"The Chaperone" makes you want to see a major drama about Louise Brooks, but this movie is far from it. Her mother has agreed to the trip only if Louise is accompanied by a chaperone, and the woman who volunteers for the job is Norma Carlisle ( Elizabeth McGovern ), a Wichita society matron of scolding rectitude who still wears a corset and staunchly favors prohibition. Just being in New York in the '20s, she's living in her own movie.īut she's doing it with a restriction. Richardson's features are a little softer and rounder than Brooks', but beneath that haircut, with red lips and black eyebrows, she comes off as radiantly knowing - the original Edie Sedgwick It Girl, a mischievous and reckless daredevil who sees that the world will be her oyster as long as she treats it that way.
The energy that pours out of her on the rehearsal floor is the same eroticized audacity that takes her into a speakeasy, where she speaks her mind by reading yours. She wants to be a dancer in the Isadora Duncan mold (and Richardson, with a dance background, communicates this directly), yet her passion isn't for dance, exactly. The movie is set in 1922, the year Brooks left her lovely but stuffy hometown of Wichita, Kan., to travel to New York City, where she'd won a coveted spot in the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts. Her fusion of delicacy and fire was unique, yet in "The Chaperone," the vivacious and daring Haley Lu Richardson plays Brooks at 16, when she was just starting out and feeling her power in the world, and damned if she doesn't conjure a dose of the Brooks mystique. She had an inner sparkle that allowed her simply to be, and that was the thrust of her presence: a revolutionary new definition of womanhood that stripped all the old roles away, leaving nothing but her casual goddess incandescence. Brooks, unlike every other actress of the silent era, even the greatest ones (Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, Theda Bara), didn't go in for grand displays she understated her smiling freedom and sensuality, letting the emotions flow through her startlingly delicate and precise features. It's the sharpness of the angles - they look like they could slice you - and the jet-black lacquered sheen of it.Īnd, of course, it's the ivory-skinned siren who wore it. Haircuts that were once cutting edge - punk spikes, a '50s ducktail, Jane Fonda 's "Klute" shag - look, almost inevitably with time, less radical than they once did, but Brooks' girl-in-a-black-helmet look is nearly 100 years old (she first wore it in the early '20s, courtesy of the New York hairdresser Saveli, the only one who was doing bobs with a razor), and in its Joan of Arc of the Jazz Age way it still looks like something out of a sci-fi fantasy. When you watch the silent-screen star Louise Brooks in one of the films that made her a legend, most spectacularly the glittering femme-fatale drama "Pandora's Box" (1929), it's shocking to see how contemporary she looks.
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