Le Boucher movie review & film summary (2003) rogerebert.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from rogerebert.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
It couldn’t be a mere coincidence, I thought to myself, after watching a couple of Isabelle Huppert’s films, as in all of these films she played morally ambiguous characters. This led me to watch some more of her films, and in those too, she was much more of the same. Playing a grey character would be putting it mildly – the more psychologically complex and unhinged – the better Isabelle Huppert seemed to be at getting under the skin of it.
1919-1950: The politics of Surrealism libcom.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from libcom.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Isabelle Huppert has the best poker face since Buster Keaton. She faces the camera with detached regard, inviting us to imagine what she is thinking. Since so often the thoughts of her characters run toward crime, revenge, betrayal, lust and sadism, it is just as well she can seem so passive; an actress who tried to portray these inner emotions would inevitably go hurtling over the top and into the next movie.
Consider Merci Pour le Chocolat, her new film, directed by her longtime admirer Claude Chabrol. There is hardly any suspense about what she s up to. The title, and the fact that it is a thriller, inspire us to regard the movie s frequent cups of hot chocolate with as much suspicion as the arsenic-laced coffee in Hitchcock s Notorious. Even if an early scene hadn t warned us that the chocolate contains a date-rape drug, we d be wary just because of the dispassionate way Huppert serves it. She doesn t seem like a hostess so much as a clinician.
In a career that spanned over five decades, Claude Chabrol was one of the most prolific of French filmmakers freepressjournal.in - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from freepressjournal.in Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.