juliette binoche
juliette binoche
The Cannes Film Festival juries handed out their awards Sunday. Competition jury president Tim Burton announced the winner of the Palme d’Or: the complex critics’ fave from Thailand, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The runner-up Grand Prix prize went to Of God and Men, directed by Xavier Beauvois. In a sign that the jury was not unanimous in support of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Biutiful (comme tout le monde), the best actor prize was shared by Biutiful’s Javier Bardem and Elio Germano for La Nostra Vita. Mike Leigh’s well-reviewed Another Year was shut out of the awards, as best actress went to Juliette Binoche for Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, rather than Lesley Manville. Best director was a surprise”
The copy is an original as well,” she answered immediately, in a perfect confident English. “For example, filming is a copy of life, but I would say it is a recreation of life. You choose what to put into the space. The intensity of the result can be even more than what we call life.”
She continued eloquently — inspired, deviating from the press kit quotes:
“The sincerity of the moment is what matters. Whether or not it is true, it is like when you dream. You cannot say it is not true. The same with your memory. What you remember can seem true. Reality with a big R is always somewhere else. We create worlds. This is where people have different realities. It is a matter of human invention. Consider the empty space before the big bang, before humanity, before the experience of time.”
I remarked that she seemed to be quite intuitively connected with her director (which is not always the case: Catherine Deneuve once told me, responding to how she found Bunuel as a director, that she liked him “because he started shoots on time”). Was Juliette a chameleon, able to go into this Copy universe with Kiarostami, after having made films with Kieslowski on faith and God?
“I don’t see them as such opposites. Kieslowski is full of doubts; that was what I loved about him. He put things in question as well. He loved details. For him, the small showed the big. In Kieslowski’s Blue, the experience of the character is different than in Certified Copy. She doesn’t know what she likes, who she is; she is in an empty moment, trying to put herself back into reality, not knowing how to handle it, put the past back.”
“With this film, I felt completely inside the character: in her inside anxiety of love, being loved, wanting to be seen. During the shoot, while walking on these very uncomfortable cobbles, she is never certain she has been seen. Abbas’ camera is generous. He does not try to edit, to take something out of me. The seeing and sharing between us allowed me to open up. It is rare to have a male director put the camera so generously on a woman. ”
“The challenge of acting in general,” she noted. “Is to be as close as possible to the camera. The camera is a mirror. The fact of being seen means that something inside me has to be seen — the inside landscapes. You can only get into that if you like jumping into the unknown.”
She paused to discuss her friendship with Kiarostami. Apparently, they had met over a decade ago, and had a coup de foudre friendship — and he had been waiting all these years for the right film to write for her. They naturally had “a friend connection” because he loves poetry as she does. And she paints, and Kiarostami paints.
