Word: chabrols
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Directed by Claude Chabrol...
...crime and trial created an enormous stir, which Director Claude Chabrol has depicted - there are angry crowds and balladeers singing laments in the street outside the courthouse - but his main interest is in the spoiled innocence of Violette. She is played with astonishing virtuosity by an extraordinary young French actress named Isabella Huppert. Violette's twisted mind seems to have been truly monstrous. The incest story was pure invention. She got her parents to swallow poison by telling them it was medicine. Yet something in her character was capable of generating sympathy. What we see in Actress Huppert...
...Director Chabrol's strategy is the appropriate one: simply to watch Violette with obsessive fascination, in the hope of catching a clue. Not many actresses could make this sort of scrutiny fruitful, but Huppert has the knack of suggesting endlessly watchable depths. The film ends (after Violette has been sentenced to be guillotined, then reprieved and sentenced to twelve years in prison) as did The Lacemaker, the first movie in which she starred: with camera and character star ing at each other gravely and impassively, until the screen goes dark...
...talks with animation and the slightest of accents. Yes, she says, the similarity in the endings of Violette and The Lacemaker was intentional; it was Chabrol's way of tipping his hat to Claude Goretta, the director of the earlier film. But she notes that the endings are only the same "for the camera - visually. For Violette, you know, the ending is open; there are chances for her. For Beatrice in The Lacemaker, it is closed, without the possibility of hope." In a way, she goes on, the two films are about young women and authority, one struggling...
...unusually firm idea of what she wants to do with her career. She has just finished playing Anne, the youngest Bronte, in Andre Techine's The Bronte Sisters. She prefers directors who let actors work out their own interpretations. This list includes Goretta and Chabrol but not the notoriously tyrannical Otto Preminger, for whom she played a part in Rosebud, his not very successful film of a few years ago. "He yelled so much," she recalls...