Isabella Rossellini can make a small supporting part the reason to watch a film. Her quiet authority matters, but we value her still more when she finds the ordinary kindness in an eccentric character.
Fi1m perspective
Connie gets on with the gardening while she talks about loss. In Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2022), Isabella Rossellini gives this grandmother an unhurried voice and good humour that survive the film’s weaker passages about fame. We were moved because she carries on tending the garden without asking us to pity her. A talking shell is an unlikely place to find such an observant performance, but Rossellini treats Connie’s age and habits with care.
David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) made her internationally known as the abused nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens. The glamour and eccentricity of Lisle von Rhuman in Death Becomes Her (1992) offered a more comic use for her presence. In Big Night (1996), her Gabriella belongs to an ensemble, including Tony Shalhoub, Stanley Tucci, Minnie Driver and Ian Holm, that holds our attention without conspicuous bids for it. We enjoy the restraint: Rossellini does not need the others to become less interesting when she is there.
Among her later character parts, Flora in Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera (2023) gives her particularly good material. She is a singing teacher in a villa her daughters would like her to leave, still waiting for Beniamina to come home. Josh O’Connor’s Arthur is the other person who behaves as though that might happen, and she treats him as the son-in-law she never had. Rossellini lets us see why Arthur would matter to this woman, even when he has stopped trying to make himself pleasant.
Conclave (2024) is a useful warning about how little a film can give her to do. Edward Berger gives Sister Agnes perhaps four scenes, yet Rossellini makes the nuns’ position among these powerful men matter. She supplies the film’s sharpest challenge to the institution, though she cannot turn an enjoyable papal thriller into the searching film it wants to be. These later roles make good use of her authority; we would welcome more of the unhurried attention given to Connie and Flora. Start with La Chimera, and give its wandering middle a little patience.
Biography
Isabella Rossellini is an Italian-American actress and model. Born in Rome on 18 June 1952, she is the daughter of actress Ingrid Bergman and director Roberto Rossellini. She made her screen debut in Vincente Minnelli’s A Matter of Time (1976), which starred her mother.
Rossellini gained prominence for her role as Dorothy Vallens in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), for which she received the Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead. She later appeared in Death Becomes Her (1992) and numerous other films and television series. Recent credits include Flora in La Chimera (2023) and Sister Agnes in Conclave (2024), the latter earning her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
