Arriving at a corner café in the 15th arrondissement in Paris, I tell the barman in poor French that I believe my companion has booked a table for lunch.
“What’s the name?” he asks, consulting a list.
“Um, Juliette Binoche,” I suggest, unlikely as that suddenly sounds.
He raises a quizzical eyebrow as if he is not getting the joke. “Who?”
“Juliette Binoche?” I say more loudly.
He shakes his head and, along with the drinkers at the bar, gives me a look that suggests: the Englishman is clearly delusional. I am seated in a gloomy corner and periodically treated to the same look for the next 20 minutes, sipping my water, checking my phone, as my semi-mythical guest fails to arrive. But lo, here, eventually, following her cheekbones through the gloom of the café is the star of Chocolat, The English Patient and Three Colours: Blue, in her plain sweatshirt and no make-up, apologising for her lateness and laughing her throaty, raucous laugh, and ordering steak and “the very freshest vegetables” while I take the chance to catch the barman’s eye.
Binoche is now 53, and is probably the highest paid and – Depardieu apart – best-known actor in France. Still, she goes about her business in Paris, she insists, without too much fuss, taking the metro and letting people wonder, “Is it or isn’t it?” You might think of her as an archetypal Parisian, but she doesn’t see herself – the daughter of a Polish émigré mother – as “Frenchy-French” at all. Or at least she has a fierce dislike of being boxed in. To prove the point she has rushed here from a singing lesson, one of an intensive series she is taking in order to star in a stage show about the chanteuse Barbara, friend to Jacques Brel. In the past, Binoche says, whenever she has started to sing, people, particularly her two children, have generally encouraged her to stop. But that has not put her off. Her singing coach insists she can learn.
“Isn’t there a danger of Florence Foster Jenkins?” I wonder.
She guffaws at the idea. “I hope I have good enough friends around me,” she says. “But I feel it is a little bit shameful for me not to at least try to sing…”
We’re here to talk about another surprising departure, her movie Slack Bay. The film is in that little-explored genre, northern-French-murder-mystery-slapstick-costume drama (with a little cannibalism thrown in). Binoche plays, with wonderful abandon, an haute-bourgeois aunt, all impressionist hats and unhinged operatic emotions, on vacation in Pas de Calais just before the First World War. She and her brother’s family become involved with some mussel pickers who live hand to mouth by the beach. They come off decidedly worse. Binoche spends the second half of the film in bandages, having been repeatedly clunked around the head with an oar. The film is both occasionally shocking and weirdly hilarious. It is the second film Binoche has made in recent years with director Bruno Dumont, who has lately traded auteur seriousness for low farce.
The previous one was more predictable fare for both him and her: a biopic of Camille Claudel, the sculptor and lover of Rodin, who worked out of a psychiatric hospital for the last 30 years of her life. That was a soul-baring and arduous shoot for Binoche. In the evenings, she says, over a glass of wine, she would plead with Dumont to “next time ask me to do a comedy”. Slack Bay makes good on that promise.
The contrast suits a lifelong philosophy (Binoche is keen on philosophies, on statements of intent. “When you are not judged from outside you can go very far,” she will say. Or, “In order to create, the need to express has to be bigger than the fear.”) This one she picked up in her teens.
“We limit ourselves, all the time,” she suggests. “I had a dilemma when I was 14 years old. I loved painting and I also loved theatre. I thought I had to choose. My mother had a friend who was a painter. I told her my dilemma. She signed a poster to me which said: ‘Juliette: choose to do everything!’ That always stayed in my mind.”
You could say she has made good on her ambition. She has made more than 60 films that range from The Unbearable Lightness of Being (described by the Guardian reviewer as a role that demanded “very little speaking, a lot of sulky staring and an incredible amount of frenzied bonking”) to Godzilla. She has continued to paint, releasing a book of portraits of her directors along with short poems about them. In 2008, from a standing start at 44, she performed a dance show, choreographed by Akram Khan, at the National Theatre. She has been politically active, particularly in support of artistic and journalistic freedom, and in the past couple of years has gone from sold-out seasons of Sophocles’s Antigone in London and New York to singing and slapstick.
Having been, in her 20s and 30s, the muse of just about every notable director in Europe (a fact which prompted David Thomson to ask in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, simply: “Is she the most beautiful woman in cinema?”) I wonder if she is feeling freer, a bit liberated from that intense male gaze as she gets older.
“There is only joy in that [muse] relationship,” she insists. “It is about sharing. The joy of making.” Even so, she says, “what seemed important when you are 20 – when you are 50 is hopefully not so important. Unless you haven’t grown up.”
Binoche started acting as a child in part to get the approval of her parents. Her mother was an actor and drama teacher, her father was for some time a mime artist. They split up when Binoche was four and she was sent away to boarding school.
Did she perform to make them happy?
“I was always waiting for the recognition of both parents,” she says. “But there is a moment you stop waiting for it. At some point I decided I could let go of the need.”
I ask what her mother, with a lifetime as an often struggling actor and director, made of her daughter’s overnight success – being cast by Godard in her first film, Hail Mary, and all that followed.
“She had different feelings about it. It was not always easy. But I was very inspired by my mother’s love of the arts. I remember there was a dissertation we were asked to do at school about one word that was important to us. I asked her what is her favourite word and straight away she said: ‘enthusiasm!’ and I was, ‘Yeah! Yeah! Exactly that!’” She claps her hands. “My enthusiasm always met hers…”
Binoche insists a couple of times, “I am not a past-obsessed person.” She tries to see her films only once or twice if she can help it, but if she happens to see her former self in those films she is struck by how much her voice in particular has changed over the years. “It was not in my body. There was something not grounded about it.”
The shift happened, she suggests, during the infamous making of Les Amants du Pont Neuf (1991), with Leos Carax, then the enfant terrible of French cinema, and also her lover. The filming lasted for three years. For Carax it was often troublingly autobiographical. The film ending he had in mind, she recalls, was “me dead and him standing on the bridge thinking, ‘Did she ever love me?’” That image almost became horribly true when Binoche came close to drowning in the Seine while filming. She recalls a catharsis under water. “In the moment I was coming back up for air,” she says, “there was a sort of contract being made inside me: after that, I was going to choose life no matter what.”
Had she not been making that choice up to that point?
“I saw that life is to progress, to move through things, to be open to change and to know new things. Life is to love…”
She broke up with Carax when she read the ending he had imagined. He changed it for her, to something happier, but she left him anyway. She has, famously, never married, despite “four proposals” which she “never answered”. After she left Carax she had a son, Raphael (now 22) with André Halle, a scuba diver on Les Amants du Pont Neuf. The father of her daughter Hana, 17, is Benoît Magimel, her co-star in Les Enfants du Siècle (1999). More recently she has been in significant relationships with American actor Patrick Muldoon and Argentine Santiago Amigorena, her director in A Few Days in September (2007). She is infamously protective of her private life, stubbornly defending mystery, occasionally with the aid of the courts.
I ask her at one point if she is living on her own.
“I have been in a relationship for a long time,” she says. “But of course you cannot know with whom…”
Why of course?
“Because: of course.”
I mention how the great French star of the 60s, Jeanne Moreau, once said about actors that they had to be “in love with love”. Would that describe her?
She smiles. “I had conversations with Jeanne. Once she said to me, of love, ‘You know, I never said no to green grass.’ I found that beautiful. But I am not like that at all. I have often said no to green grass. For my grace.”
We talk a little about how directors have sometimes tried to control her over the years, and how she feels she has resisted that. Ironically the women she has been directed by, she suggests, have often been the worst. She won’t name names but recently she came up against a woman (“not Claire Denis”) who tried to tell her how to act. “Even the biggest directors would not dare to tell me how to say a fucking sentence,” she says. “And this one was trying to do that with every line. I was like a good soldier; I went along with it. And I said to myself: ‘Ju, this is great you are being really humble!’ But I was very miserable at the end. You have to let an actor create.”
Bruno Dumont clearly gave her plenty of licence in her new film, though she says that, as with other male directors, “He hates my laugh.”
Maybe that’s why he had you bandaged up, I suggest.
She rocks back and laughs at the thought, agreeing that her operatic character is perhaps closer to the real Juliette than you might imagine – or at least that her kids might recognise that side of her.
Will Slack Bay herald a new chapter of Binoche slapstick I ask, as she checks her watch, alarmed at the time. “Who knows?” she says. “I’m all for adventure.” And she hurries back to her singing teacher, to run through her scales.
Slack Bay is released by New Wave and MUBI on 16 June
Correction: The film Slack Bay is filmed in Pas de Calais and not in Brittany as was originally stated in this article
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