Julia Roberts, Penelope Cruz films premiere at Berlin fest
BERLIN (AFP) — New films starring Hollywood sirens Penelope Cruz and Julia Roberts premiered at the 58th Berlin Film Festival Sunday, bringing celebrity mega-wattage to tragic personal stories.
Cruz plays a literature student who falls for her womanising professor (Ben Kingsley) before an illness strikes in "Elegy", an adaptation of a Philip Roth novel by Spanish filmmaker Isabel Coixet.
The picture, in the running for the Berlinale's Golden Bear top prize, deals with the elusive nature of physical beauty and includes several nude scenes with Cruz, who routinely ranks among the world's most stunning women.
But she brushed away reporters' questions about her appearance, saying she had never been typecast as a pretty face or seen her sex appeal diminish her opportunities as an actress.
"I've had plenty of offers (for roles) since I was 17," Cruz said. "When people ask that I ask, 'a victim of what?'"
Kingsley said Coixet had coaxed powerfully intimate scenes from the actors by earning their trust early on.
"She created an environment in which we could be very vulnerable to each other, very vulnerable to our feelings. I think the highest currency any actor can deal in is vulnerability," he said.
Coixet, who scored an arthouse hit in 2003 with "My Life Without Me", said she and screenwriter Nicholas Meyer had nevertheless cut many of the most explicitly sexual scenes from Roth's novel, "The Dying Animal".
She said Pulitzer Prize-winning Roth, 74, had not read the script and was not involved in making the film, although he did offer her a key piece of advice.
"He told me, 'Isabel, remember, the body has even much more memory than the brain'," Coixet said.
"Of course in the book there are things we didn't show on the screen but I think the soul and the spirit of these two characters are in there and I hope he (Roth) will like it."
"Elegy", one of 21 films in competition, drew only muted applause from reporters at a press screening ahead of the gala premiere.
The competition has seen few highlights in its first three days, with most critics favouring the Oscar-nominated "There Will Be Blood" starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a tyrannical oil magnate for the Berlinale awards.
Also screening Sunday was "Fireflies in the Garden" in which Roberts plays the long-suffering wife of a college professor (Willem Dafoe). The film was featured out of competition.
Financed and produced by Germany's Senator Entertainment, the picture gives a searing portrait of a family in the American Midwest torn apart and then gradually brought back together again in the wake of a sudden tragedy.
First-time director Dennis Lee said the film was semi-autobiographical, inspired by his mother's death.
"She was taken from my life and I started film school that fall and this was the first script that I wrote," he told reporters.
"For me it was a cathartic experience. It was in honour of my parents, both my mother and my father."
The film features wrenching scenes in which Dafoe's father character berates and humiliates his young son while his mother (Roberts) comes to his rescue.
The Oedipal triangle leaves each of them scarred, and its impact is still visible in later scenes after the boy, Michael, has come of age.
Dafoe said he found the father character very true to life.
"This guy inflicts incredible cruelty in the name of love. That disconnect is very attractive to me because I see it everywhere in all kinds of relationships," he said.
Roberts disappointed festival organisers by skipping the premiere but Lee, Dafoe and co-star Ryan Reynolds were on the red carpet.
