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07/11/2007 INTERVIEW Just four years after Dutch director Theo Van Gogh made the original, American actor/director Steve Buscemi has made an American version of this movie about a fading political journalist forced by his editor to interview a vacuous airhead soap star. The complicated relationship – and the secrets they hide - which then emerge between two people with apparently nothing in common who initially detest one another is the stuff of great movie tension and which is exactly what presumably attracted Buscemi to the project. And what may very well attract YOU to it, babeluvers, is the delicious Sienna Miller, who plays the starlet/paparazzi queen Katya (though Dutch actress Katja Schuurman, who take the part in the original movie is pretty hot too). See, Sienna was never really taken very seriously as an actress, but she surprised a lot of people with her convincing portrayal of tragic rich babe Edie Sedgwick in Factory Girl. The difference is that, as good as she was in it, Factory Girl was a lousy movie. But here she gets the chance to shine in a GOOD film. English to the core Sienna may be, her American accent never wavers and she really blossoms during the verbal fencing and conflicting attitudes that make this a very watchable movie. She’s feisty and cocky and lovable and is an admirable foil in the verbal jousting with the loathsome hack who reluctantly comes to interview her. Buscemi himself plays the duplicitous political journo who ultimately tries to bed Katya yet double-crosses her by trying to run the story told to him in confidence that she has cancer. What he doesn’t know is that she’s lied to him about that. Getting the picture of how complicated their relationship is? It’s quite an achievement for essentially just two people to dominate the screen for an entire movie but the dialogue – and acting – is good enough for them to carry it off, while providing plenty of food for thought about the nature of celebrity and the mind games that go into creating and sustaining it. Sienna Miller herself has long been seen as a product of that manufactured sense of celebrity, initially famous primarily as Jude Law’s wronged girlfriend with an image perhaps not a million miles from that of Katya, the role she plays in the movie. It’s a fitting irony that playing Katya so persuasively should lift Sienna beyond the constraints of that media stereotype into the realms of serious actress, famous not for her love life, her looks or her latest modelling campaign, but for the fabulous roles that will surely be heading her way as a direct result of this movie. |
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