Juliette Binoche stars in Both Sides of the Blade
French film star Juliette Binoche has had relationships in the past but romance isn’t on her radar: ‘A woman working so much is not an easy situation for men.’
Juliette Binoche is not kidding when she says she has no time for a romantic relationship. The stunning 58-year-old Oscar-winning French actor, widely known as La Binoche, has been busy making a slew of films and TV productions – and living her life.
“It feels like I’m going through so much, you know – my son is leaving the house, I’m still travelling and working a lot,” she says. “So that feels fine. And I’m not looking. I’m not searching. If it comes, it comes.”
One can imagine that a woman as beautiful and talented as Binoche would have many suitors.
“Maybe there are,” she chuckles. “With falling in love there needs to be a sparkle that you share. I think I need to share something in the artistic field.”
Generous, gracious and full of joie de vivre, Binoche admits she’s lucky to have so many great opportunities. “It’s very hard to say no. I am passionate about what I do. That’s my life.”
Binoche became known internationally for her Hollywood films The Unbearable Lightness of Being with Daniel Day-Lewis, Damage with Jeremy Irons, and she won her 1997 best supporting actress Oscar for The English Patient, where she co-starred with Ralph Fiennes. A nomination for best actress was for her role in Chocolat, opposite Johnny Depp.
She won international acclaim and the French best actress Cesar for her performance in Three Colours: Blue and was nominated for nine more Cesars for films including Clouds of Sils Maria and The Horseman on the Roof.
A fan of world cinema, she starred in Certified Copy by the late great Iranian filmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami and Flight of the Red Balloon by China-born Taiwanese director Hsiao-Hsien Hou, and was instrumental in bringing Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda to France to direct The Truth where she co-starred for the first time with Catherine Deneuve, playing her daughter. She has also appeared in stage productions as a dancer and singer. “I would love to do a movie musical,” she says.
The range of her current roles is extraordinary. She’s a truck driver in the US human trafficking thriller Paradise Highway, which recently screened in Locarno, she portrays a real-life French investigative journalist who pretends to be a cleaner on English Channel ferries in Between Two Worlds, and she co-stars for the first time with Vincent Lindon in the relationship drama Both Sides of the Blade, her third film with director Claire Denis.
On television she’s playing Coco Chanel in the Apple series The New Look, about how Chanel was dethroned by Christian Dior, played by Ben Mendelsohn. Previously she appeared in HBO miniseries The Staircase – screening on Fox Showcase – which starred Toni Collette as Kathleen Peterson, who died after falling down a staircase.
“I didn’t have scenes with Toni, but we had a couple of breakfasts and dinners together,” she recalls. “I enjoyed her company. She’s very energetic and full of life.”
Binoche plays real-life documentary editor Sophie Brunet, who fell in love with Kathleen’s husband and accused murderer, Michael Paterson (Colin Firth), during the making of a documentary. This marks Binoche’s first foray into television apart from having her own uproarious episode in Call My Agent!. She had previously resisted TV roles, but says she was up for the adventure. “I’m always wanting to try new things as an actor.”
On release in Australia is Both Sides of the Blade, for which Denis took out the directing prize in Berlin. Based on the book Avec amour et acharnement by Christine Angot, who co-wrote the script with Denis, Binoche and Lindon play Sara and Jean, an initially happy couple whose 10-year relationship is threatened by Sara’s chance meeting with a lover from her past, Francois, played by Denis regular Gregoire Colin. The situation is complicated when Jean, an ex-con with few work prospects, embarks on a business venture with Francois, who had been his best friend and Sara’s boyfriend when he met her.
“Jean and Sara are happy, but then suddenly this surprise comes along,” Binoche explains. “Sara is obsessed by Francois and her need to have him inside her as a woman becomes so big. One of the themes of the film is that it grabs you and there’s nothing psychological about it. It’s visceral. That’s why at the end the conflict between Jean and Sara is so deep and unbearable. It brings the animal out in us, also the instinct of surviving. I think we were brave to make this film, because it’s a very tricky theme. There’s such a rollercoaster of emotions.”
At the end of the film, which is full of gorgeous Binoche close-ups, Sara is luxuriating in a bath. When she is confronted by Jean her phone falls into the water and her past, rather poignantly, is erased.
“It never happened to me, and I hope it never will,” Binoche says. “I lost my father and I cannot erase his number. I need to keep it, so I would hate to lose that.”
Her sculptor father, Jean-Marie Binoche, who split from her actor and theatre director mother, Monique Stalens, when Juliette was four, was desperately ill at the time Between Two Worlds was being made, and he died in July 2019.
Non-professional actors, actual cleaners, appear in Between Two Worlds and give it authenticity. It is based on 2010 French non-fiction bestseller Le Quai de Ouistreham, by investigative journalist Florence Aubenas. An exploration of low-paid workers and the gig economy, the film follows Binoche’s Marianne Winckler, a fictionalised take on Aubenas, who went undercover as a cleaner and wrote the book about her experience.
“It’s a genius idea because you’re going as close as you can to someone and really living what they go through,” Binoche says. “As an actress, I’ve been through that, investigating people’s lives, while I was doing Camille Claudel 1915 and Lovers on the Bridge when I spent time on the street, so I developed an empathy with people.”
What happened when the cleaners discovered the truth about Aubenas? “They really admired Florence and found it a genius idea because she was getting so close to the truth,” Binoche says.
The actor, who has long championed social change, says the situation of low-paid workers has become worse since the pandemic, with “big companies taking over government responsibilities and taking away people’s possibilities. As we’re going into a transition to a more ecological awareness, there should be a social awareness and I think this film participates in that”.
When I tell Binoche she looks convincing as a cleaner, she laughs. “Well, I’m quite energetic. And I think I’m quite efficient, cleaning-wise. I can get in my house and do it quickly.”
Does she hire a maid? “Oh, yeah, I have two because I have a big space. And I have two kids who are not getting it. But they have to take care of their rooms. Otherwise, I can’t stand the messiness.”
She had time off in Paris during the pandemic. “The first year I was at home mostly. I was happy to be with my kids and I took care of my mother. So that was another rhythm and I enjoyed it, actually. Afterwards I worked a lot.”
Before the lockdown she had been training as a truck driver and even sleeping in the truck to prepare for her role in Paradise Highway. The first feature by Anna Gutto, which co-stars Morgan Freeman as an FBI agent on her tail, finally shot in Mississippi in July 2021. It follows Binoche’s truckie, Sally, who is forced to smuggle a teenage girl. “The more we talk about children sex trafficking the better,” she says.
She also wanted to show that trucking isn’t just a man’s world. “It wasn’t easy for women to start driving trucks, but Sally’s independent and knows her work well. She is part of a group of women drivers who look out for each other.”
Another Binoche film, Christophe Honore’s biographical Winter Boy, about a teenager in crisis after the death of his father, has just premiered at the San Sebastian Festival, where she received a career tribute. She has also been filming a major French production, The Pot au Feu, co-starring her former partner, Benoit Magimel, the father of her 22-year-old daughter, Hannah. Set in 1885 and filmed in a French castle, the film charts the romance between Binoche’s esteemed cook and Magimel’s gourmet chef for whom she has worked for 20 years. As their relationship gains some steam, she doesn’t want to marry him as she wants to maintain her freedom. He cooks up a storm to try to convince her.
Binoche hasn’t wanted to marry, either. “It’s an expression of my independence,” she once told me. Today, she says she probably hasn’t found the right man. Her most prominent relationships have been with Leos Carax, her director on The Lovers on the Bridge where she met scuba diver Andre Halle, with whom she had a son, Raphael, 28; with Olivier Martinez, her Horseman on the Roof co-star; with Magimel, who she met on The Children of the Century; with Argentinian director Santiago Amigorena, her director on A Few Days in September, to whom she was engaged for two years; and with American actor and musician Patrick Muldoon, with whom she enjoyed a long-term romance.
Of her past relationships she says: “They were never really fulfilling and I was probably too demanding. But I think I’m a pretty patient woman until, you know, I’m not patient any more. And also a woman working so much is not an easy situation for men and there was probably not a real acceptance that I was strong. So I took care of my kids and I tried to make sure that they were always on their own paths.”
The relationships that have been most meaningful to her are those where she and her partner have been “able to evolve together and take a path together”. But she has not felt the need to conform to anyone’s idea of a long-term relationship. “I always thought I was going to find love with a partner, that I was going to find a soulmate for my life forever,” she says. “After trying so hard I think that now just that feeling of love is fulfilling me. The love is present so I’m not trying to find love from outside. It’s the fulfilment that comes from being able to love, that’s key. But it took me a while to realise that.”
Both Sides of the Blade is in limited release. Between Two Worlds releases digitally on October 19.
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