When speaking about Isabelle Huppert, the Dutch director Paul Verhoeven once said, “I have never seen an actor or actress add so much to the movie that was not in the script.”
At 71, the formidable French actor continues to enrich each role with an intense curiosity and vigour. And if anything, she has only grown more prolific; rarely do more than a few months pass without a new film to her name.
Even when her talents exceed the material (a frequent occurrence), the pure pleasure of observing someone so consummately committed to their craft is always worth the price of admission.
In her latest film, Sidonie in Japan, Huppert plays the title character: a shut-in author and widow coaxed into a work holiday when her first book is republished.
There’s relatively little plot to speak of. Her press tour takes her across the country, from lively urban landscapes to Japan’s resplendent coastline, accompanied by her attentive publicist Kenzo (Tsuyoshi Ihara).
What begins as a politely professional relationship gradually develops into both lonely wanderers baring their souls to each other over six days, exchanging prolonged conversations in the solitude of taxis and hotels.
In a supernatural twist, Sidonie finds herself haunted by the ghost of her dead husband Antoine (August Diehl) – though it’s somewhat up to interpretation whether the tour has pried old psychological wounds open or if he truly has emerged from beyond the grave for a farewell tour.
Sidonie’s travels invites countless cinematic comparisons. The drawn-out, naturalistic dialogue scenes recall Linklater’s Before trilogy, while its striking compositions of Japanese landscapes and delicate unveiling of withheld feelings are reminiscent of Perfect Days and Drive My Car.
Over 20 years on, Lost in Translation remains an inescapable Urtext of glamorous westerners losing (then finding) themselves in a foreign land; in Sidonie in Japan, director Élise Girard inherits Sofia Coppola’s detached intimacy and melancholic atmosphere, as well as its grating exoticism.
Sidonie’s cluelessness towards local customs, as well as her troubles with communication, play out in tired comedic beats. Girard’s observations on the formality of Japanese manners are just as rote as its observations on the white, elderly women who fail to understand them.
It is at least amusing to see Sidonie innocently partake in a form of cinephile-specific racism; when she first meets Kenzo, whose last name is Mizoguchi, she immediately asks if he’s related to the great filmmaker of the same surname.
Later on, her husband ponders the same question, both unaware of its commonality as a surname.
Many of the film’s conversations are spent explaining the differences between East and West, particularly in early stretches in which Kenzo largely exists to educate Sidonie on anything from women’s perfume to sexual mores.
The bluntness with which they discuss cultural differences extends to the dialogue at large; you can feel the film grasping for a poetry that its script can’t help but expound in the most literal terms possible. Its spiritual journey of love and loss is limited by its spoken clichés, with Antoine and Kenzo overtly prodding Sidonie to let go of her ghosts and move on with the present.
As with her more forgettable films, Sidonie in Japan proves there’s a limit to how much Huppert can contribute to such a threadbare script.
It isn’t really worth reading into Sidonie as a thinly veiled avatar for the lead actor herself, considering that Huppert is both famously tight-lipped about her personal life, and demonstrably less of a recluse than her fictional counterpart.
Yet the actor’s own storied career imbues the story with a metatextual weight.
Photos of Huppert in her younger years can be spotted across the film, evoking both real and fictional lives spent in service of the arts. Writing, like acting, can be its own form of communion with the dead. Through their craft, the preservation of memories and emotions continue to birth something new.
Those musings on art and grief aren’t quite enough to carry this movie past the point of fleeting enjoyment. At least the film excels as a tasteful 90-minute travelogue – especially for those craving an escape from the dead of winter.
Sidonie In Japan is in cinemas now.
