Cannes Film Festival: Sometimes decide millimeters – ZEIT ONLINE

What makes a good actor? The Cannes Film Festival, where the best in the business meet, provides some impressive answers.

22nd May 2015 19:11 clock

sent the Son into the wilderness: Isabelle Huppert and Gerard Depardieu | © Festival de Cannes

In recent days, employed an issue the colleagues of the People magazines especially Must / should / must be an actress who has approached the honor to go up the red carpet of Cannes, the stages in the Palais des Festivals, wear heels at least 18 centimeters? Or are flat sandals okay?

In a way, yes, they’re right. It comes with actresses sometimes a bit more or less entirely to. Only they have understated. Quite a few centimeters decide on a successful appearance, but only a few millimeters. Anyway, on the canvas.

In the movie Valley of Love the time is very nice to watch. Isabelle Huppert stars as a woman whose adult son has killed eight months ago and it left a last letter, therefore it has to meet now with the father (Gerard Depardieu) in Death Valley and to spend a week.

Since the two are now sitting in the hot ruthlessness of this landscape, staring at the prospect that they imposed via last will and her son on a fixed schedule, and puzzle over what her son probably wanted to object. Let them come closer again after all these years? Let them trace their guilt? As a parent, you feel responsible, but to what extent they need it?

In their pure physicality Depardieu and Huppert could not be more different. He, sweating and panting in a powerful body, which is so bursting format that you often see only the burly head, the shoulders, the belly in the picture. On top of that often almost naked. “In the heat they become steaks,” he snorts again facing his feet. The sight will save us, but one suspects what he means.

In addition to this man Huppert looks even narrower than it is anyway, her head about the size of a child.

Your body is always covered by clothing or can only be guessed under water as it cools off in the pool.

As different as their physique is so different they go with their grief over – almost cold facts acceptance versus almost esoteric reincarnation fantasies. Nevertheless, the two rely on in the course of their journey together some of her present life: from their new families, their health.

This is shallower than one might expect at the starting position throughout the film. But Depardieu and Huppert would watch in their play probably a treat when the two did not talk about everything under the sun and death, but about Halle Halma.

One evening they sit in the hotel room next to each other on the bed. Because they have learned quite a bit from each other, the camera shows us at the far left of the screen Depardieu mind and in the center Huppert beautiful face. And then Huppert makes a tiny little movement with his head. It is, one could measure it there, certainly less than a millimeter, which she puts on because on Depardieu. But all of a sudden is the magic of a long-buried familiarity about them. Huppert smiles, very briefly, because it probably will her silly, and Depardieu stroking her with his hand, this sunburnt giant paw, so very tenderly on the cheek that Huppert smiles again. My God, you know since how much two people who once loved here.

As I said, one millimeter was hardly for this knowledge crucial.