Isabelle Huppert

The performance in Elle brought Isabelle Huppert awards from two institutions in 2017, the French academy's best actress Cesar, and the American independents' Best Female Lead. Both bodies are answering the same piece of work, and she had taken that same Cesar once before, in 1996. The Italian academy had given her its foreign actress David in 1980 for The Lacemaker, and Tony Rayns, assessing The Piano Teacher in 2001, points at exactly that film: her capacity to play defeated women in European art cinema has been beyond dispute ever since, he writes. In the same magazine Ginette Vincendeau instances the reverse of that reading, finding her a devastating comic turn as Augustine in 8 Women. The Berlinale gave her an Honorary Golden Bear in 2022, for a career rather than for a film. Of the forty-nine works held here the most voted is Elle.