The face of Audrey Tautou is singular. She is the perfect gamine—waiflike and mischievous. Her nose slides down a sloping hill, and her eyes are roundly inquisitive. Although in ways she resembles Audrey Hepburn, Tautou is not a kitten; she is a clever mouse.
In person, Tautou is strikingly small, at hardly more than a hundred pounds. Seated before a sold-out house of admirers at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Saturday evening, she would raise an eyebrow and pinch her lips into a coquettish smile. She had arrived for the American première of her new film, “Thérèse Desqueyroux,” which will soon be distributed for wider release, after a run in France and Belgium last fall. Florence Almozini, the program director of BAMcinématek, told her afterwards, “You give a lot of performances that are delightful.”
“That’s my strength,” Tautou winked. “I make fun of myself. That’s my principal occupation.” She charmed the crowd easily, but then stared out at them, as if amazed by her own effect. “This impressive audience looks like the wave of a tsunami,” she beckoned down to her seat in front of the screen. “You should come take a look.”
Tautou seems to perceive a richer vision of the world than the rest of us can see. Most actors use their eyes to reveal an inner life to the viewer, but Tautou always appears to be scanning the exterior and directing us to follow her glances. Indeed, at the end of “A Very Long Engagement” (2004), as she faces her lost-and-found love, the narrator recounts that she “folds her hands in her lap and looks at him.… She looks at him. She looks at him.” The longer we watch Tautou, the more we come to understand all that is framed in her sight, and the more we aspire to observe as she does.
Acuity is her character’s peculiar endearment in “Amélie,” the movie for which she is best known and most adored. That film came out in 2001, but it cuts a construction-paper heart out of the memory, earnest and dreamy, in brightly tinted Paris. Her other roles since, less memorable on the whole, have carried resonances of that shy, yet crafty, charm. And as she continues to set her gaze outward, we might wonder whether it’s because there is nothing for us to see within.
“Thérèse Desqueyroux” offers a more penetrating look into the titular character than we have seen from Tautou’s past performances. As Thérèse, she is confused, jealous, and vulnerable; in “Amélie” we saw her fantasies, and here we witness her nightmares. The story, set during the nineteen-twenties, centers around two wealthy families who own adjacent plots of land in the vast pine forests of southwest France. As a young girl, Thérèse is close friends with the neighbor’s daughter, Anne Desqueyroux, and a few years later, the son, Bernard, asks for her hand in marriage. Thérèse, cognizant of her prescribed course in life, hopes that marriage will steady her unsettled thoughts. But the intimacy Thérèse experienced with Anne cannot be replicated with Bernard; she tries to endure a suffocating marriage with the aid of letters, walks, and cigarettes. It’s no use. In desperation, she attempts to poison her ailing husband with arsenic. When, at the end of the story, he asks her why she did it, she hesitates. His every move is predictable, his focus and faith unwavering; she wonders whether he would ever do something and not understand the reason.
“What I like about this character is, it’s not that easy to know yourself,” Tautou said. “Some people at twenty years old know themselves. Others need twenty more years. I’m in this category.”
The movie—the final project of the French director Claude Miller, who died last spring—is the second adaptation of François Mauriac’s 1927 novel, of the same name, to be brought to the screen. (The first, released in 1962, starred Emmanuelle Riva, who most recently appeared in “Amour.”) Annie Miller, the late director’s wife, said that while making the film, Tautou was “his Stradivarius.” The romance of Tautou’s prior work has given way to a harder persona—more grown-up and weathered—which feels refreshingly evolved.
“I’m kind of superstitious and not very self-confident,” Tautou said. “So when a person I admire gives me a part, I think it must be a mistake. ‘Me? Are you sure?’ ” She added, “If I don’t have any self-confidence I don’t have any deception.” But Tautou, cast in the movie as a “dry and hard and sometimes poison-like woman,” escapes from the pool of light that typically surrounds her. Her porcelain skin transforms into sickly pallor; her keen eyes weary. The only thing Thérèse could see was the darkness in her own mind, and, finally, in watching Tautou, we could discern it.
Having come out of the shadows as her natural self, Tautou playfully brushed off any discomfort with her brooding part. Dressed in all black, with her hair cut short, she was asked after the screening if she was a smoker before she played Thérèse. “I wasn’t. But I have become one,” she said. And then she gave another wink. “I was a little.”
