Word: huppert
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Isabelle Huppert has one of the most watchful, and watchable, film faces. As a Paris fashion magnate who takes up with a bisexual stud (Vincent Martinez, purring his sullenness through a Joaquin Phoenix mouth), Huppert brings her appraising intelligence to a sugar-mommy role. She wants her young beau to be a gentleman at table and a beast in bed; often she stares at him as if he were under glass or in a cage. The movie asks, What would you pay for great sex? Your self-esteem? Not the great Huppert. This swank, thoughtful film gives full rein...
STORY OF WOMEN. In 1943 the Vichy government of France condemned Marie-Louise Giraud to the guillotine for the crime of performing abortions. In this eloquent work, Marie (Isabelle Huppert) is neither a monster nor a savior, but a microcosm of her amoral country...
...praise, then, to Claude Chabrol for painting the story in honest shades of gray, for finding sense in a case that could wallow in sensation. His Marie (Isabelle Huppert) is caged in a drab marriage in a dull town in occupied France. The Germans have put hopes on hold; survival is a matter of wily , compromise. When Marie finds a neighbor artlessly attempting an abortion, she helps out. Word gets around, and soon she is a successful businesswoman. And the perfect homebody: she performs abortions in the kitchen, rents her spare room to a prostitute and takes her collaborator lover...
...example of Simenon cinema -- the kind of movie that, in the manner of Georges Simenon's novels, treats melodramatic subjects with clinical dispassion. Chabrol never coddles viewers; he trusts them to sort out the evidence. His Marie is too complicated to be either a monster or a savior. And Huppert's beautifully deadpan performance finds the ideal emblem for Marie, a vessel empty of everything but human contradictions...