It's a small step from boyish crop to baldness, which may in real life signify Britney-style breakdown, but in the movies more often means alien (Star Trek: The Motion Picture), monster (Splice) or homicidal maniac (Blue Sunshine). On other occasions, it's a religious gesture: Audrey Hepburn has hers ritually snipped away in The Nun's Story (though, like the other Hepburn, she always did look cuter with short hair), while Julie Andrews's sensible ex-convent pageboy renders The Sound of Music sexless. The short haircut is humiliating punishment, meted out to inmate Eleanor Parker in Caged, or to Monica Bellucci, condemned for being the village slut, in Malèna. When women have their hair cropped on screen, it's usually because they're under some sort of compulsion or duress. Seventy years and many Joans later, Milla Jovovich's experience of modelling for L'Oréal stands her in good stead in The Messenger, when she takes a sword to her braid yet miraculously ends up with the chicest of medieval pudding-bowls, with highlights. Maria Falconetti looks suitably gamine at the start of The Passion of Joan of Arc, but it's still not sufficiently martyrish for her inquisitors, who insist on further shearing. Even in Rosemary's Baby, when Mia Farrow announces, "I've been to Vidal Sassoon" (her husband's sarky reply: "Don't tell me you paid for that"), she's unwittingly adding the finishing touch to her own martyrdom.įor the close crop is a station of the coiffe en route to immolation. It deprives them of a formidable weapon, and, instead of giving them masculine strength, only emphasises their helplessness. Getting chopped is seldom something female characters do of their own volition. It's a statement, a sign of playing men at their own game: for Keira Knightley, when she swaps modelling for bounty hunting in Domino for Moore, with her military buzz-cut in GI Jane. Short hair on female characters is rarely permitted to exist in its own right. One of the first things a girl does when disguising her gender is cut her hair, like Katharine Hepburn in Sylvia Scarlett (one of the loveliest crops in movies) or Barbra Streisand ("Forgive me, Papa!") in Yentl. They are, of course, rare, because long, lustrous tresses are one of the major signifiers of femininity. But, being saddled with the wrong sort of piliferous gene, I'm always on the lookout for short crops similar to mine on screen. If mine weren't so baby-fine, I would definitely grow it so I could have a big plait, like the damsels in a King Arthur book I had as a girl.
0 kommentar(er)
