A clash of titans. That is going to be the night of February 26th, when Meryl Streep and Glenn Close, two of the most celebrated actresses of 2011, despite all the upcoming stars and starlettes, will know who has won the Oscar. Would it be The Iron Lady (about which we already talked here!) or Albert Nobbs? That does not really matters, because cinema has already triumphed.

A stunning, perfect Meryl matched by an impressive, almost unrecognizable and refined Glenn disguised as a man. In the Dublin of the XIX century it is hard to find a job as a woman, but maybe as a man your chances will be better. That is why Albert Nobbs starts to do it since s/he was 14, forgetting even her real name. Behind her shoulders a story of bad childhood and abandonment that does not prevent her to build her future with the best chance she has, be a waiter. So she starts “a career” at the Morrison’s hotel where day by day and year by year she saves some money to buy a shop one day. S/he spends like this the best of her years. But things never go as hoped in this story where everybody is a loser, or lose something that has loved. Even love celebrates its defeat in the worst possible way. It is a perfect portray of a decaying society and its vices, where the interpretation of Glenn/Albert bears all the fatigue of trying to find a breech of hope.
Even when she wants to start a family, encouraged by another man in disguise (Janet McTeer), overcoming her fears of the relationships between woman and woman, the approach is fallacious and faked by the greed of her wife-to-be, a measured Mia Wasikowska.

A perfect story for the cinema and the playhouse, Glenn Close fought since 1982, when she first dressed up as Albert at the theater, to bring Albert Nobbs to the big screen, never finding the right script (she co-wrote this time) or the right production or even the director (now Rodrigo Garcia, the son of Gabriel Garcia Marquez). Thirty years is a long time, but they certainly painted on Glenn Close’s irregular face a sort of aura of time, a special magic that makes her a spectacular medium to bring Albert alive. Impossible to forget his introverted character, his shy smile, his quiet walking up and down the stairs of the hotel and of his life with that calm, maybe disillusioned, look that sometimes, when the belief that a future and a love becomes strong and possible, sparkles with an unknown fire in the eye.

Elena Dal Forno
09.02.2012

ALBERT NOBBS
A film by Rodrigo Garcia
VIDEA CDE Distribution, 2011
web: www.albertnobbs.it