Anne Hathaway In Les Miserables

Not since the films of Ingmar Bergman have I seen such nakedness, such naked, glamourless acting displayed on the screen. She uses her body expertly to convey a sense of her purity, of nobility and of femininity. She is not only Fantine, a mother trying to keep her sense of dignity in a world degraded by money, but also WOMAN, defending herself against the phallicism of the world.

We meet her first in the factory, dressed like other factory workers, but there is something of the nun in Anne's acting. Nudity does not expose her to the naked lusts of the male as it does in actresses like Sharon Stone. Anne's acting is pure and is derived from actual pain that she has experienced. In this, she has very much become a Method Actor. People argue endlessly about what Method Acting means, but, in essence, the actor must reconnect and REEXPERIENCE the private experience that best fits the experiences described in the script and adapt it to the script. The danger in Method Acting is that the actor, in reenacting the private experiences is destroying the reservoir of experiences that act as a support system for human experience.

The sharp angular movements of her body reminds the viewer of Bergman films like The Silence and she also possesses the alienated eroticism of Bergman's women. Her sharp reactions to the advances of men give the character a violent undertone which slices the tension of the film (Christian Humanism vs. Aristocratic, Military State). Her ability to control and use her body as form of speech creates a text that cuts through and almost burns the text of film again as in Persona... which is what makes her text, her body a text that decontextualizes itself.