Nathalie Baye

Ginette Vincendeau sorts Nathalie Baye's screen persona by decade. Through the seventies and eighties Baye built the fragile but determined woman, graceful of hand and diffident of smile, and the piece gives her part in Bertrand Tavernier's A Week's Vacation as the example of it. In the nineties women directors made good use of that same independent yet fragile image, Diane Kurys and Nicole Garcia among them. The reading then turns on a narrowing: because the film under review and another it brings up cast her as a morose sexual predator, Vincendeau holds that the work seems to fix her further in a morose, masochistic mode. She took the supporting actress César in two consecutive years, for Every Man for Himself and for Strange Affair, then won the leading category twice, for La Balance and for The Young Lieutenant. Four awards, four separate films.