“Visiting Hours”, an interview with the actress Isabelle Huppert

May 28, 2024

Patricia Mazuy's "Visiting Hours" ("La Prisonnière de Bordeaux") describes the unlikely pairing of two prisoners' wives with very different backgrounds

"Visiting Hours", an interview with the actress Isabelle Huppert Bénédicte Prot

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The one and only actress Isabelle Huppert tells us more about her character and her work in Patricia Mazuy’s “Visiting Hours” (“La Prisonnière de Bordeaux“, singular…), selected in Cannes as part of the 56th Directors’ Fortnight.

“What made me willing to do the film in the first place was the prospect of working again with Patricia Mazuy, with whom I did, some time ago [in 2000], Saint-Cyr, which was in Cannes, in the Un Certain Regard sidebar, and which I think was a really great film. Over the past years, I have liked her films a lot, especially her last one before this one, Bowling Saturn, which I think is a small masterpiece. There is something very sharp and very harsh in her vision of the world which makes her stories very interesting, whether they are more dramatic, or more comedic, or whatever, but there is also something a bit… let’s say very much political, in the wider sense of the word of course.”

“In the end, it is a tragicomedy, but throughout the film, it is, very often a comedy, which I did not expect actually. I did not expect people to laugh as much as they did at the screening, last night, but there is also something very dark in the ending, which owes to the irreconcilable aspect of this relationship, because they represent two different worlds.”

About the very first sequence : “There is something abstract that runs throughout the film, in the narrative… well abstract maybe the word is a bit strong, but you do go from one scene to the other without an explanation between the two scenes. And there is something in the writing which is very modern, very cinematic, from the very beginning…“

Plot

Two women cross paths in the waiting room of a prison where each has come to visit "their man". One is a wealthy bourgeois woman, the other, a mother of two children who has to work hard to put food on the table. The former, Alma (Isabelle Huppert) who lives much closer to the prison, offers the latter, Mina (Hafsia Herzi), a room in her large house. Is this a friendship, a romance, a pact? The film follows the unlikely pair, their dreams of female emancipation, and the reverberations of the gulf that separates them. Nothing is black-and-white here, nor half-hearted.

Written by: Bénédicte Prot

Directors' Fortnight

Guest

Isabelle Huppert

Film

Visiting Hours

Festival

Festival de Cannes

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