By Heart review: Behind the scenes with Isabelle Huppert, Fabrice Luchini

Isabelle Huppert is one of the most revered actors working in the film industry right now. She is also, quite possibly, the most inscrutable. In a roundtable for actresses conducted a few years ago, the French actor spent no extra second to say that none of the characters she has played in her career has changed her thinking about life. Her performances over the years are markedly playful, yet never the same: always reveling in that disregard for conformation. (Also read: All That Breathes review: This Oscar nominee from India is visually stunning doc on need to co-exist)

In Benoit Jacquot's modest new documentary By Heart (Par Coeurs), the camera catches Huppert beyond the context of her art. Here, she is clearly aware of the camera waiting to catch her off-guard, but will she reveal a little more than she chooses at plain sight? This exercise in documenting an actor behind the scenes, in her most private moments of preparation fuels this smart little film that played at the 2023 Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival. Alongside Isabelle Huppert, By Heart also observes the renowned French stage and film actor Fabrice Luchini, as he recites Nietzsche and then leaves backstage- creating a double bill of an actor's encounter with the text in the process. Both of them are there for the productions at Festival D’Avignon in 2021. Its fascinating to witness.

The stage is set at Avignon in the summer of 2021, where Huppert is on her way for a production of Chekov's The Cherry Orchard. In the car, she is warming up to the screenplay. Yet there is one line in the text that she can't seem to process and move forward. "The disaster is so unbelievable, I know longer what to think," she repeats impulsively in French. "I'm all at sea." She says that it has never happened so that she has been stuck in one line in the text like this, unable to fathom how to navigate its position in her head. Sharp and exacting in her words, Huppert walks around with a hidden sense of enquiry into the place, people and the character. We see her settle in a makeshift space behind the stage, take a quick nap in between, and get ready along with her castmates- constantly making sure she has got her lines down by heart.

In contrast, there's Fabrice Luchini with whom Jacquot's lens stays for a long sequence when he reads out Nietzsche with a full swing in his voice, always engulfing the meaning and subtext is his astounding delivery. His reading is commanding and passionate. Even when he is not reciting those lines, Luchini is thinking about them- always in his performative element, tirelessly talking about the question of acting, the importance or Alcestis' anger and the process of submission to the text. "The sentence is not a sentence. The sentence is a state to reach," he implores. Jacquot's camera throws light on this all-encapsulating need and hunger of an artist who is always striving to perform with a startling sense of truth. There's discipline and discomfort that keeps the actor going.

Moving ahead with an unadorned, breezy pace with handheld camera movements, By Heart offers a rewarding treat for cinema lovers acquainted with the work of these two thespians of their craft, as they bring a sense of individualism into every part they take on. But you don't really need to know these people to respond to their preparation, anxieties and last-minute mistakes. In one scene Huppert dances her way on the stage with her hands moving up and her head held high, circling round in small steps around the same spot. Is she trying to reclaim her sense of the place? Is she aware of the camera? She will never really tell.

By Heart steers clear from trying to paint an orderly, introspective snapshot filled with elaborate discussions on craft and preparation. The camera is a fly on the wall, never telling you where to look and stand. It just watches, with an accustomed familiarity of a distant friend, in the presence of which these two committed artists prepare and perform. There's beauty and terror in their artistry, but also a total devotion and fearlessness that keeps them chasing that unruly text, until it fits just right into their artistic puzzle.