A journey to meet again.
"When you're on a ship in Antarctica and there's no night, who are you?" A ghost in a ghost land. Bernadette Fox she asks and answers herself. Bernadette Fox was lost, disoriented, she moved aimlessly, aimlessly, but Kayaking between glaciers in Antarctica, she rediscovered her path, her motivation.
This is how it starts Where are you, Bernadette? (Theatrical release July 10), the last movie of Richard Linklater (Before Dawn, Boyhood), starring Cate Blanchett, as the Bernadette of the title in this adaptation of the bestselling novel by Mary Simple.
Bernadette and her perennial sunglasses of hers (à la Anna Wintour) smile on a sunny day, in a kayak, between glaciers. Flash back. Five weeks before. Bernadette is In rainy Seattle where she lives with her daughter and her husband (Billy Crudup) in a giant house, a former female reformatory which is reforming her little by little. There are corners of the house that are a ruin, others are an interior design dream.
Bee and Bernadette, close friends.
In this chaotic duality, Bernadette's true nature can be guessed. Today, housewife, dedicated mother, Bernadette was the greatest promise of contemporary architecture 20 years earlier, “an ingenious garbage recycler”, a genius who got ahead of sustainable architecture but suddenly abandoned her career and moved from Los Angeles to Seattle following her husband, a tech entrepreneur. Bernadette is increasingly unhappy and she pays all her anger against the city of Seattle. "Every time they see a nice view they want to block it with a 20-story building without any architectural integrity," he says of her.
The banality of her life overcomes her, she has more and more phobia of people, of the outside world, her almost dilapidated house, her husband and, above all, her daughter are her refuge. "What Bernadette is hiding is grief and melancholy, a sense of loss and an inability to deal with her creative failure,” says Cate Blanchett of her character. “There is a bit of Bernadette in everyone. We all pretend to be something when in reality we are something else. We all run from some part of our past that we think we are at peace with.”
Bernadette and her perennial glasses.
That clash between past, present and future is what the Australian actress identified with the most, “with the idea that it is impossible to escape from oneself”. “And above all, as one gets older, you have to face the past and take responsibility for yourself in order to move forward.”
Linklater, on the other hand, decided to direct this adaptation, a film apparently lighter and simpler than his study of the passage of time. attracted by the theme of the creative block that Bernadette suffers from. "That kind of stagnation in life is one of my biggest nightmares," confesses the Texas director. “Have you ever heard that statement? "The most dangerous thing in the world is an artist without a job." It's a very sad situation to find yourself in."
Something like that, in other words, tells him Lawrence Fishburne, embodying Bernadette's mentor in the film: “People like you should create. If you don't, you are a threat to society."
Richard Linklater and Cate Blanchett.
Society matters little to Bernadette, but what she doesn't realize is that she ends up being a threat to herself. When her husband tries to do an intervention to take her to a therapy center, Bernadette flees, flees far away, to the southernmost tip that a regular tourist can step on: Antarctica. And on that trip, she alone before the glaciers, observing penguins, trying to escape from the other cruise passengers and enduring dizziness as best she could, she finds herself, her passion, her art, her creativity. She unlocks. "I think you have to go through a moment of chaos, because you can't get rid of who you thought you were, and you have to face who you really are before you can move on, and that often happens in middle age," Blanchett continues. .
Middle age, or at any age, one of those trips that we all could use for rediscover the person we thought we were, reunite it with the one we want to be and end up discovering who we are.
Bernadette's escape.
In reality, Linklater and Blanchett they couldn't shoot in Antarctica to the disappointment of the actress, obsessed with the place, but yes they could do it in Greenland, right on the other side of the world. Of course, they caught such a hurricane, that the seasickness scenes of the ship were very real, they swear. For the actress, in any case, that day between glaciers is one of the happiest of his life: "I am Australian and I had never been able to see whales, that day I finally saw them," she says.
The scenes of the construction credits of the new base in Antarctica are real, it is halley station, built in 2012, which Linklater attributes to Bernadette.
And Seattle is also not that Seattle that Bernadette hates, they shot outside of Pittsburgh. There, after more than two years of searching for the house, traveling through two countries and five cities, they found the mansion that the protagonist family would inhabit, Straight Gate.
The incredible base designed by Bernadette. Actually, the Halley.