“Don’t forget that you are also a novelty when you become a mother,” I was told. You pay a lot of attention to the child, but your relationship with the world is new, your relationship with your partner is new, your relationship with the job is new”. Jessie Buckley has become a mother for a few months, right in one of the most challenging periods of his career, including nominations, awards and all the “fruits to collect” for his two most recent interpretations, Hamnet. In the name of the son and The Bride!. For those who are familiar with his path, motherhood is an almost symbolic phase for what the actress represented and represents on the screens. For her, who has always dedicated flesh and spirit to the complexity of being a woman.
His mother, on the other hand, works as a vocal coach in a school-female convent in Thurles, the same as Buckley attended as a child and where he began his journey into the arts. He played mostly male characters in school productions, such as Tony on the West Side Story. Crescendo also gave space to his musical talents, studying harp, piano and clarinet at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, but soon entered a period of depression that prompted him to move away (an element reminiscent of his character in Men) and reach London: “I wasn’t ready to go to university, I was lost. During the Sabatic year I went to London to try to enter a musical theatre school but I couldn’t,” he said a few weeks ago in an interview for CBS. Then, however, the turning point: participates in an audition for I’d Do Anything, a talent show focused on the search for a Nancy for the play Oliver!. Buckley reaches the final, and from there his career takes flight.
After the first roles in the cinema that are worth local notoriety, his trajectory changes with I’m thinking of ending it here by Charlie Kaufman. From here, in full alignment with the rise of the brand A24 and its pivotal themes, the actress devotes herself to a long series of female characters united by the deviction of trauma: in this case, the exasperation towards the life that they find themselves living, but above all towards the system that built them. And, to return to motherhood, it is a great example of the young Leda Caruso in The Lost Daughter, a talented, ambitious and enterprising woman but sufficiently responsible to give priority to daughters in the total physical and emotional absence of the father. Until she can no longer. Faced with the opportunity to subsurface his daily life (and therefore the system), to enjoy a liberation both pragmatic and relational, sexual, his internalized frustration no longer has reins and, in the extreme act of abandonment, the humanity of the character really has. Jessie Buckley gives the audacity necessary to each of these nuances, a purely feminine ferocity that returns in all his characters, often isolated, uncommon and filled with anger. “Jessie is a beast. There are few actors and actresses so, it is a wild animal,” commented director Maggie Gyllenhaal at Cannes before assigning her the Chopard trophy.
In this sense, Buckley is really the face of female anger in contemporary cinema. It has the emotional intelligence and intensity to take charge of the enormous burden inherited from its kind. In Women Talking – The right to choose from Sarah Polley, the Irish interprets Mariche, the most conservative woman in her mennonite community, the most gruesome to men who were raping and beating her and others. Here too mother of a daughter, in meetings to discuss how to react to violence struggles to maintain a balance: While Salomè (interpreted by Claire Foy) is openly hostile but ends up consuming his flame very soon, Buckley gives Mariche a very thesis balance between the desire to open itself to compassion that his faith would impose upon her and the resentment he feels in the heart. And as if it was not enough, its anger, sometimes too intense to be contained, the island from the compañeras: his body is always shoulders, always far from the machine point in a pose that returns detachment and surrender. Mariche is a pendulum that swings between the deep frustration towards the system, the shock given by ideological isolation and the need for understanding and acceptance by the group, the most authentic personal microcosm of the film that the actress once again manages to hold on the shoulders, while having little stage time.
In Men, speeches about the body and the female experience continue, but do not expand. In the film she plays Harper Marlowe, a young woman who leaves for a holiday in the countryside to process her husband’s suicide. Despite his character not helping her at all, Buckley still manages to upload the film of her scenic intensity, both in her marital past full of screams and violence (both psychological and physical), both in her presence of silences, walks and observations. “Every time I interpret one of these women, I feel that my space in the world grows. Interpreting these roles gives me strength, because when you understand their “nodes” gives you catastrophe, relief, gives you more connections. Sometimes I care about a shell and these women help me break it.” And in some way, in every character, the presence and strength of all these women, of these lived, of all suffering and claim: an intangible, but real manifestation of female solidarity.
Hamnet. In the name of the son, the original actress returns to confront the mourning as she had done in The Lost Daughter. In the chaos of a strongly operatic and theatrical film as its subject, Agnes and William (Paul Mescal) remain divided by mourning because they have different ways of facing it, and must find a way to reunite. Buckley confessed that he was lost to play Agnes: “lost was part of the process. I remember thinking ‘in reality, maybe it is deeply human to get lost’. And if I can show it, that it is so,” he said. “Humanity is nothing but trying to find itself at a time when one is shattered. Being human is a mess.” Moreover, no one better than her today reminds us of the complexity of the human race, embracing its comfortable and unpleasant sides with equal respect. It embraces the frustration, the anger that characterizes the life of those who are oppressed by the system, even in the most forgotten forms.
L’articolo Jessie Buckley – The Face of Female Anger proviene da SentieriSelvaggi.
