1951: The women of "La Ronde"

We're revisiting the 1951 film year in the lead up to the next Supporting Actress Smackdown. As always Nick Taylor will suggest a few alternatives to Oscar's ballot.

Each writer here at The Film Experience has our checklist of cinematic fetishes. Those qualities we look out for whenever we watch a film, a list of glories we breathlessly recite the way Nicole Kidman talks about going to the movie theater in her Nobel Prize-winning AMC ad. Cinematography so elegant the camera moves like silk. Depictions of sex that recognize it as a real human connection, something that can be playful and disatisfying, and is worth as much consideration in the buildup and the comedown as when it’s happening. Beautiful, immaculately assembled people gliding around gorgeous locales and gleefully succumbing to their libidos. Actresses fulfilling roles that are equal parts familiar archetypes and fleshy, hot-blooded individuals (you know I’m a sucker for this one). And on that note, let’s kick off our look of 1951’s alternate supporting actresses miniseries with a belatedly imported joint from France herself: the lovely ladies of Max Öphuls’ sexy, ephemeral La Ronde...

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Simone Signoret @ 100: A love letter to a great actress

by Cláudio Alves

This week, we've been celebrating Simone Signoret's centennial, an unlikely sex-symbol of the midcentury and an even more atypical Oscar champion. Previously, Daniel wrote about the French actress' brief appearance in La Ronde, and Eric paid tribute to what's probably her most excellent vehicle, Casque d'Or. Now that it's my turn to wax poetic about Madame Signoret, I find myself in a bit of a conundrum. You see, even before the centennial celebrations, the actress had been on my mind. Though, it wasn't because of a film she starred in or individual performance. Watching the animated film No. 7 Cherry Lane, I can't help but think that no one will ever be able to create a more beautiful homage to this star than director Yonfan…

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Simone Signoret in "Casque d'Or"

by Eric Blume

Today is the centennial of French Oscar-winner Simone Signoret.  Daniel paid lovely tribute to her last night for her brief role in 1950's La Ronde.  Her next big film, director Jacques Becker's 1952 movie Casque d'Or, made her a star six years before Oscar embraced her with Room at the Top. Becker captures all of Signoret's magic in this turn-of-the-century Paris underworld story.  It doesn't hurt that he has his cinematographer, Robert Le Febvre, lighting her in a gloriously celestial way throughout the movie...

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The Furniture: A Brief Tribute to Simone Signoret in a Brief Role

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber, is a series on Production Design. 

Thursday marks 100 years since the birth of iconic French actress Simone Signoret. But how to celebrate? By my count, she was in three films nominated for Best Production Design. One of them, Is Paris Burning?, I covered way back in 2016. Another, Ship of Fools, also nabbed Signoret her second nomination for Best Actress. Unfortunately, it’s something of a bloated and maudlin mess.

That leaves us with La Ronde, a film made shortly before Signoret really burst into international stardom. She’s barely in it, playing a Viennese sex worker who bookends the meandering narrative. Even so, it’s her movie star quality that makes the whole thing work - that and the magic of Jean d’Eaubonne’s Oscar-nominated production design, of course. The film is Max Ophüls’s adaptation of an Arthur Schnitzler play, a circular jaunt that slips from paramour to paramour...

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Isabelle Huppert, French Legends, and Oscar Stats

by Nathaniel R

Are you biting your nails yet? No prediction for this year's Best Actress shortlist can come without some degree of "I could be getting this very wrong!" nerves. We've been Oscar watching for a long time and it's genuinely never looked this open this late in the game (with the possible exception of 2003 but for nearly the opposite reason). If Best Actress is not a five-way lock up by now (and it often is) it's usually at least settled but for a minor battle between two women for the "just happy to be nominated" fifth spot. This year is different. Seven women remain strong and precursor supported and virtually any combination of five names seems possible as long as you include both Emma Stone (with the reliable boost of leading a Best Picture frontrunner) and Natalie Portman (with the reliable boost of Oscar's deep-deep love for mimicry).

We always believed that Isabelle Huppert was a genuine threat for a Best Actress nomination this season for her phenomenal star turn in Elle. It wasn't so much that Elle, in which she plays a video game enterpeneur who becomes obsessed with her rapist, was a a fresh look at an old star (against type) or right in Oscar's wheel house (a dark comedy about rape. LOL, no). The appeal instead is that in Elle is a suffusion of everything that's special about Huppert: her superior intellect, fascinating opacity, tortured psychology, and her daring sexuality. Oscar would be wise to pounce in a year where the media has been this celebratory about her unique place in the cinematic landscape. 'It's time!' feelings don't generally come around all that often for true iconoclasts or women of a certain age. She's both so they must act now.

Binoche, Cotillard, Adjani, Deneuve

Here's another far more superficial but still excellent reason why Isabelle Huppert needs to be nominated...

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