The ageing, the immature and the ageless: Juliette Binoche’s midlife roles since 2010

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on Juliette Binoche’s career during the past decade, a period running from her mid-forties to her mid-fifties, and suggests that her roles in this period can also be read as a subtle commentary on the typecasting of middle-aged women in cinema and thus serve to challenge audience expectations. While some of Binoche’s roles from this period represent ‘aspirational’ figures of metropolitan intellectuals, others present her as an enfant terrible reluctant to ‘grow up’. The bittersweet tone of many of these films – and particularly the comedies – belies their sometimes flippant or high-concept premise in order to demonstrate the real pressures faced by middle-aged women in their professional, romantic and family lives. Finally, however, Binoche’s self-aware and often self-deprecating persona also leads her to accept roles that play on cultural stereotypes of the older, particularly childless, woman as intimidating or witch-like: hence the Frankenstein figures of scientists with dubious ethics or the ‘mad’ sculptor Camille Claudel.