MIFF 2015 critics campus review: Actress

By Richard S. He
Updated August 12 2015 - 1:23pm, first published 12:57pm
Brandy Burre stars in the docudrama <i>Actress</i>, from director Robert Greene.
Brandy Burre stars in the docudrama <i>Actress</i>, from director Robert Greene.

What happens when art becomes more real than life? In Robert Greene’s 2014 documentary, Brandy Burre, best known for The Wire, has sacrificed her acting career to be a stay-at-home mother. Now aged 40, she gets the acting bug again – and, not by coincidence, her domestic life begins to fall apart. Shot on grainy digital video, Actress revels in the mundane ugliness of upstate New York. Motherhood was supposed to be Burre’s respite from acting; now it feels like the walls are closing in. Actress makes you wonder if there’s some inherent unfairness in the universe, that even this otherwise charming, intelligent woman can’t hold her life together. Yet with every confession – from forgetting her daughter’s birthday to admitting to infidelity – she only becomes more sympathetic. Burre’s return to professional acting is almost beside the point. Few actresses find roles as complex as the one she and Robert Greene have constructed here. As a documentary, Actress is calculated. It mines her everyday life for a tale of tragedy and not-quite-redemption, but only feels more emotionally honest for it. Brandy Burre might be between roles, but Actress is the performance of a lifetime.

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