As a request, I now turn to another performance that happens to be given by one of my true favorite actress' in 21st century cinema. She changed the way we looked at indie films in the '90s -- giving the world of cinema something so new and fresh to admire and praise while the usual, conventional ways that conventional actors played their parts around her. Another step towards "breaking out" came in the odd, hypnotic work of...
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Chloe Sevigny plays Dot (yes, that's her name), a young woman living in Harmony Korine's surrealistic wasteland America surrounded by other "creatures" of pure filth.
Dot lives alone with her siblings, her (twin?) sister Helen, and her baby sister Darby in Xenia, Ohio -- a town that's a partly living nightmarish, shitwreck that had never gotten over a tornado that hit more than twenty years earlier.
Like the other character's in this raw wasteland, Sevigny's Dot is a peculiar creature almost from another world; her white, albino-ish hair and eyebrows give her an eerie, unsettling appearance, her wardrobe is awkward and somewhat out of place, and her daily activities are as random and weird as her name.
She and her sisters enjoy sticking tape on their nipples and yanking it off it hope of making them bigger, and then just jumping on their beds to Buddy Holly's Everyday. Does it make sense? No, not really. But Dot is probably the least revolting/disturbing character in Gummo, and Sevigny's vignette is at times the most interesting to follow. We don't really know anything about Dot, but we can vividly see that she, like everyone else is doing whatever to pass time that passed a long time ago.
Sevigny's performance would be difficult to be proved as an actual characterization (in the most basic sense), but is instead a collection of striking glimpses and images of Harmony Korine's "artistic" collage of live on the edge of nothing. Korine is a rare filmmaker who puts to use Sevigny's unique gifts as an actress; her enigmatic, captivating screen presence, her odd physicality, her exotic, strange beauty, her charisma and her overall naturalism with dialogue and expression. For example take the snapshot above, and how Korine uses this slow-mo to stop and hypnotize us.
In other words, Sevigny's Dot is in total sync with the weridness surrounding her, whether she talks about girls being too skinny while walking to nowhere in the middle of the street...
...or getting her nails painted while layzing on the porch out front with the neighbor ladies...
...or washing up a stray cat's "under booty". Sevigny gives these vivid images a feeling of artistic being, like she should be on display with some of the most unusually fascinating works in a museum. The actress is also occasionally very funny too.
Especially when her sister is being "touched" by a pervert who told them he knew where their cat was. The three sisters begin slapping the guy silly, when Dot exclaims, "why are ya tryin' to touch her coochie, pervert!" Sevigny gets the levity of this absurdity and plays it both as a sad, distressing moment as well as a moment of comedy. I love the way she yells, "FUCKIN' ASSHOLE!" when the car's already sped away.
The only problem with Sevigny's work (and I don't so much blame Chloe for this) is that, although Korine captures these individual, startling moments from Sevigny, he never really strings them together to make them cohere in any way. Instead of making Dot somewhat human in a grounded, yet bizarre reality, Korine keeps her character/performance at a distance from the viewer. Wouldn't it have been nice to see some emotional chords strung into Sevigny's work? Each individual section of the performance works on its own, sure, but never actually functions beyond stark mental images -- in either a intellectual or emotional way.
But...what the hell. Chloe works her magic in this strange, freaky (almost completely) out of this world role. Though the character is written as a hazy "device" to add to Korine's realism atmosphere, Chloe's own brand of film acting makes Dot much more striking than she might've been . It's really hypnotic, surreal, and interesting work from an somewhat under-appreciated actress displaying her unique qualities in a role tailor made for her.
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