Beauty in the cinema matters

Beauty has been a central element of the cinema since shortly after it began yet it's a subject that film writers tend to tiptoe around today, for fear of seeming either sexist or low-brow. Beauty after all is the subject of countless populist celebrity magazines, pleastered all over their covers. We don't often stop to ask why.

An appreciation of the power of human beauty is the one thing that unites every type of feature filmmaking, every film making culture, whether Chinese or Indian, American, French or Spanish. This is regardless of whether the director is male or female, straight or gay.

That iconoclast Luis Bunuel boasted of deliberately turning his camera away from picturesque landscapes, as if to demonstrate the purity of his filmmaking, yet when it came to beautiful women he wasn't so quick to turn away, building films around Catherine Deneuve and Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina (both pictured right). Jean-Luc Godard may have loved to tear up film-making convention but when it came to the power of a beautiful woman like Anna Karina he seemed powerless to resist.

Most directors are hetereosexual males and female beauty is naturally high on their list of fascinations, yet note the way the perfectly gay-credentialled Pedro Almodovar fixates on Penelope Cruz.

Feminist theoretician Laura Mulvey's once influential formulation of "the male gaze", in which cinema was said to be created essentially from a voyeuristic male point of view for a male viewer's pleasure, now seems naively ideological and wrong-headed

The power and uniquity of the female gaze has always been something that even the most chauvinistic Hollywood males have had to build into their calculations. It's not that Hollywood and other film industries aren't guilty of sexism, but good-looking males are just as common in mainstream cinema as are attractive women - think Johnny Depp and George Clooney. Or Clark Gable, Marlon Brando and Paul Newman.

I started thinking about this subject after watching the upcoming French film Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky, which is released in Australian cinemas in April. Anna Mouglalis (pictured right), the French actress and model who plays Chanel, makes an extraordinary impression on screen, not so much for her acting (though it is flawless) , as for the striking beauty of her face, her remarkably feline body, and the elegant perfection with which these two go together.

The film shows Stravinsky (played by the himself rather beautiful Mads Mikkelsen) becoming obsessed with Chanel the moment she steps into the same room for the first time. Mouglalis makes this instant sexual obsession seem utterly logical - who could resist it?

Below are some of my favourite female screen beauties of recent years - the women who always glue me to the screen. All are good actresses - their looks are never something they rely on but part of an irresistible package that we call screen presence. Why women, and not men? Because I'm male and heterosexual and not the best judge of what makes a male iresisitibly good-looking. (Pictured top: Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi; Anna Mouglasis with Mads Mikkelsen in Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky. Below: Scarlett Johansson, Daniel Day-Lewis with Marion Cotillard, Eva Green, Julie Delpy and Maggie Gyllenhaal)