Behind an anonymous door in a far west Paris suburb, a man and a woman are
rolling around on the floor. Nothing particularly strange about that, except
that the woman is strikingly familiar and her presence here is incongruous.
They break, breathe, then start again, while two others, who turn out to be
the woman’s sister and her son, film them. Every half hour or so, the pair
come over to inspect the footage. They laugh, frown, argue a little, and
then give it another go. She’s good, but not as good as him. How could she
be? He is Akram Khan, one of the foremost British dancers and choreographers
of his generation, and it’s possible he’s holding himself back a bit,
dancing down for the sake of compatibility.
Juliette Binoche is, after all, an amateur when it comes to dance. As the word
“amateur” suggests, she loves it, but she is starting as a public performer
in the medium at an age – 44 – when most professional dancers are deep into
retirement. Darcey Bussell, for example, spent her mid-thirties wondering
whether she could carry on for another year or two. What does France’s most
famous film actress think she is up to? Everyone’s reaction on hearing that
she intends to dance in a two-hander is one of bemusement; how will she cope
with the pliés, arabesques, entrechats and all the other tortuous manoeuvres
her native language describes so elegantly? She does a dance of sorts in
Cédric Klapisch’s tribute to her home city, Paris, but that’s pretty basic;
more of a striptease. Surely La Binoche, as the French call their global
heroine, is about to fall flat on her face, and publicly, too. The show is
about to premiere at the National Theatre in London, and then tours the
world for a year.
But these are the wrong questions. in-i is no ballet. It would probably be
pushing it to call it dance. It’s more a physically enacted play, but with
music… and a few words… possibly some singing, too; they’re not entirely
sure. In Paris, with just eight weeks until the scheduled opening, Khan is
still toying with the idea of incorporating his own guitar playing into the
evening. Even the publicity material is betraying signs of uncertainty,
although it gives it everything it’s got, describing in-i as a “unique
collaboration that will explore notions of ascension, the visible/invisible,
angels [and the] seven stages of man in a very personal, authentic process”.
If it goes wrong, blame the masseuse. It was she, Su-Man Hsu, wife of Khan’s
producer, who suggested that Binoche should dance. She meant it as a
therapeutic pastime more than a career shift, but it got out of hand, as
things evidently do in Binoche’s life, and with her encouragement. “She was
pulling my back,” says France’s highest-paid film star, “and asked me if I
wanted to dance. Out of the blue, I said yes, because intuition knows better
than we do. It is far ahead of us in thinking and behaving. As we started to
know each other a bit, I did a little dance for her, and after I kissed her
goodbye, it stayed in my mind, and started to grow there, and that’s why she
asked me.” Su-Man gave Binoche an invitation to Akram’s work, Zero Degrees.
It stayed on her hotel table while she was in London, filming Breaking and
Entering with the late Anthony Minghella. She went along, and met Khan
shortly afterwards. They got to know each other, talked about working
together, and here they are.
She expresses some surprise at my surprise that she is doing this piece and
says, quite reasonably, that she has always been a physical actress, always
making the fullest use of the language of her body. True; she speaks it
fluently and with confidence. The sequences they are working on may be a
long way from classical choreography, but they are demanding enough. One
moment, they are circling each other nastily. It could almost be Racine with
the volume off. Next, she’s upside down on his back with her toes 8ft in the
air. Then they’re on the floor again, and she’s rolling over him like a
hurled bolster. Forget Racine. It’s more Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,
with each needing the enmity of the other in order to function. It’s all
pretty charged, even in these rehearsals. One reason is you’re expecting
them to say something, at least in the vertical sequences, because they are
looking at each other like people about to speak. But they don’t; they just
withhold and withhold. The other reason is the sheer Binocherie of it all.
Even in the dullest grey dance fatigues she looks just like that deeply
beautiful woman in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Damage, Chocolat and
so many other films over the past 20 years. It’s the freight of a real,
unmanufactured stardom, based on proper acting and charisma.
“I have always loved movement and been fascinated by it since I was at
school,” she says. “I read [the French philosopher] Henri Bergson, who talks
about it a lot. He said everything is movement, and that’s true. There is
just one tiny little piece in us which is immobile, but everything else
moves. That’s why we try to hang on closely to people, and to emotions, but
life is not like that at all; it’s moving all the time. For me, moving
towards Akram is what it came to be about. If I could never act again, I
wouldn’t mind.” She’s joking, presumably. “No. No. I don’t mind.” And to
stand still is to go backwards? “Right. Also, we try to compartmentalise our
lives. Me, I don’t know my path. I’m living my life as I’m walking.
Sometimes I want to go and see a psychic. I try not to. We have to resist
these temptations.” Because it would remove the element of surprise? “Yes,
but also because it would give us a sense of assignment about what we are
going to do with our lives, which is completely crazy.”
Her sister Marion, the older of the two, is not surprised by this move towards
dance. But then she is no longer surprised by anything Binoche does. “She
has always been doing something she never did before,” she says, “and so
this makes sense in the context of knowing her.” Both she and her nephew
Raphael, Binoche’s son, are plainly devoted to her, and perhaps a little
mesmerised as well. As her directors know, she has the face of someone to
whom something interesting is about to happen. You can’t say what it is, but
you sense that if you keep watching, it will be worth the wait. Asked what
he thinks of his mother, Raphael smiles, gives a classic teenage shrug and
says, “I just hope she isn’t going to sing.” This brings a mock-chiding
expression to Binoche’s face, and then she throws her head back and laughs.
It’s an earthy and abandoned laugh, all neck and teeth. Compared with the
cautious, processed charm of so many other stars, it’s a breath of fresh
air. She just seems very unsnotty.
Off she goes into the next improvised sequence while her sister and her son
resume their watching through the lenses. When Khan describes this strange
project from his point of view, one comment makes the logic of it fall into
place: “Trained dancers have a terrific skill, but that skill can also be a
curse. What’s great about Juliette is that if she had studied ballet or
contemporary dance, then she would only improvise through those channels.
But she hasn’t. In a way, there is less to discover with a [trained]
ballerina because you are working through a vocabulary that you already
know.”
Both agree that at the heart of in-i stands the question, “Do you dare to
love?” And the answer? “I think,” says Binoche, “that through art, I dare to
love more than in a relationship.” Famously defensive of her privacy, she
had apparently been going out with the Argentinian director Santiago
Amigorena since 2006. But now she says she is not in a relationship, and
that this project is taking her full attention. Meanwhile, she is drawing
even more of the world’s attention than usual with a retrospective of her
movie work at the British Film Institute in London, together with a set of
portraits of herself and her directors that she has painted throughout her
career. If she hadn’t decided on an acting life when she was 17, then it
might have been painting. “When I was very little,” she recalls, “8 or 9, my
mother bought coats for my sister and me, and 100 books of paintings. I was
fascinated by them and started copying and studying them. At school, I
learnt about the relationship between objects and light. Then the wind of
the movies took me.”
She has also written brief letter-like poems in tribute to the directors she
has worked with in the course of her career. None was more of an influence
on her than Krzysztof Kieslowski, the maker of Three Colours: Blue, for
which she got a Golden Globe nomination for her performance as a composer’s
widow trying to reassemble her life. “He was the one who made me paint
again,” she says. “We went on crazy adventures. I used to paint at night.
Once, I was painting in the street and there was a girl living there, a drug
addict, and she would ask me to go and buy drugs for her.” Then there was
Anthony Minghella’s 1996 film of Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English
Patient, which won her an Oscar for best supporting actress. Of Minghella’s
death this year after surgery for a growth on his neck, she says glumly: “It
was terrible, yes.” She had worked with him again two years before his
death, when she gave a ferocious portrayal of a Bosnian refugee in London in
Breaking and Entering.
In this dance piece, as in that film, she exudes the sense of a commitment so
total that the rest of life must wait. But life seems to disobey her, at
least when it comes to her children, the ones who figure more prominently
than any other when the talk returns to love and its challenges. Her son’s
father is a scuba diver, André Halle, and her eight-year-old daughter’s is
the actor Benoît Magimel. Both men, she says, are involved in the caring.
“When they [children] come out of us,” she declares, “it is the most
astonishing piece of creation… how come this human being is passing through
me? Such a mysterious moment. How come I’m sure I know this person? I feel
like, when we have kids, it’s a decision of three people. They come with
their own story, their own power… A friend of mine said that bringing up
children is like going up stairs. One step, then breathing, reaching a
certain point, then another step, that’s fine, then another and, oh, my god,
another after that; always on the move.”
She’s hardly the first hyper-busy mother to have had to juggle, but with the
sheer intensity of her work schedule – sometimes five films a year – it must
have seemed like a job for Cirque du Soleil. “I always took [my children]
with me. When my son was ten, I asked him if he wanted to come, and we went
all round the world, changing schools.” Is she the boss when it comes to
making arrangements for the children? “No, there is no boss.” But the
fathers are supportive, I suggest, and it works. “Do you have children?” she
asks. Four, I reply. “And does it work?” I pause to answer and she roars
with laughter again – this time a benign sort of “gotcha” laugh. “To me,”
she goes on, “there is no hierarchy in life. You have to recognise your task
early on. If you decide you want children, you have to take responsibility
for them until they fly on their own. It doesn’t mean I don’t make mistakes,
because I do. I want to be perfect – of course. I’ve never wanted to say no
to my son, so I always said yes.”
oh what an inspirational fish
Louise, Melbourne, Australia