the Hollywood chameleon is revealed on Arte

With her ex-husband Tom Cruise, she seems to share eternal youth. For three decades, Nicole Kidman has been one of Hollywood’s latest superstars. Its name allows you to find funding and set up a project. An aura that she forged through atypical roles and reckless back-and-forths between big productions and auteur cinema, as highlighted in the Arte documentary Nicole Kidman, eyes wide open.

To understand the Australian actress and her filmography, her director, Patrick Boudet, has himself embled a solid cast: directors John Cameron Mitchell and Gus Van Sant, whose dramas Rabbit Hole And Ready for everything were turning points in the career of the 56-year-old actress. Their memories and analyzes are supplemented by those of Peter Debruge, great pen of variety, and French critics Charlotte Lipinska and Michel Ciment. Patrick Boudet makes them comment on the clics but also on more improbable works, such as his first role in The BMX Gang.

Initially, nothing predestined Nicole Kidman to stand out. If she avoids the sitcom box, an obligatory page for many of her compatriots, she appears in TV films that are quickly forgotten, with the possible exception of the edifying miniseries Bangkok Hilton, which tells the true story of a tourist imprisoned on Thailand’s death row for unknowingly carrying in her luggage. Very quickly, these roles left the actress, raised by intellectual and demanding parents, wanting more. The young woman heads towards Hollywood, where the nautical camera White calm finally puts her on the radar. She portrays a young wife taken hostage by an unbalanced man. An almost silent performance with contained anger.

His lucky star is Tom Cruise. Between the two actors, who cross paths on the drama Thunder days, Love at first sight is immediate. Nicole Kidman got her foot in the blockbuster door: Batman Forever, The Witches. But for someone who likes to find her own flaws in her characters and examine them, this matrix is ​​narrow. Gus Van Sant and Jane Campion, who had met the actress as a teenager at her theater school, will help her break her.

Anti-aging dictate

Kidman is a hard worker, she comes armed with months of preparation. But the intense portrait of a woman from the director of The Piano Lesson, where she plays a manipulated and tyrannized heroine (the first in a long line) leaves her bloodless. It will be nothing compared professional and marital experience ofEyes Wide Shut, by Stanley Kubrick, which reunites her with Tom Cruise. The fourteen months of filming saw the line between fiction and intimacy blur. Shortly after, the star couple announced their divorce. From this earthquake that triggered a deep depression, which she will not make a secret of, Nicole Kidman draws the most powerful and fascinating films on her CV. In Moulin Rouge, The Hours, which won him an Oscar, Dogville Or Birthdayshe externalizes her s, embraces the feminist revolts of her characters.

Precise, the documentary, which mentions the recent The Prom And Being the Ricardosdoes not omit the turn towards production and the small screen initiated by Nicole Kidman, whose surname in the series credits no longer surprises anyone, after having carried in a few years Big Little Lies, Nine Perfect Strangers, The Undoing.

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Patrick Boudet’s speakers do not avoid the actress’s contradictions either. Committed but subject to the anti-aging diktat. It doesn’t matter, the cosmetic procedures undergone, they did not affect her game while inner restraint and piercing gaze. ets already evident in the great historical and romantic epic distant horizons which opens this special evening of the Franco-German channel.

Juvenile Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise play two Irish migrants, from opposite social cles, leaving in the 19th^e century try their luck in America. From New York to wild Oklahoma.