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Madame Binoche Will See You Now

From her role as Coco Chanel in a thrilling new series to her latest—rather complicated, très French—turn as an international cinema sensation, bringing charisma to complexity is what Juliette Binoche does best, onscreen and off.

BY MARISA MELTZER AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY SEBASTIAN KIM • STYLED BY JONATHAN HUGUET

Getting to Juliette Binoche’s house feels a bit like walking into a fairy tale. Off an average Paris street, you head behind a nondescript building and across a cobblestone courtyard before going through a doorway and into an enchanted-­looking garden with a winding path that leads to a freestanding stone house. Once inside, things are no less bewitching.

Binoche greets me wearing sweatpants and a V-neck sweater, but she still has the magnetic pull (not to mention luminous skin and tight jawline) of a movie star. A wood-burning stove crackles, her cat Bacchus naps in front of it, and we sit at a low coffee table dotted with bowls of lychees, chocolate, madeleines, and a pot of herbal tea.

It’s fitting to see the star—who has appeared in nearly 100 films, from art house fare like Olivier Assayas’s 2014 Clouds of Sils Maria to popcorn movies like Godzilla, and who won an Oscar for The English Patient—laying out this kind of spread, considering her latest project, The Taste of Things, may be one of the most hunger-­inducing movies in history.

“It’s about passion,” she says of The Taste of Things, which is France’s Academy Awards entry for Best International Feature Film. But she could be talking about her entire career. “Sometimes I just throw myself into it.”

The Taste of Things is based on a cult 1924 Swiss novel by Marcel Rouff, about a gentleman gourmet chef named Dodin Bouffant living in a Loire Valley château. The movie is a sort of prequel to the novel, focusing on Dodin, played by Benoît Magimel, and Eugénie (Binoche), who is his cook, muse, occasional lover, and friend. Director Tran Anh Hung won the best director prize when the movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last May, and the film has been making waves on the awards circuit ever since.

Binoche was cast in the movie first, and when she heard Magimel had been offered the role of Dodin, she didn’t think he’d take it. The two actors had a history: They met in 1998 while making the French film Children of the Century (about another love affair, this time between the novelist George Sand and the poet Alfred de Musset). Binoche and Magimel had a daughter, Hana, together, but the couple never married, and they separated in 2003. They are co-parenting but have not, to put it politely, stayed close.

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