Monday, October 20, 2008

Ode to Julie Christie

I've recently finished watching McCabe & Mrs. Miller which is, undoubtably, one of the greatest things I have ever experienced.  An absolutely perfect film, aided immensely by perhaps the most dazzlingly lovely, wounded, immeasurably sad, fragile, unbearable faces ever to grace the silver screen.  Julie Christie is, perhaps, the most beautiful woman to have ever lived.      

Even buried beneath the dull, slow awfulness of Francois Truffaut's dreadful Fahrenheit 451 she shines through as luminous.  She did the same more recently, in Wolfgang Peterson's equally wretched Troy, before proving that she aged about as well as anyone could in the aching Away from Her, where she gave one of the best performances of her career in one of the best films of 2007.

Helen be damned; this is the face that launched a thousand ships.  And begat revolutions.  And bewitched Warren Beatty on several occasions.  Warren Beatty was also in McCabe & Mrs. Miller... but he's another post entirely.


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