emmanuelle devos is lights out

bcoz she looks good

that's not really it.

are you sure

it's like she's operating on a different level than everyone else.. everyone else is beige, translucent - and they try, in their lines with her, to try and gain some purchase on this meticulous yet slightly baffled reality she possesses

each of her movements tells you something new about both her and the story

and sure she looks nice but you wouldn't pick her out of a lineup as "the actress"

http://cache.viewimages.com/xc/51266608.jpg?v=1&c=ViewImages&k=2&d=17A4AD9FDB9CF19390335F8FA9CA92A6700B1025C435F60826D5502F4A3FD04B

http://i.imdb.com/Photos/Ss/0274117/read_my_lips_1.jpg

it's like she's operating on a different level than everyone else.. everyone else is beige, translucent - and they try, in their lines with her, to try and gain some purchase on this meticulous yet slightly baffled reality she possesses

Do you think this is true of Kings and Queen too? I think Amalric achieves something similar there. But I don't know, I am terrible at figuring out what I like in performances.

i haven't seen it! i really want to though. i posted this "question" after seeing "the beat that my heart skipped" which despite some great acting and gripping scene-setting ended up being almost totally pointless and really bad, with the added insult that emmanuelle devos gets about six minutes of screen time.

"kings and queen" is amazing, more than enough for me to watch these two actors again in "my sex life" or whatever it's called, which i shall be doing forthwith. maybe i should start an emmanuelle devos blog.

i wouldn't call amalric meticulous but i would call him (entertainingly) baffled - he is very good, although i thought at times he "played the emotion" rather than the action, a point provoked by his talk with hippolyte girardot (who plays his pillhead lawyer) in the dvd interview.

ok i'm going to transcribe this bit cause it's good:

amalric: "Arnaud (Desplechin) was working on the bulkiness of our hands, gestures and emotions, which continuously short-circuit in our minds. So as a result we don't know which emotion we are to play."

(here he looks at Girardot, almost for support)

"And everything is vague. everything is ..." (he trails off)

Girardot: "Actually, we never know which emotion to play. We know what to do, and we do it.. We know what to say and we say it. Emotion -- it's the viewer, you know? It's the viewer who feels it, or imagines it.

"It's the same thing in real life. Someone comes to you crying, and tells you a story. But it's not that they're sad, in fact it's because they want to borrow 100 euros. That's the real emotion -- it's fear. It's not sadness, it's fear. Without this money, they're in trouble -- that's very real.

And you are going to be moved, not by their fear, but by their distress, their sadness, their depression."

this is one of those (few) movies i'd like to see again

what pinter said about shakespeare seems apt about this movie - "you are called upon to grapple with a perspective in which the horizon alternately collapses and re-forms behind you, in which the mind is subject to an intense diversity of atmospheric" (john lahr interviews pinter (with precious little actual interview))

it also reminds me of "i heart huckabees", a not altogether fortunate comparison -- since to my mind there's not very much good about i heart huckabees except wahlberg -- but maybe that's just because both of them have psychoanalysis in em

sorry just to clarify what i think girardot is saying, he's saying that emotion is not the actor's job, the actor's job is to do and say, and the emotion will take care of itself

I'm glad you liked it. I haven't seen My Sex Life or Esther Kahn, but La sentinelle is great (and features Devos as well).

Have you see much 70s Rivette, Tracer? Desplechin really reminds me of Out 1 and Celine et julie... (and L'amour fou, which is more directly emotionally-charged, to a lesser extent). There's a similar sort of baffled quality to the performances. I think with those, Rivette gave the actors a general structure around which they improvised, but because there were so many characters and the structures so broad, they never go into a sort of Cassavetes find-the-authentic-emotion thing; they're left to make the stories' practical connections and just "do and say".

to be fair, girardot has much the easier time of it - his character is interested in pills and money and that's it. those two things can really focus the mind. amalric has a much tougher row to hoe.

the interview w/desplechin makes desplechin come across as vacuous and boring

i tht 'read my lips' was awes.

yes yes yes yes yes

e.d. on "kings and queen":

At the beginning I was very jealous of the other principal role, played by Mathieu Armalric. He’s such a funny character. Mathieu and I met. He said “But your part is so noble, sublime…” I ended up believing him. Usually I was the kooky, funny one and suddenly I was a lady. I was afraid of being constrained: the daughter of a dying father, the mother of a fatherless child, the fiancée of a bourgeois. These were not sentiments I wanted to show at this particular time in my life. When I arrived on the set, I definitely wanted to take a revenge on Arnaud, on Mathieu… and then it became very delightful.