The same song connects the careers of a heavyweight champion, a great soul singer, the Queen of Pop and a German actress like a chain across decades and continents. “The Greatest Love of All” was composed for “I, the Best”, the biopic about Muhammad Ali, the most famous boxer in history, which Ali himself starred in in 1977, and in this first version it was sung by George Benson and made popular. Eight years later, without the opening article, Whitney Houston included it on her debut album and it topped the music charts. Finally, in the middle of the film, it sings Inés, the character in Toni Erdmann who brought fame to Sandra Hüller (Suhl, 45 years old), a German executive working in Bucharest who is completely destabilized by her father’s visit. Until then, Inés behaves like another gray manager focused on pointless work. And at a house party, with her father at the piano, which he has placed between a rock and a hard place, Inés begins to sing “Greatest Love of All”, thereby letting her boredom set in. Also for Hüller, who was well known in her country and to some extent on the road at festivals, nothing stayed the same. Today he is a star of European cinema and has starred in two of the most discussed films of the last Cannes festival, where they also won the two most important awards: Anatomy of a Fall (Palma d’Or) and The Zone of Interest ( grand prix). Huller ruled on La Croisette.
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“Interestingly, being in two films at Cannes relieves me a lot of the pressure of defending one,” he told the promotion during the festival. Although her dramatic weight is greater in French “Anatomy of a Fall” – and she even responded that she would prefer to be credited if she were for that film – than in British “The Zone of Interest”, cared Up to that point, Hüller was equally concerned with both films, the closing ceremony itself. , which he attended along with his colleagues and the director Justine Triet on the red carpet of the first, entered the Palais des Festivals, reached his seat and exited the side of the access stairs , to reiterate, the little walk with filmmaker Jonathan Glazer’s team. In the days before, both French and British attended screenings of Huller’s other films, and the German interpreter escaped to a Club Zero session of Jessica Hausner, the director she worked with on Amour Fou (2014): the actress has cinema always defined as an act of solidarity.
Huller, in white, at the beginning of “The Zone of Interest”.
In both films, her characters benefit from her talent for portraying cold women, emotionally remote from audience sympathy, sullen and sometimes enigmatic. Huller, who had previously worked with Triet in El reflejo de Sibyl (2019), bringing to life a dictatorial filmmaker who could even use the betrayal of her lover, the lead actor, for the benefit of the film they were making, initially agreed to the character Triet suggested to her for Anatomy of a Fall, that of a writer who devours everything that happens around her to write autofiction, and who blames her husband’s death (the overthrow of the title). becomes. It took her much longer to sign with Glazer, because in The Zone of Interest she brings to life Hedwig Höss, the wife of the commander of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, a woman fully aware of her husband’s work and happy is privileged to have her family raised in their midst and that he lives undisturbed by the noise made by the Nazi killing machine on the other side of his garden wall (the crematorium ovens, the screams and the gunshots). “In the end I realized that it was very cowardly to hide behind the fact that I hated her so much that I couldn’t play her,” she explained at Cannes, explaining her interest in working with a star auteur director she won over, even though she only would have done three films before.
For The Zone of Interest, Glazer hid numerous micro-cameras around the set to give the actors freedom of movement while forcing them to stay in character for four weeks in the summer of 2021. “It was funny because I felt that freedom.” “An actress, but I don’t think my character ever was: Someone who is carried away by hate will never be free,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “I’ve managed to identify with her doubts about her looks and her insecurities about her social class.” Her Sandra (her name is like her) from Anatomía de una caída is something else, although Latin audiences feel very differently about her as the Nordic audience: She is a woman who doesn’t smile all the time, who emphasizes the facts and looks at her emotions in private. Though you can send her to jail, “She’s not cold, she just doesn’t waste time being nice.”
For Hüller, Glazer is an “extraordinary human being with tremendous vulnerability” who, despite her formal precision, refuses to contain her cast, and Trier, who she has been friends with since their second job together, was filmed last summer. “an open mind, a fascinating energy” that he admires “because of its freedom”.
But this whole wave was created in 2016 with Toni Erdmann. Huller was born in 1978 in Suhl, Thuringia. At the age of 18 he moved to Berlin to study acting at the renowned Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts. In 1999 he returned to his region and performed at the Jena Theater for two seasons. And when she was finished, she traveled to Switzerland, where she worked at the Theater Basel until 2006. There she began her film career, and in a big way, in Requiem (2006), with which she won the award for best director at the Berlinale of that year, thanks to her role as an epileptic girl destroyed by religious fanaticism and ignorance of her surroundings . In her professional career she received all sorts of congratulations with “Über uns das All” in 2012, but it was Toni Erdmann from Maren Ade and her successful stay in Cannes that brought Huller to great renown and the award for best actress in European cinema, while he personally decided to live in Leipzig. “I lose myself in cities like Berlin or Munich. This size scares me, it makes me unhappy. The good thing about theater is that after work you go home and sleep in bed.”
Justine Triet with the Palme d’Or, accompanied by Sandra Hüller and actors Antoine Reinartz (left) and Milo Machado Graner, in Cannes on Saturday, May 27. Associated Press/LaPresse Daniel Cole (APN)
Since Toni Erdmann, despite his desire for a quiet life, has been making films of all kinds across the continent: the third part of the German comic saga Fuck you, teacher! (2017), the gloomy A la vuelta de la esquina (2018), the astronaut drama Próxima (2019) or another vision of Empress Sisi in Sisi & Me (2023): “I don’t discriminate against supporting or main characters. I’ve had unpleasant experiences on set throughout my career, and the hardest thing for me is when people don’t respect you, lie to you, or steal information to manipulate you because they don’t trust you. That is hard.”
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