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Another ‘Game of Thrones’ Comeuppance: Cersei in the Raw

June 15, 2015 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Regally reamed: Lena Headey's Cersei discovers the true meaning of karmy and it isn't pretty

Regally reamed: Lena Headey’s Cersei discovers the true meaning of karmy and it isn’t pretty

In last night’s episode of Game of Thrones, the season finale, Queen Cersei, the incestuous queen regent and mother to the hideous King Joffrey, finally gets her comeuppance. Reader of the book, like me, have been curious about if and when this moment would happen. For those who have just watched the series, it is more than enough that the arrogant and vengeful queen [spoiler alert] has confessed her sins to the ascetic Sparrow (Jonathan Pryce) after a long imprisonment. To add insult to injury, it was Cersei who empowered the religious figure. And then comes her walk of shame — her hair shorn, her shift removed, Cersei Lannister is marched through the town to the gates of the palace — a punishment with a history in Medieval France. In the process she is pelted with pee, crap and rotten vegetables and even exposed to the lewdly revealed breasts and penises of her people. It’s hard to recover their awe after this stroll of shame.

The book is even more shocking because we are inside Cersei’s head. And her moment of self-realization is shattering. What the daring HBO series refused to do was to show the naked Cersei as anything but attractive. After all, this is Lena Headey, whose breasts may not be as high as they once were, or of equal size, but the carpet matches the drapes and her hips are thin, her rear pleasantly round. She’s naked and humiliated but she’s still hot. What added insult to injury to the Cersei of the book was the realization that she was no longer the fairest in the land. After giving birth to three children and a steady diet of red wine, she is no longer an object of desire but repulsive in her nakedness. And this is something that she discovers reflected in the squinty eyes of her subjects. She has become closer to crone than sex goddess, and she realizes that as a woman she has lost her sexual power even as her political power is in jeopardy. Remember: this is the woman who recoiled from her lover/brother Jamie because he had lost a hand and was no longer perfect. Her self-loathing at the discovery of her fallen flesh is even more damning than the repulsion she sees on the faces of her subjects.

As terrible as is Cersei’s fecal-filled walk of shame through the narrow streets, the deeper comeuppance is that of her self image: she is not longer a desirable beauty but a hag left alone with all the foul deeds she has committed — her outside now matches her inside. The horror! HBO lacked the guts to go that far. Even though the series continually pushes the envelope of what we see on screen, the image of a misshapen, possibly menopausal nude is not one they will venture to display, opting instead for the whitewash of Headey’s undeniable attractive form, even though the camera angles attempt to show her body as grotesque. With her golden cap of hair, she’s a little too St. Joan than incestuous, homicidal Queen Cersei.

Crone

Filed Under: Movies & TV Tagged With: Game of Thrones, Jamie Lannister, Lena Headey, Nudity, The Sparrow, Tyran lannister, Walk of Shame

Thelma Adams on Reel Women: Naked Girls!: Carey Mulligan in “Shame,” Kirsten Dunst in “Melancholia,” and Kristen Stewart in “Twilight”

December 3, 2011 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Carey Mulligan, Best Supporting Actress,Shame,Michael Fassbinder,Full Frontal

Mulligan, bare shoulder

My latest column from AMC Filmcritic.com:

Write a post about actress Carey Mulligan stripping naked in Shame and suddenly you’re in search-engine heaven: Carey Mulligan naked, Carey Mulligan nude, Carey Mulligan nudity Shame. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. Pretty, naked girls stop traffic on the street, and drive traffic on the web, and to the movie theater.

Why does Mulligan, an Oscar nominee for An Education, feel compelled to take it off, all off? Partially, it would seem, to shed that chilly BBC debutante image: Look, it’s a Bennet sister out of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice without the empire-waist period gown to hide behind!

But nudity is only brave, really brave, in context [Click to read full column]

Filed Under: Essay, Movies & TV Tagged With: Carey Mulligan, Kirsten Dunst, Kristen Stewart, Melancholia, Nudity, Shame, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1

Melancholy Baby: Kirsten Dunst in “Melancholia”

November 11, 2011 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Kristen Dunst,Lars von Trier,Nazi,Ophelia,Apocalypse

Drowning Ophelia

Kirsten Dunst, like Drew Barrymore or Lindsay Lohan, is a blond that grew up in front of the camera – arguably the most gorgeous, and certainly the finest actress of the three. In Melancholia, she also becomes the most daring and memorable as Justine, a young bride whose anxiety spoils her lavish wedding but prepares her to cope with the impending world cataclysm. She embodies the relief that Chicken Little must have felt when the sky finally fell. Her crippling depression, in such contrast with her gorgeous shell, comes to represent the swirling contemporary societal anxieties in response to any number of external threats: economic collapse, religious fundamentalism, the energy crisis, super bugs, or global weather confusion.

We first saw Dunst as a toddler in commercials, as an unsettling child undead in Interview with the Vampire, and then as the spunky damsel Mary Jane caught in the web of Spiderman.

Kirsten Dunst,Brad Pitt,Tom Cruise,Anne Rice,Interview with the Vampire

Child vamp: are those your baby fangs?

But, as the actress aged, despite the roles cast her way, there was a sneaking Garbo, a larger, more disturbing presence, the potential for a knock-down drag out fight between beauty and bitterness that Marie Antoinette suggested. It comes to full fruition in Melancholia, where even a girl with fairy-tale princess looks can never have a happily ever after.

As written and directed by Lars von Trier, and arguably a projection of his own struggles with clinical depression (the shingle is out), Dunst’s Alice in Apocalypseland starts off as a gorgeous canvas, a surface beauty. Her veneer is so vivid that it weighs on her – because she knows and is consumed by the darkness within. It’s the Marilyn Monroe tragedy, the moment when Garbo wants to be alone.

The movie begins by depicting Justine in a painterly way. In one lush shot, she’s filmed to recall Shakespeare’s tragic suicidal heroine Ophelia as romantically envisioned by pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais.

Ophelia

Ophelia drowning - the original suicidal pixie dream girl

But Justine is not the mad victim heroine of Hamlet. She owns Melancholia; her character arc is central not tangential. As the movie unfurls, Justine is both the luminous sun at its center and its black hole, her personal melancholy bleeds into the new planet, unsubtly called Melancholia, which threatens to knock into earth like a cosmic croquet ball.

At the outset of the movie’s extended wedding sequence, Justine could have stepped out of an Estee Lauder Beautiful advertisement with her cumulus cloud strapless dress. She almost literally trails perfume, her make-up flawless, her skin without pores. She’s playful, loving, smart, and affectionate. She’s the bride as idealized object.

Alexander Skarsgard, Kirsten Dunst, Melancholia, Wedding Scenes,Movie Weddings

The model bride

But, because it’s von Trier, that doesn’t last long.

As the endlessly over-structured ritual continues in a remote country estate, Justine’s eyes glaze over, her smile slips, her make-up fades, her coif comes undone, her dress tears. She takes a pee on the adjacent golf-course (an image that recalls Maya Rudolph’s Bridesmaids dump without the farce). She ruts with a guest other than her groom. Fearful, she desperately seeks solace from her parents, who give her none. She mercilessly rips her arrogant advertising executive boss a new one. Later, she even beats a stallion with a whip.

Cue part two. In the aftermath of the failed wedding, Justine collapses into depression on earth as the planet Melancholia appears ever bigger in the sky. The sheen of beauty dissipates. She struggles to leave her apartment, get into a cab and walk. Food tastes like ashes in her mouth. In one scene where her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) tries to bathe her, she doesn’t even have the will to raise her own leg to climb into the tub. She is completely detached from her golden, glorious nudity.

Kristen Dunst, Lars von Trier,DepressionIn the dumps

The filmmaker has now shifted into a more despairing sense of realism. Von Trier rips the blinders off. This is what a seriously depressed person looks like when the inner darkness overwhelms the outer glow, and Dunst follows him all the way, shedding pretense and glamor like an unwanted wedding dress.

But von Trier takes Justine one more step on this journey. As the previously put-together Claire crumbles under the weight of her fear of death, her coping skills – let’s watch the end of the world with a glass of wine on the terrace – fall away. Meanwhile, Justine’s acute sense of the world rises.

Having been treated as a hysteric because of a personal sense of impending doom, the fatalistic Justine finds her center and her courage when doom is externalized. In what could be their final hours, she becomes the caretaker of her sister and nephew. And it’s this heroic transformation that takes Justine, the beautiful blond of advertising and romantic painters, and puts her into apocalyptic heroine territory. In the movie’s final moments, Justine sits cross-legged and back straight, and becomes an everywoman, the last sane human on the planet facing extinction.

Kirsten Dunst,Melancholia,Cannes,Nazi,Lars von Trier

Mourning becomes electric

Is Justine happy? No. But she has the satisfaction of knowing she was right.

(Caryn James of James on ScreenS inspired this post during a discussion at the New York Film Critics series hosted by Mark Ehrenkranz in Morristown, NJ)

Filed Under: Essay, Movies & TV, Oscar Race Tagged With: Apocalypse, best actress, Kirsten Dunst, Lars von Trier, Mark Ehrenkranz, Melancholia, Naked, Nude, Nudity

Take it Off: Does nudity equal bravery for actresses?

November 3, 2011 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Sculpture, Venus de MIlo, Nudity, Naked, Nude

Yes, but would we take Venus seriously today?

Mulling: do actresses have to take their clothes off to be taken seriously? Think Carey Mulligan in Shame. The “brave” Elisabeth Olsen of Martha Macy May Marlene shedding all for a performance being floating as an Oscar contender. Is it a rite of passage? Or can it be reduced to sex sells, or the idea that producers/directors cast women they’d like to see naked? Thoughts?

Paula Bomer I think it’s that men and women like to see naked beautiful women- producers, directors, actors, viewers. I sort of understand, though, how many actresses – think Uma- even when quite young, decide to stop doing nude scenes.

Sheila Weller I don’t know, but it does seem that actresses (especially beautiful ones) have to gain weight to be taken seriously (and then they mysteriously lose it again). Charlize Theron, Renee Zellweger (well, that was a lighthearted role but still…) and a few others whose names escape me now, but I’m sure you know them….

Susan Wloszczyna What flashed in my mind was Julianne Moore standing there pants-less for several minutes in Short Cuts. It was very specific nudity that got people talking. And it was not so much a turn-on as a statement that maybe got her taken more seriously because it somehow seemed brave. But poor Carey standing in the shower like a bottle blonde rat? No one is really talking Oscar here. She just seemed miscast in an impossible role. I think they took her quite seriously enough after An Education. What she should strip off now are these dreadful worshipful girlfriend roles in Wall St 2 and Drive.

Lewis Beale I think it’s an individual choice. Bombshell Raquel Welch never appeared nude. Around the same time, Angie Dickinson was naked in half the films she appeared in.

Sasha Stone Someone like Natalie Portman who was known as a kid star merely has to undress for that not to be the case anymore. Sometimes it works, and sometimes not. If you’re not respected to begin with stripping down isn’t going to make it happen for you. If you’re already respected and it doesn’t really matter — translation, you’re British [Read more…]

Filed Under: Movies & TV Tagged With: Boobs, Breasts, Carey Mulligan, Elizabeth Olsen, Naked, Nude, Nudity, Shame, Tits

Emily Browning at the Hamptons International Film Festival

October 15, 2011 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Emily Browning, Sucker Punch, Sleeping Beauty

Browning: big head plus small bod equals movie star

Last night at eleven fifteen at Guild Hall in East Hampton, I took the stage with Australian actress Browning, 22, to discuss her title role in Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty. Trust me: it’s no fairy tale, and Browning spends acres of the movie naked. It’s always odd to meet someone in the flesh for the first time when you’ve just spent 105 minutes staring at their nipples.

Fortunately, the Sucker Punch star could not have been more gracious for someone who had just spent three hours in customs. She’d arrived in the green room three minutes before the start of the Q&A at the Hamptons International Film Festival impossibly cool and collected, with the modest request for fries because she hadn’t yet had dinner.

The challenge of doing this kind of onstage Q&A, when every one has seen the star almost gynecologically nude and is, frankly, a bit split on what the entire movie means, is to humanize the subject without entirely avoiding the two questions the audience wants to know: 1. what’s it like acting naked? 2. what was the movie really about?

Browning, who spends multiple scenes stripped, in a willing drugged sleep, as a plaything for wealthy seniors (yet more full-frontal male, common this season but rarely so shriveled), as limp as a sleeping but not dead beauty. She explained that the trick to pulling off the X-rated rag doll was that the director taught her to meditate. In those scenes where, for example, a geezer licks her all over the face like a lolly, and another tries to pick her up and drops her to the floor, she was there but not there. It was, however, hard not to wince in anticipation of being dropped to the floor by a staggering octogenarian on the verge of a heart attack from the exertion.

According to the story (the film, not the fairy tale) the one rule demanded of the men by the madam running the op is  “no penetration,” which is apparently a lot easier for these gentleman of a certain age without Viagra– and certainly takes the performance pressure off.

More interesting, at least to me, was that Browning, fully and chicly clothed in the interview, said she preferred  being stark naked on screen to wearing sexy lingerie, which she also does at one point. Go figure. But she should know. She said it was easier being naked in her own skin than wearing silken garters and a demi-bra and projecting an image of sexy womanhood out of a Victoria’s Secret catalog.

The actress was earnest, yet less successful, in explaining what the movie was about, and what the parallels might have been to the original fairy tale, other than that there is a beauty, and she sleeps. Although the Brothers Grimm never paired the storied heroine with ancient kings as opposed to dapper princes. In all fairness, I don’t believe it’s the actress’ responsibility to explain the movie to the audience, although I personally could have used the help. Browning did say that her character was defined by an extreme passivity, and that one of her models was Catherine Deneuve in the 1967 Luis Bunuel classic Belle de Jour. The posters for the two movies bear this cinematic echo out:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: Celebrity, Movies & TV Tagged With: Belle de Jour, Catherine Deneuve, Emily Browning, full frontal, Hamptons Intenational Film Festival, nipples, Nudity, Rising Star, Sleeping Beauty, Sucker Punch

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