Kristen Stewart
The actress starts in a shocking new rock biopic, carving out a niche of respect after years of teenybobber fare.
The courtyard looks like a wedding cake. Take a pickaxe to all this swept marble and you’d hit yellow sponge made from eggs, milk, and margarine. Perfect triangles of evergreen leap from topiary tubs, fountains make chlorinated areas into shallow pools emptied of even a single tossed penny. And there in the distance is our misplaced plastic bride, truant from the cake top, a few layers down, slouched against a cream-coloured column in a sunlit archway, exhaling Camel smoke. She is looking at the ground and looking everywhere at the same time.
“I knew it was going to be you,” she says cryptically, raising her head and stamping out the cigarette.
To be Kristen Stewart takes antennae. Offset from the scant groupings of hotel guests and khaki-painted walkabouts slowly roaming the manicured groups, Stewart is hiding badly. Even if she were not that girl from Twilight, she’d be that girl over there from who-knows-were, in the black jeans and a gray t-shirt, smoking and glowering and trying very hard not to look anyone in the eyes. With her invisible province breached by my approaching footsteps, her guard eases only slightly after an introduction.
Seated now near a new tree planted in freshly combed dirt, a nervous waiter takes drink orders and scurries off, all of his body language mutely bellowing “I know who you are!” Stewart is talking about Sean Penn. She knows him. She appeared in his film Into the Wild a few years ago and she just bumped into him out in front of the building. She had said, “What’s up?
He half-smirked and said, “Haiti.” They tried to linger, to smoke and talk, but in a matter of minutes, shutters were clicking, some paparazzi had gathered, and the conversation was abruptly over.Now, freshly agitated, Stewart’s entire aspect is animated by nuisance. She winces with pain, clutching at her neck. “I must’ve slept on it wrong. Every time I look over my shoulder, it kills.” (Regardless, she’ll persist to peer behind her every so often with an audible start, turning back around with a grimace.) Every-thing has conspired and aligned here perfectly this afternoon for….
