David Hudson at The Current:
Throughout the twenty-two minutes of Isabelle Huppert and Claude Chabrol: Crossed Portraits, a program Jean-Pierre Devillers directed for French television in 1998 (and now available on the Criterion Channel), the actor and director are playfully testy with each other as they reflect on the characters they have cocreated, beginning with Violette Nozière (1978). Plain and demure at home, eighteen-year-old Violette vamps it up when she heads out to turn tricks. She tries poisoning her parents (Jean Carmet and Stéphane Audran) more than once and eventually succeeds in killing her father.
After his death, the real-life Violette Nozière partied for a week in Montmartre before she was arrested, and the trial dominated headlines in French papers for weeks in the early 1930s. Huppert was twenty-four when she played Violette, but she pulled off a feat twice as astonishing in the flashbacks. When asked in the 1998 program if there was a particular moment that stood out in what was by then a twenty-year collaboration, Chabrol recalls one that tops a list of many: discovering that Huppert could play a twelve-year-old girl. “And mine is when he asked me to do it,” says Huppert with a proud smile.
more here.
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