Juliette Binoche has starred in more than 70 films, won an Oscar and remained one of the most important figures in European and international cinema for four decades. However, she still feels anxious in front of an audience.
Shortly before presenting her first film as a director, In-I In Motion, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the French actress seemed unsure of how to explain this unusual, poetic and nonlinear work to the audience.
The documentary follows the period when Binoche, in the late 2000s, left the familiar territory of cinema and entered the world of contemporary dance. At the center is her collaboration with the British dancer Akram Khan, with whom she created a series of daring, physical and often strange performances. For an artist who the public knew as an icon of the red carpet and arthouse cinema, the film reveals a much more naked side: a body in fatigue, uncertainty, long rehearsals and a creative process where there is nothing glamorous.
Binoche sees this as the essence of the film. She did not want to feed the myth of “La Binoche,” the sophisticated and unattainable figure of French cinema. Instead, she aimed to show what it means to be inside a creative process: the search, the error, the sweat and the effort to find a common language between two very different artists.
In the film, she is shown enduring six months of ordeals with Khan. At one point, her body slams into a wall several times. But what is most striking is the lack of awareness of the image: Binoche dances as if every cell of her body is involved in an act of complete artistic surrender. She herself calls this state a “cloudy place,” a space where the beginner does not know, but precisely from this can arrive at a more inner truth.
Together with Khan, Binoche built the characters' emotional arc through long, almost therapeutic conversations with acting coach Susan Batson and through improvisations directed by Su-Man Hsu. The questions that guide the work are big and difficult: why do humans need each other so much, what does it mean to love, when do we give up and when do we continue even when love becomes unbearable?
When In-I first premiered in London in 2007, the reaction was mixed. However, the project became a personal turning point for Binoche. The play was performed more than 100 times around the world, and her sister, the director Marion Stalens, filmed some 200 hours of rehearsal footage. Binoche later edited the footage into a two-hour documentary.
Robert Redford also gave her a major boost. After a performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2008, the American actor and director entered her dressing room and repeatedly asked her to turn the project into a film. Binoche held onto this idea for years, until a producer and financier approached her with the question of whether she had a project she wanted to make.
The film also touches on the actress’s early and painful memories. In-I’s opening is inspired by an unusual childhood memory of hers: at the age of 12, while watching Fellini’s Casanova in the cinema, she became obsessed with an older man. In the play, this becomes the initial spark of romance between her character and Khan, a relationship that moves from fascination and sexual tension to arguments, consumption and separation.
But the work’s most poignant moment is connected to a much darker experience. At the climax of the performance, Binoche appears as if she is drowning, suspended in front of Anish Kapoor’s blood-red scenography. The scene stems from a memory of an attack she experienced as a young girl. She has said that the attack turned into a fight and that the assailant grabbed her by the throat. At that moment, Binoche told her: “Go ahead, do it.” According to her, this is what stopped the attacker.
The actress does not dramatize this memory as something extraordinary only for her. When the pain of returning to such a trauma is mentioned, she reacts sharply: many women, she says, go through experiences of violence, especially in France, where the percentages remain worrying.
Although she had previously considered directing, Binoche says she didn't feel a pressing need to make her own film because as an actress she had always been deeply involved in the creative process. For her, the actor is not simply someone who follows instructions: he is at the heart of the director's work, embodying it physically and emotionally.
From the directors she has worked with, she says she has learned above all to trust her intuition. Art, she says, starts with feeling: from the body, instinct and inner need. This has led her to radical roles such as Mauvais Sang, where her personal relationship with Leos Caraxin and her desire to be loved by him were part of the experience, but also in more commercial films.
One of the works that most transformed her remains The Lovers on the Bridge, the 1991 film by Carax, her former partner. For the role of Michèle, a homeless artist who is losing her sight, Binoche spent time on the streets. Filming lasted more than two years, the production faced delays and financial problems, while she turned down other opportunities to devote herself to the role.
Throughout her career, Binoche has always had a complicated relationship with her public image. After films such as The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Damage and The English Patient, the British press declared her a sex symbol. She says that this image has not bothered her, but admits that nude scenes are always difficult and require trust in the director.
This trust was not always rewarded. In the 1990s, during the filming of Alice and Martin, Binoche says she felt betrayed by director André Téchiné over a nude scene. She managed to avoid using the footage by convincing the producer to remove it, but she never worked with Téchiné again.
On the issue of on-set intimacy coordinators, Binoche takes a more complex stance. She acknowledges that safeguards can be useful, especially for younger actresses, but warns that on-screen love cannot be reduced to a list of mechanical movements. For her, intimate scenes must come from the heart, instinct, and emotional need; otherwise, they risk losing their truth.
Even about artificial intelligence, she does not show panic. According to her, the history of art has known similar fears before: photography did not destroy painting, cinema did not kill theater. Artificial intelligence, she says, remains artificial; it is neither human nor spiritual intelligence.
In recent years, Binoche has been drawn to projects that keep her connected to the land and human transformation. She will next appear in the drama Queen at Sea, in which she plays the daughter of a woman with dementia, which won the Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival. She is also filming in France for North Loire, a rural thriller from director Antoine Chevrollier. Although it was only her second film, Binoche decided to accept it immediately after meeting him.
For her, status should not become an obstacle. If an artist clings to the idea that she should not "descend" further down the hierarchy, she misses out on important opportunities for art. And in Juliette Binoche's career, risk, intuition, and stepping out of her comfort zone have always been more important than safety. /GazetaExpress/
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