"The Performance That Changed My Life"
Autor: Rubens Antonio | Publicado: 2012-05-21T21:48:00-03:00









por "Dave"

Extraído de:

http://victimofthetime.blogspot.com.br/2007/07/performance-that-changed-my-life.html

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This is for
Emma's blog-a-thon, if you didn't know, and you should get on over there and
read all the other posts, after you've read this one.



I thought
long and hard about who to write about here, the major problem being that I
couldn't think of anyone- sure, there are a ton of performances that I love,
but could I really honestly say that any of them changed me? (I take things
very seriously as you see.) I didn't think I could. Until my brain finally
looped round to a performance that it always went to, a seminal moment in my
film-watching canon. It's a distinctly unconventional and even obscure choice,
but be sure it's one that surprised even me in the way it affected me and stuck
in my head. And here it is...



Jodhi May
as Alice Munro

in

The Last of
the Mohicans (Michael Mann, 1992)



Let's get
one thing clear first. I don't like The Last of the Mohicans. I think it's
boring and long and visually dull (although that may be the video copy we own,
for some unknown reason). And, for most of the film, I barely even noticed that
Alice Munro even existed, sidelined as she is as the sister of lead character
Hawkeye's (Daniel Day-Lewis) love interest Cora (Madeleine Stowe). Various
native American parties are assisting on either side of the colonial
French-British battle in colonial America (why, I'm not sure), and Hawkeye is
an independant man reared as a Mohawk who ends up, with two friends, guiding
these sisters through various difficult and dangerous situations (including one
sequence involving a canoe chase which is about the only excitement I got out
of the vast part of the film). Naturally, Hawkeye falls for Cora, but what
interests us here is what's going on in the background.



This is
never exactly made clear, and it took reading after seeing the film to clear up
what had actually been going on. As the film nears the end, the group
progresses up a precarious waterfall, one of Hawkeye's friends, Uncas (Eric
Schweig) is killed by the men tracking them, and he falls off the edge of the
waterfall. Suddenly, surprisingly, Alice gives a look to her sister and jumps
off after him.



Basic
description does not do this moment justice. Perhaps what I'm going to say is
hyperbolic, but it is also the truth. Have you ever experienced a moment you
can't explain, where something affects you in a way you never expected, in a
way it will probably never affect someone else, in a way it may not ever affect
you yourself again? This is what happened to me here. The look that Jodhi May
gave to the camera in that tiny second of film startled me, made my heart stop,
made me weep- and I didn't understand why. There had been no build up, no
groundwork- it was simply a sudden, unexpected moment. It was overwhelming in
its despair, its sorrow, its harrowing hopelessness. I've never had a moment
like it since. I've never watched the film again for fear that I would lose the
remnants of the feeling. I doubt that you, if you watched it, would feel the
same, for I can only feel that it was a once-in-a-lifetime moment. It is MY
moment. Is there anyone else in the world who felt so strongly, from feeling so
disinterested, in that piece of film? I doubt it, and, more importantly, I hope
not.



Jodhi May's
performance changed my life because it made me realize that performances don't
always need deep groundwork to function, that someone can swoop in for barely a
second and be as affecting as three hours of a performance. Jodhi May's
performance is emotion in a captured frame, and, in a rare moment of foresight
for me, I captured it in a photo. (From my tv, isn't it good!) (Oh, and search
google for "Jodhi May Mohicans" and this image, my image, is the
first to come up, on my Rotten Tomatoes page. Wicked.)



Watch it. I
don't expect you to feel the same, and perhaps you won't have a clue what I'm
talking about. But this moment is one that I can honestly say changed me:
changed the way I look at film, change the way I understand it, change the way
I see emotions. It is one of the few moments of my life that I can't
understand, can't explain, can't put down to any earthly description.

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