IT'S EASY TO consider Juliette Binoche a regular player in Hollywood these days. She's appeared in an ever-wider array of mainstream fare, from Anthony Minghella's The English Patient - which won her a best supporting actress Oscar in 1997 - and Lasse Hallstrom's Chocolat (2000) to last year's commercially and critically underwhelming The Bee Season, in which she plays the frustrated wife of Richard Gere's Jewish scholar.
France's highest-earning actress, Binoche still leaves her schedule open for quality, art-house films. And they don't come much better than Michael Haneke's Hidden, a cerebral thriller that won best director at last year's Cannes Film Festival and swept the European Film Awards in December.
It was Binoche's second collaboration with the Austrian director, the first being Code Unknown (2000), which, like Hidden, deals with race-related issues in France. In Hidden she plays Anne Laurent, wife of television literary presenter Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil). Partly through her eyes, we see menacing videos turn up at the house.
Despite Anne's good job and well-adjusted 12-year-old son, all is not well. As she wanders around her large, pristine apartment, we see cracks appearing in her bourgeois Parisian existence. Ultimately, Anne is caught up in the paranoia surrounding the videos and is shocked by her husband's secrets regarding his treatment of a young Algerian boy in his childhood.
'There are some things in life that are unbearable,' Binoche says. 'Betrayal is unbearable, guilt is unbearable. All of a sudden, you have to face up to your own demons. I think Michael is dealing with subjects that are difficult and I think this is necessary. His films underline the details of our everyday lives, and what is very strong about them is that they say you should not just be involved in your own problems, you should open up to the rest of the world. It's easy for me to see the resonance of Hidden because it relates to immigration and to privileged people living in France.'
Binoche, who lives in a wealthy area outside Paris favoured by celebrities, considers herself a humanist. Her father, a theatre director, and her mother, a drama teacher, separated when she was four. As communists they would probably approve of her second collaboration with the uncompromising Haneke, whose films frequently attack the vacuous consumerism permeating European society.