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The transplanting of so many pretty maids (and mates)
all in a row from TV to movies in the last couple of
years has overcrowded the Hollywood flower beds with
gorgeous but insubstantial talent. Comeliness is crucial
to most actors, of course - we live lives so grating
and monotonous that the faces and bodies illuminated
in the dark at the end of the projector's beam need
to ignite explicit longings if they're not simply going
to remind us of out own ordinariness and loneliness.
But we need more than longings from the movie experiences
- we need emotional payoffs, too. Physical beauty in
the actor is seldom enough for the beholder if there's
not imagination rippling behind its surface. Once we've
gotten over the banal provocations dished up by this
or that scarlet, do we really care? Why go for a quickie
when there's the potential to fall in love?
Here's a newcomer who can fill two hours of screen
time with much more than loveliness. At sixteen, Leelee
Sobieski is the kind of probing, intensely lyrical actress
who keeps you guessing throughout the changeable weather
of a film and beyond. At least, that has happened once
so far, in the Merchant-Ivory film A Soldier's Daughter
Never Cries, which opens this month. But there's no
reason to believe it won't happen again soon in a very
different way in Stanley Kubrick's upcoming drama of
sexual jealousy, Eyes Wide Shut. That's assuming Kubrick
has given her a pivotal role: Interrogated recently
in the Interview library, Sobieski wasn't telling because,
like everyone else who worked on the film, she'd been
sworn to secrecy. All she would say is that Kubrick
"smelled good" and that, at her request, he'd given
her a lock of his hair in an as-yet-unopened envelope,
her intention being to clone him.
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In A Soldier's Daughter
Never Cries, based on Kaylie Jones fictional memoir of
growing up as the daughter of novelist James Jones, Sobieski
is Channe, who graduates from her cozy, romantic Parisian
adolescence in the '60s to a period of familial and psychological
upheaval during her later high school years in America
in the early '70s. In Paris, Channe is gauche, willful,
unseeing, especially in her relationship with flamboyant,
effeminate schoolfriend (Anthony Roth Costanzo) who teaches
her that life may be rainbow-hued but love unfolds in
shades of gray. Removed to America, awakened to her romantic
needs, Channe takes a detour and embarks on a phase as
a high school slut. Bruised and regretful, she finds solace
in the counsel of her father (Kris Kristofferson), who
offers gentle guidance but refuses to judge her. The scenes
between Kristofferson and Sobieski are some of the most
moving father-daughter scenes we've seen in years, but
Sobieski is fascinating throughout the film - a quicksilver
study in intellect vying with emotion.
In person, she's the kind of young
woman who might have inspired Choplin's Les Sylphides
rather than Jerry Lee Lewis's "Chantilly Lace," but
who knows what rock 'n' roll fires are burning beneath
her patrician poise? (We'll have to wait and see if
Kubrick has lit them.) Discovered by a casting director
in her school cafeteria, the daughter of a novelist
(her mom) and an artist (her dad), Sobieski doesn't
want much out of life, she says, just to be "a writer,
an illustrator of children's books, a potter, a painter,
a poet, a director, an actress, a screenwriter, an architect,
an interior designer, a clothing designer, a realtor,
a stockbroker, a wife, and a mother." She knows she
can't be all these, but the breathlessness, with which
she makes the list indicates how much she sees the world
as her oyster. She, though, is no average pearl.
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