Isabelle Huppert, 2024’s Lumière Award Winner: An Appreciation

Useful as it may be for facts and stats, an actor’s Wikipedia page isn’t ever the go-to place for a complete, nuanced description of their thespian essence, and so it proves for Isabelle Huppert. “Known for her portrayals of cold, austere women devoid of morality, she is considered one of the greatest actresses of her generation,” states the introduction, in a strikingly selective encapsulation of over half a century on screen. Huppert can certainly do froideur and severity with flair — she’s imposing beyond the bounds of her diminutive frame in such rigorous, chill-carrying films as Claude Chabrol’s “La Cérémonie,” Michael Haneke’s “The Piano Teacher” and of course Paul Verhoeven’s “Elle,” though whether these complex, conflicted women are “devoid of morality” isn’t a call for any one web editor to make. 

But it does Huppert an injustice to paint her, however admiringly, as some kind of quintessential cinematic ice queen. Her precision and perceptiveness as a performer have worked to many a temperature: she can be angrily righteous, daffily comic, racked with hot-blooded desire or, on occasion, disarmingly ordinary. Viewers only acquainted with Huppert’s more recent filmography might be startled by the girlish vulnerability she displays in Claude Goretta’s 1977 drama “The Lacemaker” — the performance that announced her, after a run of head-turning supporting roles in films like “Going Places” and “Aloïse,” as a new standard-bearer among France’s leading ladies, and won her a BAFTA for best newcomer. Playing a virginal, introverted teenage salon worker beset with mental health troubles, she was quietly heart-rending, while showing the foundations of the controlled self-possession she’d later bring to her work. 

The very next year, she won the first of her two Best Actress awards at the Cannes Film Festival for her haunting portrayal of a real-life teen parricide in “Violette…