Anne Parillaud Passes the Act
by Vincent Tolédano

In Francis Girod's new film, she gives herself away on the couch of a psychoanalyst. Thrills, thrills, thrills.

She grants an appointment in the bar of the Lutétia, set in red velvet and Art Déco. In the vicinity Jacques Doillon responds to the questions of another journalist; Marek Halter orders a Perrier; the Paris of arts and letters. "I live in the neighborhood. But I love the atmosphere of the grand hotels," explains Anne Parillaud. She wears a black-and-white-striped pullover which reveals her navel, and red boots cut by Freelance. And an irresistible mole at the corner of her right eye. A smile lights up her pale complexion and jet-black hair which is rolled up above her shoulders. The barman pretends not to be taken with her charm. Feline, the actress curls up in her armchair. Similarly Isabelle d'Archambault lounges on the couch of Antoine Rivière, her psychoanalyst, in Passage à l'acte, the new film by Francis Girod.

Adapted from Jean-Pierre Gattegno's first novel, Neutralité malveillante (published by Editions Calmann-Lévy), by the very Freudian Gérard Miller, who wrote the screenplay, Passage à l'acte is a psychological thriller. Ambitious and mediagenic analyst Antoine Rivière (the solemn Daniel Auteuil) encounters the mysterious Edouard Berg (the surprising Patrick Tensit) on his couch, where he will be carried away by a dark story of murder. Meanwhile the beautiful and very rich Isabelle d'Archambault lounges on the same couch, confessing the desire she has for him. But as Rivière says: "Patients who long for their analyst are always viewed as a bad thing in the profession." He refuses her advances. Obviously not very realistic.

Passage à l'acte marks then the return of Anne Parillaud to France after three years' absence. In 1993 she played Alice opposite Béatrice Dalle. Psychiatry wasn't far off, since Diane Kurys's film was called À la folie [loosely translated as "toward madness"]. The hair shorter, but the look just as smoldering, Parillaud suffered the insults of an abusive sister. Again a story of violent, tragic love.

"To be human is to navigate perpetually between good and evil. And I am attracted by those characters to the violence, to the fragility, by the complexity of their misfortune, their past. I bloom when I hear about their problems," admits Anne. In the age of Musset, she would have been a tragédienne. "But today," she says, "I feel ready to enter another world. The other side of humanity. The relationship between two people, for example. Or the relation between mother and child." The true life, perhaps. Without the sound and the fury of her last films.

Forever Nikita, the film directed by Luc Besson which restored her celebrity at the end of the '80s, Parillaud left for the United States, where she starred in four films. "Such a role in the career of an actress is already enormous. But I didn't have an American Dream. My sensibility is thoroughly European. By my tongue, my emotions. I don't have a career plan. What counts is the character. I leave it alone to live within my interior self. My body becomes like an apartment in which the character is a tenant. It can change the furniture, the layout, the decoration. It does what it wants!"

Rebellious by her own admission, Anne Parillaud professes delighting in the eclectic. She defends the colours of Chanel, her fashion designer, her model of elegance. But without any make-up. Only a hint of mascara enhances her long lashes. She readily mixes up her craft and her life. She speaks of her "periods", in the manner of a painter. For the past nine months she's been trying to initiate a project. A film which she has written especially for herself. A new period announces itself. The apartment is up for rent. I would willingly sign a lease. Even short-term...