Isabelle Huppert at MoMA
At MoMA, a film series devoted to one of the best actresses of the last thirty years: Isabelle Huppert.
MoMA’s release describes the actress as “intense, lithe, and passionate, Isabelle Huppert is one of cinema’s greatest actresses. A beguiling shape-shifter, she inhabits her characters, providing them with a dense, distinctive biography and a memorable presence. Her ability to make silences revelatory is astonishing.”
The 25-film series, which begins inauspiciously on October 18 with the American premiere of Patrice Chéreau’s dreadful 2005 drama Gabrielle, will, however, present some of Huppert’s best work. Among them are:
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Diane Kurys‘ Academy Award-nominated Coup de foudre / Entre Nous (1983), in which Huppert falls in love with an equally stunning Miou Miou;
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La Pianiste / The Piano Teacher (2001), Michael Haneke’s overblown drama, well worth watching because of Huppert’s superb performance as a repressed (and very kinky) piano teacher;
- The wacky murder musical 8 femmes / 8 Women, directed by François Ozon, and co-starring Catherine Deneuve, Fanny Ardant, and veteran Danielle Darrieux, among others.
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and Claude Chabrol’s Une Affaire de femmes / Story of Women (1988), possibly the director’s most accomplished work and one of Huppert’s greatest performances, as a pragmatic abortionist in Nazi-occupied France.
October 17–November 23, 2005
Gabrielle. 2005. France. Directed by Patrice Chéreau. Screen-play by Chéreau, Anne-Louise Trividic. With Isabelle Huppert, Pascal Greggory. The American premiere of Huppert’s most recent film, by the director of La Reine Margot and Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train. Based on a story by Joseph Conrad, Gabrielle is a two-character drama set ten years into a loveless marriage. In French, English subtitles. 90 min. Monday, October 17, 7:00 (Huppert and Chéreau present); Wednesday, October 19, 6:00. T1
La Dentellière (The Lacemaker). 1977. France/Switzerland. Directed by Claude Goretta. Screenplay by Pascal Lainé, Goretta. With Yves Beneyton, Michel de Ré, Isabelle Huppert. In the performance that made her an international star, Huppert plays a demure young woman who is unable to communicate her love and suffers for it. In French, English subtitles. 110 min.
Wednesday, October 19, 8:15; Saturday, October 22, 2:00. T1
Loulou. 1980. France. Directed by Maurice Pialat. Screenplay by Pialat, Arlette Langmann. With Isabelle Huppert, Gérard Depardieu, Guy Marchand. One of Pialat’s strongest films catches the melancholy intensity of a carnal relationship between a young bourgeoise who knows better (Huppert) and a rough hot-tempered drifter (Depardieu) who pleases her with his inarticulate chauvinism. With his documentary-like approach, Pialat casts a dyspeptic eye on contemporary social relations. In French, English subtitles. 110 min.
Thursday, October 20, 6:00; Sunday, October 23, 1:30. T1
Coup de foudre (Entre nous). 1983. France. Written and directed by Diane Kurys. With Isabelle Huppert, Miou-Miou, Guy Marchand. In 1952 one young mother meets another. A relationship develops that is, according to the director, “a little more than friendship, a little less than passion.” In French, English subtitles. 112 min.
Thursday, October 20, 8:30; Saturday, October 22, 4:15. T1
Saint-Cyr (The King’s Daughters). 2000. France. Directed by Patricia Mazuy. Screenplay by Mazuy, Yves Thomas. With Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Simon Reggiani. A revisionist costume drama about a late seventeenth-century boarding school for the daughters of recently impoverished nobility, founded by the wife (and former courtesan) of Louis XIV, Madame de Maintenon. Blindsiding religion, she creates a home where young women can “have great freedom in conversation.” In French, English subtitles. 119 min.
Friday, October 21, 6:00; Monday, October 24, 7:45. T1
Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Every Man for Himself). 1979. France/Switzerland. Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière. With Isabelle Huppert, Jacques Dutronc, Nathalie Baye. After years of working in video, Godard returned to “cinema” cinema with this saucy rumination about a man and the two women in his life: Denise, who stands up for herself, and Isabelle, who, armed with an ambiguous smile, surrenders to mild victimization. In French, English subtitles. 87 min.
Friday, October 21, 8:30; Saturday, October 22, 6:45; Sunday, October 23, 5:45. T1
La Cérémonie (A Judgment in Stone/The Ceremony). 1995. France/Germany. Directed by Claude Chabrol. Screenplay by Chabrol, Caroline Eliacheff, based on the novel by Ruth Rendell. With Isabelle Huppert, Sandrine Bonnaire, Jacqueline Bisset, Jean-Pierre Cassel. When she is bad she is very, very bad, and Chabrol captures Huppert at her most evil. She insinuates herself into a friendship with an uneducated maid and then into the bourgeois home under the maid’s care. In French, English subtitles. 109 min.
Saturday, October 22, 8:45; Wednesday, October 26, 6:00. T1
La Vie promise (The Promised Life). 2002. France. Directed by Olivier Dahan. Screenplay by Agnès Fustier-Dahan. With Isabelle Huppert, Pascal Greggory, Maud Forget. Fustier-Dahan, a painter and music video–maker turned filmmaker, elicits an extraordinarily moving performance from Huppert as Sylvie, a prostitute of a certain age with a troubled (and epileptic) daughter. Forced to flee Nice, they seek refuge with the father of Sylvie’s abandoned son. In French, English subtitles. 100 min.
Sunday, October 23, 3:45; Wednesday, October 26, 8:30. T1
La Séparation (The Separation). 1994. France. Directed by Christian Vincent. Screenplay by Vincent, Dan Franck. With Isabelle Huppert, Daniel Auteuil, Louis Vincent. In his third film, Vincent chronicles the dissolution of a comfortable marriage as experienced by Pierre, an illustrator, and Anne, a businesswoman, who suddenly (or at least seemingly so) withdraws her affection. In French, English subtitles. 85 min.
Monday, October 24, 6:00; Saturday, October 29, 4:30. T1
La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher). 2001. France/Austria. Directed by Michael Haneke. Screenplay by Haneke, based on the novel by Elfriede Jelinek. With Isabelle Huppert, Benoît Magimel, Annie Girardot. Huppert’s Cannes award–winning performance is one of the most powerful in recent cinema. Smoldering and disciplined, Huppert makes sense of sexual hysteria. A respected middle-aged piano teacher lives with her mother in a kind of tortured domesticity. Privately she abuses herself and, like a child, acts willfully and cruelly. In French, English subtitles. 130 min.
Friday, October 28, 8:00; Sunday, October 30, 2:00. T1
Madame Bovary. 1991. France. Directed by Claude Chabrol. Screenplay by Chabrol, based on the novel by Gustave Flaubert. With Isabelle Huppert, Jean-François Balmer, Christophe Malavoy. Chabrol’s icy version of the much-filmed Flaubert novel treats Emma Bovary as a casualty of a provincial society whose restrictions asphyxiate her. Fleeing into adultery and financial profligacy, she dooms herself and those around her. In French, English subtitles. 130 min.
Saturday, October 29, 2:00; Wednesday, November 2, 8:15. T1
Heaven’s Gate. 1980. Written and directed by Michael Cimino. Cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond. With Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, John Hurt. Cimino’s romantic version of the Johnson County Wars in Wyoming of the 1890s stars Huppert as a frontier madame. Cimino convinced his skeptical producers to hire an actress then little known in America, and he was right to do so. Huppert’s powerful performance centers the epic. Restored version. 225 min.
Monday, October 31, 6:30 (introduced by Huppert). T1
Rosebud. 1975. USA. Directed by Otto Preminger. Screenplay by Eric Lee Preminger, Marjorie Kellogg. With Peter O’Toole, Claude Dauphin, Richard Attenborough. The controversial Preminger, then America’s leading independent filmmaker, cast Huppert in her first English-language role as one of five young women kidnapped by Middle Eastern terrorists. 126 min.
Thursday, November 3, 6:00. T2
La Storia di Piera (The Story of Piera). 1983. France/Italy/West Germany. Directed by Marco Ferreri. Screenplay by Piera Degli Esposti, Dacia Maraini, Ferreri. With Isabelle Huppert, Marcello Mastroianni, Hanna Schygulla. In this romantic and excessive film based on an autobiography, a woman (Schygulla) seeks carnal adventures with the tacit understanding of her husband (Mastroianni), who has incestuous longings toward their daughter (Huppert). In Italian, no English subtitles. 110 min.
Thursday, November 3, 8:30. T2
Cactus. 1986. Australia. Directed by Paul Cox. Screenplay by Cox, Bob Ellis, Norman Kaye, Morris Lurie. With Isabelle Huppert, Robert Menzies, Norman Kaye. A mysterious love story between a blind man who cultivates cacti, and a French émigré who has fled an unhappy marriage and lost sight in one eye. 96 min.
Monday, November 7, 6:00; Thursday, November 10, 8:30. T2
Coup de torchon (Clean Slate). 1981. France. Directed by Bertrand Tavernier. Screenplay by Jean Aurenche, Tavernier, based on the novel by Jim Thompson. With Isabelle Huppert, Philippe Noiret, Stéphane Audran. In a French colonial African town mired in corruption, a bumbling policeman (Noiret) refuses to arrest anyone. As the locals and even his own wife ridicule him, only his mistress (Huppert) remains loyal. Ultimately, the policeman “cleans the slate” in this black comedy. In French, English subtitles. 128 min.
Monday, November 7, 8:15; Thursday, November 10, 6:00. T2
Amateur. 1994. France/Great Britain/USA. Written and directed by Hal Hartley. With Isabelle Huppert, Elina Löwensohn, Martin Donovan. Huppert approached American independent filmmaker Hartley about working together. The result was Amateur, a quirky, deadpan comedy about identity, responsibility, and coincidence, starring Huppert as an ex-nun with an unlikely avocation. 105 min.
Wednesday, November 9, 6:00. T2; Friday, November 11, 8:15. T1
Malina. 1991. Germany/Austria. Directed by Werner Schroeter. Screenplay by Elfriede Jelinek, based on the novel by Ingeborg Bachman. With Isabelle Huppert, Mathieu Carrière, Can Togay. Schroeter, one of cinema’s most impressive stylists, turns Nobel prize–winner Jelinek’s adaptation of Bachman’s novel into a virtual opera. A nameless female novelist lives with one man, Malina, and falls in love — and insane — with another. In French, English subtitles. 125 min.
Wednesday, November 9, 8:00. T2; Monday, November 14, 8:30. T1
Örökség (The Heiresses). 1980. France/Hungary. Directed by Márta Mészáros. Screeplay by Ildikó Kórody. In Hungary 1936, a wealthy married woman needs a child to inherit her father’s estate. She befriends a Jewish artist, Sylvie (Huppert), and reluctantly her husband and the young woman conceive a child for her. Eight years later, as Hungarian Jews are being deported, Sylvie will be saved or betrayed. In Hungarian, English subtitles. 100 min.
Friday, November 11, 6:00; Saturday, November 12, 6:30. T1
Comédie de l’innocence (The Comedy of Innocence). 2000. France. Directed by Raúl Ruiz. Screenplay by Ruiz, Françoise Dumas. With Isabelle Huppert, Jeanne Balibar, Nils Hugon. An engaging existential burlesque about a precocious boy, Camille, who on his ninth birthday announces to his mother, the bourgeois Ariane (Huppert), that his real name is Paul and his real mother is Isabella, a music teacher living on the other side of Paris. Much to Ariane’s chagrin, Isabella awaits him. In French, English subtitles. 102 min.
Saturday, November 12, 1:00; Sunday, November 13, 5:45. T1
Les Possédés (The Possessed/The Demons). 1988. France. Directed by Andrzej Wajda. Screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière, Agnieszka Holland, Wajda, based on the Dostoyevsky novel The Possessed. With Jutta Lampe, Bernard Blier, Isabelle Huppert, Omar Sharif. In Russia in 1870, a group of revolutionaries await their new leader, an aristocrat of whom they grow increasingly suspicious. In French, English subtitles. 116 min.
Saturday, November 12, 3:15; Monday, November 14, 6:00. T1
Passion. 1982. France/Switzerland. Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard. With Isabelle Huppert, Hanna Schygulla, Michel Piccoli, Jerzy Radziwilowicz. A metaphysical madcap comedy about the art process and impossibility of moving-image making. A celebrated Polish film director shooting tableaux vivants of famous romantic paintings drives his financial backers and his cast and crew into a frenzy. In French, English subtitles. 87 min.
Saturday, November 12, 8:30; Wednesday, November 16, 6:00. T1
Une Affaire de femmes (Story of Women). 1988. France. Directed by Claude Chabrol. Screenplay by Chabrol, Colo Tavernier O’Hagan. With Isabelle Huppert, François Cluzet, Marie Trintignant. The true story and cruel fate of Marie-Louise XX, a mother whose husband was emotionally damaged during the war and who struggles to survive in occupied France. She aids friends by becoming an abortionist, a crime punishable by death under Petain. In French, English subtitles. 110 min.
Sunday, November 13, 1:00; Thursday, November 17, 8:15. T1
Violette Nozière. 1978. France/USA. Directed by Claude Chabrol. Screenplay by Odile Barski. With Stéphane Audran, Jean Carmet, Isabelle Huppert. A bracing portrayal of a young woman leading a double life, for which Huppert won the Best Actress award at Cannes. In 1934, in a small Parisian apartment, eighteen-year-old Violette Noziere poisoned her father and almost killed her mother. In French, English subtitles. 122 min.
Sunday, November 13, 3:15; Friday, November 18, 5:15. T1
8 Women. 2002. France. Directed by François Ozon. Screenplay by Ozon, Marina de Van, based on a play by Robert Thomas. With Catherine Deneuve, Danielle Darrieux, Isabelle Huppert, Fanny Ardant, Ludivine Sagnier, Virginie Ledoyen, Emmanuelle Béart, Firmine Richard. A musical mystery involving a murdered man, a secluded house during a blizzard, and eight suspect women. In French, English subtitles. 103 min.
Thursday, November 17, 6:00. T1
L’Inondation (The Flood). 1994. France/Russia. Directed by Igor Minayev. Screenplay by Minayev, Jacques Baynac, based on the novel by Yevgyeni Zamyatin. With Isabelle Huppert, Boris Nevzorov, Masha Lipkina. Shot in Russia, this poetic melodrama follows a childless couple who adopt a thirteen year-old orphan. The girl (Huppert) becomes the object of her father’s lust and her mother’s murderous jealousy. In Russian, French subtitles. 97 min.
Sunday, November 20, 5:00; Wednesday, November 23, 6:00. T2
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