If you have never seen a film starring Isabelle Huppert - stop reading this (actually keep reading for a minute or two more) and get yourself to your nearest indie video store or Netflix list because you need to have the experience of watching this amazing actress work - though I am not sure you can actually classify what she does as work as much as it is some sort of combination of the slightest of movements or gestures with her eyes or her hand or the way she moves into or out of a room imbued with a simultaneous mixture of power and fragility that amazes. I, admittedly, was a bit late on the Isabelle Huppert fanwagon and the first film I saw of hers was La Separation (a film co-starring the equally fabulous Daniel Auteuil about the disintegration of a marriage). In the film, Huppert plays Anne, a woman who one day informs her husband that she has fallen in love with another man and she is leaving him. The film is a raw and painful study on how two people who were once in love enough to pledge their lives to each other can turn around in a moment to inflict the worse kind of pain on each other. Sublime.

The fantastic thing about Huppert is her clear indie maverick streak not only in her performances from playing a hooker (La Vie Promesse) to a dominatrix music professor (The Piano Teacher) to Madame Bovary to an ugly duckling aunt (Eight Women) to her an eccentric writer (I Heart Huckabees) and her recent turn as a woman having an affair with a man she hates (Gabrielle) but her desire to work with the most original directors out there - Chabrol, Maurice Pialat, Ozon, Diane Kurys, Hal Hartley. David O Russell, Michael Haneke and Paul Cox. Huppert is not one to appear in the big Hollywood blockbuster though she does have the distinction of being a part of Hollywood legend playing the part of Ella the whore courted by Kris Kristofferson and Christopher Walken in Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate.

It is hard to pick which of Huppert's films is my favorite but I think that it would have to The Piano Teacher as it is in this film that she is her most sublime. She is at once authoritative, even brutal but she manages to make you feel sympathetic towards her as she sexually (and emotionally) terrorizes her young student.

The BFI has very smartly decided to honor this French arthouse cinema icon screening 20 of her films including an in-person tribute screening her latest film, Patrice Chereau's Gabrielle. If you are in London, get thee to the NFT in November. if you are not lucky enough to be able to see this extraordinary body of work on the big screen, most of these films are available on DVD.

Keeping it indie!

Julie