By Pauline Adamek
“Josephine allowed me to go through so many emotions,” Juliette Binoche tells FilmInk of her character in Endless Night. “It is rare in one character to confront those extremes. Acting in this film was like being on a soul diet, but also a real diet. It felt like I was peeling away, day by day, all the possible layers of protection that an education can give. It was not comfortable, but the responsibility of such a challenge gave me real joy.”
In Endless Night, Binoche plays the real life figure of Josephine Peary, the wife of famed American arctic explorer, Robert Peary. The film follows Josephine’s long and arduous search for her husband after she becomes tired of waiting for his return in Greenland. Plunging through the ice and snow under the guidance of a local (Gabriel Byrne), Josephine ironically eventually finds herself sharing shelter with Allaka (Rinko Kikuchi), a young Inuit girl who is carrying the child of the far-from-faithful Robert Peary. “When the film starts, Josephine is full of herself, but at the end, she’s full of Allaka,” Binoche laughs of her character’s transformation.
It’s a typically against-the-grain choice of role for the French-born Juliette Binoche. Incredibly, it was nearly thirty years ago that Binoche, the daughter of an actress and a sculptor, first captured men’s hearts in The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, before bringing her irresistible bedside manner to The English Patient, for which she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1996. She has since played many objects of affection, but also a striking series of engaging, unusual, flawed, and multi-layered women too.
And while her central character in Endless Night might be waiting in vain for the husband who has abandoned her, it’s the changes that ripple through Binoche’s Josephine that make her so interesting. “The film is not trying to tell a feminist story, nor to be feminist,” the actress comments of the film’s underlying themes. “We want to allow the audience to experience a descending into one’s self in following the story of these two women. One of the reasons that I wanted to act in this film was to see a woman – with all her needs, expectations, education, and will – facing a world that she was not prepared to face. Her husband’s lover, the wilderness, hunger, the feeling of abandonment, and the cold…finally at the end, she’s able to love her worst enemy.” And it certainly helped that that enemy was played by Japanese actress, Rinko Kikuchi, the star of Babel and Pacific Rim. “She was lovely,” says Binoche. “Rinko is the easiest actress that I’ve met. We enjoyed being filmed together.”
Their work together forms the nucleus of the film, but that has come under some attack, with historians and pundits questioning the film’s veracity, and criticising its looseness around the treatment of the Peary relationship. “The core of the real story is in the film,” Binoche asserts. “A film is a creation, and a vision…it is not a documentary. This is a very powerful story. It says that we have an urgency to change and to be less greedy. We’re not the conquerors of the world, and we should be in harmony and more respectful to people and nature. Also, the storyline shows a descending into one’s self; Josephine is losing her need for power and her greedy desires through her encounter with Allaka. Loving Allaka, and wanting to protect her after wanting to kill her after despising her, is quite a journey in Josephine. We all have to learn that we’re weak, and that it is not only okay but actually necessary to recognise it.”
The one driving the film’s themes was Spanish-born director, Isabel Coixet, the singular voice behind such striking works as My Life Without Me and The Secret Life Of Words. “Isabel was insisting for me to play in Endless Night,” Binoche explains. “She said to me that she’s going through a period of time where she only wants to do essential films that nourish her soul. I’ve admired Isabel for a long time. She’s interested in all arts, and she’s open to the world. She lives without conventions, and most importantly, she cares about people. It might not be the perfect film, but it is coming from a truthful place. And that is perfect. Isabel trusts actors, and she films like a painter, freely. She’s not a conventional director. She doesn’t like to tell you what to do. But she’s very intuitive. When I asked her to do a new last take, she was always open. That’s a mark of trust and intelligence, and in those conditions, an actor can give the best.”
The film’s shoot, however, was not without its challenges. “The weather was changing all the time, but not the clothes,” Binoche laughs of the ten-day shoot in Norway. “I’d filmed in Canada in really cold temperatures – minus 30 degrees! – a few years before, and those kind of experiences stay with you forever. In Norway, I loved seeing the wide horizons, and I needed to print them in my memory in order to project them in my imagination during the studio shooting in Bulgaria, where it was so hot! Having such a false environment is not always helpful for acting.”
And what’s next for the always-in-demand Juliette Binoche? “I worked with [director] Rupert Sanders on Ghost In The Shell, with Scarlett Johansson last Spring in New Zealand,” the actress replies. “And recently, I did a French comedy called Mamans, where I played a mother who doesn’t want to grow…very different from Endless Night!”
Endless Night is in cinemas now.
