The Metrograph, an independent movie theater in New York, will be hosting a six-film retrospective of French actress Isabelle Huppert. The event kicks off November 19.
As their announcement praises, “Simply put, there is no other career quite like it; Huppert is Picasso level. Over the course of five decades she has worked with a solid portion of all the major established or emerging directors around, and has probably had a hand in more great films than any single one of them. She can be hard or soft, frigid or flirtatious, fierce or shrinking, cerebral or sensual, and sometimes a combination of all of the above in a single close-up. And somehow, improbably, she seems to only get better.”
Huppert’s career has spanned decades and continents. She has 15 César Award nominations, the French equivalent of the Academy Awards, and a win for her performance in 1995’s “La Céremonie.” She has won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival twice, and is an Officer of both the National Order of Merit and the Legion of Honour. She’s starred in two well-received films this year: Mia Hansen-Løve’s “Things to Come” and Paul Verhoeven’s controversial “Elle.”
The complete lineup is listed below, with synopses and schedule provided by Metrograph
“The Piano Teacher” (Michael Haneke/ 2001 / 35mm / 131 mins)
Few actresses have so consistently shone a light into the darker recesses of female sexuality than has Huppert, from early collaborations with Claude Chabrol and Maurice Pialat to this year’s Elle, but for many this chilly portrayal of a dangerously repressed Vienna piano professor who enters into an obsessive relationship with one of her pupils is the performance they can’t stop thinking about — with a grimace.
Sat., Nov. 19–5:15pm
“White Material”(Claire Denis / 2009 / DCP / 106 mins)
Raised in colonial French Africa, Denis would return to the continent in her cinema time and again, making it the scene of some of her very richest works. Here Huppert plays the manager of a coffee plantation in an unnamed country on the verge of civil war, trying to hang on until harvest time as the auguries of impending chaos gather on every side.
Sat., Nov. 19–10:00pm
“Abuse of Weakness” (Catherine Breillat / 2013 / DCP / 105 mins)
A too-little-seen performance which in many ways prefigures her work in Elle, Abuse of Weakness has Huppert as the on-screen surrogate of director Catherine Breillat, offering a painful autobiographical denuding in this story of a woman brought low by a stroke, after which she outfits herself in imperious SM style, but remains an easy, even willing, target for a low-class con artist (rapper Kool Shen) who milks her dry.
Sun., Nov. 20–4:30pm
“In Another Country” (Hong Sang-soo / 2012 / DCP / 89 mins)
Huppert plays three variations on the role of a Frenchwoman abroad in Korea in her first venture into the peculiar, soju-soaked world of writer director Hong Sang-soo, and is the connecting link between the elements of this triptych of glancing, awkward romantic encounters which move along at an amiable shuffle, all of them representing the invention of an aspiring filmmaker working through a mysterious trauma.
Sun. Nov. 20–6:30pm — Q&A with Isabelle Huppert following screening
“Amateur” (Hal Hartley / 1994 / 35mm / 105 mins)
Set in a disappeared downtown Manhattan of twenty years ago, this absurdist comedy from peak period Hartley introduces Huppert as an ex-nun trying to make ends meet by writing smut for the likes of Wet & Wild magazine, scooped up in a coffee shop by a bloodied but hunky hustler (Martin Donovan) who recruits her into his mission to recover his past — a journey that will lead them into a nourish underworld of yuppified gangsters.
Mon., Nov. 21–7:15pm
“Home ”(Ursula Maier / 2008 / 35mm / 98 mins)
A mesmerizing tragicomic fable of modern family life. Huppert plays Marthe, a happy-go-lucky mother whose family enjoys an idyllic existence in their isolated home. Almost entirely cut off from society at large, they forge their own utopia. Everything changes when city trucks roll in to complete the road’s construction. Lensed by the always brilliant Agnès Godard.
Mon., Nov. 21–9:30pm
Special Screening:
“L.A. Confidential” (Curtis Hanson / 1997 / 35mm / 138 mins)
Isabelle Huppert introduces L.A. Confidential in tribute to her late friend Curtis Hanson.
Sun., Nov. 20–9:00pm — Introduced by Isabelle Huppert
