Andrew Ondrejak | The Actress / 2021

playing dress-up

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rick Gradone (creative director), Andrew Ondrejak (director) The Actress / 2021 [7 minutes]

 

In just seven minutes, US director Andrew Ondrejak asks Philippines-born filmmaker and actor Isabel Sandoval to perform six primarily queer iconic figures, themselves representing mixed genders and, in the case of Marlene Dietrich, a gender-crossing figure.

     In a sense, this film is a kind cinematic version of one of artist Cindy Sherman’s photographic conceits, attempting to embody various figures from classic film scenes. But the choices here seem random and with no coherent logic.

     This short begins with Sandoval playing Jane Wyman in All That Heaven Allows, as she shifts quickly to a sort of stand-up comedian version of Marlene Dietrich in Morocco. After a brief visitation into the body of Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet, she becomes the intergalactic fantasy figure of Jane Fonda in Barbarella. Another quick visit in a kind of science-fiction futurist character, Malcolm McDowell in The Clockwork Orange, transforms her to a slightly more ponderous consideration of what being someone other truly means as Jessica Chastain in Terrence Malick’s always ponderous The Tree of Life.

      The connecting link between these various metamorphizations is the idea of transformation itself. Sandoval begins her role, dressed as herself, commenting “I want to start from nothing. To become someone else. Someone new. To leave these arms, and these legs. To escape this body in order to understand it.”  

      And over the course of the shifts of character, there is a great deal of pretentious, new-age style dialogue about fantasy and the possibility of becoming one another, of moving from self to self without being able to find one’s true self. Indeed, the film ends with her advice as a mother to son “You can become anything you want,” while the character herself seems to regret her search for having looked elsewhere without first looking within.

     Director Ondrejak insists: “In each scenario, the cinematographer Diana Matos and I tried to stay as faithful as possible to the original way it was filmed…including lenses, film stock, and camera movements. It was an enormously interesting process akin to being a painter and going to the Louvre to replicate a painting by an old master.”

      However, he doesn’t truly pull it off, some of the makeup and wigs looking ridiculously inept, particularly regarding the Dietrich and Jane Fonda scenes. Sandoval, on the other hand, almost makes for a convincing Malcolm McDowell and a reasonable facsimile of Jane Wyman lost in the perfect world without love.

     But in the end, these don’t evoke anything much except vague facsimiles of what must be the director’s favorite characters from some of his favorite movies, without truly exploring why they are significant and how they reveal the truths he is evidently seeking about self and other, gender and fantasy, and natural and exaggerated forms of beauty. Strange to say, despite this journey of a single individual into personal vision of the past, there no evocation of love or nostalgia, but simply an attempt at imitation. Whereas, Sherman’s work in this particular corner of her vast exploration of self, gender, and identity is so fascinating because it nearly overwhelms one with a sense of nostalgia by freeing the images of all narrative content.

      I’d give this young filmmaker praise for trying something rather bold, but suggest he seek out a more talented writer than himself and a more experienced creative designer. It was a joy, however, to see Sandoval, who shares some of these concerns in her own work, helping a younger filmmaker out.

 

Los Angeles, May 29, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2023).