There's often a collective sigh when a French actress of a certain age crosses over into roles that are no longer mere displays of sumptuousness. It's sad to think of lost youth, of course, but there's another spectacle at play as film directors fumble haltingly to present a new kind of beauty—until the actresses simply fall back on their trademark pouts and poses.
Then Marina Hands shows up. The daughter of a British director and a French actress, Hands—she's 32, if that matters—has remained oddly ageless, unmoored to any era, a performer capable of intimacy under any condition.
Already, in 2003's The Barbarian Invasions, she gave a young banker a glimpse of his future with the help of her dewy eyes while he conducted a very particular sort of deathbed-tending to his horny and ornery father. In this spring's Lady Chatterley, her Constance was similarly grounded, looking past another sickbed—her husband's—toward the earthly delights on their wooded property. She also managed to persuade the estate's gamekeeper that life was as fleeting as the seasons and as enjoyable in the moment as weaving flowers into her hair.
This winter brings Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, in which Hands is but a memory come to life as one man's blissful mind flickers with past pleasures—the kind his paralytic body now denies him. From his hospital bed, he remembers their romp—the departure of it all, the languid escape to Lourdes that can still shine a little light on his ailing brain's darkness.
How can one woman really do all that in three films—actually reveal something important about the future, the present, and the past? However she does it, expect Hands to keep appearing in reveries as ideal wives, grand patronesses, and elusive mistresses who teach the world new things about the French woman—perhaps the planet's most electrifying curiosity.
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