Berlin Review: Isabelle Huppert In ‘About Joan’
deadline.comFêted and eternally fabulous, Isabelle Huppert is this year’s Berlin Film Festival honorary Golden Bear laureate for her life’s work so far, with an accompanying program of some of her most celebrated films.
About Joan is her newest, screened out of competition as a Berlinale Special gala (though Huppert was unable to make the trip to Berlin after testing positive for Covid).
That is quite a lot of weight to carry for Laurent Larivière’s slender story about the malleability of memory. That subject in itself, broad and deep as it is, may be too much for this rickety film to bear, even with Huppert’s flickering brilliance in the title role.Joan first speaks to us across the dashboard of her car, telling us who she is: a successful publisher, the child of an Irish father and a French mother who gave her an Irish name nobody in France knows how to pronounce.
She used to think she knew the story of how her parents met on a ship, that she even had a photograph of them together on deck, but she now realizes she imagined that picture and really, she has no idea.
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