ARDANT: NO COMPROMISES

“Love is the most important thing in life,” says French actress Fanny Ardant. “I feel that a couple must be treasured as a work of art and one must spare no effort to make it work. It’s an absolute value. You can’t make compromises in love.”

The star of such films as “The Woman Next Door” and “Confidentially Yours”--both directed by her late companion and father of her daughter, Francois Truffaut--didn’t have to make compromises in her private and professional lives.

Relaxing on a sofa in a friend’s apartment, she exudes the mixture of sophistication and earthiness that prodded Truffaut to write, “I had been seduced by her large mouth, her big black eyes and her triangular face. Right away I recognized in Fanny Ardant the qualities that I wanted most in the protagonists of my films: vitality, enthusiasm, humor and intensity; balanced on another level by a sense of secrecy, a touch of clownishness, a hint of savagery and, above all, vibrancy.”

Her new film just opened here, “Next Summer,” a drama that examines the crises endured by several generations of a family. In it, Ardant, 35, tests her convictions in a role that admittedly bears similarities to herself.

“I play a passionate woman who expects everything out of life, craving success at work and in love. She wants to try everything; she’s quite modern. And she really loves her husband (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant). In one scene, she chastises her father (Philippe Noiret) for being unfaithful to her stepmother. She says that one must not betray the person one lives with. That’s exactly what I feel myself.”

The movie was directed by Nadine Trintignant in the south of France in 1984, and the shoot was especially trying for Ardant, because Truffaut was then dying of brain cancer in Paris. In the movie, her father also gets seriously afflicted, which lends their joint scenes a special immediacy.

“When you create a role, if it’s to have any truth to it, it must involve pain. It’s part of our fate. But one must never forget that it’s a suffering that serves a purpose. And an actor’s pain is similar to that of a pianist or a sculptor who agonizes over the right touch. Still, it’s pain that also includes joy. And I’m happy on the set, because it’s a slice of life, with a beginning, a middle and an end. I always feel that there may never be another film, so there’s not a moment to waste.”

In spite of her cool facade, Ardant contends that her aim as an actress is to “bring warmth” to her roles, an aim that corresponds to what Truffaut tried to do in his movies. Says Ardant, “Like all great film makers, he spoke about what it means to be a human being.

“Francois’ world was that of a storyteller, whose interests were love, women, children. . . . He took the most important things out of life and put them in his work. He had a humorous yet sad way of seeing things--be it everyday life or madness, death and despair. . . . It was a search for the absolute in love, too: the search for the impossible love. For me, the film that best expresses his universe is “Two English Girls”--it had that kind of painful intensity, and yet it was lighthearted, like life.”

After Truffaut’s death in 1984, she granted few interviews in France, and in none did she discuss him. But now she seems willing to share a memory or an insight.

“I believe you always love the people you’ve loved,” she muses. “Maybe we have but one love affair in our lives and the rest isn’t really love. I’m not too experienced in that.”

Although she points out that “fundamentally, what I felt about life hasn’t changed,” she admits that she has been affected by her tragedy. “I’ve become more nostalgic, more tormented because of what happened. . . . “ Her voice breaks ever so slightly. “It’s as if I sit on a rocking chair and the street moves around me . . . but I’m still sitting on the chair. I’m still the same person. I guess I’m less free now, so maybe people think I’ve become cold or self-protective, but that’s the surface. What really moved you, always will. What once gave you joy, will do so forever.

“You know, people have theories about what happiness is, and in their quest for it they may overlook something much more interesting. Perhaps all being happy really means is to live; even to wait for things that may never arrive, but at least to be open to them.”

Ardant, the daughter of a French military man, grew up in Monte Carlo. Although her bourgeois family wasn’t wealthy, it provided Fanny and her siblings with plenty of intellectual stimulation.

As a girl, she gobbled up Balzac and Proust. “But I never felt it was at the expense of living,” she stresses. “Books gave me the experience of others, which could never be mine. You don’t have time to live out all those love affairs or experience the mentality of other epochs. So you trust the great writers and know they didn’t lie. Reading may be an escape, but it’s also an intense desire to live.”

A self-professed dreamer (“I’m a bit like Gene Tierney in ‘The Ghost and Mrs. Muir’ ”), she says the cinema has “helped me live. It makes things that happen in real life clearer, more lucid. . . . It enables you to say things you’ve always wanted to say, but couldn’t find the words. It helps illuminate life. Cinema intensifies life, but without life it’s nothing.”

Her life includes her duties as a mother to two daughters, the 11-year-old Lumir, from an early marriage, and the 2 1/2-year-old Josephine, Truffaut’s child. “I’ve always believed that you don’t put children before you,” Ardant says. “You take them with you. I share my joys and sadness with them, my enthusiasm and indignation, and the simple things--get dressed, go to school, help with homework, eat . . . sometimes these things are bothersome and sometimes pleasant. But I believe having children is a gift, because these are people that you love in a definitive manner--and who you hope love you in the same way.”

Although she has expressed fear of marriage and hasn’t tried it even with Truffaut, her film roles place her repeatedly in a family context. Her next film (which she is currently shooting in Rome) is Ettore Scola’s “The Family,” in which she plays a pianist who rejects the man she loves because he’s married to her sister. Co-starring Vittorio Gassman, Stefania Sandrelli and Trintignant, the movie examines our century as experienced by an Italian clan.

By contrast, in “Conseil de Famille,” directed by Costa-Gavras, Ardant plays “the ‘mother’ who’s actually the ‘brain’ of a family of thieves. She plays the violin, drinks liqueur, but makes all the important decisions, like The Godfather.” The man she loves is a jovial adolescent of a thief, played by Johnny Hallyday. “It’s a subversive comedy,” the actress adds, “because it depicts a family with a value system so different from the traditional one.”

She’s constantly employed in European films, but Ardant, who actually started her career in the theater, playing the classics, hasn’t renounced her old flame.

“I love the theater,” she stresses. “I love the excitement when the audience arrives. And the feeling at the end that the ship has sailed--with everything yet to be experienced. In the cinema, too, when you accept a role you really like, you mustn’t think too much about career and money. You must do it because you like it. That’s when each film becomes a new adventure. That’s the only way to be happy.”