Crazy night for Isabelle Huppert at the Lumière Festival

Friday evening, in an overheating Palais des Congrès in Lyon, the actress received the Lumière Prize and gave a beautiful speech. Here it is…

Friday evening in Lyon, Isabelle Huppert received the Lumière Prize from the hands of Alfonso Cuaron. She succeeds Wim Wenders. This is the third French personality to receive this trophy that Thierry Frémaux likes to describe as “Nobel Prize for Cinema“, after Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve. The ceremony took place in an overheating Palais des Congrès, full as an egg. The great organizer of the event and director of the Lumière Institute has a sense of celebration. The guests are first passed through the traditional photocall Their faces retro-projected on the big screen of the room against a background of Ennio Morricone spaghetti, incite delirium. , Anthony Delon, James Franco…

Then the music suddenly changed. “He There is no season for music to live, basically, no season for sound to live (…) Eeeeeeeeeettttt…. you sing, sing, sing, this refrain that pleases you…“Isabelle Huppert emerged, galvanized by the 80’s hit declared the anthem of the evening (Sandrine Kiberlain will do a piano-voice version)… We are told over and over again, “Crazy Night” is Huppert’s favorite song. Forgotten the cerebral actress, make way for the queen of the dancefloor…

Huppert, Delon, Lelouch… The highlights of the 2024 Lumière Festival

Between clips praising the richness of a festival which aims to be as heritage as it is people while remaining good-natured, we saw Camelia Jordana restore its letters of nobility to Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” which we thought was definitely lost to the football cause, Julien Clerc whispering his hit “My preference” or even Alfonso Cuaron say all the good things he thinks of Isabelle Huppert. And then, the Chabrolian actress unfolded a little paper and delivered this:

“Usually, I learn other people’s texts by heart… Well, in principle. My words to me, I prefer to read them to you. Tonight I receive a prize. I’m not going to hide it from you, I really like receiving prizes. The prizes, when you think about it, are a bit to calm turbulent artists, but also to tell the person who receives it that they have not worked for nothing. So seen like that, you understand why I like receiving awards. Because giving them to me and receiving them, I hear what people say to me: “Isabelle, you did your job well. You didn’t work for nothing…” Work is important. Is it really a job? Can we really call it that? That’s another story.

So tonight I get a prize. Not just any one. This one is very special because it is called: the Lumière Prize. It’s not nothing. It’s not just because this award is named after the genius inventors of the same name – oh so predestined. Before them, there was painting, since them, things have changed.

So here I am in full light. Light says a lot of things. We say light years, we say: “at the speed of light”. Light goes quickly. It’s time, space. But there is no light without shadow. There is no shadow without light. What brings us all together here is this strange invention, this subtle alchemy between light and darkness, between what we see and what we guess. An infinite play between the visible and the invisible, between reality and dreams, between noise and silence. It is this interstellar journey that we experience with passion. This infinite space of discoveries, of questions which manages to capture fragments of life, to reveal mysteries, to give substance to invisible emotions.

With cinema, I have traveled the world but I have not explored the issue. No matter how much I continue to do it, I never stop saying to myself: “What else do I have to say? » Actually, I don’t know. What I know is that a screen shows and hides. It says what we don’t want to say and it doesn’t say what we want to say. It protects and it exposes. It raises questions. Not a smoke screen, no, rather a case which treasures all those I have met, who have indelibly marked my journey, with whom I have established a virtuous pact and who has never is lacking and without which, as they say, I would not be here. But if we say it, it must be true. They all gave me the most precious gift. They looked at me. It’s better than loving. Love is blind sometimes, it’s well known. No, no, they just looked at me. And that’s what cinema does. The cinema is watching us. It helps to live, to be looked at. Cinema also keeps memories alive. It’s important, memory and memories…

For example, tomorrow I will wake up and this bright moment will be a wonderful memory forever. That doesn’t stop us from thinking about the future. The past is good, but the future is not bad either. The past is not the future. But tonight, what I love most of all is here and now. It’s this joyful and wonderful moment, full of emotions where I say to you all, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.”