Iconic Isabelle

Michael Haneke wouldn’t start shooting until he had Isabelle Huppert, and she is the piano teacher at the heart of his shattering adaptation of Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek’s novel. She has locked every feeling away, until a student comes along who is determined to find the key. — Erika Kohut teaches piano at the Vienna conservatory, where she is merciless with her students, and spends her evenings in the flat she shares with her strict mother. She is lonely, and her sexuality finds its outlet in voyeurism and the video booths of porn shops. Then Walter Klemmer, a gifted young student, begins to court her, and Erika tells him exactly what she wants. — Grand Prize of the Jury | Cannes Film Festival | 2001 Best Actress (Isabelle Huppert) | Cannes Film Festival | 2001 Best Actor (Benoît Magimel) | Cannes Film Festival | 2001

Haneke never explains why the world ended, and although he made this post-apocalyptic film in 2003, it catches something of the existential emptiness of our own time. Isabelle Huppert leads her children across fields and down roads, trading everything she has for a safe place to spend the night. — Anne and her husband bring their two children to a house in the French countryside, looking for shelter some time after a catastrophe nobody names, and find armed strangers inside. By nightfall the family is on the road along with the rest of the country. A silent boy begins to follow them, and Anne lets him. — Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 2003 Official Selection | Toronto Film Festival | 2003

François Ozon’s farce, a stylish homage to classic cinema, is set in 1935 Paris, where a jobless actress and a lawyer with no clients share a flat and scrape by. When the actress is charged with murdering a producer, the pair realise her trial could be the best publicity they’ll ever get. — Madeleine Verdier is an actress nobody hires and Pauline Mauléon a lawyer nobody calls, and in 1935 Paris the two of them share a flat they can’t afford. Then a producer is shot dead and the police come for Madeleine. Pauline tells her to claim self-defence, and the courtroom becomes the best stage either of them has ever had.

Isabelle Huppert won an award at Venice in 1988 for playing Marie-Louise Giraud, who carried out twenty-seven abortions in occupied Cherbourg and was put on trial for it by the Vichy regime. Chabrol tells her story without once telling you what to think. — Marie is raising two small children in a town in German-occupied France, with a husband sent home wounded from the war and not a penny to her name. When a neighbour comes to her in trouble, Marie helps her out, and word gets around fast. Soon there’s a queue outside her door and a prostitute living in the spare room. Marie has money for the first time, and it suits her down to the ground. — Golden Ciak Award for Best Film | Venice Film Festival | 1988 Best Actress (Isabelle Huppert) | Venice Film Festival | 1988

Claude Chabrol meets the heights of his ‘60s filmography with this suspenseful gem full of playfulness and lethal passion. Isabelle Huppert in one of her 7 collaborations with the director and Anna Mouglalis in one of her first on-screen appearances. — A famous pianist and the CEO of a chocolate factory get married, the second time for both of them. The pianist has a teenage son from his previous marriage, whose mother died at birth. A young pianist enters their lives claiming to be his real daughter. That’s when the new wife’s Machiavellian character comes to play… — Best Film | Louis Delluc Prize | 2000

Haneke won the Palme d’Or and an Oscar for his most tender film. Jean-Louis Trintignant (“Three Colours: Red”) and Emmanuelle Riva (“Hiroshima mon amour”) play a couple whose love has weathered everything, until it comes up against the one thing nothing and nobody can defeat. — Georges and Anne are retired music teachers in their eighties who have been together for decades and have lived in the same Paris flat for many years. Then one morning at breakfast, Anne stops in mid-sentence and stares blankly into space. From then on her memory begins to fade, taking with it the life the two of them have built together. — Best Foreign Language Film | Oscars | 2013 Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 2012 Best Actress (Emmanuelle Riva) | BAFTA Awards | 2013 Best European Director | European Film Awards | 2013 Best Foreign Language Film | Golden Globes | 2013 FIPRESCI Prize | San Sebastian Film Festival | 2012

Victor and Betty work their way round Europe’s luxury hotels in a camper van in Claude Chabrol’s fiftieth film, and they might be accomplices, lovers, or father and daughter. The director never decides, and Isabelle Huppert and Michel Serrault are enjoying themselves too much to give anything away. — Victor’s first rule is never to take too much, which is why he and Betty, touring Europe in a camper van, only ever con luxury hotels out of sums too small for anyone to call the police. Then Betty spots a courier with five million Swiss francs in his briefcase. Suddenly the rule doesn’t interest her at all. — Best Film | San Sebastian Film Festival | 1997 Best Director | San Sebastian Film Festival | 1997

Haneke, the constant provocateur, has some fun with the demise of the traditional upper-class family as we know it, using murder as the only point of connection in the unbridgeable generation gap, in a perversely ironic best-of that winks at the whole of his oeuvre. — There’s nothing "happy" about the life of this family. The eldest daughter has taken over the family business from her father because of his advanced age. She has to deal with the potentially catastrophic consequences of a work accident at one of the company's construction sites. At the same time, her brother takes custody of his teenage daughter after the mysterious poisoning of his ex-wife. He too is hiding secrets, which could endanger his second marriage. — Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 2017

Claude Chabrol called it the last Marxist film, and it stars Venice winners Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Bonnaire. In the Ruth Rendell novel it’s based on, the killer and her motive are revealed in the very first sentence, and knowing where it’s all heading is what makes your blood run cold. — The maid in a large country house in Brittany, Sophie is quiet, diligent and obedient, and she keeps it hidden that she cannot read a single word. In the village, Jeanne runs the post office and never hides what she thinks of the family up at the big house. The two women become friends, and before long one is pushing the other to rebel. — Best Actress Award (Isabelle Huppert) | César Awards | 1996 Best Actress (Isabelle Huppert, Sandrine Bonnaire) | Venice Film Festival | 1995 Pasinetti Award for Best Actress | Venice Film Festival | 1995 Metro Media Award for Best Film | Toronto Film Festival | 1995

Isabelle Huppert has proven that she can play anything. In Jean-Paul Salome's political thriller based on a true story that rocked France, she gives yet another excellent and multi-layered performance as a fearless syndicalist. — The true story of Maureen Kearney, a trade union representative for a French multinational nuclear power company who became a whistleblower, risking her life to expose top secret deals that shocked the world. — Official Selection - Orizzonti | Venice Film Festival | 2022