SOME GREAT ACTORS are like musicians who just happen to be…

““SOME GREAT ACTORS are like musicians who just happen to be brilliant at their instrument. They are, in every other way, perfectly normal, but they have this extraordinary ability, and the instrument they’ve learned to play is their own emotions. Sandrine Bonnaire is like that. So is Sandrine Kiberlain. Others are people whose emotional lives are so interesting in themselves that there is no question that they belong on screen. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi falls into this category. Their craft consists of transforming their hypersensitive natures into a kind of instrument, flexible enough to assume the shapes and contours that their various characters require. Karin Viard, who emerged as a major star in 1999, is not in either of those categories. She is not playing an instrument. She is not creating an instrument. It is more as if she is the instrument. Her talent is so huge, and her access to it so immediate that she requires no process to turn Jekyll into Hyde. Obviously, this is too facile a description to be completely accurate or to do justice to the effort that her performances require. But one really does get the impression that Viard could get thrown into any artistic ocean and end up doing an Olympics-worthy butterfly stroke in record time.””

— Mick LaSalle