I don’t think I can quite agree with the young man sitting near me at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Saturday night who enthused to his companion, “She’s even better on stage than she is on screen!”
After all, the “she” in question was Isabelle Huppert — perhaps the most daring and most cinematically skilled actress of our time — on her closing night in Robert Wilson’s staging of “Quartett,” an adaptation by German playwright Heiner Muller of the same material that inspired “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.”
On screen, Huppert has the sort of near-mystical rapport with the camera that you only see every so often, in actors as diverse as Dirk Bogarde and Monica Vitti. This is a gift that transcends acting technique and conventional standards of “beauty” — it’s the uncanny sense of knowing how to project thought and emotions to a movie camera.
Huppert is not a marvel of versatility in terms of playing a huge range of different people (ala Meryl Streep) — she simply has the ability to convey with her face almost everything we need to know about the women she plays in movies.
Over the past decade, Huppert has pushed herself by showing a willingness to explore the dark side of human behavior with seemingly no inhibitions or fears of what 
moviegoers might think of her playing such deeply disturbed characters as the title role in “The Piano Teacher” (2001).
In “Quartett” Huppert showed that she has the more grandiose acting gifts that are needed to push a character across the footlights in a live performance. Although, “character” is a tricky term when it comes to the work of avant garde pillar Robert Wilson, who uses performers as figures in his striking stage pictures.
Huppert was listed in the program as Merteuil — the part Glenn Close played in the Stephen Frears film “Dangerous Liaisons” and Jeanne Moreau tackled in Roger Vadim’s “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” — but in Wilson’s eccentric and mesmerizing interpretation the actors keep switching roles.
At moments, Huppert was possessed by the spirit of Valmont, her erotic ally/enemy with whom she plots the sexual conquest of virgins. The actors were also called upon to briefly revert to non-human behavior (Huppert as a lewd frog was quite a sight to behold, let me tell you!)
Huppert received fabulous support from Ariel Garcia Valdes as Valmont and the strikingly attractive and very precise Rachel Eberhart and Benoit Marechal as the objects of the older couple’s twisted sexual game playing.
“Quartett” was only Huppert’s second stage production in New York City (she made her debut four years ago in another challenging BAM production, the 90-minute suicide note “4.48 Psychose”).
It would be the easiest thing in the world for Huppert to visit New York City in a charming comedy or traditional drama in which she could conquer critics and audiences alike with very little heavy lifting. How wonderful that the star decided we were up for something far more interesting, something in the spirit of the most demanding work she has done on screen, but conceived purely for the stage.
