Sunday, May 11, 2008
The French stud-boy is usually too hot to keep clothed, and too interesting for Hollywood to ever take notice.
May 5, 2005 | Hollywood stud-boys are generally too boring (Brad Pitt), too weak (Ashton Kutcher), too all-things-to-all-people (Will Smith), too adolescent (George Clooney), too humorless (Russell Crowe), too delicate (Jude Law) or too stupid (Kevin Costner). They've done too many test audiences with weepy, overweight girls from the Midwest or something, and now most leading men are too accessible and nice -- threatening, broody, strange, potent, complicated masculine energies are almost entirely missing from the screen. Intense, intelligent leading men are apparently too challenging for American audiences, who want their male stars likable and familiar, and are apparently put off by internal conflict or complexity. Thinking women are stuck with intractably grumpy, macho hicks; gleeful, overgrown teen clods; smug pretty boys; and wispy, cologned metrosexuals to project their fantasies onto. Unless they want to go foreign.
Which is why I love French films, and Grigoire Colin. He is more exotic-looking than Hollywood stars are allowed to be: long face, Asiatic eyes, an elegantly large, aquiline nose, Faye Dunaway cheekbones; small, round mouth -- like a living Modigliani. Trying to describe his unusual features by a combination of ethnicities, one might try French-Jewish-Japanese-Siberian; his face is a combination of mismatched features that shouldn't work, but is unexpectedly magical. A good deal of Colin's films contain doting landscape shots of his naked body, the musculature of which might be composed of windless sand dunes -- a vulnerably natural, velvety, soft-edged hard-body that reflects a purer, more classic and subtle aesthetic than the cut, dyed, gym-bot, briskety sinew of Brad Pitt, whose physique, like the modern architecture he loves, looks miserably uninhabitable.
Aside from his obvious physical gifts, Colin, who began acting on the French stage at age 12, brings something to the screen that American stars can't -- range, emotional courage; fascinating choices. Colin takes risks that would paralyze American stars with insecurity. He turns, film to film, from priest to rapist, thug to sophisticate, innocent to bastard -- clean, precise, complete transformations, gorgeously built from the inside out. It is as if Colin's soul is as clear as water, free from the various inner tattoos and inhibitions of ego and personality that would prevent him from inhabiting a character completely -- totally unlike an American heartthrob, who would wear different costumes but basically play small variations of himself in every film.
In "Olivier, Olivier" (1992), Colin, just 17 at the time, delivers an intricate, skilled performance as a boy who runs away from his screechy, melodramatically dysfunctional family at the age of 9, and returns six years later, having lived in the meantime as a gay bus-station hustler. Colin is able to project a dippy teen innocence at the same time he is delivering a sleazy, too-knowing bedroom stare-down. He floats back and forth between a deceitful, abused sexual menace and a quivering vulnerability -- an unfortunate kid for whom seduction, both emotional and physical, is survival. It's shockingly sophisticated and well-observed inner work, especially for a teenage actor. He recites a poem at one point, articulating each emotional turn like a seasoned Shakespearean on a freshly paved textual autobahn -- hair-raisingly impressive.
"Before the Rain" (1994), directed by Milcho Manchevski, is an interesting triptych of stories of people affected, in different and far-reaching ways, by religiously motivated violence in Yugoslavia. In it, Colin is so beatific and flawlessly pretty as the young Macedonian priest Kiril, his face evokes a better-lit version of a pious Audrey Hepburn in "A Nun's Story." Kiril, who has taken a vow of silence, hides in his quarters an Albanian runaway girl who is being sought by armed packs of feuding locals. Colin has no lines; Kiril's entire inner journey -- a love that grows from general (humankind) to specific (the girl), with its agonized suspense, betrayal, deep faith, shattering loss -- is conveyed through his glittering eyes, so dark as to look all-pupil, like jet buttons housing tiny suns.
"Son of Gascogne" (1995) is a charming little treasure of a film by Godard protigi Pascal Aubier. At 20, Colin still looks like a gawky adolescent, all wrists, nose and knees. Harvey (Colin) is an innocent, fatherless tour guide, leading a pack of hollering ex-Soviet Georgians around France. He is convinced by a louche, gold-chained limo driver that he is the illegitimate son of "Gascogne," a famous, deceased bon vivant from the era of French New Wave cinema. As Harvey gets dragged around Paris and introduced to Gascogne's (and presumably director Aubier's) famous old friends -- New Wave stars like Anna Karina, playing themselves -- he grows fond of cashing in on the residual star power of his long-lost playboy father. It is a Cary Grant role -- madcap, exasperated, romantic, with lots of yelling and arm waving -- and Colin pulls it off with impressive timing and control, particularly in a scene in which two hot older women get him drunk and seduce him in a hot tub. The shy, geeky wonder and gee-whiz surprise on his face as the women undress him is a prime example of the understated, selfless commitment with which Colin serves his films; a young male star in the United States would be too egocentric, too scared of looking uncool, at this point in his burgeoning career, to let himself look like the naive goofball that "Gascogne" required.
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