Huppel once said: "If we are all in a psychiatric hospital, then I am in the schizophrenia ward, and she (Adjani) is in the rhapsody ward." ”
These two "madmen" are both the most beautiful harvests of the French film industry and the ongoing contemporary living legends.
Person of the Day/ID: meirirenwu
Text/ An Xiaoqing
In the "map cannon" about female aesthetics, saying that a woman has the temperament of a French woman is probably a general compliment.
The use of this term as an adjective contains the world's long-standing multiple aesthetic identities with French women. It's a composite temperament that mixes confidence, laziness, casualness, and "effortless fashion."
For French women, whether 15 or 65 years old, they are all messy French bangs, floral dresses, striped shirts, Mary Jane shoes, plus small teeth or open teeth with a low frequency, as well as undisguised wrinkles and sagging corners of the mouth, a style that has continued steadily from its master, Jane Birkin.
Jane Birkin
Arguably, compared to the American and East Asian aesthetics, which mutate every decade, the French perception of female beauty is as solid and solid as their fascination with pleasure and philosophy. Over the past century, France has provided many vivid examples of aesthetic diversity. People who have seen Ou Rong's movie "Eight Beautiful Pictures" will not object to it.
Stills from "Eight Beautiful Pictures"
In the axis of time and present, there are two French actresses who are the most special, and both of them coincidentally call "Isabella". From the age of 17 to the 60s, the two continue to show the world what true female beauty and freedom are.
They are Isabella Adjani and Isabella Huppel, who have played crazy and neurotic women all their lives.
Adjani
Huper
1
Imagine what you were doing in your 60s.
According to the current fashion of our country, you may either be competing for the basketball court or on the way to the basketball court. Either in the injection of hyaluronic acid, or on the way to the skinlift.
The only time I can be sure is when I will be called a grandmother. However, in the face of 64-year-old Yu Peier and 62-year-old Adjani, this "grandmother" is really impossible to say.
Since the ancient era of BBS, film magazines and blogs, Adjani has never left the "French rose" in the hearts of Chinese netizens and movie fans, and her blue eyes that are enough to break Truffaut's camera are still missed by many people in the bullet screen to this day.
Compared with Adjani, who shocked the world as soon as she debuted, Hupel's beauty became more and more complex and meaningful as she grew older. Especially in recent years, she has continued to be prolific and frequently award-winning, becoming the most appreciated performing artist by Chinese netizens.
The two Isabella debuted at the age of seventeen or eighteen and have not stopped working as actresses ever since. In their nearly half-century careers as actors, the two have played the most roles of marginal women who are far from reason and mainstream. Most of these women are neurotic, extreme and weird, in short, crazy women by secular standards.
Therefore, some people say that Adjani's portfolio is simply a "history of neuropathy". Others have calculated, "Of the 70 roles that Lieppel has played, 35 of them are naked and 35 have mental problems." ”
As two of France's most important "national treasure" actors, the two Isabella's continuous classic interpretations of "madmen" seem to echo the French philosopher Foucault's book "Madness and Civilization". In the different dimensions of philosophy and drama, they jointly dissect and interpret the power structure under the tension of modernity and the existence of the power structure, how much modern man has the right to choose the individual life and freedom.
Adjani began her career as a mad woman at the age of 19. It was 1975, and at the invitation of the French New Wave director Truffaut, she starred in "The Story of Adele Hugo", adapted from the life experience of the daughter of the French literary hero Hugo.
Truffaut and Adjani
Falling in love with love itself and indulging in the pursuit of a life of catching horses led to Adele's tragedy, which eventually led to the rest of her life in a mental hospital. Although the story is extreme, I believe that everyone has recalled the experience of losing themselves in so-called love during the movie.
At the end of the film, Adjani, wearing a long gray and white dress, stood on the beach with a broken look, and said her last words: "Thousands of mountains and rivers, thousands of mountains and rivers, go and meet you, this kind of thing only I can do!" ”
The film earned the 21-year-old Adjani a nomination for Best Actress at the first César Awards in French Cinema.
Coincidentally, The first work that Huper is remembered for is also playing an "abnormal" girl who kills her father and mother and suffers from a vicious disease. In 1978, at the age of 23, Hupel won the Best Actress Award at the 31st Cannes International Film Festival for "Violet Nozier".
Huppel in Violet Nozier
In the time that followed, Adjani played more crazy women: the mad woman's morbid wife in the film Enchanted (1981); The talented female artist Camille Claudet in Rodin's Lover (1988), who became morbid and insane because of her painful relationship with the sculptor Rodin; and the broken and debauched court woman in Queen Margot (1994).
Stills from Enchanted
Stills from Rodin's Lover
Stills from Queen Margot
The three heavyweights brought three French César Awards, a Berlin queen and an Cannes film queen as Adjani.
2
On the other hand, Huppel is also rushing on the road of playing a crazy woman and an out-of-control life.
She played Emily Brontë, La Traviata, Madame Bovary, and also played the mother who had a complicated relationship with her son and lust in "My Mother". For Pell, one of the most enjoyable is "The Piano Teacher."
Stills from "The Piano Teacher"
At that time, director Haneke had just gotten the script for "The Piano Teacher" and called Yupel and asked, "Hey, Isabel, I have a pervert here, do you want to act?" ”
The film earned her her second Cannes Post-Film Trophy. Fans all over the world remember the piano teacher who had a perverted symbiotic relationship with his mother and was in a chaotic relationship of lust, ethics and power.
These are perhaps the two "drama maniacs" who play the most crazy and out-of-control women in the world. And if it weren't for the harshness and laziness that pushed away a lot of scenes, the similar theme movies we saw later, "Paris Wild Rose" and "Bitter Moon", should have been played by Adjani.
After all, as netizens summed up, "she plays the talented and fierce women in French history, and countless directors think that she is the most eloquent actor to interpret 'hysteria, aristocratic neuroticism and charming insanity'." Compared with the "modern derangement" and perversion played by Hupel in the later period, the role of Adjani's golden age has more classical connotations, but the tragedy in it is the dilemma and emotional motif that human beings have always existed.
Adjani has always resisted projection and interpretation from the outside world. As the most brilliant and dazzling star and woman in France in the 1980s and 1990s, she has always firmly defended the defense of her personal life, refusing to be spied on and shared by the outside world.
One year at the Cannes Film Festival, she even refused to cooperate with the red carpet photographers' request to take pictures, and when she finally walked out of the venue, she was protested by all the photojournalists by putting down the camera and turning her back.
But she's still the same. She said, "I'm simpler and more complex than you think." I love people, and I have fear. I'm docile, but at the same time I'm wild. These states alternate. ”
She loves the profession of actor, but she often feels that "people overestimate actors, exaggerate actors, and worship actors excessively." Perhaps it is this kind of introspection that makes her always contradictory in the roles of actors and stars.
During the filming of Rodin's Lover, this tension and contradiction between the inside and outside reached its peak. Without getting any news about Adjani, newspapers began to rumor that Adjani had AIDS, and even speculated that she had died.
This forced her to go on TV and announce "I'm not dead" to everyone between shots. Adjani finds herself always attracted to "tragic women who sacrifice themselves, their work, or their love", and her own "state of extreme paranoia" and "sensitivity" is exactly what happened to Camille and Adele Hugo.
In rare reports, Adjani admits that acting in this kind of game about "sensitivity" "makes my profession dangerous." All subtle things are dangerous. ”
As Meryl Streep put it at this year's Ballon d'Or, "Take your broken heart, make it into art." Turn your heartbreak into art. As the promising Golden Portrait Queen Chunxia said in "Strange Story", "Every heartbreak becomes a job."
Adjani also turned her heartbreak into art. Like her characters, she herself never follows the rules. It wasn't until her eldest son was ten years old that the public learned that the child's father was Brunonu Eaton, the director who directed Rodin's Lover. After years of intense bonding with Daniel Day Lewis, she gave birth to her second child on her own.
Adjani's second son, Gabriel-Kane Adjani Day Lewis, has shown a love of music since he was a child, and at the age of 9 he studied music composition at the Berkeley School of Music. In 2015, Gabriel-Kane released a new EP that he later signed with modeling agency IMG Models.
Compared with Adjani's human drama intersection, Hupel is more in the intensive creation of various extremes and madness that ordinary people cannot experience. She said that her original intention as an actor was to "go elsewhere.". This "elsewhere" probably refers to a different story and heart.
And she did. In The Piano Teacher and her recent work, Huppel astonishingly and talentedly expands the boundaries and possibilities of understanding sex, women, and human nature. Just as it was hard to digest the toilet paper she sniffed in the video hall when she picked up a man's used toilet paper, it is now difficult to distinguish the delicate relationship, the distinction between good and evil, and the justice of lust between her and the masked neighbor who raped her. Huppel is like a philosopher, and in different survival experiments she will tell you about her uncertainty and ambiguity as a human repertor and a petri dish.
She never felt that these roles were disdainful or unbearable. Instead, she sees "being an actor" as "a liberation" — "I often play roles that can even be called monsters, and they are extreme but a small aspect of each of us." Because we all know that tragedy and paradox are often hidden in the norm. ”
"When playing these roles, I don't make such a clear distinction between good and bad, purity and dirty, vulnerability and strength... These characters are like a mirror, as long as they can see the corners of the audience's heart, it is good. ”
Haneke, the director of "The Piano Teacher", once commented on her: "I have not only been able to express the dilemma of physical and mental torture to the extreme, but also maintain a hard intellectual temperament, and I have not seen the second one who can combine the two so well." ”
3
The more people get to the back, the more they realize the value of their existence.
It's not just that they may be the most A-film post-production titles among living actresses: Adjani has won five César Awards, one Cannes, one Berlin queen and two Oscar nominations. Yu Pell has won two Cannes films, three Venice queens, one Berlin film queen, two César Awards queens, one Golden Globe Award, and more importantly, they have shown the world talent and continuous efforts, which will make an actor grow like a tree through several generations.
In the Chinese context, their symbolic value as actresses and women's way of life is even greater. What is true beauty, what is the freedom to be born as a human being, and then how a mature woman/actress should live with herself, how to continue her career, how to broaden the boundaries and imagination of life.
In February, the 64-year-old Huppel won a Golden Globe award for the film "Her". Some time ago, she came to China to tour the fragment of Duras's "Lover". She still maintains the habit of working with different directors. In the eyes of fans, she is light, mysterious, full of feminine charm, more beautiful than she was in her true girlhood.
Stills from "Her"
Similarly, Adjani is still making movies. She didn't age alone like the peerless beauties of the past. In 2009, at the age of 54, she played another out-of-control middle school teacher in "The Day the Skirt Flew". She was fat and old, but her eyes still had a light.
Stills from "The Day the Skirt Flew"
That kind of light is what Truffaut said, "Your gaze alone can create a dramatic atmosphere." In the eyes of her Chinese counterparts, who are the same age or even a few rounds younger, it is difficult to see such a bright light maintained by continuous creation and practice.
Huper said, "To be an actor is ultimately to learn to be a free person." ”
But in today's China, people who identify themselves as actresses are probably the least free people in the big circle of Vanity Fair and show business. What restricts their vitality is the accumulation of social and cultural habits and the industry, as well as the shaping and control of age and beauty by the times. This anxiety not only spreads throughout the mature actor group, but also confuses more and more practitioners.
In a conversation in Shanghai, Yu Peier answered director Jia Zhangke's question about "actresses with great age limitations".
"We always talk about the tragic fate of actresses. It's not the movies that kill them, it's life... We want to follow our own standards. Do you think that as an actress you have to start at 15 and end at 20? ”
In fact, the vast majority of China's top actresses have stopped their careers because of their age and choices. The well-known film critic Ah Lang once wrote, "There are no (mature) women in Chinese movies, and Chinese actresses seem to have only two states: young girls and old ladies." ”
In the snobbish investors and creative themes of the amazing lack of and narrow screenwriters, most of the domestic actresses over the age of 40, if you want to continue acting, can only play the role of the mother-in-law in the corner.
Among the actresses over the age of 50, only Maggie Cheung and Zhang Aijia have achieved the full freedom of Adjani and Hupel. Other 63-year-old Pan Hong, 56-year-old Chen Chong, 62-year-old Liu Xiaoqing, 51-year-old Wu Junmei, and 48-year-old Jiang Wenli, who should have continued to create, were all trapped in the role of mother-in-law, the role of a hard-standing girl and the situation of no drama.
Maggie Cheung, 51
Stills of "The Most Beautiful Love", When Jiang Wenli was 45 years old
On the contrary, "64-year-old Isabelle Huppel, in "Her", can still be defined by sexiness." Charlotte Rampling, 71, is elegant and playful in "45th Anniversary". Helen Mirren, 72, is still fierce in "Fast and Furious 8". Meryl Streep, 68, in "The Queen of Running Out of Tune", shows a girlish shyness, which is not contradictory at all. Even the beautiful legend of Sicily, Monica Bellucci, is 53 years old and still sexy. Cameron Diaz, 45, is simply a teenage girl. Juliet Binoche, 54, who is still learning modern dance, said, "Why stay in a safe place?" ”
Charlotte Ramplin, "45th Anniversary"
Helen Mirren, "Fast and Furious 8"
Meryl Streep, "The Out-of-Tune Queen"
In "45th Anniversary," Charlotte Ramplin "every inch of muscle change is a play." In the private memories of fans, she still stays in the seductive photo of the Blu-ray DVD cover of "Midnight Gatekeeper".
Jia Zhangke commented on Pell: From the girlhood to the present, the female image spanning all ages is like a declaration of women. This sentence should also be dedicated to Charlotte Lampling.
The 71-year-old, like her 20s, has a good-looking face full of stories and emotions. Wrinkles and loose muscles, like the lines on the bark of a large tree and the branches of a forked tree, are calm and full of dignity of life.
Charlotte Ramplin
But at present, the main contradiction between most female celebrities in China is still the contradiction between the increasing symptoms of stiffness and the increasingly irrepressible fear of aging. They have long and brilliantly considered and polished the amount of botulism and the angle of their jaws, rather than their own acting skills and business. Focus on each draft, labeling the mature and baby-born self as a "girl", rather than completing a passing three-dimensional role.
Maggie Cheung, who is a French woman in her bones, once had a fear and mind of Asians about "old", full of incomprehension: "I grew up in England when I was a child, and then lived in Paris for ten years, and people there did not have this concept. Beauty is not everything, it is a waste of life. Beauty must be added to taste, plus happiness, plus other things, is the happiness of life. Why is it necessary to be young and wrinkle-free to be beautiful? ”
Goethe said, O eternal woman, leads mankind to soar.
The presence of two 60+ isabella makes us always wary of the increasingly single Internet celebrity aesthetic around the world. This aesthetic, like the invasive plant of astonishing reproducibility, the Bauhinia Zelan, has overflowed on any social platform.
The fear of aging and the unrestricted bowing to youth have become, like politics, power, and capital, a shackle that restricts the full and free development of each individual.
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