It is Bérénice Bejo’s day off, and she wants to get straight down to business. No sooner is she through the door of her agent’s office in Paris than she is steering me into one of the bright conference rooms, yanking out chairs for both of us and plonking her belongings on the table.
We have met to discuss The Childhood of a Leader, a brooding psychological drama directed by the young actor Brady Corbet, who Bejo says is “a little genius”. She plays a nameless, emotionally frigid mother in early-20th century France. While her American husband is helping to broker the Treaty of Versailles, their young son grows mysteriously malevolent.
“She’s like a queen who cannot reign. But she has a son strong enough to be a king,” says Bejo. That’s how I approached it. She can’t have the power because she’s a woman, so instead she has this boy and she pushes him as far as she can.”
As she talks, Bejo stuffs a green-and-white linen scarf inside a black crash helmet daubed with white squiggles. Moped? “Bicycle,” she chirrups. “I’ve been a bicycle girl for 15 years. And this is a cool helmet, no? So I don’t look stupid.” No chance of that. The actor, who turned 40 last month, is wearing a black leather jacket over a grey vest, grey jeans and trainers. She has long chestnut hair, which she gathers periodically into an improvised ponytail, and freckles on her nose.
In The Artist, the Oscar-winning homage to the silent era, she was Peppy Miller, a movie extra who rose to the top faster than bubbles in champagne. The camera fell unambiguously in love with Bejo, and millions of cinemagoers followed suit. Bejo was already married to the film’s writer-director, Michel Hazanavicius; the couple live with their two children, a son of eight and a daughter who is almost five, as well as Hazanavicius’s daughters, aged 18 and 12, from his previous marriage. They met in 2005 while shooting the spoof OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, starring Jean Dujardin, later to be the star of The Artist, as a suave, moronic secret agent. The picture was a riot, but it had serious points to make about colonialist attitudes to the Arab world; it felt as if Austin Powers had been rewritten by Edward Said.
Bejo’s function was to upbraid the hero, often with no more than a disbelieving, deadpan look, whenever he made another gross cultural faux pas, such as telling the muezzin to “shut the fuck up!” during the call to prayer. Western ignorance and insensitivity were the targets. Even so, could the film be made now? She gives a gasp. “It’s funny you ask that. I was wondering also. I will ask Michel tonight what he thinks. I’m not sure.”
OSS 117 opened in April 2006, just two months after the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo published an anti-fundamentalist cartoon of a sorrowful Muhammad saying: “Cest dur d’être aimé par des cons” (“It’s hard being loved by jerks”). “People asked me when OSS 117 was released: ‘Are you not scared?’” she recalls. “I thought, ‘Have you even seen the film?’”
Hazanavicius caused controversy when he wrote a defiant open letter to Islamic State after the 13 November attacks in Paris. “Here in France, what we love is life,” he wrote. “And the pleasures that go with it. For us, between being born and dying as late as possible, the main idea is to fuck, laugh, eat, play, fuck, drink, read, take a nap, fuck, talk, eat, argue, paint, fuck, take a walk … read, fuck, give, fuck, sleep, watch movies, scratch our balls, fart to make our friends laugh, but above all to fuck, and eventually get a nice little handjob.” He showed it to his wife in advance. “I was, like: ‘Hey, you’re fucking a lot!’” she laughs.
She suggested he post it on Facebook. “We didn’t think it would spread all around the world.” After the disbelief, fear set in. Then after a few days we said: ‘Islamic State might have something to do other than shoot us and our children.’” The family lives not far from the Bataclan theatre, which was the main focus of the attacks.
“Two days after it happened, we were out having dinner in those streets. Two days after that, we were at the theatre. I said to Michel: ‘Do we just keep going?’ He said: ‘We have to.’”
Will there be any more letters? “If he wants to write another one, we would post it. We cannot live with fear in our bodies. That’s not my character. I can’t stop living.”
At times like these she thinks of her parents. Her father was a film-maker who specialised in Buñuel-esque comedies; her mother trained as a lawyer. They fled Jorge Rafael Videla’s dictatorship in Argentina in the late 1970s and moved with Bejo, her sister and their two step-siblings from Buenos Aires to Paris. She was three at the time. “They survived. I keep going because that’s the way I’ve been taught.”
The similarities between the family she came from and the one she has created for herself are striking. Both contain two children from earlier relationships and two from the present one. And I can’t be the first journalist to point out that her father and her husband are both film-makers. “Also, my dad’s name is Miguel and sometimes I say his name when I mean Michel.” That’s almost too Freudian. “I know,” she sighs. “You cannot marry your dad, so you marry the closest thing to him.”
Though it was The Artist in 2011 that brought Bejo international success, she had been acting for more than a decade, including the likeable medieval romp A Knight’s Tale, with Heath Ledger, in 2001. One of her favourite roles, she says, was in Most Promising Young Actress, a French comedy from 2000, in which she played a girl who rejects her father’s hairdressing business to pursue an acting career. It can’t be a coincidence that she singles out this story of dads and daughters, especially since its director, Gérard Jugnot, also played her on-screen father. The roles of parent, film-maker and husband are forever merging in her life.
She is currently midway through shooting the comedy Redoubtable, her fourth collaboration with her husband. And – what do you know? – this one is about a director. Not just any director: Jean-Luc Godard, played by Louis Garrel. “It’s set around 1968,” explains Bejo, who plays a friend of Godard’s. “He had just made La Chinoise, which wasn’t well received. People said: ‘Why don’t you make another Le Mépris?’” Not unlike what happened when she and Hazanavicius followed The Artist in 2014 with The Search, an unloved drama set in war-torn Chechnya. “Redoubtable is about Godard but there are moments when I can see it is about Michel, too,” she says fondly. “People ask him, ‘When are you going to do another comedy with Jean Dujardin?’”
In the space of three years, Bejo and Hazanavicius experienced the extremes of critical and public reaction. She describes in escalating steps the realisation that The Artist was becoming a phenomenon. First, Harvey Weinstein bought the movie. “I didn’t really know what that meant. Michel said it was a good sign.”
Then there was the rapturous premiere at Cannes. “We were like, ‘Oh cool. Maybe more than 10 people will see this one.” It was when the film bagged 10 Oscar nominations, including one for Bejo herself, that she thought: “This is big.” (It later won five, including best picture, best director and best actor, as well as six Baftas and three Golden Globes.) But it was never about prizes for her. “The exciting thing is what happens after. What sort of movies will you be able to make? What comes next?”
She answers by using her hand to mime a nose-diving plane. “It’s great to get everything. It doesn’t feel so great to get nothing.” For every cheer that greeted The Artist at Cannes, The Search received a boo. Hazanavicius had lost his knack for visual precision and eloquence, but it felt also as if the couple were being punished for their change of direction. “In each case, it was too much. Too much love and then too much hate. The Artist was not the best film of its year, and The Search was not the worst. You realise you’re in the middle of something that has nothing to do with you.”
It all came back to her earlier this year as she read the coverage from Cannes of Sean Penn’s new film, The Last Face, which was similarly mocked for its earnestness. “He said: ‘I’m sad because now I don’t know if I’m going to be able to sell my film.’ I thought, ‘Well, Sean, you won’t. You’re not going to be able to do anything with it because you got booed. Sorry. You’re dead!’” She brushes her palms clean, as though she’s just finishing burying something with her bare hands.
At least Redoubtable is taking her in a lighter direction after making three serious films back-to-back: The Childhood of a Leader, Tran Anh Hung’s Éternité (“It’s like a poem to life”) and Joachim Lafosse’s After Love, which she describes as “an hour and a half of talking and arguing”. She thinks the latter will be her last movie about a break-up for a while, especially as she covered similar ground in Asghar Farhadi’s 2014 melodrama The Past: “I think I need to move on.” Time for a separation from separation.
It has also been refreshing to return to comedy after the intensity of After Love, where there were as many as 80 takes for a single scene. “Some actors were saying they found Joachim hard to work with. ‘Oh, he yelled sometimes.’ I said, ‘He’s searching. It’s hard. Give him time.’ I’ve learned a lot about directors, and I’m very patient with them now thanks to Michel. I love him so much that I excuse them more than I might have done before.”
Dads, husbands, directors: what’s the difference anyway? “It’s not like I think of them all as my husbands,” she protests. “But loving one director makes it easier to love them all.”
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