Michael Rozek’s Marianne – The Extraordinary Gaze Of Isabelle Huppert
Michael Rozek’s Marianne is a one actor film and the one actor here is the truly great Isabelle Huppert. It’s a combination which unsurprisingly produces a film that is both unusual and extraordinary. Rozek eschews the usual garnish and trickery which come as standard in commercial cinema, and instead creates a work of pared-back simplicity and directness. Huppert is sat simply on a sofa in a country house and speaks directly into camera in one long take – the first edit in the film doesn’t happen until the 63rd minute – and there is minimal camera movement. Marianne, then, is an exercise in performance, raw truth and cinema itself.
Liberated from convential cinematic distraction, we are able to pay attention to the fine details and high nuances of Huppert’s performance through which the meaning of the film is transmitted. Further, this clarity enables us to create a real and powerful connection to Huppert when she speaks into camera. We are struck by her penetrating gaze with its unique intensity, pinned by it in fact, and it is extraordinary. She says at one point “I’m expressing … not something on the screen … but something through the screen” – this is literally true. We gaze at her then her gaze bounces back onto us. And perhaps in that moment, we, even if only vaguely or remotely, get a sense of what it must be like to act opposite this important contemporary actor.
Huppert reads her lines from a script which creates the feeling of a work in progress, rather than the polished delivery we would expect. In the background we can read the words Some Like It Hot on a book sat on a shelf. At one point Huppert says “I am a character played by an actress,” and the script also references other filmmakers like Bergman and Tarkovsky. We are being made conscious of cinema, conscious of performance and we are being asked to take some responsibility for what we see. We are not passive spectators consuming a story – we are participants in a show. We are acting with Huppert and we are observing her and we are being hypnotised by her all at the same time. It is a unique performance and a unique experience watching it – unlike anything else in cinema.
Huppert speaks in English rather than her native French – of course we have seen her in English-language film before, but we understand her to be a French actor. This linguistic switch-up adds another flavour to the mix of this subtle rawness. Another layer of comfort and cinematic expectation has been peeled away. The language that is natural for Huppert is removed, and she performs in an unnatural one. Late in the film Huppert reverts to French [there are no subtitles], and she is no longer speaking to camera and she has changed location – a passageway. She is about to make an entrance into a room for the next scene. She practices walking through the passage whilst trying to get a piece of paper out of her pocket – no longer Marianne but Isabelle Huppert in rehearsal. We are taken to new a level of intimacy here – even the layer of performance is removed and we enter straight documentary.
In the final scene, Huppert returns to the sofa and her script. But this time her eyeline is slightly off-camera and our connection to her is cooled. Now we are more observer than participator. Her intense gaze is no longer upon us and we sit in shadow and watch.
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