on 10 actresses she has girl crushes on. I was delighted to see someone else shares my enthusiasm for
The mention of the UK actress prompted me to dig out the piece I wrote below for The Australian four years ago on a new generation of European screen actresses then emerging. Garai was one of them.
, currently screening on ABC1, but has yet to land the kind of killer lead film role that would push her into the same elevated sphere as
has largely disappeared off the radar, though she has continued to work. This quote from her Wikipedia is germane: "I have seen Hollywood, and although I have nothing against it, it's not my kind of life. My agent is shocked that I want to stay in Europe. If Hollywood offers me a great part, of course I'll take it, but I just don't want to live there."
WOMEN ON A ROLE - By Lynden Barber, The Australian, September 01, 2007
IF 2007 is destined to be remembered for anything in the cinema, it is for great female acting. This year a clutch of lead performances by relatively little known women has made this viewer, at least, leave the cinema feeling drunk with the excitement of a new discovery.
I'm not talking about merely bright turns from promising newcomers, but the kind of tour de force performances from which significant decades-long careers are forged. Intriguingly, they're all from Europeans.
First came France's Marion Cotillard, incandescent as singing legend Edith Piaf in La Vie en rose, followed closely by Dutch actor Carice van Houten, who effortlessly dominates virtually every scene of Paul Verhoeven's Black Book as a Jewish undercover agent for the anti-Nazi resistance in The Netherlands during WorldWarII.
The third, Britain's wonderfully named Romola Garai, takes the title role as a best-selling, early-20th-century English novelist in French filmmaker Francois Ozon's Angel (to be released on November 1), where she turns in the kind of feisty, a-star-is-born performance that makes you wonder whether Vivien Leigh would have had such a sure chance of bagging the Scarlett O'Hara role in Gone with the Wind had Garai been around at the time.
All these performers have racked up several previous film and television appearances but this year's roles amount to the kind of surprising breakthroughs that give those of us who love cinema reason to keep returning in optimism. Despite the best efforts of Hollywood to drag us into a maelstrom of increasingly tired sequels and comic-book adaptations, European writers and directors are giving women the chances of alifetime.
For further evidence see Angelina Jolie's eye-opening performance as Mariane Pearl, the widow of slain journalist Daniel Pearl, in Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart (to be released here on October 18); Penelope Cruz in Pedro Almodovar's Volver; Helen Mirren's Queen Elizabeth in Stephen Frears's The Queen; Judi Dench facing off against Cate Blanchett in Notes on a Scandal for British director Richard Eyre.
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| Monica Vitti in L'Avventura |
The recent deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni should remind us that this is nothing new: think of Monica Vitti in the latter's early 1960s films and the haunting performances of Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson and Liv Ullmann in the work of the Swedish director.
Hollywood, meanwhile, seems largely to have closed down its possibilities for telling powerful women's stories, corralling actresses into the occasional romantic comedy or, in a shallow nod towards sexual equality, making them one of the boys as action heroines.
Women wanting fulfilling roles usually have to turn to the independent sector or look to non-American filmmakers: Charlize Theron in Monster, for example, or Blanchett and Nicole Kidman in countless titles. It's 33 years since feminist film critic Molly Haskell first bemoaned the decline in the quality of Hollywood's women's roles since the '30s and '40s, and nothing much seems to have changed.
But back to our newcomers. Notable about this trio is that they're each able to take difficult, unruly or compromised characters -- people who on the page may have threatened to turn off audiences -- and make them, if not always likable, then compelling.
Van Houten's undercover agent is a Mata Hari figure whose work requires an extraordinary degree of duplicity and sangfroid. In Verhoeven's revisionist take on the Dutch resistance, few -- including van Houten's character -- are without moral compromise, but the actor has the viewer on side throughout. Certainly van Houten is strikingly attractive, but she lends her character not only beauty but extraordinary strength of character, making the plot's many implausibilities easier to overlook.
Garai displays a similar strength as the title character of Angel, but does something quite different with the role. She somehow finds the warmth, humour and high spirits that make an egotistical, impetuous woman into something of a proto-feminist heroine whose rudeness and cheek is fascinating and often amusing.
Ozon, here working entirely in English for the first time, observes that Garai "wasn't afraid of the more grotesque aspects of Angel's character, and she brought naivety and charm to the part, with her big, dreamy, childlike eyes. Plus, she really liked Angel. Not all the actresses (who auditioned for the role) did. Many of them found her monstrous and mean, an anti-heroine, a liar, a failure; she frightened them. Whereas Romola played it straight, she approached Angel with no disdain whatsoever."
Like van Houten, Garai has striking looks, but there's something mysterious and intriguing about them, a quality that makes us wonder about the woman to whom they belong. She looked completely different in the title role of the ABC miniseries Mary Bryant (for which she won an AFI award) and was transformed into a magnificently orange-coiffed beauty in this year's Amazing Grace, about anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce. She's equally hard to recognise from the stills of her next project, an adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement.
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| Marion Cotillard as Piaf |
Cotillard also has a chameleon quality; she is, in real life, an attractive woman with little resemblance to the plain and tiny Piaf, who became increasingly bizarre-looking as she aged. Cotillard's Piaf is on a short fuse: often demanding, arrogant, coarse, noisy and self-centred. Yet she provides human complexity by blending these traits with vulnerability, passion and determination to rise above her difficult everyday surroundings.
To achieve this, a performer has to stop worrying about whether the audience will love her and concentrate on what the character needs to become fully human. It requires, in other words, a lack of vanity.
Are there young European men capable of matching these women's achievements? Perhaps Romain Duris (Inside Paris and The Beat that My Heart Skipped).
As for the young Brits, Ben Whishaw (Perfume) and James McAvoy (The Last King of Scotland): the jury is still out. For now, it's the women who are dazzling. Will Hollywood guzzle them up? Unlikely. Van Houten is filming opposite Tom Cruise in the plot-against-Hitler movie, Valkyrie.
But Cotillard's role as Russell Crowe's French love interest in Ridley Scott's A Good Year was hardly a career highlight. Further high-profile US roles may come these women's way, but when it comes to big acting opportunities, they'll continue to look to European filmmakers for some time to come.
Much as I adored 2004's Real Gone, it ploughed a narrow furrow, all barking electric blues. This ones is Wait's most satisfyingly balanced studio set of new material since 1999's sublime Mule Variations. Everything Waits can do, he does here, and he does it blindingly well. Backed by, among others, Keith Richards and Marc Ribot on guitars and Primus's Les Claypool on bass, which probably tells you all you need to know.
