Review of the film Sebastien Bailey “Actress”

Sebastien Bailey’s melodrama “The Actress” (Comme une actrice) was released. The director, who seemed to be about to tell a parable about love, age and changeable female nature, filmed a story reeking of mothballs about a woman going crazy at the sight of wrinkles in the mirror, says Yulia Shagelman.

In the opening shots, Anna (Julie Gayet), an experienced actress on the threshold of her fiftieth birthday, transforms in her dressing room, and then masterfully plays the parting scene with her “husband” – a partner in the series, which is already in its fifth season. Anna herself, however, is not too happy with the state of her career: the series is tired, and the roles offered to women of her age do not seem interesting. She dreams of re-entering the theater stage and playing Rosaura from Calderon’s play “Life is a dream”, chosen by the filmmakers, of course, not just like that, but as a fat metaphor. It was from this play that Anna once began her acting career, and now her husband Antoine (Benjamin Biolet) is again putting it on, but he considers his wife already too old for the role. Naturally, such an attitude offends her, after professional quarrels personal ones begin, and Antoine, to her complete despair, offers to disperse.

In search of a solution to her problems, Anna does not go to a psychologist or her agent (Cyril Gui), who has found a new role for her, but to Chinatown, where she buys from an elderly woman in qipao (Yang Zhiying) a bottle of drops of an unknown composition, which, like the healer promises, they will calm her down and give her self-confidence. But only if you do not take more than three at a time! Of course, the first thing Anna does, once again rejected by her husband during an attempted audition for the role of Rosaura, where she came by surprise, is to swallow too many drops. The effect is unexpected: in the mirror, the heroine sees not herself, but a young rival who has received a role. It turns out that thanks to a mysterious drug, she can briefly turn into other women – and not with the help of makeup and wigs, but for real.

One of these women is the journalist Dolphin (Agate Bonitzer), in whom Antoine, in front of his almost ex-wife, clearly shows not only professional interest. Transformed into her, Anna starts an affair with an unsuspecting Antoine and gets the opportunity to relive the moments of passion and intimacy that once connected them. True, as it should be in fairy tales, she has to pay for this: returning to her body, she finds that it is covered with ulcers and ages much faster than it was before the magic drops. But the obsession with Antoine overshadows the mind, Anna continues to take the potion and even steals a new vial from the Chinese healer when the first one runs out.

Women, and especially actresses, are such incredibly emotional and impetuous creatures, obsessed with love, as well as with their own youth and beauty, director Sebastien Bailey and his co-writer Zoe Galeron tell us. For this, they are ready for any sacrifice, even for a complete rejection of their own “I”, physical and mental, which Anna demonstrates, dissolving in Antoine even with more dedication than in a series of young beauties, whose images she tries on herself, in the process, literally destroying itself.

The story of the heroine could be considered just a special case of madness, if the authors did not ask for generalizations, choosing allegorical language. A thriller with a double motif, like Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a parable about the desire for eternal youth, like The Picture of Dorian Gray or Makropulos’ Affair, an aging actress story, like in Maugham’s Theatre, a family drama, an elegiac love story, and even a bodysuit -horror – elements of all this are in Bailey’s picture. However, he does not complete any of the ideas, clutching at the next, and the film turns into an indistinct medley of images and meanings, each of which we have already seen in a more talented and accurate performance.