This Sunday, March 19, 2023 on France 2, actress Isabelle Huppert will be responsible for translating wiretaps to the silent brigade in the film La Daronne. Did the 69-year-old French actress learn Arabic for this role?
In the movie La Daronne (broadcast on Sunday, March 19, 2023 at 9:10 p.m. on France 2), Isabelle Huppert plays a French-Arabic legal interpreter, employed by the narcotics squad and responsible for translating wiretaps. But it doesn’t stop there: her character, Patience Portefeux, in her fifties, is inspired by one of these phone calls and eventually becomes a dealer herself under a false identity in order to pay for her mother’s nursing home. Of course, the one who knows all the tricks of the dealers will make it difficult for the police… This feature film, released in 2020, signed Jean Paul Salome was nominated for the César 2021 for best adaptation (of the novel La Daronne by the writer Hannelore Cayre). Isabelle Huppert, convincing in the title role, leads this bittersweet thriller and surprises by seeming to master Arabic to perfection. So, did the actress learn to speak this language for the purposes of the film?
Isabelle Huppert helped by a coach
Despite her status as an icon of the seventh art (and not of fashion according to internet users who categorized her outfit at the last Cannes Film Festival as “Bonhomme Cetelem”), actress Isabelle Huppert sometimes still had to be coached for some of his roles. To create the illusion that you speak the Arabic language in the film La Daronnethe actress learned all her lines phonetically in just a few months. “She learned syllable by syllable, intonation for intonation”, explains director Jean-Paul Salomé, proud of the work of his actress and his coach. Known as a huge hard worker and an actress open to new challenges, Isabel Huppert did not count his efforts to memorize this language, which is not his own. During the filming of the movie Frankie in Portugal, the actress learned her lines in Arabic between takes or as soon as she had a break. “We played her dialogues for Moroccans who told us she spoke well, with a little French accent”welcomes the director.
The sequel under this ad
Isabelle Huppert, a multilingual actress
In addition to a multiple cesarean section, Isabel Huppert is also a multilingual actress. As for the purposes of its role in La Daronneshe learned the basics of the Arabic language, the French star played in the Russian language in the film by Igor Minaiev Floods in 1994. It must be said that during her childhood she had taken Russian lessons at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Paris. Isabelle Huppert speaks good Italian and English and has proven it in other cinema releases (Rosebud, The Story of Piera, Sleeping Beauty…). “It is clear that I feel most comfortable in French, it is still my mother tongue”jokes the actress assignedabout his many roles in other languages.