"Oscar-winning French actor Juliette Binoche could have settled for Hollywood stardom. Instead, she is putting the spotlight on human rights injustices in Iran
Actor, poet, painter, dancer: these are all real-life roles that Juliette Binoche has performed with varying degrees of success or, at least, recognition. But this year it is as a human rights campaigner that the 46-year-old Oscar-winning star of The English Patient has drawn perhaps most headlines.
Just recently hers was one of the celebrity names attached to the international appeal to halt the stoning to death of Mohammadi Ashtiani, the 43-year-old Iranian mother found guilty of adultery. Ashtiani had already been lashed 99 times and held in prison for five years, after confessing under torture to having affairs with two men.
Binoche was not the only actor to defend Ashtiani (Emma Thompson, Colin Firth and Robert De Niro also put their names to the campaign), but she was probably the one from whom the authorities in Iran least wanted to hear. As things stand, the woman who made her name in films including The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Three Colours: Blue and Chocolat looks highly unlikely to be receiving any cards from the ayatollahs this Eid.
Beginning with the Cannes film festival in May, where she won the best actress award for her performance in Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy, Binoche has exploited her global renown to bring attention to the arbitrary and often barbaric justice system of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
It started when she broke down crying during the press conference for Kiarostami's film. What prompted her tears was the news that Kiarostami's countryman, friend and fellow filmmaker, the Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who was meant to be a judge at Cannes, had commenced a hunger strike in Evin prison in Tehran.
The scene was all the more powerful because Binoche has long had a reputation, particularly in France, for being aloof and rather unemotional. The daughter of two Parisian actor-directors, Binoche started out working for auteurs like Jean-Luc Godard, and over her long career she has continually resisted the stereotypical romantic roles for which her exquisite features seemed to have been moulded.
Nor has she been any easier to pin down beyond the screen. While it's known that she has a 10-year-old daughter by the French actor Benoît Magimel and a son by a professional scuba diver, and that in the past she has had relationships with the actors Daniel Day-Lewis and Olivier Martinez, and the directors Leos Carax and Santiago Amigorena, Binoche is quite guarded about her private life, and often conceals her thoughts and experiences behind airy generalities.
Yet her demonstrative display at Cannes did what any number of well-meaning press releases might have failed to achieve: it grabbed the attention of the world's media. Binoche had met Panahi, a leading light of the Iranian new wave, in Iran. He was imprisoned, along with his wife, daughter and friends, apparently because he had been planning to make a film about the Green Revolution, the reformist movement opposed to the repressive theocratic junta that runs Iran.
It's thought that Binoche's close working relationship with Kiarostami, had led her to take a personal interest in his homeland. And the compliment appears to have returned by Iranians.
'Iran is very special,' said Binoche during Cannes. 'I've visited several times and we're closer than we think… We think of Iranian women as the property of men; chained up in the kitchen. But they know all about films and books and music. I was in a street in Tehran and all of a sudden I had five women in burqas chasing me, totally black from head to toe. And they knew all about me and had seen maybe five or six of my films.'
She expressed her sympathies with Iranians, and specifically Panahi, when she went up to collect her best actress award at Cannes wearing a strapless white dress and a sign bearing the imprisoned director's name. Shortly afterwards, Panahi was released by the Iranian authorities, and many observers, particularly in France, attributed the decision in part to Binoche's actions.
Binoche was keen to play down the political significance of her intervention. 'Doing a film with [Kiarostami] is already political, so I don't need to add more. Your consciousness should be in the choice of the work.'Instead, she preferred to highlight the humanitarian and, in particular, artistic merits of speaking out. 'We need artists and intellectuals to have different views on our lives,' she said. 'I believe that artists should have this specific role, because they can influence the way we think.'
On occasion, however, Binoche's 'different views' have erred on that side of excessive difference sometimes referred to as plain bonkers. Three years ago, for example, while promoting a film entitled A Few Days in September, directed by her then boyfriend, the Argentinian Santiago Amigorena, she outlined her conviction that the CIA and the US government were involved in the 9/11 attacks. By way of an endorsement for this view, she sought the opinion of an Iranian ambassador. 'I went to see [the ambassador] at the time and he said of course it's true.'
In other words, she not only helped foster the most pernicious and idiotic conspiracy theory of our time but appeared to be labouring under the belief that an ambassador for President Ahmadinejad's government – which actively promotes Holocaust denial – was, of all the world's diplomats, some kind of arbiter of truth.
Times and movies change, though, and so too, it appears, has Binoche's respect for the Iranian regime. Following the international publicity that Binoche helped to generate, and the widespread condemnation of Iran for its cruel and unusual punishment of women, the Iranian authorities changed Ashtiani's death sentence from stoning to hanging. In an effort to cover its tracks, the regime then terrorised Ashtiani's lawyer into exile and broadcast a murder confession by Ashtiani, almost certainly secured through torture.
Responding to this latest abuse of human rights by the Iranian government, Binoche recently put her name to a letter written by Bernard-Henri Levy, in which the French philosopher and activist accused the Iranians of 'blatantly lying', called for Ashtiani's immediate release, and argued that her case was symbolic of the 'freedom and dignity of thousands of others'.
In a sense, it doesn't take much to sign a letter, but that should not necessarily detract from Binoche's small but symbolic protest. Along with her co-signatories, she has refused to accept the idea, common in some radical circles, that there are cultural exceptions to basic human rights. She has targeted the Iranian regime, while maintaining solidarity with the Iranian people. And she has shifted her focus from conspiratorial fantasy to real-life inhumanity.
Kate Allen, Amnesty International UK director, believes Binoche's contribution has made an impact. Her stand on Iran this year, she says, 'has definitely added to the international campaign to demand human rights in the country. There's no question that a well-timed intervention from the likes of Juliette Binoche can really give a boost to the work of human rights defenders around the world.'
When La Binoche – as she is known in France – was young, her pretty sweetness earned her the nickname of La Brioche. And evidently it didn't just refer to her looks. 'As a child,' she once recalled, 'I would dream about uniting people across the world. If you could do that through film, can you imagine how wonderful that would be?'
Uniting the world is a tall order, but this summer La Brioche has made it look a piece of cake. Not through her screen roles, as well acted as they may be, but her lead in supporting rights.
Certified Copy opens on 3 September"
Another reason, if I needed one, to love La Binoche.
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