At a dinner with 10 very smart women, at a kitchen table among artichokes, beet salad, glasses of red wine and overlapping conversations, a recommendation came to me from afar: the podcast from the literary magazine The Paris Review. The next day I received a message from the recommender with one of the episodes. I listened to several until I came across one that featured Molly Ringwald.
The photos on this cover, shot by Paola Kudacki in New York, were going to be taken a few days later, so I interpreted that WhatsApp as an act of psychomagic. In it podcast The actress reads a short story about a teenager who loses her mother. A role that she, of course, had played in Molly Ringwald in her own adolescence when she starred in The girl in pink The film, perhaps with The club of five, She is one of the most famous of the combo that Ringwald formed with John Hughes, with whom she began working in 1984 when the director wrote to her, or rather to the photo of her that he had in his office, his first box office success, Sixteen candles. These three films positioned the 16-year-old actress as a teenage symbol of a generation. She then she disappeared. The fear of forever being the girl in pink added to the difficulties of being a teenager among sharks in the Hollywood of the eighties, as she recounted in an article in The New York Times titled All the other Harvey Weinsteins, They encouraged him to try his luck with auteur cinema. He went to France, worked with Jean-Luc Godard on The Lear King, and there it stayed.
But it is not so easy to get rid of a generational label. “The word adolescent has stuck to me like a mollusk,” she wrote in the book she published shortly after turning 40. It is enough to want to get rid of something to find it multiplied, Truman Capote/Tom Hollander explains it very well in the new installment of Feud, the Ryan Murphy series directed by Gus Van Sant that has recovered a cult Molly Ringwald. In one chapter, the drunken writer eats Chinese takeout from a cardboard box. He hates the carrots in the recipe, so he tries to separate them. “The more you push the carrots away, the more everything becomes a plate of carrots,” he complains. Something like this happened to Molly Ringwald until she decided to write, translate and return with this project at the age of 50 in which she plays a deranged and powerful woman far from her recognizable naivety. In Capote vs the swans she plays Joanne Carson, the only one of the swans who was faithful to the writer until the end. The series is generating a great revision of Capote’s person and his relationship with his supposed friends, women whom he used to ascend socially and to tear them apart in his work.
Reckoning with the past is not easy, but Molly Ringwald has done it several times. In 2018 she published a text in The New Yorker in which he talked about how John Hughes had kept in the script of The club of five scenes of sexual harassment that were uncomfortable for the actress. In 2023 she translated from French the biography of Maria Schneider, the actress of The last Tango in Paris, to whom, as she herself told much later, no one warned that the rape scene with the butter was going to be filmed because, as Bertolucci said, they wanted her to react “like a woman, not like an actress.” She was 19 years old at the time and that abuse marked her forever. Ringwald decided to translate this book because she herself, as she said in a reading of the work, had gone through “experiences in which I have not been protected, but reading what happened to Maria I feel lucky.” The fortune of not having become the classic broken toy manipulated by an author, but rather being the author herself.
