#it's missing Ewan and Micko but it's still a great photo

[autumnsup]

Riding on the heels of my Mandy Slade appreciation post from yesterday, I had to drop in a few quotes from another blog I discovered recently that goes into depth about Toni Collette's performance. I don't know if I agree with every point the blogger made, but they certainly provided some interesting parallels and contrasts with previous analysis on the characters of Velvet Goldmine.

"[A]ll the praise in the world for Collette’s performance shouldn’t overlook how rare so many of the integral features to Mandy Slade are within her filmography. How many characters can you think of where her beauty and sexuality were this central? How often has she traipsed around bathed in so many riches and ornaments? When has she highlighted so many angles and colors to a person without quite revealing their core, the same way one might try to look through a jewel that’s too bright and multifaceted for anyone to comfortably say they’ve seen the center of it? I think my favorite sequence of hers, purely for how Haynes films her, is Jack Fairy’s 1969 New Year’s Party, where she talks about meeting Brian for the first time. She looks fantastic, yet she's so absorbed into Brian when she sees him that it becomes almost impossible to tell them apart for the rest of the party. Even for most of their sex scene, their bodies combine in a transfixing whorl of light and flesh that only occasionally clarifies whose body is whose. Toni Collette is fucking hot, and to see her beauty be so central to her character and so magnificently showcased should be more common than it is."

"Mandy goes through some of the most overt shifts in her appearance of anyone in Brian’s entourage, yet we never really get the sort of dominating style or private interiority that would suggest some core version of herself. Compared to Curt Wild’s feral, wounded, livewire attitudes or Brian Slade’s alien glam and aching wants, it’s not clear what Mandy really desires. She seems perfectly content with being a prized bauble in her husband’s collection of personalities, as she slips oh so comfortably in and out of her poses and costumes. Even in her unvarnished present, as Mandy candidly sifts through her memories, it’d be doing a disservice to Velvet Goldmine’s theories on presentation and self to ascribe this version of her as an ultimately truer, deeper woman. Rather than over-elucidating a hidden depth or thru-line of personality, Collette digs into each scene while working with the heightened cinematic grammars Haynes is using to meet her halfway. Sometimes Collette evokes a fiercely specific sense of who Mandy is, while in other moments she simply drains her face and lets the image of Mandy standing in a black void speak for itself."

"Toni Collette is the kind of actress with a dozen performances anyone could confidently pick as the very best in her career and feel absolutley justified in their choice. I still imagine her harrowing, wretched Annie in Hereditary will be my go-to for a while. But the absolute rarity of the sort of character work she does in Velvet Goldmine - blessedly freed from doing rescue work or needing to fully flesh out a character, and instead asked to preserve mystery, beauty, and wit across multiple timelines - makes it stand out in the best of ways. For my money, this is still the best film she's ever been in, and ranks among the most creative uses of her talents. Mandy Slade is an absolute gem, and I hope Collette will get another chance to play in this kind of sandbox again."

Source: https://href.li/?http://thefilmexperience.net/blog/2021/7/2/1998-toni-collette-in-velvet-goldmine.html

@25yearsofvelvetgoldmine