by Daniel Crooke
Known most recently from her starring role as "Visiting European Dignitary Whose Queenliness Clearly Outshines Her Present Yankee Company" from the taut, twisty thriller Angels in Awards Season in America, lauded subversive, all-around transgressor, and actressexual heartthrob Isabelle Huppert celebrates her 64th birthday today by doing what we all hope to be doing at sixty-four years of age: still absolutely slaying the game.
Now that she's wrapped up months of feigning surprise on stage while gleefully clutching golden trinkets she has never not deserved, Madame Huppert is back to work...
Her bevy of intriguing new projects in the pipeline includes Michael Haneke's Happy End, Hong Sang-soo's Claire's Camera, and Benoît Jacquot's Eva. If that's too long a wait, you're in luck! A wonderful video of her dancing to Début de Soirée's "Nuit De Folie" at a French party has surfaced on the internet. Tag yourself - I'm the spin that starts the fun!
Isabelle Huppert dancing is the miracle god referred to in The Bible pic.twitter.com/yb0LvouReB
— Maria-Jose Benites (@MjAllennn) March 14, 2017
If you've had your fill of L'Huppert Hoopla (pronounced oop-la) surrounding her virtuosic performances in Elle and Things To Come then, again, you're in luck! She only has one hundred and twenty-four other credits for you to explore and revisit. The reason I personally keep coming back for more is her uncanny ability to wring empathy from a conflicted audience while simultaneously fueling their discomfort or undercutting their own expectations for how a woman should behave. She traps you in her often nonchalant gaze, pulling you into her head without permission. Not that her entire filmography is built on a moral minefield -- you'd be hard-pressed to find a performance as hysterical and heartbreaking as her work in François Ozon's 8 Women -- but when the inevitable, dilemma-drenched detonation hurts this good, there's no reason to complain.
A few of my favorite performances would have to include her walking, talking self-delusion of a plantation baron in Claire Denis' colonial hangover White Material, the mysterious, infantile postal worker gone postal in Claude Chabrol's La Cérémonie, and obviously her swooning-through-stabbing virtuoso who demonstrates the horrific human consequences of sharing yourself in Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher.
How will you celebrate another year of Isabelle Huppert? Long may she reign!