When Bérénice Bejo was young, her sister sat her down and told her: "Bérénice, I love you. But you take up too much room." This was not a hint about bodyweight. The sisterly advice was more to do with Bejo's roving arms, a tendency to flail when she spoke. She was, and still is, a great gesticulator.
"It's the Argentinian in me, I get enthusiastic, I use my body," the 36-year-old tells me, the day after her new film, The Past, has premiered at the Cannes film festival.
Born in Argentina, Bejo grew up in Paris and is best known for charming audiences around the world as Peppy Miller in the Oscar-winning black-and-white movie The Artist. We're having tea on the roof of a seafront hotel, where the view of Cannes's yacht-filled harbour has been temporarily obscured by black drapes and fairy lights. It is the afternoon, but later the terrace will become a small nightclub – a small, cold nightclub. Cannes is wind-struck today, the yachts are roiling and Bejo, wearing a pretty but insubstantial dress, has a blanket around her shoulders. It falls free, of course, whenever she needs to emphasise a point and the gesticulating takes up.
It's not strange to see her emote like this, physically. At the end of 2011, when for a few months The Artist dominated the cultural agenda, the world fell for Bejo without her saying anything. As Peppy, she played a young star in 1930s Hollywood who embarked on a love affair with Jean Dujardin's older matinee idol, George. Dujardin got a famous line of dialogue at the end but Bejo didn't utter a word. Her skill was in conjuring up the character through movement – the twitches and shivers, a wild tap dance, those unforgettable, face-crunching winks. The film was a hit, winner of enough Oscars and Baftas and Globes to ballast every one of the upset yachts in Cannes.
The very first scene in Bejo's new work, The Past, directed by Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, involves more mime. As with his previous drama, A Separation, The Past explores the dismal end stages of a marriage. Bejo's character, Marie, meets her estranged husband, Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa), at the airport, where they are temporarily divided by thick security glass. They greet each other with sad eyes, a few mouthed words. It's a powerful sequence, though one Bejo might have watched a few too many times. At the film's premiere the night before, she tells me, she fell to daydreaming. "I was sitting there thinking, 'OK, so that's me silent but in colour. Next scene it'll be me in colour – and speaking. It's like I'm slowly working my way towards the cinema of the present. What next? 3D?'"
The Cannes premiere made front-page news in Le Monde and most of the early reviews have been positive ("Unimpeachably authentic"; "Real intellectual sinew"). Bejo is hotly tipped for the best actress award. The walls of the hotel terrace we're on have been mounted with big photographs of French actresses, Marion Cotillard, Audrey Tautou, Mélanie Laurent, the domestic A-list, and it's this sort of company The Past ought to push Bejo into. She says she never thinks ahead. "I have no idea of my career [plan], no vision. I go wherever life takes me."
It is the familiar dodge of an actor. "I don't like to think about handling a career. I like to think of meeting a new role, a new director…" It's only when she relaxes into our conversation that some mischief creeps in. She makes a joke about sleeping with directors for work, which is bold, given she's married to the man behind The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius. And for all the easy talk about letting acting roles come to her, she says she'd zip Hazanavicius and their two young children into a suitcase to go wherever, immediately, if it meant getting to make a film with Ang Lee.
When she and Hazanavicius got married, she says, the 46-year-old already had two daughters from a previous relationship, but she wasn't unburdened herself. "I had a dog," she deadpans, "a very big dog." She then casually brings up smoking marijuana with her dad as a teen. She is both charming and slightly baffling.
The Farhadi film is unusual in that the director made it in France, with French dialogue, without being able to speak the language himself. Bejo and her co-stars learned to take instruction through a translator. After the success of A Separation, Farhadi had become too prominent to be comfortable in Iran and arranged to make his new film abroad. Something similar brought Bejo's family from Argentina to France in the late 1970s. "My parents are very intellectual people. They were running away from a dictator [Jorge Rafaél Videla]. And they wanted to go somewhere where the culture would be stronger than, you know, the military. It was going to be either Paris, Berlin or New York, and they chose Paris for the same reason that Asghar chose Paris – because of the past of the city. The energy of its culture. When you are in Paris you feel Louis XIV."
Her parents, she says, were intellectuals. Cinephiles. She watched musicals, westerns and Wilder with her father and by the time she was a teenager Bejo had decided she wanted to act. The big wound, in this period, was a part she almost got in a Gérard Depardieu film. "I bought a red dress to go to the audition. I was pretty close, maybe the last three. I remember hanging up the phone and crying. Why? Why? Why? But you grow up. You learn it's part of the job."
By the time she was 28, there had been a few too many of these learning opportunities. She'd had a small role in a Hollywood film, A Knight's Tale, and erratic castings in France, but Bejo was broke, sleeping on her sister's couch. A script came through for a film called OSS 117, an adaptation of a popular French novel about a goofy spy. The spy was to be played by Jean Dujardin. Michel Hazanavicius was directing. "I didn't want to go to the audition," Bejo remembers, "French comedies weren't my thing." She flicked through the script, though, and found it tickled her. "You know," says Bejo, "if I didn't get that part, I wouldn't have my kids?" She laughs nervously.
The filming of OSS 117 must have been a blast. Bloopers, posted online, shows Dujardin and Bejo collapsing in laughter, scene after scene, while Hazanavicius issues gruff-voiced cries of "Action!" from behind the camera. Bejo became great friends with Dujardin. She has said her relationship with Hazanavicius stayed professional until shooting was finished, at least until the edit. Then they fell in love. It prompts another wonderful offbeat disclosure. Bejo offers, unbidden, a list of the similarities between Hazanavicius and her father, pondering how this might have factored in the attraction. "It's very interesting. They like the same kind of movies. And Michel's got a beard and my dad's got a beard. And my dad's name is Miguel, which sounds like Michel. I maybe have to go and lie down on a psychologist's couch about this."
When OSS 117 came out in France it was a commercial hit, but it didn't do a lot for Bejo. Employment quickly dried up again. "After OSS 117 I made one movie, called Modern Love. Then I got pregnant and didn't work for a long time, maybe a year and a half, two years. That was hard. Because you're just a… " She searches for the English word. "In French we say une femme au foyer, a woman at home, you're not working. I'm an actress, I don't want to be at home. Yeah, for a few months, maybe, but not for two years." She says she tried to remain upbeat. OSS 117 and a sequel had made good money in France, giving Hazanavicius some clout. He was now pursuing a long cherished project, a silent movie.
Hazanavicius wrote the character of Peppy – full of pep – with his wife in mind. "Michel changed my life. And I think I changed his life too. Writing the part in The Artist for me, it was a gift. But I think I was really good in the movie, I tried my best. I gave back what he gave me." Harvey Weinstein, who bought the film at Cannes in 2011, contributed too. With his usual blend of contentiousness and cash outlay, he steamrollered The Artist to awards-season glory. Hazanavicius won an Oscar. So did Dujardin.
Bejo points out that her own nominations, for an Oscar and a Golden Globe among others, didn't result in any wins. "I was the loser," she says bluntly. "So after a while I said [to myself]: Right, I'm going to watch Michel win. He had so much fun. He met so many people, so many famous actors and producers and directors. It was fun to watch him living that."
They seem to be a couple who pick up each other's slack like this. Directly after The Artist, Bejo was approached about a supporting role in Populaire, a comedy about secretaries in 1950s France. In the wake of Peppy, a lead, she felt too grand to take the smaller job, a feeling that lasted 24 hours, she says, until Hazanavicius called her "dumb". He also passed along Asghar Farhadi's mobile number, picked up over a chat at the Oscars, so that she could text the Iranian and say nice things about his script while she was still hoping to be cast. Bejo, for her part, helped keep Hazanavicius's head out of the clouds when The Artist got big.
"I was the one who was more grounded during the Oscar season. I had just given birth. I knew I was going to lose every award. And that, I think, helped us to stay normal. It's important not to feel too cute. Do you know what I mean? Not to like the image of yourself too much. It's a joke. It's play."
Fifteen months on, a sense of normality has returned. Before flying out to Cannes, Bejo and Hazanavicius were moving house, switching arrondissements in Paris for somewhere bigger. "Thanks to The Artist," she says, "the banks have been very nice." Has there been any bad stuff? Bejo considers it for a while and arrives, unexpectedly, at autographs.
"When The Artist came out, Michel would sign autographs, always smiling, always nice. I had to work on it. Now I'm pretty cool. Because I've realised that if you say yes, your life goes on. But if you say no, you keep the no the whole day. You feel like an asshole."
She says she's taking a break to be with her family after Cannes. Three months off, no acting, an untroubled femme au foyer for a while. Then in August she'll start shooting a new film. It's written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius, which worked out well the last time.
Populaire is in cinemas from 31 May. The Past will be released in early 2014
