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CriticsFilm
The Observer Critics
04.08.19The infi nite variety
of Juliette Binoche
Streaming
biopic Camille Claudel 1915 , and
having a blowsy, hysterical ball
as a shrill, overdressed aristocrat
in the poisoned slapstick romp
Slack Bay. Also look out for Polish
director Małgorzata Szumowska ’s
fascinating, largely overlooked
Elles , a study of journalistic
ethics and vicarious thrill-seeking
powered by Binoche’s risky
physicality in the lead.
A soupçon of Binoche, then,
though should you wish to continue
your own retrospective on other
streaming platforms, options are
plentiful, from established career
high points such as Three Colours:
Blue ( Chili ) to only-for-the-devoted
oddities like her ambitious but
uneven performance as a post-
apartheid South African poet in
In My Country ( Amazon , if you’re
curious). Dig deeper, however, and
you’ll fi nd a near-lost gem in the
Mike Figgis short Mara , a 20-minute
Henry Miller adaptation in which
she bristles with concentrated
sensuality. Taken from the director
and recut by HBO for a 1991
compilation, it’s now available
via Figgis’s own Vimeo page – a
true Binoche completist can’t do
without it.Guy
LodgeMubi shines a spotlight
on the wit and risk-
taking of one of the
most magnetic actors in
contemporary cinemaviolence in Paris that
plays, if anything, more
urgently now than it
did in 2000. (They don’t
have Haneke’s more
celebrated Binoche-starrer
Hidden , an invaluable
thematic companion piece,
but Google Play does .) For a more
relaxed, gentle, crinkled side of
Binoche, Mubi have also selected
Assayas ’s lovely, bittersweet,
chablis-soaked Summer Hours , a
grown-up family comedy that also
ranks among its director’s best.
Newly landed on the Mubi queue,
meanwhile, is the performance
that, if pushed, I’d pick as Binoche’s
greatest, and certainly one of the
most ingenious by any actor this
decade: she’s wittily attuned to the
evolution of identity , trickery and
lovers’ gamesmanship in Certifi ed
Copy (above), Abbas Kiarostami ’s
origami-folded idea of a romantic
comedy, in which two wary lovers
are reunited... or have they just met?
Coming later this month, too, are a
pair of Bruno Dumont collaborations
that perhaps offer the selection’s
most extreme Binoche contrasts.
She’s austerely devastating in
the title role of stripped-backAuteurism – that sometimes
questionable practice of attributing
fi lms entirely to their directors,
super seding all other collaborators- is the predominant language
of serious cinephilia, and serious
cinephile streaming sites tend to
follow suit. Mubi, for example,
tends to be director-led in its
programming, dedicating the bulk
of its retrospectives and guest-
Subtitled “ The
Woman With a
Thousand Faces ”,
Mubi’s best-of-
Binoche roundup is
thoughtfully chosen
and aptly rangy, even
if it kicks off with one
curious clanger (and one of the
actress’s few visibly unconfi dent
moments) in Louis Malle ’s erotic
melodrama Damage. From there
on, however, the pickings get much
richer. Before they shuffl e off the
end of Mubi’s curated queue, you
have a few days left to catch her
two fi lms with madcap visionary
Leos Carax. In Mauvais Sang, one
of her earliest breakout roles, her
glowing ingenuousness is the
stabilising infl uence in a thrillingly
deranged Aids-era gangster thriller.
Five years later , in the ravishing,
punk-operatic vagrant romance
The Lovers on the Bridge , she
was already a more knowing,
sensuous actress.
Also currently on the platform
is her smart, candid turn as an
audition-hopping actress in Michael
Haneke ’s still-undervalued Code
Unknown , a subversive essay on
racism, class confl ict and moralcurator spots to the artists calling
the shots behind the camera. Yet its
current themed season, dedicated to
the work of Juliette Binoche , makes
a compelling case for the actor as
auteur. The selected fi lms, the bulk
of them by celebrated fi lm-makers
in their own right, are tonally and
stylistically disparate, yet bound by
the French star’s singular screen
magnetism: a presence at once
serene and febrile, with ideas and
desires twitching beneath that
extraordinary face.
Now in her 50s , with more than
65 fi lm credits to her name, Binoche
is as busy as ever, with Claire Denis ’s
brilliant High Life fresh in our fi lm-
going memories , Olivier Assayas ’s
chic, limber Non-Fiction hitting
screens (and Curzon Home Cinema )
in October , and a new fi lm with
Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-eda ,
The Truth , opening the Venice fi lm
festival in a few weeks.РЕЛИЗ
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