Sarah Polley receives European Film Award Nomination

Sarah Polley is by far one of my favorite actresses and she really hasnt gotten much recognition for it. She has starred in a ton of great films and really did a great job in the Dawn of the Dead Remake. Now she is finally getting some big recognition. Sarah Polley has been nominated for the prestigious European Film Award in the best actress category for her role as an emotionally damaged nurse in The Secret Life of Words.

 

Polley will be competing with Penelope Cruz (Volver), Sandra Hüller (Requiem), Natalie Baye (Le Petit Lieutenant) and Martina  Gedeck (The Lives of Others) – whose films are all distributed in Canada by Mongrel Media – and Mirjana Karanovic (Gravica).  The winner will be announced this Saturday, December 2, in Warsaw.  The Secret Life of Words, which also stars Tim Robbins, was released theatrically in Canada this past summer by Mongrel Media, and is now available on DVD as part of the Festival Collection at Blockbuster.

 

The film marks Spanish writer-director Isabel Coixet’s second feature starring Polley, following My Life without Me. Filmed in English, it won four 2006 Goya Awards (the Spanish Oscars) for best film, direction, original screenplay and production supervision. During a vacation – her first in four years – on the coast of Northern Ireland, Hanna (Polley) inadvertently ends up on an oilrig, nursing Josef (Robbins), a man who’s been severely burned in a rig accident. His corneas are also affected, rendering him blind for a couple of weeks. Josef is intrigued by the woman he can’t see. Hanna, who wears a hearing aid, talks softly. She’s secretive, often answering his questions with a single word or silence. She’s trained as a nurse. But why has she been working in a factory? She’s got an accent. But where is she from? She makes calls to a woman (Julie Christie). But why does she hang up? As Joseph begins to reveal his own dark past, finally so too does Hanna.

And when she does, the horrifying details come gushing out like a floodgate. The film captures the ennui of life on an oilrig, where excitement comes from a karaoke night, or a pet goose, or a cook (Javier Cámara of Talk to Her) who entertains himself by preparing haute cuisine for a crew that prefers plain grub.  Scenes are punctuated with songs from the likes of David Byrne, Clem Snide and Tom Waits. Literary references abound, in particular to British writer John Berger, whose book Ways of Seeing can be spotted on Josef’s desk.