Third place:
Oscar Isaac (actor - Inside Llewyn Davis) [68 points / 10 votes]
Second place:
Lupita Nyong’o (actor - 12 Years a Slave) [104 points / 16 votes]
And your winner...
Adele Exarchopoulos (actor - Blue Is the Warmest Color) [135 points / 21 votes]
"When Blue Is the Warmest Color somewhat surprisingly walked away with the Palme d’Or after premiering at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, the interim discussion before its stateside debut was focused largely on two topics: the graphic lesbian love scenes and the controversial set conditions as per the lead actresses’ own reports. Following the film’s release, however, the narrative largely shifted to awed fawning over newly-arrived actress Adele Exarchopoulos.
Following the story of Adele (Exarchopoulos), an ingénue who finds herself drawn into a highly-charged romance with the older, worldlier Emma (Lea Seydoux), Blue works hard in its early moments to establish Adele as a naïf on the verge of a sexual awakening. A particular scene finds her eating dinner with her parents, absorbed by the television while hungrily shoveling pasta into her mouth and all over her face, simultaneously painting a youthful image of blitheness while also foreshadowing the insatiability bubbling just beneath the surface. Director Abdellatif Kechiche does much of the legwork here, and despite the unfortunate stain of purported volatile work conditions, it is easy to see the guiding hand of a master craftsman, particularly in the early going. Yet, by the end of the film’s three-hour runtime, there is no doubt that Exarchopoulos has herself crafted something truly wonderful and wholly her own.
Films which navigate their way across large periods of time habitually feature characters whose development feels stilted; there is a lack of naturalism which too often truncates all of the moments most essential to bringing a character to life. Exarchopoulos brilliantly sidesteps this typical pratfall, managing to age from combustible teenager to resolved young woman, capturing both the histrionics and subtleties of this most difficult transitional period with equal aplomb. Whether she is grappling with the moral erosion that comes with an understanding of the power she holds over another’s individual’s happiness or fighting off the near suffocation she feels when she sees herself losing something she doesn’t think she can survive losing, Exarchopoulos is utterly transfixing. She magnetically and affectingly travels from innocent and voracious to reprehensible and manipulative to, finally, fractured but whole. The final scene, in which Exarchopoulos and Seydoux meet after years apart to find some resolution, brings Adele’s character full circle in ways both heartbreaking and hopeful and caps off one of the most impressive acting displays of the year.
It says a lot that in awarding the Palme d’Or last year, Steven Spielberg and the jury awarded the prize to both director Kechiche and his two stars, saying they wished to recognize “the achievements of three artists.” It is sometimes easy to forget in an increasingly auteur-centric industry that the work of filmmaking is always collaboration, and despite what sometimes appears to be the case, there is never a single individual deserving of praise. In the end, Exarchopoulos took on a role which could have been exploitative and embodied a character who could have been caricaturized, and she transformed it into something so much more. A breakthough, indeed, and then some." - Luke Gorham
See the full results.
No comments:
Post a Comment