The Globe and Mail has an article on Mennonite author Miriam Toews and her acting gig in Carlos Reygadas’s Luz silenciosa, AKA Silent Light, which premieres May 22 at the Cannes Film Festival:
It all began when Reygadas was in Germany about a year ago, looking for actors (that is, non-actors) for his film, a love triangle set among the Mennonites of northern Mexico. A leading advocate of Plautdietsch, the archaic German dialect that originated in the country’s lowlands, gave Reygadas a copy of A Complicated Kindness, figuring he’d enjoy its story of a Mennonite teenager growing up in small-town Manitoba. He did enjoy it, but he was even more thrilled when he turned to the author photo at the back. . . .
Toews plays Esther, a mother of seven and the wife of a Mennonite farmer (Cornelius Wall) who, “against the law of God and man,” according to an official plot summary, falls in love with another woman (Maria Pankratz). She still doesn’t know exactly why Reygadas chose her for the role. “I guess he just thought somehow I looked the part of Esther – this spurned, rejected woman – which is kind of funny because I’m a pretty happy-go-lucky person. Well not so much, but relatively. I didn’t think that I had that sort of sad countenance. Maybe I do, more than I know.”
Even though she was nervous in front of the cameras, Toews says there was something relaxing about being a cog in someone else’s machine. “Normally I write books and that’s my life, and here I didn’t have to think too much about creating my own characters, my own story. It was kind of nice to be part of Carlos’s vision and just follow directions. So that was a relief, and the collaborative aspect of it was also fun compared to the solitary existence of writing.”
And she discovered some similarities to her own work. “I inhabit the characters in my writing, for sure, I become the characters. So in that way I guess it felt like a natural thing to be wanting to do. I’m not sure I succeeded at any level,” she says with a self-effacing laugh, “but it certainly felt like, ‘Here we go, this is something I’m familiar with attempting to do.’ Whether it’s successful or not, who knows? But it was a familiar process.”
A non-thespian artist being approached for an acting gig because of the photo on her cover? Reminds me of how Sam Phillips’s album Martinis & Bikinis was noticed by the folks behind Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), who cast her as a mute terrorist.
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