After a long love affair with Cannes, Juliette Binoche finally gets to run the show

No secondary spotlight for her next Cannes film, Rendez-vous, in 1985: the 21-year-old was front and centre in director André Téchiné’s chic erotic love triangle, which took the best director prize. She was too new on the scene to win best actress, but stardom beckoned.

A glorious portrait of Binoche from a photo call at the 1985 festival is the very picture of ingenue joie de vivre: barefoot on the beach, dressed simply in a white miniskirt and scarlet jumper, grinning as she jumps about 3ft in the air. She’s new to this town and already owns it.

Reflecting on the experience years later, she said: “I knew I had become a star when I shook hands with Simone Signoret at the 1985 film festival. She died four months later.” Cannes is where batons are passed.

The surprising thing, in reflecting on Binoche’s subsequent career, is how little Cannes figured in it for another 15 years – during which time she assumed French national treasure status, while cracking Hollywood in a way few of her equivalently revered compatriots have managed.

In the same year as Rendez-vous, New Wave master Jean-Luc Godard tapped her for a supporting role in his film Hail Mary, before she aligned herself with a newer guard of French auteur in mad young genius Leos Carax. She took the lead in his unnerving 1986 Aids allegory The Night Is Young – Berlin snagged the premiere of that one – and for his 1991’s visionary, extravagantly budgeted Paris vagrant romance Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, once dismissed at home as an out-of-control folly, though it would find an adoring cult following soon enough.

The director and his star were romantically involved during the three years of filming, but Binoche wisely ended the relationship, having read Carax’s doomed ending for her character – lying dead on the bridge while her lover was thinking: “Did she ever love me?”

Last year, she had no film at Cannes but made headlines at the festival, anyway. At the opening ceremony, she got weepy again, in happier circumstances than in 2010: selected to present Streep with an honorary Palme d’Or, she broke down as she delivered a besotted, endearingly loopy tribute: “You changed the way we look at women in the cinema world. Love conquers all, you have conquered us.”

The image of the two women tearily holding each other on stage was the enduring one – a demonstration of pure awestruck fandom from Binoche, now a veteran and an icon herself.

Whether acting, dancing or politicking, Binoche has long been a champion for avant garde art. When she presided over the Berlin competition in 2019, her jury handed the top prize to Israeli director Nadav Lapid’s challenging, caustically anti-Zionist satire Synonyms. There she described her feeling of political responsibility as jury president: “We will use our knowledge, our experience and our awareness to judge what are the best films necessary for the present time and the future. What feels human is political.”

It remains to be seen whether she brings that same principle to Cannes this year, but we can expect adventurous choices on her part, in collaboration with a diverse jury that includes, among others, American actors Halle Berry and Jeremy Strong, Indian director Payal Kapadia and Congolese documentarian Dieudo Hamadi.

Somewhat remarkably, given Binoche’s habit of collecting A-list auteur credits, not one of the 21 directors in competition at Cannes this year – who range from veterans such as Lynne Ramsay, Panahi and the Dardenne brothers to newer kids on the block Ari Aster and Julia Ducournau – has worked with Binoche before. (Perhaps she’ll be compiling a shopping list for future collaborations.)

It wouldn’t be out of character for her to champion one of the competition’s relatively unheralded wild cards, including Japan’s Chie Hayakawa or Germany’s Mascha Schilinski.

In a recent interview, Binoche observed how Cannes altered the course of her career four decades ago: “I discovered how this big film reunion can change someone’s life in a few days. It is the place of great discoveries, a mirror of our minds and hearts of who we are.”

As a discoverer now, rather than the discovered, she’ll again want to make her mark.

The 78th edition Cannes film festival will take place 13-24 May

Binoche’s first leading vehicle casts her as a young stage actor caught between the dubious affections of two men in Paris. The film’s sexual politics haven’t aged terribly well – while Binoche recently stated in 2023 that she was a victim of sexual misconduct on set – but it’s not hard to see why she made an instant impression. Critics have reached for the word “luminous” too often with regard to Binoche, but she’s positively fluorescent here: impossibly youthful and breakable, but with that contained, melancholy quiet that has always read a little older than her years.

Perhaps the most austere and upsetting work in Binoche’s filmography, Michael Haneke’s devastating psychological thriller casts her and Daniel Auteuil as the picture of upper-middle-class French privilege and social remove:media couple Anne and Georges Laurent, terrorised with unnerving surveillance videos that gradually point to a past injustice. It’s Auteuil’s character who carries the weight of the film’s scrutiny, but Binoche is superb as a woman caught between doubt in her family and looking the other way. Her two Haneke collaborations brought out a brittle control in her acting: it’s a shame they haven’t worked together more.

A leading light of Taiwanese new wave cinema, director Hou Hsiao-hsien made his first European-set film with this gentle Parisian domestic portrait – a homage of sorts to French director Albert Lamorisse’s famous short The Red Balloon. Binoche, sporting a choppy bottle-blond e hairdo, stars as a hard-up puppeteer and single mother who hires a Chinese film student as her son’s new nanny, and a close bond develops between the three. It’s the very picture of breezy Paris bohemianism, with Binoche in an unusually relaxed, offbeat register.

Binoche had previously worked with Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami, making a brief appearance in his experimental 2008 film Shirin, but they collaborated two years later on a full-blown fusion of both their talents: an elliptical romantic drama of reunion and regret, lit from within by her bittersweet performance as an antiques dealer who might or might not have a past (and a future) with  British writer. Her Cannes best actress win was wholly deserved.

One of the head-scratchers of Cannes’s 2017 edition was how Claire Denis’s lovely, weary-wise midlife romantic comedy was rejected for the festival’s official selection, instead showing up in the independently programmed directors’ fortnight sidebar. It houses one of Binoche’s warmest, funniest performances as a divorced artist working her way through one imperfect relationship after another, accepting her independence in the process. It’s a film for anyone who’s shuffled between hankering after love and celebrating their solitude, with Binoche a beacon of hope for middle-aged lonely hearts everywhere.

Tran Anh Hung’s gently paced, lavishly sensory love story between a 19th-century gourmet and his loyal longtime cook might be the most intricately detailed and instructional foodie films ever made, with extensive screen time given over to detailed culinary preparation and ritual, with mouthwatering results. But it’s the palpable emotional bond between the two lead character s that gives it soul, abetted by the real-life history between the stars playing them: Binoche and Benoît Magimel had had a five-year relationship beginning in the late 1990s, producing a child, and the film crackles with the worn chemistry of lovers who have come back around to friendship.