Label(le) Huppert 
 

PostED ON 18.10.2025

Isabelle Huppert, 2024 Lumière Award honouree, returns to Lyon with a pair of films that both reveal and revel in the full extent of her extravagance — somewhere between tragic burlesque and bona-fide burlesque; a portrait of two absolutes that play off each

WHO ?

Isabelle Huppert plays a restless poet in Malina by Werner Schroeter, adapted from the novel by poétesse Ingeborg Bachmann, featuring a script by Nobel Literature laureate Elfriede Jelinek (incidentally, the latter also penned The Piano Teacher, another œuvre under the Huppert label)...  In Vienna of 1970, a young woman is intensely torn between Malina, her ever-present housemate who understands her, and her sometime-lover Ivan.

Fast-forward 34 years, and Huppert assumes the role of Marianne in the aptly-named The Richest Woman in the World by Thierry Klifa, inspired by the Liliane Bettencourt — François-Marie Banier Affair.

© Manuel Moutier
The Richest Woman in the World (2025)

DUALITY

These two female protagonists are diametrically opposed. One is in perpetual motion, like a wind-up doll in a burning flat, while the other is a tiny immobile figurine, kept under lock and key in her vast mansion. Both are surrounded by an entourage determined to prevent them from wreaking havoc.

© Neue Studio - ZDF / DR
Malina (1991)

DESTROY, SHE SAYS

These characters, for whom money and material possessions are unimportant, are filmed in inscrutable close-up, as they ponder what is being inflicted upon them. Alone, yet in company, they possess superior reflexes — the result of free thinking that transcends society, yet still under the protective gaze of their male partners. For them, reality is irrelevant. They welcome the sweeping grandeur of sentiment, the need to feel everything much more acutely than is allowed. As we said, absolutes.

Virginie Apiou

© DR
The Richest Woman in the World (2025)