Like many film fans, I used to imagine that Juliette Binoche would remain frozen, a moving picture of ethereal beauty and youth, raw innocent sensuality, just as she was in The Unbearable Lightness of Being opposite Daniel Day-Lewis, another actor whose fresh face seemed destined to be locked in amber. As the younger love of Day-Lewis’s randy doctor, she didn’t burn in an all-consuming way – Lena Olin as the mature lover was the forest fire scorching the plains – instead Binoche glowed with a light that alerted us to the woman she was on the verge of becoming. That is not to say she was girlish, in that It-Girl fashion hyped by studios and the industry machine to attract teens today. No, Binoche had already stepped off the edge, but had somehow been captured in the exact moment before the start of the fall.

By the next frame, in Louis Malle’s Damage, she was icy-hot. Cool and alluring enough to drive Jeremy Irons to distraction, compelling this married doctor and rising politician to abandon all sense of practicality and decorum (along with his sanity) to rush into a passionate affair with his son’s girlfriend, this still young, but far wiser version of Binoche. How she had changed in that instant, a mere four years between The Unbearable Lightness of Being and here, but she had, and more importantly, she used this siren’s call of hers to entice us to follow her every move and adaptation.

As much as I might think of those two earlier roles, it is Krzysztof Kieskowski’s Three Colors: Blue that makes me dream of Binoche. Just a year after Damage and now she is the embodiment of a haunting sadness following the loss of her husband and child in an accident, a wounded woman struggling to survive and yet, as the music of the reunification of Europe stirs within her, she becomes a transcendent blue, renewed and enduring. I wonder sometimes if I can separate the music of this movie, which stands as one of the few scores in my iTunes library that I can recall as effortlessly as my favorites from Prince (“How Come You Don’t Call Me Anymore?”) or Miles Davis (Sketches of Spain), from the images of Binoche alone, floating in those eternally blue frames.

I could go on, but I find it best to stop now – before her Oscar-winning turn in The English Patient, which showcases Kristin Scott Thomas, joining Binoche as representatives of women of the moment – and fast forward through the rush of images she has recorded of her womanly evolution onscreen. Scanning to the present, and the double feature of Binoche offered up at the festival here in Munich. Clouds of Sils Maria, from Olivier Assayas, debuted at Cannes, and on this next leg of its festival run, grants us the opportunity to reminisce with Binoche a bit. She stars as Maria Enders, an international actress at the peak of her fame, tempted by an emerging young director to return to the play that catapulted her career, over 20 years ago, except, the idea is for her shift roles. At the time, Enders was the alluring protege who seduces her boss, eventually driving the seemingly successful woman to suicide. Now, Enders would end up playing the boss to a hungry ingenue (Chloe Grace Moretz) who has become a bad-girl on the celebrity circuit, while playing vapid cardboard super heroines in blockbuster movies. Behind the scenes, Enders finds herself caught in a familiar cycle with her assistant (Kristen Stewart) that adds another reflection for the veteran actress.

It was inevitable, while watching Clouds of Sils Maria, to not consider the notion of Binoche facing a similar set of circumstances. A hotshot indie name is given the chance to do whatever they want by a bottom-line driven studio dependent and they pitch a remake of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, somehow, someway reconfigured, updated to fit the current geopolitical pulse and wow, wouldn’t it be perfect to cast Binoche as Olin’s more experienced lover. It is the kind of scenario Binoche likely faces during interviews – “what character of yours would you be interested in revisiting?” – but here at the festival, the answer comes not in Assayas’s film.

Instead, inquiring minds would have been wise to track down Binoche in Erik Poppe’s  A Thousand Times Good Night, where as Rebecca, a top war zone photographer, she wanders fearlessly through some of the most morally challenging events – unfathomable genocides, preparations for acts of terrorism – bearing witness without becoming an active participant. That is, until she captures the final rites of a female suicide bomber in Kabul, going so far as to ride in the van with the woman as she is transported to her target. Rebecca exits the van just before the woman detonates her bomb, but is wounded and forced to return to her family – loving husband Marcus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and daughters Steph (Lauryn Canny) and Lisa (Adrianna Cramer Curtis) – who press, in their own ways, for her to leave the danger behind.

Ignoring, for a moment, the ethical considerations of following the last minutes of a suicide bomber, the idea of Rebecca surrendering her job is the kind of issue most male photographers don’t struggle with in the same way she does here. This is a question of gender roles, age-old rules of mothers being there, women far removed from the adrenalized rush of conflict, but Rebecca dares herself (and goes so far as to announce to her family, bosses, and potential suitors for her talents) to walk away.

This is the kind of role actresses, mature actresses dream of, but rarely get in Hollywood. This is the story of a woman driven by passion and righteous anger to seek to right wrongs, in some way, to have an impact on the world without working through the agency of a man. A Thousand Times Good Night is Rebecca’s story, not Marcus’s, and her relationship with her daughters, especially the elder of the two, passes brutal but necessary lessons on.

And the answer to that early question, the one about Binoche retracing the “unbearable lightness” of her past. Well, that’s a fool’s errand, and Binoche proves in each of these films that she is nobody’s fool. Binoche and a host of other phenomenal actresses like Kristin Scott Thomas, Tilda Swinton, and Cate Blanchett are still in the process of showing us what we should be talking about when we speak of women onscreen. (tt stern-enzi)