Geneviève Bujold in a ‘state of grace’
Feisty actress, 70, delights in role in movie about love and dementia
‘It’s nice to be at our age,” says Geneviève Bujold. “It is. It’s not just grey hair and wrinkles and aches. There’s something very beautiful that comes and visits and stays.”
Bujold is 70, old enough to play a grandmother in the new movie Still Mine, about a woman named Irene who is beginning to suffer the effects of dementia.
“I’m very proud of the film,” she says. “It’s beautiful. It’s filled with light. It’s a love story between two old people, strong people. It gets me. It’s as if I’m not in the film and I can watch it and be moved … It gets me.”
She’s speaking from Malibu where she lives with her partner, Dennis Hastings, a carpenter she met when he was building her house. By coincidence, Still Mine is about a New Brunswick farmer named Craig, played by James Cromwell, who wants to build a house for his ailing wife but runs into a lot of bureaucratic rules that hold him up.
It’s a sweet film, but there’s a note of feistiness in Irene, an edge that Bujold has also shown in many of the 69 movies and TV shows she has made over the past 60 years. You hear it when you compare Still Mine to other movies, such as Amour, Michael Haneke’s Oscar-winning drama about an elderly man who must care for a wife who has suffered a stroke. At one stage, he slaps her in the face out of frustration at her helpless condition.
“Let’s not talk about Amour,” Bujold says. “This is an offensive film for me. My body got out of the seat … when he slapped her I went, ‘ No. If that’s love I certainly wouldn’t want any part of it.’”
She’s more generous about another film on a similar theme, Sarah Polley’s Away From Her, in which a woman with Alzheimer’s is put into a home where her husband watches her slowly forget him and begin a new life.
“With her film, that’s love,” Bujold says. “That’s love.”
Still Mine was written and directed by Canadian filmmaker Michael McGowan and based on a true story. Bujold never met the real Irene — who is now living in a care home — but she imagined her life based on her own feelings about people. She did her own hair and wore her own clothes, choosing things a farmer’s wife would have.
“I have to tell you that preparation for me is really a state of grace,” Bujold says. “I love it. The second I say yes to a script, I’m in it. And I start, it comes to me; I remain open, and it comes to me.”
That is how she came to wear an incongruous string of pearls throughout the movie.
“Since I knew that I really wanted her to be not about clothes or anything about that, I wanted a wrinkle that would have been something from him, that he would have given her years ago. A farmer who gives his wife a pearl necklace, and she would never take it off. And pearls have a softness and a light about it. I thought it was nice.”
Bujold got a pearl necklace that way. She wears it in Still Mine.
“My companion for the last 32 years, who’s a carpenter, we met while he was building my house — that is now gone. Not him. The house — he went to downtown L.A. to look at pearls, and I can just imagine him looking for the pearls for me and he didn’t know which was which, and he gave me that necklace of pearls. I don’t wear it all the time, but I have it, and it’s in the film.”
Bujold is still busy as an actress — she has two other movies coming out shortly — but she remains picky about her roles. “When I go out, it’s because I really want to,” she says. “I know I can share some truth. My truth.”
She’s happier making a small movie about older people who not only deal with their problems, but find time to make love as well.
“They’re still dynamic, and it’s still happening,” she says. “Unbelievable. If they would just tap into older actors, it would revolutionize something.”