As I still try to wrap my head around Phantom Thread, I'm also still trying to wrap my head around Luxembourgian actress Vicky Krieps.Deciding how I feel about her may be key to deciding how I feel about the movie.
I don't have any doubt that Krieps gives a good performance in this movie. But there's something about her that gives me the creeps, and I'd say that even if her last name didn't make it a play on words. (I was going to say "clever play on words," but I don't know how clever it is.)
Being given the creeps by someone is usually a good thing in a movie. It means they are burrowing into some core part of your subconscious that produces a reaction of revulsion in you. It may not seem like it, but that's usually something you want. The unsuccessful actor is the one that makes you feel nothing.
But I don't know with Krieps. I find it kind of hard to look at her. I don't mean that she's ugly; she is probably quite pretty, though this movie takes pains to make her seem very plain at times, and it's to her credit that she allows the camera to see her this way. It's a performance lacking in vanity, which is another thing we usually want, or should want anyway.
No, the thing I find hard to look at is encapsulated pretty well in the above picture, which is why I searched until I found it. Yes, that's a pleasant expression, for sure. A warm, welcoming expression. But there's also something alien about it that I can't quite put my finger on. It's the eyes, or maybe the smile looking just a little forced. I find it discomfiting.
But what I really find discomfiting is the emotions that are behind it. Krieps looks at Daniel Day-Lewis in this movie with an almost confronting level of need. She yearns in a way that is off-putting. But it's not the desperate need that expresses itself by clinging to someone's leg as they try to shake you off, staring at them with haunted, pleading eyes. That might have almost been better. Krieps expresses a kind of psychopathic unwillingness to disguise the nakedness of her need. When Day-Lewis shows her some attention in that restaurant over his breakfast order, she looks at him with these eyes that seem to say "You have just signed an unwritten contract with me, and it is a lifetime contract, and I am so certain of its successful fulfillment that I am not even being demure or coquettish. I am diving in headlong, and I lack the self-awareness to realize I need to cloak my intentions through the traditional techniques of flirtation and seduction. I am scooping an overflowing helping of my need onto your plate and making you eat it." Of course, the food metaphor becomes a lot less metaphorical later on.
Can all that be gotten from one expression? Well, then Vicky Krieps is a good actress indeed.
Certainly we would say that should become part of her perspective as the movie goes on and she grapples with her jealousy and desire to shift his attentions back to her. But it's this opening scene where this gawky girl exudes a sort of resplendent, vampiric emotional dependency that throws me. Maybe it throws me in the right way, maybe it doesn't. I'm still deciding.
Vicky Krieps isn't the first one to unsettle me in this way. Here is another actress who I find it hard to look at, because her expressions are so needy and confronting:
Although I'm a huge fan of her sister Rooney, I have just never been able to fully come around on Kate Mara. She also gives me the creeps. I think it dates back to how she was used in American Horror Story in the only season of that show I watched. She constantly had this look in her eyes that was equal parts needy and accusatory. I felt like her eyes were boring through the screen into me, and I wanted to squirm right out of my seat.
There's going to be something vaguely unsavory to the fact that the three people I feature in this piece are all women, but at least with the third we are going to end on a positive note. I used to get a creepy vibe also from her:
That still is from Wicker Park, and it was my first exposure to Rose Byrne. I suppose she would have something in common with Mara's character from American Horror Story, to the extent that I remember the plots from either of those films/TV shows -- an "other woman" spurned, trying to make hell for some man, but only because she's so desperately in love with him that her rage and passion have gotten all twisted up. (You'd think I had a woman like this in my own life, but I haven't.) There was something about the look in Byrne's eyes in that movie that made my skin crawl.
The good news is that Byrne has come back from that to become one of my favorite working actresses, in part because she did something seemingly counterintuitive with her career -- she became one of the most deft comediennes going. As just one example, she absolutely kills it in Spy, particularly this line reading: "When I was a little girl growing up in Bulgaria, which is the worst by the way. Poor people everywhere and cabbages constantly cooking. There was this woman who was kicked out of her house and she lost all her money. She couldn't even sell her body. So she became a clown on the streets. She would perform all her tricks standing in mud, and just cry and cry. You remind me of this woman." And later: "You're funny. It's the Bulgarian clown in you."
Where was I?
Oh yeah, so there's hope for Krieps and Mara.
And no, I don't really live in fear of women needing me and wanting to kill me in equal measure. Why do you ask?
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