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Using unknowns to freshen up Cannes
2007-05-25
French director Catherine Breillat typified a trend at the Cannes film festival by casting unknowns who had never acted before in "Une vieille maitresse." "A painter chooses their colors, they don't buy them ready-made at the market and that's how I choose the actors who play in the film," she told reporters after a press screening of her 19th century tale of love and betrayal. "They are unknowns, of course, but I think that unknowns are often much better, with a lot more freshness than others who may be worn down." Although hardly unknown, singer Norah Jones took her first role in Chinese director Wong Kar-wai's "Blueberry Nights" and this trend towards debutant actors recurred in films from Israel, Austria and the United States. Gus Van Sant used non-professionals in his skateboarder film "Paranoid Park," casting many via the MySpace Internet site. In Breillat's film, neither Fu'ad Ait Aattou, who plays the young Ryno de Marigny, nor Claude Sarraute, a veteran French journalist who takes the role of the worldly Marquise de Flers, had appeared in a film. Fu'ad Ait Aattou was cast for his youthful good looks and Sarraute plays a grandmother. "I fell on my arse when I heard," she said. "Une vieille maitresse" ("An old mistress") is a costume drama adapted from a story by the 19th century French writer Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly. It represents a change for Breillat, known for taboo-breaking films such as "Romance" and "Sex is Comedy." She said she felt she was working with "newborn oxygen" with her unknowns. "They have the pureness and energy of freshly discovered crystals," she said in the film's program notes. Like "Paranoid Park," "Tehilim," a family drama set in Jerusalem, uses unknowns to play the part of the teenagers at the centre of the film while the other competition entry to make major use of non-professionals used mature performers. Both former nurse Ekateryna Rak and Paul Hofmann, whom the film's production notes said served time in prison and who is described as having no fixed address, appear for the first time on film in Austrian director Ulrich Seidl's "Import Export." They did much to create "Import Export's" grimly realistic feel. But even for professionals, casting can come as a welcome break. German-Turkish director Fatih Akin said that when he cast his leading man Bavi Davrak, the actor was "resting" from his career by working in a parking lot.
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