Adèle Haenel is the bearer of hope when it comes to the renewal of the somewhat dusty French cinema. Because the 30-year-old actress succeeds in something that is a rarity in the elitist Parisian cosmos of culture: to remain an outsider.
"I grew up with Jim Carrey comedies," says Haenel. "But mostly I watched anime, the films of Hayao Miyazaki were up and down my back." It's not exactly what one would expect from an actress who is currently running after the entire French film elite. Haenel takes these liberties - simply because she can. "My connection to the film is pure gut feeling," she says in a conversation in Berlin. "A cinephile culture, I do not own that kind of thing, my parents never went to the movies."
Just because she was such a restless child, they had sent the parents as a five-year-old in a theater class. At the age of 12 Haenel finally made her first film, the acclaimed psychodrama "Little Devil". But then she lost sight of the acting, graduated from high school and was first brought to film by a casting agent who discovered her on a demo.
Always one step ahead
This spontaneity characterizes Haenel's career until today. The story of a movie? Is it usually relatively unimportant: more important is a unique view of the world, which should always be a bit crazy. "I want to feel that my counterpart has an obsession, that there is something there that does not let him or her go." Therefore, she always chooses the directors and projects herself and not the other way around.
Haenel speaks fast French, always seems to be one step ahead in her thoughts. A restless feeling that also sets in when watching their films: only the sheer variety of roles that Haenel is able to depict, is hard to beat. Whether as a prostitute in Bertrand Bonello's nightmarish fin de siècle epic "House of Sin", as a self-confident doctor in the social drama "The Unknown Girl" by the Dardenne brothers or as an anti-Aids activist in Robin Campillos "120 BPM" - there is no role that Haenel would not trust.
In the video: Review to "Dear Antoine as no trouble"
And so it only fits, that at the moment two films run with her in the German cinemas, which at first sight could hardly be more different: "Dear Antoine than no annoyance" and "Portrait of a young woman in flames".
"Dear Antoine as no trouble" was already a big hit in France in 2018. In the highly original film by Pierre Salvadori Haenel plays the policewoman Yvonne, a slightly dreamy, but not naïve woman who saves her fellow human beings in a very funny way from ruin. She is a mother, widow, has a colleague who constantly stops for her hand, and wants to protect that eponymous Antoine. Yvonne's late husband had once unjustly taken him to prison.
Exactly this overcharging of character had irritated her in the role, says Haenel. "With so many movies, I feel that characters are just for a certain thing, a feeling, or a statement, where the characters are full of contradictions, they behave themselves, they lie, I like that, that tenderness for this human piecemeal . "
No archetypes, no pars pro toto - this is no different with Haelen's role in "Portrait of a Young Woman in Flames" (starting October 31st). The 1770 story of a tender but impossible love between the young Countess Héloïse, played by Haenel, and the portrait painter Marianne (Noémie Merlant) was often celebrated as a feminist ouevre - a mistake for Haenel: "The film has nothing at all with feminism It's a film about women who can do without the usual heroization, so it's not a movie about strong women, but about women. "
Coming out with acceptance speech
There is a sense of modesty in those words, but on closer inspection, Haelen's approach is quite radical, for it shuts off some of the actor's self-image - that of biographical uniqueness, the male connoted footprint in history. "I just want to represent normal people as an image of an epoch," says Haenel.
"Portrait of a young woman in flames" is Haenel's joint project with director Céline Sciamma. Sciamma's directorial debut "Water Lilies" was Haenel's feature film back in 2007, a terrific coming-of-age movie that accompanied three girls in the province for a summer's sexual exploration.
ddp images / interTOPICS / Capital Pictures
Adèle Haenel (left) and Pauline Acquart in "Water Lilies"
With Sciamma Haenel not only shares an intimate artistic bond. At the award ceremony for César 2014, Haenel made her love affair with Sciamma public in her acceptance speech for the Best Supporting Actress Award, thus creating the most prominent lesbian coming-out in the still very conservative French film world.
Between the states
Sciamma has emphasized in interviews that she had "designed a portrait of a young woman in flames" Haenel on the body. "Their entire life was predetermined: they grew up in the monastery, only to marry and be subject to a man," said Haenel about the noble women of the time.
But in Sciamma's film and Haele's role is a naturally subversive force, because Sciamma has its story just before the French Revolution settled, and the idea that soon everything will be different, primed the film. Héloïse, who grew up in the estates society, learns through the slowly unfolding affection for Marianne that her planned life is actually no life. "I wanted to make this gliding between the states of love, hatred, imprisonment and freedom tangible," said Haenel.
A sentence that could be symbolized for Haelel's acting as a whole, for the gliding between the states, sometimes gentle, sometimes impetuous, is common to all their characters. So she makes them unpredictable - and incredibly alive.
For directors, this is a gift that they are only too happy to accept. Director-directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne once said in an interview about "The Unknown Girl": "Sans Adèle Haenel, il n'y aurait eu de film". Without Adèle Haenel there would have been no film.
It is also a praise to Haelen's ability to take the prefabricated ones from their characters. Even after more than twelve years in the film business, they do not exist, the recognizable Adèle Haenel role. Only films that lose their recognition value without them, there are many.