Director: Olivier Dahan
Talent: Nicole Kidman, Tim Roth, André Penver
Release Date: 6th June 2014
A sequence midway through Grace of Monaco sees Grace Kelly (Nicole Kidman) attempting to learn how to be a princess, My Fair Lady-style. We open on a shot of Kidman standing, arms slack by her sides; she wears a sheepish grin. The reverse shot reveals a man holding a card with the word ‘serenity’ on it. Cut to, Kidman, slack armed with a pained expression on her face — ‘anger’ the card reads. The camera rapidly cuts from expression to expression and card to card, all the while Kidman’s face expresses a range of half-hearted emotions — all from the bottom of her face.
Her eyes tell us the real story: lifeless and never-changing, never blinking, Kidman stares out toward the middle-distance emotionless, counting down the seconds ‘til the end of the day. She is silently composing an email to her publicist and staging a phone-call to her agent: she’s not sure how or why she ended up here in front of these cue cards, but she knows one thing for certain, someone’s getting fired.
Words: Luke Maxwell
For more film coverage this month, see our reviews of When I Saw You, Omar, Venus In Fur, A Million Ways To Die In The West and Edge of Tomorrow.
