“The Driver” (1978)
Walter Hill’s movie saw Adjani playing a different sort of role than those that would become her niche; unlike the majority of her more famous characters, The Player (all the dramatis personae in “The Driver” are known solely by pseudonyms) is one cool customer. When, after a poker game, she is one of a few to spot The Driver (Ryan O’Neal) sitting in his getaway car waiting for his allies to finish their robbery, she is called in by the police to identify him. She denies he was there and is paid handsomely for doing so by The Driver’s colleagues. From then on, she finds herself caught between The Driver and The Detective (Bruce Dern), who is as frighteningly hot-headed as The Driver is serenely laconic. “The Driver” is a film laced with chilly intrigue, and (aside from a typically explosive Bruce Dern), inhabited by people who waste neither words nor smiles. Adjani easily matches O’Neal for enigmatic impassivity, her French accent adding another layer of mystery to the nocturnal Los Angeles where the “The Driver” is set. Although she doesn’t play the most prominent part, and disappears altogether during the second act, her presence lends a valuable icy glamour to the drama. Her early showdown with Dern is a highlight, as she stands quiet and unmoved in an ‘empty’ apartment (The Driver is hiding in the room next door) while The Detective prowls around, trying frantically and fruitlessly to get a rise out of her. But even when she is quite literally just a passenger in the proceedings – sat next to The Driver during his daredevil routines at the climax, her unrufflable demeanor finally ruffled by his terrifying driving – she’s always terrifically watchable.
“Nosferatu The Vampyre” (1979)
In Werner Herzog’s evocative reimagining of the German expressionist classic, Adjani is Lucy, the wife of real estate agent Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz). Jonathan is sent to Transylvania to arrange a property deal with the elusive Count Dracula (Klaus Kinski), and eventually succumbs to the Count’s fanged embrace. After seeing a photograph of Lucy, the Count becomes obsessed with finding her and brings a deadly plague across the sea with him to wreak devastation on her hometown. With no one willing to believe the danger that her pursuer poses, it’s up to Lucy to put an end to his unrelenting destruction. Although she is billed behind Kinski and has less screen time than Ganz, Adjani’s Lucy drives most of the action in “Nosferatu the Vampyre”; once the Count completes his deadly sea voyage, accompanied by a phalanx of plague-carrying rats, an apocalyptic lethargy falls over everyone but her. With her snow-white skin, a waterfall of raven hair, and huge round haunted doll eyes, what Roger Ebert called Adjani’s ‘quality of seeming to exist on an ethereal plane’ is a perfect fit for Herzog’s eery, otherworldly feature. She imbues Lucy with a dignified doggedness; in the face of apathy or condescension from everyone she encounters, she is determined to rid the world of the brute who destroyed her beloved husband via whatever means necessary. As is so often the case with Adjani’s characters, her apparent outward delicacy masks indomitable inner steel, and the strange chemistry her Lucy shares with the Count (portrayed with characteristically unnerving relish by Kinski) makes an already beguiling movie all the more interesting.
“Possession” (1981)
Adjani has played many disturbed women in her career, but her character in Andrzej Zulawski’s “Possession” is on another level entirely. When we meet Anna, she is kicking her husband Mark (Sam Neill) out of their home upon his return from a work trip. He is baffled as to why she suddenly wants to end their marriage, and his frenzied investigation into what has happened to her in his absence leads to an array of ever darker places. For the first half of the movie, Anna is just seen through the eyes of the people who are watching her: Mark, and then the two detectives he hires to discover her secret. With every scene, as we try and understand what is happening to her, our curiosity grows increasingly intense. Then we discover that Anna’s been possessed by an enormous evil squid creature, who she sleeps with and offers human sacrifices to… and things only get crazier from there. Adjani famously said that it took years of therapy to recover from her time on “Possession”, and it’s easy to see why the role of Anna would have taken such a toll on her. Her acting is relentlessly, exhaustingly physical; for the vast majority of her performance she is screaming or convulsing or stabbing or screwing or flailing, or slashing, or – in that one iconic scene – excreting vast quantities of viscous ooze from various orifices. To call her acting ‘raw’ doesn’t even scratch the surface; in the most extreme moments (and there are many of those) it’s as if she’s simply disemboweling herself for the camera. And she is mesmerizing.
