During the 70th edition of the San Sebastian Festival, where the European star will present ‘Fuego’, directed by Claire Denis, actress Juliette Binoche will receive one of this edition’s Donostia Awards in recognition of her career. ‘Fire’ was the film with which Claire Denis won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the last Berlin Film Festival. The French actress worked under the command of David Cronenberg, the other Donostia Award winner in this edition, in ‘Cosmópolis’ (2012).
Juliette Binoche was born in Paris on March 9, 1964. The daughter of a theater director and sculptor and an actress, she studied acting at the Paris School of Dramatic Art and, after graduating, began in the theater. Her debut in the cinema took place at the age of 20, with the film ‘Les Nanas’ (1984). A year later, director Jean-Luc Godard gave her the opportunity to star in the film ‘I greet you, Mary’, playing the Virgin Mary. Her consecration would come with ‘Bad blood’ (1986) and ‘The lovers of the Pont-Neuf (1991), both by Léos Carax, of whom she became muse and lover. Steven Spielberg offered her to be the lead in ‘Jurassic Park’, but she Binoche turned down her offer to work on the famous trilogy of colors by Polish Krzysztof Kieslowski.
Binoche, who among her many activities includes being a helicopter pilot, was the first European actress to achieve “the triple crown of best actress” at the Berlin, Cannes and Venice film festivals. She has expanded her career beyond film over the years. In 1998 she made a strong foray onto the stage with Luigi Pirandello’s ‘Naked’ and in 2000 she hit Broadway with Harold Pinter’s ‘Betrayal’, for which she was considered for the Tony.
Their top 10 from best to worst among those available on platforms:
Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche in ‘The English Patient’. /
The English Patient (Anthony Minghella 1996). Available on HBO Max, and for rent on AppleTV and Amazon
Starring Juliette Binoche, Ralph Fiennes, Willem Dafoe and Kristin Scott-Thomas. The film for which Binoche won the Oscar. At the end of World War II, a young nurse named Hana (Binoche) tends to a severely burned plane crash victim. Her past is shown in flashbacks, revealing an involvement in a fateful love affair. Based on a novel by Michael Ondaatie that takes place between Italy and North Africa, it is also a chronicle of a double love story that involves four people.
Juliette Binoche and Jeremy Irons in ‘Wound’. /
Wound (Louis Malle 1992). Available on Filmin, Acontra+ and Prime Video, and for rent on Apple TV and Amazon
Starring Juliette Binoche, Jeremy Irons and Miranda Richardson, it is the penultimate production of the late Louis Malle, which marked the return of the French filmmaker to the triangular and passionate story. Binoche plays Anna, a young woman marked by the suicide of her brother who has learned to survive dragging with her the stigma of fatality. The enigmatic protagonist thus becomes the trigger for a devouring and also transgressive passion that will destroy the solid foundations on which a British conservative politician has sustained his personal success and social projection. Malle’s description of the deterioration of the family institution is even more disturbing with the choice of the particular link that links two of the three vertices, allowing him to question the double morality and hypocrisy of the bourgeois class of which the French director himself was part.
Juliette Binoche in ‘Blue’. /
Three colors: Blue (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1993) Available in Filmi and Movistarplus+
Starring Juliette Binoche, Benoît Régent and Florence Pernel. Start of Kieslowski’s ‘Three Colors’ trilogy (in the other two the actress made cameos), which corresponds to ‘freedom’. Binoche is here Julie, a woman who, in a car accident, loses her husband, a prestigious composer, and her daughter. Upon recovering from her injuries, she decides to start a new life, independent, lonely and anonymous, away from the privileges that she previously enjoyed. The one who was an assistant to her husband tries to get her out of her isolation. He has been in love with her for many years and ends up convincing her to finish the ‘Concert for Europe’, an ambitious unfinished work her husband was preparing for her when he died. Dazzling interpretation of Binoche developing a character with a powerful inner life.
Juliette Binoche in ‘Chocolat’. /
Chocolat (Lasse Hallström, 2000) Available for rent on Rakuten TV, Apple TV and Amazon
Starring Juliette Binoche, Johnny Depp and Lena Olin. A comedy fable about how a person, a relationship or a city can change, just by trying a little of the pleasures of life, including chocolate, and thus feel freer. It all begins when to Lansquenet, a very traditional French village, where nothing has changed in the last hundred years, the North Wind takes two foreigners with him. Vianne (played by Binoche) and her daughter. The magic of ‘Chocolat’ also emanates from the idyll between the characters of Binoche and a wandering traveler played by Johnny Depp, who, in a rare role in his artistic career, is the film’s romantic lead.
Juliette Binoche in ‘Bad Blood’. /
Bad blood (Leos Carax. 1986) Available in Filmin
Starring Juliette Binoche, Michel Piccoli and Denis Lavant. Cult film, mixes science fiction, film noir, drama and romance, which led to the meeting between Leos Carax and Binoche. Set in Paris in the near future, two old thieves, Marc and Hans, owe money to an uncompromising American woman who gives them only two weeks to pay. They plan to steal and sell a new antidote to cure a virus that is killing those who “practice love without love”, but they need an accomplice. They recruit ‘loose tongue’, a rebellious boy who has just broken up his relationship with his 16-year-old girlfriend. Binoche is here Anna, the lover of Marc (Piccoli), with whom the camera falls in love from the moment she appears. A dazzling presence that established the actress throughout the world due to her enormous magnetism.
Juliette Binoche in ‘Journey to Sils Maria’. /
Journey to Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas, 2014) Available for rent on Rakuten TV, Apple TV and Amazon
Starring Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart and Chloë Grace Moretz. A reflection on the acting profession in which a veteran lady of the theater receives the proposal to take part in the play that launched her career 20 years ago. Binoche is Maria Enders who, 20 years after becoming a famous actress for her portrayal of Sigrid, a character that fascinated Helena and led her to suicide, must decide if, now that she is at the peak of her professional career, she wants to return to accept a role in the play, recast by a new director, this time playing Helena. Olivier Assayas explores one of his favorite themes, the passage of time, here from a generational perspective. By raising the theme of each person’s relationship with their past, the film draws parallels with the shared history of Assayas and his lead actress, Juliette Binoche, who met 20 years ago.
Image of ‘The unbearable lightness of being’. /
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Philip Kaufman, 1987) Available for rent on Rakuten TV and Apple TV
Starring Juliette Binoche, Daniel Day-Lewis and Lena Olin. An adaptation of the famous novel by Milan Kundera, which shows how a doctor, an accomplished womanizer, meets a monogamous woman. He is determined to live with a lightness of being untouched by themes like compromise and communism. Everything happens in Prague, in 1968. Tomás (Daniel Day-Lewis) is a surgeon who works in a city hospital. Single and a womanizer, he maintains strong emotional relationships with the painter Sabina (Lena Olin). One day he must go to perform an operation in a provincial city and there he meets Tereza (Juliette Binoche), to whom he feels attracted. He returns to Prague and is visited by the young woman who has decided to work in the city. They make love and end up getting married, despite which Tomás continues to maintain his previous dissipated life. Reformist winds run and Tomás is involved in the events of the Prague Spring. It was Juliette Binoche’s first international job.
Juliette Binoche in ‘Certified Copy’. /
Certified copy (Abbas Kiarostani, 2010) Available at Filmin and Mubi
Starring Juliette Binoche, William Shimell and Jean-Claude Carrière. The story of the meeting between a man and a woman in a small Italian town in southern Tuscany. He is an English writer who has come to give a lecture. She (played by Juliette Binoche) is a French gallery owner. The Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami plays with the viewer by organizing a very attractive general bewilderment. The study of the couple constitutes in itself a whole genre. As usual in Kiarostami, an apparently small story, in which hardly anything happens, but which is nothing more than an imperceptible but very intense evolution of existence, in short, the stuff that almost everyone’s lives are made of. What is extraordinary is provided by her sensitivity, her poetry, by showing it, relying on Binoche’s immense interpretation.
Juliette Binoche and Alexis Loret in ‘Alice and Martin’. /
Alice and Martin (André Techiné, 1998) Available on Netflix
Starring Juliette Binoche, Alexis Loret and Carmen Maura. A drama between brothers with great performances: Victim of a childhood full of problems, Martin accidentally kills his father and runs away to take refuge with one of his brothers who lives in Paris, where he is lucky enough to become a model . There he meets Alice, the sister of a friend, developing a passionate relationship between them. However, Martin maintains a totally reserved attitude regarding his past and the reasons that prompted him to leave his family. When Alice informs him of her pregnancy, the past returns to dominate and upset. Techné creates a complex but easy-to-follow narrative, with a story of characters, intimate but full of edges and with splendid actors. Binoche is Alice here, on whom the most dramatic burden in history falls.
Juliette Binoche in ‘Unknown Code’. /
Unknown Code (Michael Haneke, 2000) Available on Mubi
Starring Juliette Binoche, Luminita Gheorghiu and Thierry Neuvic. Haneke’s first meeting with Binoche, which he immediately fell in love with. A story almost without protagonists, coral, naked and aggressive, whose threads are moved by chance, reality or what is perceived as reality. On a busy Parisian boulevard, someone drops a very crumpled piece of paper into the hand of a beggar. This is the bond that, for a moment, unites the paths of very different characters: Anne, (played by Binoche), a young actress who is about to start her film career, who barely sees her boyfriend Georges, well, he’s a war photographer. Amadou, a music teacher at an institute for deaf children, is the son of an African who works as a taxi driver and has a deaf little sister. Maria is a Romanian immigrant who sends home all the money she gets from begging. When she is deported, she returns to Romania before embarking on another humiliating journey to France: The fate of several characters intersects and connects, in a film based on long sequence shots.
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