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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
The director of "Gas Food Lodging" and "Things Behind the Sun" shares her memories of the greatest British actress you've never heard of, who died unexpectedly in early September.
Sep 30, 2002 | "British Actress Cartlidge Dies Suddenly" was what I read by chance on IMDb, a small headline that ran Sept. 10. Not many details: She got sick, she died, she was only 41. It was shattering and so sudden. Her voice was still on my answering machine.
The night I found out that my friend Katrin Cartlidge died, I had a dream. We were on the bluffs in Carpinteria, Calif. This is a spot the coastal Chumash Indians considered holy. They felt blessed to live here for thousands of years, and I feel blessed to live here now. In my dream I was there with Katrin, and any time spent with her, as everyone who knew her felt, was blessed time.
It was just the kind of dream you'd have when someone you love has died suddenly -- we were talking, nothing special, just talking. We walked fast along the bluffs. The waves in the ocean were surreally close and high as we sped along, so fast that our feet were off the ground. We were flying close to the sand as we talked. We didn't speak of the big things. We talked like we had all the time in the world.
Before I met Katrin, I was a fan of her genius, and she really was a genius. (I can hear her laughing right now, like I'm so over the top by saying this about her.) The first time I saw her, I was stunned by her performance in Mike Leigh's "Naked". If you've seen the film, you know which one she was: the Goth-clad rocker girl, Sophie, who makes the bad mistake of coming home to her flat to uninvited houseguest Johnny, played by David Thewlis. The next time I saw her, she was an entirely different energy as the compassionate, quiet Dodo McNeill (the nurse, sister-in-law of Emily Watson's character) in Lars von Trier's "Breaking the Waves." I was smitten with her versatility and penetrating depth on the screen -- it became my dream to work with her.
But I never did get that chance. Instead I had the extraordinary privilege of becoming her friend. We met by blessed chance at one of my favorite film festivals, in Locarno, Switzerland. Katrin was serving on the jury, as I had done the year before. My friend and mentor, French director Claire Denis, was also on the jury and introduced us. Both Kathryn Bigelow (who would later direct Katrin in "The Weight of Water," which is due out later this year) and I were invited back after our jury stint together to bring our favorite films: I brought a Douglas Sirk movie, "There's Always Tomorrow," and Kathryn brought "The Wild Bunch." Even with her heavy load -- and no one knew better than Kathryn and I what was expected of you on that jury in terms of watching movies -- Katrin came with her boyfriend, the South African actor Peter Gevisser, to see these films that had inspired us.
My last image of Katrin in Locarno was of her walking to the pool one moonlit night with her beloved Peter, and how happy they looked together. They were holding hands in matching terry-cloth robes from the hotel. They were everything to each other in that image: lovers, best friends, brother and sister, kindred souls. Me -- I was undoubtedly, as always, nursing some bordering-on-masochism affection for someone who could not return it. I wondered how she did that: She found him, he found her, and they were happy.
I realized when she died that Katrin knew nothing of my love life or sex life or what was in my heart and head for which man. We never talked about it because Katrin had the love of her life; she didn't need to have that girl talk about her relationship. It worked, and if it ever didn't, I have to imagine she was able to talk to the person to whom it mattered -- Peter. I could have revealed anything to her, in all the gory, sloppy, embarrassing details, and she would have accepted me whole (although she would not have indulged me!). Luckily for her, she managed to be spared what all my other female friends have not.
It was when I saw Katrin in Lodge Kerrigan's amazing "Claire Dolan" that she exceeded whatever we regard as an actor's talent. However great any performance you have seen is -- she transcended that. There are few of these we experience in a lifetime, and Katrin achieved that in her rendering of an Irish woman forced into prostitution to fulfill a parent's debt. Katrin performs sex scenes throughout the film. When I wrote about the film and her performance upon its release, I worried that people thought I meant her performance was brave because she was an actress having so much sex on screen. That couldn't be further from what I meant.
