Oh Kate: the shrewing of a tame one

I lost respect for Kate Winslet today.
Not all of it, but a considerable amount.
More than a little.
In fact, quite a bit.
Well, a little.

First, read this (if you haven't already), and then report back to tell if you've spotted the reason.
Or just to read me talking about it.

Isn't she deneuvely?

Oh yes, she is very "deneuvely".
(And considering I never particularly liked Deneuve - except her looks - that might not fare too well with me. But I digress.)

She is suddenly gorgeous beyond belief (even considering the heavy airbrushing).
And that's coming from someone who LOVED her as an actress, but never really saw her physical attraction.
(Yes, of course she was pretty, even beautiful. But... come on, was she really all that?)

That's certainly not the reason of my discontent.
Even her alarmingly sudden loss of all facial fat - which made her lose her delightfully "period" appearance - didn't bother me to the point of eliciting this blurp.
Or her apparently needless "tarting up".
(We get it: she is sexy. We don't really need to see her naked body to get the idea.
Or is it the "once a fat kid, always a fat kid" - that's Winslet talking, not us - that made this show-off of bare curves irresistible to her?)


No, it was this:


Casually dressed in a gray T-shirt, black pants, and flats, Kate Winslet has just descended from the rooftop deck of the downtown-Manhattan loft that she shares with her husband, film and theater director Sam Mendes, and their two children. <...> She admits she has just been upstairs indulging in her only known vice—smoking. Winslet, 33, rolls her own cigarettes; she picked up the habit on the set of Sense and Sensibility when she was 19. “I don’t smoke around my kids,” she’s quick to point out. “Like that makes it any better that I smoke at all, because obviously it doesn’t. But I don’t smoke in the house. I mean, I had a cigarette this morning, which is because I hadn’t been. Coffee and a cigarette: bingo!” She pauses. “I’m not sure if I want you to print that,” she says. Then she laughs.


The woman apologises for her smoking - so profusely that it takes half of a passage.
Smoking is obviously the mother of Satan. Yes. We know that.
And, God forbid, she doesn't smoke in front of her children.

OK, so she is concerned about her children, bless her heart. Of course. Who could blame her?

And also about her public image.
(Especially considering she was in NYC at the time, and we all know that smoking is the latest incarnation of Belzebub there. Not that London is much better in that regard, not lately.)

Personally, I would have preferred to elegantly dispense with such explanations and apologies, but then it's not my terrace, or my interview.

But consider the very next passage:


Hang around her for five days or only five minutes and you get the same woman: unfiltered, frank, sometimes blunt, though her British accent and her musical intonation make her speech, even the way she uses the word “fuck”—and she does use the word a lot, for comma, period, and exclamation point—sound like poetry.


And notice how the reporter herself beatifically qualifies this idiosyncracy (as opposed to the mute approval of her self-bashing regarding smoking): Kate's florilegium of assorted fuckery (Fuck yeah!, You bet your fucking ass I do!, et-fucking-cetera) sounds like poetry.
And lest we don't get the picture: "Winslet exhibits a refreshing lack of pretention".

Ahem.

But then, we have come to almost expect such gregarious conformity from reporters (especially American ones) - haven't we?

It's the actress' conformity, its her gregariousness, what surprises me.
And not in a good way.
Not like her acting.
Or even like her new-found blonde bombshell look.

Let me see if I understand this: she feels compelled to apologise for her smoking (on her terrace, to boot) - but she doesn't feel the need to be even remotely embarrassed by her documentedly copious and blatantly unnecessary use of expletives, including the F word?

Are we being told that, in Winslet's opinion, seeing mum indulge in smoking (on the terrace!) would be more damaging to her children than hearing the poetry of effing as a substitute for punctuation?
(No Queen's garden party for you, kiddies!
And believe it or not, they CAN be fun.
Really.
No, really.)


When I started this, it was much less Kate's odd perspective than a certain frame of mind - and the insidious forces that do the framing - what I had in mind. And the best illustration of it that I can think of right now is certainly not this interview but rather certain passages in Milan Kundera's book The Unbearable Lightness of Being in which said frame of mind and said framing forces are brilliantly exposed.

But it will have to wait. Late afternoons are always made later by heavy rain.

And besides, you can always go and read the novel for yourself - and then tell me if you see its connection to this apparent rambling about Kate's interview.
(It is a very, very subtle connection, I'll give you that. Definitely.
But subtle doesn't equal irrelevant.)

Or just read it.
If nothing else, parts of it are pure poetry.
(Unless, of course, you manage to find some prim and purged translation...)


Bah... this vent has made me see that I do still like you, Kate.
Come over, we'll have a cigarette.
On my terrace.
I'll even let you roll it for me.

Just don't bring any fucking reporters with you.