Field Guide: Annie Girardot

Today is International Women’s Day, celebrating the achievements of women and (one hopes) shedding light on their aspirations and on the conditions in which they live. In truth, the French have been observing the occasion since February 28, when the actress Annie Girardot died; since then, news reports have paid tribute to a long, remarkable career. (As has her funeral service, attended by thousands of friends, family, colleagues, and fans here in Paris last Friday. Nobody does funerals like the Parisians.) Most remarkable, perhaps, is the general insistence, beginning with Girardot herself, back in the 1970s, that she was just an ordinary Frenchwoman.

This in turn may tell us something about how Frenchwomen view themselves, and how they want to be viewed by others. Girardot was possessed of a great and versatile talent — launching her stage career at the Comédie Française and appearing on screen in everything from Louis De Funès comedies to Michael Haneke psychodramas. Very few women could do such things, but she wasn’t ever flashy about it.

Visconti’s Rocco: The pretty one is wearing the bandage.

She was beautiful without being glamorous (or, least of all, threatening to other women), and she seemed completely un-self-conscious as she aged, almost defiantly seizing the least-flattering camera angles. Without being a slave to fashion, she dressed nicely, a prime exemplar of the Frenchwoman’s instinctive gift for accessorizing perfectly. She seldom called attention to herself, but let her work speak for her.

And what work it was! I’ve seen only a tiny handful of her films, but they’re a fascinating lot. In Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers, she’s gorgeous, sensual, alive — but the real glamour part goes to Alain Delon, at his most beautiful, and on that playing field, she can’t compete, and she knows it. She uses her wits and talent instead, and it’s telling that Delon’s best scenes are opposite her.

De Broca’s Dear Inspector: With Philippe Noiret

In Tendre poulet, better known as the global hit Dear Inspector, we see her in middle age, already insisting that she’s Everywoman and yet toying with our understanding of the significance of that idea. She’s engaged in an incredibly charming romance with a onetime sweetheart from her youth, played by Philippe Noiret — but she’s afraid to tell him she works for a living now — as a police detective. Even while she’s rekindling old flames, she’s trying to solve a high-profile murder case. (The film was so successful that it led to a sequel, a development quite unusual for grownup movies in this country; these were among the first French movies I saw after beginning my studies of the language.)

In Haneke’s La Pianiste, she’s ravaged almost beyond recognition, an elderly invalid whose querulous neediness is driving her daughter to distraction (and increasingly shocking behavior). Here again — or perhaps more than ever — the lack of actressy vanity is stunning, and she rises to the demands of the role with harrowing intensity.

La Pianiste: With Isabelle Huppert and Benoît Magimel

At least this much of her character’s story was true to life: Girardot was suffering from Alzheimer’s, which would prove the cause of her death last month. With her usual candor, Girardot spoke about her condition and drew on the enormous reserves of affection in which she was (and is) held by the French public in order to call attention to the disease. Among the many news stories on Girardot’s death were follow-up features that explained Alzheimer’s, reported on treatment and care, and interviewed patients and their families, who are not unlike my in-laws.

When mourners said of Girardot on Friday that she was “a model,” they didn’t mean she was a fashion model — but a role model. And most of those who spoke of her were women, too.

Ultimately, maybe what it means to be a French Everywoman is this: to be truly extraordinary.

La Pianiste: With Isabelle Huppert

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Field Guide: Jeanne Moreau

For a long time, I believed that, if I were a woman, the last thing I’d want to do would be to make friends with Jeanne Moreau. At almost any given point in her lifetime, she’s been a candidate for Most Fascinating Woman on Earth, and it’s one measure of her early influence that, as young women, both Lily Tomlin and Madeline Kahn tried to copy her look.

Brilliantly intelligent and wonderfully gifted, Moreau was muse to most of the important directors of the second half of the 20th century, and even in old age, her voice ragged and her beauty ravaged — she’s still somehow beautiful. Men and women alike are powerless to resist her. How could another woman stand anywhere near her seductive presence?

In Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud

I have recently revised this opinion, based on some of the films of Moreau’s later career. She is, I believe, just about the best girlfriend any woman could ever hope to have.

Exhibit A is Nathalie Granger, a movie from 1972 now in rerelease here in Paris; I saw it the other night. In a country house in the Yvelines (hey! That’s where I live!), two sisters listen to radio reports of violent teenaged criminals in the Forest of Dreux (hey! That’s not far from my house!). Moreau and Lucia Bosé work in the garden. They pick up two little girls from school. Are these the daughters of one sister, or are they representations of the children these women used to be?

This dynamic clip from Nathalie Granger
is typical of the fast-paced drama: click to play.
(With Lucia Bosé)

There’s no answer to this, because Nathalie Granger is so self-consciously a product of its time. Most of the film is given over to enigmatic silences. The women sit and stare into space. They pace nervously through the house and the garden. They talk on the telephone, to no particular effect. The girls play piano. And that’s it.

Constant threats of violence never translate even to action, and nothing is every explained. It’s a ponderous intellectual exercise. If you took the time to break it down, the movie would probably mean something, but there’s no reason to think you’d give a damn once you decoded it.

What big cigarettes you have!
As the grandmother in François Ozon’s Le temps qui reste

The only breath of air in the picture is a startling comic turn from a tongue-tied, inept door-to-door salesman. Audiences today derive an additional pleasure from his scenes, because he’s played by Gérard Depardieu, young and handsome in a role that’s almost inconceivably far from the archetype he has become in the years since Nathalie Granger was made.

The other saving grace of the picture is Jeanne Moreau herself. Time spent in her company is not time wasted, even if she doesn’t seem to be doing much of anything. Of course, she is gorgeous. But beyond that, you find yourself focusing on her mystery: what is she thinking? Why did she do that? (Or, in this case, why isn’t she doing anything at all?) What will she do next?

With Brad Davis in Fassbinder’s Querelle
(She sings in this one, of course, and lest I forget,
Moreau also has enjoyed a successful recording career.)

To the mysteries of her presence, we add an artistic mystery: why did she agree to make this picture? Here, at least, we know the answer: the director was Marguerite Duras, a writer whose work Moreau admired. The women were friends, and since Duras’ death, Moreau has portrayed her onstage and on screen, burnishing Duras’ reputation by linking it to her own lustrous image.

Moreau as Duras in Cet amour là

Exhibit B is the career of director Josée Dayan. A mediocre talent of deeply conventional tastes, she is drawn to sprawling literary adaptations and period pieces. While there are (usually) incidental pleasures to be found in her films, she’s repeatedly proven herself incapable of shaping big structures, whether entire movies or set-piece scenes. To succeed, then, or just to get the necessary funding, she relies on the tony reputation of the novel or biography in question — and on the participation of Jeanne Moreau.

Sometimes these projects have afforded Moreau good opportunities as an actress. In Dayan’s adaptation of the life of Honoré de Balzac, for example, Moreau turned in a memorable portrait of the novelist’s mother, needy and nagging. But as a rule, Dayan’s films don’t advance Moreau’s reputation so much as they trade on it.

A scene from Dayan’s miniseries, Les Misérables,
with Depardieu (Valjean) and John Malkovich (Javert).
(Moreau plays a self-flagellating nun in this one.)

Thus, when Dayan decided she’d like to direct an opera, she enlisted Moreau as co-director. They chose Verdi’s Attila — another sprawling period piece, in which the chorus functions as the equivalent of a cinematic “cast of thousands.” For a first-time opera director, it’s rather like the amateur who says, “I’m not an architect, and in fact I’ve never even done anything like this, but I think I’ll build the Taj Mahal today.”

The results were disastrous, and an opportunity for Moreau was squandered. Her very real potential might have thrived in a smaller, more intimate opera — Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, for example, would benefit tremendously from her psychological insights into the drama. But that wasn’t Dayan’s vision, and Attila wound up looking like a vanity project. (Hard to argue that it wasn’t.) Who will ever entrust Dayan and Moreau with another opera?

In Truffaut’s Jules et Jim
(With the one who isn’t Oskar Werner)

At the age of 82, Moreau hardly needs to work at all, and her legend will survive just about anything. People will be talking about her for generations to come, much as we talk about Sarah Bernhardt. But every minute that Moreau worked with Dayan, she might have been working on something superior. Heaven knows, greater talents than Dayan’s would have given Moreau any opportunities she wanted — but she didn’t take them.

That’s loyalty, and it’s why I’ve come to believe that Jeanne Moreau is probably the best girlfriend ever.

In Truffaut’s La mariée était en noir

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Field Guide: Catherine Mouchet

T’as des beaux Lisieux, tu sais?
Mouchet, center, as Thérèse, bride of Christ

Alain Cavalier’s Thérèse (1986) is one of the smallest, most delicate movies ever made on a Christian theme: quiet, painterly, still, it is lit like (and feels like) an old Dutch masterwork. A casual viewer can be forgiven for thinking nothing is happening onscreen, when in fact the movie’s central character is involved in an intensely dramatic relationship with Jesus (who, for all his virtues, is not the perfect boyfriend). That her agony and ecstasy are mostly internalized doesn’t make them any less passionate.

The real-life Thérèse

Based on the life of Sainte Thérèse de Lisieux (1873–97), the movie introduced a young actress named Catherine Mouchet; for her astonishingly convincing portrayal of Thérèse, she won the César for “Meilleur Espoir Féminin,” and promptly found herself typecast. She dropped out of acting for a while, returning to school for a philosophy degree — which, in France, is actually considered more practical than a career in acting. Do not doubt it: Catherine Mouchet is one smart lady.

Back onscreen in recent years, she remains a luminous presence, though most directors insist on casting her as homely and shy, creating a gallery of spinsters, wallflowers, and victims. Her career is thus an ongoing struggle for her — the cross she has to bear, if you will — and you can see her relief whenever she’s cast as a prostitute or a morally compromised woman.

As Caroline Maquet

So I was pleased to see her play against type in L’autre Dumas, as the soignée wife of Auguste Maquet. In gorgeous period costumes and a flattering hairstyle, she looked as serene and lacquered as an Ingres portrait, while radiating determination and good sense. In her next movie, L’arbre et la forêt (by the gay auteur couple, Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau), she even gets some funny lines.

Mouchet’s ability to project sensitivity and ambiguity is unrivaled by almost any actress I’ve ever seen. Some day, French directors are going to make better use of her. But even in a dull role, she’s always interesting to watch. You may think she’s a watercolorist, a miniaturist. If you look closely, though, you’ll see she’s always working on a bigger, bolder canvas than anyone else’s.

In L’arbre et la forêt, with Sabine Seyvecou

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Field Guide: Dominique Blanc

So much for propriety!
An exuberant hypocrite, in Indochine

For much of her career, Dominique Blanc has brilliantly merged two important traditions: the classical French confidante, with whom the heroine shares her woes; and the wisecracking Hollywood sidekick. Even when she doesn’t make some tart remark about the protagonists’ business, you can see she’s thinking of one. Though she works constantly, with more than 60 films to her credit, and has taken leading roles from time to time, she’s really remarkable in character parts and supporting roles — which most modern actors have forgotten, or never knew, how to play.

With Deneuve, in Indochine

With her wide-set eyes and nasal voice, she’s an unlikely candidate for many glamorous star turns, but Blanc knows how to take even the smallest part and run with it, and she excels in playing the foil. She demonstrated this — to my astonishment — in two of the first pictures I saw her in, Patrice Chéreau’s La Reine Margot (1994) and Régis Warnier’s Indochine (1992), costume dramas in which she contrasted with, respectively, Isabelle Adjani and Catherine Deneuve. (They are, perhaps needless to say, two of the most glamorous actresses France has ever produced.) Blanc was nominated for the César for best supporting actress for both films, and won for Indochine.

Fashion Plate: In La Reine Margot

As those movies suggest (and as her latest release, L’autre Dumas corroborates), Blanc looks terrific in period dress — almost any period, really, except our own, when fashion is created for taller, thinner girls. Her work in costume dramas may account partly for my notion of her as a confidante, that character whose primary purpose is to prevent the heroine from talking to herself. The confidante crops up all over Racine and Corneille, usually an attendant or noblewoman of lower rank than the heroine; her literary heirs are seen in opera, Lucia’s Alisa and Trovatore’s Ines being prime examples.

At her best, Dominique Blanc provides the necessary emotional support associated with the classical confidante, and yet, like a French Eve Arden, she’s always standing off to one side, commenting on the principal action even when she says nothing aloud, and eager for adventures of her own.

As Céleste, with Benoît Poelvoorde as Maquet

L’autre Dumas features a scene in which Blanc’s character, Céleste Scriwaneck, realizes that Auguste Maquet isn’t the man she thought he was. She’s devastated — but she won’t give the younger, prettier Charlotte Desrives (Mélanie Thierry) the satisfaction of knowing why. Blind to almost every truth (including that of Maquet’s real identity) but seeing the tears in Céleste’s eyes, Charlotte asks what’s wrong. “It’s nothing,” Céleste replies simply; “I just lost someone very dear to me.”

What she means, of course, is that her idea of Maquet has been lost; it’s a beautiful moment. Very little else in the picture rises to this level of artistry, it must be said.

Glenn Close has nothing on her:
Blanc in L’autre

An actress of Blanc’s range can’t be expected to linger too long outside the spotlight, and her latest star vehicle was L’autre (The Other Woman, 2008). Because of my travel schedule, I missed the picture, a contemporary urban drama in which Blanc plays a vengeful ex-mistress; for her efforts, she was awarded Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival. She’s been nominated for nine Césars, winning four (one best actress, three supporting), and in 2008 won the Molière for her stage performance in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Clearly, she’s a talent to look out for — and chances are, she’ll turn up again somewhere, very soon.

With Malik Zidi, in Les amitiés maléfiques:
In this tale of youthful ambition, Blanc isn’t quite a French version of the Texas Cheerleader Mom, but she’ll do nicely, thank you.

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Field Guide: Agnès Jaoui

By happy accident, her last name contains two words for “Yes.”
(And her first name is pronounced “Ahn-Yes.”)

The almost perversely prodigious polymath Agnès Jaoui (actress, dramatist, director) has been making the rounds of French talk shows lately — to promote her new record album. Because, on top of everything else, she sings, too.

While it’s not unusual for French movie stars to cut albums, it’s quite a bit rarer for their vocalizing to be worthy of our attention for any reason other than their celebrity — because, you know, they make movies. Jaoui has joined the ranks of such illustrious predecessors as Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau. Her first album, Canta (2006), is a collection of mellow, Latin-accented numbers: not terribly deep or demanding, it’s great for dinner-time when you’re tired of Gipsy Kings. But she’s got an appealing, vibrant timbre, solid range, and (not surprisingly) admirable expression. I’m looking forward to hearing Dans mon pays.


Onscreen, Jaoui the actress projects an image of intelligence, unpretentious beauty, and (sometimes neurotic, sometimes deluded) confidence. Some of this may be affect, but it works for me, and moreover, it’s true: she really is too smart to need to worry about whether she’s brushed her hair this morning.

I have yet to see all of her films, but I was taken with her work in Le Rôle de sa vie (Role of a Lifetime, 2004), in which she plays a famous French actress who hires a timid writer (Karin Viard) as her personal assistant. Having worked in precisely that capacity both for a famous opera singer and for a famous television newsman, I snapped to attention immediately.

Compensation: Sometimes your boss will sing for you.
Viard (left) with Jaoui in Rôle

Jaoui captured the star’s egocentrism, but that’s the easy part: any three-year-old can play a diva. Her greater success lay in her ability to win the audience’s sympathy with humor and occasional flashes of compassion. We didn’t question Viard’s affection for her in return, or her persistent hope, despite ample evidence, that her boss would some day get her act together.

Toward the end of the picture, when Viard says, in a double-barreled blast of pent-up accusation and regretful forgiveness, “I thought you were my friend,” Jaoui’s shocked, silent reaction tells us that, yeah, she thought so, too. So did we — for much of the movie.

And that’s how those relationships play out, in real life. Take it from me.

As a playwright and screenwriter, in collaboration with her spouse, Jean-Pierre Bacri (who is also an actor and director), she has specialized in the group dynamics of genuine eccentrics, spiced with wit and sharp observation. One good example is Le Goût des autres (The Taste of Others), in which several characters keep bumping up against each other, falling in and out of relationships, as their differing cultural tastes make it harder to communicate. (I just saw this on TV and thoroughly enjoyed it.) Not surprisingly, their scenarios represent a field day for other actors; one of their earliest successes, Un Air de famille, catapulted my beloved Catherine Frot to stardom.

I’ve yet to see any of the pictures she’s directed, though one in particular has tempted me so that I nearly bought the DVD, sight unseen: Comme une image (Like a Picture, 2004) explores questions of self-worth, beauty and art, centered on an ugly duckling who is studying to be an opera singer. The picture received rave reviews. What am I waiting for?

Oh, and apparently she dances, too.
From the photo shoot for her new album.

Where Jaoui fails, as I’ve been reminded as she takes her latest press tour, is in giving interviews. She just doesn’t focus. On one recent program, her vagueness seemed reasonable: it was a Sunday lunch-hour show, and as she explained, she’s seldom awake so early. Worse, they were asking for her opinion on politics. (Every French actor is automatically presumed a political philosopher of the highest order.) Yet what I see in these appearances is a mind constantly racing ahead: to the next question, to the next answer, before she’s gotten to the end of her first sentence.

Happily, when her responses count most, she’s better than coherent: she’s eloquent and wise.

Ahn-Yes? Yes-Yes!

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Field Guide: Danielle Darrieux

As Max Ophüls’ Madame de…, with Charles Boyer

To call Danielle Darrieux a national treasure is so obvious and so easy as to be downright lazy. She’s been making movies since 1931, and she’s still at it, at the age of 92. In her spare time, she’s been a concert singer and stage actress, with the occasional foray into both MGM and Broadway musicals, even replacing Katharine Hepburn in Alan Jay Lerner and André Previn’s Coco. Authentically French, a superior singer, and younger and prettier, too, Darrieux made Hepburn a nervous wreck.

In one of her recent films, Darrieux lent her voice to a character who is, in a way, another country’s national treasure: the grandmother in Marjane Satrapi’s animated memoir of Iran, Persepolis. The warmth, cultivation and familiarity of Darrieux’s voice must have provoked a pavlovian response in French audiences, because cinematically, she’s our grandmother. And one of that character’s signature touches — perfuming her brassiere with fresh jasmine blossoms — seems exactly the sort of thing Darrieux must do in real life.

Somehow, you know she smells good:
That’s the sort of woman she is.

I haven’t seen all of Darrieux’s movies (there are more than 100 of them), and I wonder whether she has. Several are among the best ever produced in this country: The Earrings of Madame de …, La Ronde, Le Plaisir (all by Ophüls), Demy’s Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, even Ozon’s 8 Femmes. She also appeared in a number of glossy literary adaptations that strictly adhere to the so-called “tradition of quality” against which the Nouvelle Vague directors rebelled. Among these are the movie versions of two of my favorite novels, Zola’s Pot-Bouille and Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir.

Extremely pretty without being conventionally beautiful, she possessed two assets above all others. Well, three, actually: two sparkling eyes and an equally sparkling wit. With these gifts, she proved well-suited to characters who, if they’re not in a drawing-room comedy, usually act as if they were. Often she’s been cast as a bourgeoise, to exploit her innate elegance. (And it’s true that, if she ever played a fishwife, I’m in no hurry to see the results.)

Madame de…, perhaps her best-known film role, admirably sums up her abilities. She presents a spun-sugar lightness to the character, and then, as the circumstance turns from game to reality, she shatters that brittle façade, bringing into clear view a substantial, poignant core.

Darrieux has excelled at sophisticated comedy.
Here, a scene from La Vie à deux.*

One of my favorite of her pictures is Le septième ciel (Seventh Heaven), in which she plays a youngish, upper-class widow whose piety and charitable works are supplemented by her oh-so refined murder of people who really, really, truly deserve it. (Something like what I imagine Bernadette Chirac must be like, when nobody is looking, only quite a lot prettier and more tasteful.) The movie is a trifle, but her sense of comedy is simply sublime to watch in action.

In Le Rouge et le Noir, which I saw not long after reading the book, she wasn’t quite my mental image of Mme de Rênal — blonde instead of the brunette I’d pictured. But she did a brilliant job of conveying the character’s moral conflict, often with immense humor but equal sympathy. And as the story turns from bedroom farce to prison drama, Darrieux admirably conveyed Mme de Rênal’s growing passion and determination. Stendhal couldn’t have asked for better.

Wrestling with her conscience,
tiptoeing to her lover’s bedroom.
This scene from Le Rouge et le Noir is quite funny, actually.

If all goes well, next year will mark her 80th anniversary in motion pictures. Even Katharine Hepburn couldn’t claim such a record. But in both cases, it’s talent and personality — charm — and not merely longevity, that make an actress truly special. Danielle Darrieux has been sprinkling movie screens with jasmine blossoms for generations.



*NOTE: Not having seen La Vie à deux (by Yves Allégret, first husband of Simone Signoret and father of Catherine Allégret), I don’t know whether it’s a comedy at all, sophisticated or otherwise. But this is exactly how Darrieux looks in Le septième ciel, which was made around the same time.

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Field Guide: Anne Brochet & Michèle Laroque

Brochet, center, as Roxane in Cyrano
(That’s Jacques Weber on the right.)

It’s often remarked that, whereas American actors traditionally are caught in a tug-of-war between New York and Hollywood, British actors profit from the concentration of theater, film, and television production in London. French actors may enjoy a similar centrality in Paris, but truth be told, the vast majority of stage productions in the capital are cheesy, smirking boulevard comedies that not even stellar performers can uplift. (That’s why I seldom go to the theater here.) Still, one regularly finds top-name movie stars on Parisian stages, and two delightful leading ladies are now treading the boards.

Both Anne Brochet and Michèle Laroque came to my attention in the 1990s with brilliant performances in a handful of films — and both have slipped off my cinematic radar in the years since, though they continue to work frequently. In both cases, the initial impressions were so strongly favorable that I look forward to seeing them again, but I’m waiting to see them in the right vehicle.

Brochet, as Madeleine de Sainte-Colombe

Anne Brochet is stepping into the role of Tracy Lord in Philip Barry’s Vie Privée at the Théâtre Antoine. Perhaps to avoid comparison to Katharine Hepburn, the play is not being performed under the title for which the movie The Philadelphia Story is known here (Indiscrétions). There’s no point promising a Hepburn impersonation when the leading lady isn’t going to deliver one: though Brochet is awfully good at projecting an eccentric, nervous intelligence, it’s quite unlike Hepburn’s, and she doesn’t possess anything resembling Hepburn’s rangy, athletic grace.

No matter. Brochet’s own assets are more than enough, as she proved in Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) and Tous les matins du monde (1991). The films are costume dramas, both set in 17th-century France, yet Brochet’s roles are wildly different.

In Cyrano, she’s Roxane, a lady of the court so gorgeously dressed that we may be excused for failing at first to understand that, of all the characters in this story, she has the strongest innate ability to perceive what lies beneath the surface. Everybody else is obsessed with appearances, but it takes a mind as nimble as Cyrano’s to dupe Roxane, and that’s Brochet’s triumph. She peels away layers before we know they exist.

The confrontation: “Père, je l’aime!”
With Depardieu and Marielle, from Tous les matins

In Tous les matins, she eschews all that glamorous artifice to play Madeleine, daughter of one composer (Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe, played by Jean-Pierre Marielle) and lover of another (Marin Marais, played by Guillaume Depardieu, in his first leading role).

Here, the austerity of Brochet’s appearance contrasts with that of the young Depardieu: when Marais returns from the court of Louis XIV, it’s he — not she — who’s powdered, rouged, and bewigged. And the stillness of her performance makes the force of Madeleine’s emotion all the more startling. When she blurts out, “Père, je l’aime,” it’s as if the earth has split in two. Though she was only 25 when the movie was made, she delivers a performance of exquisite sensitivity and control.

Laroque, with Patrick Timsit, in Pédale Douce

Michèle Laroque appeared in a batch of gay-themed movies in the 1990s, including the international smash hits Pédale Douce and Le Placard. Though her characters weren’t terribly sympathetic, Laroque won hordes of gay fans, by whom she was a little nonplussed. When my brother met her at a film festival, he reported that she seemed really to have no idea what she’d done to deserve all the fuss.

The answer, I suspect, can be found in her performance as Hanna, the mother of a seven-year-old boy with a passion for dolls and dressing as a girl, in Ma vie en rose (1997). Hanna is at first bewildered, then angered by Ludovic’s behavior: it flies in the face of convention and it’s made the family something of a neighborhood spectacle, at exactly the moment when her bourgeois aspirations have reached a fever pitch. Her long path toward acceptance of her child is by turns funny, terrifying, and heartbreaking, and Laroque serves up a tour de force.

Perhaps only someone with Laroque’s checkered résumé could have pulled off such a part: she’s acted in everything from sketch comedy to police drama, and she writes and produces, too.* Laroque is currently starring in a comedy, Mon brilliantissime divorce, at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal. Her website is skimpy on features and mostly under construction, but it can be found here.

*NOTE: Though you may not find this terribly pertinent, my mother will want to know that Michèle Laroque studied English at The University of Texas at Austin.

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Field Guide: Mélanie Laurent

A smile meant to be photographed:
She manages to be ordinary and beautifully unearthly at once.

Quentin Tarantino’s new film, Inglourious Basterds has opened, and among its international cast, an Austrian actor, Christoph Waltz, has received most of the attention. But one of its other stars is increasingly familiar to French audiences, and serves to remind me that, if I were more conscientious about my Field Guide, she’d be familiar to you, too. Her name is Mélanie Laurent.

She’s quite young, as you can see, and most of her career thus far has been devoted to extremely small roles, albeit sometimes in very big pictures (such as Indigènes). The exception has been Je vais bien, ne t’en fais pas (I’m fine, don’t worry), a psychological drama about a young woman who seeks her missing brother — or at least an explanation for his sudden disappearance. The film falls apart about two-thirds of the way through, as most French movies do. (Almost every film in this country would benefit from approximately six more months’ development.) Yet such is the strength of Laurent’s performance, such are the wit and tenderness she brings to the screen, that she carries the entire picture through even its weakest moments. We never stop to wonder why her character is in a mental hospital, for example, because we are so swept up in her characterization.

This is something that very few actresses with greater maturity and experience can pull off, and it bodes well for Laurent’s future. It was no surprise to me when she won the César for best newcomer — or, as it is put more elegantly in French, Meilleur Espoir Féminin, “best feminine hope” — for Je vais bien. She gave half a dozen great performances in that picture, binding them together seamlessly.

Though I’m not a Tarantino fan, and unlikely to see Inglourious Basterds (in which, to judge from the reviews, Laurent is not particularly well-served), I’m looking forward to what ought to be a truly exciting career.

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Field Guide: Yolande Moreau

Quite possibly the sexiest woman in cinema today

Belgian-born Yolande Moreau first caught my eye in Quand la mer monte, a bittersweet romance she wrote (and co-directed), based on her own experiences in a one-woman show touring the hinterlands. Along the way, she meets a fellow (Wim Willaert) whose sole occupation, if you can call it that, is creating gigantic Carnival costumes. That neither of them looks remotely like a movie star doesn’t stop their passion. Before the picture is finished, you will be smitten with Yolande, and as firmly convinced as her “poussin” is that she’s one of the most sensuous beings ever to grace the screen. Since that first encounter, I’ve looked forward to each new appearance onscreen, and she is never less than satisfying – albeit not always quite so sexy.

I’ve just seen her again in a new picture called Louise-Michel, and such is the angry tenor of the times, so resentful are Americans toward the wizards who wrecked the economy, that some smart producer in Hollywood doubtless has snapped up the adaptation rights already, to set the thing in Kentucky, perhaps, instead of Picardy. That producer will be hard-pressed, however, to find an American actress to fill Moreau’s sneakers.


In an extraordinary bit of physical acting that gets only more brilliant the longer you watch, Moreau plays the Louise of the title (though that is also an homage to the 19th-century anarchist Louise Michel): hulking, inarticulate, violent, and often very funny. Her illiteracy leads to some amusing complications, including a terrific sight-gag torn from the playbook of Buster Keaton. When she and her colleagues are laid off without warning from a little clothing factory, Louise suggests that they do something useful with their severance money: namely, hire a hit-man to kill the boss. It becomes increasingly clear that, in Michel (Bouli Lanners, also Belgian), Louise has chosen the wrong guy; ultimately, they join forces to see justice done. More or less.

Natural Born Killers? Lanners and Moreau in Louise-Michel

It’s one of the oddest films I’ve seen in years, yet every loony detail is just right. Apart from a joke at the expense of 9/11, it ought to succeed in U.S. release – and, as I say, it’s itching for an American remake.

Moreau is nominated for a Best Actress award at the Césars on Sunday, February 28, for her work in another film from last year, Séraphine. I wonder if it’s still plaing around town….

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Field Guide: Enfants Sauvages

Wild Child: Testud in Aime ton père

Though the French film industry is remarkable in offering leading roles to actresses past the age of 40 and 50, there are plenty of younger women onscreen, too, and two of these — Sylvie Testud and Ludivine Sagnier — promise to become durable stars.

That said, Sylvie Testud might go into politics or marine biology. She’s completely unpredictable. Already branching out beyond cinema, Testud played real-life novelists Amélie Nothomb in Stupeur et tremblements (Fear and Trembling) and Françoise Sagan in the recent Sagan: now she’s a published author in her own right. I’ve yet to read her work, though from a quick glance it appears to be closer to Nothomb’s work than to Jackie Collins’: it may be beach reading, but it’s not celebrity trash. A fierce yet feline presence onscreen, this Lyon native exudes restless intelligence, raw sexuality, and not a little rebelliousness; these qualities served her well in two early roles, Albertine in Chantal Akerman’s updating of Proust, La Captive, and one of the sisters who inspired Genet’s The Maids in Les Blessures assassines. She is always exciting to watch, always strange and surprising. Look for her as Edith Piaf’s sidekick in La Môme (La Vie en Rose) — and anywhere else you can find her.

Testud in Stupeur et tremblements

Another of my favorites, Ludivine Sagnier has proven herself phenomenally versatile already, excelling in comedy (8 Femmes), drama (Swimming Pool), mystery (A Girl Cut in Two), and a musical (Les Chansons d’amour). She even played Tinkerbell in the 2003 Peter Pan! Though she’s generally playing a sex kitten, she’s wily, and she bends her art to suit the material. To my surprise, she popped up in Claude Miller’s A Secret (2007, currently playing in New York, where I saw it this week); here, she plays not the sex kitten but a young Jewish woman under the Nazi Occupation, whose doubts about her marriage have disastrous consequences for her child. When you go to see her pictures, you honestly don’t know what to expect. Her precocious track record comes as a relief, because even in cinemaniac France, we get flash-in-the-pans, one-note wonders, dropouts and flameouts. There’s every reason to think that Sagnier will be around for a long time.

Sagnier, as one-third of a couple in Les Chansons d’amour

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Field Guide: Sandrine Bonnaire

Hitchcock blonde? Bonnaire, in Confidences trop intimes

Another very beautiful actress, Sandrine Bonnaire got an early start (the lead in Agnès Varda’s Vagabond), Bonnaire may be following the example of Simone Signoret and Jeanne Moreau by aging fearlessly. She’s still slim and barely 40, but look — she’s got crow’s feet! And darn it, she still looks great. What’s more, the openness and brilliance of her smile serve her in a variety of roles: her characters often begin with goodwill toward all — until somebody pushes them too far.

With Marina Foïs, in Un coeur simple

Highly intelligent offscreen, Bonnaire plays naïve beautifully: her gradual revelations of toughness or savvy lend extra interest, even mystery, to her films. She made banality terrifying in Claude Chabrol’s La Cérémonie, opposite the more overt Isabelle Huppert; she struck plausibly Hitchockian notes in Patrice Lecomte’s Confidences trop intimes (Intimate Strangers), in which nothing turns out as expected. Recently, she starred as one of Flaubert’s most curious creations, the simpleminded housemaid Félicité in Un coeur simple, and she directed a well-received documentary, Elle s'appelle Sabine, about her sister, treated (not always gently) for what was diagnosed as autism. She seems remarkably well-poised to benefit from French cinema’s liberality toward leading ladies: plenty of important pictures are made here starring women over 30, and opportunities exist for actresses to bring their talents to other fields, such as screenwriting and direction.

With my beloved Catherine Frot in L’empreinte de l’ange,
An autumn 2008 release I haven’t seen!

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