France’s Two Isabelles : Acting: Huppert is able to build her roles by drawing upon her inner life and letting herself go.

What strikes you first about Isabelle Huppert is that the camera doesn’t lie: She is the auburn-haired beauty in life that she is on the screen. She is also as self-possessed in person as are many of her heroines, most notably her latest, Marie Latour, in Claude Chabrol’s masterful “Story of Women,” currently at the Los Feliz. One of France’s finest younger actresses, Huppert is warm and friendly, confidently bilingual and so direct and brisk that it takes half as long to interview her as it does most actors.

Huppert happened to be in town for a photo session for a French press agency when the Los Angeles and New York critics voted “Story of Women”--in Los Angeles it tied with “Distant Voices, Still Lives”--as best foreign film of the year, an honor already accorded it by the National Board of Review. In it, Huppert plays an impoverished provincial young wife and mother who discovers that during the Occupation she can improve her lot dramatically by performing the occasional abortion, mainly upon women who have become pregnant by German soldiers, and renting a spare room to a prostitute friend whose clientele is mainly German.

Latour is based on an actual woman, Marie-Louise Giraud, who met a dire and hypocritical fate because of these activities.

“The political facts are all true, Marie’s actions are all true,” explained Huppert, wearing a becoming lime-colored suit, in her Westwood hotel room. “We built upon the facts a personality. Marie is not really a sympathetic character, but she’s a survivor. She’s Scarlett O’Hara, a product of circumstances. For me, she is an exact metaphor for the female condition, something which goes beyond the question of good and evil.”

As timely as “Story of Women” is in regard to abortion and women’s rights, it is even more important an evocation of the most painful period in modern French history. Chabrol views Marie as a catalyst for her times, revealing the full extent of their corruption under Nazi rule. Huppert’s Marie is at once shrewd and naive, quick to take advantage of previously undreamt possibilities but blind to the consequences. (One touch that Huppert contributed to Marie’s naivete was to suggest to Chabrol and his co-writer Colo Tavernier O’Hagan that they have her start studying to be an opera singer, something that Huppert has done herself for three years purely for her own pleasure.)

“The film is very complex and ambiguous, and it is really fair in regard to abortion,” said Huppert. “It recognizes that it is a difficult issue even if you are pro-choice. The scene I like best in the entire film is in the cafe when the prostitute asks, ‘Do you think babies have souls even when they are in the belly of their mothers?’ Chabrol has the honesty to ask this. In most films set during the Occupation, you have the good French and the bad Germans, but in our film it is not so black and white. It makes audiences a little edgy.”

At this moment the phone rang, and it was from her 6-year-old daughter in Paris. After many “mon amours” and reassurances to the child of her imminent return, Huppert explained that she also has a 2-year-old son. Both children are by Italian director Ronald Chammah, with whom she lives in Paris. “In Europe, we do not marry so much as here,” she said with a smile.

For Huppert, “Story of Women” was a happy reunion with Chabrol, who directed her a decade ago in “Violette,” a stunning film based on a true story of a young woman who in the 1930s murdered her parents. “I shouldn’t say this about myself, but I think I’m good at these unsympathetic characters,” admitted Huppert. “I think I can show their naivete.

“We shot ‘Story of Women’ in eight weeks. It’s so extraordinary to work with Chabrol--he works so fast. His footage hardly has to be edited; only the great directors can edit in the camera. We didn’t talk much, we ended up with the same instincts. I had a concern about playing an abortionist, so I tried to use this clumsiness I felt. Chabrol told me to remember that she could just as easily have been a plumber. That first abortion was very, very important. After that scene I felt safe.

“But great roles are easy to do--those roles which totally revolve around you. You just let yourself go. It’s all there in your inner life. Of course, it takes years to build an inner life, but it’s no big deal to draw upon it.”

Now 34, Huppert has been in films since 1971 and has worked not only with most of France’s top directors but has even gone to Australia to appear in Paul Cox’s “Cactus.” Along with “Violette” and “Story of Women,” Claude Goretta’s “The Lacemaker” has provided her with perhaps her finest role, that of a country girl undone by a summer romance. She was the leading lady in Michael Cimino’s hugely controversial “Heaven’s Gate,” which she firmly regards as a masterpiece and is pleased that at last it will open in Paris in its uncut version.

Huppert recently returned to the stage for the first time in 12 years to play Natalia in Turgenev’s “A Month in the Country.” This led to her being cast by Jacques Doillon in “The Revenge of a Woman,” based on Dostoevsky’s “The Constant Husband.” “Doillon, who I think is very, very talented, made it about two women instead of two men. It’s the confrontation of two women, a wife and a mistress. I play the wife, and Beatrice Dalle, who was in Jean-Jacques Beineix’s ‘Betty Blue,’ plays the mistress. I try to make her feel guilty. It’s coming out in Paris in two weeks.

“I have another picture with Chabrol this summer. It’s from a little French book you might have heard of--’Madame Bovary’! This is something Chabrol has always wanted to do. It’s his favorite book, his bedside reading.”

In the meantime, Huppert would like another try at Hollywood. (Her last time around was Curtis Hansen’s stylish 1987 Hitchcock homage, “The Bedroom Window.”) “I like Hollywood--well, not all of Hollywood, but the point is, ‘Does Hollywood like me?’ I like a very broad range, I like experimentation. My motivation is simply what I really want to do. And if a director really, really wants me, I always feel the possibility of something emerging that’s fulfilling.

“I like the change of working in American pictures because you have to be more externalized, not so interior. That’s the main attraction--besides the narcissistic pleasure of greater recognition! I am never satisfied with my own work--you can always do better. I always think I’m a work-in-progress.”