"In a very complex way, things have improved in the dramatic field. Before you had the good and the bad and you couldn't mingle them. Now it's more ambiguous"
About this Quote
Huppert is praising a messier kind of progress: drama has gotten better precisely because it stopped policing the border between virtue and vice. Coming from an actress famous for inhabiting women who refuse to be likable on schedule, the line reads less like a neutral observation and more like a quiet manifesto. The “very complex way” is doing work here; she’s not claiming a moral upgrade, she’s naming an aesthetic one. Complexity is the new standard of realism, and realism is the new authority.
The subtext is a critique of older storytelling ethics, where characters were sorted into clean categories so the audience could relax into judgment. That model flatters viewers by making them jurors rather than participants. Ambiguity, by contrast, keeps the viewer implicated: if good and bad “mingle,” your own impulses mingle, too. You don’t get to exit the theater with a verdict; you leave with a residue.
There’s also an industry context tucked in. As film and TV moved toward psychological interiority - antiheroes, compromised heroines, unreliable perspectives - actors gained permission to play contradiction without being punished by the narrative. Huppert’s career maps onto that shift: European art cinema’s moral murkiness gradually seeped into mainstream prestige storytelling, where “complex women” became marketable rather than suspicious.
Her final word, “ambiguous,” is almost a dare. It suggests drama isn’t improving by becoming kinder or clearer, but by becoming harder to consume as moral comfort food.
The subtext is a critique of older storytelling ethics, where characters were sorted into clean categories so the audience could relax into judgment. That model flatters viewers by making them jurors rather than participants. Ambiguity, by contrast, keeps the viewer implicated: if good and bad “mingle,” your own impulses mingle, too. You don’t get to exit the theater with a verdict; you leave with a residue.
There’s also an industry context tucked in. As film and TV moved toward psychological interiority - antiheroes, compromised heroines, unreliable perspectives - actors gained permission to play contradiction without being punished by the narrative. Huppert’s career maps onto that shift: European art cinema’s moral murkiness gradually seeped into mainstream prestige storytelling, where “complex women” became marketable rather than suspicious.
Her final word, “ambiguous,” is almost a dare. It suggests drama isn’t improving by becoming kinder or clearer, but by becoming harder to consume as moral comfort food.
Quote Details
| Topic | Movie |
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