06-15-1995 ANNA

Not until Sally Kirkland received several major awards, including a nomination for Best Actress by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, for her performance in ANNA did the film shake the persistent critical reprimands of banality -- not altogether surprising, given how thickly allusions to other films and other genres are layered in the narrative.

From the first shot of the Manhattan skyline, a ringing phone draws the viewer into a modest apartment. It is answered by a disheveled middle-aged blonde with a heavy Czech accent: The Off-Off Broadway actress Anna Radkova (Kirkland) is reminded by her furious agent that one of her rare auditions is about to begin in fifteen minutes. Arriving in a chic black outfit highlighting her spectacular legs, the energetic and only slightly ravaged Anna looks an unlikely candidate for the role of an older woman in what seems to be the work of a lesser Polish absurdist. The lunatic audition over, she is accosted by a bundled-up figure, introducing herself in fluent Czech as a fervent admirer from their former homeland, just arrived in New York and ready to wash dishes simply to be near her idol. When the young woman, Krystyna (Paulina Porizkova), faints from hunger on her suitcase full of old clippings documenting the actress' brilliant career, Anna takes her home; when her agent lets her know that she has been chosen for the play, she announces to Daniel (Robert Fields), her ``lover, a little,'' that she is keeping Krystyna for luck.

With her looks and English groomed by Anna and Daniel, respectively, Krystyna flourishes: A photomontage of the two women bridged by a voice-over letter to Krystyna's younger sister overseas details the enthusiastic embrace of America. While the depressed Anna continues to watch from the wings the repetition of the mad play in which her role turns out to be the understudy for a cast of seven women, Krystyna soon lands a major role in a film by world-famous director Baskin (Larry Pines).

In a part-motherly, part-sisterly mood, Anna confides details from her complicated past to her protegee, telling her that she can ``make what she wants of it'': from stardom at the crest of the Czech New Wave tech under the tutelage of its best young director, subsequently her husband Tonda (Steven Gilborn), through post-1968 invasion persecution, prison, death of a child, and expulsion from her homeland, to a rejection in New York by the now fully Americanized Tonda. Krystyna seems deeply moved; yet on her first television show, answering a question about her life, she uses the same story, carefully rehearsed, to provide herself with a dramatic past proper for an Iron Curtain star. In a precipitous series of events, the distraught Anna throws out Krystyna from her apartment, finding that in the process she is also losing Daniel, who wants to move to Los Angeles as Krystyna's manager; subsequently she watches an old film of hers burn up as it becomes caught in a jammed projector in a mostly deserted theater. Drunk during her one evening on the stage, Anna curses her audience. Finally, she is seen on a beach where she climbs over a dune, pulls out a gun and, aiming badly, shoots. Emerging in a white dress from the sea in front of a battery of film cameras and a large crew, Krystyna is wounded but runs to embrace the older woman. The two weep in each other's arms while Krystyna's unflappable voice-over letter to her sister describes Anna's behavior as a minor breakdown, her own health problem as insignificant, and tells of their future plans, which involve Los Angeles, film work, and a face-lift for Anna.

Most critics saw the archetypal plot of the young actress stealing the existence of the aging star as a less-than-original compound of themes from ALL ABOUT EVE (1950), A STAR IS BORN (1954), SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950), and almost every backstage musical ever made. Granting, however, a near-generic status to this premise, it is possible to appreciate instead how these familiar conventions are inflected. From this perspective, Kirkland's portrayal of Anna, the fading star, belongs properly in the same category with Bette Davis' portrayal of Margo Channing, James Mason's portrayal of Norman Maine, and Gloria Swanson's portrayal of Norma Desmond. In the three latter cases, however, the requisite charisma for those roles as fading stars was accrued by Davis, Mason, and Swanson after years of top billing. In her first major film role, Kirkland's task was first to build up the resonance of stardom, cover it with twenty years of failure, and then somehow sum up the contradiction.

It is thus apparent why Polish screenwriter Agnieszka Holland (herself a filmmaker whose best-known work is PROVINCIAL ACTORS, 1979) and director Yurek Bogayevicz (whose career began in the Polish experimentalist theater of Jerzy Grotowski) would have chosen to work with a Strasberg-trained actress. In best Method style, Kirkland plays each scene by drawing on two fundamentally disjunct emotions, carefully managing body against objects. During a particularly low point of her existence as understudy, verging on tears, she lies on the floor and gives a maternal pep talk to a cockroach. A new production assistant drops in to tell her how much she admired her performance in an early Czech film; smiling radiantly Anna accepts the compliment, then returns politely to the cockroach. Far from the madness or the wrenching melodrama usually associated with the figure of a fallen star, Anna's failure emerges simply as a function of differences between cultures: Her foreignness is allowed to stand without turning pathetic, deliberate, or comical.

It is proper that characterization would be structured so complexly, given that the key turn of the plot is Krystyna's theft of Anna's ``depth,'' that accumulation of experiences and memories that define an individual's persona. This dimension Krystyna lacks completely; indeed, the two photomontage and voice-over sequences, normally devices that allow a heightened intimacy with a character, serve here mainly to document the young woman's absolute banality. Neither vicious nor ambitious, Krystyna is a blank surface that needs depth to be transformed from merely another pretty face (supplied, appropriately, by the world-famous model Porizkova) into a dramatic actress with a complete emotional ensemble.

The dichotomy of depth and surface does not serve only to differentiate the mediums of theater and film in terms of their capacity to represent psychological space. The flattening of Anna's life story by Krystyna is also a process of fitting it into the cliche-laden slots of the American mass media at large.``All East Europeans have bad teeth,'' opines one character; ``I hate Czech films,'' says another.``Here you'll need a life story,'' Anna instructs Krystyna, and she advises that it include mention of cruel Communists, bloody uprisings, heroic democrats, and evil Russian ambassadors. While explicitly mocking these generic requirements, the film also makes occasional ironic use of them (ambiguously enough for some reviewers to take the jokes seriously and reproach the two Polish filmmakers for spreading stereotypes about East European culture). Krystyna thus arrives in New York directly from a costume drama about turn-of-the-century immigrants: baggy stockings, braided buns under a babushka, and a disarming but far from perfect smile. Pensively she reveals to Anna that her youth in Czechoslovakia was boring, nothing more than ``playing piano Õandå milking cows.''

What makes ANNA at once troublesome and fascinating is that the film, like so many European art films in the 1960's, circulates with an additional layer of information that belongs both outside and inside the text itself, ostensibly apparent only to those in the know, but in fact also carefully distributed through select press channels. According to the film's credits, the story of Anna is a thinly veiled biography of Elzbieta Czyzewska, a brilliant Warsaw stage actress whose complicated involvement with the Polish authorities as well as with the Polish film establishment in the late 1960's led her to settle in New York, where she made several unsuccessful attempts to regain a theatrical career. Legendary among emigres as well as theater cognoscenti (Meryl Streep has acknowledged her debt publicly), Czyzewska was apparently instrumental in arranging the debut of Joanna Pakula in GORKY PARK (1983). Conversely, Porizkova's own biography, even modified for the film's press packet, is no less melodramatic than the one Krystyna is castigated for ``stealing'' from her mentor. Left in Czechoslovakia as a young child by her parents, who failed in all of their efforts to get her released through legal channels, she was to be kidnapped by her mother and two Swedish journalists in a rented plane. The action was interrupted by the police, however, and the mother was jailed for several years before the authorities yielded to massive international media pressure and let the family return to Sweden along with a second child born in prison.

Drawing on generic forms acceptable to the American audiences, Bogayevicz and Holland bracketed the problem of cultural authenticity (America's view of non-America as shown in an American-made film) within a more readily accepted plot of struggle for formal authenticity (as a problem of authentic versus artificial depth in performance). Using extra-filmic levers (an already famous model's face, the frisson of a plot a clef), Bogayevicz and especially Holland thus redesigned their past experience, making it possible to be rediscovered by America so as to break into world cinema a second time.

Review Sources:
Films in Review. XXXIX, January, 1988, p.45
Life. X, October, 1987, p.8
Los Angeles Times. November 13, 1987, VI, p.1
New York. XX, November 9, 1987, p.116
The New York Times. October 2, 1987, p. C11
Variety. CCCXXVI, April 8, 1987, p.16
Vogue. CLXXVII, October, 1987, p.82

Award Citations:
Academy Awards - Nomination - Best Actress - Sally Kirkland
Los Angeles Film Critics - Winner - Best Actress - Sally Kirkland (tie)
Golden Globe Award - Winner - Best Actress (Drama) - Sally Kirkland