Binoche's career path knows no boundaries
By not being tied to Hollywood or France, actress makes most of a globalized landscape
A year at the Yale School of Drama costs $25,735. Juilliard is about $1,500 more. And you don't even want to know what an education from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art will set you back. For aspiring movie actors, it would be a lot cheaper just to study the career of Juliette Binoche. A week with her movies might not make you a better actor - although I don't see how it couldn't. But it may make you wiser about the acting you should aspire to do. Binoche is as good an example as we have of an actor who appreciates the realities of a flattening world. She works in her native France but not always for the French. The American film industry for her is a nice place to visit but not to live in. Binoche is acting globally.
Right now you can see her in "Flight of the Red Balloon" (it opened here Friday) as a frazzled mother and puppeteer. Her character, Suzanne, lives in Paris, but the movie is characteristic of its Taiwanese maker, Hou Hsiao-hsien, a director whose sensibility places a luxurious, sometimes labor-intensive, emphasis on the passage of real time. This is a revision of "The Red Balloon," Albert Lamorisse's short classic from 1956, and the beautiful thing about it - one of them, anyway - is the way the world is distilled to a single apartment. Binoche gives herself over to Hou who, in turn, gives most of the movie over to her. She's not the first star to act in one of his films, just the first actor to seem like a star in one. Suzanne is a mess - selfish, scattered, and tardy. But more than any woman to show up in one of Hou's previous films - not to mention any other movie I've seen in a year - she's utterly alive.
After she won an Oscar in 1997 for Anthony Minghella's "The English Patient," Binoche probably could have stayed in Hollywood, but her subsequent choices - movies with the Austrian director Michael Haneke; the Belgian Chantal Ackerman; Minghella, a Brit - suggest a shifting paradigm. Hollywood is no longer the absolute center of the movie universe. Binoche's career makes it seem like just another town. She's prepared to make the world her country.
Once upon a time a star of Binoche's talent and beauty would have come to America and had a long, iconic career in studio productions. She also would have been a part of Hollywood's illustrious immigrant culture, where a lot of the old foreign-born directors and stars became naturalized citizens - Garbo, Dietrich, Colbert, Garson, Grant, Lansbury, Capra, Wilder, Lubitsch, Hitchcock - and remained reasonably devoted to the American film industry.
At the Toronto International Film Festival last year, Binoche told me her career couldn't survive on a diet of American movies now. Not many women's could. But when she was starting out in France, she knew she couldn't sustain an interesting career solely on French films, either. So she learned English and landed a part as Daniel Day-Lewis's soulfully earnest girlfriend in Philip Kaufman's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." Kaufman's movie was an excitingly international production in itself - the Californian director adapting Milan Kundera's novel about the Prague Spring starring an Irishman, a Frenchwoman, and Lena Olin, a Swede, each of whom spoke Eastern Bloc English.
In a sense, Binoche is fortunate. She's never needed a "Catwoman" to keep her on the radar. Not all her choices are sound. But for every "Dan in Real Life," there's an "Unbearable Lightness of Being," "Blue," or "Code Unknown." Very good movies - in the case of Haneke's "Code Unknown," a very good movie about how scarce goodness is in the world. Haneke showed us modern Paris groaning under the strain of multiculturalism. Binoche played a small-time actor in Paris. Her part was no bigger than those of the Arab and African actors in the film. She was not a star. She was a citizen. Haneke's film distilled global chaos into a latticework of urban dysfunction. And in one shocking scene that dysfunction expectorates right in Binoche's face. It's hard to imagine many other stars daring to undergo the same treatment for her art.
If Binoche's borderless strategy keeps her steadily employed, it also makes her employable even when she's beyond her sensual prime. (At 44, she doesn't seem close to passing it any time soon.) The roles will probably still be more interesting with Haneke, Hou, and Israel's Amos Gitai, with whom she's shooting a film right now. Natalie Portman and Penelope Cruz seem to be forging international movie careers like Binoche's. They may never conquer Hollywood but they'll certainly work longer and have better parts than if they worked exclusively in Hollywood. And in this globalized movie landscape, that's the lesson American agents, producers, and audiences would do well to heed. They should stop looking for another Julia Roberts and start looking for the next Juliette Binoche. 