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Binoche finds home 'inside myself'
Formidable actress communicates with intelligence, curiosity
By DUANE DUDEK
Journal Sentinel film critic
Posted: March 8, 2007


Duane Dudek
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The memory of a brief encounter with Juliette Binoche late last year can cure a winter's worth of whatever ails you.

On this day, the normally brunet actress was blond, for her role in an upcoming film by Hou Hsiao-hsien.

"Add tall," she said, referring to the high heels she wears.

The striking combination was the antithesis to the worn-out, working-class Bosnian immigrant she plays in Anthony Minghella's new film "Breaking and Entering," which opens today.

'Breaking and Entering'




Jude Law plays an architect who gets entangled in his own mixed motives in "Breaking and Entering."



Jude Law and Juliette Binoche's characters become involved in "Breaking and Entering."

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Juliette Binoche

Audio: Dudek's interview with Binoche

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Binoche finds home 'inside myself'

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Buy a link hereDuring an interview in which the French actress spoke impeccable English - "I love the language" - it was a star-struck and tongue-tied reporter who had trouble communicating.

Binoche is a formidable and prolific performer.

Her early work in Jean-Luc Godard's "Hail Mary" in 1985 was followed by her U.S. debut in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" in 1988, a best supporting actress Oscar for Minghella's "The English Patient" in 1997 and an Oscar nomination for "Chocolat" in 2001. And she has appeared in innumerable French films, including "Caché," "Jet Lag," and "The Widow of Saint-Pierre."

But Binoche is no chameleon, and her performances are rarely appearance-driven. Rather, she projects a ferocious interior life of intelligence and curiosity.

'A universal place'
As a child, she moved from place to place, and had "to find my home inside myself."

And she soon found out that, when you bring your home wherever you go, you feel at home wherever you are.

"Very early on, when I study as an actress, I don't want to stay French," she said. "I want to reach a universal place where there are no boundaries and the connection is about unification.

"I could live anywhere. But because I have children, I have to belong somewhere."

In "Breaking and Entering," she plays a character who leaves war-torn Bosnia for London to protect a son who squanders the opportunity by burgling the offices of an architect, played by Jude Law, with whom she falls in love.

Binoche said Minghella conceived the story while traveling in Sarajevo because "he wanted to talk about what it's like to be an immigrant" in Europe.

She called the issue "a big trauma" in France, which her earlier film "Caché," about Algerian immigrants, studied from a nationalist perspective.

"It's fascinating to see (when) a person in his own country is a musician, artist or engineer, and when this person has to leave and be in exile, they have to be a seamstress or a cleaning lady to carry on and continue living," said Binoche, whose grandmother came to France from Poland during World War II. "When you see immigrants in Paris, you don't imagine they had a better life, or a different life" elsewhere.

A world re-divided
"Breaking and Entering," Binoche said, was a chance for her to explore the issue from another perspective.

She prepared for the role by traveling to Bosnia, she said, because "I like to study. Whether it's to get historical knowledge or to have a little bit of truth in myself, I have to go there and meet people."

While there, she said, she formed the impression that, before the war "people from so many different cultures and traditions . . . were living together" in Bosnia, "and they were proud of it. And then all of a sudden it changed. It became about division and classification."

Today, Binoche said, she sees that this same "madness," where people are "divided by war and crippled by fear," is spreading globally.

One solution, she suggested, can be found in "Breaking and Entering," and its universal language of forgiveness.

E-mail: ddudek@journalsentinel.com




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