Human Automata

The modern concierge's daughter who fulfills her ambition by playing the Queen of Spain in Ruy Blas at the Theatre Francais is only one of many thousands of men and women who have sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a new tongue. --George Bernard Shaw

It disappoints that the classic facial beauty Faye Dunaway emanates on screen leads with few exceptions to mere dilatory satisfaction. It may be the limitation of her range and roles operating off of each other, or that she never again had a director like Polanski, since Polanski seemed able to illicit a vulnerable tigress, a predatory feline who leaps forth as her hauteur fractures under pressure. The raging porcelain never quite delivers the suggestion of her intensity and emotional investment, once you look beyond Chinatown, except for her supporting role as Yolande fourteen years ago. She was a tour de force of conviction as a queen mother under duress in the face of the dissimulation of Franco national identity, despite the fact that The Messenger disserviced both the legend and the veracity of Joan d'Arc, a film of minute ensemble moments which could not carry the whole affair. Dustin Hoffman comes late in the day to post-modern fragmentation.

This does not detract from Dunaway's glamour; it only points to the juxtaposition between the promise of a glamorous figure and the expectations of catharsis within a performance. Marilyn Monroe had the same problem but conveniently overdosed into hagiography. Dunaway outlasted herself into the contempt of the familiar figure always on the verge of ferocious histrionics, devoid of climax and exhausted pleasure. She barely fakes it with Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. There is the glimpse of her breast, a diminutive curve in a room festooned under studio lighting, yet the erotic tension, repressed to the imagination, is nearly unbearable. Her contemporary stills evoke the octogenarian Mae West of my childhood, the capped teeth now garish, skeletal, somehow still beautiful. "I have completed a work," I wonder if this is how she settles her accounts with the residual impact of her rise during the decade of America's militant radicalism, a decade neither all that anarchist nor as transformative as is supposed among popular sentiment.