One Temptation She Didn’t Resist

Four years have elapsed since Juliette Binoche made the transition from European art-house icon to internationally recognized film actress. She did it in a single leap, in Anthony Minghella’s “The English Patient,” as Hana, a French Canadian nurse in World War II traumatized by grief when her boyfriend is killed in action.

The 1996 film, of course, cleaned up at the Academy Awards--so extraordinarily moving and powerful was Binoche’s performance that she was named best supporting actress, edging out the sentimental favorite, Lauren Bacall. She was the first French actress to win an Oscar in 37 years.

Every Hollywood studio was sending her bouquets with open-ended work offers attached. The film world was at her feet. A huge fortune was hers for the making. So what did she do? She returned to France and made five French-language films in a row.

In fairness, Binoche did tackle one English-speaking role in this time. But it was a long way from Hollywood, in terms of geography, mind-set and remuneration: She worked at the Almeida, a London fringe theater, in a 1998 production of Pirandello’s 1922 play “Naked,” as an au pair in whose care a baby dies. As the British press reported at the time, the work paid a handsome sum equivalent to $360 a week.

Finally she has returned to English-language filmmaking. But even now, she is starring in a project with a heavily European flavor, cast and crew, and a story that’s more art house than megaplex.

Binoche, 36, has come to this small village in the rural west of England to film scenes in “Chocolat,” based on a best-selling novel by Anglo-French author Joanne Harris. Directed by Lasse Hallstrom, the film is set in 1959 in a small, tranquil, uptight French town. She plays Vianne Rocher, who arrives with her young daughter and opens a chocolate shop across the square from the church. She sells seductively mouthwatering candies and has an uncanny knack for anticipating each customer’s precise desires, which she satisfies with exactly the right confection.

Her talent for temptation brings her in conflict with the community’s more self-righteous citizens and the mayor (Alfred Molina), who endeavors to drive her out of town. Meanwhile, Vianne makes friends with a band of river rogues who dock at the edge of town; one is a handsome wanderer named Roux, played by Johnny Depp.

The Miramax film--which opens in Los Angeles on Friday--was partly shot in England as well as France, which was why Binoche found herself tramping across a muddy field on the kind of day that gives English summers a bad name: cold and damp, with blustery winds. But in the privacy and warmth of her trailer, she looked content and composed.

“This is a light piece, a happy piece,” she said gaily. “I’m in a good mood. I feel we’re very lucky as actors to be able to go to different countries and meet different people.” Binoche isn’t always so upbeat on the set. This reporter has seen her tense and moody on two previous films, though one understood why on seeing them. “Damage” (1992), in which she played the mistress of a married English politician (Jeremy Irons), counted as a rare lapse of judgment by the late Louis Malle. “Wuthering Heights,” from the same year, in which she was miscast as Emily Bronte’s heroine, Cathy, opposite Ralph Fiennes’s Heathcliff, was such a disaster it failed to secure a U.S. cinematic release.

Along the way, Binoche has earned a reputation for being assertive, even prickly, when she is working. She has a clear idea of what she wants and is not afraid to express her feelings. But as someone on the “Chocolat” set observed: “Juliette’s mood gets very heavily influenced by the material she’s given.”

And Binoche clearly likes this film: “It’s about chocolate, you know, how bad can that be?” she said, before throwing back her head and giving an endearing, snorting laugh.

She’s also in distinguished company. Apart from Molina and Depp, Judi Dench (herself a recent Oscar winner for “Shakespeare in Love”) plays Armande, a fiercely independent woman in the town who befriends Vianne. The formidable Swedish actress Lena Olin is Josephine, a townswoman whose unhappy life is transformed by chocolate’s healing powers. The great English classical actor John Wood is Guillaume, an elderly citizen who finds Vianne’s candies rejuvenating. And legendary French screen star Leslie Caron (“Gigi,” “An American in Paris”) portrays Madame Audel, a mournful widow.

The entire troupe is being corralled by Swedish director Hallstrom, still basking in the success of his Miramax hit from last year, “The Cider House Rules.” Hallstrom, famously one of the world’s most patient, even-tempered directors, is working for the first time with his wife, Olin; his bonhomie makes the company cheerful enough to ignore the English weather.

Still, why did Binoche wait this long to capitalize on her success in “The English Patient”? She shrugged. “My agent in America told me there was this script. I told [Miramax boss] Harvey Weinstein I would like to make the movie.

“My aim is not to be an American star,” she says with that distinctive laugh, incongruous for someone with her delicate beauty. “Otherwise I would have moved there.”

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It is no insult to her considerable acting ability to say that much of Binoche’s appeal resides in her face and its exquisite bone structure. She has dark, darting eyes, which sometimes, even in the most innocuous conversation, can make her look genuinely startled. She has full lips and a broad, generous smile, but her natural expression is one of bewildered melancholy. On screen she can seem an unfathomable enigma.

But she is perfectly straightforward about her decision to distance herself from the industry feeding frenzy that followed her Oscar win. It wasn’t even the first time she had declined Hollywood’s entreaties; in 1992, she turned down the lead female role in “Jurassic Park.”

“It was a deliberate choice,” she said of taking the low-paying gig at the Almeida. “I need to break things down. Because when I said the Oscar was a French dream, I meant it, you know? Prizes are illusions. So for me, what I mean by breaking is if you are always doing the same thing it’s a way of dying for me.

“When I won the Oscar, there was something telling me this isn’t the truth. And I was so connected to the work on ‘The English Patient,’ and then the consequences of it were totally different and had nothing to do with the work. So I needed to go back to real work.”

And she found herself exhilarated to be playing in a small fringe production: “It was a wonderful experience at the Almeida. First because of the bunch of actors there, it was really like finding a family. There were seven actors, and we completely bonded with one another for almost five months. I was staying in Islington [a London district], and walked every night to the theater. I was completely helped by the others and the Almeida. It’s a small theater, so everyone’s badly paid. It’s all about passion because of the situation. So it becomes real, you see the purpose of your doing it.”

That principle guided her choice of French films after “The English Patient.” Some have secured an international release, including “Alice and Martin,” in which she played the girlfriend of a psychologically bruised young man; “Children of the Century,” featuring her as the 19th century author George Sand; and “The Widow of St. Pierre,” a period piece in which she starred as the compassionate wife of a governor on a French colonial island.

Binoche said she is surprised by how her career has progressed. Her parents, an actress and a sculptor, divorced when she was 4, and she grew up in the countryside, mainly with her mother. She first received wide attention in France at age 21, with the release in 1985 of director Andre Techine’s “Rendez-Vous,” followed the next year in France by Leos Carax’s AIDS-themed movie “Bad Blood.”

In 1988, she attracted the notice of international cineastes, playing opposite Olin and Daniel Day-Lewis in Philip Kaufman’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” Her reputation as an art-house icon was sealed by her turn as a penniless, one-eyed Parisian artist in Carax’s “Lovers on the Bridge,” from 1991, and her roles in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Three Colors” trilogy.

“I’m surprised because I dreamed of things being like this when I was 18 or 19,” she said. “Of being able to be free and choose the things I wanted to do. So there’s a kind of surprise, an astonishment. At the same time, I’m surprised by life in general. When you say no to something, it comes back to you in a different way. . . . You think you’re the ruler, but you’re not, things drag you along.”

The same could be said of her relationships. While filming “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” she was linked with co-star Day-Lewis. She had a long affair with director Carax, and then took up with another co-star, Olivier Martinez, who appeared with her in a lavish French period movie, “The Horseman on the Roof.” Binoche has a 7-year-old son, Raphael, whose father, Andre Halle, is a professional scuba diver.

And today, unseen in an adjacent trailer, is her baby daughter, Hana, whose father she is reluctant to name. Hana, it’s pointed out to her, was also the name of her best-known film character. “That may be the reason, but it’s not the only one,” she retorted. “And I’m not going to tell you the other reasons.”

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Rays of sunlight dart through the clouds, and this part of England becomes temporarily transformed into a sunlit day in the garden of a French cottage. Dench, Wood and Caron are among eight characters seated at a banquet table, and Olin scurries around pouring wine. Then Binoche emerges, carrying a huge platter of seafood, followed by the French child actress Victoire Thivisol, who plays Vianne’s daughter, Anouk.

Binoche smiles broadly, and exclaims: “Bon appetit, everyone!” The assembled company goes, “Aaaah!” at the sight of the food. And Hallstrom murmurs, “Cut!” After four takes, he has his scene, and the cast members disperse amiably until they are called for the next set-up.

Caron, who played Binoche’s mother in “Damage” eight years ago, observed that she has matured. “Her personality has opened up so much,” she said. “And I think it’s because she has children. I admire her levelheadedness.”

Dench spoke of filming a big scene with Binoche on their first day on the set: “There was no awkwardness, we just got on with it and did it, and it was lovely. She has a divine sense of humor, which I like.”

And Hallstrom noted: “She’s a great actress, Juliette. She’s got taste. But this is a different venue for her too, I think. For once she’s playing a character that’s warm and outgoing and generous.”

Nothing, it seems, could ruin Binoche’s mood on this particular day. She was even reflective on the life of a film actress and its limitations: “I want to be a mother and I want to be involved in my work. You have to make choices. If a woman is a film actress, her career is from 20 to 45, or whatever. But you can dream and you can visualize other things.”

Currently she’s co-starring with Liev Schreiber in a Broadway revival of Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal.” Pinter is not easy under the best of circumstances, and this play about a duplicitously adulterous triangle flopped in 1980. The revival is a commercial success and has been generally well-reviewed, although some critics complimented Binoche’s talent but concluded she was wrong for the part of Emma, who’s had a long affair with Schreiber’s character.

Her next film is already lined up and will be shot in Italy next year. Titled “The Assumption of the Virgin,” it is about the life of the great Renaissance painter Filippo Lippi, and will be directed by Walter Salles (“Central Station”).

These days, Binoche is even relaxed about fame and its attendant irritations: “It’s a question of choices. When we were shooting recently in a French village, people came along and wanted to see me. So I had a lot of autographs to sign. You can decide: I won’t do that, it’s stupid. But it’s like offering chocolate. It’s about the gesture of doing it. You have to be open to other people, because the work you do makes some connection with them.

“It’s happened that sometimes I was not in a mood for signing, but you have to deal with your emotions, admit you don’t feel like doing it, and say to the person, I’m sorry, this is not the right time.”

Usually, then, fame isn’t intrusive? “Oh no. I mean, it’s not as bad for me as it is for American stars. That’s a completely different world. You become a prisoner.”