The ageing, the immature and the ageless: Juliette Binoche’s midlife roles since 2010

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on Juliette Binoche’s career during the past decade, a period running from her mid-forties to her mid-fifties, and suggests that her roles in this period can also be read as a subtle commentary on the typecasting of middle-aged women in cinema and thus serve to challenge audience expectations. While some of Binoche’s roles from this period represent ‘aspirational’ figures of metropolitan intellectuals, others present her as an enfant terrible reluctant to ‘grow up’. The bittersweet tone of many of these films – and particularly the comedies – belies their sometimes flippant or high-concept premise in order to demonstrate the real pressures faced by middle-aged women in their professional, romantic and family lives. Finally, however, Binoche’s self-aware and often self-deprecating persona also leads her to accept roles that play on cultural stereotypes of the older, particularly childless, woman as intimidating or witch-like: hence the Frankenstein figures of scientists with dubious ethics or the ‘mad’ sculptor Camille Claudel.

KEYWORDS:

• Juliette Binoche
• stardom
• midlife
• comedy
• melodrama
• childlessness

At first glance, Juliette Binoche may appear anything but a ‘disturbing’ or ‘transgressive’ woman. One of the most successful French actresses of her generation, Binoche is an establishment figure, beloved of both popular audiences and festival-going cinephiles. She has the versatility to work across languages (French, English and Italian), production contexts and genres in everything from drama and melodrama to romantic comedy and action blockbusters. In doing so, this article suggests, Binoche has been able to put together some of the most compelling and nuanced portraits of middle-aged women on screen today. As scholars of ageing in cinema have pointed out (Dolan 2017, 4), with ageing populations in the west and an increasingly mature audience for films, older people are more and more commonplace on screen, but they tend to reinforce a judgemental distinction between those individuals who are ‘ageing successfully’ (wealthy, active, alert, ‘classy’, etc.) and those – whether celebrities or ordinary citizens – who rather demonstrate the abjection of ageing through their saggy flesh, their diminishing mental capacities or their social isolation. As Holmes and Jermyn argue, ‘the management of the ageing self is often articulated in terms of a neo-liberal rhetoric of personal responsibility’ (Holmes and Jermyn 2015, 19), and the visibility of ageing stars helps to promote this idea. Josephine Dolan comments: ‘older female stars articulate cultural anxieties arising from the rejuvenation imperatives of successful ageing and from the spectre of fourth age abjection’ (Dolan 2017, 23).

The Juliette Binoche considered in this article is by no means ‘old’ (she was forty-five at the beginning of the 2010s), but her relatively youthful persona is, in part, a consequence of the ‘successful ageing’ displayed in her midlife roles. Thus, Binoche’s roles from the 2010s are associated with glamorous locations: global cities like Paris and New York, but also holiday destinations like Tuscany, the Vaucluse and the Swiss Alps; she is regularly depicted in luxurious homes and apartments, stylish clothes and, perhaps above all, creative and fulfilling professions. However, where Binoche shows us women who are professionally successful, confident and admired, she much less frequently incarnates the domestic satisfactions of a stable but loving relationship and of a happy family. Binoche’s middle-aged women struggle with internal conflict and relationship breakdown; they must come to terms with the sometimes bleak consequences of their earlier life choices, with the spectre of missed opportunities and with their inevitable replacement by a younger generation of women. While such questions provide the staple themes of middle-aged drama, the corpus of work built up by Juliette Binoche appears quietly but stubbornly transgressive through its general refusal of reconciliation or resignation: far from suggesting that successful women can ‘have it all’ in midlife, these roles repeatedly demonstrate how professional satisfaction becomes concomitant with family breakdown or psychic instability.

This article surveys a wide range of Binoche’s roles from the 2010s. Beginning with a brief recapitulation of the star’s persona as formed in a couple of iconic roles from the 1990s, the article proceeds to show how that persona has developed in Binoche’s mid-career, reinforcing certain expectations around typecasting while expanding into new areas of performance and representation. To that end, the discussion initially focuses on different production categories within Binoche’s recent filmography. A section on melodrama demonstrates how a number of films have traded on key facets of the star’s persona as built up in the 1990s. Since it is notoriously harder for ageing actresses to secure starring roles, I consider how the contribution of smaller parts to a range of films showcasing other – often younger – stars has helped complicate and deepen Binoche’s portraits of middle-aged femininity. We consider the increasingly important role of comedy in allowing Binoche to satirise some of the social traps and double binds of ageing femininity. Finally, we conclude that a significant majority of Binoche’s roles from this period imply the negotiation of a – more or less serious – ‘midlife crisis’ and we look in detail at three films from different generic traditions (romantic comedy, psychological thriller, social-realist drama) that show Binoche’s protagonist reinventing a radically different – and often younger – self.

In her pioneering analysis of the first decade and a half of Binoche’s filmmaking, Ginette Vincendeau noted that the actress ‘had succeeded in going international while remaining identified as an auteur cinema star’ and that her roles, ‘more cerebral, more anguished and more fragile’ than those of her peers, made her comparable to New Wave actresses like Jeanne Moreau, Emmanuelle Riva or Delphine Seyrig (Vincendeau 2000, 241–242). Vincendeau further observed the frequency with which Binoche played artists on screen, thus ‘stressing her empathy with the world of the films and their directors’ (249). Binoche’s characters and performances were often interpreted by reviewers and spectators as being ‘enigmatic’ or ‘mysterious’ and the camera tended to fetishise her face much more than her body: in Vincendeau’s words: ‘its beauty and luminosity attract the camera like a magnet, but its smoothness refracts the gaze of the spectator’ (249).

A brief evocation of a couple of Binoche’s iconic early roles will serve to confirm key transgressive elements of her persona and will enable us to identify continuities and differences in the midlife phase of her career. While it is necessarily reductive to deduce Binoche’s persona from only two films, spatial constraints oblige us to take these internationally successful examples of French auteur cinema as key formative works in the consolidation of the performer’s distinctive yet versatile star identity. Trois couleurs: Bleu/Three Colours: Blue (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1993) presents a melodramatic story in the affectless mode of much arthouse cinema. Binoche plays a young woman, Julie, who loses her husband and child in a car accident and becomes so numbed by grief that she shuts herself off from others, refusing to answer (or ask) questions for most of the film, with only occasional gestures – like dragging her knuckles along a stone wall – betraying her intense pain. In Bleu, Julie’s inner life is the very subject of the film, yet it remains mostly opaque throughout. Roles like this helped to constitute what Mick LaSalle calls ‘the essential contradiction of [Binoche’s] screen image’: she tends to appear ‘Serene, secure in her essential value’ and yet the women she plays are ‘usually turbulent, troubled and extroverted’ (LaSalle 2012, 37). Vincendeau described a ‘sublimated form of romantic passion’ common to Binoche’s films (Vincendeau 2000, 243): she feels intensely or inspires intense feeling, yet these are only rarely granted carnal manifestation. Bleu is filled with contemplative close-ups of Binoche’s face, her gaze fixed but largely inexpressive, the play of light over her eyes instead inviting the spectator to project meaning onto the shot. The film’s closing image, of a tear running down Julie’s face, is thus constructed as a quietly redemptive conclusion, a significant breakthrough in her grieving process.

An important counter-example is provided by Les Amants du Pont-Neuf/Lovers on the Bridge (Leos Carax, 1991), a much more physical role playing an artist sleeping rough on the streets of Paris that sees Binoche drink, dance, run through Métro corridors, water-ski on the Seine and wrestle with her co-star Denis Lavant. Michelle, in Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, is perhaps more than any other, the role that saw Binoche qualified as a ‘brave’ actress since here she consents to be rendered ‘ugly’ for most of the film, transgressing the conventions of glamorous female stardom. Dressed mannishly in shapeless beige slacks and a yellow tracksuit top, with ratty hair, a sunburned face and dirty teeth, she sports a grubby patch over one eye and struggles to focus the other, while much of her dialogue is grudgingly mumbled. There is unquestionably a melodramatic romanticism about Les Amants du Pont-Neuf too, however, albeit a nostalgie de la boue. The film is an utterly unapologetic appropriation of a ‘very French’ representational tradition of amour fou, the setting in the Paris streets and occasional surrealist touches placing it unequivocally within the lineage of André Breton. Here too, though, the physical lovemaking of Michelle and Alex (Lavant) is effectively sublimated into the literal fireworks of the bicentennial celebrations of the French Revolution and of Alex’s street performances breathing fire. Ultimately, for all her frenetic activity, we gain little more access to Michelle’s inner world than we do to Julie’s in Trois couleurs: Bleu; it is instead through Alex’s voiceover that we learn of Michelle’s pathological grieving over a lost lover, doubled by the personal tragedy of the loss of her sight.

Binoche and melodrama in the 2010s

As these early roles perhaps begin to suggest, a paradox pertains to ‘transgressive’ roles on screen since it is often by playing ‘disturbing’ – that is, unsympathetic or unattractive – characters that actors, especially women, achieve critical acclaim and canonisation by the filmmaking establishment in the shape of high-profile awards. A number of Binoche’s important roles from the 2010s thus continue to build on these key aspects of her star persona established in the films of the 1990s. But, while the more wayward traits of the earlier roles could perhaps be excused by the recklessness of youth, in these midlife roles the consequences of the character’s drive for achievement or thirst for adventure are more starkly set out in terms of domestic disharmony.

In À coeur ouvert/An Open Heart (Marion Laine, 2012), Binoche and Edgar Ramirez play a married couple of open-heart surgeons who seek relief from their high-stakes profession in their hard-partying lifestyle and intensely passionate relationship. As Javier’s (Ramirez) drinking becomes increasingly uncontrolled, he is side-lined from his job, which threatens the stability of the marriage. In an astute portrait of toxic masculinity, the film demonstrates Mila’s (Binoche) restricted room for manoeuvre: when she seeks to compensate for Javier’s volatile, self-destructive behaviour, he becomes enraged at being treated as weak. The ambiguous, dreamlike ending implies that Mila and her unborn child both die of exposure while searching for Javier, indirect victims of his emotional inarticulacy.

The emotional awkwardness is reversed in Tusen ganger god natt/A Thousand Times Good Night (Erik Poppe, 2013) where Binoche plays a photographer specialising in conflict zones whose career impacts upon her husband and two daughters. After she is injured while photographing a suicide bombing, Rebecca’s family give her an ultimatum, unable to manage the constant stress of fearing for her safety. The majority of the film documents her home life and in particular her relationship with her teenage daughter Stephanie (Lauryn Canny) who at once admires her mother’s courage and commitment to justice and seeks to defend herself from emotional attachment for fear of losing her. The narrative comes to a head when Stephanie is placed in danger during a joint trip with her mother to the Kenyan border, but the film offers a redemptive resolution when the teenager, in a presentation of her mother’s work at school, concludes that ‘They [i.e. the inhabitants of conflict zones] need her more than I do’.

Nadie quiere la noche/Endless Night (Isabel Coixet, 2015) is a period drama set in Arctic Canada in the early years of the twentieth century. Binoche plays Josephine Peary, the wealthy wife of an explorer who comes to search for her missing husband. Despite her attachment to a bourgeois lifestyle (dining in a tent with silver service and Italian opera playing on a gramophone), Josephine is presented as an intrepid and determined woman, pushing on into the wilderness even after most of her crew have turned back in fear. Eventually, she is left alone to pass the winter with her husband’s pregnant Inuk concubine (Rinko Kikuchi) and overcomes her jealousy and prudishness to realise the importance of mutual aid in this forbidding environment. Although the child is born alive, and given a name meaning ‘Child of two mothers’, it does not survive the winter.

Despite their modest critical and commercial fortunes, these films demonstrate some of the key aspects of Binoche’s persona from this decade. In particular, against the common association of middle-aged women with motherhood, Binoche’s roles often present her as a childless woman, or with children only as vaguely identified background figures, or in active conflict with children. It is often the case, as in the examples above, that her character’s stubborn focus on her desires – whether sexual or artistic, or defined by science or adventure – either prevent her from mothering or actively harm her children. As in the earlier films analysed by Vincendeau, Binoche’s mid-career roles are often characterised by artistic or creative professions: she is variously a painter or visual artist (Camille Claudel 1915 [Bruno Dumont 2013], Words and Pictures [Fred Schepisi, 2013]), an investigative journalist (Elles [Malgorzata Szumowska, 2011], The Son of No One [Dito Montiel, 2011], Ouistreham/Between Two Worlds [Emmanuel Carrère, 2021]), a photographer (A Thousand Times Good Night), an actor (Sils Maria/Clouds of Sils Maria [Olivier Assayas, 2014], Doubles Vies/Non-Fiction [Assayas, 2018]), a dancer (Polina, danser sa vie/Polina [Müller and Preljocaj, 2016]), or a screenwriter (La Vérité/The Truth [Hirokazu Koreeda, 2019]). Binoche has likewise continued to work closely with auteur directors, sometimes actively seeking collaboration (for instance with Bruno Dumont) and repeatedly choosing to work with directors who generally prefer non-professional performers (Dumont, Abbas Kiarostami, Hou Hsiao-Hsien), directors who, in Binoche’s own words, ‘don’t like to see acting’ (Binoche 2013, 36). The films discussed in the remainder of this section contain melodramatic elements but are directed in an auteur style that deliberately seeks to downplay melodrama. As Howard Hampton puts it in relation to Sils Maria, Assayas ‘deliberately lowers the overwrought stakes of the play within the film to a more humane, life-muddles-on temperature’ (Hampton 2015, 42).

When Binoche sought out work with Bruno Dumont, he cast her as Camille Claudel partly because of her extratextual artistic work. Binoche has a long-standing interest in painting and is known to have produced her own canvases when playing artists in Les Amants du Pont-Neuf and in Words and Pictures (Murphy 2014). Camille Claudel 1915 is another ‘brave’ (because unflattering) role for Binoche, the actress appearing in sack-like dresses alongside real patients with severe learning difficulties. As Stéphane Delorme remarked, rather than allowing Binoche the bravura performance of an isolated martyrdom, Dumont thrust her into uncomfortable proximity with these patients in a gesture of deliberate ‘neutralisation’ of the star (Delorme 2013, 32). Indeed, the film creates an oppressive sense of the absolute inescapability of madness and misery in the hospital where Claudel is interned against her will, the total absence of privacy, quiet and solitude in these shots where there is almost always another patient watching, laughing or shouting in the background. Although Dumont gave Binoche little real direction – ‘You don’t do anything, just sit there,’ he claims was his instruction (Dumont 2013, 26) – the actress insisted on working with a coach in order to access the psychological backstory of the role.¹ The result is an eloquent performance of stoical weariness, the heaviness about Binoche’s gait and her fixed stares implying her impotent rage. Although Claudel is never seen sculpting in the film (or not for more than a moment), the camera’s focus on patterns of light suggests her artistic sensibility.

The film does not, however, seek to rehabilitate Camille Claudel as some kind of feminist martyr; as Dumont commented, his intention behind the film was not a ‘settling of scores’ (Dumont 2013, 24).² Instead, Camille Claudel 1915, while generating sympathy for the sculptor’s unjust confinement, nonetheless suggests that she genuinely suffered from a mental illness. Her paranoia is made clear in the opening scenes in which she stares fixedly at a potato being cooked, convinced that her enemies are trying to poison her. Claudel’s psychic instability is demonstrated in two key sequences in which she makes a plea to male figures with power over her status: first, to her doctor, and subsequently to her visiting brother Paul. For both scenes, Dumont gave Binoche no script but asked her to improvise her speech after studying Claudel’s letters from the hospital. In addition, he filmed in a long shot-sequence with no rehearsal and only two or three takes, thereby placing the actress herself in a vulnerable position, delivering an important entreaty with little room for failure. In both cases, the speech begins as a perfectly reasonable protest against Claudel’s unfair detention before gradually unravelling as the shot runs on and on, Binoche/Camille’s gaze turning inward as she begins to get lost in her paranoid fantasies and loses the thread of her own argument.

A busier, brighter film than Camille Claudel 1915, but with a similarly introspective core, Sils Maria offers Binoche a role that is something like a self-portrait as a successful middle-aged actress. The opening scenes, in which Maria Enders (Binoche) and her personal assistant Valentine (Kristin Stewart) juggle multiple devices while they manage the actress’s schedule, demonstrate the competing claims on Maria’s attention, from blockbuster film roles to sober theatrical performances, from award ceremonies to divorce lawyers. Indeed, the film presents Maria’s closest relationship as being the one with her assistant, who offers considered advice on career choices and helps her rehearse for roles, who reacts in tandem with Maria to narrative developments (wincing at the announced arrival of a disagreeable old flame) or speaks on her behalf (regarding the disposition of a hotel room). The film hints more than once at an erotic attraction between the two women but, as Laura DiSumma points out, that attraction is ‘always at risk […], threatened by the confusion of identity we see unfolding in multiple directions’ (DiSumma 2021, 162). Sils Maria constitutes a vertiginous meta-narrative since Maria is asked to play the mature role in a play about a destructive passion between an older and a younger woman, having come to fame by playing the more junior role in her youth. As Binoche/Maria rehearses lines with Stewart/Valentine, the tense, if productive, confrontation between generations of women performers becomes at once the source and the subject – the substance – of the film.

These rehearsal scenes make up the majority of the long middle section of Sils Maria, sandwiched between a shorter prologue and epilogue depicting Maria in the glamorous world of the film and celebrity industry, as though the film sought to present a kind of radiography revealing the hard work that lies behind the glittering surface of showbusiness. Accordingly, Binoche is dressed in ball gowns and smart suits in the first and last parts of the narrative (the film was financially supported by Chanel) with long, buoyant hair and full make-up, whereas, in the middle section, she regains the cropped bob of her ‘gamine’ period (Vincendeau 2000, 242) and is mostly dressed in trousers and sweaters for hiking or lounging. There is a further contrast in the film between Binoche’s performance style, marked by emotional outbursts, flamboyant gestures of frustration and spontaneous movements around the shot, and the studied awkwardness, contained energy and grudging facial expressions that seem to characterise Kristin Stewart’s embodiment throughout the film almost regardless of narrative developments. These central scenes have a deeply immersive quality; as Howard Hampton suggests, the film places the spectator ‘right on top of people so fiercely wrapped up in their own internal worlds they don’t notice you eavesdropping’ (Hampton 2015, 41). Sils Maria thus seems to suggest, at both its narrative and formal levels, that naturalism in performance may be a privilege of youth. Maria is sceptical of the young actress, Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloë Grace Moretz), cast to play her partner in the play, but Valentine defends her: ‘There’s no distance between Jo-Ann and her character’, she says, before adding, ‘You can’t be as accomplished as you are, and as rounded as an actress, and still want to be young forever’.

Smaller roles

All the films discussed in the previous section contain major roles for Binoche in which she is on screen in almost every scene and could be said, in some cases, to ‘carry’ the film (although, in others, this would be an injustice to her co-stars). But one of the more intriguing developments in Binoche’s later career has been her embracing of minor and supporting roles. Some of these, in international productions, are relatively thankless and, presumably, have largely financial motivations (Godzilla [Gareth Edwards, 2014], The Son of No One); others, such as Ma Loute/Slack Bay (Bruno Dumont, 2016), are no doubt accepted out of affection for the director. The proliferation of smaller roles in the career of a middle-aged actress is perhaps inevitable given the global film industry’s traditional preference for either male or very young women protagonists. Small roles can sometimes confine the middle-aged performer to shallow stereotypes: in Godzilla, Binoche is the successful woman who ‘has it all’: husband, family and high-achieving career; in The Son of No One, on the other hand, she appears as an embittered workaholic with no apparent family or social life (and coded, through costume and performance cues, as a probable lesbian). But some of these smaller roles offer significant performance challenges in their own right and highlight Binoche’s ability to lend a disconcerting depth – to suggest a thickness of character and a moral complexity – to even the most apparently minor or effaced of screen appearances. Thus, she demonstrates the flourishing sexuality of the middle-aged woman in two films in which an erotic fixation is developed between Binoche’s character and the much younger Robert Pattinson (born 1986): Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg, 2012) and High Life (Claire Denis, 2018). In High Life, too, and in Ghost in the Shell (Rupert Sanders, 2017), Binoche’s performance – marked by grand-guignol gestures in one case and restrained irony in the other – sends up the misogynist cliché of the middle-aged woman as a childless witch.

In Cosmopolis, Binoche plays an art dealer and mistress to the amoral billionaire Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson). Her cameo appearance begins with a sudden cut to the middle of a sex scene, Binoche grinding on Pattinson’s lap before collapsing in a post-orgasmic heap on the floor of his limousine. Her confidence in this role as a seductive fortysomething woman enjoying a free-spirited liaison with a younger man anticipates a number of Binoche’s roles in this decade (discussed in more detail below) in which she is shown seeking relationships with younger men. All the same, there is perhaps an ambiguity about the way Binoche prowls around the floor and the seats of the limo in this scene: in Jonathan Romney’s eyes, ‘It’s as if she’s in a cage, a trapped luxury acquisition’ (Romney 2012; see Figure 1). Yet Binoche is more than an exclusive fetish object in this scene. She helps to establish the moral vacuum at the heart of Packer’s wealth (he wants to buy the Rothko Chapel; she insists that it ‘belongs to the world’) and her snappily exchanged dialogue serves to make clearer one of the film’s key themes of the characters’ alienation from themselves. ‘Was I expecting you?’ she asks incongruously after rolling off Packer’s lap and, when he quotes something she said to him in the past, she responds with a gawky sneer, ‘What did I mean?’ As Romney comments, ‘Cronenberg has found comedy in this language that perhaps DeLillo wasn’t fully aware of’. (Romney 2012)

Figure 1. A post-coital Binoche reclines in the limousine in Cosmopolis (2012).

La Vérité (2019) offers a fuller role for Binoche, that nonetheless stands in support of Catherine Deneuve, the real star of the film playing Fabienne Dangeville, a monster of conceit and narcissism, a legendary French actress who treats all her colleagues and family with contempt. Deneuve incarnates this tyrant with her characteristic offhand delivery and elegant demeanour and the film plays on inter- and extratextual knowledge, referencing iconic roles like Belle de Jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967) or evoking, through the haunting presence of ‘Sarah’, the youthful demise of Deneuve’s sister. Faced with the all-consuming presence of this actor/character, Binoche gives an effaced and naturalistic performance as Deneuve’s daughter Lumir. In the words of Molly Haskell, she is ‘mousy in the way that daughters raised in the shadow of great beauties often are, yet at the same time luminous, exuding the naked authenticity of someone who has nothing to protect’ (Haskell 2020, 70). Lumir, visiting Paris from California on the occasion of the publication of her mother’s memoirs, queries the veracity of this account, but mostly appears aloofly amused by Fabienne’s outrageous behaviour, for instance scoffing incredulously on learning that she has never once apologised to a man. Fabienne, who believes that her daughter fled her influence because she had failed to become a successful actress in her own right (her performance in a school play was ‘altogether bad’), manages even to spoil the climactic reconciliation with Lumir when she regrets aloud not having used the emotional material to improve her latest screen performance. Demonstrating the often awkward positioning between generations that middle age brings, Binoche here is in a role closer to that of Kristin Stewart in Sils Maria: managing the emotional regulation of an ageing diva. It is she, for instance, who talks her mother back into the film role when she wants to flee. Binoche herself observed that Koreeda had been ‘fascinated’ by Assayas’s film such that La Vérité was written in a displaced dialogue with it (Rapold 2020).

Cosmopolis and La Vérité both demonstrate Binoche’s ability to bring levity and a sense of humour to ostensibly serious narrative material. This capacity is further demonstrated in the mad-scientist roles of Ghost in the Shell (Rupert Sanders, 2017) and High Life (Claire Denis, 2018). In Ghost in the Shell, Binoche is unquestionably a background figure, playing a minor supporting role to the film’s star and sex symbol Scarlett Johansson. Binoche’s Dr Ouelet is a Frankenstein figure, the doctor behind the creation of the super-advanced cyborg Major (Johansson). There is little sense, in the film, that Ouelet has any life outside the laboratory and indeed she is first introduced, through Major’s point of view, as a disembodied voice, thus by implication an a-corporeal and, hence, asexual being. As Major’s creator, however, Ouelet appears as a godlike figure, able, for instance, to permanently erase elements of the cyborg’s memory. ‘I can see everything’, she tells her young protégée at one point, ‘all your thoughts, your decisions’. Binoche/Ouelet’s scenes provide a kind of philosophical relief between the film’s extensive action sequences. At one point, she muses, ‘We cling to memories as if they define us, but they really don’t. What we do defines us’. It is as though Binoche’s continental pedigree gave her a licence for existential philosophising. Such scenes tend to dupe the spectator into regarding Ouelet and Major’s bond as something akin to a mother–daughter relationship until a dramatic reversal reframes Ouelet as a monstrous figure responsible for ninety-eight failed human–cyborg experiments prior to Major’s realisation. ‘Sacrifices were made’, she comments with a grimace. Ouelet is redeemed, however, by restoring Major’s real memories and sacrificing her own life in order to allow the cyborg to escape.

Ghost in the Shell thus telescopes rather a lot of grand narratives and historical figures – everything from Josef Mengele to Jesus Christ – in its high-concept screenplay. The mad scientist that Binoche incarnates in High Life is likewise culturally resonant but Claire Denis’s film, by virtue of its generic inheritance (most obviously Solaris [Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972]) and intended audience, is under little obligation to sacrifice thought to action. Binoche’s Dr Dibs here is another monstrous mother figure performing experimental inseminations on a convict ship as it drifts through deep space, sometimes extracting semen from men or implanting embryos in women while they are unconscious. Although the spectator may initially mistake Dibs, with her white coat, as a representative of the law on this anarchic mission, she soon gives the lie to this idea by striding around the ship declaring, ‘My crime was the only one worthy of the name’. We subsequently learn that she murdered her own children back on Earth. The unnatural character of Dibs is reinforced by the fact that she is the only individual we see inside the ‘Fuck Box’, an elaborate mechanical sex simulator. The filming of this scene, with the camera whirling around Binoche’s contorted body, her long black hair plastered to her back, recalls, as Emma Wilson astutely observed, Goya’s drawings for Witches’ Sabbath (1798) (Wilson 2019, 22). Dibs is punished like a witch, jettisoned into deep space, yet her influence survives in the birth of a healthy child, Willow, and the narrative leaves ambiguous whether Dibs is simply the gynaecological facilitator here, or actually the egg donor. Certainly, the adolescent Willow (Jessie Ross), with her long dark hair, looks more like Dibs than the mother who carried her (Mia Goth). Among the many unanswered questions High Life leaves us with – are Willow and her father (Robert Pattinson) preparing to kill themselves, or to commit incest at the end of the film? – the role of Dibs remains prominent, with one possibility being that she is the miraculous matriarch of a new human race. As Wilson comments, ‘Beyond nature, beyond artificial insemination, Denis imagines new forms of parthenogenesis’ (Wilson 2019, 22).

Ghost in the Shell and High Life demonstrate that, in addition to her nuanced, naturalistic portrayals of complex characters, Binoche is, at times, not above exaggerating features of a role in order to create a more generically appropriate construct. This tendency is also brought to the fore in Binoche’s increasingly common work in comedy in which the sensitive evocation of rounded personalities sometimes deliberately gives way to stereotype and caricature.

2017: Binoche’s year of comedy

Having developed a reputation over several decades as a serious actress specialising in drama and arthouse cinema, Binoche appeared to make a concerted bid, in 2017, to prove that she could laugh at herself by starring in a trio of significant comic roles in different genres: the popular romantic comedy Telle mère, telle fille/Baby Bump(s) (directed by Noémie Saglio), Claire Denis’s quirky auteurist deconstruction of romantic comedy tropes in Un beau soleil intérieur/Let the Sunshine In, and a guest starring role on the hit Netflix series Dix pour cent/Call My Agent! As feminist critics have long argued, comedy is one of the genres that has traditionally allowed actresses to step outside ‘safe’ representations of femininity and to give freer rein to ‘unruly’ womanhood (Rowe 1995). Binoche’s comic roles in the 2010s allow her to explore with verbal alacrity and physical excess some of the awkward tensions of middle-aged femininity: dealing with a patronising and covetous male gaze even at the height of career success; returning to the dating market to find the pool of male suitors irrevocably flawed by life experience; adapting to later-life pregnancy having built a persona on the basis of youthful free-spiritedness.

The episode of Dix pour cent that features Binoche (season 2, episode 6, first streamed May 2017) is the highest-rated episode of the series on IMDB (user rating of 8.3 out of 10). This is no doubt partly because it is the season finale and therefore concludes various narrative arcs, or proposes a new dimension to them in view of the next season. But the fact that Binoche was invited to appear in this particular episode itself speaks to her star power. Binoche’s star entrance, emerging from a dressing room in an absurdly ostentatious ballgown – all feathers, sequins and cleavage – is at once extremely glamorous (she is preparing to present an awards ceremony at the Cannes Film Festival) and pointedly self-mocking. ‘I feel like this dress is a bit too sophisticated for me’, she admits.³ But the dress will provide much of the episode’s broad comedy since the Armani tuxedo that Binoche prefers is already being worn by Cannes jury member Gong Li. We subsequently see Binoche rehearsing her speech in her hotel room dressed in a dowdy tracksuit offset by fetish heels and a necklace so valuable that it requires its own security detail. The episode thus deliberately plays on Binoche’s star image that, ever since the films of the early 1990s that we discussed at the beginning of this article, has combined glamour with grungy elements, in roles that have swung between evocations of inaccessible beauty and the performer’s willingness, literally and metaphorically, to get her hands dirty.

The comic formula of Dix pour cent relies on putting well known French actors in unlikely and unflattering situations and, in the process, demonstrating how stars are at once divas and ‘normal people’, achieving what Richard Dyer (1979) identified as the reconciliation of apparent contradiction between extraordinary charisma and universal relatability. In this episode, for instance, we witness Binoche, for all her spellbinding beauty and intellectual pedigree, struggling to pronounce the names of international festival cinema favourites like Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Golshifteh Farahani or Matthias Schoenaerts while the burlesque comedy of the episode’s climactic scene revolves around Binoche’s sudden need to pee when she is bound into her impractical ballgown. Yet the episode also offers Binoche the chance to restore her dignity and status when she fights to regain her composure in her torn dress and ‘improvises’ a speech to the festival crowd celebrating the equal participation of women filmmakers. Likewise, a sub-plot involving a financier (Philippe Uchan) who seeks to use his economic capital as leverage to seduce Binoche, but who is discomfited by the actress’s own aggressive performance of sexual entitlement, presents Binoche as an uncompromising heroine for the #MeToo generation.

A rather more subtle and generically awkward comedy, Claire Denis’s Un beau soleil intérieur introduces a set of concerns that will be central to Binoche’s mid-career and that provide the focus for much of the remainder of this article: the pleasures and perils of sex and relationships in middle age. Un beau soleil intérieur is frank about the sometimes distasteful experience of sex with partners whose previous sexual history cannot be occluded: the film opens with a sex scene in which Vincent (Xavier Beauvois) defensively asks the impatient Isabelle (Binoche) if her previous partner came more quickly. Although she entertains several suitors (half a dozen in the space of a year), Isabelle wonders aloud whether her love life may now be behind her, and this despite the fact that the domestic responsibilities one might imagine as precluding much romantic adventure are barely visible in the film, Isabelle’s daughter glimpsed in only a single shot. Commentators have seen in this choice of focus a ‘sex-positive feminism’ on the part of the filmmakers (Wilson 2019, 25). As Erika Balsom remarks, ‘Denis allows her protagonist an emotional and practical freedom, never punishing her for her exploratory openness, instead affirming it while registering its toll’ (Balsom 2018).

Un beau soleil intérieur feels at times like a sardonic deconstruction of the romantic comedy genre, for instance in the way it plays on the discrepancy between the beauty and elegance of its heroine and the emotional immaturity of her prospective male partners, yet without ever allowing one man to emerge as her champion or to redeem himself through an arc of psychological growth. Isabelle’s pretenders are, variously: an entitled married man who bullies and belittles everyone around him (Beauvois); an alcoholic and indecisive actor (Nicolas Duvauchelle); an oddly dressed and self-obsessed neighbour (Philippe Katerine); her ex-husband (Laurent Grévill); an ageing seducer who prowls provincial nightclubs (Paul Blain); a sleazy, overweight fortune teller (Gérard Depardieu); and a professional colleague who also has a family of his own, and whose romantic interest appears out of nowhere near the end of the film (Alex Descas). As Emma Wilson comments: ‘Binoche is a goddess. That even she, as Isabelle, is faced with so much erotic disappointment makes the film the more sardonic in its despairing recognition of the misogyny and ageist triviality women face’ (Wilson 2019, 25).

With its gallery of comically ineffectual characters, Un beau soleil intérieur comes across as something like a denunciation of pervasive Flaubertian bêtise (a cross between stupidity and received ideas). Much of the comedy is drawn from the characters’ inarticulacy, their apparent inability to connect on the same wavelength even for the duration of a conversation, while Isabelle’s misplaced hope in these deeply flawed men makes her ‘a sort of modern Emma Bovary’ (Wilson 2019, 24), fixated on an ideal of romantic love that is never borne out by her experience. While such a reading does not preclude sympathy for Isabelle (any more than it did for Emma Bovary), it tends to complicate the confident assertion of the film’s feminist agenda since it implies just how far Isabelle continues to see her own value as dependent upon men’s desire.

This focus on men’s desire anticipates another significant trend in Binoche’s midlife roles: films that deliberately organise their narrative around the middle-aged performer’s ability to pretend to be younger than she really is. In Telle mère, telle fille, Binoche (then 53) plays Mado, the mother of Avril (Camille Cottin, 28), yet their roles appear reversed such that the film trades on the genre of the role-swap comedy. Mado lives in a messy bedroom, cluttered with untidied clothes and full ashtrays, in the apartment that Avril shares with her fiancé, Louis (Michaël Dichter). Mado rides a pink scooter decorated with stickers and dresses almost invariably in tight jeans and band T-shirts. In places, the comedy derived from this role-swap is far from subtle, as on a trip to the supermarket when Avril offers her mother childish foods such as Chocapic and Nutella while Mado sulks when her daughter will not buy her a cheap, skimpy top, curling her chewing gum around her finger and making faces at the cashier (see Figure 2). Mado’s failed marriage to Avril’s father is little more than a joke to her; a pantomime of the relationship is performed for the benefit of Louis’s parents, which flirtation results in Mado becoming pregnant at the same time as her own daughter.

Figure 2. Mado (Binoche) plays with her gum in Telle mère, telle fille (2017).

Mado is repeatedly designated by the film as an unfit mother. It is revealed that she had Avril at the age of seventeen and, when she learns of her daughter’s pregnancy, her immediate response, pronounced to the horror of Avril’s in-laws, is ‘You’re not going to keep it?’⁴ She is indignant at the idea that she will have to share her bedroom with the baby and, in one scene, she enjoys a joint with a friend (Stéfi Celma) while they are supposedly looking after a toddler. In another farcical episode, Mado, despite knowing she is pregnant, climbs up to the Parisian rooftops, in her high-heeled cowboy boots, in order to avoid a confrontation with Avril. It is not difficult to see this portrayal as misogynist. Mado comes across as a singularly irresponsible and immature individual whereas the father figure, Marc (Lambert Wilson), in addition to being a successful orchestral conductor, cultivated, virile and well preserved (he expectantly greets Mado in the nude in one scene), immediately steps up to accept his paternal responsibilities upon learning of Mado’s pregnancy. More charitably, however, one could see the film as a satirical portrait of a culture in which it is acceptable for women – especially middle-aged women – to be sexual (as Mado is), or for them to be maternal, but it is not conceivable for them to be both. Telle mère, telle fille mocks a certain squeamishness around reproductive biology: when Mado tells her gynaecologist she wants an abortion, he immediately assents: ‘You’re quite right, pregnancy is revolting!’ (‘la grossesse, c’est dégueulasse!’). The patronising pre-natal classes that the expectant mothers attend are likewise mocked for their tendency to turn women into asexual saps. On the contrary, Mado could be seen to marry her vibrant sexuality with her motherhood when she teaches a dance class for pregnant women or when, in the film’s climactic scene, she invades the stage where Marc is conducting, dancing around him, heavily pregnant in red chiffon, before passionately embracing her lover to the applause of the crowd.

Binoche and midlife crisis

Telle mère, telle fille offers an indication of a recurring narrative trope in Binoche’s roles of the past decade: a middle-aged woman who is apparently in such denial – or such internal conflict – about her stage in life that she takes to acting like a callow youth. This broad narrative framework can be found in films occupying very different genres, thereby implying a widespread discomfort with the representation of middle-aged women’s lives, bodies and relationships, and evoking in different ways the idea of a midlife crisis. This final section considers a romantic comedy, La Vie d’une autre/Another Woman’s Life (Sylvie Testud, 2012), a psychological thriller, Celle que vous croyez/Who You Think I Am (Safy Nebbou, 2019), and a film in the tradition of French social realism, Ouistreham (2021).

Even more clearly than Telle mère, telle fille, La Vie d’une autre can be seen as a romantic comedy doubled with a body-swap movie: Marie (Binoche) falls in love with a young man from a wealthy family, Paul (Mathieu Kassovitz), but, following their first night together, she awakes disoriented to find that twenty years have passed and that she is a middle-aged wife and mother and a senior business executive. The film clearly apes Hollywood romantic comedies in its bright opening sequences set in an idyllic location (a large house by the water) and scored by upbeat English-language pop music. The close-up dissolves of the couple’s lovemaking to a sensual soundtrack are likewise a generic cliché. The body-swap narrative meanwhile draws broad comedy from Binoche acting young, playing up to the gamine persona from her earlier career: she writes little notes on her hand, for instance, or simply flashes her smile when she doesn’t know how to respond, in places appearing exaggeratedly childlike compared to the supposed age (25) at which Marie met Paul. The film exploits what Adam Kotsko (2010) has called the comedy of awkwardness, arising when individuals – here, Marie – appear not to understand the unspoken code governing certain social situations, such as business meetings, or a mature marriage: Marie’s attempts to seduce Paul fall flat.

Like Telle mère, telle fille, La Vie d’une autre appears, at first glance, to be a deeply misogynist narrative, implying that a woman who swaps her youthful flirtatiousness for domestic responsibility and professional success has, in the terms of Julie Rodgers’ analysis of the film, ‘betrayed her “true” female identity’ (Rodgers 2022, 22). A more generous reading might see the film as seeking to suggest that ‘adulthood’ is never more than a performance, as when Marie slams folders peremptorily on the table in a business meeting in order to give herself an air of authority. As Gregor Moder has suggested, comic performance tends to work through the repetition of familiar gestures in such a way as to render unstable their claim to authenticity or authority (Moder 2019, 232). Marie in La Vie d’une autre can be seen to have pierced the veil of her middle-aged bourgeois life such that everything suddenly appears unfamiliar. But, if the consequences of this new perception are initially comical, they quickly develop a more sombre edge. ‘You wake up one day and you’ve lost your car’, she tells her cleaner in a moment of distress,⁵ a line that conceals the more serious shocks of middle age: you wake up one day and you have become a stranger to your spouse, become an efficient cog in a barbaric machine, become a person you despise … The film’s refusal of the traditional neat resolution of romantic comedy adds to this sense of unease: despite her attempts to reconnect with her husband, Marie’s divorce from Paul is finalised and she chooses to leave her job to move to the company’s London office. The film does not allow Marie simply to incorporate the regained playfulness of youth into her bourgeois lifestyle, instead implying that the two may in fact be irreconcilable.

In Celle que vous croyez, adapted from a novel by Camille Laurens, Binoche plays Claire, a professor of literature who, having been unceremoniously dumped by her younger lover, creates a fake Facebook profile in order to befriend his flatmate, Alex. Although she initially hopes only to spy on her ex, Claire ends up falling in love with Alex. François Civil, cast as Alex, played Binoche’s teenage son in Elles (2013), a fact which, for cinephile viewers, is likely to add a (perhaps unconscious) incestuous frisson to this inter-generational romance. As in Telle mère, telle fille or La Vie d’une autre, the mise-en-scène of Celle que vous croyez plays deliberately on the question of Binoche’s visible age. Early in the film, she is often made to look somewhat dowdy: usually sporting glasses, with hair greying a little and wrinkles not hidden. As Claire falls in love with Alex, Binoche’s hair gains blond highlights, she walks with more bounce and swagger (see Figure 3), talks supine on the phone with her legs up the wall like a teenager and engages in youthful activities like drinking, dancing and phone sex.

Figure 3. Claire (Binoche) on the phone to Alex in Celle que vous croyez (2019).

Camille Laurens’s autofictional novel (Laurens 2016) contains multiple layers of narration through which she throws into question the plausibility of the story. First, there is an account Claire gives to a therapist, in which, increasingly guilty about her dissemblance, she ‘abandons’ Alex without ever having met him in person and, broken-hearted, he kills himself. Second, a ‘novel’ written by Claire in a psychiatric hospital in which, after ‘leaving’ him, she subsequently engineers a meeting between her real self and Alex and they fall in love, but he leaves her when he discovers her earlier deception. Third, a ‘letter’ from Laurens to her publisher in which she admits that the narrative was adapted from her own experience with a younger man who left her upon discovering her true age. By excising the last of these layers, the film adaptation renders the narrative less complex and it hovers generically and tonally between the territory of the psychological thriller (is Claire a villain or a victim? Will her duplicity be unveiled?) and the romantic comedy (Claire’s attempts to orchestrate a physical meeting between herself and Alex are like so many failed romantic epiphanies, while the fantasised romance in Claire’s ‘novel’ is filmed as rom-com parody with clifftop walks and readings from Rilke).

Claire is arguably a woman undergoing a midlife crisis, a cultural phenomenon that, as Susanne Schmidt (2020) has recently argued, can be seen to have feminist origins in the potential for new sexual and lifestyle freedoms arising from menopause and the empty nest. Other feminist commentators have observed that, while the sexuality of middle-aged women has recently become more culturally visible, in practice this visibility is dependent upon a set of tightly controlled norms around appearance, weight, dress, etc. In short, desirability becomes a new form of discipline for women beyond thirty-five (Hinchliff 2014, 69–71). Camille Laurens’s novel is an excoriating attack on the double standard of ageing and the violence with which older women are rejected from social space. Elements of this remain in the film, but the overriding focus on Claire/Binoche’s transformation from maudlin solitude to ecstatic amorousness and back again, together with the excision of the novel’s last section and its extensive authorial self-justification, tends arguably to imply that Claire was, at best, naïve and, at worst, criminal, in her quest to kindle a youthful passion.

Ouistreham contains no element of romance but is another film about a middle-aged woman reinventing herself through deception: it is adapted from Florence Aubenas’s surprise bestseller, Le Quai de Ouistreham, a journalistic enquiry in which she pretended to be a divorcee with no resources in order to experience first-hand the precarity of zero-hour, minimum-wage labour. In keeping with Aubenas’s deception, the mise-en-scène of the film stresses the ordinariness of Binoche’s character, here renamed Marianne Winckler, dressed in cheap clothes – shapeless jeans and an old cardigan – and minimally made up (see Figure 4). Several of the film’s key dialogues take place while Marianne is driving herself and a colleague to or from a workplace. Like La Vie d’une autre, Ouistreham highlights the performative aspect of the world of work, Binoche’s wide-eyed eagerness at a job fair (‘Cleaning has always been my passion!’) ably exposing the absurdity of the recruitment process.⁶ Such scenes, together with the shots of Juliette Binoche cleaning toilets and mopping floors, serve to underline the political message behind Aubenas’s book: since there is no essential reason why the people in low-paid jobs are better suited to them than other (wealthier, better connected, luckier) people, there is no justification for treating them with less dignity than anyone else, and this should be reflected in working conditions.

Figure 4. Marianne (Binoche) with her cleaning trolley in Ouistreham (2021).

Over the course of the narrative, Marianne learns that the managerial class are routinely patronising and contemptuous whereas her fellow workers are invariably friendly and mutually supportive, buying her presents they can ill afford or lending her a car that proves invaluable (a loan which, as Hélène Jaccomard remarks, perhaps only highlights Aubenas’s skills of persuasion and networking acquired through privilege [Jaccomard 2016, 103]). The distinction is somewhat Manichaean, reinforced by the casting of attractive young non-professionals to play Marianne’s new friends and unprepossessing or overweight performers to incarnate bosses and supervisors. Generic narrative tropes, such as a scene in which Marianne and two colleagues get trapped on a cross-Channel ferry after cleaning it and enjoy an impromptu illicit cruise, add further elements of fictionalisation. The ethical question of Marianne/Aubenas’s deception, largely occluded in the book as Jaccomard (2016) notes, is central to the film partly because it lends an internal conflict to Binoche’s character that can be registered on her face in key scenes like the wordless one in which she breaks character to attend her father’s funeral. Critics saw this as an authorial gesture by director Emmanuel Carrère whose literary output has been consistently fascinated by questions of fraud and false identity (Gombeaud 2021). Arguably, this constitutes a betrayal, or a ‘corruption’ (Ribeton 2021) of Aubenas’s work since Carrère’s focus is on the self, whereas Aubenas’s gaze was directed outward to understand others. Positif noted that the film is almost structured like a crime thriller or spy movie in which ‘the stranglehold gradually tightens’ as Marianne’s burgeoning friendships conflict with and threaten to undo her cover story (Mercier 2022, 41). The denouement, in which Marianne is unmasked by her new best friend Chrystèle (Hélène Lambert), and the epilogue, in which the two women have a final, unresolved confrontation, further add to this fictionalisation. While the film may disappoint admirers of Aubenas’s book, however, it joins a growing set of mature roles for Binoche that depict women whose midlife crisis is expressed through reinvention. Marianne may have no hesitation, at the end of the film, in abandoning her job as a cleaner to return to her life as a Parisian writer, but she repeatedly suggests that the friends she has made while undercover provide a warmth and authenticity that may be lacking from her bourgeois intellectual life. A little drunk and emotional on her impromptu ferry crossing, Marianne begins to cry and exclaims, ‘I just wish we could stay friends forever and never lose touch!’⁷

***

How transgressive, ultimately, can Juliette Binoche be in her screen roles when she is one of the most globally recognisable incarnations of French femininity of her generation? As with any prolific screen performer, one would not expect uniformity from a decade’s worth of roles (from 2010 until the time of writing, Binoche has thirty-five screen credits), but we can identify certain patterns from the foregoing survey of Binoche’s mid-career. Melodramas and comedies (whether in ‘popular’ or ‘arthouse’ mode) have been the genres that have provided the richest starring roles for Binoche, perhaps unsurprisingly given that these genres have historically been the screen home for narratives about and ‘for’ women throughout most of the world and, as feminist critics have repeatedly demonstrated, a privileged forum for challenging traditional gender roles without compromising accessibility for viewers (Gledhill 1987; Harrod 2015). Specific details of these roles, however, suggest noteworthy trends about the representation of middle-aged women in contemporary French – and global – screen culture. First, given Binoche’s age during the 2010s, the relative absence of children from most of these roles is striking. As a general rule, children are either largely or completely absent from the narrative or, where they are present, they are a focus of conflict (as in A Thousand Times Good Night) or the site of perverse experimentation (Ghost in the Shell, High Life). It would appear that it is still unusual, or problematic, to represent a middle-aged woman who is both happy and fulfilled in motherhood and successful in another domain of activity. This may be realistic (most working parents complain of feeling inadequate in one or both of their roles), but it surely remains gendered: the man who is active, entrepreneurial or heroic yet still a devoted and adored father is a common trope of mainstream film narrative. We may note that one rare film in which Binoche plays a happy mother and a successful scientist is a Hollywood blockbuster – Godzilla – and even there her devotion to science leads to her self-sacrificial death within the first fifteen minutes of the film, while her husband (Bryan Cranston) continues to play a heroic seismological and paternal role for the remainder of the movie.

The plots of Binoche’s films from the past decade may imply that women on screen are henceforth seen to be entitled to live out a midlife crisis complete with a period of reinvention, relationship renewal and so on. But, if Binoche’s midlife crisis films succeed, largely on the strength of her performances, in eliciting sympathy for these conflicted women, it remains the case that they are unlikely to emerge from their crisis without significant loss: of a husband (La Vie d’une autre), of friends (Ouistreham), even of their sanity (Celle que vous croyez). Likewise, Binoche’s roles suggest that romance narratives involving middle-aged women cannot be presented straightforwardly, as inherently interesting: either the romance is legitimated by calling the heroine’s (subjective) age into question (La Vie d’une autre, Celle que vous croyez), or the romance is marked by tragedy (alcoholism and miscarriage in À cœur ouvert, illness and disability in Words and Pictures). Naturally, all narrative requires a source of drama or conflict, so it is hardly surprising that, in mid-career Binoche, the path of true love is never smooth. Still, it is striking how few happy endings there are in the films surveyed here: exceptions like Telle mère, telle fille appear as pure fantasy whereas the majority of her roles end, at best, ambivalently (in loss, uncertainty or Pyrrhic victory) and, frequently, in tragedy (death or internment). This is no doubt connected to Binoche’s career-long association with art and auteur cinema and that mode of filmmaking’s labelling of the happy end as ideologically suspect. Nonetheless, the bleak fortunes of so many of Binoche’s brilliant women tend to imply that middle-aged women, especially when intelligent, independent and articulate, remain disturbing.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Douglas Morrey

Douglas Morrey is Reader in French Studies at the University of Warwick and has published widely on French cinema and literature, especially the New Wave, Claire Denis and Michel Houellebecq. He is currently developing research on masculinity in contemporary French literature and culture.

Notes

1. ‘Tu ne fais rien, tu t’assieds, voilà tout.’

2. ‘je n’étais pas là pour régler des comptes’.

3. ‘J’ai l’impression que cette robe est un peu trop sophistiquée pour moi.’

4. ‘Mais vous allez pas le garder?’

5. ‘On se réveille un matin et on a perdu sa voiture.’

6. ‘Pourquoi la propreté? – Ça a toujours été ma passion.’

7. ‘J’aimerais tellement qu’on reste amies, qu’on ne se perde jamais.’