Chameleon: Isabelle Adjani's Incomparable Decade

CHAMELEON: ISABELLE ADJANI’S INCOMPARABLE DECADE

by Matt Hammitt

      "We are all the same, but in different words. In different bodies, and different versions."-Isabelle Adjani in Possession.

Isabelle Adjani is one of the most versatile artists of the 20^th century. Between 1975 and 1985, the French actress put together a resume as diverse and audacious as any in the history of film, and yet she remains an almost completely unknown quantity in the minds of American moviegoers.

We exist in a media landscape where access to foreign films is no longer a prohibitive barrier to interested parties looking to expand their palette. The great filmmakers and performers in Europe have no shortage of advocates and film fans have little trouble exploring their work. Liv Ullmann and Catherine Deneuve are firmly imbued in the canon of great actresses in 2015. Even Adjani’s European contemporaries, like Juliette Binoche or Isabelle Huppert, have received ebullient praise from American critics and film junkies. Isabelle Adjani is better than all of them. For those ten years between 1975 and 1985, she was better than anyone; and she was likely better than any one has been since.

She’s never enjoyed mainstream American box office success. Her only real direct exposure to American audiences came via 1987’s historically disastrous Ishtar and 1996’s Diabolique, a terrible remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques, wherein Adjani proved that even with no motivation or verve, she is still leagues better than Sharon Stone. Diabolique was a disaster, it ended Sharon Stone’s winning streak and seemingly prohibited Adjani from ever receiving an earnest second chance in Hollywood. And so, with no easy entry point for American audiences (like The English Patient or Chocolat for Binoche or even I Heart Huckabees for Huppert), Adjani’s work has yet to gain any momentum west of the Atlantic.

Adjani began the her prodigious career in the theatre, and even her best work on film retains an air of theatrical bombast. At age 18, she starred in the 1974 film La Gifle, notable mostly because Francoise Truffaut saw it and was inspired to cast Adjani in the lead role of 1975’s The Story of Adele H. The film stars Adjani as Adele Hugo, daughter of renowned novelist Victor Hugo, and it explores her tortured, unrequited obsession with a British military officer. Adjani is remarkable. She communicates a depth of despair so powerful as to provoke the audience’s empathy in the most alien of narratives. The Story of Adele H. is a love story about a person who loves alone. It is all longing and no catharsis. It is a marathon of a performance and the result is exhausting and explicitly non-rewarding.

In 1976, Adjani became the youngest woman to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. I can’t help but think that perhaps her greatest misstep was being so immediately phenomenal. You see, there is no room to improve on the performance Adjani gives in The Story of Adele H., and if you can’t ascend as an artist, you must pivot.

We are fortunate enough, for comparison’s sake, to have an uncanny contemporary analogue for Adjani’s nascent career. In 2011, Jennifer Lawrence was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone. She was 20 years old, just over 70 days younger than Adjani when she was nominated for that same award in 1976. Lawrence’s performance is excellent (albeit not on par with Adjani’s in Adele H) and it endures as her best. In this sense, Lawrence’s career is an adroit point of comparison for Adjani. However, the manner in which each actress followed that early success couldn’t provide a starker contrast.

You see, Lawrence took immediate advantage of the status and hype surrounding her nomination and created a comfortable (and lucrative, it must be said) balancing act starring both in proven-successful blockbuster fare (see The Hunger Games, X-Men) and satisfying yet thoroughly unambitious Oscar-bait (see every David O.Russell movie since I Heart Huckabees.) Lawrence might not possess the ability to transcend her performance in Winter’s Bone, but it would be nice to watch her leave that comfort zone to try and match it. At the tender age of 24, Lawrence already feels incredibly entrenched and stale.

In contrast, Isabelle Adjani followed The Story of Adele H. with an absolutely stunning feat of genre-hopping. She would not allow herself to stay in one dramatic pocket so long that her performances became boring or obligatory. Adjani, like all truly brave artists, knew when to pivot away from creative complacency, and her willingness to do so is her most enduring strength.

She followed-up Adele H. with Roman Polanski’s The Tenant, where she portrays Stella, the somewhat removed and stoic counterbalance to Polanski’s tormented protagonist Trelkovsky, the Lt. Pinson to his Adele Hugo. The Tenant is a triumph of directorial vision, and it’s success is conditional on Polanski’s performance being allowed to stand in wretched isolation from those of his co-stars. Adjani provides him that space. She delivered a virtuoso performance in Adele H. and would go on to deliver many more, but in The Tenant she demonstrates a talent most actors with a capacity for brilliance are rarely capable of: she yields. She augments, and she does so without ever being less than fascinating. It stands as one of her rarer achievements.

The late ‘70s witnessed Adjani continue to dabble in unique roles across disparate genres under the direction of many singular filmmakers: from Andre Techine’s romantic thriller Barocco, to Werner Herzog’s excellent reimagining of F.W. Murnau’s titular Nosferatu the Vampyre, to Walter Hill (a ‘70s and ‘80s film-genre chameleon in his own right) and his underrated 1978 crime movie The Driver. The agency of the female lead vacillates wildly among each of these roles, as does the breadth of Adjani’s performance. In Barocco, Adjani is front-and-center, manipulating her lover’s killer into becoming his mirror image. In Nosferatu the Vampyre, she is, as Lucy Harker, the direct target of the sinister machinations of Klaus Kinski’s Dracula. Her role as The Player in The Driver splits the difference, being at turns a pawn in the game of chess between her two male costars, and at others the determiner of their fortunes.

Then in 1981, she starred in Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession, a film that holds a number of very significant distinctions in my heart. Not only is Possession my favorite horror film. Not only is Adjani’s performance in it my favorite horror movie performance ever, it is my favorite performance ever in any film, regardless of genre. Adjani is heartbreaking and terrifying, tender and shrill (incomparably shrill: never has screaming female protagonist been as effective in a movie, or as loud. And many have tried.) It is Adjani’s most theatrical performance. She plays a woman whose every move is observed and dissected by the men in her life. Her performance is a window into how maddening it must feel to be ever on stage, ever on display. And maybe it provides answer enough as to why Isabelle Adjani is not more of a celebrity or an icon than she is. Perhaps she has very consciously rejected that enterprise. Perhaps she did so as early as 1981.

1981 also saw Adjani cast as one of the four principals in the Merchant Ivory film Quartet, for which she received the award for Best Actress at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival. Quartet  is the closest Isabelle Adjani ever came to trying to recapture the type of performance she delivered in The Story of Adele H., although it is by no means a retread. The film remains distinct and stands among the best Merchant Ivory productions. Adjani plays a woman who is forced to solicit a room in the apartment of a married couple after her husband is sentenced to prison for a year. She then becomes party to the increasingly dissolute state of the couple’s marriage, all the while pining for a reconciliation with her incarcerated lover.

It is worth noting that among the common threads of Adjani’s roles during this period is the way in which her obvious and yet somewhat mercurial sexuality is leveraged to exploit the audience’s expectations for the narrative. Adjani is beautiful, her porcelain complexion and frozen blue eyes render her almost doll-like. She is often presented as something of a living tchotchke: collectible, controllable and subject to the whims of her male counterparts. Adjani subverts those expectations time and time again, particularly in the films where her sexual identity is central to the narrative, as in Possession, Quartet or 1983’s One Deadly Summer. Her performances are bold statements made by a 28 year old actress in an era when women’s rights were being met with some powerful reactionary pushback from a Western patriarchy tired of being asked to cede what little authority it had yielded throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Adjani is confrontational and provocative. She was always beautiful, and yet she contained within her the power to be tremendously hard to watch.

Isabelle Adjani was only 30 years old when she starred in the extremely weird Luc Besson action/romantic-comedy/drama Subway. It marked the end of her most productive, inimitable professional decade. It is also the most overt fun Adjani can be seen having onscreen. I like to think Subway as dessert, a well-earned confection after 10 years of dense, challenging and increasingly esoteric material. Which is not to say that Subway lacks substance. On the contrary, it is really, really fucking good. Adjani gets to add some welcome levity to her oeuvre and, appropriately enough, the film ends with her and Christopher Lambert on an implied stage, drowned in audience applause.

While Adjani’s post-1985 career is scattered with successes, like Camille Claudel and Queen Margot, her output slowed considerably and the unfamiliar territory left for her to explore grew smaller and smaller. Claudel and Margot are very good performances, but they are nonetheless very familiar.

Familiarity is a fairly requisite quality in movie stars, and most successful American leading men and women are careful not to venture too frequently or too far from the kind of work that bred their initial success. But Isabelle Adjani seems interested in acting only insofar as it provides a vessel for her artistic expression, and she never seemed content to repeat herself. Had she been fortuitous enough to land a breakthrough Hollywood role, I’m not so sure she could ever have been compelled to cash in on the sequel or bleed dry her particular niche in the marketplace.

It is worth noting, however, that Isabelle Adjani embraced her inner 1980s crossover star in at least one way: In 1983, she released an album titled Pull Marine. The album, produced by chanson legend Serge Gainsbourg, is full of straight-forward pop songs soaked in era-appropriate synth string arrangements. The results are vanilla and uninteresting, with a few exceptions: “Ohio” is a catchy pop-showtune that owes significant inspiration to both ABBA and the Bee Gees, “D’Un Taxiphone” sounds like a sexy, whispered freestyle over the Inspector Gadget theme song (in the best possible way; and honestly, is there a way such a thing could not be worthwhile?) and “Beau Oui Comme Bowie,” which is a semi-obvious and conscious attempt to recreate the plastic soul of Bowie’s own mid-70s period. The music video for “Beau Oui Comme Bowie,” readily available to view on YouTube, features Adjani awkwardly dancing next to a grand piano bathed in a halo of smoke and dressed like a generic mall-pop starlet, every once in a while a drawing or painting of David Bowie awkwardly floats across the screen. It is such a bizarre, low stakes enterprise. I cannot even begin to imagine how the album was marketed. “Do you like Samantha Fox? How about Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession? Well dust off that 8-track motherfucker!”  

Brief diversions into French radio-bubblegum territory aside, Isabelle Adjani was infallible between 1975 and 1985. The quality of her performances is immense, but the diversity among them is almost unbelievable.

Honestly, absent all substantive arguments I’ve made in support of that claim, just look at the list of directors she worked with during that time: Francois Truffaut, Roman Polanski, Andre Techine, Walter Hill, Werner Herzog, Andrzej Zulawski, James Ivory, Luc Besson. That is a fantastic group of collaborators. To think that her performance stands as the most enduring piece of every one of those collaborations is almost laughable, but it happens to be true.

She delivered every director something more than what was asked and every audience something other than what was expected. I cannot fathom a more reliable metric by which to ascertain creative achievement.