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Isabelle Huppert, 2024’s Lumière Award Winner: An Appreciation
Huppert can do froideur and severity with flair but her performances have ranged far beyond her best known state of mind as a cinematic ice queen.
Huppert can certainly do froideur and severity with flair — she’s imposing beyond the bounds of her diminutive frame in such rigorous, chill-carrying films as Claude Chabrol’s “La Cérémonie,” Michael Haneke’s “The Piano Teacher” and of course Paul Verhoeven’s “Elle,” though whether these complex, conflicted women are “devoid of morality” isn’t a call for any one web editor to make. This century alone, we’ve seen her stretch into heightened camp excess for François Ozon in “8 Women” and “The Crime is Mine,” revert into terse last-nerve desperation for Claire Denis in “White Material,” revel in riotously demented villainy for Neil Jordan in “Greta,” and demonstrate a mellowed, airy, slightly self-mocking drollness in multiple team-ups with the singularly prolific Korean director Hong Sang-soo. In 2016, she gave two of the finest performances of her career within months of each other, earning a long-overdue Oscar nomination for her intrepid, funny, wickedly perverse characterisation of a raped woman who brazenly resists being a victim in the pitch-black provocation “Elle.” But she was just as worthy, in a far gentler register, in Mia Hansen-Løve’s exquisite divorcee portrait “Things to Come”: wistfully pained and tender and finally resilient, by a path very different to her character in “Elle.” Such is the duality of Huppert, and what makes her one of the very greatest — that much, at least, Wikipedia has quite correct.
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