Kristen Stewart: An actress who broke stereotypes about herself
At the St. Petersburg Festival "Message to Man" showed “The Personal Buyer” Olivier Assayas - the drama with Kristen Stewart in the lead role about a young girl who works as an assistant with a celebrity, and in her free time tries to communicate with the spirit of her twin brother. The film this year participated in the Cannes competition, and Assayas has already shot Stuart in Sils-Maria: for the role the actress received the prestigious prize of the French Film Academy Cesar, a unique case for a Hollywood movie star. We understand how Kristen Stewart has changed over the years on the screen and from the star of the franchise “Twilight” has grown into a magnificent actress - one of the strongest in her generation.
"Playing" sounds like a lie to me, and I try to do the opposite. When you play something, you manipulate people so that they feel certain things. And I don't want to think that I force things: that I’m losing like an actress. " Stewart really does not force her to empathize and does not put pressure on the audience: her careless and extraordinary Bella Swan is perhaps the only way to cope with the kitschy romantic heroine and the five-part heavy saga. At the same time as Twilight pulled pocket money from teenagers for five years, both Stewart and Pattinson launched other careers in which youthful filming experience with yellow and burgundy eyes already seems to be an absurd anecdote.
The desire to play low-key was evident from the first strong adult role in "The Country of Entertainment." There Kristen portrayed a student at a summer part-time job who runs away from a rich family to a stupid summer holiday park so as not to see her stepmother and rich father. Her intrigue with the hero Jesse Eisenberg is devoid of any emotional special effects, and in contrast with Twilight, which brought fame, "The Country of Entertainment" looked like a heartfelt, simple and accurate movie about unheroic youth. While pale Bella Swan galloped through the trees, Kristen chose other roles to form a strong and interesting acting biography. "Slightly open, not display",
- She says about the methods of her favorite directors who helped her grow. Sean Penn, Greg Mottola, Olivier Assayas, Kelly Reichardt, Woody Allen - she learned from everyone, turning from the object of obsession of Seventeen readers to an actress with directorial ambitions. Recently, Stewart took off the first short meter and admits that she sees herself in the main chair on the set after being removed in all possible roles. Money has long been irrelevant: the real actor's grace, in her opinion, is to work with those who think in stories, not dollars.
Stewart grew up in a family of filmmakers in Los Angeles, started shooting at 8, got the first star role at 11, first millions at 18, and then another and more - now Kristen Stewart is 26 years old, and she herself is surprised that she can grow up follow screen roles. Never ceasing to be a superstar after Twilight, she felt more confident with the advent of great popularity. When the lenses are aimed at you 24 on 7, there is nothing else left but to just be yourself, no matter how human you are. Now Kristen - the face of Chanel and Balenciaga - is preparing for the wedding with his girlfriend. After a coming-out, she is less and less eager to meet media expectations, has changed her style and, having come to the red carpet in an unbuttoned burgundy suit on a naked body, looks mature, calm and incredibly confident. "I want to show myself so much. I want to be seen and understood - and I myself am ready to appear before the audience in the most honest, most sincere way."
The quieter her role, the more noticeable, as Stewart hypnotizes and absorbs the heroes, working at depth. In the last film, Olivier Assayas's "Personal Buyer", Kristen plays a small fry: a celebrity assistant stuck in Paris. Her duties during the day are to pick up dresses and take jewelry, riding a moped from one boutique to another. Work - stupid and meaningless, like a celebrity for whom she works. But there is also the twilight part of this story: suffering from a heart defect that led to the premature death of a twin brother, the heroine Stewart feels clairvoyant in herself and seeks to connect with the soul of the recently deceased.
Evening walks to an abandoned house, reading about spiritualism and mysterious dialogues with an unknown person by SMS, who knows about the heroine the most intimate - around this, and not the facade of a personal buyer, her real spiritual life is being built. Instead of grinding out the tragic role of Kristen, he plays a person, whose excitement cannot be guessed by what lies on the surface: a ghost lives under the smooth surface of his voice, mimicry and movements, who is not interested in what he is surrounded by. “She played what I wrote,” said Olivier Assayas, the scriptwriter and director of the film, in an interview, “but carried it to another dimension. This is the most exciting thing to become a witness.”
Stewart is convinced that a person turns into himself when no one is looking at him: in the invisible moments of sleep, breathing, simple conversations and small things, we quietly walk along the only true path. Not all significant moments are tied to actions and not all feelings convincingly look in polarities: she manages to transmit confusion, thoughtfulness, muffled melancholy and anhedonia without loud cries without visible effort. Apparently, the joke about the resting bitchface and hundreds of questions about why she never smiles comes from the same properties. Kristen Stewart actually smiles a lot, but her smile does not have the solemn brilliance inherent in many celebrities. Rather, it conveys the neutral benevolence of a person who does not want to fall in love with himself at once the whole world and is in thoughts somewhere far away.
Aloof, seemingly submissive and also an assistant, Stewart was already playing with Olivier Assayas in Sils-Maria. With a casual hairstyle, in practical clothes, with laconic cues and her own opinion, she embodied the idea of everyday life. Sils-Maria is a Bergmanian in spirit and a completely fascinating film, where the mystic is as unobtrusive as in The Personal Buyer, side by side with practical relationships. This drama is a triumph of two actresses who are not similar to each other: Juliette Binoche with a royal carriage and subtle refinement and Kristen Stewart with dirty hair, not removing her faded T-shirt American women were not given half a century).
The actress and her assistant leave for the mountains to rehearse the play: one heroine of play 40, another 20, inevitably draws them to each other, and the young one manipulates her mature. Binosh’s heroine’s career began when she played for 20 years, now she needs to play 40-year-old, and an operational and pragmatic assistant easily throws cues, completes tasks and is always in the right place at the right time. But something in this play is alarming and restless: the clouds over the Swiss mountains are gathering, and the premiere poses painful questions to the actress about her own talent, relationships with people, future old age and death. Reflective and neutral, like any mirror, the heroine Stewart, Valentine, shows what others want to see. And it is precisely her soft presence that gives history the opportunity to turn around its axis many times. As in the "Permanent Customer", it is a shadow with its own life and motivations, an elusive and quiet creature in which it is impossible to find cliches: its outlines are drawn with a dotted line and made of air.
“Once again and with feeling,” says one of Stewart’s tattoos about the nature of the acting and that feeling will not necessarily mean emotional peaks. Deaf, unsteady, unrecognized feelings, which are replaced by actions, are best for her - and she herself is well aware of that. How does she work? Yes, almost like in a dream. Eyes open, everything already happened, it was as if she was not. In “Some Women,” the latest film by American indie director Kelly Reichardt, Kristen Stewart feels like a low-key and deceptively inexpressive teacher at an evening school in Montana: her adult student from the farm begins obsessively
follow mentor. Stewart speaks simple things again in an even, unhurried voice, but he tells his body and face much more than with speech. God is in the details - it is the everyday poses, the mumbling and focused look, the whisper and the banality she succeeds best of all. Once again and with feeling, she plays the daughter of a sick Alzheimer, a young beatniks and a rock star, a hippie and a resident of a dystopia, never touching the limits of acting. "I am not here" - Stewart disappears, only the outlines of her roles remain.
In an interview, the actress explains how she began to feel better as she grew older: honesty towards herself led to an intuitive choice of directors and a game in which you can’t suspect falsehood. Speaking of the first quarter of life, she recalls the sadness, oversaturation and exhausting physical anxiety that are in the past. From competitive relations in the female world, she came to the point that she most appreciates women captured by their own creativity and interests - be it colleagues Juliette Binoche and Julianne Moore, musician and elder comrade Patti Smith, idols Lizzie Borden or Joan Jett.
Having opened her relationship with the girl and announced her engagement, she felt happier: "As if I was alive again." But most importantly, the image invented by marketers at Twilight was dispelled like smoke, and the current Kristen Stewart doesn’t look like a little starlet with a fox face on a 8-year-old carpet. What a joy, after all, she will say (and more than once) that you can get a haircut, dress and use obscenities in an interview without looking at the prevailing stereotype about you.
In Woody Allen’s “Social Life,” she sparkles with adventurism and cheerfulness and shines with the warm beauty that people who live in harmony with themselves radiate. "How do you feel yourself and not stand guard at the same time, depriving yourself of all the pleasures of life?" After a while, Stewart answers herself — in interviews and roles of new women who had not recently existed in the cinema, and it was high time for them to appear. "What worries me is to live truthfully, and this is how I live now." The on-screen and human liberation of Stewart from the clichés she was awarded at the end of the zero years is a symbol of the great changes that have happened to female characters in drama and women in the cinema over the past few years.
Photo: Miramax Films, CG Cinéma, Arte France Cinéma, Film Science, Film Nation Entertainment
