Elsa Zylberstein

In I've Loved You So Long (2008), Kristin Scott Thomas has the part everyone remembers: the sister out of prison after fifteen years, saying almost nothing. Zylberstein has the harder job. Léa talks, because somebody has to, and because she wants back a sister she lost when she was too young to be told anything. The scene the film is known for is at the swimming pool. The one that got to us is earlier, in a classroom, where Léa stands in front of her students and finds she can no longer teach. Nothing has happened to her in that room. It has all happened at home, and Zylberstein lets us watch it arrive a week late.

That is roughly what she does: she plays the person whose feelings are inconvenient to the plot and makes them the point. It was there from the start. Her first part of any size was Cathy, a prostitute, in Maurice Pialat's Van Gogh (1991). Then Mina Tannenbaum (1994), a friendship drama she carried, and the costumes of Farinelli the same year. Through the late nineties and 2000s she went back four times to Raúl Ruiz, who is nobody's idea of an easy evening, and turned up in Little Jerusalem (2006). The Claudel film is the one we have reviewed and the one to start with, because it is the clearest case of a part built around her rather than handed to her. She knew Claudel's novels before she knew him, and it was over coffee that she suggested he write a film.

She works hardest when the director demands most. "I'm obsessed with directors," she has said, and it shows both ways. Under Pialat, Ruiz and Claudel she is exact and unshowy. In the comedies that fill out the later years, Plan de table (2012) and Claude Lelouch's Un + une (2015), she is charming and underused; those films want her to be likeable, and she can do that without trying, which is the problem. The notices have been saying much the same for years, and we do not think they are wrong.

The late turn is towards history. She spent years developing Simone: Woman of the Century (2022), Olivier Dahan's film about Simone Veil, and plays the woman across nearly four decades. We have not reviewed it and will not judge it here, except to note that it is the first time she has made the film happen rather than been cast in it. A dancer since childhood, she tends to prepare through the body: the walk, the voice, the accent. That suits a biopic. Whether it suits what she is best at, which is the small domestic collapse nobody else in the scene has noticed, is another matter. Start with Léa; after Scott Thomas, she is the reason that film is worth your evening.