Who Doesn’t Love Isabelle Huppert?
Regardless of whether you do, you may want to head to Film Forum for its retrospective of the uncannily flexible actress who’s long been sought out by directors from around the globe.

“The last movie star” is a trope that’s been banging around for some time now. It not only served as the title for a 2017 movie that was among Burt Reynolds’s last feature films, but was the impetus for actor and director Ethan Hawke’s recent documentary series on Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.
As each generation turns down the pike, new candidates for that rueful honorific are inevitable. For my mother and father, it went to Greer Garson and Gregory Peck. For the stray millennial, it may someday be Daniel Kaluuya and Margot Robbie. In the meantime, let me posit Isabelle Huppert — not as the last movie star per se, but rather the last movie star who cineastes can all get on the same page with.
Who doesn’t love Isabelle Huppert? As of 2022, Ms. Huppert has been at it for five decades and there’s little sign of slowing down. In this year alone, she’ll be in six films, and she also had a theatrical run as Lyubov Ranevskaya in the Festival d’Avignon’s mounting of ‘The Cherry Orchard.” Ms. Huppert guest-starred in a 2018 episode of the French television series “Call My Agent” as a veteran actress with a reputation of being an inveterate workhorse. She was, of course, playing herself.
Film Forum is in the midst of a three-week retrospective of Ms. Huppert’s pictures. Even a cursory scan of the movies listed on the calendar evinces an actress of uncanny flexibility who has been sought after by a staggering variety of directors. Forget French filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, Claire Denis, and Diane Kurys. From Korea’s Hong Sang-Soo to Austria’s Michael Haneke to, here in the U.S., Michael Cimino and David O. Russell: International directors want a piece of that “fearless and mesmerizing, sometimes scary, sometimes freakish” talent.
The last quote comes from a New York Times film critic, Manohla Dargis, and is as good a description as any of Ms. Huppert’s portrayal of Jeanne, the wildly unpredictable postal clerk in “La Cérémonie,” a 1995 psychological thriller by director Claude Chabrol.
Chabrol employed Ms. Huppert several times over the course of his career, including in “Story of Women” and “Violette Nozière,” both from 1978, and as the title character in 1991’s “Madame Bovary.” (All are showing at Film Forum.) It was in “La Cérémonie,” though, that Ms. Huppert cut the sharpest figure. There’s a reason it’s among the pictures getting the most traction during the current retrospective.
“La Cérémonie” is based on a Ruth Rendell novel, “A Judgment in Stone.” Chabrol, who adapted the screenplay in tandem with Caroline Eliacheff, had to know that he was working with a book whose first sentence is among the most celebrated of literary opening lines. Can one spoil a movie that’s close to 30 years old? Suffice it to say, Rendell gave the game away with a declamatory statement, and then followed it up with a tale of murder whose motives were, at once, shockingly random and seemingly predestined.
Chabrol and Ms. Eliacheff were likely attracted to the book for precisely those reasons. Being one of the few Hitchcock acolytes who sustains comparison with the Master, Chabrol postpones Rendell’s introductory revelation for a good third of the movie. When the truth about Sophie Bonhomme (Sandrine Bonnaire) is made plain, the audience has already become rattled by Jeanne — a character who seems ancillary at first, but then comes to dominate the proceedings.
Is it pushing the Hitchcock comparison too far to say that Jeanne is as memorable and unsettling a sociopath as Norman Bates, Bruno Antony, or “Uncle Charlie,” the skeevy figure in Hitch’s perpetually underrated “Shadow of a Doubt”? Say this much for Ms. Huppert’s performance: We don’t need to know Jeanne’s backstory to realize that she’s more than a little problematic. Paranoia, erotomania, delusion, and, oddly enough, practicality are attributes Ms. Huppert puts into motion with an almost breezy innocence. It’s a scary performance.
Should you need a starting point from which to admire Ms. Huppert’s inestimable gifts, “La Cérémonie” will fit the bill. After which, you’ll more likely than not want to camp out at Film Forum in order to immerse yourself in the other often troublesome characters she so capably embodies.