bbie Cornish
Pouty, sweet-faced blondes have been a cinematic come-on at least since Carroll Baker climbed into a crib for Elia Kazan's "Baby Doll" half a century ago. The Australian actress Abbie Cornish looks like more of the same in "Somersault" (late August), but her performance offers a better brand of thrills. Pairing her own stunning debut with that of the "Somersault" writer and director Cate Shortland, Ms. Cornish plays Heidi, an unhappy 16-year-old whose unblinking sexual knowledge of the adult male implies abuse that the movie wisely never spells out. Caught half-undressed with her mother's live-in boyfriend (an impulsive act of revenge for her mother's neglect), she takes off in a panic of fear and shame, fetching up at a distant ski town in the Snowy Mountains with little more than her body to use for currency until she can work out something better.
By any ordinary standard, Heidi should be about as innocent as Paris Hilton. But there's nothing ordinary about Ms. Cornish or "Somersault." This isn't the story of a teenage siren; it's an exploration of the pleasures and dangers of female adolescence that transcends easy categories of right and wrong. For all Heidi's singularity, Ms. Cornish makes her feel universal. She does dumb, risky and occasionally self-destructive things, but Ms. Cornish lends her an indestructible innocence, a kind of strength and hopefulness that, given what she's up against, is both admirable and terrifying.
She conveys that innocence with an emotional and physical candor. Heidi doesn't use come-hither looks or slutty postures. She looks people in the eye; she has a kid's body, and she uses it like a kid, with an easy, un-self-conscious energy. It's what makes her come-ons disturbing experiences for the men she comes on to. In failing to provide them with a fantasy about her own lust, she inadvertently shows them how predatory theirs is. Her own desires are honorable - Heidi wants to be loved and safe. Who doesn't?
Simon Abkarian
Simon Abkarian is a famous stage and film actor in France, but modest roles in "The Truth About Charlie" and Atom Egoyan's "Ararat" (both 2002) weren't enough to make audiences remember him here. Sally Potter's new film, "Yes" (June 24), should change that. Set in London, "Yes" stars Mr. Abkarian as the lover of an Irish-American scientist (Joan Allen) unhappily married to a philandering British politician (Sam Neill). Mr. Abkarian's character is a political immigrant, a Lebanese doctor who supports himself as a cook and catering worker. With his long, elegant body and lined, tragicomic face - mournful eyes, a delicious smile under a canopy of dark mustache and a nose just short of Cyrano's, Mr. Abkarian is a visual feast. He's seldom still, his expressive features shifting from sad to sexy to sharply observant, and his loose-limbed body moving for the sheer pleasure of it.
This is a virtuoso physical performance: at the political banquet where he first meets Ms. Allen's slightly shy, cerebral character, he moves through the room with such easy authority that he might be the host of the dinner instead of the headwaiter. And one evening after he and Ms. Allen have made love, he dances for her on top of a tiny table in a way that feels tribal and ancient. It's an act of seduction and celebration, inflected with a touch of humor; but he's also showing her where he comes from and how far it is from her Anglo-European world. Mr. Abkarian's performance is virtuosic in another way. Ms. Potter wrote "Yes" in verse. All the actors are good, but Mr. Abkarian wraps his voice around the poetry with such supple command that the subtly stylized language becomes a dimension of his character, his exile, and passion and hunger for life flowing out of him like a song.
Tony Leung Chiu-wai
At 42, Tony Leung Chiu-wai is a huge star in Asia, with more than 60 movies to his credit. But it was just four years ago that "In the Mood for Love," Wong Kar-wai's meditation on loss and desire, introduced him to nonspecialized American audiences. As a figure of ravishing sadness, Mr. Leung's gentle newspaperman, Chow Mo Wan, has no equal. With the smallest gestures - the tilt of his body, the lift of a hand, a quickly shuttered glance - he conveys his intense but discreet yearning for the woman who ultimately refuses him. It's safe to say that some of the anticipation here for Mr. Wong's new film, "2046," a sequel to "In the Mood for Love," has to do with audiences' desire to see Mr. Leung's enchanting character again.
They're in for a shock. In "2046" (Aug. 5), he plays what an earlier generation of women called a patent-leather man. Throwing his life away at a hot-sheets Hong Kong hotel called the Oriental, he's a charming smoothie, with slick black hair that catches the light and a cheesy, pencil-thin mustache. Last seen in "In the Mood for Love" confiding his heartbreak to Cambodia's ancient ruins, Chow was the ultimate romantic. In "2046," romance is dead, and so is something in him.
Chow retains some of the generosity that made him so appealing in the earlier film. But he can also be repellent, starting with that mustache, which robs Mr. Leung's face of its sweetness, and which he insisted upon over the director's objections. When Chow amiably rejects the advances of a pretty young prostitute (Ziyi Zhang) who's fallen for him, Mr. Leung puts a subtle edge of boredom on the rebuff, which makes it cut like a knife. He dashes the viewer's hopes just as coolly. In a recurring motif, characters retreat to the Oriental's roof to contemplate life-changing decisions. When Chow appears, you think that he'll let go of the past and recover his humanity. But as Mr. Leung's faintly amused gaze makes clear, he's just there for a smoke. He lets us glimpse Chow's suffering only in the tiny intervals after he leaves a companion; then the smiling bonhomie or flirtatiousness falls away, revealing the bleak eyes and weary solitude of a man in thrall to a perverse fidelity: the refusal to heal.
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