So, my favorite actress is Romola Garai, who has played both Gwendolen Harleth in Daniel Deronda, and Emma Woodhouse in Emma. When I first watched Daniel Deronda, I thought "That Gwen would make a fantastic Emma - she's spoiled, beautiful, intelligent, talented but doesn't develop her talent and submit to anything requiring patience or industry, and must mature by the end of the story." Imagine my delight (no, I really skipped from the computer store in the mall I worked back to my job from which I was on my break the day I found out that she'd been cast) when my fancy proved prophetic, and Romola played Emma absolutely brilliantly in the recent BBC miniseries. However, despite the fact that those two performances inspired me to do a paper this semester exploring the influence of Austen's Emma on Eliot's Gwen, while rewatching bits of Emma the other night, I realized something. Romola is a classical English actor - and despite the fact that she doesn't radically change her looks from performance to performance, she creates entirely different characters with subtle facial expressions and all the other aspects that go into making a performance.
I want to take a film class, just so I can use technical terms to talk about what I now only have English terms and my own fumblings about in the field to say. Even disregarding the manic quality of Romola's performance as Emma contrasted with the reserve in her Gwen, there's a brittleness to Gwen that Emma is totally lacking. While Gwen shows some moments of pleasure, in singing and hunting, there's always a sense of guilt, or unease, or just plain unhappiness. Emma, on the other hand, radiates vigor, happiness, fun, joy, purity, and love (even in her most immature, cruel, or foolish moments). There are expressions Romola has as Gwen you can never see in her Emma, and vice versa. I desperately want to be able to describe such things in terms that are precise and disciplined - discussing the way director Tom Hooper's use of classical framing, low angles, wide lenses, and set pieces of astonishing splendour and clarity (which would give way to rather annoying handheld jerkiness and muddiness in the later, more acclaimed John Adams), or the actor choices of Romola's posture, body language, positioning, head tilts, and quirks of mouth and eye differentiate the characters. But for now, I just say this:
I am in even more awe of her skill and depth as an actress than ever before.
And now for the RL - a very nice update on that, this time :-)
A nice in my class remembered I loved slippers (and bare feet), and that I had worn a hole in my old pair. So tonight in class she gave me a nice pair, just because she wanted to! Normally people are not my favorite thing in the world (actually, normally they're my least favorite thing in the world), but today reminds me that people are sometimes the way God shows love.
And today I woke up at 7:30am and drove out to have free pancakes at IHOP. Wonderful, tasty, and delicious.
All in all, a good day.
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