Animated intimacy gives "Anomalisa" sexy edge in Venice prize fight
Jennifer Jason Leigh has done plenty of sex scenes in her career but none as intimate as those she voiced, fully-clothed, for Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson's new animated film "Anomalisa". Speaking to AFP at the Venice Film Festival, Leigh revealed how voicing a scene explicit enough to earn the stop-motion feature an 'R' rating in the United States had been an eye-opener. "I've done sex scenes in movies before but this was the most intimate," she said of her vocal performance opposite British actor David Thewlis. "And we were six feet away from each other, just doing it in a microphone. "There is something about that -- I think it translates into the film -- that felt incredibly real, incredibly exposed and very, very intimate. "And yet we never touched, we had our clothes on, you know but there was something more real about it than when you do a sex scene on a set and you are naked." Jason Leigh is the voice of Lisa, an awkward sales rep that married-and-bored corporate motivational speaker Michael Stone (Thewlis) encounters on a business trip to Cincinnati. Seduced by her rendition of Cindy Lauper's "Girls Just Want to Have Fun", Michael believes he has found his soul mate, the woman he wants to start a new life with. But after their memorable initial night together, their liaison sparks a descent into a nightmare of paranoia and psychosis. - 'Everybody is broken' - It is, in Kaufman's own words, intended to be an antidote to the standard Hollywood romance. "They were very damaging to me growing up," the celebrated writer of the screenplays for "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and "Being John Malkovich" has said. He is directing for the first time since the 2008 cult hit "Synecdoche, New York" and he told AFP he was trying to say something about the broken world that Michael, and so many other people, inhabit. "It's our world and we tried to recreate it and there is sort of this idea that Michael does that for a living: he travels from city to city and every hotel room he goes looks exactly the same," he said. "I think he is a normal human being and there is something wrong with him. I think that most of us have something wrong with us and are not able to articulate what it is. Why we feel the way we do, but everybody is broken. "It becomes very intimate and you feel like you are eavesdropping. If we made it like a joke that puppets are having sex, which is I think a more common way to play it, then it distances the audience and you can relax. "But we showed this, we showed it pretty much real time, which is an unusual thing in the movie and you feel like you shouldn't be there". Warmly received in Venice, "Anomolisa" is being tipped as potentially the first adult-themed film to claim the Oscar for best animated feature. Kaufman and Johnson will discover on Saturday evening if their production has won Venice's top award, the Golden Lion.
