In February, I spoke to Weisz via Zoom from his home in upstate New York. She was wearing a simple shirt and thick clear acrylic glasses that gave her the look of the most stylish professor on a dissertation committee. Weisz radiates the poise that was the signature of her early career, looking stolid until something unexpected catches her eye and she flashes a warm smile. As we talked, his demeanor made me continually search for something nice to say. Dark-haired, with bushy eyebrows and an attentive look, she still retains the features of the English rose with a fresh face that became the center of attention in the work of Bernardo Bertolucci. “Stealing beauty.” The face harbors more emotion now and has a greater capacity to convey sweetness or menace or some kind of ambiguous danger that lurks beneath its placid surface.
In recent years, as Weisz has entered a more boundary-pushing phase of her career, you can watch her break through the cultivated, beautiful exterior to reveal moments of vulnerability and even ugliness that touch the viewer on a visceral level. These characters, such as the power-obsessed Lady Sarah from Yorgos Lanthimos’s “The favorite”, or the obstinate and transgressive Ronit Krushka from “Disobedience” — are appetizing women who arouse more curiosity than simple admiration. Watching these performances, you get the feeling that something instinctive and utterly compelling has come to life within Weisz. His performance as the impulsive and obsessive Mantle twins is an extension of this movement to portray women who do not represent an ideal, but are embodied, desiring beings struggling to negotiate the weight of that desire.
We’re used to some sleight of hand, carefully placed cut-aways, and scenes in which fresh-looking mothers in hospital gowns hold swaddled, clean babies in their arms. Actual childbirth is somewhat more radical.
When Weisz pitched a gender-swapped version of “Dead Ringers” to a producer at Annapurna Pictures, she was intrigued by the twins’ intricately intertwined personalities, the way they negotiated their tense obsession with each other. “It just seemed like very fertile ground,” Weisz explained. “A twisted, codependent relationship between identical twins, whatever their gender, who are brilliant in their careers.” Unlike Jeremy Irons’ diametrically opposed siblings in Cronenberg’s film, whose complementary personalities might seem to form a single person, Weisz’s are intricately intertwined: Although Beverly is introverted, she’s hardly passive, pursuing both her affairs and her mission. to create a more humane world. , female-led way of giving birth with a silent approach. Elliot reins in her own scientific imagination, her appetite for grander interventions like eliminating menopause or aging, in service of what she perceives to be Beverly’s needs. Weisz fulfills the dual roles of Beverly and Elliot with her own raw, organic power, guiding patients through labor with quick, steady hands and a tone that is firm almost to the point of coldness.
But some of the series’ most moving moments come when she taps into maternal vulnerability, like when she portrays Beverly’s discovery that she’s had another miscarriage, the latest in a series of disembowelments. The camera pans over her hand holding a bloody piece of toilet paper in a shot that’s almost from a first-person perspective. The effect for me, as a viewer, was the opposite of an out-of-body experience: it was a vision I had only experienced in my own life, and for a moment my mind raced to think of the consequences involved: it was I was menstruating, had forgotten to take my pill, was there something deeply wrong inside of me? It could be said that the series normalizes these physiological processes by showing them on the screen, but they are already normal: they are only the invisible part of the iceberg that a body has.
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