American tourist Frank meets mysterious British woman Elsie on the train to Venice. Romance seems to bud, but there's more to her than meets the eye.
23 Feb The Tourist (2010)
Charade
This film is quite an achievement, because it attempts to reproduce a form from 40 – 50 years ago, without any adjustment.
The form is simple, being a variety of a con movie but without announcing itself. It involves a couple and adventure; only late in the game can we put some shape on what we suspect, that someone is not who they say. It is an actor‘s format, indeed requires actors that we are thoroughly familiar with. This allows us to always be aware that we are watching a pretence: one soul pretending to be another.
The game is in following how many layers down the pretence goes. Recently, we saw an attempt in ‘Duplicity,‘ which failed. It used actors who were not capable of the form, who cannot do the sort of acting where you carry your celebrity persona, the pretended identity and the ‘real‘ identity in every scene and in parallel. In this case, we have the actors we need.
The story itself is simple. If you have no spoiler information going in, there is a pleasant surprise. All else is formula and Venice. It is that actors that make this work.
Depp has always been capable of this, all the way back before he had celebrity to help. Angelina has been a pleasant surprise. Her public persona is a carefully managed role, and she seems to be capable of anything thrown at her. Here, she adds value by inserting a fourth persona (after Angelina, the lover and the agent). What she does is play Audrey Hepburn playing the lover, wide-eyed with an inner skepticism.
Watch how she carries herself. Her centre of gravity and the presentation of self is all in the neck, a carriage unique to this film. This is of course what Audrey brought to the vocabulary, head and shoulders as secondary body parts. The effect is subtle, but oh so powerful.
Posted in 2011
Ted’s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.
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