朱丽叶·比诺什

From The Times
January 5, 2008
Juliette Binoche does Disney
She may have taken up with Disney, but La Binoche is still very much her own woman, as our critic discovers

Juliette Binoche is tightly hugging a huge cushion to her belly. “I’m going to hide more and more,” she smiles. It’s a curious sight: the most esteemed French actress of her generation, in her glorious red satin dress and silver heels, shielding herself with soft furnishings. And well she might, for “La Binoche” has gone and done the unthinkable: a Disney film.

Before you start getting visions of the woman who beguiled in Three Colours Blue and won an Oscar for The English Patient surrounded by cartoon squirrels, I should explain – Dan in Real Life is a smart adult romance far removed from your typical Mouse House production. It’s the story of single father-of-three Dan (Steve Carell), who writes the eponymous newspaper column dispensing life advice but in reality is anything but settled. When he meets Marie (Binoche) the attraction is instant – until he discovers she just happens to be the new girlfriend of his younger brother (Dane Cook).

The film is directed by Peter Hedges (who wrote What’s Eating Gilbert Grape) and, though Binoche is a charming presence throughout, there are times when you wonder if she accidentally turned up on the wrong set. In fact, the film followed on from the filming of the forthcoming Flight of the Red Balloon, by the Taiwanese maestro Hsiao-hsien Hou, in which she plays a puppeteer struggling to raise her son alone. “It was two really different worlds,” she says. “It was a little depressing to start with – like, ‘Come back to reality, Juliette! Love and freedom is not always on Earth! It’s about making movies here.’ But I survived.”

Binoche roars a throaty laugh. “I love jumps like that,” she says. “I think you learn so much from the jumps.” Even so, being paired up with Steve Carell, star of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and the US version of The Office, would seem like a chasm for an actress like Binoche to cross. “I have to say we got on very well,” she says. “He’s a very serious actor.” The result, as Binoche puts it, is something “more subtle and personal” than your average Hollywood fare. If it’s an unlikely combination, it’s evidently worked. The film has so far taken $44 million (£21.8 million) in the US – almost double its budget. Certainly, it’s Binoche’s best American film, though that’s not saying much: she turned down everything from Jurassic Parkto Mission: Impossible in favour of some very strange choices. After the sickly romance Chocolat, in which she unconvincingly romanced Johnny Depp’s guitar-strumming Gypsy, she made Bee Season, a Kabbalah-influenced family drama that even Madonna would have a hard time sitting through.

Evidently an actress who goes on gut instinct, Binoche claims such trifles as whether a film does well is of little consequence. “I’m not even aware of the success,” she says. “Success is such an illusion. When somebody tells me what they feel about a movie I can sense the reality of it. But success is an idea. It doesn’t matter to me. It makes me feel good but I’m not sleeping with [box office] scores.” Binoche has never been about that: it’s why she’s been capable of devastating performances for Krzysztof Kieslowski as the widow of a composer in Three Colours Blue and Michael Haneke, with whom she worked on Code Unknown and Hidden. “I like to be scared,” she says, “otherwise I get bored.”

What’s interesting in the case of Dan in Real Life and the defiantly art-house Flight of the Red Balloon, is that Binoche has uncovered two stories in a row that deal with the difficulties of raising children alone – a situation she knows well. She is bringing up two of her own in Paris – 14-year-old Raphaël, who came from a brief relationship with a professional diver named Andre Halle; and Hannah, 7, from her relationship with the actor Benoît Magimel, who starred opposite Binoche in Les Enfants du Siècle (1999). “It’s complicated,” she sighs. “It’s difficult. I think I’m learning from my kids so much to be their mother. I don’t think you’re born a mother. I think you become one.”

Her domestic situation is evidently a reflection of her upbringing. Her parents (the theatre director Jean-Marie Binoche and actress Monique Stalens) divorced when Juliette, an only child, was 4. It wasn’t long before she found acting as a way of escape. “The desire came first when I was in school, in the courtyard playing with my friends. It was my way to survive school.” A headstrong child, she enrolled in the highly regarded Paris Conservatoire when she was a teenager – despite her mother’s reservations. At 21 she made her major screen debut in André Téchiné’s Rendezvous and promptly received the Best Actress award at Cannes.

If Binoche had her time playing sexed-up roles, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Damage, there’s still a childlike purity that she manages to tap into in her performances. In what sounds like another nod to Disney, she explains that she has made a room especially for fairytales in her home. “I love children’s books,” she says. “Fairytales are very necessary for children to see a perspective on life. It’s a very philosophic way of reaching life.” While she’s often drawn to portraying tragic figures in her work, it strikes me that Binoche, now 43, is still looking for her own fairytale ending. “I’d love to get married,” she sighs. “It just never came along.” She had a long affair with the director Léos Carax, whom she met on his 1986 romantic thriller Mauvais Sang. They reunited for Les Amants du Pont-Neuf in 1991 with Binoche playing a role Carax wrote for her, complete with eye-patch and smudged cheeks. There have been other affairs: Daniel Day-Lewis during The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Olivier Martinez, her co-star from The Horseman on the Roof.

Recently Binoche has been stepping out with the Argentinean-born film-maker Santiago Amigorena, who directed her in the conspiracy thriller A Few Days in September (2006). She played an unlikely assassin. It was a role that evidently turned her on. “I had to be aggressive and seductive in a way I’d never been before, burnt inside as if I’d seen too much.”

There’s already talk of another project with Amigorena, a revenge thriller called Another Kind of Silence, as well as a Richard Eyre film The Other Man, with Liam Neeson. For the moment Binoche has gone back to what she does best: classy French cinema, completing Olivier Assayas’s L’Heure d’Eté, in which she plays a sister who is “not interested in the past”, as Binoche puts it cryptically. Still, I’m intrigued by Binoche’s attachment to that cushion, an action that seems to lend her a fragile, vulnerable air. Is she a fighter, too? “Oh, I’m everything,” she replies. “I’m all the animals of the forest. I tell you!”

Dan in Real Life opens on Jan 11; The Flight of the Red Balloon opens on Mar 14