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10.10.07
NYFF: "Actresses."
[A note: "Actresses" has just been picked up by IFC First Take. We've generally tried to avoid reviewing films that will be distributed by our sister company for obvious reasons, but, given that First Take is handling like, 99% of the NYFF line-up at this point, we're setting that rule aside for now and you can take this with as large a grain of salt as you require.]
Method acting is a form of insanity. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi should know; she's been acting in films for over two decades. In "Actresses," her second effort as a director, she prods the malleable, unstable temperaments of those who choose to spend their lives contorting their personalities into those of fictional characters by way of a stage production of Turgenev's "A Month in the Country." Bruni Tedeschi, who co-wrote the film with Noémie Lvovsky and Agnès de Sacy, stars as Marcelline, an established actress who's turning 40 and whose inner voice of sanity is getting drowned out by the ticking of her biological clock, or maybe the naggings of her pragmatic mother (Marysa Borini), whose patience for Marcelline's romanticism and lifelong girlishness is wearing thin. In following "A Month in the Country" from initial read-throughs into production, "Actresses" finds plenty of humor in the ridiculousness of the process, from Marcelline, in an early exercise, working herself into a frenzy trying to figure out how to open a door in character, to the gay director Denis (Mathieu Amalric) mauling Marcelline in her dressing room out of some idea of how a director should treat his chosen muse, to another in which Marcelline gives another actress three minutes to cry on cue. That last scene recalls Scott Coffey's 2005 portrait of a Hollywood starlet hopeful "Ellie Parker," but the film as a whole has more in common with Mitsuo Yanagimachi's "Who's Camus Anyway," which screened at the festival two years ago and which also follows the folie à plusieurs of a big production. Actors are inherently dramatic people, argues "Actresses," because they spend their lives immersed in grand gestures and so can only communicate that way in real life, no matter how silly it seems to the normal population. Marcelline in particular has trouble separating the feelings of her character (who she starts to hallucinate in the form of Valeria Golino) from her own, and so may or may not have fallen for the actor (Louis Garrel) playing her character's on-stage love interest, a relationship exacerbated by her own desperation to find love.
Bruni Tedeschi is radiant and milky-eyed as Marcelline, and also fearlessly loony. As the film goes on and becomes more funny-sad than funny, she becomes accordingly more shrill and unreasonable, until she finally finds herself echoing the iconic dramatic gesture of another high-strung cinematic heroine. For Marcelline, the act doesn't win her any arguments, it just leaves her dog-paddling in the Seine.
"Actresses" screens October 11 and 13th at Frederick P. Rose Hall, and will receive an eventual theatrical release from IFC First Take.
+ "Actresses" (FilmLinc)
+ "Actresses" (IMDb)
Comments
A grain of salt? You'd need Lot's wife to accept this review from the distributor. Maybe you'd better stick to your policy of not anaylyzing films you will release. This is a puff review, frankly, and not flattering, considering how many fantastic movies you are making possible for people to see (many of which I am thrilled to write favorable about). I reviewed Actresses0 for Indiewire in my fest coverage, and honestly, it was one of the two or three worst films in the festival: nothing fresh, very old-fashioned, an annoying vanity production. I'm sure it will serve the needs of francophiles who will love it for just that--nothing threatening, highbrow Paris--the same ones who went for Avenue Montaigne and similar wafer-thin projects.
Posted by: Howard Feinstein | Oct 11, 2007 7:32:04 AM
Well, Mr. Feinstein, I'm not a distributor. I work on the network side of IFC, something that I've repeated like a broken record on this blog, and have no connection with the distribution company other than the fact that we're both owned by the same parent corporation. I usually still recuse myself from reviews of films picked up by that distribution arm, but given the large number of titles at this festival that fall under that category, it would seem to make coverage impossible if I followed that self-made rule. Hence, the disclaimer above — this review, like all the others from this festival, other festivals and theatrical releases on this blog, is my own lowly personal opinion. I have no inherent interest in writing a "puff piece," nor have I been pressured to — as for my opinion on the film above, well, I'm sure a longtime critic like yourself is acquainted with the concept that sometimes people disagree about films. If you're unhappy with the fact that "Actresses" was included in the festival or picked up for release, please direct your complaints to the parties responsible.
Posted by: Alison | Oct 11, 2007 8:10:47 AM
Hi Alison,
I have never seen your responses to the issue of working even for a parent company that owns the distribution arm releasing a film you're reviewing. Reminds me of a psychopharmacologist friend, a very ethical guy, like you I'm sure (but not a guy), who counted the prescriptions he had written for products from companies whose reps had courted him with dinners and compared those to rx'es for drugs which came with no pampering. I do think you're a good writer, I just find it very hard, even unconsciously, to separate issues of perks and salaries from opinions. You didn't have one reservation about this film, whether I hated it or not, and that's what threw me off.
You recommended I complain to the festival and the distributor: Well, showing/releasing is their perogative. But expressing my opinion on this site is a way of telling IFC that I don't like it (though there are enough francophiles in New York that will go see anything French, especially when it's sanitized), and my Indiewire festival coverage made that point. For the heck of it, I'll paste that part here, also so you can see my problems with it. I'm including a bit on The Last Mistress, because I linked them. Here goes:
A connoisseur of sex in women’s lives, French director Catherine Breillat neatly surveys the space occupied by females of a certain class in her engaging, passion-inflected The Last Mistress, adapted from Jules-Amedee Barbey d’Aureuilly’s novel of 18th-century manners. Asia Argento portrays an irresistible Spanish courtesan under the spell of Fu’ad Ait Aatou’s dandy; she’s id to his refined (and sexually inert) superego of a wife. Ex-model Ait Aatou’s overwhelming beauty takes center stage, though Argento’s libidinal energy makes him seem like a case study in ennui. You can’t beat a woman’s fire.
Or can you? In Actresses, her second outing as a filmmaker, veteran Italian (and French-reared) performer Valeria Bruni Tedeschi casts in a significant supporting part Louis Garrel, like Aid Aatou a stunning young actor with feminine features. Is this a middle-aged woman’s thing? This is the kind of uninspired French production that gets my blood boiling: a project both naïve (“The Marriage of Figaro” AND “I Will Survive” on the soundtrack?) and rarefied, born of and about privilege and set in a high-culture milieu (remember Avenue Montaigne?). A movie about a famous theater actress (played by the director in full vanity-production mode; she gets to crack up) whose biggest problems are wanting a baby and a spouse amounts to very little dramatically--even if they are entwined with her role as the aging Natalia Petrovna in Turgenev’s A Month in the Country. I loved her presence in Ozon’s 5 X 2 and Time to Leave, among other projects, but she should remain in front of the camera, under someone else’s guidance. Breillat, for instance, who is as liberated as Bruni Tedeschi is constrained.
Posted by: Howard Feinstein | Oct 11, 2007 1:29:05 PM
"I do think you're a good writer, I just find it very hard, even unconsciously, to separate issues of perks and salaries from opinions. You didn't have one reservation about this film, whether I hated it or not, and that's what threw me off."
As I see it, isn't the whole point that because you hate the film, YOU are the one having problems separating your own subjectivity from fact? "Actresses" was one of my favorites of the festival, personally, and I actually loathe the kind of francophile bullshit that you've lumped it in with. Or is my opinion not valid either because I occasionally freelance for IFC News? Jeezus, someone thinks highly of himself.
Posted by: Aaron Hillis | Oct 11, 2007 2:35:18 PM
