The French actress Isabelle Huppert has a long career playing unusual women but with Elle, she takes on one of her most challenging roles: Michèle is a wealthy Parisian businesswoman who is raped in her own home by a masked intruder. Choosing not to report the assault to police, she begins to stalk her attacker. Huppert spoke with The Globe and Mail at the Toronto International Film Festival about Elle and another new performance, as a philosophy professor abandoned by both her husband and her publisher, in Mia Hansen-Love's Things to Come. Note: Spoilers for Elle to follow.
What did you think when you first read the script for Elle?
I had read the novel [Oh… by Philippe Djian] and I loved the novel … and I loved the script. I found the role deep, very rich and very exciting. The film is very complex; it's the exploration of a brain, a very unusual brain, as many people's are. One shouldn't take the story at face value or as a generalization, a statement. It's a fiction, almost like a fable, a fantasy.
Isabelle Huppert says the more complex characters are, the easier she finds them.
Christopher Wahl
Nonetheless, there are no markers for an audience that we are not supposed to interpret this as reality.
Yes, but even if you take the film as real, the ending makes it escape anything definable. It's somebody who doesn't react in predictable ways, and doesn't want to be a victim. So instead, she takes control of what's happening to her. That is the essential point of the film. And taking control, she leads us to a resolution that still looks like a revenge. If it's not a revenge, I don't know what you would call it. But she becomes complicit in the rape … But in the end, there is a punishment, since this person dies and, in a sense, it is her who leads him to this punishment.
Critics are debating how conscious she is of leading him toward that death.
I think she is conscious of that, but that's the interesting thing about the character. In standard narration, one shows a character who foresees their own reactions. Here, this character advances blindly, the moment before she acts, she doesn't know what she'll do. I found the same thing as an actress: I didn't imagine anything about her before playing her, I just really wanted to play her. I didn't say she is this rather than that; instead, she is somebody a bit undefined. But what is certain is that she doesn't want to be a victim and she moves continually; she reacts to everything coolly but she always continues to move forward. There's no sentimentality, there's no psychology. She moves to move.
Huppert says her character in Elle doesn’t want to be a victim, so takes control of her situation, which leads to a ‘resolution that still looks like revenge.’
Were there surprises in filming? Did the character surprise you in any way?
No, characters never surprise me. The shoot can surprise you. The one thing that can surprise you is to be shooting with a bad director, but that certainly didn't happen with Paul Verhoeven. I had total confidence in him. I had no fear of being put in danger or manipulated; I felt we were accomplices.
And the scenes of violence, there was no risk of those emotions engulfing you?
No. Well, it just depends what you call emotion. There are emotions that touch me and those that don't. An emotion that is expressed crudely doesn't touch me; but there is emotion in that character. You step into someone's life and you go into every corner of her consciousness, her past, her present, her sense of irony – she has a powerful sense of irony and is always asking herself questions about what is happening to her.
Huppert says as an actress, she steps into the lives of her characters, inhabiting their consciousness and history.
You have also recently appeared in Things to Come, the film by Mia Hansen-Love about an older woman whose husband leaves her and whose mother dies. She is also a character forced to examine her life and the two films feel like mirror images of each other, one a masculine view of a woman, fixed on her relationship with her sexuality and the other …
I don't think it's a masculine view, Verhoeven's film. Not at all. She is not the product of a masculine fantasy, the heroine of Elle; she is neither the victim nor the avenging woman. On the contrary, she is someone who remains deeply feminine with all that brings, her fragility, her uncertainty and her questioning. I find they are women who define themselves in a space, a space that I can claim, where they are neither victim nor wonder woman or Amazon. There is more subtlety and gentleness, especially in Mia's film [Things to Come]. She insisted on that gentleness. There is brutality, too, fortunately, otherwise the character would just be completely soft, and anodyne, but there is a sort of gentleness and light, with something very sharp there, too.
Actresses sometimes complain there is not much work after 40, but you work continually. Is that a particular decision of yours to work so much?
No. I just have great opportunities and I take them. I like to work; being an actress, it's not just a job, it's a relationship with the world, it's exceptional work. It's not hard for me to act …
Huppert says she felt ‘no fear of being put in danger or manipulated’ when filming Elle.
Even if the characters are unpleasant?
On the contrary, the more complex the characters, the easier I find them.
Or in pain?
What is experienced as suffering for the audience is not suffering for the actor. It's the opposite.
Then you have found the right profession.
I think so. I'm keeping it.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Elle opens Nov. 18 in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal