SARAH CLYNE SUNDBERG'S GUILTY PLEASURES:

PRÊT-À-PORTER (1994)



Let me draw your attention to a film that perhaps isn't so much embarrassing as severely underappreciated. In my mid-teens my mind was similar to cheap sausage; pretty much anything went in. This included a gem unique to the early '90s — Elle Topmodel. I could not get enough of the comings and doings of Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista and Kate Moss (those were supermodels, lest you did not know).  Meanwhile I had my angry-girl Doc Martens and parka-wearing indie cred to protect. I kept my obsession with fashion and models under wraps. Happily, there appeared a film that was art house enough so that I could see it without shame: Prêt-à-Porter. This was Robert Altman's send-up of the Paris fashion week and the fashion industry at large. At the time, I thought it was all fiction (though thrilling) and laughed my ass off at the prissy TV anchor, the egomaniac fashion designers, and the three scary-looking fashion editors, shriveled in their severe brown bobs. And last but not least, the two journalists who holed up in their hotel room, reporting the shows off the TV while screwing and getting trashed off the booze in the mini bar. That was before I knew the world well enough to realize that some things don't need to be made up. The movie also reads like a best-of '60s Euro movies with Sophia Loren, Anouk Aimée and Marcello Mastroianni knocking about on screen. I find that unlike Elle Topmodel, Prêt-à-Porter has only improved with age.

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We’ve discussed in this space before the fact that it’s a lot easier to build a career as a character actor if you’re a man than it is if you’re a woman. Even in today’s Hollywood — or should I say, especially in today’s Hollywood — men are allowed to be quirky, unattractive, unconventionally charismatic; while women are allowed to be beautiful. It’s hard to develop a reputation for playing smart, idiosyncratic characters with unusual looks in a town where Britney Spears and Kate Winslet are considered grotesquely overweight. Still, you really don’t appreciate how bad things can be until you consider the fact that one of the movie business’ most talented actresses won her only Academy Award. . . for playing a man. Diminutive, husky-voiced New Jersey native Linda Hunt was clearly never going to be a big-screen superstar; her throaty, almost masculine vocal tone and 4'9" frame seemed to guarantee that if she got work it all, it would be in gimmick roles and stunt casting. But director Peter Weir saw enough genuine talent in her to give her the role of guide and photographer Billy Kwan in his 1982 political drama The Year of Living Dangerously; her towering performance was enough to get her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Unlike other pieces of gender-bending casting trickery like Hilary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry or Felicity Huffman in TransAmerica, there was nothing artificial or calculating in the role: Hunt took a professional approach towards playing a man, and fully inhabited the part in a way that continues to impress twenty-five years after it was filmed. She’s never quite gotten out of the habit of playing men — her most recent memorable role was as the putatively male "Management" in the ambitious HBO failure Carnivalé — but she’s turned in plenty of terrific performances, in the intervening years, in her native gender. As the years go by, roles in animation and video games — the boon of the contemporary character actor, and a natural for someone with as distinctive a voice as Hunt’s — have become more common. But a woman with talents this prodigious, however small a package contains them, has got at least a few great big-screen roles left in her; maybe she’ll become the first person to win Academy Awards for both genders.

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