When it comes to the career of French actor Juliette Binoche, there’s such a bounty of great performances, that picking best is akin to juggling with chainsaws, only much tougher.
Here, we’re taking a look at some of Juliette Binoche performances – from the riveting to the playful.
Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991)
Binoche won her first European Film Award for her role as Michèle, a vagrant artist losing her sight in this swooningly romantic concoction from Leos Carax. She ends up living on Paris’s oldest standing bridge, the Pont Neuf, and in love with Alex, a street performer.
Three Colours: Blue (1993)
Her sombre performance in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s masterpiece, the first of his Three Colours trilogy, was accoladed as well. She plays Julie, the wife of a famous composer who is trying to piece her life back together after surviving a car crash that kills her husband and their only child.
Certified Copy (2010)
Not content with blurring the line between her real and screen personas, Binoche employed subtle nuance to build a character who evolved and mutated in front of our very eyes. Certified Copy saw a couple bickering as they wandered around a Tuscan village, with the quizzical central conceit being adapted from Alain Resnais’ Last Year At Marienbad: do these people know and love one another, or have they never met?
Hidden (2005)
Binoche played a more central part in her first Michael Haneke film, Code Unknown, in 2000, but she was excellent in Haneke’s award-winning Hidden as Anne, a Parisian publisher whose broadcaster husband starts receiving disturbing videotapes containing surveillance footage of their home.
Cloud of Sils Maria (2015)
A multi-layered, femme-driven film that pushed Binoche to new heights. She stars as a veteran actress who comes face-to-face with an uncomfortable reflection of herself when performing in a revival of the play that launched her career 20 years earlier. Binoche tackles the complex role with elegance and melancholic wit.
