JULIETTE BINOCHE
CINERAMA
ICONIC JULIETTE
LOVE MADE OF MANY DIFFERENT THINGS FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE
By PETER THOMAS BUSCH
French actor Juliette Binoche finds a sliver of the personality that distinguishes people apart from one another in a particular stage in life and then channels that sugar or poison, whatever that may be, to create film characters.
Ultimately, Binoche performs the face of love in the various phases one may find love during the different stages of life.
In The English Patient (1996), Binoche plays the face of unconditional love often found in a nurturer. The Canadian military nurse on the hospital train shares her love unconditionally with the wounded.
A most beautiful film, the English Patient does well to survive a plot as complicated as love itself. Hana has the care of a burn victim whose face and lungs and undoubtably the rest of his body has been so severely burned in a plane crash as to have become indistinguishable.
The film is all about love, which seems to have branded Binoche in her career moving forward, having been awarded the Oscar for Best Supporting actress, and all.
Hana’s careful sharing of the ever delicate fresh plumbs and fresh chicken eggs during the rationing of wartime exemplifies Hana’s natural love for others, while any reason not to love, brings tears to Hana’s visage.
Count Almasy spills his journal and then the flashbacks begin to flow on screen from an earlier time before the plane crash when Count Almasy, played by Ralph Fiennes, and Katharine Clifton, played by Kristin Scott Thomas, have an affair that unravels a close knit group of cartographers mapping the Sahara Desert for the Royal Geographical Society.
The adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s novel begins with a third camera overhead view of the sand dunes stretched out like a man’s and a woman’s body deeply in love beside each other.
Love also gets in the way of a life path in the Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988). Binoche costars with Daniel Day-Lewis in scenes set in Prague when the resistance begins to revolt against the Soviet Occupation in 1968.
The Prague Spring is a backdrop to the interrelated bursts of emotions when lovers meet and cannot quite settle on the terms between each other moving forward.
Daniel Day-Lewis plays a doctor, Tomas, enjoying spontaneous sex with many women, while Binoche plays the love interest, Tereza, who wants monogamy. The intellectual and emotional game plays out while the political events of the Prague Spring suddenly rise up and fall out just as quickly.
Binoche plays an absolute innocent reaching out almost for her first true love only to have Tomas not quite as committed.
Lena Olin plays Sabina, the third party in the love tryst.
Olin is recast with Binoche in Chocolat (2000). Binoche channels all her character’s love through the chocolates she creates in a small shop in a remote French village. The villagers have limited their emotional experiences and their desire for pleasure so as to have an exclusive devotion to Christianity.
Vianne first reaches out to the emotionally and physically abused Muscat with the gift of a special chocolate. The pleasure of the bursting flavors becomes irresistible, and the two women bond quickly and begin to help each other out with their respective difficulties that they encounter in being single women in a small remote village.
People gradually trickle into the chocolate shop for a favorite treat, and the shop is a great success, but the village elders become concerned that the experience with pleasure will become a moral distraction.
In Wuthering Heights (1992), Binoche costars with Ralph Fiennes in this classic tale of love and love lost. Cathy is true to her feelings and marries the person to whom she has become betrothed. But Heathcliff, her adopted half-brother, becomes enraged that his lifelong soulmate has chosen another lover with whom to spend the rest of her life.
Binoche and Fiennes show how the love interest becomes a primary motivator for adolescent youths. And that love gone wrong can ruin the lives of all the people involved while those that survive are so disenchanted that they become the destroyer of worlds.
Binoche has become a classic actor being seen on screen performing with genuinely transparent emotional responses to what is occurring along the narrative. The love element is just one part, although an important part to her performances.
Cathy becomes traumatized by the emotional turmoil that love causes.
In Camille Claudel 1915 (2013), Binoche stars in this companion biopic to Camille Claudel (1988) starring Isabelle Adjani.
Claudel has been torn apart by love to such an extent that she can no longer function within the rules of Parisian society, particularly with the emotional and verbal attacks she makes against her former love interest, famous French sculptor Auguste Rodin.
Without love, Claudel’s world of art and life collapses.
Binoche picks up the story after Claudel’s family has consented to the sculptor being institutionalized in an asylum in the South of France. Claudel becomes traumatized by the lack of freedom and the stubbornness of her famous poet brother to see life her way and have her released into his care.
Claudel moves through the years of her confinement in a bit of a trance while feeling the pain and disillusionment of the lost love of lovers and the abandonment of family and friends.
Binoche has become an established internationally renowned performer with a Silver Bear from the Berlin Film festival and an Oscar for her 1996 supporting role in The English Patient, and 11 French film industry Cesar nominations, including a Cesar for Three Colors: Blue (1993) and a best actress winner at Cannes Film Festival for her performance in Certified Copy (2010).
Elle has begun to express bursts of uncontrolled anxiety after a long marriage, in Certified Copy.
The protagonist meets enigmatic art historian and writer, James, and the two of them become entangled in the idea behind his latest book. Binoche and William Shimell seem oddly cast together at first, but when Elle begins to seem even odder than the casting, the audience becomes pre-occupied with their character development, where the narrative will take the audience and why the two characters are travelling around Italy together after a chance meeting at a book reading.
James’ idea behind the book is that a copy is just as good and even better than the original. Binoche’s gradually develops her character as quietly struggling with relationships. Everything gradually gets muddled as the two acquaintances travel around an Italian town transferring more and more emotional meaning from their relationships in the background to the relationship being developed between the two of them on screen.
The plot turns when Binoche has made a copy of a copy of the screen character, at which point everything begins to make sense to the audience, although everything in the scripts has become confused.
In The Wait (2015) the mother of a young man must entertain a young woman who arrives at the country house to spend time with her lover. Binoche plays Anna struggling to be compassionate but at the same time transparent with Jeanne.
Anna at the same time carries the grief of a recent death in the family, as Jeanne arrives during the funeral preparations.
The classical acting has now become art, and Binoche seamlessly transitions through the script layering on top of unconditional love the extra emotive devices such as grief and regret and suspicion.
The untold tragic truth is that Anna’s son will never arrive at the country house in Sicily to meet up with his fiancé, Jeanne.
Binoche has developed her acting art a long way from the film in which she plays an alluring young actor struggling to establish herself enough to move to Paris. In Rendez-vous (1985), everyone becomes instantly smitten by the young and free, Nina.
But Nina is nothing near to being free with the naked sexual aggression of the people she meets. The love imposed upon Nina becomes disruptive to her career. And the spiral continues downward, with many life paths altered because of love.
Binoche though is having a career of a lifetime that has gone entirely in the other direction.
