A good face can help you with just about anything. This is true for relationships and even more so for movies.
I think this is why, in our current moment of danger and despair, when we are looking for even the smallest comfort that can help us get through the next day, I found myself drawn to the Owareto.
Said aloud, the Owareto looks like some sort of exotic antelope, and if I capitalize on that as suggested by the New York Times style guide – OWARETO, flush with intimidating capital letters – you might wonder if it’s was acting on the name of a virus or the acronym of a health agency racing to contain it.
Fortunately, it has nothing to do with it. The Owareto I’m referring to is an Oscar-winning actress emotionally reacting to opera, and right now, she’s all I have.
My first meeting with an Owareto took place in 2004, with the audacious drama of “Birth” by Jonathan Glazer, with Nicole Kidman. The film was released during Kidman’s post-Oscar chill, when his resume was dominated by bombs like “The Stepford Wives” and “Bewitched”, and I remember that the theater was deserted. Audience and critics had become skeptical of the actress, and “Birth” had such a risky connection line – 10-year-old boy insists he’s the reincarnation of Kidman’s late husband – that many simply stayed away.
What they missed was a virtuoso sequence almost halfway where Kidman, completely shaken by the strange certainty of the child, is carried away for a lyrical appointment with his sufficient fiancé (played by Danny Huston) . The couple rushes to their seats at the start of Wagner’s “Die Walküre”, and on a long, uninterrupted shot, the camera lands on Kidman’s face as she lets herself believe in the impossible.
It’s an incredible emotional arc – over several minutes, without a single word of dialogue, Kidman’s face goes from terror to the hope of resolving itself in steel – as well as an even more incredible actress feat. You could almost call her the Kidman Oscar clip, if you wanted to ignore the fact that she was not nominated for this role and that Oscar clips don’t tend to last two and a half minutes. (Their loss, not ours.)
However, I never forgot Kidman’s epiphany in evening dress, and over the years, I began to think of similar moments of tour de force in other films. Maybe you haven’t watched “Birth” (but you did watch “Birth”!) But you almost certainly saw “Pretty Woman”, which made Julia Roberts a megastar and spent a mighty interlude establishing her Owareto bona fides.
The streak comes to a crucial point for the streetwalker played by Roberts, who received a burst of Pygmalion and a trip to the San Francisco Opera House by wealthy corporate thief Richard Gere. “The reactions of people to the opera the first time they see it are very dramatic,” he tells her as “La Traviata” is about to start. “If they love him, they will always love him. If they don’t, they can learn to appreciate it, but it will never be part of their soul. “
It’s a lot of pressure for a woman or an actress to measure up, but Roberts passes this soul test with flying colors. She is overwhelmed by an emotional connection to “La Traviata”, and as tears rise to her eyes and a frown at the edges of her mouth, she takes a deep breath, trying to dampen the passion that comes so naturally to her. . While Gere sees his reaction without artifice to this great work, it is clear that he fell in love. He’s about a minute behind the audience.
The funny thing about Owareto’s scenes is that they are both subtle and anything but. Obviously, it takes a lot of skill to make authentic the journey of the character’s micro-realizations, but let’s be real: it is also a kind of stuntman. The films stop in their tracks to serve these moments, and a non-charitable viewer could claim that they want to show more what the actress can do than what the character goes through.
To that I say, then what? The subtle things are not always better, and if you already dare to call the opera, you might as well clear your throat and go further. “Moonstruck” is hardly concerned with subtlety: this romantic comedy about two New York Italians begins with the sound of “That’s Amore”, after all. I guess there’s still some subtext if you really want it, but writer John Patrick Shanley’s gift is for characters who express exactly what they feel with clarity that is surprisingly comical.
When Cher goes to the Met with a volcanic Nicolas Cage in “Moonstruck” and sparkling tears run down his cheeks while watching “La Bohème”, the film has firmly established itself in the domain of oversized opera, and c is all the more exciting for this audacity.
The same goes for Kenneth Lonergan’s masterpiece “Margaret”, where long before Anna Paquin had her Owareto moment, another character accused her of being excessively dramatic. “You think I think is it an opera?Shouts Paquin.
Lonergan later stages the film’s emotional climax in a real opera, which might seem to point out twice a point that has already been raised. But when Paquin falls apart during “The Tales of Hoffmann” and bends down to finally kiss his distant mother, I cry too. Of course, it’s exciting to see a high-level actress tearing apart several rows of emotions, but there is also a kind of transfer in play: we often turn to fictional characters to articulate things that we cannot do all just not, so watching an Owareto find this same kind of catharsis on the largest scale possible is to better understand my own relationship to art.
The Owareto club is small but powerful. It seems shocking, for example, that Cate Blanchett never reacted emotionally to the opera. “The Favorite” allowed Olivia Colman to react emotionally to Emma Stone’s dance, which is similar but always different. Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore both played opera singers on screen, but it might have been better to remove one of them from this scene and place them in a stuffed seat next to … well, let’s say Alec Baldwin, as he ignores the tears his wife wears skillfully at a distance.
The recent French romance “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” has something similar to an Owareto moment at the end, and even if I don’t dare spoil the context, the scene has moved and delighted me. However, as I thought about this moment over the past week and started to revisit many of these films, I came to watch these scenes with more nostalgia.
What I realized is that movies have the ability to transport us somewhere, just like a great actress. I can’t go out right now, and there are a lot of things I can’t express. But she can, and on her face, there is enough travel for the two of us.