Two years ago, Juliette Binoche came to New York with the script for “Chocolat” in hand, and the starring role for herself in mind. She sat down with Harvey Weinstein, the larger-than-life power behind Miramax Films, who she already knew was planning to produce the film, and told him how much she loved the part.
“I was kind of astonished by his reaction,” Binoche recalled recently. “He said, `Well, Juliette, if you really want to do it, then you have to ask for it.’ So I said, `Harvey, may I do this film?’ And it’s funny, but it was a very good experience for me, because making a demand is very clarifying. I think in life you have to ask for things to happen. They don’t just pop out of a box.”
Being demanding has its rewards, as Binoche is learning. Not only has she been nominated for an Academy Award for best actress for her star turn in “Chocolat,” but the movie itself is in the running for best picture. If she had a tendency to wait for things to happen in the past, this intense, exacting French actress is now fully in charge of her career. And she’s flaunting her new prowess in two films in which she plays almost maddeningly take-charge women.
In “Chocolat,” Binoche infuses Vianne, a chocolatier who can intuit people’s spiritual needs as well as their hunger pangs, with so much supernatural strength that she unflinchingly takes on a whole French village to prove a point or two — about single-motherhood, sensuality and what the right blend of chili peppers and cocoa can do. She blows into town and starts reforming the local population with determined zeal.
In the second film, “The Widow of Saint-Pierre,” which is scheduled for a spring opening, Binoche goes one step further, portraying an idealistic young wife who takes her passionate pursuit of justice to a dangerous extreme.
The film, a French-language drama directed by Patrice Leconte (“Girl on the Bridge” and “Ridicule”) and based on actual court records, is set in 1850 on a small French island off the coast of Canada. It examines a strange triangle involving a condemned murderer, the military captain who must carry out the death sentence and the captain’s beloved wife, who makes it her mission to redeem the doomed man.
While the prisoner, a hard-drinking fisherman (played by the Yugoslav director Emir Kusturica in his acting debut), awaits the arrival of a guillotine from France, Binoche, as the beautiful but headstrong Madame La , requests permission to employ him as her gardener. Her doting husband (Daniel Auteuil), who presumably knows better but can deny her nothing, lets her turn the prisoner into her protege, setting in motion a series of events that leads to tragedy.
Leconte uses the barren Atlantic coast landscape as a metaphor for the couple’s devoted but childless marriage, and he manages to raise subtle questions about guilt and innocence and the nature of the human heart as his camera dwells on the delicate features of his fierce heroine.
“I think if you are strong you are also very vulnerable,” says Binoche, who by her own estimation is “very willful.” “You cannot have one without the other, otherwise you are not human. What I liked about the story was the ambiguity. She has strong opinions and is educated and has very much her own way of doing things. But it is complex, you know. There are things you cannot control because they are in you.”
Over breakfast, Binoche looks positively serene, happy even. With her auburn curls chopped short, she looks uncannily like a young Ingrid Bergman. The only sign of age in the 36-year-old actress is something wise, and a little sly, in the smiling brown eyes.
As she fiddles with her teacup, she explains that for her, acting involves such a huge commitment, both personally and professionally, that she never takes a role unless it speaks to her so strongly that she feels she must accept it.
“I am always trying to balance my life, my work and my family,” she says, referring to her two small children, Raphael and Anna, by Andre Hall, a professional scuba diver. They live just outside Paris. “I probably take my work too seriously, my art. I hear people tell me sometimes, `It’s the kind of film where you’re going to have a good time,’ or `It’s just to have fun.’ Fun!” She slaps the table as she yells the word. “Fun, you know, is not related to moviemaking. I mean, you can have the joy of making something and the involvement, but it takes so much, and you have to give so much — all the will, and desire, and burning and boiling. I could never just walk through a role. How could I? It’s not my way of working. I was born different.”
Lasse Hallstrom, who directed her in “Chocolat,” says, “Juliette has easy access to her emotions. She knows the importance of being completely present in every scene because the camera is awfully revealing. She has a quality that I think you find more common in Europe, which is trusting the subtle choice, trusting that it will be enough. And she comes very well prepared. She learned to make chocolate for the film, which impressed me.”
Hallstrom is married to the Swedish actress Lena Olin, who co-starred with Binoche in 1988 in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and has a supporting role as an abused wife in “Chocolat.” “It was great to see them together, because there was a kind of shorthand there,” Hallstrom says. “I gave them a lot of room to experiment, and I think that Juliette appreciated that because she wanted to be a bit more loose, not to be so in control and self-aware. She wants to get those surprising moments that go beyond what is in the script.”
Binoche concedes that in the past she has been known to throw herself into her work with a bit too much abandon. To prepare for her role as a homeless painter in “The Lovers on the Bridge” (“Les Amants du Pont Neuf,” 1991), which was directed by Leos Carax (her boyfriend at the time), she exposed herself to the elements for days at a time so that her skin would look convincingly raw. But by the end of the movie, which was shot in fits and starts over 2 1/2 years, she was cured of the need for that sort of punishing realism. “I learned to switch it on and off,” she says. “As Laurence Olivier said, `Just act.'”
But her penchant for emotional truth came back to haunt her later, when Krysztof Kieslowski, the director of “Blue,” saw her blush during one scene and demanded that she blush again in the next take. “He thought I was that good an actress, I could blush like that,” she says, snapping her fingers. “So I tried, and I tried, and I could not do it again. Well, you know, that only happens sometimes.”
She finds it amusing that she is praised for her great beauty, which is almost invariably described as “luminous” or “incandescent.” “I mean, look at me,” she says, throwing her head back and letting out a loud guttural laugh. She claims her laugh sounds like “a dog’s bark, but then so does Judi’s,” she says, referring to Dame Judi Dench, who has been nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actress in “Chocolat.” “What I’ve learned is to never take things personally, because that’s when you get into trouble,” Binoche adds. “I think acting is so much about leaving the ego and learning to forget yourself.”
As the child of two stage actors, she was never sanguine about her appearance while growing up; for years, she says, she was obsessed about having “a fat nose.” When her parents were out of work and money was short, she was shipped off to stay with relatives and attended a number of schools. She says she always felt like an outcast and learned to survive by playing the clown.
Binoche says she found her recent Broadway experience reinvigorating and would love to return to New York to do another play. She loves Paris but does not miss it. “I like being an outsider,” she says. “It’s liberating. I am lucky to be desired here, to be able to go back and forth between France and here. It’s a wonderful feeling. It’s what every artist should have.” Soon she’ll be off to promote “Chocolat” in Europe for Weinstein, who has produced most of the films she has made in English and who is the main reason she keeps working in America. “If it wasn’t for Harvey,” she says, “I wouldn’t be here.” (Her next Miramax project is Walter Salles’ “Assumption,” based on an Anthony Minghella script about the 15th Century Florentine painter Fra Filippo Lippi.)
After her final performance in “Betrayal,” on Feb. 4, Binoche called Weinstein to talk about a French film project she is developing. “We talked for two hours,” Weinstein recalls, “and then finally I said, `OK, Juliette, this time I have to ask, Can we do this film together?’ And she said, `Yes.’ So I told her, `See, we’ve come full circle.'”
While they don’t always see eye to eye, Binoche says, she and Weinstein have found a way to work together. “I don’t know if he understands me, but he lets me be me.”
