朱丽叶·比诺什

From The Times
August 16, 2008
Juliette Binoche gets metaphysical
Artists don’t come more free-spirited than Juliette Binoche. As she abandons film for a year to pursue a new dance project, the Oscar-winning actress talks of art, love, intuition and intimacy

Behind an anonymous door in a far west Paris suburb, a man and a woman are rolling around on the floor. Nothing particularly strange about that, except that the woman is strikingly familiar and her presence here is incongruous. They break, breathe, then start again, while two others, who turn out to be the woman’s sister and her son, film them. Every half hour or so, the pair come over to inspect the footage. They laugh, frown, argue a little, and then give it another go. She’s good, but not as good as him. How could she be? He is Akram Khan, one of the foremost British dancers and choreographers of his generation, and it’s possible he’s holding himself back a bit, dancing down for the sake of compatibility.

Juliette Binoche is, after all, an amateur when it comes to dance. As the word “amateur” suggests, she loves it, but she is starting as a public performer in the medium at an age – 44 – when most professional dancers are deep into retirement. Darcey Bussell, for example, spent her mid-thirties wondering whether she could carry on for another year or two. What does France’s most famous film actress think she is up to? Everyone’s reaction on hearing that she intends to dance in a two-hander is one of bemusement; how will she cope with the pliés, arabesques, entrechats and all the other tortuous manoeuvres her native language describes so elegantly? She does a dance of sorts in Cédric Klapisch’s tribute to her home city, Paris, but that’s pretty basic; more of a striptease. Surely La Binoche, as the French call their global heroine, is about to fall flat on her face, and publicly, too. The show is about to premiere at the National Theatre in London, and then tours the world for a year.

But these are the wrong questions. in-i is no ballet. It would probably be pushing it to call it dance. It’s more a physically enacted play, but with music… and a few words… possibly some singing, too; they’re not entirely sure. In Paris, with just eight weeks until the scheduled opening, Khan is still toying with the idea of incorporating his own guitar playing into the evening. Even the publicity material is betraying signs of uncertainty, although it gives it everything it’s got, describing in-i as a “unique collaboration that will explore notions of ascension, the visible/invisible, angels [and the] seven stages of man in a very personal, authentic process”.

If it goes wrong, blame the masseuse. It was she, Su-Man Hsu, wife of Khan’s producer, who suggested that Binoche should dance. She meant it as a therapeutic pastime more than a career shift, but it got out of hand, as things evidently do in Binoche’s life, and with her encouragement. “She was pulling my back,” says France’s highest-paid film star, “and asked me if I wanted to dance. Out of the blue, I said yes, because intuition knows better than we do. It is far ahead of us in thinking and behaving. As we started to know each other a bit, I did a little dance for her, and after I kissed her goodbye, it stayed in my mind, and started to grow there, and that’s why she asked me.” Su-Man gave Binoche an invitation to Akram’s work, Zero Degrees. It stayed on her hotel table while she was in London, filming Breaking and Entering with the late Anthony Minghella. She went along, and met Khan shortly afterwards. They got to know each other, talked about working together, and here they are.

She expresses some surprise at my surprise that she is doing this piece and says, quite reasonably, that she has always been a physical actress, always making the fullest use of the language of her body. True; she speaks it fluently and with confidence. The sequences they are working on may be a long way from classical choreography, but they are demanding enough. One moment, they are circling each other nastily. It could almost be Racine with the volume off. Next, she’s upside down on his back with her toes 8ft in the air. Then they’re on the floor again, and she’s rolling over him like a hurled bolster. Forget Racine. It’s more Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, with each needing the enmity of the other in order to function. It’s all pretty charged, even in these rehearsals. One reason is you’re expecting them to say something, at least in the vertical sequences, because they are looking at each other like people about to speak. But they don’t; they just withhold and withhold. The other reason is the sheer Binocherie of it all. Even in the dullest grey dance fatigues she looks just like that deeply beautiful woman in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Damage, Chocolat and so many other films over the past 20 years. It’s the freight of a real, unmanufactured stardom, based on proper acting and charisma.

“I have always loved movement and been fascinated by it since I was at school,” she says. “I read [the French philosopher] Henri Bergson, who talks about it a lot. He said everything is movement, and that’s true. There is just one tiny little piece in us which is immobile, but everything else moves. That’s why we try to hang on closely to people, and to emotions, but life is not like that at all; it’s moving all the time. For me, moving towards Akram is what it came to be about. If I could never act again, I wouldn’t mind.” She’s joking, presumably. “No. No. I don’t mind.” And to stand still is to go backwards? “Right. Also, we try to compartmentalise our lives. Me, I don’t know my path. I’m living my life as I’m walking. Sometimes I want to go and see a psychic. I try not to. We have to resist these temptations.” Because it would remove the element of surprise? “Yes, but also because it would give us a sense of assignment about what we are going to do with our lives, which is completely crazy.”

Her sister Marion, the older of the two, is not surprised by this move towards dance. But then she is no longer surprised by anything Binoche does. “She has always been doing something she never did before,” she says, “and so this makes sense in the context of knowing her.” Both she and her nephew Raphael, Binoche’s son, are plainly devoted to her, and perhaps a little mesmerised as well. As her directors know, she has the face of someone to whom something interesting is about to happen. You can’t say what it is, but you sense that if you keep watching, it will be worth the wait. Asked what he thinks of his mother, Raphael smiles, gives a classic teenage shrug and says, “I just hope she isn’t going to sing.” This brings a mock-chiding expression to Binoche’s face, and then she throws her head back and laughs. It’s an earthy and abandoned laugh, all neck and teeth. Compared with the cautious, processed charm of so many other stars, it’s a breath of fresh air. She just seems very unsnotty.

Off she goes into the next improvised sequence while her sister and her son resume their watching through the lenses. When Khan describes this strange project from his point of view, one comment makes the logic of it fall into place: “Trained dancers have a terrific skill, but that skill can also be a curse. What’s great about Juliette is that if she had studied ballet or contemporary dance, then she would only improvise through those channels. But she hasn’t. In a way, there is less to discover with a [trained] ballerina because you are working through a vocabulary that you already know.”

Both agree that at the heart of in-i stands the question, “Do you dare to love?” And the answer? “I think,” says Binoche, “that through art, I dare to love more than in a relationship.” Famously defensive of her privacy, she had apparently been going out with the Argentinian director Santiago Amigorena since 2006. But now she says she is not in a relationship, and that this project is taking her full attention. Meanwhile, she is drawing even more of the world’s attention than usual with a retrospective of her movie work at the British Film Institute in London, together with a set of portraits of herself and her directors that she has painted throughout her career. If she hadn’t decided on an acting life when she was 17, then it might have been painting. “When I was very little,” she recalls, “8 or 9, my mother bought coats for my sister and me, and 100 books of paintings. I was fascinated by them and started copying and studying them. At school, I learnt about the relationship between objects and light. Then the wind of the movies took me.”

She has also written brief letter-like poems in tribute to the directors she has worked with in the course of her career. None was more of an influence on her than Krzysztof Kieslowski, the maker of Three Colours: Blue, for which she got a Golden Globe nomination for her performance as a composer’s widow trying to reassemble her life. “He was the one who made me paint again,” she says. “We went on crazy adventures. I used to paint at night. Once, I was painting in the street and there was a girl living there, a drug addict, and she would ask me to go and buy drugs for her.” Then there was Anthony Minghella’s 1996 film of Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient, which won her an Oscar for best supporting actress. Of Minghella’s death this year after surgery for a growth on his neck, she says glumly: “It was terrible, yes.” She had worked with him again two years before his death, when she gave a ferocious portrayal of a Bosnian refugee in London in Breaking and Entering.

In this dance piece, as in that film, she exudes the sense of a commitment so total that the rest of life must wait. But life seems to disobey her, at least when it comes to her children, the ones who figure more prominently than any other when the talk returns to love and its challenges. Her son’s father is a scuba diver, André Halle, and her eight-year-old daughter’s is the actor Benoît Magimel. Both men, she says, are involved in the caring. “When they [children] come out of us,” she declares, “it is the most astonishing piece of creation… how come this human being is passing through me? Such a mysterious moment. How come I’m sure I know this person? I feel like, when we have kids, it’s a decision of three people. They come with their own story, their own power… A friend of mine said that bringing up children is like going up stairs. One step, then breathing, reaching a certain point, then another step, that’s fine, then another and, oh, my god, another after that; always on the move.”

She’s hardly the first hyper-busy mother to have had to juggle, but with the sheer intensity of her work schedule – sometimes five films a year – it must have seemed like a job for Cirque du Soleil. “I always took [my children] with me. When my son was ten, I asked him if he wanted to come, and we went all round the world, changing schools.” Is she the boss when it comes to making arrangements for the children? “No, there is no boss.” But the fathers are supportive, I suggest, and it works. “Do you have children?” she asks. Four, I reply. “And does it work?” I pause to answer and she roars with laughter again – this time a benign sort of “gotcha” laugh. “To me,” she goes on, “there is no hierarchy in life. You have to recognise your task early on. If you decide you want children, you have to take responsibility for them until they fly on their own. It doesn’t mean I don’t make mistakes, because I do. I want to be perfect – of course. I’ve never wanted to say no to my son, so I always said yes.”

Her own parents were in showbusiness; her mother an actress, her father a theatrical director. She was four when they divorced, had an unhappy time at a Catholic boarding school, got into the highly competitive Conservatoire de Paris, quit the course, and started working with a boyfriend, Leos Carax, on small French movies; by 23 she was in the film version of the Milan Kundera novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, directed by Philip Kaufman, and that was that. The world was binoché, from the loftiest critic to the basest gawper. Praise was heaped on her in clichés, but for every “gamine” there was a “sultry,” so that she was, as she remains, hard to categorise; she could handle romantic comedy such as A Couch in New York as naturally as she could take on the heavyweight challenge of the French literary giant George Sand in Children of the Century.

In teaming up with 34-year-old Khan, she has found a similarly single-minded working partner: London-born to Bangladeshi parents; cast in Peter Brook’s Mahabharata at 14; fought off parental opposition to pursue a career in dance; founder of his own company; collaborations with author Hanif Kureishi, composer Nitin Sawhney and artist Anish Kapoor, the designer of in-i. The way Khan tells it, the two of them had started from nothing. “I filmed her a little, and we started getting to know each other. She said it should be like an exchange, breathing in and breathing out. So we met the next day, warmed up separately and thought about how we could start. It became an imitative game. It’s what a child does. My sister’s son is one year old, and tries to say everything in your accent.” Khan is married, has no children yet, but would like some. “We ended up, through improvising, with one becoming the voice and the head of the other, almost like an angel. The other person becomes your own inner voice.”

It is as intense as it sounds; if anything, more so. “We haven’t touched all the surfaces of getting to know each other,” he says. “We have to show each other our demons. If I can reveal mine to her, then she can reveal hers to me. It means that there is an intimacy. The way I am with her is not the way I would be in front of you.” If we are talking of love, it sounds as though they have plenty of the stuff for each other. It’s a bourgeois question, but doesn’t a professional relationship as profound as this one pose problems for the husband or wife? And aren’t the problems exacerbated by one of the performers looking like Juliette Binoche?

Khan has seen this one coming, and is unthrown. “I said to her [my wife]: when she and I kiss, how would you feel about that? She said, ‘You’ll know when to stop. I trust you. If you bring her into your real life, you’ll know where the line is drawn.’ That gave me the confidence.” But these are difficult areas, aren’t they, when play-acting is conducted with such conviction? “You mean it blurs the line?” asks Binoche. There would seem to be that danger. “It’s very interesting,” she replies. “This is a first for me, this finding of a balance between us. It’s almost like getting married, then learning to know each other after the contract is made.” More circling, entangling, analysing. Does she ever surprise you, I ask her sister, who replies: “I think she is working hard at surprising herself.”

A month on, they’ve come to London and are rehearsing at the National. With five weeks to go, the talking has all but stopped. “It’s contradictory to talk about it,” she says. “Like painting, it’s not about talking, it’s about doing it.” She looks smaller than she did in Paris, and appears to have lost more weight through these eight-hour days of movement. She’s tense and controlled, as if the whole weather of her has changed. Asked how she feels, she replies: “Erm, there’s no escape.” They’re opening at this theatre because its artistic director, Nicholas Hytner, has long been a fan of both artists. “When we produce a play,” he says, “we know exactly what that play is. When you put a choreographer into a theatre, you have no idea what he is going to ‘write’. This exists somewhere in-between, and these devised shows are always nerve-racking. It would be idle to pretend it’s not alluring to have such a great movie star here, but this came about because of her relationship with Akram.”

Su-Man is with them today. How does she think Binoche is doing? “Better than I had imagined,” she smiles, “technically and artistically. Juliette is a marathon runner, not a sprinter. She tries; she gives it everything she has. She is very open.” Then she and everyone else looks at Binoche as they always do, private and public alike, waiting for the next thing to happen on her face. And she, just for a moment, looks at the ground.

in-i opens at the National Theatre in London on September 6. The British Film Institute’s Binoche season runs from September 1 to October 5