Kristin Scott Thomas is at the Comedy these days, Emma in Pinter's BETRAYAL: A woman crushed by her husband who finds in his best friend's admiration the impetus to become the best friend's lover... told backward, from the death of love to the proposition. I saw a performance on Monday. Wonderful work.
And this afternoon, on Channel 5, RANDOM HEARTS.
Thomas' stillness works beautifully in BETRAYAL. I'm not good enough for the man I married, she sadly acknowledges; but I'm good enough for you, for you, you give me and my life meaning... until, of course, she asks her lover to leave his wife ("Impossible", he replies), and we watch her crumple -- so painful! I can imagine Scott Thomas easily, fully, as a woman so cuffed and abused by her husband that she barely dares to speak.
As the congresswoman in RANDOM HEARTS, though: No. Who can't sympathise with Bill Clinton, his nose and other bits rubbed into the Ueberkompetenz of Hillary in his bed every night? Plump soft giggly enraptured Monica... a change is as good as a rest, eh, Bill? The stillness, the passivity of Scott Thomas... Not for, not in, someone in politics, not even with a daughter's interests ("She idolised her father!") as the stalking-horse behind which the mother wants to hide. Mis-casting, mis-acting? Harrison Ford is his usual avatar, testosterone-with-a-brush-cut, rolled out on casters to mouth his lines.
I puzzled over the title for a while. The sorrow that adultery, that the craving for romance, brings into one's own life and into those of others -- are they, can they be, worth all the heartbreak, the doubt and incredulity and shame, that these choices of selfishness inflict? What are the reasons that we stray? Pascal tells us: Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point. This film says: The heart has no reasons for behaving as it does. The heart loves, and strikes out to hurt, at random. A film, then, with mature and complicated ideas, and praiseworthy ones.
Wonderful occasion for a film, grand chance to watch KST, valuable to me as a window into what she, the actress, can and couldn't do. Certainly worth having watched. Not worth averring that I'd watch it again...