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

Accessibility Settings

Text

Applies the Open Dyslexic font, designed to improve readability for individuals with dyslexia.

Applies a more readable font throughout the website, improving readability.

Underlines links throughout the website, making them easier to distinguish.

Adjusts the font size for improved readability.

Visuals

Reduces animations and disables autoplaying videos across the website, reducing distractions and improving focus.

Reduces the colour saturation throughout the website to create a more soothing visual experience.

Increases the contrast of elements on the website, making text and interface elements easier to distinguish.