The Pictures; The Face
The movies feed us all kinds of dreams and illusions, but the most democratic, and also the cruelest, may be the fantasy that those vivid projected shadows we see on the screen are people just like us. There are, of course, movie stars whose charisma amounts to a kind of distilled ordinariness -- the nice guy, the girl next door, Jimmy Stewart, Meg Ryan, Kevin Costner, Doris Day. But there is another, rarer breed whose beauty is almost too unearthly to be sexual, and who we could never in our wildest dreams hope to be.
This distinction, obvious to any moviegoer, arises from a number of ineffabilities having to do with talent and technique. But mostly it's a matter of cheekbones. Cinema, with its bright lights and character-establishing close-ups, infuses the ridges and declivities of the human face with expressive power. Good bone structure confers a kind of immortality, as well as offering some immunity to the depredations of time, especially for women. Men grow thick and jowly, but even in their old age, stars like Gloria Swanson, Katharine Hepburn and Jeanne Moreau have managed to defy gravity.
The black-and-white era was the golden age of the cheekbone. The glories of Greta Garbo in close-up, those evocative shadows and hollows, will never be matched in Technicolor or digital video. The recent past offers Audrey Hepburn and Faye Dunaway, but ambitious screen actors tend nowadays to submerge their natural glow in the grit of naturalism. Today's stars are unquestionably good-looking, and have much better muscle definition than their predecessors, but fewer of them, especially male stars, have faces with the power to haunt.
Whatever else might be said about it, Lasse Hallstrom's new film, 'Chocolat,' brings together two contemporary icons of sorrowful, hollow-cheeked luminosity -- Johnny Depp and Juliette Binoche. Depp, a gifted realist, has sometimes been betrayed by his good looks. In 'Donnie Brasco,' his performance as an undercover F.B.I. agent infiltrating the New York mafia stretched credibility, not because of flaws in his acting, which was characteristically meticulous, but because of the flawlessness of his face. In Julian Schnabel's new film, 'Before Night Falls,' Depp has a double cameo as a jailhouse drag queen and a sadistic prison guard, but even behind heavy eye shadow or a militaristic mustache, his essential Deppness shines through.
Juliette Binoche first came to the attention of American audiences in 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being.' Sharing the screen with Daniel Day-Lewis and Lena Olin, she looked downright moon-faced in comparison, but by 'The English Patient' a decade later, she held her own in an impressively concave cast that included Ralph Fiennes, Kristin Scott Thomas and Willem Dafoe. Whether she and Depp can find the emotional chemistry to carry this picture remains to be seen, but their matching dark eyes and melancholy airs suggests it will be hard to look away. And a glance at young Victoire Thivisol, who plays Binoche's daughter, suggests that, once her baby fat melts away, a new golden age of the cheekbone may yet be before us.
-- A.O. SCOTT