SPECTRUM
Monday, October 18, 2010
37
Lifestyle
Blonde or brunette? Celluloid rivals fight it out in Paris By Emma Charlton
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n a wall-mounted screen, Marilyn Monroe sings a chorus from “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” next to a blown-up picture of Kristin Scott Thomas pulling off a peroxide wig to reveal the dark hair beneath. “Brunette/Blonde?”, which opened this month at the Paris cinematheque, uses
even in the movie world, the image of the blonde flickered back and forth between “pure and impure.” Until the 1930s, the blonde was the demure housewife, and the brunette was cast as a temptress. Then the tables turned-the blonde taking over as femme fatale, an enduring myth that culminated in the figure of Marilyn Monroe. “At each period, the viewer
US jazz singer Randy Crawford, center, performs during Beirut Jazz Festival in Beirut, Lebanon, Saturday. —AP
Inarritu’s ‘Biutiful’ opens Mexican film festival People walk past pictures of French actresses Brigitte Bardot and Kristin Scott Thomas as they visit the exhibition “Brune/Blonde” (Brunette / Blond) at the French cinematheque (La Cinematheque Francaise). —AFP film and television archives, photography and art to retrace how generations of movie makers have used women’s hair to seduce and shape their times. Penelope Cruz stares out from underneath a platinum wig, her sultry Latin looks camouflaged for the camera, for the poster of the show. “Women’s hair is a constant motif for all filmmakers, in all films,” said curator Alain Bergala, whether curled and glamorous like Veronica Lake, wild and loose like Brigitte Bardot, or cropped and rebellious like Jean Seberg. Above all, he said, “the 20th century was the century of blonde imperialism”-and nowhere more so than on the film sets of Hollywood. Illustrating the point: a pre-war US archive clip of Lana Turner gives women detailed tips on how to achieve the same hairstyle, with short blonde curls wound cherub-like around her head. In another, Jane Fonda talks on camera about her early experience of the film industry-how it judged her too dark to be “commercial”, so that for 10 years she was forced to dye her hair and lashes blonde. A kaleidoscope of “Elle” magazine covers shows Catherine Deneuve through the ages, polished, thick locks at shoulder length in the 1960s to frizzy-haired blonde in the 1980s-each time a model of femininity for her generation. But
knows how to tell the good girl from the bad, even if the codes have changed,” said Bergala. Later, the show moves the viewer away from the stereotype of the eternal rivals on to the 1990s and the cinema of David Lynch and his “idea that there is a blonde and a brunette inside every woman,” said Bergala. In Lynch’s “Lost Highway”, Patricia Arquette plays both sides of a female figure-dark and blonde. In “Mulholland Drive” the twin heroines, blonde and dark, are caught in a complex play on identity. The Paris show also aims for a broader historical sweep, looking at the politics of hair throughout the decades. From the 19th century Suffragettes or 1920s flappers to Jean Seberg’s nowclassic crop in the 1960s, short hair symbolized women’s liberation, while Black Panther activists adopted the afro as a means of protest. One gem-a US propaganda film from World War IIenjoins women to ditch Veronica Lake-style locks for shorter, practical styles better suited to working on factory machines in the war effort. On a darker note, the show also highlights how the Nordic cult of blondness was adopted by Nazi Germany as a symbol of racial purity, spreading to Josef’s Stalin’s Soviet Union which celebrated the ideal of the blonde peasantand on to the film studios
By Istra Pacheco
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exican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, acclaimed for his movies “Babel” and “Amores Perros,” opened Morelia’s International Film Festival on Saturday with his newest work set against the plight of migrants. Inarritu said, though, that “Biutiful” is not a movie with a sweeping theme about politics or despair-rather it is the story of a dying man discovering what is most important as life runs out. The main character, Uxbal, played by Oscar-winning
Spanish actor Javier Bardem, lives and works in a Barcelona slum as a middleman for African and Chinese migrants who is dealing with a bipolar ex-wife and trying to make ends meet for his two children. Though the raw portrait of migrant life and their exploitation is a key secondary theme, the tragedies that unfold are not a commentary on immigration, Inarritu said. “I’m not trying to make them victims or saints,” he said. “I’m just trying to integrate them into a dialogue, show that they’re human beings with virtues and flaws, with their needs as par-
ents and children.” Inarritu said Barcelona is just one of many cities around the world grappling with the growing flow of migrants. He acknowledged the phenomenon is heartbreaking, too, in his own country-where 72 migrants from Central and South America were recently massacred, reportedly after refusing to work for a drug gang that kidnapped them on their way to the US. But he said political arguments over migration are for others to make, not his movie. “It’s the story of a father and his children, a man who finds love in his most difficult
moments,” the director said. “There are no accusations. It’s not a sermon ... it’s the realization that in the final moments of life, what’s most important is love, forgiveness, compassion.” The film, which Mexico has nominated to compete for best foreign film in next year’s Oscars, is Inarritu’s first departure from his well-known style of interweaving several simultaneous plot lines. He focuses entirely on Bardem’s character in “Biutiful,” saying he wanted to create a more lineal story, yet at the same time circular. The film begins and ends with the same scene. — AP
Susan Boyle overcame bullies with her singing
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he Scottish music sensation was tormented throughout her childhood by other pupils at school because she was “different”. But Susan - who suffered from learning difficulties because she was starved of oxygen during her birth found peace through her love of music. She said: “My singing silenced the bullies, but better than that it silenced the demons inside of me. When you’ve been jeered at, told to shut up, sit still, stop being silly, there’s noise constantly rolling around your head. When I was singing it was peaceful. It gave me a new identity. Instead of being ‘That Susan Boyle - do you remember she was a bit odd at school?’ I became Susan Boyle - did you know she can really sing?’ “ Susan who shot to fame on Simon Cowell’s TV show ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ - says the worst incident was when one of the most spiteful bullies stubbed out a lit cigarette on her, leaving her completely traumatized. In her new
book ‘The Woman I Was Born to Be’, she recalled: “One afternoon a gang of girls and boys started chasing me. I set off, trying to get a head start, running as fast as I could ... but they caught up with me. They grabbed my bag and swung me round so I toppled down a bank towards a stream, landing on my face in a patch of nettles. The ringleader stepped forward, took a cigarette from her lips and stubbed it through the back of my blazer. The perfect round hole seemed to sum it up, all I was good for was stubbing out a cigarette. I was of no use to anyone.” The 49-year-old singer still occasionally has moments of doubt about herself, which she believes is a result of her unhappy childhood, but is happy with her achievements. She said: “I still have my moments of doubt, doesn’t everybody? If my story means anything, it is that people are very of ten too quick to judge a person by the way they look or the quirks of their behavior.” — Bang Showbiz
British singer Susan Boyle, who was discovered on the television show Britain’s Got Talent, at the signing of her autobiography, ‘The Woman I Was Born to Be’, at a book store, in Piccadilly, London, yesterday. — AP
(From lef t) Mexican director Alejandro Inarritu, Argentine actress Maricel Alvarez, center, and Spanish actor Javier Bardem pose for photographers at the Morelia International Film Festival in Morelia, Mexico. —AP
‘Leave It to Beaver’ mom Barbara Billingsley dies By Steve Gorman
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Shakira performs in Las Vegas Saturday. —AP
Italian animated film wins I
Kim Kardashian blows out the candles on a cake in celebration of her 30th Birthday at the 10th Anniversary of TAO restaurant in New York, early yesterday. — AP
talian short film “Big Bang Big Boom” directed by Blu was awarded late Saturday the top prize at international animation festival Anim’est in Bucharest. The jury praised the creation for its “inventive and monumental execution”. Produced in 2010, “Big Bang Big Boom” evokes evolution and its possible consequences in a non-scientific manner. French-Italian co-production
“Eleanor’s Secret” by Dominique Monfery received the prize for the best feature film, while South Korean director Yumi Jung was awarded the prize for best short film for her “Dust Kid”. Created last year to stimulate animation in the region, the Balkanimation section gave its award to a Bosnian-Canadian co-production, “Once upon a many time” by Eva Cvijanovic. The film explores relationships with
places and people when forced to leave home. The award for the best Romanian film in competition went to Cecilia Felmeri for her animated documentary “Mathias, Mathias”. This fifth edition of Anim’est, one of the main animation festivals in Eastern Europe, screened 511 films from 46 countries and featured American director Alex Budovsky as a special guest. — AFP
ctress Barbara Billingsley, best known for portraying the quintessential suburban American mom on the 1957-1963 television comedy “Leave It to Beaver,” died Saturday at age 94. A family spokeswoman said Billingsley, who also played a memorable cameo as a jivetalking elderly passenger in the 1980 hit comedy film “Airplane!,” had been in poor health in recent years and died of rheumatoid disease at her Santa Monica, California, home. In her signature role as June Cleaver in “Leave It to Beaver,” which ran for six seasons, Billingsley personified the ideal middle-class mother and housewife in an era when relatively few American women with children worked outside the home. Ever patient with the family’s rambunctious younger son, nicknamed Beaver, played by Jerry Mathers, and their teenage son, Wally (Tony Dow), June Cleaver was always impeccably stylish, often seen doing household chores in pearls and earrings. Her pipe-smoking TV husband, Ward Cleaver, was played by Hugh Beaumont, who died in 1982. The show aired first on CBS, then on ABC. Reruns are still shown widely in syndication almost half a century after the program went off the air. Billingsley reprised her June Cleaver role in several revivals and TV movie updates of the original show that aired into the 1990s. She complained at times that her association with the character left her forever typecast in Hollywood as the perfect mother. But Dow said in an interview with CNN that Billingsley “was very proud of being June Cleaver.” “She was
just happy as a lark being recognized as America’s mom,” he said. It was an image she used to comic effect in “Airplane!” as an elderly passenger who offers to have a word with two upset African-Americans speaking in heavy street slang on the plane after she politely tells the flight attendant, “Oh, stewardess, I speak jive.” The daughter of a Los Angeles senior police commander, Billingsley appeared on Broadway during World War Two as a chorus girl and also worked as a fashion model
In this Sept 27, 2007 file photo, Barbara Billingsley, of “Leave It To Beaver,” smiles as the cast members reunite in Santa Monica, Calif. — AP before getting her start in TV. According to the entertainment website IMDB.com, Billingsley was good friends with several other actresses famous for the moms they played on TV, including Florence Henderson (“The Brady Bunch”), June Lockhart (“Lassie,” “Lost in Space”) and Jane Wyatt (“Father Knows Best”). — Reuters