As long as there are cameras there will be actresses, so seems to be the central idea behind Robert Greene’s terrific and often terrifying Actress, a docudrama about real life actress Brandy Burre, who once had a recurring role on HBO’s The Wire, and decided to leave her career behind to start a family. Burre and her partner Tim Reinke moved to upstate New York where she seems to have decided to carve a life for herself out of a Douglas Sirk film, except after a while she realized this wasn’t all she wanted.Yet what exactly is it that Brandy wants is something we never truly discover.
“I tend to break things” she confesses in voiceover as the film begins, setting in motion what feels like a modern take on films about actresses like All About Eve and Imitation of Life, but beyond the obvious comparisons to well-known films, Actress is trying to reflect the complexity of being a woman, and makes us wonder why society has demanded that all women become actresses and expects them to slip in and out of their roles as wife/mother/employee etc. with the ease with which Meryl Streep changes her accents.
A whirlwind of beautiful contradictions, Burre explains within the same scene that she forgot her daughter’s birthday and how much acting felt like a burden, making us realize that she never grew content within any of the boxes she was put into. We wonder how much time she spends running lines in her head when she suddenly confesses that “every once in a while I’d like to be thrown over a chair and made love to”, with the conviction of Marlene Dietrich. With someone who seems both so chaotic and self-aware we can’t help but question if the film itself isn’t a masterful audition tape, and if it is, what does it mean about the way in which we perceive nonfiction media?
While Actress isn’t precisely trying to be commentary about the way in which reality television has taken over networks, one look at Brandy holding a glass of wine is enough to make the words “real housewife” automatically come to mind, Greene a master of visual reference without ever recurring to obvious cues. As Brandy walks through the theater district and we see posters of Jessica Chastain in The Heiress (“the it actress”) and Broadway show The Performers (ahem, that title) we wonder how much of this was Greene finding perfect locations, and how much of it comes from the way we’ve been predisposed to digest media. Actress may seem to be just about Brandy Burre, but the more we look at her and the more evasive she becomes, the more hooked we are, as one line in the film expresses “I’m not sure what it means, but I’m trying to listen to what it says”.
