Over the years it's become something of a cliche: Isabelle Huppert is a small woman who's built up an illustrious career by playing emotionally powerful roles _ roles so big in attitude that we tend to forget the size of the actress playing them. She's played Madame Bovary; she's played the amoral mother in a film based on a George Bataille novel; and she's probably best known to Thai audiences as the intensely masochistic Erika Kohut in The Piano Teacher.
Isabelle Huppert in a scene from Captive .
And in this pre-Oscar season, it is healthy to remind ourselves that one of the world's most adventurous actresses is not necessarily tied to Hollywood and can do equally good work an ocean's width away.
Huppert's latest role is in a Filipino film now competing for the Golden Bear at the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival. In Captive, Huppert, 59, is required to do something that goes against that cliche about her outsized talent.
"I play a woman who's concerned about others more than about herself, and this pushed me to create a modest character," she said. "It's a kind of a metaphor to what I have to do as an actress _ that is, not to stand out, but to be part of the ensemble."
Captive recounts the true ordeal of a group of people, Filipinos and foreigners, who were kidnapped by the Abu Sayyaf separatists in Mindanao back in 2001. With details tweaked and streamlined, the film chronicles the Muslim insurgents' storming of a resort on Palawan Island from where they round up 20 hostages and take them on a long journey across the sea and through the jungle while battling the Filipino military and demanding ransoms. Huppert plays Therese, a French NGO worker who's kidnapped along with a senior colleague and taken on a gruelling trek through snake-infested, monsoon-lashed tropical forests. Directed by Brillante Mendoza, Captive is one of only two Southeast Asian films in the Berlin race this year (the other is from Indonesia).
"There's nothing in this role that can be compared with other roles I've played, because here my character is not a character. I'm playing a hostage and being a hostage means you're not anything any more. Early on in the film, you see the people who have been kidnapped introducing themselves and [revealing] what they do _ some are bankers, some work in newspapers, and my character is a social worker _ but very quickly you forget that because that's no longer what they're defined as ... [now] they're only defined as hostages. That's the strength of the movie ... that, by definition, my character is anonymous; that's exactly what the director wanted to explore."
Huppert's acting, here as in everything else she's done, is a compelling mix of icy intelligence and quiet intensity. Although in Captive she's only one in a large group of actors, both professional and first-time, she manages to raise the bar of emotive involvement whenever she appears on screen. Captive is a film of restless movement, near chaos _ all shouts and no whispers; it's a headlong rush of political urgency and religious questioning in which the strange dynamics between captives and captors play out against a carpet of gunfire.
"We shot the film in chronological order," said Huppert. "That's very important in the rendering of the passage of time and the characters' experience. We were literally thrown into a boat [during the abduction scene] on the first day of the shoot without knowing each other. It's as if at the beginning we had no identity of our own, as if the violence is abolishing the differences between the characters. Only gradually do we get to know each other more and do some of the characters get identified more as human beings.
"Mendoza is a director who's very free _ he dares to deal with time with such freedom. Shooting this film put me in a state of extreme surprise."
How Mendoza deals with time in his movies was what first sparked Huppert's interest in this role. It's rare for an actress of her stature to star in a relatively small movie from this little-known part of the world. In 2010, when Huppert was serving as president of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival, she awarded Mendoza the best-director prize for Kinatay, a film that collapses the sense of time in its dark plunge into violence. Months later, when the two met again, the Filipino director offered her a role in Captive.
Unlike most other films she's worked on, Huppert said she found it impossible to prepare for her role in Captive. She didn't get to meet any of the real-life hostages from that 2001 incident prior to the shoot, so she had to trust Mendoza to capture the sense of pandemonium while relying on her own instincts and imagination as an actress. She does give some credit, however, to a book written by Ingrid Betancourt, the French-Columbian politician who was snatched by Farc insurgents and held captive for more than 2,000 days. Huppert said she made use of the book as emotional background while she was shooting Captive.
"But it would be unfair to say that I can now understand the motives of the terrorists, just because I did this film," she said.
"[What Betancourt went through] was a different situation and in a different political context from that of my character in Captive, but I think the core of the hostage experience is similar. One of the things is that, all of a sudden, you begin to create a relationship with somebody who's supposed to be your enemy. You begin to have a link with someone you least expect to.
"There's a hope of humanity in it, but there's also the loss of that hope, too."
Working with a non-European director isn't something entirely new for Huppert, who thrives on being versatile. Two years ago she made The Sea Wall with Rithy Panh, a Cambodian-born director (although it was a French production based on the book by Marguerite Duras). And this year, besides her role in another new film called Amour (directed by Michael Haneke), Huppert will also appear in a Korean film directed by Hong Sang-soo.
"I like everything!" she declared with a big smile. "I like variety." And we, the audience, couldn't possibly ask for more.
