French actress Juliette Binoche.JULIETTE BINOCHE: ENCHANTE!
By
Alex Simon
Editor’s Note: This article originally ran in the November 1996 issue of Venice Magazine.
"Comment allez-vous. Je m'appele Alex Simon." "Enchante." "Bonjour." "Omlette du fromage." These are just a few of the French phrases this jittery, nervous interviewer was practicing on the way to meet the ravishing French actress Juliette Binoche at her Four Seasons hotel suite recently. In town to promote her latest film, The English Patient, in which she co-stars with Ralph Fiennes, Kristin Scott-Thomas and Willem Dafoe, Juliette immediately disarmed said interviewer when, upon entering her suite and greeting her with a well-honed and beautifully inflected "Bonjour," she responded with "Hi! Great to meet you!" Okay, so much for dazzling her with my Rainman-level French. Maybe a few of my well-researched questions would dazzle her, thankfully able to be posed (and understood by her) in my marginally better English.
The first thing that strikes you about Juliette Binoche, apart from her stunning, ethereal beauty, is her infectious upbeat energy and fierce intelligence. Unlike many of the dark, haunted and brooding women she has portrayed on-screen, this is definitely a woman with a "glass half-full" philosophy of life. When the interviewer points this out to her, she responds with a hearty laugh "Well of course I'm different in real life. If you're happy inside, it's very easy to play at being sad, and then going back to being happy again."
Born in Paris to parents she describes as "very eclectic people" who were involved in the theater, teaching, writing and other aspects of the arts. Juliette's childhood was spent in boarding schools around Europe, as well as a great deal of traveling the globe with her family. Traveling remains a passion today. "When you travel you get a great sense of where your roots are," Juliette explained. "Once you know that, you can go anywhere."
Juliette's parents exposed her to a variety of the arts, and she even studied with her mother, who taught drama at the time, when she was thirteen. However, the acting bug didn't bite until she hit her late teens. With her boarding school days behind her, Juliette studied at the Paris conservatory. At seventeen, Juliette directed a play in school, afterward declaring to her mother "I know what I want to do: I want to be in the theater." The following year, a friend introduced her to a top casting director in Paris who suggested she try her luck at movies, soon landing her first role at the tender age of twenty in the French film Rendezvous. From there, the roles kept coming, and Juliette has done close to twenty films to date, working with some of Europe's most legendary directors, the first of which was Jean-Luc Godard, in the controversial Hail Mary (1985).
Juliette's English language debut came in Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being in 1988, playing the fragile lover of womanizing doctor Daniel Day-Lewis, whose own internal conflicts mirror the turmoil of Soviet tanks invading his home of Prague in 1968. Juliette's heart-wrenching performance won her critical acclaim throughout the United States and North America.
Juliette is also familiar to American audiences from her role opposite Jeremy Irons in Louis Malle's Damage . "That film was a difficult experience, not because of Louis, but because of the tension between Jeremy Irons and myself. Because it was such a dark subject matter, things were quite intense on the set. I had a lot of admiration for Louis, though. He was very helpful to me, not necessarily in words, but just in a way he would look at me during or before a take. It was very difficult for him at the time because he was very ill and I think felt rather trapped by his illness, but he really tried to make the best of his situation while we were working."
During the difficult shoot, however, Juliette discovered a book, "Talking with Angels," which got her through the rough spots, reading being another passion of hers. "I've been carrying that book with me for a long time now, and I was really shocked when I found out that Los Angeles meant 'City of Angels.' " She added with a laugh, "I thought, if that's true, why do they have all those earthquakes and other horrible things?" As far as her impressions of the U.S., Juliette professes a love for San Francisco, but admits that L.A.'s car-driven culture is not quite to her taste. "I think you have to have a purpose to be (in L.A.). You have to work. If you're out of work and you just hang around, it must be the worst thing ever, because then you can lose yourself. L.A. has always struck me as a place with no center, making that much more difficult, I think, for a lot of the people here to find a center inside of themselves. This is especially important if you work in film, because it allows you to go into uncharted areas of yourself, but in order to get "home," you've got to have that center inside yourself."
Juliette's next big international hit was Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blue, part one of his trilogy of films on life in contemporary France, for which she won the French Cesar award for Best Actress (the French equivalent of the Oscar) and was nominated for a Golden Globe in the U.S. "We actually had a lot of laughs on that film. Krzysztof was a real pessimist and I'm just the opposite, so we'd always laugh and kid about how different we were. He was very warm, and helpful, and patient."
Juliette describes her role in her latest film, The English Patient as one of her favorites thus far. Based on the best-selling novel, Patient opens in the final days of WW II in Europe. Juliette's character Hannah, a French-Canadian nurse, feels that everyone she touches is doomed to die after losing her fiancée and best friend within days of each other. She comes upon a man only known as "the English patient" (Ralph Fiennes) whose features and own identity seem to have been burned away in a plane crash which he barely survived in the Arabian desert. Hannah decides to care for this shell of a man in his final days, taking up residence in an abandoned monastery in the hills of Italy, during which time the pair aid each other in healing the physical and emotional scars of war and, through flashbacks, the English patient helps Hannah and the audience, put together the pieces of his mysterious past. The film is one of the year's best, with Juliette's sensitive performance being one of its highlights.
When her busy schedule isn't filled with making a film, or representing the new Lancome fragrance Poeme, Juliette spends her time with her 3 year-old son in Paris, and is very politically active in the French organization ASPECA, which provides aid to the children of Cambodia. Juliette personally is Godmother to six Cambodian children, whom she goes to see often. "I like to be active. I can't stand being passive. When I do something that interests me, I get a great deal back from that. That's why I haven't been seeing a lot of movies, I feel too passive just sitting there." As far as favorite films, Juliette confesses to not being a fan of "gadget films" such as Star Wars and a lover of Frank Capra films and the films of Jimmy Stewart. "He's always such a gentleman on screen. Like Meryl Streep, you feel that you're watching someone who's a good person inside, which makes you want to love their character more."
With that, what was supposed to be a half hour interview has turned into over an hour. Although she is in a rush with the clock ticking on the departure time for her flight home, Juliette walks me to the door, graciously extending her hand for a warm good-bye. As I turn and give her a final "Good-bye," she looks at me, a glint of mischief in her eye, and with a wink says "Au revoir."
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