A TIFF Cinematheque retrospective dedicated to the career of the actress Sandrine Bonnaire seems a little premature, somehow Bonnaire’s been making movies for nearly three decades, but at the age of 43, her career is far from over. Think of this as a mid-point celebration, then – and an excuse to get some really great movies back on the screen.
Agnès Varda’s Vagabond, for example, which kicked off the Bonnaire retrospective at the Lightbox last night (and repeats tomorrow at 6:30 pm). Or Maurice Pialat’s A Nos Amours, which introduced Bonnaire to moviegoers around the world – and which screens tonight at 9 pm. Or Jacques Rivette’s Joan The Maid, a five-and-a-half-hour epic featuring one of Bonnaire’s most stunning performances as the conflicted but committed Joan of Arc. (That screens Sunday at 3:30 pm.)
Claude Chabrol’s La Ceremonie (Saturday at 5:30 pm repeats March 18 at 9 pm) pairs Bonnaire with Isabelle Huppert in a bone-dry tale of working-class servants undermining a wealthy family Patrice Leconte’s Monsieur Hire (Monday, 6:30 pm) casts her as an eminently corruptible innocent who falls into Michel Blanc’s unstable orbit.
Bonnaire’s reunion with Pialat, Under The Sun Of Satan (Thursday, 6:30 pm), is perhaps less deserving of “stone classic” status, but still awfully compelling, with the 19-year-old Bonnaire utterly convincing as a pregnant sinner who challenges Gérard Depardieu’s driven cleric morally, spiritually and physically.
The retrospective also includes the Toronto premieres of André Techine’s 1987 North African allegory Les Innocents (Tuesday, 9 pm) Philippe Lioret’s 2001 romantic comedy Mademoiselle (Wednesday, 6:30 pm) and Caroline Bottaro’s 2009 Joueuse, which casts Bonnaire as a chess enthusiast who enlists a cranky doctor (Kevin Kline) to teach her the finer points of the game. (Released in the U.S. as Queen To Play, it’s still in limbo here.)
The real discovery in the series, screening tonight at 6:30 pm, is Bonnaire’s 2007 documentary Her Name Is Sabine. It’s a portrait of Bonnaire’s autistic younger sister, Sabine, contrasting camcorder footage of Sabine as a withdrawn but capable teenager with footage of the shambling, depressed and socially incompetent woman she’s become after two decades of treatment, including a five-year stay in an institution from which she emerged 30 kilos heavier and dulled by overpowering medication.
Her Name Is Sabine is the opposite of a celebrity vanity project this is a brave, unflinching and profoundly personal work by someone who’s decided not to hold anything back, the better to tell her sister’s story and raise awareness of her condition. It also suggests that Bonnaire has a hell of a career ahead of her as a filmmaker, if she ever decides to quit her day job.
