The Radical Vulnerability of Juliette Binoche

Quite possibly the most captivating — and elusive — performer of our time, the actress has built a career around a seemingly endless exploration of what it means to be human.

Article by Sasha Weiss

Juliette Binoche, photographed at Treehouse Studios in Atlanta on Aug. 5, 2021. Maison Margiela jacket, saksfifthavenue.com; Loro Piana sweater, loropiana.com; Paco Rabanne pants, saksfifthavenue.com; and Bottega Veneta shoes, price on request, bottegaveneta.com. Photography by Collier Schorr. Styling by Jay Massacret.

As I approached the corner where I was to meet Juliette Binoche, I felt weirdly tearful — as if she and I shared some difficult history. I’d never met her, of course, but I’d binged on her movies in preparation for writing about her, and they were terribly moving, even a little wounding. This is not because of anything cruel or meanspirited in the roles she chooses but because of the clarity with which she gives expression to hidden feelings: neediness; the intense desire to push past the boundaries other people put up; the anguish, experienced maybe most acutely by middle-aged women, of being relegated to the category of the unseen. Binoche risks so much nakedness onscreen that, watching her, it’s hard not to feel somehow exposed yourself.

A scene from one of her recent films, 2017’s “Let the Sunshine In,” directed by Claire Denis, kept replaying in my head as I thought about the affecting mixture of vulnerability and strength that Binoche so often embodies. Binoche plays an artist in her 40s, Isabelle, who moves from one unsatisfying love affair to another. The men she gets involved with are more prone to toy with her emotional readiness than to reciprocate it. And yet she enters into each relationship with an almost religious commitment to the possibility of lasting passion. After finally dismissing one of her particularly callous lovers, she finds herself at a nightclub with some artist friends, being lectured by one of them (a man, naturally) about how she should open herself to sex during periods when she isn’t in love. Her face is tight and distracted, her eyes scanning the room, looking for a way out of the conversation.

When Etta James’s “At Last” comes on, she floats onto the dance floor, taken by the music. She closes her eyes, tilts her head, begins to sway. Her beautifully articulated lips part. She seems, somehow, both self-contained and inviting. Suddenly, as if summoned, a stranger takes her into his arms. The comfort of his touch floods her being and, for the duration of the song, reality has changed: They are a couple, trusting, united, turned on. Their dancing is so intimate, it’s almost shocking. How can someone so wounded be so open to experience? Isabelle is desperate, but she is not only that. She’s also deeply connected to herself. She knows what makes her feel good, and feeds her own hunger without hesitation. Her life experiences, though painful, seem only to reinforce her commitment to entering into contact when it’s offered.

That this moment could provide both discomfort and relief, that it could hold so much contradiction, is a testament to Binoche’s amplitude as a performer. Isabelle is one in a long line of Binoche’s complicated women. In “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (1988), the film that brought her to international fame, she plays Tereza, the often-betrayed lover of Daniel Day-Lewis’s libertine doctor, Tomas, with a grave innocence that, as a friend texted me recently after watching it, makes you feel verklempt with tenderness and concern.

But as with most of Binoche’s vulnerable characters, Tereza is never pitiable. This is partly because of the quality of Binoche’s beauty, which, even when she is crying, or pouring a drink, or begging a lover not to go, is stately and radiant. Yet it’s also because of her quick changeability, the sense that the women she plays, like the people we know in life, are irreducible. Throughout her career, she’s chosen roles that hold emotional extremes in equipoise: grace and wildness, glee and misery, self-consciousness and freedom.

“She’s been in the best films that were ever made since we’ve been alive,” the actress Kristen Stewart, who co-starred with Binoche in the 2014 film “The Clouds of Sils Maria,” told me over the phone. “Every time I watch her, I’m laughing out loud about how I don’t really think there’s anyone better than her.” Stewart explained that this is because “there’s something about her that has intimidating integrity. There’s no way to generalize about the types of characters she plays because they’re so nuanced and run the gamut of variation. But there’s something about her … she looks you in the eye and tells you something. She’s so honest.”

Loro Piana sweater. Photography by Collier Schorr. Styling by Jay Massacret.

Binoche, who is 57, has, in the last decade or so, taken even steeper risks. When she was young, she was more easily recognizable as a type — a deeply charming gamine who invited protectiveness, a descendant of Audrey Hepburn and Jean Seberg. In her 40s and 50s, though, she has seemed uninterested in charm and its rewards, engaging instead with a more profound self-inquiry. Her characters, as they must, are aging with her, and Binoche today seems intent on investigating all the new layers that accrue to a person as they grow older. Her women — a spoiled adult daughter in 2008’s “Summer Hours,” a mysteriously dissatisfied single woman in 2010’s “Certified Copy,” a mentally ill sculptor in 2013’s “Camille Claudel 1915,” an actual mad scientist in 2018’s “High Life,” a catfishing divorcée in 2019’s “Who You Think I Am” — are dealing with varieties of loss: loss of love, loss of stature, loss of a parent, loss of identity, loss of fertility, loss of attractiveness. The last decade of her career makes an ongoing argument that older women are abundant, maybe the most abundant, subjects, even as it insists on the universality of weakness and disappointment. Binoche invests these performances with the paradoxical sense that mastery and self-exposure go hand in hand.

But as with most of Binoche’s vulnerable characters, Tereza is never pitiable. This is partly because of the quality of Binoche’s beauty, which, even when she is crying, or pouring a drink, or begging a lover not to go, is stately and radiant. Yet it’s also because of her quick changeability, the sense that the women she plays, like the people we know in life, are irreducible. Throughout her career, she’s chosen roles that hold emotional extremes in equipoise: grace and wildness, glee and misery, self-consciousness and freedom.

“She’s been in the best films that were ever made since we’ve been alive,” the actress Kristen Stewart, who co-starred with Binoche in the 2014 film “The Clouds of Sils Maria,” told me over the phone. “Every time I watch her, I’m laughing out loud about how I don’t really think there’s anyone better than her.” Stewart explained that this is because “there’s something about her that has intimidating integrity. There’s no way to generalize about the types of characters she plays because they’re so nuanced and run the gamut of variation. But there’s something about her … she looks you in the eye and tells you something. She’s so honest.”

Binoche, who is 57, has, in the last decade or so, taken even steeper risks. When she was young, she was more easily recognizable as a type — a deeply charming gamine who invited protectiveness, a descendant of Audrey Hepburn and Jean Seberg. In her 40s and 50s, though, she has seemed uninterested in charm and its rewards, engaging instead with a more profound self-inquiry. Her characters, as they must, are aging with her, and Binoche today seems intent on investigating all the new layers that accrue to a person as they grow older. Her women — a spoiled adult daughter in 2008’s “Summer Hours,” a mysteriously dissatisfied single woman in 2010’s “Certified Copy,” a mentally ill sculptor in 2013’s “Camille Claudel 1915,” an actual mad scientist in 2018’s “High Life,” a catfishing divorcée in 2019’s “Who You Think I Am” — are dealing with varieties of loss: loss of love, loss of stature, loss of a parent, loss of identity, loss of fertility, loss of attractiveness. The last decade of her career makes an ongoing argument that older women are abundant, maybe the most abundant, subjects, even as it insists on the universality of weakness and disappointment. Binoche invests these performances with the paradoxical sense that mastery and self-exposure go hand in hand.

“Compulsion?” she asked, seeming baffled by the premise of the question, that enjoying work was somehow fraught or neurotic. “The joy of creating is that it’s not painful,” she said. “There’s a lightness in it. It doesn’t mean that certain films are not difficult — because sometimes it is very difficult — but at least you try something new. I think the key for me is going to places you’ve never been, not only for yourself but for the audience, as well.” Later, she said: “I don’t think there’s a big difference between being present in life or being present on film.”

We were both sweating, and Binoche seemed relieved when I suggested that we take off our masks. As she removed hers, she smiled, and seemed to quickly assess my face, as if it would reveal something. She then said a warm “Hi.”

Bottega Veneta sweater, saksfifthavenue.com. Photography by Collier Schorr. Styling by Jay Massacret.

When I asked her how this desire for newness had expressed itself lately, she talked about “Who You Think I Am,” her film that was released in the United States in September, whose fundamental theme, for Binoche, is abandonment, a condition she’d always wanted to explore: “Because it’s so unbearable to feel abandoned.”

Binoche plays Claire, a literature professor in her 50s, who, a few years after being left by her husband for a younger woman, poses online as a 24-year-old and gets entangled with a younger man, texting constantly, talking on the phone, planning meetings that never materialize. There’s a startling scene of Claire, ventriloquizing her alter ego’s breathy voice, having phone sex and bringing herself to an ecstatic orgasm. It’s filmed inside a car, very close up, and Binoche’s delirium is devastating. Later, after the affair has imploded and she is exposed, Claire narrates the events to a therapist, circling her motivation, alternately trying to evade and to understand why she would indulge this fantasy.

“The desire for eternity, the illusion of eternal youth. We all want to distance ourselves from the prospect of our death,” the therapist suggests.

“I’m OK with dying,” Claire says, with a flicker of comedy, but then her face contorts as she allows herself to say the words “but not with being abandoned.” The camera watches her patiently as tears pour down her face and she inclines her head a bit toward the therapist, asking to be understood. She then adds, with unmistakable pathos and truth, “We are never too old to be little. I needed to be soothed, to be taken care of, even with delusions.”

Binoche explained that she had been the one to propose the line about being fine with dying but not with being left. “Because it meant so much to me, and I think when you relate that much, then you don’t have to act. It’s just you.”

She remembers these feelings of abandonment from childhood. Binoche was born in Paris, and when she was 4, her parents — her mother was a teacher, director and actress; her father, a director, actor and sculptor — sent her and her older sister to a boarding school where her grandmother was working as a cook. For one period, she didn’t see them for an entire year. It was a foundational time for her, something she’d spent her life trying to heal from and to understand — but also, she emphasized, to make use of.

She didn’t feel resentment, she insisted, “because, first of all, I did some work, and told what I had to say” — I gathered she meant in therapy, which she did intensively for a time in her 30s — “and also because love takes over.” Her mother and father were young, she explained, they were political, they didn’t have money and they had just separated. She could now sympathize with her parents’ predicament, having raised two children of her own (she has a son and a daughter, both in their 20s, with different fathers; Binoche has never married). “They wanted to have a life somehow, because it’s true, when you have kids, you have to juggle so much.” Binoche remained close to her father and admired her mother, who later raised her and her sister. “She gave me a lot of roots with books, music and films and theater because she was just interested in that.” They would travel for hours just to see a play when they lived in the countryside.

Bottega Veneta sweater, saksfifthavenue.com. Photography by Collier Schorr. Styling by Jay Massacret.

It was by now stiflingly hot, and we agreed we should get out of the sun. We ducked into a teahouse at the side of the trail, a cozy place with a large selection from all over the world, that Binoche said she’d scouted out for us the day before. She ambled around the shop, peeking into glass containers and studying what was on offer, before ordering a Pu’er tea from China, which prompted a nod of approval from the barista, who didn’t seem to recognize Binoche. No one did that day, not even the young woman with long braids and a shirt tied at her torso who had set up a camera stand for her phone in the outdoor seating area and was beginning a selfie-taking operation that was to last for over an hour. The lack of attention didn’t surprise Binoche; she’s an internationally famous actress with an Academy Award (for her role as a nurse in 1996’s “The English Patient”), but people often can’t place her, or mistake her for someone else they know.

Today she was dressed in a kind of athleisure incognito: black exercise pants and a peach-colored T-shirt, sunglasses, her hair pulled half-back, no makeup. But something in her physicality would be recognizable to anyone looking closely. There was an alertness to her expression, a definitiveness that, when in motion, recalled her most iconic characters: Tereza in “Unbearable Lightness” gliding through a swimming pool; Camille in “Camille Claudel 1915” striding determinedly around the asylum that she hoped would someday release her.

I kept asking her, in different ways, how she allows herself to be so vulnerable onscreen. She was relaxed in her chair, her eyes darting quickly, almost imperceptibly, back and forth, as I’d often seen them do in close-up, searching for the answer. She described a process of submission: She prepares and prepares and prepares — mastering the script, sometimes doing intensive research, summoning memories, locating them in her body, making diagrams of emotion — until she doesn’t have to do anything. It is an almost mystical emptying out that allows her to become filled, suddenly and frictionlessly, with whatever feeling was required. But more than anything, she explained, what gave her courage was the joyful feeling of trust she often has with the directors.

She compared it to the relationship between a parent and a child. If the parent is not telling the child what to do, is not monitoring them, is not frightened, “the child grows in his own way.” The very best directors, she said, the ones who can “see everything,” know how to cede control. “They leave you, they know how to leave space” for you to flourish in your own talent and capacities. But later, in an email, she described the relationship as one of equals. “The eye of the director becomes my inner eye,” she wrote. “It is an eye that reveals (not judges). I can go far, when I’m trusted. But that same eye can also be turned back on the director, for him or her to see differently, as making a film is like walking together, searching together, becoming one (in the best case). Not knowing who’s directing and who’s being directed.”

Binoche has long been sought out by — and has actively partnered with — auteurs, and though there is a consistency in all her performances, a certain density of feeling, each one of them has uncovered a different aspect of her abilities. In “Code Unknown” (2000) and “Caché” (2005), Michael Haneke capitalizes on her prickly sensitivity. In “Camille Claudel 1915,” Bruno Dumont uses her girlishness as a kind of weapon in a story about a middle-aged woman entrapped and driven mad by her past. In “Summer Hours” and “The Clouds of Sils Maria,” Olivier Assayas invites her to play accomplished women with large egos whose brittle shells are pierced. In “Certified Copy,” Abbas Kiarostami takes her capacity for emoting and puts it into overdrive, so that what is real and what is acting become confused. And in “Let the Sunshine In” and “High Life,” Claire Denis zeros in on Binoche’s sensuality, discovering both freedom and chaos.

Denis told me over the phone that Binoche is “solid as a stone.” She said she trusted her immediately, that it was “the trust of camaraderie and solidity. And the strength. There is a way sometimes, if I wake up with anxiety, of course I will think, ‘OK, I can lean on Juliette.’ She’s always there. The entire movie can lean on her.” Which is why, Denis explained, she can ask Binoche to play characters who put themselves on the line: “Because if you’re not strong, you don’t dare. She’s vulnerable because she’s a daring woman.”

Many of Binoche’s women seem unable to accept the unbridgeable distance between two consciousnesses, and throw themselves, continually, against a wall. Binoche described a similar hunger to dissolve boundaries between herself and others, and told a story about working on “Blue” (1993) with the revered Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski, in which she plays a woman grieving the sudden death of her husband and child in a car crash, and trying to discover a way to go on. She was anxious about getting into character because the costumes were too conceptual. “The costume director, you know, was going through different blues, and it was so intellectual. And I was feeling, ‘This is not working for me because it’s too on the nose.’ And [Kieslowski] agreed, so we had to change it at the last minute and it was like a week before, and I was worried, and Kieslowski said to me, ‘What are you worrying about? Don’t be worried. You know, I’m only interested in your intimacy.’”

Dior coat, price on request; La Ligne top, nordstrom.com; Paco Rabanne pants; and Bottega Veneta shoes. Photography by Collier Schorr. Styling by Jay Massacret.

She didn’t understand what he meant at first, but then, on the first day of shooting, during a scene in which her character, who is herself injured, lies in bed watching a televised broadcast of her husband and daughter’s burial, “the camera was inside my bed, me crying like crazy. And then I realized, OK, now I know what he means by that, by the intimacy. Because he couldn’t be closer. He was like that, in my eye.” Since then, she has had a special affinity for close-ups: “I’m more aware that if the camera comes closer, somehow, the director wants to be closer. And so it touches me. They want to see what’s inside.”

Binoche in close-up is a marvelous thing. The essence of her beauty, in recent years, is its inwardness. There is a churning behind her face. I thought of Alice Munro’s short stories when I watched Binoche, the way she often writes about how wayward and rich and deviant thoughts are beneath a placid surface. (“People’s lives,” as Munro puts it in the 1971 story “Lives of Girls and Women,” “were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable — deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.”) Binoche, in 10 seconds of looking straight into the camera, offers the tantalizing suggestion of thought made visible, of a woman carefully observing her own inner shifts.

A marked lack of vanity is part of what makes this transparency possible — as well as a disinvestment in the idea of preserving her youthful beauty. Binoche seems to be in near-absolute control over her charisma. Her beauty is classical — dark, responsive eyes; dark hair, usually worn bobbed and tousled; heart-shaped lips that widen into a smile that seems to radiate from deep within her. She is poised and unperturbable, and no matter what role she is playing (and she is still, in her 50s, cast as women who could be in their 40s), you don’t want to look away from her. But she’s never gaudy and rarely hypersexualized (which is different from sexual, which she often is), and is also capable of looking so desolate and stricken that you can clearly see the marks of time and experience on her face. It’s rare to watch an actress embrace, as Binoche has, her own changing body; she finds it deeply funny, as well as sad. “It’s such an absurd situation,” she said, reflecting on aging. “Why do we need to change? Why on earth do we need to change, why are we turning gray and having wrinkles and getting easily fat? It doesn’t feel fair, and it feels absurd. But there’s part of me that is laughing about it inside, and also who likes to defeat that joke.” It’s as if, in collaboration with the camera, she is operating a lighting system that can be brightened or dimmed at will.

Akris sweater, akris.com; and Wolford tights (worn on arms), wolfordshop.com. Photography by Collier Schorr. Styling by Jay Massacret.

Binoche’s career has coincided with, and to some degree presaged, cultural shifts that have expanded the possibilities for women and the characters they play in film and on TV. In 2021, the messy woman reigns. She defies feminine ideals of pliancy and consideration for others; she’s often self-absorbed and given to outbursts. She pursues sex avidly if it appeals to her, but may be just as likely to masturbate, or to treat her partners with as much fickleness and even contempt as men have traditionally treated women in the movies. Her appetites (for food, sex, drugs, attention) often rule her, and we’re asked to admire her for indulging her whims, for opposing stereotype, for being funny and vain and unpredictable and often unlikable, in addition to being occasionally generous and possibly brilliant. Think of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s title character on “Fleabag” (2019), Sandra Oh’s detective Eve Polastri on “Killing Eve” (2018-present), the women of “Broad City” (2014-19), Issa Rae’s Issa Dee on “Insecure” (2016-present) and Frances McDormand’s Mildred Hayes in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” (2017), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 2018. We now reward this quality of realness.

But it has also given rise to new stereotypes. These performances get painted with the sheen of politics, so that misbehavior, or id, or vengefulness are jumbled together under the label of empowerment. The critic Beatrice Loayza, writing in The Baffler about the 2020 film “Promising Young Woman,” a rape-revenge fantasy with a slick and twisted variation on the ungovernable woman, posits a new female archetype: She is “messy but empowered; unstable yet brilliant; ruthless with men and in solidarity with women; finally winning, because she’s suffered so much.” Loayza suggests that, as a result of attempts to push back against the idea that women are victims, an antivictimhood has taken hold, calcifying into a kind of armor.

Binoche’s work cuts against this sense of defensiveness, the idea that vulnerability is really a form of power. What would it mean, she seems to be asking, for women to show themselves in moments of complete defenselessness? Not physical danger, but emotional danger that may or may not be resolved, nakedness that isn’t rewarded? There’s something radical in her capacity for tenderness, at a moment when tenderness is in retreat, something remarkable about her transparency, when many of us carry on an elaborate performance of self on the internet, advertising our accomplishments and projecting wit and moral certainty. Vulnerability — though it is supposedly prized as an antidote to toxic male behavior — is actually still a rarity, onscreen as in life.

Maybe the next phase of liberation for women and their fictional alter egos is total unguardedness. Binoche’s work, in its now-decades-long investigation of complex women, has offered a model for this possibility. She shows what it’s like to take women seriously, uninterested in coating weakness or sadness or aging or loneliness with a compensatory sheen of something else. What would it be like to just be? Binoche, in front of a camera, has come as close as possible to attaining that level of freedom.

“That’s the contradiction,” Binoche said. “That you have to be vulnerable and strong at the same time. Because you need to have holes in order to make the light come through.”