Take Three: Jérémie Renier

Craig from Dark Eye Socket here with another Take Three. Today: Jérémie Renier

Take One: Private Property/Nue propriété (2006)
Joachim Lafosse’s beautifully-crafted French family drama Private Property, starred arthouse doyenne Isabelle Huppert alongside Renier and his brother Yannick (also an actor). They're just about getting on in a country house that non-identical twins Thierry (Jérémie) and François (Yannick) don’t want to sell, but Mater Dearest does; the live-away father/ex-husband backs the twins – and it’s his house. The drama is all about the to and fro of this looming possibility, the elephant smack bang in the front room and pregnant with the biggest pause imaginable. Lafosse curiously shapes his narrative with inharmonious tension between the three: it’s sometimes sexual, sometimes queasily thick, and most times unavoidable. Freud would’ve loved a visit with this Gallic clan.

Renier plays the pivotal character; an invisible finger seems to poke us into scrutinising him more than the others. Though the twins share a bond and personality traits, hes' the independent one. The connection between these adult brothers is still very adolescent (computer games, play fights etc) and  proves to be part of the family’s undoing. Everyone is excellent (come on, it’s Huppert!), but Renier has the most baggage to haul. In a scene where his childishness is on full display he hides from the family in nearby woods. Renier's face goes blank and he seems to be disappearing inside himself. It's incredibly powerful but he handles extensive complex, quick-fire dialogue just as maturely as an actor. Thierry is one of his strongest recent roles.

Take Two: In Bruges (2008)

Martin McDonough’s In Bruges holds a small, throwaway role for Renier, an elevated cameo if you will.

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Take Three: Shelley Duvall

Craig here with Take Three. Today: Shelley Duvall

Take One: 3 Women (1977)

There aren’t very many characters like Millie Lammoreaux in the movies. Watching Robert Altman’s 1977 masterpiece 3 Women you can see why. Essentially there are two reasons: she’s a hard sell, commercially speaking, and Duvall has played her perfectly well here already; there’s no need for an imitation version from anyone else. Duvall made Millie so singularly and categorically her own. It’s her signature performance; the centrepiece on her C.V. As per the title, she shares the film with two other women: Sissy Spacek, as her new roommate and care-home co-worker Pinky Rose, and Janice Rule as Willie Hart, a local (to Millie’s apartment complex, the Purple Sage, where much of the film takes place) artist – the one who paints the mysterious swimming pool mural which seems so significant to these 3 Women, and (metaphorically?) permeates it with an uncommon atmosphere.

Millie’s unconventional in her desire to be the picture of conventionality, and therefore slightly barking by “normal” folks’ standards. She is awkward to be around, obsessed with women’s magazines and being the girl with the utmost social purpose, to an almost unhealthy degree; she’s too-brightly presented for her own good (literally and psychologically – her yellow and purple outfits cover a multitude of personality shortfalls), self-regarding, scared of tomatoes and is passive-aggressive 23 hours a day. But she’s never less than individual. A one-off. She’s also one of the most riveting, uncontainable and unique creations in all ‘70s American cinema. There’s humour in the awkwardness and then a wrenching sadness. We see Millie change, vividly and complexly, toward the film’s last scenes – just before the film waltzes gloriously off into its own unfathomable illogicality. Duvall quite rightly won Best Actress at Cannes and the LAFCAA for 3 Women. But she should have won much more.

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Take Three: Burgess Meredith

Craig here with Take Three. Today: Burgess Meredith

Take One: The Sentinel (1977)
Watching Michael Winner’s high-pitched horror The Sentinel has two great side effects: one, you get some great ‘70s New York apartment porn (with the bonus of having Ava Gardner as your guide); two, you’re treated to one of Meredith’s most under seen and relishable performances. It came a year after his Supporting Actor Oscar nod for his signature role as Mickey in Rocky. He plays Cristina Raines favourite new neighbour Charles Chazen, a dotty, slightly effete, amiable and – oh yeah – imaginary elderly resident in the suspiciously cheap waterside Brooklyn Brownstone.

He lives happily with his parakeet, Mortimer (also imaginary), his cat Jezebel (the meows sound real), and a blind priest sentry guarding the apartment block from all the demons of hell. So, yes: he leads a simple, gentle life.

The Sentinel sits very much in Rosemary’s Baby’s shadow; it’s the Xmas cracker version of Polanski’s tenant-terror movie but it has charms to recommend it. But dismay occurs halfway in: Meredith disappears from the film for a considerably baffling amount of time.

There are many other notable on-the-way-up and on-the-way-out actors in the movie. Deep breath now: Chris Sarandon, José Ferrer, John Carradine, Ava Gardner, Eli Wallach, Sylvia Miles, Arthur Kennedy, Christopher Walken, Beverly D’Angelo, Jeff Goldblum, Martin Balsam, Jerry Orbach and Tom Berenger. It may well be the best ‘70s cast outside of a Poseidon Adventure or a Towering Inferno. But Meredith is the one you miss when he's gone. His part is slightly more prominent due to the role Chazen plays in the grandly dark scheme of things. He pops up, when we least expect but most want him to, to summon forth a legion of misshapen hotel guests of the dead, and then exits the film in style. Meredith invests The Sentinel, mad as it already is, with just a touch more senior tomfoolery; he also gives it its gaga ambience. Much of the film’s silly brilliance comes from him.

Take Two: Batman (1966)

Out of the four actors who played masked arch foes in the 1966 big screen adaptation of the Batman TV series, Meredith ended up with the longest career after. [The Penguin awaits after the jump]

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Take Three: Isabella Rossellini

Craig here with Take Three. Today: Isabella Rossellini

Take One: Blue Velvet (1986)
“She... Wore... Bluuuuuue Vel-vet.” Indeed she did: bluer than velvet was the night. Ladies and gentlemen, Rossellini was the Blue Lady, Miss Dorothy Vallens, in David Lynch’s mid-eighties masterpiece Blue Velvet. Vallens was a tortured torch singer, a gas-guzzling freakopath Frank Booth’s (Dennis Hopper) late-night inviter and pervy amateur detective Jeffrey Beaumont’s (Kyle MacLachlan) sexual initiation vixen. And yet, behind it all, lay a fretful wife and mother. Rossellini’s introductory scene in the film showed her as a midnight siren, a depressed blue dahlia who, once done with her sad, strange rendition of Bobby Vinton’s titular song, seems to dematerialise into a pair of Lynch’s signature red curtains.

 After she finds snooping Jeffrey in her closet she’s both defender of her home and explorer of her own dark thoughts. She’s furious, but as excited by the imminent enveloping mystery as he is; you can just make out the glimmer of utter thrill creep across Rossellini’s face as she jabs his cheek with a breadknife. Here's to Rossellini for nearly making Dorothy as kinky as her male lead. She doesn’t so much break the fourth wall as demolish it, with an infuriated stare and exclamation to camera (“Grand Central Station!”) when more than one guest visits her gloomy apartment at once.

More of the sublime Saddest Music within Blue Velvet, plus the ageless silliness of Death Becomes Her after the jump.

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Take Three: Michael Pitt

Craig here with Take Three. Today: Michael Pitt

Take One: Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)
Pitt’s weedy teenage wannabe rock imp Tommy Gnosis (The Jesus freak army brat formerly known as Tommy Speck – then, very nearly, Tommy Ache) got to grapple with Hedwig’s Angry Inch in unconventionally inventive ways back in 2001. John Cameron Mitchell’s slip-up-operation rock opera, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, was like nothing else on screen at the time. If you could avert your eyes from internationally ignored “icon” Hedwig’s shining beacon of starlight, then hidden in the flared remnants, and on the sidelines, was Pitt’s Tommy. He was initially willing to dote on her every word but eventually reluctant to acknowledge his own sneaky appropriation of her back catalogue. He became the big star; Hedwig toured the fish restaurants of America.

Pitt does the naive, overtly adoring rock moppet well. He also does the non-committal, dull-eyed whiner-singer act capably, too. In short: he nailed being a half-hearted androgynous songster on the head. His game karaoke portrayal was a bizarre squishing together of Iggy Pop, Kurt Cobain and Marc Bolan and it made for a perfect contrast with Mitchell’s gender mis-reassigned glamzilla. Pitt had the “gee shucks” drippiness down to a tee early on and the moody insouciance of a fast-rising pin-up later in the film. Pitt’s occassionally been compared to Leonardo DiCaprio (they look faintly alike), but he was destined for less starry vehicles. Hedwig was his first substantial role after a few bit parts in some notable movies, setting the left of mainstream tone.

Take Two: Funny Games US (2008)
Pitt put his baby-faced Buscemi looks to ominous use in Michael Haneke’s close-to-replica  American remake of his own 1997 violent image treatise Funny Games. I’m not this particular remake’s biggest admirer, but I’ll stunt the bile flow and focus on the matter at hand, the one stand-out aspect: Pitt’s performance, which was remarkable for its blandly creepy conviction. Brady Corbet’s less assertive Peter was fine. But Pitt, as fourth-wall-breaking smiling Paul, had the film – just like the terrorised family at its centre – under his thumb with his politely negotiated terror. He was the sociopathic preppy-styled ringleader; a blond, blank-eyed menace.

Pitt brings out the duplicity innate in his character through careful use of body language and an array of insincere facial expressions (a slyness you can also see in his Murder by Numbers and Boardwalk Empire roles). Rid of his floppy-fringed slacker locks and the pouting hipster tics of other films, with hair slicked down in Aryan tidiness and his lips curled into a smug half-smile respectively, he projects just the right amount of playful goading. He fleshes out what was essentially a second-hand scolding message character. By the time he’s playing God – and, by proxy, director – by rewinding the action to fit his own murderous MO, Pitt has quite literally won his not actually all that funny game. Without him, Haneke’s lofty polemic loses something integrally dark.

Take Three: Last Days (2005)
He certainly looked like teen spirit. And he certainly sounded like teen spirit. But whether he really, truly smelled like teen spirit is open for debate. Pitt played jaded and degraded rock icon Blake, a rather transparent stand-in for Kurt Cobain, in the third entry in Gus Van Sant’s loose death tetralogy. (Gerry, Elephant and, slightly less a part of the gang, Paranoid Park being the others.) Some folks got terribly roiled up by “their” favoured generational spokesperson being portrayed in such an irregular fashion, other folks went with Van Sant’s tonic poem and embraced his loose interpretation of a famous life self-terminated too early. Although Blake was our main focus, Pitt ensured we weren’t privy to everything his portrayal represented. I’m Not There was used for Todd Haynes’ experimental Dylan biopic, but it’s a more apt title for this portrait of rock iconicity. Or He’s Barely Audible.

Pitt achieves a lot by doing little on screen: stumbling his way around his crumbling mansion with a shotgun, mumbling his way around a conversation with a pair of Mormon callers, looking fed up when Kim Gordon pops in for a chat, playing hide-and-seek with Asia Argento, making himself scarce when Lukas Haas and co. drop by unannounced, sharing a moment of tender clarity with a mini clowder of stray kittens. He draws attention by shielding himself from us; we barely see his face. When we do see his face, it’s a blank slate - a pale, unkempt presentation of incoherent mannerisms. It’s kind of Method acting, but kind of not. (Stripped Method? Method Undone?) It's the shuffling, vaporous presence itself that makes an impact. Portrayed this way, Blake is always a scruffy enigma, there to curiously mull over or ignore as we see fit.

Thre more key films for the taking: The Dreamers (2003), The Village (2004), Silk (2007)