Kate Winslet returns to HBO with the Mare of East series …

Kate Winslet is back. And it is in this privileged way that had its presence in the early 90s, intense and heartbreaking before the emergence of Titanic. This roaring creature of fury and scandal that Peter Jackson turned into Celestial creatures, or the passionate Marianne Dashwood of Sensitivity and feelings, with her curls and her laughter, or Ophélie who resisted the academicism of Kenneth Branagh in his adaptation of Hamlet by Shakespeare. So, before James Cameron’s epic and dazzling fame, the public eye in every detail of his body and his born star status, the whirlwind of that romanticism that breathed cinema before the reign of superheroes and sequels, Kate Winslet was already there, with that sublime strength, clinging to the worlds she inhabited, being part of them as if they were echoes of her own essence. And part comes back Easttown Sea, the new HBO series that goes beyond the formulas of the prestigious policeman to follow the gray and melancholy life of his injured character.

Easttown mare appears as the new bet of the chic streaming platform, replacing the successes of Big little lies O Cancellation, detective intrigues encapsulated in the portrait of a social group, its secrets and privileges, the natural or urban environment as plastic of its underground rot. However Easttown mare, from the hand of its creator Brad Ingelsby, try condense the spirit of this small town in Pennsylvania through the circuits of everyday life that anticipate the emergence of a crime. And Mare Sheehan is more than the local police officer who leads the investigation, faced with the thickness of local relations, its economic inequalities, its social grudges. It is she who condenses in this tired walk, expression of years of loss and disappointment, to the rhythm of this forgotten geography, with its gray houses and its Saturday afternoon squares, an imperceptible horror that has come to stay .

Day after day, Mare collects the remains of these forever lost dreams. She pursues the drug addict brother of a classmate to put him up in a shelter so that he does not die of cold, he answers the call of a neighbor who swears to have seen a marauder while arguing with her husband, it pursues minor thefts, resolves fights and deep-rooted grudges. This region marked by the use of opiates, intra-family violence and the ropes of poverty is also overwhelmed by the disappearance of a teenager who has never been resolved, who weighs on Mare’s shoulders like another of his personal tragedies. And it is then that a new crime, a naked corpse by the river, a new horror which confronts the community with this hidden face, imposes its logic of exception. Church sermons, house-to-house whispers, resentful arrests, reproaches in the police station illustrate this world in which Mare moves with her own pain and that of the others in tow.

“Now that I’m over 40, I’m interested in portraying real characters, not very glamorous, rather than unattainable ideals”, Winslet said in a lengthy interview with the site Brief take. “The biggest challenge for me playing Mare was creating the trauma of losing my son.. Even today, I can hardly talk about it. I must have created so much pain, and held it back for twenty months, that it still makes me cry. It’s that we started filming in September 2019, they closed us in March 2020, and we were only able to return in September to finish at the end of last year. So I had to hold Mare within me and I always feel like I haven’t finished sending her away. “

Winslet not only learned with remarkable precision the accent of the region – the “delco”, typical of Delaware County, where the creator is from – he condensed in his own physiognomy the impact of the tragedy of her past and the endogamous reliance on the community – both the outward traits such as undyed hair since her son’s death and the pained expression and look over her shoulder at the persistent demand of the people – but offered Mare an unusual light in her moments of solitude, an unforeseen humor in the scenes shared with the great Jean Smart who plays his mother, this gesture of prevailing, of which Faulkner spoke, in a land of pain and injustice.

During those unusual years of suspended and postponed premieres, Winslet also returned to cinema with Ammonite, the second film by Francis Lee, British director of those intense debuts which Land of god (2017). Ammonite take as a starting point the life of paleontologist Mary Anning on the Lyme Regis coast, her pioneering work in fossil research, her unrecognizable legacy. And while the pivot of the story is the fiery relationship that united her with Charlotte Murchison, played by Saoirse Ronan, and which made choreographed sex scenes and the substrate of 19th-century lesbian melodrama speak. What stands out in Winslet’s work is once again the creation of a character attached to an inhospitable environment and in conflict with a persistent scrutinizing gaze.. His Mary Anning, hardened by the loneliness and troubles of the past, finds its fulfillment in the discovery of a naked interior and therefore so true.

The actress who seemed comfortable in epic clothing, in that doomed passion in the remains of the Titanic, in the post-shipwreck memory gadgets, the same that brought a Mildred Peirce modeled to life before the gaze. by Todd Haynes, a representative of an America that reinvented itself after the Depression, which enjoyed its veils of tragedy and emancipation, now pushes his way until he finds the most illustrious crudeness. Mare and his dark stoicism, in an era without exploits or artifices, pursues the traces of a crime like those of his own truth. And she knows the nooks and crannies of this town like Mary Anning the rocks of the Dorset coast, which hide fossils like little lost treasures of a past glory. Both are the result of that unglamorous present that Winslet wants to capture already at the time of his artistic and professional maturity. A perfect moment for those who have always shown that they can transcend it.