. Additionally, an exhibition will be held in London of her paintings of directors with whom she has worked and of herself in character.
Were that not achievement enough for one woman, her bilingual book will be published at the same time, composed not only of paintings but also poems she has written about some of those same directors. And all of this after having completed five films in 10 months.
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. Now she has found a new outlet.
When she was filming Minghella's
Breaking And Entering in London in 2006, her shiatsu masseuse, a friend of Khan's, asked her 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.
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 the recently completed film
Paris, she performs an ironic, hip-shimmying striptease in one scene but in another she is a wallflower who has to be dragged onto the dance floor. 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.
With Binoche, he began by having her shadow his movements but on the morning of day two she announced that she wanted to do something different. "I told him I wanted to explore from nothing," she says, and so was born the project that has become
In-I.
The pair got to know each other through dance, an uncomfortable intimacy, you'd think. "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."
Add a set designed by installation artist Anish Kapoor and they should have the audience swooning. The show will also include snatches of text written in English by Binoche and Khan. "I'm going to be acting what I wrote, isn't that crazy? To be responsible for the meaning of it all ... As an actress, there's a place where you think, 'Well, it's his [the director's] film.' You don't take responsibility in the same way."
The performance will be on tour for almost a year, with dates in London, Sydney, Tokyo, Abu Dhabi and Paris. This hectic itinerary will spin to a halt in September next year in Brooklyn, allowing Binoche time to make just one film, by Abbas Kiarostami in Italy.
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 unexpected loveliness of a summer's day on London's South Bank, 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.
With three months of rehearsals behind them and just one more to go, she and Khan are cagey about the program's content, though they admit to the craziness of their endeavour.
There will be improvisational elements but Binoche initially struggled with the necessarily choreographed element. "I'm not used to that kind of language. I like my freedom as an artist and within the words of a script I always find a way to be free. Where's my freedom if there's a moment when I have to follow Akram's dance?"
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's National Conservatory of Dramatic Arts as painful. "Painful in the sense that it was too rigid for me. I was already an independent atom."
Does she have any plans to step behind the camera? She brushes off the question as if it were immaterial. "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 example, replaced her in the title role of Lucie Aubrac after she reportedly queried some of the character's lines.
Binoche's parents were in the business and one of her first memories is of being taken backstage at a production of
Romeo And Juliet. Only two years old, she was 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 when she can.
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 kind of 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 swings the conversation back around to acting but for a moment it feels as if 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 has 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, but she won't talk about the secrets of French womanhood, either, despite having enacted the Anglo fantasy in countless English-speaking roles. "I don't know - I think we're all different and special and ..." she trails off.
Such a response might come across as sulkiness in another but from Binoche it's tinged with something wounded, pained almost. 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 film career with her new venture 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.
The Observer
Juliette Binoche and Akram Khan's
In-I opened in London last week. They perform at the Sydney Opera House from February 18; tickets are on sale now.
thanks for the pics rosemary..she looks wonderful there..
