26 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER11, 2019
Isabelle Huppert
1
THEPICTURES
THESHRUG
I
sabelle Huppert, the French movie
star, marched across the little bridge
from Madison Avenue into the Met
Breuer, opened and shut her handbag
for a security guard, and disappeared
into a stairwell. The filmmaker Ira Sachs
tried to keep up. “The stairwells here
are famous,” he called out. Up a few
flights, Huppert frowned at a taped-off
door. “This floor is closed,” she said,
then continued upward.
They emerged into an uncrowded
gallery, containing a retrospective of the
Latvian-American artist Vija Celmins,
known for her photo-realistic render-
ings of spider webs, star fields, and des-
ert floors. Sachs had wanted to show
them to Huppert, he said, because “I
felt that there was a relationship to the
infinite.” The theme put him in mind
of his new film, “Frankie,” set amid the
bluffs and forests of Sintra, Portugal.
Huppert plays the title character, a
French movie star who reacts to a
life-threatening diagnosis with what
might be called the Huppert Shrug.
(Recall the opening scenes of “Elle,” in
which her character is violently raped
by an intruder, then brushes herself off
and goes about her day.)
Huppert, who wore a gray tartan
trenchcoat and nude lipstick, read the
wall text. “Oh, Death Valley,” she said,
picking out a familiar phrase. “I did a
movie in the Death Valley. It’s called
‘Valley of Love,’ by a French director
named Guillaume Nicloux. We shot
four years ago, with Gérard Depardieu
and myself. It’s a beautiful film. Noth-
ing to do with Ira’s, but it also deals
with death.” She approached a graph-
ite drawing of rippling waves: “Unti-
tled (Ocean),” from 1977. Sachs re-
marked, “Vija paints so you have a sense
that there’s a world outside the frame,
which is always my intention when
shooting a film.”
Huppert nodded, and they moved on
to a painting of a porcelain surface. “Is
that a relief?” she said. “How do you say
relief? It means you think it’s not flat.
You think there is another dimension.”
“Well, we use the French word
‘trompe-l’oeil,’” Sachs offered, as Hup-
pert checked Google Translate on her
phone. “Voilà!” she said: the English
word was also “relief.” “You feel that the
ink is thicker here.” She pointed back
toward the painted porcelain.
“Do you feel that acting is an illu-
sion?” Sachs asked.
“Not really, no,” she said. “It’s hard,
for me, to connect acting to painting or
images. Only rhythm and music.” In
2005, she collaborated with the artist
Roni Horn on a series of a hundred
photographs. “She wanted to have very
different expressions on my face,” Hup-
pert recalled. “I had no makeup, noth-
ing. And she wrote the names of sev-
eral of my films, put them in a hat, and
each morning I would take a little paper
and choose a film, and she would ask
me to remember the main feeling which
irrigated my performance in the film.”
She tensed her lips. “For the first five
minutes I thought, What is she talking
about? But it made perfect sense.”
“I want to play that game!” Sachs
said, then called out names of Huppert’s
films: “‘Loulou’! ‘La Cérémonie’! ‘Heav-
en’s Gate’!”
Huppert smiled at the mention of
“La Cérémonie,” in which she plays a
blasé murderess. “That is certainly
different from ‘Frankie,’” she allowed.
“If you ask an actress to play an actress,
it creates a feeling of reality, of course—
much more than if I was playing a nurse
or a butcher.”
“She’s not as famous as you are,” Sachs
said, of his protagonist. “Frankie’s doing
much more television than Isabelle.”
“But she has a beautiful bracelet,”
Huppert countered. “She has some kind
of exterior sign of being wealthy and
successful. So with those little indices—
how do you say indice?” She returned
to Google Translate. Voilà: “A clue.”
“That’s a lot of what filmmaking is,”
Sachs said. “How many clues do you
need to give to get the audience to know
the characters intimately?”
A couple approached Huppert, star-
struck. The man mentioned a friend
who, in 2003, had a chance to buy one
of Celmins’s works for fifteen hundred
dollars, but couldn’t afford it. His com-
panion said, “The same thing happened
to me, with a James Castle.”
“Eggleston, for me,” Sachs chimed
in. “Everybody’s got their one.”
Huppert gave the Shrug. She’s not
a collector, she said. “I have this little
painting of a tree, which I bought on
a big boulevard in Moscow. It isn’t
worth anything, but I just love it. I
have my own barometer of what’s worth
and what’s not worth.” She circled back
to where she had started and snapped
a photo of “Untitled (Ocean).” She did
not explain why. But it was, perhaps,
a clue.
—Michael Schulman
room of cubicles. Without much ado,
the dog found a RAM card on the floor,
concealed by a nameplate that had fallen
off a door.
Since Hannah’s graduation, in March,
she has accompanied Hyla on more
than a dozen missions. (The sheriff felt
that it would be too risky to allow a
journalist to go out in the field—even
a journalist who laughs at danger.) On
an early case—a routine search of the
home of a man on probation for a sex
crime—she turned up a digital camera
and a Game Boy inside a knapsack.
Does Hannah feel proud when she lo-
cates an item? “I don’t know,” Hyla said.
“I never asked her.”
When Hannah is not working, she
lives with Hyla, his wife, their three kids,
and their other dog, Chestnut, a pug-
gle. A while ago, the family misplaced
an iPad. So far, Hannah has not been
able to find it.
—Patricia Marx
