Sandrine Bonnaire’s gaze gives her away. No matter how inadvertent she tries to pass by, how much negligence she holds the cigarette with or how mild is her makeup: the famous French actress has distinctive dark eyes that look at everything like if they can’t understand anything…
That’s how I immediately recognized her in the lobby of the Chaplin movie theater when, dressed in black and skinny she walked against the crowd looking for an open space to smoke. By the way, weird habit for someone whose last name sounds like “good air” … I went to the lobby to interrupt a drag, and in my bad French and his gringo-accented English we talked till the organizers of the French Film Festival asked her to enter back, because the show was about to begin …
“I would like to know more about Cuban cinema, because in my country we hardly known Strawberry and Chocolate, and that’s about it,” she confessed with some embarrassment. She folded her arms, and spoke about Elle s’appelle Sabine (Her Name is Sabine), a documentary about her sister, who suffered the consequences of delayed diagnosis of a form of autism.
For 25 years, Sandrine filmed moments of Sabine’s childhood and adolescence. “She loved the filming. I was asking a lot, and she loved acting. It became more calm and focused, she felt better about herself, “the actress says.
When asked about the social utility of the cinema, she went further and said that art must be used to express all positions and share ideas, “as long as it is done with full responsibility.” Now, Sandrine recognizes that to perform it takes desire, and every day is harder to select a subject to film it.
Finally, and walking back in, I asked her what she liked about Cuba, and she said he loves several things such as the solidarity of the Cuban people. She stood for a while in silence, mentally weighed something before adding: “I would say that freedom Cubans have, but in capitalist countries they understand otherwise to be free.”
In the end, Sabrine took the Chaplin’s stage, simple, smiling and with good vibes, and she said pretty much what I had already in advance: she met just Cuba three weeks ago, and when she returned to Paris she felt a powerful need to return to this country to know (know us) better, if at all that was possible in couple of weeks tour.
That night the Chaplin was packed with Francophiles, some downright snobs, sorry for the redundancy. In fact, many in the audience were laughing at certain jokes before they were translated, sometimes reluctantly, just to show that they do understand. Further evidence pedantry doesn’t know of geography or clichés.
For example, Sandrine’s sobriety contrasted with the extravagance the figures of Cuban cinema, disguised as … of them … Havana is a surreal city, but the combination of sunglasses, hat and umbrella always strikes at night.
So how the hell I ended up talking about fashion? Merde, I’m just another snob …
