When she looked in the glass and saw her hair grey, her cheek sunk, at fifty, she thought, possibly she might have managed things better--her husband; money; his books.-- Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse, p.14
Michael Apted engages cinematic allusions as well as the dramaturgical in his direction of Nell, and perhaps even some narrative traditions. According to the lucky theater critic, Handley was aware of this in the production of his play, but the film superimposes a diachronic continuum with the history of Grizzly Adams, the short lived Lucan, or Truffaut's rigorous battle as an auteur. What about on set romances that seem to be requisite to belong to the screen actors guild, or Foster's characterization of Nell's rape phobia as a mythological echo, even older than the taunts of demonic possession in The Exorcist?
What I am driving at is my willingness to equivocate on Jodie Foster's public projection of her sexual ambiguity, despite my betrayed disdain and contempt for my fuck wit neighbor. It involves more than her life long navigation from child actor celebrity to contemporaneous diva. As an artist, Ms. Foster seems wary of binary definitions of otherness. Certainly not present in all her roles, it is still an important subtext in many of them, a willingness to evade certain aspects of identity that I can respect.
I could push this post a little further, but we shall return to it, my health permitting. Lithium batteries are an untrustworthy crutch, and my frustration with their flimsy durability is of the sort that makes the ambulatory frightened of me. Tomorrow is an event day. Rare thing.
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