The same song unites, like a chain across decades and continents, the careers of a heavyweight champion, a huge soul singer, the queen of pop and a German actress. The Greatest Love of All was composed for I, the Best, the biopic of Muhammad Ali, the most famous boxer in history, which Ali himself starred in in 1977, and in that first version it was sung and popularized by George Benson. Eight years later, without the article the beginning, Whitney Houston included it in her debut album and with it exploded the music charts. Finally, Inés, the character in Toni Erdmannwith whom Sandra Hüller (Suhl, 45 years old) achieved fame, a German executive who works in Bucharest and whom her father's visit completely destabilizes, intones her rapturously in the middle of the footage. Until that moment, Inés behaves like another gray directive, focused on meaningless work. And at a party in a house, with her father at the piano, placed by him between a rock and a hard place, Inés starts singing Greatest Love of All, dynamiting her slab of boredom. For Hüller, known until then in her country and something in the festival circuit, nothing remained the same either. Now, star of European cinema, he has appeared in two of the most talked about films at the last Cannes festival, where they also won the two most important awards: Anatomy of a Fall (Palme d'Or) and The Zone of Interest (Grand Jury Prize). Hüller reigned on La Croisette.
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"Interestingly, being in two films at Cannes relieves me a lot of the pressure of being in one," he said in the promotion during the festival. Although its dramatic weight is greater in the French Anatomy of a fall – and came to answer that if it was awarded, he preferred it to be for this one – than in the British The Zone of Interest, Hüller took care of both films equally until the same closing ceremony, in which he participated in the red carpet of the first with his colleagues and director Justine Triet, He entered the Palais des Festivals, reached his seat and came out again on the side of the access staircase to repeat a walk with the team commanded by filmmaker Jonathan Glazer. In the previous days, both the French and the British came to see the screenings of Hüller's other films, and the German interpreter escaped to a session of Club Zero, by Jessica Hausner, director with whom she worked in Amour Fou (2014): the actress has always defined cinema as an act of solidarity.
Hüller, in white, at the beginning of 'The Zone of Interest'.
In both films, his characters benefit from his talent to embody cold women, emotionally removed from the sympathy of the public, arisque and sometimes enigmatic. Hüller, who had already worked with Triet in The Reflection of Sibyl (2019) giving life to a dictatorial filmmaker, capable of using even the betrayal of her lover, the protagonist actor, for the good of the film they are shooting, accepted at first the character proposed by Triet for Anatomy of a fall, that of a writer who swallows everything that happens around her to write autofiction, and that she is accused of the death (the fall of the title) of her husband. Much longer to sign with Glazer, because in The Zone of Interest she gives life to Hedwig Höss, the wife of the commandant of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz, a woman fully aware of her husband's work, happy to raise her family between privileges and who lives without the noise that the Nazi murder machine causes on the other side of the wall of her garden (the crematorium ovens, the screams and the shots) disturb him. "In the end, I realized that it was very cowardly to hide behind the fact that I hated her so much that I could not play her," he explained at Cannes, and he was overcome by the interest in working with a star director of auteur cinema, even though he had only made three films before.
For The Zone of Interest, Glazer hid numerous micro-cameras around the set, allowing the actors freedom in their movements while forcing them to stay inside their characters for four weeks in the summer of 2021. "It was funny, because I felt that freedom as an actress, but I think my character never was: someone who is carried away by hate will never be free," she told the Los Angeles Times. "I managed to connect with her in her doubts about her appearance and her insecurity about her social class." Her Sandra (she is called after her) of Anatomy of a fall is something else, although the Latino public will feel her very differently from the Nordic: she is a woman who does not smile constantly, who underlines the facts while considering emotions private, although that can send her to jail: "She is not cold, she simply does not waste time in liking."
For Hüller, Glazer is an "extraordinary human being, with enormous vulnerability" who refuses, despite his formal precision, to lock his cast in it, and Trier, of whom she is friends since their second work together, shot last summer, "an open mind, a fascinating energy" that she admires "for her freedom".
But this whole wave emerged in 2016 with Toni Erdmann. Hüller was born in Suhl in Thuringia in 1978. At the age of 18 he moved to Berlin, to study theatre at the prestigious Ernst Busch School of Performing Arts. He returned to his region in 1999, and for two seasons performed at the Jena Theatre. And when he finished he traveled to Switzerland, where he worked at the Basel Theater until 2006. There she began her career in cinema, and she did it in a big way, in Requiem (2006), with which she won the award for best actress at the Berlinale that year, thanks to her role as an epileptic girl destroyed by religious fanaticism and ignorance of her environment. In her professional climb, in 2012 she received all kinds of praise with Über uns das All, but it was Toni Erdmann, by Maren Ade, and her successful passage through Cannes with which Hüller reached the status of great, and the award for best actress in European cinema, while personally deciding to live in Leipzig. "I get lost in cities like Berlin or Munich. That size scares me, it makes me unhappy. The good thing about theater is that after work you go home and sleep in your bed."
Justine Triet, with the Palme d'Or, accompanied by Sandra Hüller, and actors Antoine Reinartz (left) and Milo Machado Graner, on Saturday, May 27 in Cannes.Associated Press/LaPresseDaniel Cole (APN)
Since Toni Erdmann, despite his desire for a quiet life, he has shot all kinds of films throughout the continent: the third installment of the German comic saga ¡Que te dan, profe! (2017), the bleak Around the Corner (2018), the drama with astronauts Proxima (2019) or another vision of Empress Sisi in Sisi & Ich (2023): "I do not discriminate secondary characters or protagonists. I've had unpleasant experiences on a shoot in my career, and for me, the hard part is when people don't respect you, lie to you or steal information to manipulate you because they don't trust you. That's hard."
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