On s'est connus: Jeanne Moreau

I think of this as the iconic Moreau look. Bare face, cat eyes, unfussy hair, and the plainest little black dress.

Sometime in my teens (was it when I started studying French in college?), my mom decided we needed to watch Jules and Jim. Mom said she'd seen it years earlier but "the only thing I remember about it is that she sings a little song with a guitar."

"She" was Jeanne Moreau, of course, and the song was "Le Tourbillon," a perfect little grace note of suspended time in the middle of this perfect, daring, how-the-fuck-did-Truffaut-pull-this-off-before-he-was-thirty film.

I think of this as my introduction to Jeanne Moreau, though I guess technically I'd seen her as the old lady in the frame story of Ever After, her distinctive voice grown gravelly with time and lending a gravitas to the film's final lines that you don't often find in children's fairy-tale films.

But in the years to come, she became my favorite French actress. She was intense and sexy and had a piercing kind of intelligence. She was never an ingenue (the early-career glossy publicity photos where she tries to look like a '50s ingenue are kind of hilarious). She was always a fully grown, if petite, woman who needed the rougher edges of the French New Wave, handheld cameras and minimal makeup and intelligent scripts and complex characters. She did her best work after she was thirty. She had Resting Sad Face (like me). She had a tart little voice, like green apples, and even recorded some other jazz-pop songs besides "Le Tourbillon." The Lovers, a movie she made in 1958 that included a nude love scene, eventually prompted the famous U.S. Supreme Court case where Justice Potter Stewart ruled "That's not obscene, I can't define pornography but I know it when I see it." She was the first woman elected to the French Academy of Fine Arts. (Although, as praiseworthy as that is, it's also kind of shameful that it took until 2001 to break that glass ceiling.) She was Maggie the Cat in the French premiere of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and can you even imagine?

I watch her movies and I want to take up smoking and wander around cities at night being intense and brooding and melancholy and restless and dissatisfied. One thing I think we don't talk about enough is how there are a lot of male stars who embody a disaffected, brooding quality, but among women, there's pretty much only Jeanne Moreau. Women, too, sometimes want to be romantic existentialists. Women, too, want film-star icons who were uncompromising and iconoclastic, lonely and proud.

I did feel a physical shock on reading the news that she died but, if I take a step back, I mean... she was 89. She worked with the best filmmakers of her era. She smoked like a chimney and made it to the end of her ninth decade on Earth. I sang "Le tourbillon" in the shower this morning. RIP et adieu, Mme Moreau.

Marian Seldes and the last of the grande dames

When I took a course on Fairy Tales in college, we spent a class session performing scenes from Ondine, by Jean Giraudoux. I secretly hoped to be cast as Ondine because Audrey Hepburn originated the role on Broadway, and I'd idolized Audrey since I was four years old. So at first, I was slightly disappointed to be cast as Bertha, the "other woman" in the play's love triangle. Then I saw that the role of Bertha was originated by Marian Seldes, and I decided that that was probably better, anyway. Wasn't it better to be a complex and passionate human woman instead of a naive, unworldly water nymph?

I never got to see Marian Seldes onstage, and this memory may not sound like much, but I remember it as a decisive moment in my personal development. Be striking, be "handsome," be impressive. Don't be a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

With the passing of Seldes, Elaine Stritch, and Lauren Bacall this year -- grande dames who each, in their own way, exuded a larger-than-life theatrical personality -- it truly feels like the end of an era.

RIP, Ms. Seldes.

Seldes as Bertha in Ondine, 1950s.

A Moreau moment

The other day, when I envisioned a Chanel biopic made in the 1950s or '60s with Jeanne Moreau in the lead, I was mainly thinking of how Moreau and Chanel share a certain uncompromising, implacable quality (which is not a quality one associates with Audrey Tautou)...

Little did I know that Chanel was one of Moreau's favorite designers, that there are photos of them together in Chanel's famous apartment...

...and that even today, Moreau maintains her association with the couture house, narrating an audio guide for a Chanel exhibition and appearing in a video on the Chanel website where she gives a tour of this apartment (go here and click on #2).

I am actually in a Jeanne Moreau phase at the moment--it started when I watched Viva Maria on Comcast last week. No offense meant to Brigitte Bardot, Moreau's Viva Maria costar, who is of course beautiful and delightful. But in general, I am never as fascinated by bubbly and exuberant Bardot types as I am by women like Moreau--whose eyes held an infinite sadness and wisdom and seen-it-all quality even when she was only in her thirties.

When I grow up I want to be an intense French woman. Chic and opinionated, passionate but unsentimental. Like Moreau. Like Chanel. Like Natalie Dessay. Like my host mothers in Paris and Bordeaux. Not altogether like Edith Piaf, whose life was too painful for anyone to covet; but like her, like all these women, in taking Je ne regrette rien as a motto!

Nicole Kidman as Halloween Inspiration

Is Nicole Kidman my favorite actress? I don't know; she's had a bit of a strange career path lately, though "come what may, I will love her until my dying day" for Moulin Rouge. But judging by the number of times her roles have inspired my Halloween costumes over the last several years, you'd be forgiven for thinking that.

Freshman year of college, I dressed up as "Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf." Basically I wanted an excuse to buy nose putty and make myself a monstrously huge fake nose. I also thought that this was the kind of clever, intellectual costume that would appeal at Vassar. Little did I know that Halloween at Vassar is the night when everyone puts away the intellectual pretentions that weigh heavily upon them for the other 364 nights of the year and just lets loose. I felt embarrassed to have chosen such a deliberately frumpy costume.

Kidman as Virginia Woolf
me as Virginia Woolf

Oddly enough, the "frumpy" dress I bought at Goodwill, when divorced from the fake nose, ugly hat and clumpy shoes, actually turned out to fit me really well, and has since become one of my favorite wardrobe pieces. I wore it when portraying a 1930s character in my play last spring.

I already wrote a lengthy blog post about my last year's Halloween costume: Marguerite Gauthier from La Dame aux Camélias. This character, as you may know, inspired the character of Satine the tubercular courtesan in Moulin Rouge. And Kidman/Satine's astoundingly gorgeous red gown in that movie set me off on a years-long quest for my own perfect red dress. I found one in Paris a year and a half ago, and wore it for my Dame aux Camélias costume.

Kidman in Moulin Rouge

me as La Dame aux Camélias

And this year? The choice was simple: Mrs. Coulter from The Golden Compass. I have loved the book since I was 9 years old, and when the movie came out last winter, it made the story better-known and gave Mrs. Coulter a distinctive "look." In the movie, Kidman makes her first entrance in a gown that is all-over gold sequins, and as luck would have it, I had purchased just that kind of gown for $2 at a rummage sale several years ago. I then bought a stuffed-animal golden lion tamarin (to represent the golden-monkey daemon), consulted this tongue-in-cheek guide for "How to Be Like Mrs. Coulter," and I was set to hit the town!


Kidman as Mrs. Coulter (with Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra)

me as Mrs. Coulter, with the golden monkey (I'm keeping it and have decided to name it "Philip" in honor of Philip Pullman. Oh, and it's a complete coincidence that my pose in this photo mimicks that of Kidman in the picture above. I am not that obsessed!)

Of course it's too early to tell what I'll be for Halloween next year, though as I've mentioned before, I've often wanted to work up a Margot Tenenbaum costume. Still, if that doesn't pan out, I'm dying to see Nicole Kidman/Baz Luhrmann's new movie Australia, and the images and costume sketches of Kidman's character reveal that she again has a very tempting wardrobe--slinky '30s dresses mixed with safari gear!

"Juno" and the Gay Talk

One of the nice things about getting older (by which I mean "out of my teens") is that people my age are starting to make a mark in the media, and my generation is developing a voice of its own. I've been thinking about this a lot after seeing the ultra-Zeitgeisty Juno. Director Jason Reitman is 30 years old and screenwriter Diablo Cody is 29. And sure, like many reviewers, I found her quirky dialogue a little too much to take, especially at the beginning of the film. But how great is it that people are actually talking about a movie's dialogue for once? And that this dialogue was written by a female screenwriter?

Even better are the young stars, Michael Cera (19) and Ellen Page (20). Ever since Arrested Development I have loved how Cera does "awkward"--while most "awkward teenage boy" performances just annoy me (cf. Rabbit Hole, 100 Saints..., Doris to Darlene). I think it's because many actors make the mistake of playing these roles as one-dimensional, jittery bundles of nervousness, too shy and sensitive to ever survive in the real world. Michael Cera is different--more understated, less heart-on-sleeve. The actors I dislike simply telegraph "I'm a dork! I'm socially inept!" Cera goes for "I'm trying to be cool, I think it'll work this time...but oh no, did I just do something dorky?" He tries and strives, where other actors just act like losers from the get-go.

Thus, these lines are just so apt--Cera's appeal in a nutshell:

JUNO: You're like the coolest person I've ever met, and you don't even have to try, y'know...
PAULIE: I try really hard, actually.

And Ellen Page is the first actress of my generation that I feel I can relate to. Someone talented and funny (she was hilarious on Letterman) who seems to care about the craft, not the fame or swag bags or clubbing. Someone who got famous because of a small, good movie, not for bad behavior or being a celebrity's daughter or being on a Disney show. I mean, who was I supposed to relate to before this--Hilary Duff? Maybe Evan Rachel Wood was a promising, offbeat role model, until she started dating Marilyn Manson, which is too offbeat even for me. (Ellen, Hilary, Evan, and I were all born in the same year, 1987.)

But I'm also annoyed that the Ellen Pages of this world still have trouble gaining acceptance amongst all the Hilary Duffs. I especially noticed this when I saw on Ellen's IMDB message board about half a dozen threads speculating that she's a lesbian. And OK, "not that there's anything wrong with that," with being a lesbian, I mean.

But I do think there is something wrong with the "reasoning" behind many of these "she must be gay" posts. There is something wrong with saying "judging by her behavior i dont think she digs guys. Lohan/Paris/Britney behavior, shows me they obviously dig guys. i know that sounds twisted, but its the truth" (found here). There is something wrong with thinking that a cute 20-year-old actress must be a lesbian if she isn't in a high-profile, paparazzi-attracting, PDA-filled relationship. There is something wrong with people who comb through every interview Ellen Page has ever given to see if she mentions a boyfriend, and when she does say something like "my ex-boyfriend," dismiss it with a "Well, she probably dumped him when she figured out she was gay!" And there is something wrong with a Hollywood system that presents young gay and lesbian actors with an impossible dilemma: stay in the closet, work 24-7 to quell rumors about your sexuality, and become a big star; or come out of the closet, have everyone praise your courage, but find yourself limited to smaller roles.

People say that Ellen Page sets off their "gaydar" because of her tomboy style, avowed feminism, and "low butch voice." This last accusation especially annoys me, because I like her for her deadpan delivery--a refreshing change from all the starlets who have high-pitched voices cooing Valley Girl uptalk. So do girls now have to sound like airheads in order for people to believe that they are heterosexual? When I and my articulate, feminist, non-trendy Vassar friends are launched into the real world in June, will everyone assume that we are gay?

If Ellen Page is indeed a lesbian, and comes out of the closet while her career is still nascent, I will admire her even more--for being courageous as well as talented and funny. But I also (and maybe this shows that I'm still not as accepting as I'd like) will be slightly disappointed. If Ellen Page is the first actress of my generation that I relate to--and she's also "ponging more gaydar than anyone since Jodie Foster"--then where, as a straight woman, does that leave me?