How Kristen Stewart Became Her Generation from falikmasi's blog

The airport in Telluride, Colorado, is small and private. The town’s film festival, held each year during the Labor Day weekend, has a reputation for intimacy — celebrities are not subjected to red carpets or corsetry, and the looming mountains have a way of making Hollywood seem garish and far away. This year, Kristen Stewart flew to Colorado from Venice, Italy, where “Spencer,” a new movie in which she plays Princess Diana, had just premièred. The first reviews of her performance (“ ‘Spencer’ Stuns Venice, Earning Standing Ovation and Oscar Buzz” — Variety) were published as she slept above the Atlantic. She stopped at a hotel to change and have her dyed blond hair styled in a messy updo, then went directly to the Werner Herzog Theatre, along with Pablo Larraín, the movie’s director, arriving only a few minutes behind schedule.

Her look was nineteen-fifties suburban dad: a black-and-white cabana shirt over a cropped white tank top, blue jeans, red suède creepers, white socks. Stewart, who was born and raised in Los Angeles, describes herself as California to the core — she has “L.A.” tattooed on a wrist — and few people since James Dean have looked better or more at ease in a T-shirt and jeans. She seems to channel a lineage of countercultural American femininity: rockabilly girls and punkettes, Beat poets and skaters, Jordan Baker rather than Daisy Buchanan. She was convincing as Joan Jett, in the 2010 bio-pic “The Runaways,” and as Marylou, the sixteen-year-old bride of Dean Moriarty, in the 2012 adaptation of “On the Road.” Now she was playing a different misfit, the twentieth century’s most famous princess. She told the audience that Telluride was the best festival, and that she’d never had more fun making a movie. Then everyone settled in to watch a film about confinement and despair set to a frequently menacing score of free jazz.

“Spencer” takes place during the Royal Family’s Christmas holidays at Sandringham House in 1991, at a breaking point in Diana’s marriage to the Prince of Wales. Surrounded by quivering Christmas jellies and glistening puddings, the Princess is cut off from the world and oppressed by royal traditions; eventually, she is haunted by the ghost of Anne Boleyn. The score, by Jonny Greenwood, raises the tension to nearly unbearable levels. Early in the movie, Diana sits at dinner in the throes of an anxiety attack, dressed in a green gown the same color as the soup in front of her, and crunches into a string of pearls. (The gems are a source of humiliation: Charles has bought the same present for his wife and for his mistress.) The necklace reappears later, fully intact, making it clear that Diana is mentally unravelling. “The piano wire snaps way quicker than I thought,” Stewart said, when I asked her about the scene. “Spencer” has less in common with “The Crown,” the Netflix series about the Royal Family, than it does with “Rosemary’s Baby” or “Gaslight,” films in which the mental breakdown of the female lead is the rational response to conspiracy, and madness looks something like resistance.

Thirteen years ago, at the age of eighteen, Stewart became internationally famous as the star of “Twilight,” the adaptation of a young-adult novel about vampires and werewolves in the Pacific Northwest. The film and its sequels gave Stewart a legion of fans but, in other quarters, fixed an impression of her as the oddly inexpressive star of mawkish teen movies. Online, a host of memes appeared featuring images of Stewart with captions such as “Five movies, one facial expression,” or “I don’t always smile, but when I do, I don’t.” The jokes captured something about Stewart’s naturalism and restraint, qualities of her acting that some find captivating and others inscrutable.

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By	falikmasi
Added	Nov 16 '21

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