Three Fall Performances That Belong on TSR’s Ballot
Olivia Colman, Sandra Hüller and Léa Seydoux make choices visible in three very different films. One would move our Best Actress ballot today.
The fall has brought three performances worth setting alongside Julianne Moore’s work in The Debut. Olivia Colman gives a woman purchasing a husband the impatience of someone trying to get a job done. Sandra Hüller makes a daughter’s attention more interesting than the speeches everyone has come to hear. Léa Seydoux returns to a piano after the facts of her life have changed and has to make the act of sitting at it feel like something a musician might still know how to do. In each case, a scene has an ordinary action that the actor can make newly difficult without calling attention to the effort.
When TSR made the case for Moore in September, the appeal was in how much a small part could matter to the person trying to play it. Her conviction gave the comedy room to be exacting without becoming dismissive. These new performances make a different demand on a ballot. A critic can admire what the films are trying to say and still ask where the actor supplies something the writing cannot furnish on its own. Each of these cases turns on one scene. The order below follows the argument, and the final choice is for TSR’s own ballot.
Olivia Colman makes a commission sound reasonable
The Fisherwoman in Wicker has a very practical reason to approach the Basket Weaver. She lives at the edge of a village willing to benefit from what she catches and unwilling to reconsider the place it has assigned her. A local person knows how to make something she wants. Colman treats the encounter with Peter Dinklage as a negotiation that may take some patience and a little bluntness. She has arrived to be heard as a customer. The village’s opinion of whether she ought to have come is a thing she has already spent enough time considering.
The choice gives the movie an unusually stable place from which to become strange. Colman can let embarrassment pass through the scene without turning the woman’s desire into an embarrassment. That allows the later attraction to Alexander Skarsgård’s Wicker Husband to have an available physical life. The performer needs only to take an interest in the body in front of her, including the problems that accompany learning how to touch it. Her very practical start makes the tenderness more convincing. The audience has seen how much effort it took for the Fisherwoman to get another person to treat her desire as an instruction worth following.
There is a case for putting this first on the ballot if the emphasis is on holding together a tricky tone. Colman can permit a joke about a person’s awkwardness without offering the person to the audience as a joke. That protects the romantic part of the film when the villagers are at their broadest. My reservation concerns the space the movie gives the relationship once the town has found reasons to intervene. Colman still has plenty to do. The fable occasionally gives her a narrower set of choices than the woman bargaining with the basketmaker seems capable of making.
Sandra Hüller has to keep the trip moving
The first thing to watch in a public appearance in Fatherland is the person who can afford to keep looking at Thomas Mann. The second is Erika, who has to keep looking around him. Hanns Zischler’s Mann has a set of public duties and the practiced ability to give a room enough of himself for it to believe they have been fulfilled. Hüller’s Erika has other information to collect. She can hear what a question would allow the people asking it to claim, and she has an interest in the amount of attention her father still has available for the exchange. A scene that could belong entirely to the public figure becomes considerably more complicated because somebody is present who knows when the public figure will need to leave.
Hüller can make two reactions legible within a single beat. An honor can have real significance for Erika, and the staging of it can ask more than she is willing to grant. Her disagreement with something that happens in the room may be inseparable from her desire to get her father safely through it. There is no need for a later speech to tell us which feeling was sincere. The performance has allowed both of them to acquire a practical use. It is the most economical work of these three, and it would make sense to bring it onto a ballot even if one were chiefly thinking about the films as individual showcases.
Pawlikowski helps by keeping the journey short and the images disciplined. The scale puts a particular obligation on the performers. There may be no further opportunity to establish why a look mattered. Hüller can let the work of listening feel complete without supplying a complete account of Erika’s position. That is a strength the film needs, and it leaves a useful question after the scene. How much of the journey would have looked like a coherent public event if the daughter had been allowed to make all the decisions she had enough information to make?
Léa Seydoux makes it possible to hear the pause
The piano in Gentle Monster is the object I would start with. Lucy can return to it because she is still a pianist, even after an allegation involving her husband has made many of her other positions difficult to recognize. Kreutzer gives the instrument a simple material importance. A woman sits down in a place she already knows how to occupy. Seydoux has to carry the difference between the physical availability of work and the amount of attention Lucy can actually give it. The instrument can remain visible while the character is also listening for things that have no place in a rehearsal.
The film could have approached Lucy through a set of increasingly explicit judgments about her husband. Seydoux is most exact when there is a decision she has good reason to postpone. Her responsibilities to a child and to her own work can become urgent on a day when very little new information has arrived. The pause before she speaks is valuable because it can hold the thought of what someone else is ready to hear. We can follow the injury through the daily decisions it makes harder, even if the surrounding drama has yet to settle which of the other perspectives will be allowed to carry equal weight.
A comparison with Moore helps clarify the choice. Moore’s rehearsal gives a character permission to become absorbed in an activity other people can still take lightly. Seydoux brings a different kind of seriousness to professional attention. The work has already claimed a part of Lucy’s life, and it remains available after she has discovered how much else is subject to change. The contrast is visible in the way each performer approaches a room she has been in before. One discovers that the room can ask more of her than anybody expected. The other has to find out how much she can still ask of it.
On this ballot, I would move Seydoux into the top five and keep Moore in first. Seydoux’s performance persists through changes of company, activity and apparent urgency. The person dealing with an accusation and the person returning to a professional task can be felt together in an image without the film having to declare that one of those lives has replaced the other. Hüller is the closest call. She makes a much smaller amount of screen time do remarkably complicated work. Colman supplies the most disarming shift in tone. The reason to take all three seriously is visible in the scenes themselves, in the small decisions that each movie would have struggled to make legible with anybody else.
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