Why Virginie Efira should win the Best Actress… | Little White Lies

The Oscar Goes To...

Why Vir­ginie Efi­ra should win the Best Actress Oscar

09 Feb 2023

Words by Ryan Coleman

Blonde woman with curly hair embracing a dark-haired person, their faces close together, eyes closed.
Blonde woman with curly hair embracing a dark-haired person, their faces close together, eyes closed.
The Bel­gian actress has been qui­et­ly build­ing a body of excel­lent work, defined by her empa­thet­ic por­tray­als of mul­ti­fac­eted women.

In a new series, we’re cel­e­brat­ing the films we loved that aren’t like­ly to dom­i­nate the awards race. Over the new few weeks, our writ­ers make pas­sion­ate argu­ments for the per­for­mances and craft that stood out to them, from block­busters to art­house and every­thing in between.

Awards for act­ing sad­ly don’t always – or even often – go to the best per­for­mances of the year, but rather to the most” per­for­mances. To the actors strain­ing so hard to show audi­ences the work they put into their role, or cam­paign­ing relent­less­ly across Hollywood’s press cir­cuit. Per­haps it’s actu­al­ly effort and not achieve­ment that vot­ing bod­ies val­ue most high­ly when assess­ing performance.

Take the two fron­trun­ner female per­for­mances of this year: Michelle Yeoh as Eve­lyn Quan Wang in Every­thing Every­where All At Once and Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tár in TÁR. Both actress­es give fine­ly nuanced per­for­mances and they are good films, but in their own ways, each is the most atten­tion-seek­ing, affir­ma­tion-demand­ing per­for­mance show­case of its actress’s career. TÁR even opens with a lengthy list of the character’s excep­tion­al accom­plish­ments – prac­ti­cal­ly an author’s note as to why the audi­ence should care about her.

I’m not a crit­ic who believes that sub­tle­ty and restraint auto­mat­i­cal­ly make a per­for­mance bet­ter. Max­i­mal­ism, maudlin emo­tion­al­ism, and even didac­ti­cism all have their place in cin­e­mat­ic sto­ry­telling, but it is clear that cer­tain char­ac­ter types attract praise over oth­ers. The sub­tle, ground­ed, self-effac­ing pro­tag­o­nist, with­out any strik­ing trag­ic flaws who embarks on a relat­able human jour­ney just doesn’t excite the way a mul­ti­verse-jump­ing super­mom or wom­an­iz­ing mega­lo­ma­ni­ac com­pos­er do.

But — so the critic’s impo­tent cry always goes — it should. Case in point: Vir­ginie Efi­ra, the rav­ish­ing Bel­gian actress who broke through to inter­na­tion­al audi­ences in 2016 with a small role in Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, and cement­ed her sta­tus as one of the most ver­sa­tile and excit­ing stars of the con­tem­po­rary French film scene with her lead­ing role in his next film Benedet­ta

For Efi­ra, a for­mer weath­er fore­cast­er and host of Amer­i­can Idol-type pro­grams in Bel­gium, to break through a crowd of actress­es with a high­er den­si­ty of raw tal­ent than can be found most oth­er nation­al scenes right now (think Lau­re Calamy, Léa Sey­doux, Mar­i­on Cotil­lard, Noémie Mer­lant, and that’s just the younger cohort) is impres­sive. That she did so firm­ly past ingénue age, the age where too many actress­es are offered their most chal­leng­ing and diverse parts, is even more astonishing.

A young woman with blonde hair wearing a black leather jacket stands in a dark, dimly lit setting with blurred lights in the background.

Efi­ra starred in a whop­ping four films that pre­miered in some form last year, but it’s not on the basis of hard work that she deserves the high­est hon­ors of her pro­fes­sion for her efforts. Across these four films — Régis Roinsar’s Wait­ing for Bojan­gles, Serge Bozon’s Don Juan, Alice Winocour’s Paris Mem­o­ries, and Rebec­ca Zlotowski’s Oth­er People’s Chil­dren – Efi­ra ful­ly man­i­fests and demon­strates a com­plete, dex­trous con­trol over what every per­former needs to tran­scend the the label of mere actor” and become a star: her star per­sona. That is, as Richard Dyer would put it, the idio­syn­crat­ic and invig­o­rat­ing­ly clear social type or clus­ter of ide­olo­gies that Efira’s very pres­ence on screen reflects that hasn’t been reflect­ed before, to an audi­ence who has been hun­gry for it.

In these last two films in par­tic­u­lar, Efi­ra crafts such deeply faceted, vis­cer­al­ly tex­tured por­traits of ordi­nary women (just the kind you might know, see on the street, or even be) that her per­for­mances ascend to the lev­el of the sub­lime, trans­mis­sions of pure feeling.

Paris Mem­o­ries fol­lows Mia, a woman recov­er­ing from a ter­ror­ist attack inside a Paris restau­rant (Winocour based her film on accounts from her broth­er and oth­er sur­vivors of the hor­rif­ic 2015 Bat­a­clan shoot­ings). The shock of vio­lence dead­ens her sens­es, cot­ton­ing over her mem­o­ry, which even­tu­al­ly pries her away from her cur­rent part­ner (Gré­goire Col­in) and sets her on a rocky, riv­et­ing path toward re-inte­gra­tion. Oth­er People’s Chil­dren tells the sto­ry of Rachel, an Eng­lish teacher who strikes up a romance with Ali (Roschdy Zem) at gui­tar lessons. Rather than focus­ing on their wax­ing and wan­ing affec­tions, direc­tor Zlo­tows­ki pans to Rachel’s rela­tion­ship with Ali’s young daugh­ter Leila – some­times ecsta­t­ic, some­times frac­tious, and always laced with the inde­fin­able melan­choly of the step parent.

Both Mia and Rachel are augured into the cru­cible of midlife angst. The pain of bow­ing in and out of rela­tion­ships has lost the deli­cious edge that comes with youth­ful free­dom from respon­si­bil­i­ty. Career has cal­ci­fied around both char­ac­ters like lime­stone, and they both won­der what would hap­pen if they broke free. And both women are approach­ing the precipice past which preg­nan­cy would be impos­si­ble, so moth­er­hood weighs heavy on the mind. But here is the unique spark that makes Efira’s screen pres­ence so incan­des­cent: she nav­i­gates each jour­ney with a kind of grate­ful curios­i­ty. An open­ness to expe­ri­ence that has been weath­ered but not com­pro­mised by life’s tougher pas­sages. Efira’s expres­sive face is both pil­lowy and feline, her fen­nel-seed eyes always betray­ing a kind of wry warmth even in the midst of humil­i­a­tion, ter­ror, and despair. 

Efi­ra can exude both inno­cence and expe­ri­ence simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, both con­fi­dence and self­less humil­i­ty. Her innate poise and affa­bil­i­ty recalls Ingrid Bergman, and like Bergman, Paris Mem­o­ries and Oth­er People’s Chil­dren her­ald that this mid­dle pas­sage may be the most extra­or­di­nary peri­od of her career.

You might like