While it would be difficult to imagine Catherine Deneuve browsing a Manhattan coffee cart’s baked goods, it’s actually the first matter of business for fellow French screen icon Isabelle Huppert whenever she has time to squander in New York City.
“I love bretzel,” she says charmingly. “It’s an experience, just eating a bretzel when you get to New York. That’s New York for me.”
Between her visits to MoMA and strolls through Bushwick’s Maria Hernandez Park with her son (more on that later), Huppert, 70, is in the city to introduce select opening-weekend screenings of Jean-Paul Salomé’s La Syndicaliste (English title: The Sitting Duck), in which she plays the whistleblowing Irish trade unionist Maureen Keany. She also recently made an appearance at Film Forum, where she introduced a new restoration of her 1981 crime-comedy Coup de Torchon, directed by the late Bertrand Tavernier.
Christmas Day brings yet another opening: The Crime Is Mine, helmed by Huppert’s frequent collaborator François Ozon. As a kooky, Gloria Swanson–esque screen siren, Huppert is the comic foil to costars Nadia Tereszkiewicz and Rebecca Marder, who play a younger actor and her unrequited-in-love lawyer friend embroiled in the murder of Huppert’s ex-flame, a film producer.
Sporting flaming red hair à la Sarah Bernhardt—or, in New Yorker lingo, Grace Coddington—Huppert channels the fast-talking screen heroines of 1930s and ’40s screwball comedies for what may be her vampiest performance yet. “Instinctively, I decided [my character] had to talk very quickly, like a machine gun, killing words,” she explains.