Word: huppert
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...visual quality of the film is lush - sets and actors perhaps too lovingly dressed in period trappings - but Huppert gives astringency to the scenes. The camera lingers on her plump, spoiled, intelligent face, and it is possible to see the wall that she has built between herself and the world. Behind the wall is Violette; what she may be is only partly guessable. Her crime is solved, but the mystery remains...
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...
...Huppert's performances are so strik ingly vivid and so markedly personal that they seem not to be performances...
After seeing The Lacemaker, in which Huppert played a sweet dull-minded girl broken by her first love affair, it is impossible to believe that in real life she is not at least slightly bovine. Violette (for which she won the Best Actress award at this year's Cannes Festival) leaves the viewer convinced, contrarily, that she must be willful, neurotic and blown about by stormy emotions. Neither turns out to be the case. Her face is lively and full of intelligence, and it shows none of the opacity that she assumed for these two roles...
There has been little torment and oppression in Huppert's own experience. She was the clever youngest daughter in a big, prosperous Parisian household, and her parents (her father is a manufacturer of safes, her mother an English teacher) were full of encouragement when she decided that she wanted to change her educational direction from Russian studies to acting. At 15, freckled, a bit chubby, with the look of a beauty five years before she would be beautiful, she had a small part in Faustine et le Bel Etc. Even then she was very much self-propelled...