By Dan Callahan
"I'm not an apparition," insists Delphine Seyrig in Truffaut's Stolen Kisses (1968), "I'm a woman." While we would like to give her the benefit of the doubt, there can be no denying that Seyrig is the most ghostly of actresses, haunting her own movies with a druggy, dazed quality over which she placed a severe intellectual patina. Something as simple as a different hair color makes her an entirely different person; in the Truffaut film, she's a platinum blond, and so delicately tender with Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leaud) that you can almost smell the scent of her perfume as she makes his romantic fantasy of her come true, if only for a few hours. At one point on their fateful afternoon, before they make love, she remembers the words of her dying father, who told her "people are wonderful." Seyrig creates so vivid a picture of benevolent, mysterious beauty for Doinel and for us that she briefly brings Truffaut to the level of a life-embracing Jean Renoir. A phantom of the cinema and truly ageless, Seyrig is capable of stopping an entire film with one decisive physical gesture, one smile, one glare, one sound from her smoky, murmuring voice.
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2 comments:
What a wonderful piece, Dan. You bring her back to me in a way that makes me ashamed for consigning her for so long to a forgotten pocket of my mind. When I was a teenager in Philadelphia I spent countless hours alone in a tiny movie theater near my Germantown high school, drinking in the New Wave with a passion I could never share with my more Gidget-loving friends. I spent months lounging around in attitudes I thought were like hers in "Marienbad," mystifying my poor parents. Years later, when I lived for a short time in Paris, I tried fruitlessly to walk and dress and speak like Fabienne Tabard, succeeding only in breaking my meager budget on Chanel shoes. You bring it all back. Merci.
Glad to have stirred up pleasant memories; also glad that Criterion released "Jeanne Dielman" on DVD. Seyrig is a real icon, and definitely worth remembering and even emulating.
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