Acting with your eyes

Just watched The Girl on the Bridge (French title: La Fille Sur Le Pont) on Tivo, it's a great movie! It's in French with English subtitles, and it was filmed in B&W. I caught 10 minutes of the middle of the movie and was hooked, just the acting in those 10 minutes was superb. I wanted to see the whole thing, so Tivo caught the whole thing for me. Turned out the story was fasicnating as well.

Daniel Auteuil is mesmerizing in this, his eyes are so intense. I haven't seen him in any movies previous to this, but I definitely want to see more of his movies. I also thought that Vanessa Paradis and Auteuil had the perfect chemistry together in this movie. But at the same time, her teeth looked as if they were all brown and stained, and I'm thinking, "Only in a non-American movie can a movie star have stained teeth like that."

Lately, I've been noticing actor's eyes, how much of the acting they do is in their eyes. For example, going back to Rupert Everett as Sherlock Holmes, the first thing I noticed was the difference in his eyes, and I think that's what really made his performance of the character so real and stunning. There was also a specific scene in which Watson's fiancee, who is a psychologist or something like that, is describing to Holmes a psychological reference book of sexually deviant behaviors. Everett's performance in that scene while he's listening to her was all about the eyes. His facial expression didn't change one bit except for his eyes, and with just that you could see his growing shock and incredulity that a woman would be talking about that subject so openly and with such intellectual passion. (Remember in the days of Sherlock Holmes, women didn't talk about that sort of thing, I guess.)

The eyes are the windows to the soul. And that makes for great acting.