Violent Femme

Sylvie Testud is the best actor you’ve probably never heard of—yet.

America has no real equivalent to Sylvie Testud. We just might have to embrace the gutsy French androgyne herself—like that would be such a bad thing. Imagine Jennifer Jason Leigh actually winning Oscars for Single White Female or Last Exit to Brooklyn. Then imagine her learning fluent Japanese or mastering the clarinet in effortless displays of Streep-like immersion. There are also Testud’s three published memoirs to consider, comic riffs of self-deprecating wit that bear comparison to peak-period Woody. Oh, yes; Testud did direct once—a short. She used a fake name.

“Sylvie could be the French Lillian Gish,” enthuses Serge Bozon, the director and cowriter of Testud’s latest, La France, via e-mail. “Even for young directors like me, who are never sure of what they want, she was ready to explore and take risks.”

Bozon’s eerie WWI drama—both an atmospheric period piece like Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man and, oddly, a musical—opens Friday 11 at Anthology Film Archives. In it, Testud plays Camille, a soldier’s lonely wife who, disguised as a boy, falls in with a random company while in pursuit of his whereabouts. “On our first day of shooting, I was improvising a simple scene with no dialogue in which Camille falls down and is picked up,” Bozon recalls. “In the very first take, Sylvie gave me a gorgeous, innocent yet searing and childish smile that I will never forget.”

“My approach to acting can be likened to little kids playing games,” laughs Testud, 37, from her home in Paris. “Intense and concentrated. But then, suddenly, if they don’t like the game anymore, it’s okay. They’re just going to switch to another one. It’s like that for me. If something doesn’t go exactly as planned, I will just…change. And hope that the next game doesn’t suck so bad.”

Testud herself has a three-year-old son, Ruben, who she says is scarily like his mom. “He’s very autonomous,” she reports. “He has his own life, uses everything at his disposal. He plays my piano. He paints like me; he looks like me.” Testud may seem like she’s affecting a faux-naive sense of wonder, but it feels closer to real curiosity and an actor’s hunger to mine completely from life.

“It may have something to do with her background: part French, part Italian, part Jewish and a lot of other parts,” says Film Forum’s Bruce Goldstein, who worked with Testud on the U.S. release of 2000’s Murderous Maids, her breakthrough thriller based on France’s infamous Papin sisters, which earned its star her first César Award (France’s Oscar) of two to date. “It’s one of the most intense performances I can think of, playing an absolute monster,” says Goldstein. “She was so convincing that I wasn’t prepared for the funny, charming and completely charismatic woman who stepped off the plane at JFK,” he adds.

“Yeah, I’m not the scared type,” Testud says. “But I can’t really say that out of boasting. It’s a preprotected profession, so I never feel in danger. Rather, when I take on a role, I need to create a new set of reflexes, another rhythm entirely, to make the character complete. I flee the boring sides of my job. I would quit if I started to feel that—and I do very easily.” (After Murderous Maids, Testud took nearly a year off, dodging endless requests to play violent characters, like modern-day Parisian thrill-killer Florence Ray, “just written to blow up the city,” the actor recalls.)

Still, the nuanced, impossibly rich roles—like Testud’s comic turn as a shamed Belgian toiling at a Japanese corporation in 2003’s Fear and Trembling (her second César)—aren’t exactly plentiful. Meanwhile, she looks toward Hollywood and has fantasies; there are plenty of actors she admires (“Got a few hours?” Testud quips, mentioning Cate Blanchett and Lili Taylor). And she recently saw her La Vie en Rose costar Marion Cotillard win an Oscar.

“That was just unbelievable—shocking,” says Testud, currently starring in a biopic of her own, about controversial author Françoise Sagan, released in France last month. “I wouldn’t say no to an Oscar. But it would have to be the right part, nothing skimpy. I prefer to be a guest at the party rather than the organizer.” And, like the party guest who captures all the attention, Testud has pegged her own appeal.

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