Anouk Grinberg is radiant, powerful and free in Louis Garrel’s new production, The Innocent. We find in this tender and inspired comedy the face of the one who shone so much in the cinema, as in Thank you life, directed by Bertrand Blier, father of his son. The 59-year-old actress had been rare on the screens in recent years and is making a comeback. Because we could also see it recently in Deception by Arnaud Desplechin and The Night of 12 by Dominik Moll. In Releaseshe confides in her reunion with the 7th art, her sweet and beautiful meeting with Louis Garrel for whom she is full of praise, but also looks back on her complicated past.
Facing her fear of returning to film sets, Anouk Grinberg rediscovered a taste for exhilarating cinema with The Innocent by Louis Garrel. She had moved away from it to devote herself to other, more inspiring projects. The theater has always kept a place of choice throughout her career, but she has also given importance to writing and painting. A taste for art that was not obvious. As a child, she had other, complex aspirations. “As a child, I wanted to be a good sister. Not because I believed in God, but because I already had the feeling that in order to preserve his secrets, it was better to escape power relations and seduction, not to be in the heart of the city. I come from a family of leftist intellectuals who considered my faith to be so ridiculous that it atomized it. So I left my parents at a very young age, but not to live with the nuns“, explains the actress in Release.
I was a kind of walking sun to make everyone forget, especially myself, that nothing was wrong.
From her childhood, the daughter of the writer, playwright and former CEO of Gillette Michel Vinaver, whose real name is Michel Grinberg, does not keep a very idyllic memory: “As a child, my life was not very comfortable, but I did everything so that no one knew that I was living on a pinhead. Above all, I wanted no one to ask me the slightest question that could make me tumble. I was a kind of walking sun to make everyone forget, especially myself, that nothing was wrong.“
His words about his mother, sick, are poignant, as they always include his child’s gaze: “Periodically, I saw men in white enter the house to take her and take her to the asylum. She came back from each of her stays a little worse off and depressed. My father was away. Predators were on the prowl and no one had taught me how to defend myself from them. I thought that was life.” Using the metaphor of Forrest Gump who starts running so fast so as not to let life destroy him, Anouk Grinberg has slipped body and soul into the profession of actress, with the so much we know about her.