PERFORMANCE PERSPECTIVES

"The Girl on the Bridge"
ACTING BEING DIFFERENT?

• Magical.
• Charming
• Allegorical.
• Cinematic
• Entertaining.

This is a delightful film.

And the performances….? They're terrific.

It's the performances, which are the major contributors to the films charm.

That the two leading actors (VANESSA PARADIS & DANIEL AUTEUIL) strongly re-enforce the extraordinary value of the most essential basics of acting makes these performances worth watching. There are many moments in this film where the act of two people looking at each other, often for significant periods of time, is at that moment the sole vehicle for story.

Two characters needing different things face each other - drama, conflict and hope. Here the difficulty of having individual "needs" met becomes the entire focus of the drama.

What more is required?

And what can be simpler than that?

Here the simplest, the most basic and the best elements of performance are truthfully and potently utilized.

In an interview for The Sunday Age, 2 April 2000 with Philippa Hawker, VANESSA PARADIS is quoted as saying, "A lot of actors have this way of completely transforming … from one movie to another, they are a different person. I love that but I don't know if I'll be able to do it, because even if I tried with The Girl on the Bridge I can still see a lot of me there."

Transforming or being different is often seen by actors as the pinnacle of achievement. And yet questing this goal, in fact, often destroys a performance. (I hasten to add this is obviously not the case in "The Girl on the Bridge") It destroys performances because it distracts the actor from the most important ingredients of drama and character - truthfully pursuing "need".

Often the quest to create a character that is different from the actor or from previous creations, leads to contrivance, mannerism and self-consciousness. And it ignores the essential fact that the audience is going to most readily engage with the universal truths that are part of us all and therefore, obviously, part of the actor playing the character. It is foolhardy to try and deny these unconscious stimuli. And it is inevitable that they will emerge. This is something to be encouraged.

VANESSA PARADIS made the right choice. If she set external goals for herself as a performer in this film she didn't let them inhibit the character's interactions.

The way to achieve the differentiation that VANESSA seeks is through expanding our knowledge of the "needs" which drive us as individuals for it is through knowing ourselves better that we can come to better understand the way the characters we create behave. It is the "us" in "them" which is the real value.

VANESSA used her current self-knowledge and her current understanding of the world exceedingly well in this film. And further more she didn't let her personal goals (which are irrelevant to story and character) distract from her performance.

For these achievements she should receive loud applause.

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