Portraits of Binoche

Films, paintings, dance, poetry ... Juliette Binoche looks well on her way to becoming a national treasure in the UK

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Michael Haneke and Juliette Binoche, as painted by Binoche

The British love creating national treasures, like John Betjeman (his NT status existed entirely independently of the laureateship), Alan Bennett, and Stephen Fry. I wonder if we are attempting to expand the role to create a new international treasure: the French star Juliette Binoche.

There is a major retrospective of her work currently at London's BFI Southbank, with the faintly Cliff-Richard-esque title of Jubilations. On Tuesday she did a major onstage interview there with Geoff Andrew and down the road at London's South Bank she is preparing a new dance work at the National Theatre with choreographer Akram Khan entitled in-i, which opens tonight.

She has published a new bilingual volume of poems about the directors she has worked with, and BFI Southbank is also mounting a serious exhibition of Binoche's paintings, entitled Portraits In-Eyes (a title which suggests some kind of "brand-fit" with her dance piece). It's basically a full-on, multimedia Binoche fest, a culture-lovers' Binochapalooza.

She certainly exerts a powerful pull. A distinguished British film writer told me once that while interviewing Juliette Binoche, he simply fell under her spell, overwhelmed by the heady atmosphere which this beautiful and charismatic woman creates around her. He found himself emoting and empathising with what Binoche was telling him about the tortured character she was playing, nodding urgently, encouragingly, and appearing to Binoche quite as moved by what she was saying as she was herself. My friend began to lean in towards her, intimately, locking eyes - and hers were now actually brimming with delectable tears, as they so often do on screen. For one electrifying moment, he wondered if he might lean a few inches further and kiss her on the lips. At the last micro-second, he lost his nerve, leaned back and the fever abated. From that day on, he has wondered what would have happened if he had carried on and gone for the snog. Would she have slapped his face? Or would there have been a glorious morganatic affair, like Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts in Notting Hill? Tellingly, when he tried the same gooey-eyed touchy-feely empathy routine the following week with Kristin Scott Thomas, she responded in a more Anglo-Saxon way and more or less snapped that he should pull himself together.

It was the exhibition of Juliette Binoche paintings that fascinated me, and this week I wandered into the BFI Southbank foyer to have a look - still no easy matter, actually, because despite the building's revamp, this still means finding your way to the old box office entrance past a disconcerting array of Portakabins and bins.

I had wondered if these paintings were going to be absurd: a case of Ingres's violin, a effusion of luvvy-ish silliness.

But no. This exhibition really is a treat. I am not in a position to judge Juliette Binoche's paintings as art - for such a judgment, one would need to consult my colleagues Adrian Searle or Jonathan Jones. But untutored though they might be, to me her paintings looked witty, insightful, smart, emotionally generous - a kind of caricature-impressionism - and thoroughly intriguing and charming.

The show consists of 34 pairs of portraits: each head-and-shoulders study shows a director that Juliette Binoche has worked with, and opposite, a different character self-portrait - that is, an impression of the character that Binoche played in that director's film. The directors include Jean-Luc Godard, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Michael Haneke, Anthony Minghella, John Boorman, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Abbas Kiarostami. And opposite each is Binoche. Some likenesses are better than others, but no one could deny Binoche's talent and the fact that she has reproduced no fewer than 34 different versions of herself, each very different, yet each recognisably her, is really rather brilliant.

The best studies are when she has worked with a director for a second time. For Michael Haneke's Code Unknown (2000) the bearded sage is calm, blank, forbidding: an instantly recognisable sketch. Binoche's character Anne is coolly looking up to the top right of the picture frame. But look at the portrait-pair (shown above) that represents their work on Haneke's great masterpiece, Hidden (2005).

Her self-portrait as "Anne" shows the eyes lowered, perhaps deeply hurt, ashamed by the lies and evasions of her character's husband, famously played in that film by Daniel Auteuil. But Haneke is now bizarre: a cartoon look of gawping dismay, looking over to the right, part Homer Simpson and part Munch's Scream. It really is a great comic and dramatic effect and I laughed out loud when I saw it. Is this the vulnerable, mercurial, goofy side to Haneke that Binoche saw on location - but not shown to critics or journalists? Or has she projected her own feelings onto his face?

I have no idea. There are astringent, shrewd sketches of others. Her Godard - for whom she gave her first film performance in 1985 in Je vous salue Marie - is good. As for Kiarostami, in whose new film Shirin she has just appeared, she has persuaded the great man to remove his trademark dark glasses, which I doubt he would do for many reporters or press photographers. Her André Téchiné, who directed Binoche in Rendez-vous (1985) looks extravagantly woeful, eyes cast down to the bottom right, whereas she looks up pertly to the top right, creating an uptick to the eyeline, and the face looks weirdly like David Walliams.

Her Abel Ferrara has an expression of infinite weariness and bleariness, and for him Binoche has made herself look like nothing so much as a splodgy Mona Lisa. For Anthony Minghella's The English Patient (1997), she sees herself like a little boy. Individually, these studies may look callow, or like street art sketches, but their effect is cumulative; they are an emotional and personal archive. I wonder if any are for sale?

· The exhibition continues at London's BFI Southbank until 5 October. Admission is free. Go and have a look.

Juliette Binoche não para de me surpreender pois para além de ser uma actriz de eleição também tem uma multiplicidade de actividades que vão desde o activismos pelos direitos humanos à pintura passando pela dança. Não será com toda a certeza fácil expor a sua vida desta maneira mantendo uma jovialidade e uma força fora do comum. Assim sempres que possa vou colocando neste blog as causas e as actividades de JB.