Leelee Sobieski, the wild card

Here's a newcomer who can fill two hours of screen time with much more than loveliness. At sixteen, Leelee Sobieski is the kind of probing, intensely lyrical actress who keeps you guessing throughout the changeable weather of a film and beyond. At least, that has happened once so far, in the Merchant-Ivory film A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, which opens this month. But there's no reason to believe it won't happen again soon in a very different way in Stanley Kubrick's upcoming drama of sexual jealousy, Eyes Wide Shut. That's assuming Kubrick has given her a pivotal role: Interrogated recently in the Interview library, Sobieski wasn't telling because, like everyone else who'd worked on the film, she'd been sworn to secrecy. All she would say is that Kubrick "smelled good" and that, at her request, he'd given her a lock of his hair in an as-yet-unopened envelope, her intention being to clone him.

In A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, based on Kaylie Jones's fictional memoir of growing up as the daughter of novelist James Jones, Sobieski is Channe, who graduates from her cozy, romantic Parisian adolescence in the '60s to a period of familial and psychological upheaval during her later high school years in America in the early '70s. In Paris, Channe is gauche, willful, unseeing, especially in her relationship with a flamboyant, effeminate schoolfriend (Anthony Roth Costanzo) who teaches her that life may be rainbow-hued but love unfolds in shades of gray. Removed to America, awakened to her romantic needs, Channe takes a detour and embarks on a phase as a high school slut. Bruised and regretful, she finds solace in the counsel of her father (Kris Kristofferson), who offers gentle guidance but refuses to judge her. The scenes between Kristofferson and Sobieski are some of the most moving father-daughter scenes we've seen in years, but Sobieski is fascinating throughout the film - a quicksilver study in intellect vying with emotion.

In person, she's the kind of young woman who might have inspired Chopin's Les Sylphides rather than Jerry Lee Lewis's "Chantilly Lace," but who knows what rock 'n' roll fires are burning beneath her patrician poise? (We'll have to wait and see if Kubrick has lit them.) Discovered by a casting director in her school cafeteria, the daughter of a novelist (her mom) and an artist (her dad), Sobieski doesn't want much out of life, she says, just to be "a writer, a painter, an illustrator of children's stories, a potter, a poet, a director, an actress, a screenwriter, an architect, an interior designer, a clothing designer, a realtor, a stockbroker, a wife, and a mother." She knows she can't be all of these, but the breathlessness with which she makes the list indicates how much she sees the world as her oyster. She, though, is no average pearl.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning