Isabella Huppert & 'Ma Mere'

I’m not particularly interested in the personal lives of film stars. I don’t find an actor’s personal life particularly useful in assessing their career and understanding the films they make. Woody Allen’s ‘Husbands and Wives’ was released around the time of his non-marital troubles but I never found his tabloid life to shed any light on Woody’s “art” no matter how closely one mirrored the other. ‘Husbands and Wives’ is a film so outside that particular episode that to compare the two would cause someone to miss the beauty of that film entirely. His real life may hover in the back of my mind but the life on the screen is far more important.

People’s quirks come from sources so varied while life throws such large and looping curveballs, we can never truly know what drives a person and their creations. To try and add a person’s personal life and problems to the process of watching and understanding a film, book, play, painting, etc. takes away the ability to understand the thing on its own terms. And while we think we may know Jennifer Aniston, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Lindsay Lohan (as talented a film actor as they come, by the way), the truth of them lies so far outside our realm of understanding, that we’d best accept what they have to offer, grab a bag of popcorn, sit back and enjoy the show.

Having said that: What the fuck is up with Isabelle Huppert?

My first encounter with this legendary film actress happened in 2001 when a friend and I went to see ‘The Piano Teacher’ (La Pianiste) in which she plays a sexually repressed piano teacher engaged in what can only lightly be called an affair with one of her young students. After watching what one reviewer (I forget which one) called the most bizarre love scene in the history of cinema and another scene in which Isabelle Huppert sits on a bathtub and takes a razor blade to her own genitalia, my friend and I stumbled out of the theatre in need of a some smelling salts and a serious shower.

My second encounter came courtesy of David O’Russell’s hilarious existential comedy ‘I Heart Huckabees.” Somewhat lighter, Huppert plays a guru named Caterine Vaubin who is well versed in absurdist/nihilistic philosophy. Here is what the folks at Wikipedia have to say about her character:

She teaches them to disconnect their inner beings from their daily lives and their problems, to synthesize a non-thinking state of "pure being". Being lifted from their troubles, they wish to keep that feeling forever, yet she tells them that it is inevitable to be drawn back to the human drama, and to understand that the core truth of that drama is misery and meaninglessness.

Russell’s film makes excellent use of Huppert’s French-cool and her film persona by having her seduce her intellectual young charge, mud wrestle him into his primary self and lead him to a significant source of his suffering. Huppert has good fun with this variation of the knowing older woman coaxing the younger man toward maturity and the fact that her lips look like they do when she speaks makes me want to be that young man.

Huppert and I were reacquainted with a vengeance yesterday on, of all days, Mother’s Day when Jeremy and I went to BAM to see the 2004 film ‘Ma Mere.’ The film, directed and adapted with a serious Oedipal complexity by Christophe Honoré and based on a story by the French intellectual surrealist pornster Georges Bataille, takes on the age old theme of the incest love triangle and charges like a bull into uncharted sexual and psychological territories with a combination of intelligence and repulsion rarely experienced in a multiplex. Huppert plays Hélène, the prostitute mother of the film’s hero, Pierre, and her motherly duties include introducing Pierre to her lesbian lover, engaging in a teasing threesome with the two of them in the backseat of a taxicab, watching as Pierre practically rapes her lover, hiring one of her associate prostitutes to watch over him while she’s away on business and, in the film’s climatic moment, cradling a masturbating Pierre while taking her own life. After the film, Jeremy said he considered leaving two or three times. Though it would have pained me to do so (I hate leaving a theatre before finding out how the story ends) the thought had crossed my mind as well.

I admit three films does not a career make but on the basis of these three encounters with her, Huppert creeps the living bejeesus out of me. Her face, full of freckles and topped with long red hair, promises warmth but her manner exudes cool. She seems to rebuff every camera’s (and our) attempt to love her by turning our affections inside out to reveal jagged and often cancerous underbelly of our desires. It takes a good and brave actress to delve into these darker realms of ourselves and Huppert, by reputation, seems perfectly suited for the challenge. A scroll through IMDB reveals an accomplished stage and film actress who began acting at a young age and later attended the Conservatory of Versailles and the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art of Paris. It shows a career spanning theatre, television and film in France, England and the United States in a variety of roles and working with a variety of directors.

Having only seen three of her films I find myself at something of a crossroads: I appreciate the work she does in such projects but am disturbed by the projects themselves. When confronted with such a conundrum I find myself wondering why actors choose the projects they do. Films which explore the oft-ignored parts of human life, however unpleasant, are certainly worth looking at but I find myself wondering what compels directors, actors’, painters’, writers’ to continually explore these themes in these ways. I wonder what leaps into Huppert’s mind and/or soul when she read ‘The Piano Teacher’ or ‘Ma Mére’ that provokes her to be involved in such projects. I wonder what quirks in her personality brought these interests about. These wonderings may be where fascination with movie stars begins. And part of the attraction may be the indisputable fact that because these people are not us, we will never know the answers. But still, I have to ask:

What the fuck is up with Isabelle Huppert? (but in a good way, you know?)

Spiderman 3

Let’s start with the suit: lush red and deep blue, a textured fabric with at least a 9000 thread count. The thing’s as wrinkle free as Dick Clark and blankets Peter Parker like a second womb. Except when he’s not wearing it at which point it takes on the appearance of a deflated inner tube and you’re left to wonder why Peter is wasting his time peddling pictures of Spiderman to a bellowing J. Jonah Jamison (the amazing J.K. Simmons) at the Daily Bugle rather than surrounding himself with supermodels sporting his fabulous creations on a runway in Milan.

Jeremy and I attended the midnight showing of ‘Spiderman 3’ at the Union Square Cinema last night and let it be known that after the movie while waiting in line for the bathroom (The movie runs two and a half hours with previews. ¾ of the way through I was silently pleading for an intermission) the commentary was less than enthusiastic. Three people I eavesdropped upon “hated” the movie; thought it “sucked.” One person thought the ubiquitous “they” ruined the franchise. Another person, no older than nineteen, accused the director, Sam Raimi, of intentionally “ruining” the franchise. My favorite audience moment came courtesy of a woman in my row, three seats down, who after visibly flinching from a punch thrown by Peter Parker at the love of his life Mary Jane Watson, screamed to her friends, “Why am I watching this thing?” (When the film ended, she announced to no on in particular that she “needed a drink.” Who could blame her?)

I flinched too. I think everyone in the theatre did. We all definitely gasped. If you have seen the first two films or know anything about them, then the thought of Peter punching Mary Jane in whatever context should fill you with horror which is probably something the director intended. Peter announces at the beginning of the first film that his is basically the story about a girl and spends the first two films trying to get her. His love is so pure and the longing so, well, long, that the sight of him punching her shocked me in a way I haven’t been shocked in a long time. The punch throws the film into a different realm and imposes a new perspective of our hero, one more in tune with the realities of his situation.

Is this something you want from a blockbuster film about a superhero? Judging from the audience’s reaction last night, the answer would be a resounding “No,” but I’m interested to see the film’s reception in the next two weeks. Personally, I’m not sure how I feel about ‘Spiderman 3.’ It’s certainly a good time with a few stunning moments but Raimi seems to be juggling so many plotlines and characters that none of them really stick. I get the feeling that if I hadn’t seen the first two, I’d have a hard time caring about this one.

All this is tempered by the fact that I am seriously wondering how seriously I should take any film based on the premise of a crime-fighter created by a spider bite. I hadn’t through about that until seeing this film. I hadn’t thought about it before because the first two films balanced the real and the extraordinary so seamlessly. This one: not so much. The punch and the darkness it creates battles with the villains and the conflicts they inflict on our heroes which results in some quick and unsatisfying conclusions. I left the theatre unsatisfied and wanting more, wishing this blockbuster were a bit smaller.

But then there is this: (Warning: read this next paragraph only if you’ve seen the film or don’t mind knowing how it ends.) After the punch and after Peter Parker has once again saved Mary Jane’s life, Peter walks into a bar where Mary Jane is singing and reaches out to her. Mary Jane reaches back of course but when the ensuing embrace seems to be one of understanding rather than romance and passion. The people at the end of this movie are older, wiser and more aware of the not only the bliss but the damage their love can inflict on each other. As they held each other, I found myself thinking that this is how love sometimes feels. This is as unsentimental a notion I ever expected to find in a ‘Spiderman’ movie.