Scanning through the list of Vanessa Redgrave's roles I realize that somehow I've hardly seen her in anything. This is no joke - I've tried to watch Antonini's Blow Up on three different occasions and something's gone wrong with the DVD every single time. My viewing of that film is cursed. I've never seen Julia, for which she won her Oscar. You've got to skip all the way to 1992 to find the earliest film of hers that I'd seen, that being Howard's End. After that she's been here and there in things I've seen and don't remember her in - she's in Mission: Impossible? - or seen and found her annoying in - god I hated what she was doing in Evening - but mostly she's just an actress that's not been on my radar. She made me cry a lot when I saw her perform Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking but a robot could've recited lines from that book and made me sob buckets.
I realize to some of you this all probably sounds like blasphemy. I mean sure, by all accounts she always seemed like a cool lady in real life. I'd just not found the "in" into admiring her actual work yet.
Cue The Devils! I've seen several of Ken Russell's films at this point and I can easily say that I found Vanessa Redgrave's performance as the lusty humpbacked nun Sister Jeanne to be the best performance in a Ken Russell film that I've yet seen. His films require a... hmm... well, a specific skill in walking the thinnest of lines. Alright, so half the time the line's left way way way back in the dust. His characters are big booming symbols, rapacious and slobbering and usually rather insane. Most of the time, they're nowhere near seeming much human. No offense to Oliver Reed, who I like quite a bit, but he typifies this sort of aggressive thrusting performance. A strut, a sticking out of the chest and genitalia. He isn't playing emotion, he is emotion. In the Q&A (with Russell and Redgrave that was held after after the screening I saw) Russell said he and Reed has narrowed their director/actor discussion of what was wanted in any upcoming scene down to three levels: Moody One, Moody Two, and Moody Three. They'd start with a Moody One but usually ended up going with Moody Two. You can remember the scenes where they're hitting Moody Three, lemme tell ya what. The smaller roles in Russell's films always seem the sharpest to me - the places where the character actors can sweep in and make broad impressions with broad statements and then fling themselves back off of the frame as if washed away by a big gust of wind.
But Redgrave was revelatory for me here. Sister Jeanne is all of these things - a moody mad-woman, a creep, a pervert whose own perversions seem to be bubbling up and bursting right out of her own spine, crippling her sideways into a knot of sharp black-and-white habit-clad angles. But she's also never not human. Redgrave infests this monster of a mother with more humanity than I could bear to see! The tumult of her desires, dragging her back and forth from wanting to rejecting to needing to destroying, it's all there in her furrowed eyes, her curled lips, the sweat, so much sweat, coming from under that hood of heavenly cloth. It's big, oh it's big, but it all feels so terribly real at every moment that I couldn't look anywhere else. The world was on fire around her, with Derek Jarman designed cities! And Redgrave would contort her frame into an awful angle and whisper a degrading horrible prayer and I was putty in her bloodied Sunday palms.
It was glorious, and it was as if I was seeing a redefinition right in front of me of what Ken Russell films should be about. They should all be as dynamic, as gloriously mad yet recognizably real, as the magic Vanessa Redgrave conjures here. He tapped into a well of real fury, of real palpable devilry, with her, and the screen throbbed.
ETA Nathaniel saw it this weekend as well, and wrote up some thoughts over at The Film Experience.
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I realize to some of you this all probably sounds like blasphemy. I mean sure, by all accounts she always seemed like a cool lady in real life. I'd just not found the "in" into admiring her actual work yet.
Cue The Devils! I've seen several of Ken Russell's films at this point and I can easily say that I found Vanessa Redgrave's performance as the lusty humpbacked nun Sister Jeanne to be the best performance in a Ken Russell film that I've yet seen. His films require a... hmm... well, a specific skill in walking the thinnest of lines. Alright, so half the time the line's left way way way back in the dust. His characters are big booming symbols, rapacious and slobbering and usually rather insane. Most of the time, they're nowhere near seeming much human. No offense to Oliver Reed, who I like quite a bit, but he typifies this sort of aggressive thrusting performance. A strut, a sticking out of the chest and genitalia. He isn't playing emotion, he is emotion. In the Q&A (with Russell and Redgrave that was held after after the screening I saw) Russell said he and Reed has narrowed their director/actor discussion of what was wanted in any upcoming scene down to three levels: Moody One, Moody Two, and Moody Three. They'd start with a Moody One but usually ended up going with Moody Two. You can remember the scenes where they're hitting Moody Three, lemme tell ya what. The smaller roles in Russell's films always seem the sharpest to me - the places where the character actors can sweep in and make broad impressions with broad statements and then fling themselves back off of the frame as if washed away by a big gust of wind.
But Redgrave was revelatory for me here. Sister Jeanne is all of these things - a moody mad-woman, a creep, a pervert whose own perversions seem to be bubbling up and bursting right out of her own spine, crippling her sideways into a knot of sharp black-and-white habit-clad angles. But she's also never not human. Redgrave infests this monster of a mother with more humanity than I could bear to see! The tumult of her desires, dragging her back and forth from wanting to rejecting to needing to destroying, it's all there in her furrowed eyes, her curled lips, the sweat, so much sweat, coming from under that hood of heavenly cloth. It's big, oh it's big, but it all feels so terribly real at every moment that I couldn't look anywhere else. The world was on fire around her, with Derek Jarman designed cities! And Redgrave would contort her frame into an awful angle and whisper a degrading horrible prayer and I was putty in her bloodied Sunday palms.
It was glorious, and it was as if I was seeing a redefinition right in front of me of what Ken Russell films should be about. They should all be as dynamic, as gloriously mad yet recognizably real, as the magic Vanessa Redgrave conjures here. He tapped into a well of real fury, of real palpable devilry, with her, and the screen throbbed.
ETA Nathaniel saw it this weekend as well, and wrote up some thoughts over at The Film Experience.
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4 comments:
You should see "Isadora" where she portrays Isadora Duncan. It is a beautiful film with one of the most memorable endings ever! I saw "Blow-Up" once, I think I mostly saw it to see Veruschka! I need to see it again. I wish I had had the opportunity to see "The Devils" on the big screen. I have only seen it on VHS, all I can remeber is the hot water douche or was it an enema.....you have probably only seen it, but "The Magdalene Sisters" is also a great film, but very depressing. I love nun movies.
Hm.. it may be all downhill between you and Ms. Redgrave from here on out as she is usually a bit more ... subtle than in 'Devils'.
But permit me to suggest 'The Trojan Women' where she also gives a BIG performance along with a lot of other really cool actresses.
Note: it's a film of classic Greek tragedy so there will be a lot of talk.
But I don't have anything against subtlety, RDaggle - it was the hints of subtlety that she injected into her performance here in The Devils that bowled me over for it, really. Everybody's BIG in Ken Russell movies but she modulated it brilliantly, more than any other actor in any of his movies that I've seen, I thought. I don't doubt that outside of a Ken Russell movie she'd have to bring it down a notch - she'd have died years ago from screaming and thrashing herself about otherwise. ;-)
I wish it was available on DVD, but the TV film "Playing For Time" is very good, with a terrific supporting cast, led by Shirley Knight.
Although the movie "The Bostonians" is deadly dull, her performance is one of the best ever filmed.
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