Despite proving resistant to typecasting, Isabelle Huppert has been closely bound to French cinema's sustained exploration of sexuality since even her earliest on-screen appearances. Her first performances trafficked in fantasies of virginal purity, consigning her largely to the role of erotic curiosity. We might recall, for instance, her appearance in Bertrand Blier's Les Valseuses/Going Places (1974) as the 16 year old Jacqueline, a carefree adolescent who becomes entangled in the film's coarse culture of libertinage, or her subsequent role as the suggestively named Brigitte, the reclining nude whose sunbathing we intrude upon in the similarly bucolic setting of Yves Boisset's Dupont Lajoie/The Common Man (1975). Following her cinematic breakthrough, which is typically understood to have occurred in the late 1970s with the successive releases of La Dentellière/The Lacemaker (Goretta 1977) and Violette Nozière (Chabrol, 1978), her protagonists have only grown in complexity and psychosexual depth. If, from our contemporary vantage point, we might situate Huppert among French cinema's most enduring objects of desire, then many of her roles in post-millennial cinema demand us to clarify exactly what it is that we mean by endurance, addressing not only questions of time, periodization and historicity (durée) but also the more implicit notions of bodily performance, strain, and vulnerability that are also suggested by the term.The sheer breadth of Huppert's filmography means that to trace a given theme across her oeuvre is, by extension, to follow the grain of French cinema over the last forty years. However, while this body of film yields a rich and compelling repository, a number of factors confound typical markers of time or indices of historicity -not least her oft-remarked 'agelessness' and the affective ties that her characters entertain with younger men (L' école de la chair/The School
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