Admirable Adjani

SPOTLIGHT

Like Greta Garbo, Isabelle Adjani seems betrothed to the screen. If Garbo, bending to enfold the world "like a great, sailing swan" (Kenneth Tynan), is cinema's indulgent mother, Adjani is its last pure daughter. She became famous in France as a slender miss with The Slap. The movie itself was a so-so comedy of bourgeois muddle, but Adjani let her feelings tail from a high kite. Happiness bannered the upper air. From Colette to Frangoise Sagan, France has doted on girlhood, and Adjani became the country's premiere jeune fille (a place in French pop culture later annexed by Sophie Marceau in La Bourn). If The Slap proved she could be a captivating presence, Francois Truffaut's The Story of Adele H. stamped her as a natural force—and a moody apparition. She couldn't have been a more milky-pearly bead of mythy intent than she was in Adele H., pursuing a callow lieutenant across land and foam under low, discouraging clouds. Her crowning moment as Victor Hugo's daughter came when she spumed her unworthy lover with an Unseeing Gaze. And Adjani was only nineteen. Such maturity! She seemed to have the future bagged.

Then came the correction. Nothing shameful, but a distinct falling-off. She was a kept kitten in Quartet, a blank cartridge in The Driver, and a Bronte sister in The Bronte Sisters; she had her neck punctured in Nosferatu, and was slimed by the unspeakable in Possession. Even her entrances of prepared dazzle sometimes resulted in anticlimax. When Adjani descended the stairs in Subway, the screen seemed to part in rapt awe. Aburst in black plumage, she was the night's raven mistress. But waiting for her in the urban grotto was only Christopher Lambert in his what-me-worry? grin and spotty raincoat. She also recorded an LP, breathily crooning such ditties as "Le Mai Interieur" and (my favorite) "Le Bonheur C'est Malheureux." Sigh. Perhaps it was ever so, this extravagant waste of Beauty. Graham Greene once grumbled that Garbo's chariots ran aground in sawdust, stalled in "the slow consummation of her noble adulteries." Like Garbo, Adjani outclasses her clinkers, her gem-blue eyes staring dreamily past the smoked lens into the ethereal. But she has never become an opiate of the people on this side of the Atlantic, as Garbo did. That could change once Ishtar escapes from director Elaine May's fix-it shop. Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman loose in the desert sands are the film's major draws, but it's Isabelle Adjani (indignant, amused, pale, blushing, aloof, proud, possessed—the most cherishable actress alive) some of us most want to see.

JAMES WOLCOTT