A Sensual Child Comes of Age

By RICHARD CORLISS

Nastassia, Isabella, Joanna--elegant names, radiant new beauties in the world of movies and modeling. Their allure is distinctively European: it starts with their wide, serious eyes which do not blink at fame

Who loves you, baby? Who watches you and watches over you? Who protects and exposes you? Who finds poetry in every pore, grace in your limbs, mystery behind those eyes? Whose passive power turns you on, gets you acting and acting up, captures your gifts? Who can never forget you? Who is your perfect lover, baby? The camera is.

The camera loves Nastassia Kinski. Every feature of her young body comes to life before its lens. The wide, gray-green eyes send out satellite signals of precocity or perversity. The dewy skin holds, on the left cheek, a tiny scar, like a bookmark in a turbulent autobiography. The lips, extravagantly full, can pout or preen or tauten resolutely or open in an elfin smile. The long Botticelli neck carries the eye to a strange and strong body, with delicate breasts, expressive musculature and the strong haunches of a peasant girl or a centaur. Kinski is a true camera animal because these disparate, classically mismatched parts combine sensationally well. Looking at her, the spectator is drawn to look into her--to search those eyes, that face and body, for the real Nastassia Kinski. But because she is a true camera animal, the real Nastassia Kinski may not exist. She is a fiction, a bewitching fairy story written by the collective imaginations of her directors and photographers, her public and herself.

For more than a century, the camera has conspired with artists and models to create successive ideals of allure. One early ideal was Parisian: gaunt and haul monde, with cheekbones so prominent you could cut your finger on them, if you dared touch them. Then, as the Hollywood cinema shouldered its way to eminence, the world standard became the active, approachable American woman, radiating health and common sense. Now there is another ideal, a new symmetry of features raising its profile in still and moving pictures. It sells mood, merchandise, magazines and, soon, movies. It holds all the history and mystery of an older world, all that intelligence and sophistication, but with one bright eye fixed on the dream of international stardom. It is the new face of Europe.

Behind this face is a restless, ambitious spirit. She is not content with being merely a model, only an actress; she demands a kind of Renaissance celebrity. Isabella Rossellini, for example, could have decided to coast through gossip pages as the gorgeous daughter of Ingrid Bergman and Italian Film Master Roberto Rossellini. Instead she has become a journalist, a television performer, a film actress and, on a whim, one of the fashion world's most sought-after models. Joanna Pacula rose quickly through the disciplines of theater, film and TV acting in her native Poland; now she has the female lead in the Hollywood adaptation of Martin Cruz Smith's bestselling novel Gorky Park, and oh yes, she dazzled Vogue readers with a recent photo session.

As fashion's foremost photographer for 30 years, Richard Avedon can sense this overseas change: "The girls who are most successful on Vogue covers now are romantic heroines. The look started with Nastassia and Isabella, who, with their sensuous and serious eyes, could be sisters. They share a quality I'd thought stopped with Audrey Hepburn. There's a return to calm--but with no loss of turbulence."

Of all the new European beauties, it is Kinski, 22, who reconciles most fully the conflicting pulls of a multimedia career. She is primarily a movie actress, who came to international prominence three years ago as the naive heroine of Roman Polanski's Tess and, previously, as Polanski's teen-age sprite-mistress. But if there is a single image identified with her, it is not from Tess or any of the ten other films she has made. It is Avedon's 1981 photograph of a python draped around the nude Nastassia's 5-ft. 7-in. frame. The snake is doing its manful best to embrace her; she wears the thing as insouciantly as if it were a feather boa. The avid male can decode several messages here, none of them comforting: Nasty is Eve, and this Garden ain't big enough for the three of you; Nasty is a pansexual wood nymph, as likely to cohabit with reptiles as with humans; Nasty can charm a snake, so you tangle with her at your own risk. Another message is clearer still: this wild child will do anything for the camera.

The sexual challenge, childlike arrogance and mischievous humor of that picture are qualities that Kinski was already bringing to the screen. In One from the Heart she was a circus performer, walking the high wire of fantasy above Francis Coppola's working-class love story. In Paul Schrader's Cat People--her most seductive performance and most frustrating film--she was a descendant of leopards, torn between human love and animal passion. And in James Toback's Exposed, which opened last week, she plays a girl from the American Midwest who escapes to New York and a high-fashion career, only to step into the crossfire between political terrorists and a vengeful militant, played endearingly by Rudolf Nureyev.

All these films were unsatisfying, if provocative, and Exposed is a giddy, goofy shambles. But Kinski deserves credit for daring to embody the disturbed visions of directors like Schrader and Toback. "I guess I've been a creature of the director's imagination," she confides in a dusky, lilting English, one of four languages she speaks fluently. "You see, I want to get a glimpse of his eyes searching out things inside of me. I want to go to hell and to heaven for him. I want to make his dreams come true." In these films, she did attain one dream: to remain untainted by their lapses and excesses, and still attract a crowd. Recently, Henry Kissinger came to visit the set of Nastassia's new movie. He shook her hand and said, "I saw you turn into a panther." That will do as a definition of star quality.

Now some of Hollywood's Important People are detecting that radiance. Kinski's American career, which had seemed close to derailment after the flops of One from the Heart and Cat People, is skimming along smoothly. Last year she made three movies--Exposed in English, Moon in the Gutter in French and Spring Symphony in German--and now she is shooting her first Hollywood comedy, Unfaith fully Yours. Says the film's director Howard Zieff: "She has great instincts She still hasn't cracked the surface of al that beauty and talent. She's going to be a big star." Co-workers find a festival o movie stars in her face: Ingrid Bergman and Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren and Audrey Hepburn. According to Toback, Norman Mailer scanned the rushes of Exposed and declared that she had the same qualities as Marilyn Monroe.

This hallelujah chorus is likely to swell next week, when the Cannes Film Festival puts Kinski's latest two films on display. In Peter Schamoni's Spring Symphony, a brisk biography of the courtship of Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck, Kinski has the rare opportunity to play a vibrant, gifted, normal young woman in love with her art and her artist, and she accedes to the challenge handsomely.

Moon in the Gutter, the second film at Cannes, is something more: a delirious summary of all earlier Kinski heroines, and of just about every bedizening movie technique. No surprise here: the director is Frenchman Jean-Jacques Beineix, whose previous film was the scarily assured Diva. Moon in the Gutter marks a significant advance over Diva in coherent style. Here, each kaleidoscopic effect, each slash of color, each gliding camera movement serves the story of a dockworker (Geerard Depardieu) who falls under the spell of an enigmatic Circe (guess who?). Kinski's first appearance, at the door of a sleazy waterfront bar, gets the full star treatment. There she stands, looking great in soft curls and soft focus, as the violins swell deliriously and a sultry breeze, blowing from inside the bar, fingers her dress. It is one of the sexiest entrances since Garbo slouched into a similar joint 53 years ago in Anna Christie.

"The woman she plays resembles a star," says Beineix. "With one look, she lights up Gerard's night. She is fragile and yet a hunter, dominating and perhaps dangerous. Nastassia was perfect for the role. I was completely seduced by her. I caressed her face on my editing table. But I found that she requires a lot of care, love and work. She makes great demands--and woe to the director who cannot satisfy them. You have to be strong with Nastassia. Otherwise she will devour you."

The actress who elicits all this hyperbole--panther, devourer, new Marilyn--is the product of a remarkable, almost incestuously close family. "To look into Nastassia, you must look at her parents," says Actor Armand Assante, who knows the whole family. "Her mother is a poet, her father is possessed." Klaus Kinski, 56, is a sacred monster among movie actors, modern cinema's great eccentric villain, the star of Werner Herzog's Aguirre the Wrath of God and Nosferatu, with the haunted face of a Byzantine warrior-poet and a reputation as a defiantly difficult performer. Says his daughter: "He's got eyes like hell and the sky at the same time." But for his young wife Ruth Brigitte and their infant child 20 years ago, life with Klaus sounds more like hell.

"Living with him was like being onstage, every day and night, in Kafka," recalls Brigitte, 42. "He was extremely jealous. It was as if he had built a private religion around us: Madonna and Child." Nastassia concurs: "My mother wanted to work in movies, and people asked her to. But he just wanted her to be a mother, be a wife, be this Venus, a planet he could land on at any time." Klaus had another obsession: to build a ship that would never touch land. "Someday we'll be on the ocean," Nastassia remembers him saying, "and play with the fish and never be dependent on anybody." But this would-be Flying Dutchman left for good when Nastassia was eight and has seen her only a few times in the past decade. Today he says, "I don't need a Bible to tell me I'm doing wrong a hundred million times in my life. But Nastassia should know I've loved her always, always, even before she was born."

With Klaus gone, Madonna and Child created their own world. "My mother and I built this strangely close relationship," Nastassia says. "She's like the sun coming up to me. In this jungle around us she protects me, like the lion's mother. When we talk it's total ecstasy. She's the only person I know I could love." Actress Jodie Foster, 20, knows Nastassia well, and says, "Strong women usually come from strong women. These are two very independent, strong women who are absolutely dependent emotionally on each other." Even today Nastassia will excuse herself from a restaurant table to run to a phone and talk with her mother.

"I always felt Nastassia would become an artist," Brigitte says. "Her father filmed her when she was two years old, and already she was a child-woman, with such sensitivity and such pain in her face--pain not as a human would feel it, but as a flower, a rose would feel pain." Little Nastassia danced, she posed and painted: "I painted faces of beautiful women with mirrored eyes, or fairy women with wings, or queens. I'd spend hours painting tiny flowers on the queen's gown. I always painted women, never men." And as she studied her art, she began working her charm. "All of Munich was after her," recalls Brigitte in helpless admiration. "All day long: 'Is Nastassia there?' Boys, girls, it doesn't matter, they all wanted something from her. I loved her too much to try to keep her."

What Nastassia wants, Nastassia usually gets. Then as now, she wanted to be watched, and then taken. Her first beau was 15, she was 14, and, she says, "He waited for almost a year, just watching me, before he dared to say hello. It was the most romantic love story. We were two children in love in our own world." Soon enough, another world beckoned. At a party in Munich, she met Roman Polanski. He was 42; she was 15. "It started out as a light romance," Polanski says. "But I quickly realized that Nastassia had the potential to become a great actress. Now Nastassia is passionate about being in movies. Indeed, she has nothing else on her mind, to the point of nausea."

With her restless spirit, and the enlightened narcissism of the star performer, Nastassia has set a pattern for her affairs: love beautifully, leave quickly. "I always fall in love while I'm working on a film," she says. "It's such an intense thing, being absorbed into the world of a movie. It's like discovering you have a fatal illness, with only a short time to live. So you live and love twice as deeply. Then you slip out of it, like a snakeskin, and you're cold and naked. What worries me is that when these loves die, they hardly leave traces on me. I wonder why I don't suffer."

Perhaps these occasional passions for her directors and leading men, beginning with the first cry of "Action!" and ending with the final cut, are pacts she makes for art, romance and commerce. Kinski acts on instinct--great instincts--not from technique. "I don't understand acting except while I'm doing it," she asserts. "And sometimes not even then." Her Method is a kind of controlled madness. For her, each new film is a fairy tale she can believe in; she is the sleeping beauty, and her director is the prince whose talent and passion will convince her of the dream's reality. To cast a spell she must fall under his spell. Then they can become the hero and heroine of their own film.

In the face of advice from her lawyer, her agent and her friends not to make Exposed, Kinski went ahead. Why? In part because in pitching the film to her, Toback played Tristan to her Isolde: "This movie is why we're alive. It is why you were born and I was born. If we die when this movie is finished it won't matter, because this is it." Nastassia seems unbothered that the resulting film looks like a Bloomingdale's window of Terrorist Chic, and that the story line functions as a metaphor for her dangerous need to be used by directors whose eccentricity overwhelms their artistry. Exposed is "a film and an experience I truly love," she says. Indeed, she believed so strongly in it that she paid, out of her $500,000 salary, $75,000 to reinsert four scenes that had been cut. That must be a Hollywood first.

It remains to be seen if Hollywood will return the favor and if her fascinating aura can attract the mass of moviegoers. The odds are against her, on three counts. No European performer since Audrey Hepburn has become a blazing star of American movies; actresses these days have fewer options, fewer succulent roles offered them, than actors; and American films are in a period of relative indifference toward the very notion of stardom, instead putting their faith in big-budget special effects and no-name sex comedies. Kinski may have to settle for her current status as a celebrity commodity, for whom each film is not so much a vehicle as an expensive commercial for some exotic fragrance. "Nastassia No. 1 ... Share the fantasy."

It is possible that Kinski's own fantasy has little to do with stardom, at least of the Hollywood variety. Though she will play Susie the Bear in the movie version of John Irving's The Hotel New Hampshire, Kinski will continue to make European films "because they are such a big part of me." One project she may direct but not star in is a script she wrote called Day and Night. It is, she says, "like a fairy tale that shows the day and night of human beings. There are two characters: a beautiful woman about 35, who has never really lived, and a boy about eleven or twelve. They are not related; they are not lovers. During the day the woman screams at the boy and hits him, but at night she changes into a loving, nurturing person. To keep the day beast away, they resolve to swim out into the ocean at night, as far as they can, then wait for morning. They do, and when day breaks, the woman tries to drown the child. He holds on to her and they both drown, hugging each other."

Which are you, Nastassia Kinski? The child or the woman? The day beast or the dream angel? The European actress or the Hollywood star? The high-fashion doll or the rag doll? The new beauty or a woman older than Eve?

Who knows? The camera knows, and cares. --By Richard Corliss.

Reported by Denise Worrell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Denise Worrell/Los Angeles This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.