Armitage charming

If you’re Richard Armitage — not only lanky, large, and powerful (in your own words, “just a gangly bloke”) but with clear kinetic energy in your limbs and performing physically since your earliest childhood — how do you communicate other moods as an actor? Even if you’re graceful, how do you make your burgeoning physicality, and the tendency to place movement and the emotions of powerful movement a central axis of your acting, work for you in dramatic settings where that’s not exactly what’s expected? How does such a big actor come to be appreciated for his gentleness?

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One way: use your physicality counterintuitively, against your own strengths, undermining your own status, in combination with your eye movements. Rather than steering the scene with your body, let your eyes move your body through the scene.

Who can forget it — the moment in episode 1 of The Impressionists where Claude Monet and Camille Doncieux have their first longer conversation?

This is a scene in which, throughout, Richard Armitage undermines his superior stature to Camille to show the level of what is supposed to be both an artistic, and on some level, a romantic, encounter stemming from a visual infatuation or fixation on the artist’s part. It’s a curious effect of the scene that we’re never sure about his flirtation — is it a flirtation with Camille, or an entrancement in the sight of her? Later in the series, of course, we learn that the attachment is very much to the visual reaction she engenders in him and somewhat or much less to her own person. This scene sets up that trajectory for the relationship quite effectively as well.

Armitage again shows himself a master of status games; he makes Monet is the artist petitioning his muse to pose for him, and in order to accomplish this effect, he constantly undermines his height. At 0:13, for instance, we see Monet looking down, his body in a subdued physical position, then preparing himself by taking and letting out a rapid, deep breath, and raising eyebrows in hope against disbelief.

As Monet’s conversation with Camille takes shape, we see him at 0:17 looking down, again, and then tossing off a slight headshake, as if clearing his mind of disbelief. He crosses the entire length of the shot with purpose, but still not really looking at Camille — even though we assume that’s all he wants to do, because he looks away so determinedly, signaling his desire with the contrary performance — until he’s all the way across the room, looking at her only briefly at 0:20 before turning away again.

The leaning posture as a means of undermining Monet’s status (it also makes the set look very cramped, like an attic) helps Armitage out — as at 0:27, when Monet responds to Camille’s suggestion that he may be dreaming. But key to Armitage’s work in this scene is the subtle insert of the sudden, furtive glance. (If you think you’re seeing a less confident, exuberant variation on Harry Kennedy here, you’re not wrong, I think.) After 0:27, Monet’s glance now appears to escape his own control, as at first he’s transfixed, until he tears his eyes from her, but then they drag him back at 0:30, though it’s a struggle for him to look above the axis of his own eyebrows.

[My caps throughout, incidentally.]

At this point, Armitage begins slowly but surely to shift the energy of the scene, because he starts very gradually to subordinate his body and physicality to the strength of his eyes, pulling his entire body around the axis created by the still, magnetic connection of his eyes to Camille’s as he moves back across the room.

Monet’s physical posture and bowed head, drawn ostensibly from the rush he seems to feel to get the colors together and start work as soon as possible, lend the viewer a sense that Monet’s body is starting slowly to move from under out of his control, again with the head down position. He concedes status again at 0:39, with the admission that the studio is his friend’s, a line delivered with his head moving away from Camille.  But the spark of flirtation reappears at 0:41, as if he’s fighting with his own feelings of desire and worth, noting that his friend lets him borrow the studio with an arched eyebrow, a slightly bitten jaw, backing away from the sparks of energy he’s shown at 0:45. Again Monet displays, most briefly, the gleeful, flirtatious smile — but his physical energy undercut, punctuated, interrupted, by the way his head looks away at 0:49.

There’s also one of those moments where I wonder if art is imitating life, if the Monet who tells Camille that he’s not a successful painter yet draws on the Armitage who, a few years earlier, was not a successful actor — yet.

Finally, at 0:59, we begin see the look that says it all, the glance that changes the scene, overmans Monet’s physicality and shows us how Armitage has subordinated all of his physical power to a gesture he’s making with his eyes and his forehead. If this were a musical piece, it would be the repetition of the earlier phrase he plays after 0:30. This time rather than swinging his body around his eyes, instead Monet’s eyes and the visual hunger with which he looks at Camille and her hand against the dress draw his body across the room. Interestingly, this is the first point in the scene at which Armitage gets close to playing at his actual height, as if the draw of the vision is finally enough to make Monet, the artist, as big as Monet, the man. We see the gentleness of his hand at 1:11, as he moves Camille’s hand over the back of the dress.

Because Monet’s produced this transfixed, almost obsessive focus on the view of Camille in the dress, and Armitage has used it carry Monet across the room in the preceding seconds, we recognize as viewers that the encouraging, flirtatious glance on Monet’s face at 1:12, extended as he descends to rearrange the skirt, unites the personal and the visual desire of the artist. Monet draws us into the picture he sees with his own excitement.

As an actor, Armitage has played two long phrases at this point, at 0:30 and 0:59, in each case showing us a more intense progression of the ways that Monet’s eyes control his body. Those two movements, long strokes of vision, set us up for the climax of the scene, in which we see just exactly how much Monet’s entire personality has become his eyes: at 1:22 — when his eyes are now steering him so completely he creates the impression he’s forgotten his body — and, overbalanced by his vision, Monet stumbles backwards into into the easel. The climax is thus also, as much at Armitage draws us in its direction, the ultimate act of physical self-undermining.

The charm of this equally flirtatious, equally magnetic scene is created not by an actor who seeks to be gentle — but rather by an actor who realizes that the strength of the artist, the force behind which the actor puts his body — actually lies in the artist’s eyes and gradually, but with increasing intensity, subordinates the action of his body to that impulse.

~ by Servetus on September 20, 2013.