In Girard’s ‘Sidonie au Japon’ which screened at the 20th edition of the Marrakech International Film Festival this year, Huppert plays a woman who is still haunted by the memory of her late husband, which leads her on a voyage to Japan that she will never forget…
A roundtable of three women journalists can turn out either to be a wonderful thing or simply awful. On this occasion, while sitting under the Moroccan sun, outside in the riad-styled courtyards of La Mamounia, while interviewing the stunning French star Isabelle Huppert and the director Élise Girard, the combination turns out to be magical.
“Who wants to ask the first question?” Says the colleague from India, a woman who would turn out to be my favorite person at this festival. Apart from a flair for mixing vibrant khaadi colors in her clothing, she possesses the kind of wisdom and humor that make even a simple coffee break an adventure, a-la Indiana Jones.
“I’ll go first,” I hear myself say, thinking I know just how to break the ice. Interviewing La Huppert can be intimidating because she treats each journalist as an individual, something unusual for movie stars, and will end up looking so deeply into your eyes that your soul feels naked.
Tilda Swinton, Jessica Chastain and Isabelle Huppert in Marrakech
“Do you believe in ghosts?” Huppert’s knee-jerk answer to my icebreaker is a nippy “ha… No!” Once again though, the French star taps into her one-to-one approach and notices the disappointed look on my face. “I’m too rational — I believe in memories, I believe in how you need the past to enjoy the present and enjoy the future, but no, I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“It’s a good background and inspiration for fiction,” she adds. When I tell her how Sidonie au Japon has taken up a comfortable, warm place in my heart, Huppert discloses further.
“I don’t believe in ghosts but,” she says seriously, “but I do believe that yes, sometimes you just think about someone you lost and maybe for some people you call it a ghost and for some people it’s just a thought, an obsession…” Like in the film, where writer-blocked author Sidonie goes to Japan, to present the reprint of her first book, and embarks on a journey to her past — which includes the loss of her husband who seems to haunt her in the present — but also manages to accidentally step into her future. In Osaka, Sidonie meets her French-speaking Japanese publisher Kenzo Mizoguchi, played by Tsuyoshi Ihara to quiet perfection, and together, they will unblock their mutual pain.
If ever there was an adult love story, complete with fairytale themes and magical turns, it is Sidonie au Japon.
As Élise Girard joins our roundtable, Huppert explains the question I asked and points out to Girard, “because you believe in ghosts, and I don’t.” “Oh you do?!” I hear myself exclaiming to Girard, maybe more enthusiastically than the occasion allows. “Yes, she does,” Huppert says drily, shooting me a look of camaraderie, like she and I know better now.
The table, including Huppert erupts in laughter. The French journalist, a wonderfully free spirit, chimes in “I think ‘elaborate’ was your next question?” This is when a good roundtable turns into the interview of the festival.
Élise Girard photographed in Venice at the Giornate degli Autori, where the film world premiered in September
“How do you believe in ghosts? Are they with us, are they a thought…?” I ask Girard. Another plus of a great group of journalists is that they will allow you the time to ask follow up questions and this journalistic dance becomes an easy group effort that yields the most delicious results.
“They are with us, but I don’t see ghosts” Girard replies. “Because you are not mad!” Huppert jumps in, sarcastically, causing another uproar at the table. “I feel that people who died still remain, in a way, around us,” Girard continues, “and that relationship we had with them, remains in time — as an example, a friend is still a friend, my grandmother is still my grandmother — so sometimes it happened to me to see, to imagine what a friend who died would have told me, if he were still with me.” Dead people we loved still live around us, what a beautiful thought! “It makes me strong, this belief,” Girard adds.
My beloved late friend Richard, he is definitely part of this roundtable, in spirit. He and I were going to come to Marrakech together in 2018, when he had been hired to do the international PR for the festival. We shopped for outfits together in Paris, he bought a beautiful pair of shoes that he would wear on the red carpet in Marrakech. But he didn’t make it, passing away in mid-November, just days before the festival was slated to kick off. And I didn’t make it either, unable to find the courage to put one foot in front of the other, and make it to the airport — let alone to Morocco — without him.
Isabelle Huppert in a fluid Balenciaga dress on the red carpet in Marrakech
Sidonie au Japon features an unorthodoxly filmed “sex” scene, where Huppert is, for all intents and purposes naked, though shown through a series of still photographs in various stages of lovemaking with co-star Ihara. I ask her if she has gotten more or less comfortable with nude scenes at this stage in her career. “It’s a nude scene but it’s very elliptic,” Huppert points out, “the idea to do it with photos, it’s a very good idea, because everybody talks about it as it is a very striking way of doing of a love scene.” The actress, sporting a more strawberry blonde look than her usual auburn red locks at the festival, says that most of the time, love scenes in films, are “a fail — you have to be very talented, and find the good angle to do it, and doing it this way is very poetic, very mysterious, and it also gives very much the feeling that she [Girard] wanted to give in the film, that it is their first time.”
Huppert also taps into the imagination angle of filming the scene this way. “I don’t know why this stillness gives something fragile, and also asks the spectator to imagine the scene, and that’s what cinema is about — a way to show the invisible for me.”
Sidonie au Japon is a deeply poetic film, but also filled with little comedic moments that make women, in particular, go “ah, yes, of course!” One such moment, which is played back and forth and even somehow ends the film, involves Sidonie’s handbag, which Mizoguchi keeps taking away from her, in a Japanese sign of respect — a guest should never carry anything, that to him is hospitality. As my Indian colleague points out, “it’s cinematic and says so much about the culture,” and Girard adds in, “a woman always has a bag,” meaning Sidonie is nude, “very fragile” in the moment he’s taken all away from her.
What does a bag represent for Huppert?
“Some people, sometimes don’t have bags and I think it’s very sexy — for me it gives a sense of freedom,” Huppert says, and when she sees someone bag-less, wonders “where is the money, where is the cellphone, maybe it means there is no cellphone which is the sign of a great freedom, you don’t have to bother with connections…” She continues, pointing to what Girard has said about being fragile without one’s bag, “maybe she’s wrong, because in fact when I see someone without a bag, for me it’s a sign of strength, of power, it’s liberating and it gives me a sense of independence.”
Isabelle Huppert being filmed in La Mamounia while wearing those pink Balenciaga heels
At the end of our chat, I compliment Huppert on her beautiful Barbie-pink knotted fabric pumps, and ask her “are they Balenciaga?” “Yes,” she replies coyly, and while trying to fill the silence, I chime back, “of course, ‘cause you are the queen of Balenciaga!” She shoots me a look, kind but also a bit haughty. “I’m the princess, not the queen.” Of course, silly me.
That subsequently becomes the motto of the Marrakech Film Festival for us, the three journalists lucky enough to imagine that Isabelle Huppert, for this half hour, this morning, has been our best friend, our BFF. And the princess of Balenciaga, forever. Inshallah.
Images courtesy of the Marrakech International Film Festival, header photo courtesy of Indie Sales, all used with permission.