The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (57 page)

Back in Canada, she was very active in TV and the theatre. She met and married the director Paul Almond:
Isabel
(67, Almond);
Entre la Mer et l’Eau Douce
(67, Brault); an unhappy venture into big pictures, as
Anne of the Thousand Days
(69, Charles Jarrott);
Act of the Heart
(70, Almond); a short,
Marie-Christine
(70, Claude Jutra);
The Trojan Women
(71, Michael Cacoyannis);
Journey
(72, Almond);
Kamourasaka
(73, Jutra); another Hollywood dud,
Earthquake
(74, Mark Robson);
Alex and the Gypsy
(76, John Korty);
Swashbuckler
(76, James Goldstone);
Obsession
(76, Brian De Palma), which with a more humane director would seem an outstanding performance in which woman and child merge in the way of Geraldine Chaplin and Ana Torrent in
Cría; Another Man, Another Chance
(77, Claude Lelouch); and
Coma
.

She was in
Murder by Decree
(79, Bob Clark);
The Last Flight of Noah’s Ark
(79, Jarrott);
Final Assignment
(80, Almond); on TV fighting voodoo in
Mistress of Paradise
(81, Peter Medak);
Monsignor
(82, Frank Perry); in
Choose Me
(84, Alan Rudolph); with Clint Eastwood in
Tightrope
(84, Richard Tuggle);
Trouble in Mind
(85, Rudolph); wonderful in a very tough role in
Dead Ringers
(88, David Cronenberg); funny as the art dealer in
The Moderns
(88, Rudolph);
Red Earth, White Earth
(89, David Greene); and
A Paper Wedding
(90, Brault).

In Canada frequently, and for TV often, she worked on:
Rue du Bac
(90, Gabriel Aghion);
False Identity
(90, James Keach);
The Dance Goes On
(91, Almond);
Oh, What a Night
(92, Eric Till);
An Ambush of Ghosts
(93, Everett Lewis);
Mon Amie Max
(94, Brault);
The Adventures of Pinocchio
(96, Steve Barron);
Dead Innocent
(96, Sara Botsford);
The House of Yes
(97, Mark S. Waters);
Last Night
(98, Don McKellar);
You Can Thank Me Later
(98, Shimon Dotan);
Eye of the Beholder
(99, Stephan Elliott);
The Bookfair Murders
(00, Wolfgang Panzer);
Finding Home
(02, Laurence D. Foldes);
La Turbulence des Fluides
(02, Marion Briand);
Downtown: A Street Tale
(02, Rafal Zielinski);
Jericho Mansions
(03, Alberto Sciamma).

Sandra Bullock
, b. Arlington, Virginia, 1964
From
Speed
(94, Jan De Bont) to
Speed 2: Cruise Control
(97, De Bont), Sandra Bullock went from $500,000 a picture to $12.5 million. All this, of course, in a society where, famously, you are worth whatever you get. Though possibly some relic remains of an earlier culture which—while liking Ms. Bullock well enough—could reckon that $500,000 was generous for her Annie Porter in that first
Speed
. Would it amaze you to hear the proposal that 500,000 young women in America could have done as well in the part? Or am I missing the point?

As I said, I like Ms. Bullock: she is fun, tomboyish, gutsy, observant, and pretty. But she has become a business, her own production company, and what is called a national favorite. So be it—but, as I go through the list, I defy you to be quite sure which film was which.

She is the daughter of a German opera singer, Helga Bullock, and as a child the family traveled widely, following the mother’s career. Sandra can sing, too. She was educated at Washington-Lee High School, and then briefly at East Carolina University before she went into acting. She did some TV and she had the lead role (the Melanie Griffith part) in a short-lived TV series,
Working Girl
(90). Her first significant movie was
When the Party’s Over
(92, Matthew Irmas), followed by
Demolition Man
(93, Marco Brambilla);
Wrestling Ernest Hemingway
(93, Randa Haines);
The Vanishing
(93, George Sluizer);
The Thing Called Love
(93, Peter Bogdanovich), and then
Speed
.

That was followed with
While You Were Sleeping
(95, Jon Turteltaub), her first vehicle;
The Net
(95, Irwin Winkler);
Two if by Sea
(96, Bill Bennett);
A Time to Kill
(96, Joel Schumacher); seriously out of her depth as Hemingway’s girl in
In Love and War
(96, Richard Attenborough); and then
Speed 2
.

For
Hope Floats
(98, Forest Whitaker), she was co–executive producer; with Nicole Kidman in
Practical Magic
(98, Griffin Dunne); the voice of Miriam on
The Prince of Egypt
(98);
Forces of Nature
(99, Bronwen Hughes);
Gun Shy
(00, Eric Blakeney), which she produced;
28 Days
(00, Betty Thomas); a comeback in
Miss Congeniality
(00, Donald Petrie);
Murder by Numbers
(02, Barbet Schroeder);
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
(02, Callie Khouri);
Two Weeks Notice
(02, Marc Lawrence);
Crash
(04, Paul Haggis).

And so the girl next door edged past forty, a household name, but not yet in a single vital movie. She produced
Miss Congeniality 2: Armed & Fabulous
(05, John Pasquin);
The Lake House
(06, Alejandro Agresti); very good as Harper Lee in
Infamous
(06, Douglas McGrath)—a film that mattered;
Premonition
(07, Mennan Yapo);
The Proposal
(09, Anne Fletcher); producing
All About Steve
(09, Phil Traill);
The Blind Side
(09, John Lee Hancock)—which proved to be a big hit and a revival for Sandra. With
Blind Side
and
Proposal
, she became #1 at the box office, and for
Blind Side
she got her Oscar. What’s next? Medea?

Luis Buñuel
(1900–83), b. Calanda, Spain
1928:
Un Chien Andalou
(codirected with Salvador Dalí). 1930:
L’Age d’Or
. 1932:
Las Hurdes/Land Without Bread
. 1947:
Gran Casino
. 1949:
El Gran Calavera
. 1950:
Los Olvidados/The Young and the Damned
. 1951:
Susana/Demonio y Carne; La Hija del Engaño; Una Mujer Sín Amor; Subida al Cielo
. 1952:
El Bruto; Robinson Crusoe; El
. 1953:
Cumbres Borrascosas/Abismos de Pasión; La Ilusión Viaja en Tranvia
. 1954:
El Río y la Muerte
. 1955:
Ensayo de un Crimen/The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz; Cela S’Appèlle l’Aurore
. 1956:
La Mort en Ce Jardin/Evil Eden
. 1958:
Nazarin
. 1959:
La Fièvre Monte à El Pao
. 1960:
The Young One/La Joven
. 1961:
Viridiana
. 1962:
El Angel Exterminador/The Exterminating Angel
. 1964:
Le Journal d’une Femme de Chambre/Diary of a Chambermaid
. 1965:
Simón del Desierto
. 1967:
Belle de Jour
. 1968:
La Voie Lactée/The Milky Way
. 1970:
Tristana
. 1972:
Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie/The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
. 1974:
Le Fantôme de la Liberté
. 1977:
Cet Obscur Objet du Désir/That Obscure Object of Desire
.

There has always been a temptation to view Buñuel as one of the few towering artists who have condescended to adopt film as their means of expression. According to that approach, we may assess him as a Spaniard, as a surrealist, and as a lifelong antagonist of the bourgeoisie. All those strains persisted in Buñuel’s films and they repay close attention. But it seems to me an error to think that Buñuel—often working quickly—was casual about the medium. On the contrary, I believe that he is one of the greatest of directors simply because of the expressive mastery of his films.

There is an approach that sees no “beauty” in Buñuel, as if so fierce a social critic could have no business with the bourgeois taste for cinematic grace. But this is to confuse prettiness with beauty, Lelouch with Renoir. The detachment of Buñuel’s camera, the apparent emphasis on the inner potency of an image as distinct from its form, Raymond Durgnat’s point about the amount of three-quarter-length shots, do not detract from the constant elegance of Buñuel’s films. Color and the presence of Catherine Deneuve have helped some people to discern a growing interest in style on Buñuel’s part. But where are the ugly shots in earlier films, where are there moments when the image is not essential in all its items? Beauty in cinema is the integrity of meaning and means—not the matching of the two, but a unified conception. Thus
Un Chien Andalou
—and every film after it—is made with the calm and simplicity that only come when an artist has understood his or her medium. That is why
Un Chien Andalou
is able to make fun of continuity—a bourgeois fetish; why the exact angle and texture of its images haunt the mind long after analyses of them have been digested. The eye opened to be cut in half is the prompting mirror of our response: nothing is more sensual than the breasts that dissolve into buttocks; more energetic than the pluck of the girl defending herself with a tennis racket; more tender than the hermaphrodite oblivious of traffic; more atmospheric than the funeral cortege. And long before Warhol’s cinema, the lovers in
L’Age d’Or
engage us in the epic awkwardness that afflicts love. Could a film have been banned so long if its power was not in the explosive mixture of style and sense? Could Buñuel have kept himself from directing for so long if he did not view the medium serenely? Could assigned projects make so little difference to the art of a director if that art was not within his images? Could anyone so sustain an inquiry into imaginative life and an unaffected account of externals if he was not a great filmmaker?

There is some use in trying to correct the impressions that Buñuel’s social criticism is deeply hostile to people, that he is antagonistic to popular cinema, that he worked in a vacuum unaffected by other films. To take the last point, he delights in the presence of Fernando Rey as a “connection” in
Discreet Charm
, just as his use of Delphine Seyrig, Stéphane Audran, and Jean-Pierre Cassel cannot be evaded as a wicked if gentle reproof of the modishness in the work of Resnais and Chabrol. Again, when a disembodied hand advances on one of the marooned guests in
The Exterminating Angel
, that is not just a “Buñuel hand”—the means of touch and emblem of sexuality—but a recollection of
The Beast with Five Fingers
(47, Robert Florey) a Warners film made at the time when Buñuel was in charge of dubbing their films into Spanish. Earlier, in 1935, he had worked for Warners and may have been so impressed by the melting waxworks in
The Mystery of the Wax Museum
(33, Michael Curtiz), that something remained for
Archibaldo de la Cruz
. Those are some small, ill-buried links. What is more worthy of research is the way, over the years, Renoir and Buñuel exchanged ideas, actors, and images.

The sooner one allows that the interruption of bourgeois ceremonies and affairs in
L’Age d’Or, Exterminating Angel
, and
Discreet Charm
is of a kind with that in
La Règle du Jeu
, the sooner one sees that Buñuel is a comic director and that his reputed savagery is only a consistent view of the neurotic frailty with which we lead our lives. It is too easy to call
El, Archibaldo
, or
Belle de Jour
black comedies. How much more useful to see that, as with Renoir, Buñuel allows himself no villains, no unflawed heroes, but claims that everyone is on a level—as witness the austere distance that his camera keeps—similarly engaged to address fantasy and reality. Even the more overtly harsh pictures
—Los Olvidados, Nazarin
, and
Viridiana
—in which Spanish anticlericalism asserts itself as Buñuel’s one artistic overemphasis, the social criticism does not disparage one person more than another. Rather, it shows that we live imaginary lives in which we hold varying symbolic reference for different people. In Buñuel’s films, all men are facets of the libido, all women resemblances of love: remember that in
Un Chien Andalou
several parts were played by the same actor and actress.

The “realism” of his films—whether the squalor of
Los Olvidados
, the table settings of
Discreet Charm
, Crusoe’s island, or that reluctance to use a subjective camera should not mislead us into thinking that Buñuel believed in reality. That way lies the trap of claiming him as an anarchist, communist, anti-Catholic director. On the contrary, he is ideally suited to popular cinema and the emphasis it puts on dreams, identification, and the manifestation of fantasy. Surrealist manifestos could not have had a better arena than commercial cinema. The stylist Buñuel never forgets us sitting in the dark, hanging on the brightness. How could the power of the “cut” be better demonstrated than in
Un Chien Andalou
’s opening? See how clearly
L’Age d’Or
describes the essential overlap of documentary and fantasy as scorpions and man illuminate one another. Recollect how far
Archibaldo de la Cruz
is a fantasist, trying to convert plastic imagination into flesh. What better demonstration is there of the comparison of watching film and dreaming than the sequence, some twenty-five minutes into
Exterminating Angel
, when the anxious guests settle down to sleep, perchance to dream? Its sheer photographic feeling of slumber is one of the most sensuous moments in cinema. And what is
Belle de Jour
but a bourgeoise who indulges her daydreams and thereby reveals the way our open eyes are clouded by feelings?