Author | Graham Fuller
Translated by | Wheat (Paris)
Edit | Yu Chunjiao (Shanghai)
This article was originally published in the 20173 issue of Sight and Hearing
Kristen Stewart accurately presents the non-stop, troubled female figures, portraying the uneasy mental outlook of contemporary people. Directors Oliver Assayas and Stewart, in their second collaboration, Personal Shopper, amplified this fear and uneasiness through the thriller genre.
In this turbulent and spiritually deprived era, except for the glamorous upper class, everyone is burdened with heavy anxiety. Naturally, celebrities, viewers, and critics evaluate them based on whether he/she reflects the face of the contemporary person.
No other actor in the West can vent the impetuosity of the times on screen as consistently as Kristen Stewart. She's played a range of roles that are somewhat similar — Olivier Assayas' Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) and the latest Private Buyer (2016), Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women (2016), and Ang Lee's Billy Lynn's Longtime Half Walk，2016）。 The Stuart in these movies is synonymous with guilt, inferiority, and smallness. Those who still call her "Twilight Girl" are still unaware, or choose to ignore, Stewart uses a non-exaggerated posture to present a fanatical but exhausted female figure, reflecting the universal world-weary mood and fear.
Stills from Saturday Night Live
However, on February 4, 2017, Stewart hosted Saturday Night Live for the first time, which made people all over the world happy. She let it go, exposed herself, and didn't have any shelves at all.
She responded to Trump's tweet about her breakup with Robert Pattinson, saying, I'm so up! ”（I’m so gay！ Gay has both happy and gay connotations; she mentions her latest film, The Private Buyer, which should be the first time Asayas has been named on Saturday night; she mentions her first experimental short film, Come Swim, which she directed and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
She kissed Vanessa Bayer wetly in a pizza rolls-style "Super Bowl" trailer ad, and imitated straight female supermodel Gisele Bündchen during the game. She also accidentally exploded the F-word. People met a brand new, cheerful Stewart, as if everyone could fall in love with her.
Wet kiss with Vanessa Bell
Stills from "Some Kind of Woman"
It all makes one wonder how many of those who became her fans in the twilight period (2008-2012) because of the pessimistic and isolated Bella Swan are still her fans. The audience for watching a blockbuster is definitely not the same as the audience for watching an Asayas movie or "Some Kind of Woman." But after all these years, the girls in their twenties who liked the Gothic Bella (or simpler: Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) are now presumably working, like Beth Travis, a young lawyer in Some Kind of Woman, or Valentine in Sils Maria and Maureen in Private Buyer Cartwright, like that, is in the cultural and artistic circle.
Some of them may have watched or are watching their mothers get rid of disease, just like Stewart's daughter in Still Alice (2014) watching her mother be haunted by Alzheimer's disease. Some female classmates with stories may see themselves in Sophie in Anesthesia (2015). Those who enlist will echo Amy Cole in Camp X-Ray (2014); those with siblings in the army are like Billy's sister Kathryn in "Billy Lynn's Halftime Battle."
Stewart opens so many doors for audiences to experience contemporary life in the film and let young people echo themselves. She is not only a professional actress, but also an actor of the times. She is like Marlon Brando of the year, and even more so the James Dean of this era.
Stills from Sils Maria
Stewart's contemporaneity may have something to do with her freely switchable sexual orientation, and more importantly because of her unsuspecting performance. Her performance is great because she is good at revealing her heart and conveying thoughts, especially worries and doubts, revealed through detailed body movements. This ability was demonstrated as a child in Panic Room (2002) and Speak (2004). She knows who she is and selflessly lets the audience know her.
Much like dean's characters, Stewart's characters all have a strong sense of self. Bella, Amy, Sophie, Beth, Catherine, and Maureen are all young women who struggle with adult life without giving up on themselves. Virentin (maria Enders, the actress who plays Juliet Binoche as an assistant but falls deeper) is not as extreme as Maureen in Private Buyer, but both roles are tailor-made for Stewart by Assayas and have a lot in common – they are personal assistants of famous female stars; the roles of female stars can be interpreted as symbols of motherhood but also as a source of emotional impulses, which trigger a series of struggles.
Verentin eventually disappeared from the top of the Swiss Alps and left Maria because she had chosen herself. Maureen puts on her boss, Kyra, in a sexy costume and tries to be her. This scenario is very informative and will be analyzed in detail later in this article.
Stills from "The Private Buyer"
Talented actors and performers who are ill-spoken in public tend to devote themselves to roles in front of the camera or on stage, such as Jean Arthur, Tom Courtenays, Ben Whishaw, and Carey Mulligan. Shyness does not equal self-awareness. Acting requires actors to let go of themselves and become another person, and those who live under the gaze of others and care about what others see as they look have a hard time letting go of their sense of self. But Jerry Lewis and Norman Wisdom, two confident actors, have played comedy roles that care too much about the eyes of others.
As a mainstream movie star, Stewart always seemed stiff and awkward at talk shows and awards ceremonies. (The crazy paparazzi forced her to do it!) I did an interview with her in 2010 about the sex worker role in Welcome to the Rileys, and she was polite, self-defensive, and passive, but when we started the formal conversation about the film's characters and performances, she spoke passionately and gushed for 20 minutes.
This shows that Stewart only began to let go of her self-defense when acting and talking about acting, but her personal style could not be concealed. In "X-ray Camp" she always has a slight frown of habit, and in "Private Buyer" she has a somewhat wanted to throw up expression from beginning to end.
Stills from Camp X-ray
She is a perfectly restrained actress. Stewart's performance is natural, and her skills seem to be innate. She, like Dean, unconsciously reveals her inner, reveals the spirit of her ego, which can be said to be one of her acting skills to make the performance look like it is not acted. Those actors who do not label and do not show their personal personality are also so that the audience can not see the traces of performance.
Stewart may also need to accept himself more openly and completely. In Woody Allen's Café Society (2016), she plays Vonnie, married to a big boss in Hollywood in the thirties, and years later, her ex-boyfriend Bobby, her husband's nephew, reunites with her, and the two put aside their reputations and return to the sweet old days. Meeting Bob again makes Vannie nervous, but impulsive. However, Stewart could not show this excitement, probably because of her lack of similar experiences.
In Walter Salles' On the Road (2012), Stuart's Marylou is dumped by Dean Moriarty, and Marylou leaves Sal Paradise; she plays Marylou's efforts to suppress her sadness well.
In Billy Lynn's Halftime War, Stewart's sister Catherine blames Billy for enlistment; she is the only anti-war person in the Texas family, symbolizing the weakness and ridiculousness of moral heart in the film. Although Ang Lee's film was criticized by critics, Stewart's performance in it was convincing and one of her best.
Stills from Billy Lynn's Halftime Battle
Assayas must have been amazed by Stewart when filming Virentin's one-man show in Sils Maria. Verentin raced alone on the winding road, stopping halfway and throwing up. The scene was like Joan Jett, played by Risturt in The Runaways (2010), peeing on the male guitarist's guitar, destroying her high-cold appearance temptation at once. It can be seen that after Dean, there is finally another actor who can play a charming madman, cold and manic.
In Private Buyer, Stewart shows her deeper, untold depths. Like Bella, Maureen lived in pain, and her twin brother Lewis died of a heart attack three months earlier. Maureen also had a hereditary heart condition and was warned by doctors to avoid excessive physical and psychological burdens.
The story arrangement allowed Asayas to combine the two genres of thriller horror and psychological film, and also squeezed Stewart as the protagonist. Louis and Maureen agreed that the one who died first in the two of them would send a signal to the other who was alive. Maureen comes to the house where Louis and his wife lived, tries to communicate with him, but summons a ghostly woman who can show her. Maureen went to London to pick out a few dresses for Kayla, and on the train back to Paris that day, she irrationally believed that the strange text message was from Louis, and fell into the long cat-and-mouse texting process. The audience keeps watching Maureen walk into danger, but Maureen herself doesn't know it.
Stills from The Fugitive Band
The heart of the film is embodied in two main scenes: Maureen's round-trip trip to London, where she is only exposed to a taxi driver and a designer assistant; and the scene after she then sneaks into Kayla's apartment in Paris.
In these clips, except for the long shots of the location and the close-up of the mobile phone, all of them are occupied by Stuart. Set against the backdrop of Maureen's regular commute, she undergoes a spiritual change, from a delusional beginning to a later masochism. Maureen was already familiar with the journey to and from London: she bought tickets at gare du Nord, bought an espresso at a station café, got on the train to find a spot, and so on. But the appearance of strange text messages disturbed this pattern, triggering a series of reactions from Stewart: she moved her mouth, frowned, touched her lips, covered her mouth with her hands, covered her eyes, she sobbed, collapsed; her subtle movements, even convulsions, almost blurred the boundaries between performance and reality.
The owner of the strange text message slowly hints at her identity, while Maureen accepts the other person's offer, changes her dress and tries to become another person, thus changing her mood. Since trying on the heels she picked for Kayla one day in a Parisian designer's private studio, in her London studio she's asked her beautiful designer assistant to try on her clothes, wearing a gautier-style sexy chest strap.
That night at Kayla's apartment, Maureen drank a lot of vodka, stripped naked, put on a sheer bra and a pair of French panties that Kayla didn't want, a pair of expensive high heels, that chest strap and a black sheer dress, looked at her sexy and charming self in the mirror, and then masturbated on Kayla's bed. Assayas accompanied the solo performance with Marlene Dietrich's classic rendition of "Das Hobellied"/"The Planing Song" (Ferdinand Raimund), with the lyrics being the first-person Valentin (perhaps echoing Virentin in Sils Maria) to express the mindset of facing death indifferently.
This self-obsessive "dancing and clearing the shadow" inspired by the owner of a strange text message is reminiscent of the scene in Assayas' Irma Vep (1996) in which Maggie Cheung wears a rubber tights and becomes a female snitch. Dietrich's smoky voice is reminiscent of the Josef von Sternberg films, where the figure of her mesmerizing characters overlaps with Maureen's trance in a dress at this time. These two small fragments of memories evoke that "The Private Buyer" is a tribute to the book "The Ghosts of Cinema Past" (by Bert Cardullo, 2009), while criticizing contemporary economic globalization: Maureen's large back-and-forth text messages on her mobile phone while on the train become a symbol of her physical and mental journey; she mechanically travels to and from London just to pick up a few clothes, the absurdity of which reflects Kayla's indulgence in fashion. Or the glitz that comes with greedy money.
Many young girls may have sneaked through their mother's clothes once or twice when their mother was not at home, so Maureen wearing Kayla's clothes can be seen as a throwback to the innocent years of the past. It also represents resistance. She did this because the sender allowed her to do so. She thought the sender was a dead twin; perhaps she knew but didn't want to admit it: it was Ingo, Kayla's extramarital lover. If it is the latter, then wearing Kayla's underwear on Kayla's bed has two more layers of symbolism: one is the powerful seduction of the woman who usurps her boss, and the other is attracted to Ingo and approaches him in order to break his strangeness.
Playing Maureen is an official step into the adult world for Stewart, who has not shown a lot of nudity on the screen before. When Bella and Edward first go to bed, the hand clutching the bed frame is not naked; in "On the Road", Marilyl masturbates to Dean and Searle at the same time, and does not shoot the body, but uses Stewart extremely badly.
Stills from Twilight
Stewart plays Mallory, a stripper and prostitute who welcomes to Lear's home with smoky makeup, who is only 20 years old at the time, but can already skillfully perform the sexual expression of the characters. Wearing ripped mesh socks and leather gloves, Mallory was obviously not as old as she thought she was, but like a sheep in wolf's skin to do evil. Full of foul language and savage, she bit her fingers, grinned vigorously and wiped her lips, inadvertently shaking one foot. She was bruised all over her body, her hair disheveled and her face pale. Stuart's portrayal of this wayward Maloney who doesn't take care of herself is pathetic, clearly a victim of child abuse and apathy.
Doug Riley, the owner of the pipeline company, sees his deceased daughter in Mallory and begins to take care of her. He refuses to have sex with Mallory, cleans her apartment, and punishes her with the F word. When his wife, Lois, shows up, she looks after her like a mother. The good times were short, and Mallory chose to escape into the darkness, yelling at the well-meaning couple: "I'm not anyone's little girl, it's all too late!" This sentence also implies that Mallory will choose to grow into an ordinary person later.
Maureen's "exquisite pranks" in Kayla's dressing room and bedroom are like bella, the clown duck of the year, transformed into the embodiment of a swan, and the feathers are not yet plump, and they are not as beautiful as Dedley's mesmerizing beauty. If Assayas objectified her, he was not a competent anthropologist. The sexual expression of this scene comes from the self-objectification of Stuart, who became Maureen. Small body movements are the most convincing. Alcohol made her relax, and she casually put her clothes on top of her to see what it would look like. She put on the chest strap, took it off again, thoughtfully picked up the thin bra, buttoned it, and put the chest strap on it again.
She's sexy because she's clumsy and real, and even more because she's herself, alone, not being watched by others. Except for us, the audience, watching her off-screen, and we'll be watching her all the time. Hopefully, years from now, we'll see Stewart in a chest strap or a nun's robe.
Deep Focus DeepFocus is the author of today's headlines