Auteurism – that sometimes questionable practice of attributing films entirely to their directors, superseding all other collaborators – is the predominant language of serious cinephilia, and serious cinephile streaming sites tend to follow suit. Mubi, for example, tends to be director-led in its programming, dedicating the bulk of its retrospectives and guest-curator spots to the artists calling the shots behind the camera. Yet its current themed season, dedicated to the work of Juliette Binoche, makes a compelling case for the actor as auteur. The selected films, the bulk of them by celebrated film-makers in their own right, are tonally and stylistically disparate, yet bound by the French star’s singular screen magnetism: a presence at once serene and febrile, with ideas and desires twitching beneath that extraordinary face.
Now in her 50s, with more than 65 film credits to her name, Binoche is as busy as ever, with Claire Denis’s brilliant High Life fresh in our film-going memories, Olivier Assayas’s chic, limber Non-Fiction hitting screens (and Curzon Home Cinema) in October, and a new film with Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-eda, The Truth, opening the Venice film festival in a few weeks.
Subtitled “The Woman With a Thousand Faces”, Mubi’s best-of-Binoche roundup is thoughtfully chosen and aptly rangy, even if it kicks off with one curious clanger (and one of the actress’s few visibly unconfident moments) in Louis Malle’s erotic melodrama Damage. From there on, however, the pickings get much richer. Before they shuffle off the end of Mubi’s curated queue, you have a few days left to catch her two films with madcap visionary Leos Carax. In Mauvais Sang, one of her earliest breakout roles, her glowing ingenuousness is the stabilising influence in a thrillingly deranged Aids-era gangster thriller. Five years later, in the ravishing, punk-operatic vagrant romance The Lovers on the Bridge, she was already a more knowing, sensuous actress.
Also currently on the platform is her smart, candid turn as an audition-hopping actress in Michael Haneke’s still-undervalued Code Unknown, a subversive essay on racism, class conflict and moral violence in Paris that plays, if anything, more urgently now than it did in 2000. (They don’t have Haneke’s more celebrated Binoche-starrer Hidden, an invaluable thematic companion piece, but Google Play does.) For a more relaxed, gentle, crinkled side of Binoche, Mubi have also selected Assayas’s lovely, bittersweet, chablis-soaked Summer Hours, a grown-up family comedy that also ranks among its director’s best.
Newly landed on the Mubi queue, meanwhile, is the performance that, if pushed, I’d pick as Binoche’s greatest, and certainly one of the most ingenious by any actor this decade: she’s wittily attuned to the evolution of identity, trickery and lovers’ gamesmanship in Certified Copy, Abbas Kiarostami’s origami-folded idea of a romantic comedy, in which two wary lovers are reunited… or have they just met?
Coming later this month, too, are a pair of Bruno Dumont collaborations that perhaps offer the selection’s most extreme Binoche contrasts. She’s austerely devastating in the title role of stripped-back biopic Camille Claudel 1915, and having a blowsy, hysterical ball as a shrill, overdressed aristocrat in the poisoned slapstick romp Slack Bay. Also look out for Polish director Małgorzata Szumowska’s fascinating, largely overlooked Elles, a study of journalistic ethics and vicarious thrill-seeking powered by Binoche’s risky physicality in the lead.
A soupçon of Binoche, then, though should you wish to continue your own retrospective on other streaming platforms, options are plentiful, from established career high points such as Three Colours: Blue (Chili) to only-for-the-devoted oddities like her ambitious but uneven performance as a post-apartheid South African poet in In My Country (Amazon, if you’re curious). Dig deeper, however, and you’ll find a near-lost gem in the Mike Figgis short Mara, a 20-minute Henry Miller adaptation in which she bristles with concentrated sensuality. Taken from the director and recut by HBO for a 1991 compilation, it’s now available via Figgis’s own Vimeo page – a true Binoche completist can’t do without it.
New to streaming & DVD this week
Gloria Bell
(Curzon Artificial Eye, 15)
A US remake of a foreign-language hit – Sebastián Lelio’s lovely Chilean coming-of-middle-age comedy Gloria – that actually works: Lelio directs (again) with tact and wit, and Julianne Moore, right, finds fresh, tender, sexy notes in the title role.
Domino
(Signature, 18)
Sad to report that Brian De Palma’s first film in seven years is every bit the ignominious career footnote that its straight-to-DVD status suggests: an incoherent cop revenge thriller directed without much verve or pluck.
Le Sang d’un Poète/Le Testament d’Orphée
(Studiocanal, PG)
Poet-film-maker Jean Cocteau’s pair of blazingly obsessive, surreal masterworks get lustrous Blu-ray treatment, though the middle film of his Orphic Trilogy (Orphée) has not been reissued.
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