Huppert was born into a well-to-do family in Paris in 1953. It was still too early for lunch, so why not pay a visit to the nearby museum? She was at liberty, other than this, her commitment to an interview. She’d changed out of her character’s clothes (dark-wash jeans, cashmere sweater, heeled brown boots, long wool coat, silk scarf-the conventional attire of an affluent French matron) and into her own, far more bohemian-chic outfit of wide-leg black pants paired with a close-fitting rust-colored sweater and pale-pink sneakers, over which she wore a mustard-colored, belted rainproof coat. The morning’s scene on Mazuy’s film had required little time to complete, and, after a couple of hours on location, Huppert was no longer needed. the duration of a gaze,” she tells her interviewer in slow, measured tones, as a hapless agent waits in the parking garage. “Time is crucial in my line of work-the duration of a shot, the pace of the narrative . . . When I pointed out that her current commitments had a touch of “Call My Agent!” about them, Huppert said, dryly, “In fact, I mainly contributed in person to make it a lot worse than it is in reality.” A particularly delicious moment in the episode comes when Huppert, on the way from one set to another, is reminded by a call on her cell phone that she is actually triple-booked she insists on stopping off at a radio station for a live interview to which she has committed. When production demands necessitate her being on both sets at the same time, the agency’s chief has to race her across town in a car without either director noticing her absence. The premise of Huppert’s episode is that she has been double-booked for two movies she’s making an American film by day and a French costume drama by night. In 2018, she appeared in an episode of “ Call My Agent!,” the popular French sitcom about the workings of a Parisian talent agency, which features actors playing themselves in fictional scenarios. “It’s all a bit too much together.” Huppert is famously prolific she regularly makes upward of three films a year, with a catalogue of a hundred and fifty-plus credits over a career that has spanned more than five decades. “Actually, I have another theatre piece I am preparing for next spring, with the Italian director Romeo Castellucci,” she told me, slightly sheepishly. On weekends, she had been shuttling back to Paris to prepare for her forthcoming appearance onstage in Stockholm, as Mary Stuart in Robert Wilson’s production of “Mary Said What She Said”-a revival of a play she first performed in Paris, in 2019, and which she will also be taking to the Barbican, in London, in the spring. Huppert had spent little time in Bordeaux before arriving to make this film, and had enjoyed hardly any downtime since. “It’s a story about two women whose husbands are in jail, and we come from two different social backgrounds, and we become friends,” Huppert had explained, in fluent English, earlier in the morning when I met her in her trailer on set. She was co-starring with Hafsia Herzi, a French actress of Tunisian and Algerian descent. (She has won twice, most recently for the lead role in Paul Verhoeven’s “ Elle,” as a rape victim who develops a consensual sexual relationship with her assailant.) In Mazuy’s new film, tentatively titled “Portraits Trompeurs,” Huppert was cast not as a noble but as a contemporary bourgeois woman. She was nominated for a César Award, the French equivalent of an Oscar-one of sixteen such nominations since her first, in 1976. She and Mazuy first worked together almost a quarter of a century ago, on “Saint-Cyr,” a period drama in which Huppert plays Madame de Maintenon, the secret wife of King Louis XIV. Huppert, who is perhaps France’s most celebrated actor on the stage and the screen, had been based in Bordeaux for about seven weeks, shooting a movie with the director Patricia Mazuy. When Isabelle Huppert’s car pulled up outside around noon on a recent Monday, she gasped with surprise at the splendor, and hastened toward the entrance to explore. Opened in 2016 at a cost of eighty million euros, the building has a dazzling exterior, with a tower of what looks like swirling green-gold glass rising above a gleaming coil. Just north of the city center of Bordeaux, on the bank of the wide, sluggish Garonne River, lies the Cité du Vin, a spectacular museum dedicated to the global history of wine.
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