CINEMA: Matters of the heart dominate the conversation when Lara Marlowe meets the French actress, Fanny Ardant.
No matter how integrated Europe becomes, no matter how globalised the world's culture, the French will always have a different take on love, sex and marriage. The film Nathalie, which comes to Ireland this month, provides further proof, if proof were needed, of how differently the Gallic psyche broaches these questions.
Fanny Ardant plays Catherine, a middle-aged gynaecologist who learns by chance that her husband Bernard (Gérard Depardieu) has spent a night with another woman. "What hurts her most is not that Bernard has cheated on her," Ardant said in an interview. "It's the casual way he says: 'c'est normal'. That is the real wound."
On leaving her office late one evening, on a whim, Catherine enters a bar which doubles as a bordello. There she meets a young prostitute named Marlene, played by Emmanuelle Béart. "My husband would like you," she muses. And the plot thickens.
Catherine hires Marlene, whom she renames Nathalie, to approach Bernard in the café where he reads his morning newspapers over coffee. She is to pretend to be a student, and report back to Catherine. It is, Ardant notes, a way of testing Marguerite Duras's maxim that "No husband can resist a stranger walking into a bar." Catherine and Nathalie meet at regular intervals so the young woman can tell Catherine about her increasingly daring sexual exploits with Bernard.
Béart recounts each episode in imaginative, almost pornographic detail. Catherine is troubled, but like the manipulative Marquise de Merteuil in the 18th-century classic Liaisons Dangereuses, is trapped in her own web. And as with Liaisons, we grow more than a little bored. Were it not for Ardant's luminous performance, Nathalie would hardly be worth watching.
This film could just as easily be entitled: In Praise of Infidelity. One night, Catherine catches the eye of a young barman and goes home with him. "She's a free woman, not a square bourgeois," Ardant explains. "She has sex with the barman not to spite Bernard, but because Nathalie has made her discover the lightness and pleasure of life. In a bizarre way, it saves her marriage."
Ardant is sitting in a booth at the back of the Café du Trocadéro. Though it is hot outside, she wears black, woolly tights and a pink trench coat, cinched tight around her waist. Large, exquisitely mounted diamond rings seem to drip from her fingers. It is hard to believe that the muse of the late, great film director Francois Truffaut is now 55 years old. The slender figure, diaphanous complexion and huge, dark eyes have not altered since Truffaut directed her in La Femme D'à Côté in 1981.
Ardant has one thing in common with the Catherine character in Nathalie, she says: the determination not to be a victim. "You need a lot of imagination to make a success of a marriage. In the film, I'm the one who has imagination. Catherine doesn't just weep and resign herself. The husband gets interested in her again because she is behaving mysteriously. If she cried in her pillow every night, she wouldn't have saved her marriage." Love, in the French definition that Ardant espouses, is not about the fusion of two beings who share every thought and secret. "If you're too transparent [in love], you're dead!" she says. "It is something like a game. Love can withstand anything but boredom; the great danger to love is boredom."
Catherine is wise not to break down over Bernard's infidelity, Ardant says. "As long as she controls the situation and is master of the game, she may suffer, but she is not humiliated. She never makes a scene. One must never, never show that one is jealous. It's a horrible defect. It dirties you. A person is jealous like they're blonde or brunette - you can't help it. But you have to struggle against it."
The screen relationship between Catherine and Nathalie is ambiguous, with hints of a lesbian flirtation. "It is not a homosexual relationship," Ardant insists. "It's more sensual than sexual. Catherine succumbs to the charm of this woman, who is beautiful, gifted, troubling. Nathalie changes her life; it's an initiation."
Ardant lived with Truffaut from 1981 until his death in 1984. She was pregnant with their daughter Josephine, now 20, when he died. Josephine, who is never photographed, lives with her mother and is a student of criminology. Truffaut's early disappearance is, Ardant admits, a grief that never passes. "The people you love, you love all your life," she says. "He was a great director, who had the essential qualities of energy, enthusiasm and passion for his work."
Ardant is a notoriously private person. She takes piano lessons and says she would have been a musician had she not been an actress. Her father was a cavalry officer, which was why she was born in the cavalry town of Saumur. Her parents didn't want her to be an actress, so she earned a degree at the political science institute 'Sciences Po' to keep them happy. "It was my passport to freedom," she says.
French cinema books record that Ardant was married to Truffaut, but she corrects this. "I have never married," she says emphatically. "I think marriage is somehow unnatural. You can give up your freedom out of love, but marriage is a contract. The only marriage I believe in is the Church ceremony, for people who are religious, who do it as an act of faith, in a spiritual way. But going before Monsieur le Maire - it's ridiculous."
Despite her low opinion of marriage, Ardant says she believes that total love between a man and a woman exists, though she has never found it. "I can conceive of a man and woman living together for 60 years; I knew my grandparents, so I believe in eternal love. But I don't believe in the institution. A man and a woman who live together for more than 50 years and have always loved each other and never cheated on each other - it's like a masterpiece. It's the Cathedral of Paris!"
So is she in love now? "Yes!" Ardant exclaims, without hesitation. With Depardieu, her co-star in Nathalie? Paris Match recently announced that the two were lovers. Ardant's musical laughter explodes across the café. "Are you crazy? You believe Paris Match? It's an outrageous story. The journalist who interviewed us confused what we said in interviews about Nathalie with real life."
The object of her affection is French, Ardant says, but he is not an actor. Is he a director? She laughs again. "I won't tell you!" Before Nathalie, Ardant and Depardieu played lovers or spouses in La Femme D'à Côté, Le Colonel Chabert, and a television film about the life of Balzac. "I am very fond of Gérard. I couldn't imagine life without him," Ardant says. "He's been part of my life since I started working in cinema. Even before La Femme D'à Côté, I played a tiny role in a film he was in. He was the only one who went out of his way to talk to me. I never forgot it."
She admits that Nathalie "is a very French movie". Though there are one or two lurid scenes in the bordello, the film's most salacious episodes are verbal. "It is connected to the tradition of 18th-century theatre in which words are essential, like in Choderlos de Laclos or Marivaux," Ardant says. "You can do good, or harm, just by talking." During Nathalie's graphic descriptions of her encounters with Bernard, you can almost see the words stabbing Catherine. "The power of the word is the opposite of action," Ardant continues. "And it's probably the opposite of English-language theatre. In English theatre, it's action; in French theatre, the word."
Ardant was so impressed by the Irish actress Fiona Shaw's performance in Medea last winter that she went backstage to congratulate her, then wept as she walked home. Ardant says she seeks to move her audiences the way Shaw moved her: "To speak to their heart, more than their mind. And never cheat - cheating is the most shameful thing in cinema," she says. What does she mean by 'cheating'? "Not to give everything, holding back. When I saw Fiona Shaw, she gave everything."
When the subject of happiness comes up, Ardant surprises me. "I am not happy at all," she blurts out. It is a stunning confession from a woman who is so admired and envied. Why? "I don't want to say ..." she says. I am intrigued, yet reluctant to trample further on her privacy. Surely it's just a passing phase? "It's as if I wasn't really interested in being happy," she continues. Then what is she interested in? "In being intense. In the intensity of life."
Ageing is always a delicate topic with beautiful actresses. "Journalists have been asking me that question for 30 years," Ardant says. "It's hard for journalists to age too; it's the same thing." Touché. Other French actresses - Emmanuelle Béart, her co-star in Nathalie, comes to mind - indulge in plastic surgery and continue to play roles far younger than their age. Not Ardant. "In the cinema, it's a question of representation, of harmony, of roles that correspond to the maturity of your face and body," she says. "It's silly to try to hold time back. I expect nothing from life," she says. "I don't want it to go on for years and years. So I find it almost disgusting to want to survive, to want to remain young and beautiful and glamorous. As if one wanted to be forgiven for existing." As for plastic surgery: "Nothing I've seen on other women has convinced me."
Women's magazines that tell one "how to stay sexy until 90" or "how to hang on to your lover" make her feel "like jumping out the window", Ardant says. The women of our mothers' and grandmothers' generations didn't look in their mirrors and moan. "In any case, it doesn't do any good. Jealous tantrums or lamentations over one's age don't serve any purpose."
Ardant has made some 40 films in 20 years, but La Femme D'á Côté was her most memorable role. In the film, the characters played by Ardant and Depardieu are lovers who can neither live together nor live apart. When Ardant and her husband unwittingly move in next door to Depardieu and his wife, the consequences are tragic. The Truffaut film showed a different version of French love - passionate and all consuming. In Nathalie, 23 years later, love has become a survival game. Perhaps the transition from hopeless love to self-preservation comes naturally with age? "I still think it is more beautiful to die for love than to adapt to life," Ardant says. "I haven't evolved."
Nathalie goes on general release countrywide on July 16th