“You make me want to love again. To feel the need. To lose control. To become obsessed.”
Meryl Streep and Juliette Binoche have never acted in a movie together, even though one is the Juliette Binoche of America and the other is the Meryl Streep of France. Why is that? I do feel like the CIA is probably responsible. Perhaps the respective governments in question fear these women’s combined actorly energies would be far too powerful for the everyday cinemagoer, blown back as he might be in his hypothetical seat, radicalized and subsequently refusing to go to work, eventually dismantling the decaying infrastructure that barely hoists up the western world. I’d like to imagine that the movie Juliette and Meryl would make would be like Heat, except with far more facial expressions and only marginally less abject death (this is a French film, after all; Juliette doesn’t often do Hollywood). Juliette is a French assassin hired to kill renowned architect Meryl Streep’s husband (played by Martin Short), and Meryl agrees it’s probably sensible (he deals arms), and afterwards they team up and expose the sinister goings-on at an international croissant factory. Or Meryl is a famous American actress who comes to town on a book tour and Juliette, who has been fired from her job as a journalist for making up fake movies in articles, becomes obsessed with her and stalks her across the French countryside.
Anyway. We may never know for sure what’s been going on vis-à-vis this non-pairing, but we got a small preview of a possible better world at the opening ceremony of Cannes, where Juliette presented Meryl with the Honorary Palme d’Or and both eventually ended up weeping and holding each other. (This was after — and I cannot stress this enough — a French pop star named Zaho de Sagazan sashayed across the Palais and personally serenaded jury president Greta Gerwig with David Bowie’s “Modern Love” in tribute to her street-dancing scene in Frances Ha, and before we all watched the opening-night film, Quentin Dupieux’s The Second Act, in which the interminably rich vein of “cancel culture” is “skewered” in a “movie” about the “artifice of filmmaking” that uses various narrative devices like breaking the fourth wall to vaguely gesture at fears about AI and political correctness destroying the industry and ends with a several-minute tracking shot of the dolly that was used to film said tracking shot.)
meryl streep and juliette binoche onstage at cannes tonight opened some kind of interdimensional portal pic.twitter.com/lAgT8G3HWQ
— rachel handler (@rachel_handler) May 14, 2024
Back to Meryl and Juliette. Juliette, hair slicked back and wearing a red gown, kicked off the interaction with a long, visibly emotional speech about how Meryl “has nourished us.” She stared Meryl in the face as she complimented her for many minutes: “When I see you on the screen, I don’t see you. I see your movement that is passing through you that we call ‘acting,’ but in fact is something else. It’s a connection you make by your presence. Letting beauty come to you. A place where intention, though, energy, love, and truth are flowing through you all at once. Where does it come from? Loss? Love? Were you born like this? What was your dream?” Juliette directed these questions at Meryl with an intensity that did not feel rhetorical. “I don’t know,” she finally conceded, “but what I know is that there’s a believer in you. A believer that allows me to believe.”
Juliette went on to specifically compliment Meryl’s various roles, calling her an “international treasure,” then took a fascinating swerve into something resembling lust. “In falling in love, I fall in love with you,” she said, giggling charmingly. “You make me want to love again. To feel the need. To lose control. To become obsessed.” She referenced Sophie’s Choice, then Out of Africa and its “‘don’t move’ scene, one of the sexiest moments in cinema history.” Meryl stood next to her throughout, wearing a calming white gown and glasses, making a series of grateful and stunned and moved and chuffed and bashful facial expressions and occasionally fanning herself, which is to say, being Meryl Streep.
Midway through, Juliette got so choked up that she had to pause and collect herself. “You changed the way we look at women in the cinema world,” she said, as Meryl reached out and held her hand. “And also helping us to look at ourselves differently.” The audience went wild. Meryl touched Juliette’s shoulder, comforting her during her own award speech. Juliette turned bright again and brought up Mamma Mia and called Meryl “Mama.” “Love conquers all. You have conquered us,” she finished, beaming. Then she began to yell passionately. “Congratulations to the Super Trooper herself, the Dancing Queen, and now the winner of the honorary Palme d’Or, Meryl Streep!” They hugged for a long time, but not too long, lest they chemically merge. Meryl took the mic.
“Juliette Binoche. La Belle Binoche. You don’t know —” now Meryl had to pause and collect herself. “When I found out you were going to present this to me, I went crazy. Because for the last two weeks, I have been immersed in your great artistry.” To be specific, Meryl was binging Juliette’s Coco Chanel series The New Look and watching The Taste of Things, which sent her straight “to bed, because I was crying so hard when you died.” This was all “completely coincidental” at the time, Meryl explained; she didn’t yet know Juliette would soon be onstage holding her. “I know what it takes to come out and do this, and I’m very grateful,” she added.
Meryl then turned to the audience and thanked the festival (which she last attended 35 years ago, and where she won Best Actress for Evil Angels) and her agent and her makeup and hairstylist, then proceeded to debate the correct pronunciation of Cannes. “Cannes, Cannes, Cannes. Americans, we say Cannes. We think it’s fancy to say Cannes. But that’s wrong. Anyway, I don’t know what I was saying.” Same.
Meryl concluded by likening the experience of watching her own career montage to “looking out the window of a bullet train, watching my youth fly into my middle age right on to where I am, standing on the stage tonight.” Three decades ago at her first Cannes, she explained, “I was already a mother of three and I was about to turn 40, and I felt that my career was over. That was not an unrealistic expectation for actresses at that time. The only reason I’m here tonight is because of the very gifted artists with whom I’ve worked, including Madame La President.” She pointed at Gerwig. “Incidentally, that was my daughter she was beating up in Frances Ha in the first clip,” she said, referring to Grace Gummer. “I’ll speak to you about that later.”
Meryl thanked the audience for not getting “sick of my face,” and she and Juliette hugged again then officially opened the festival while holding hands. They both immediately left to do a heist.
