BERKLEY, CA.- Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive presents the exhibit Isabelle Huppert: Passion and Contradiction through June 30. “I like to take unusual characters and make them as normal as possible,” Isabelle Huppert (b. 1953) has said, “to play with the contradiction. To try to understand how the good and the bad live together.” This great French actress's understanding of contradiction is embodied in the pair of roles that brought her to international stardom: the simple, fragile heroine of The Lacemaker (1977), and the amoral murderess of Violette Nozière (1978). (The latter film began a fruitful, decades-long collaboration with director Claude Chabrol, just one of the many major auteurs—Jean-Luc Godard, Joseph Losey, Maurice Pialat, Bertrand Tavernier, and Michael Haneke are others—whose films she has graced.) Huppert has crafted a remarkable series of performances marked by self-possession and a fierce, guarded intelligence. Always willing to take risks, she has played more than her share of debased or even monstrous characters, but has invested them with an unsentimental awareness. She says, “I don't try to sympathize with my characters, I just try to empathize with them. Try to understand. . . . I think I do this in films that are made in the shape of a question, not in the shape of an answer.”

The San Francisco International Film Festival presents a screening of Huppert's new film Gabrielle at PFA on April 28. On April 30, Jean-Claude Carrière, cowriter of Every Man for Himself and Passion, will be present for an SFIFF screening of Belle de jour.