Seeing is believing, even in the illusion-making world of cinema. In a new film called The Door In The Floor, you see almost all of Kim Basinger -- emotionally and physically.
"God, she's what?" her co-star Jeff Bridges asks himself in a Toronto Sun interview. "Fifty years old? And she looks just like she did in Nadine!"
Bridges and the blond bombshell Basinger, who will turn 51 four days after Bridges turns 55 in early December, last worked together in the 1987 movie Nadine. They play a battling married couple in both movies. In the John Irving-inspired drama The Door In The Floor, Basinger is emotionally stripped naked by a tragedy in her marriage and she is physically stripped naked in an incendiary sex scene with a college-boy lover (played by newcomer Jon Foster, who is three decades younger than his co-star). She does not use a body double and seems unabashed.
"Maybe it's that painting she carries around or that she keeps in her attic," Bridges riffs on the stunning physique Basinger shows off so graphically (he is also referring to the anti-ageing legend embedded in Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray). "I do know that she wears a hell of a lot of sunscreen or doesn't go out in the sun at all. That might have something to do with it.
"She has a more European sensibility to it, which is great. You can see that in 9 1/2 Weeks, where she had that same kind of willingness, that gameness. That's a real asset for an actor, if he has gameness, a willingness to be the fool or try the weird thing. And she has that!"
Bridges' comments come in a telephone interview this week from New York. Earlier, in a group session, the Sun sat down with Bridges and Basinger together in Hollywood.
In that interview, Basinger waxes happy about the sex scene with Foster, pausing to dismiss any analysis about how most American movies are uptight about sexuality and nudity, especially in comparison to European movies.
"I don't know," Basinger says of the differences, "and I don't care. I enjoyed every minute of it, okay? I think love and sex comes in all different ways and sizes in life and I've just, more or less, had a European attitude about things, I think.
"(In) my life, I've been so attracted to the Harold And Maude aspect of living, you know, as opposed to your norm. Normal is sooooo boring. I like to spice it up a little myself."
She doesn't explain, other than to invoke images from Harold And Maude, a 1971 cult movie in which a geriatric cougar played so mischievously by Ruth Gordon takes a boyish but suicidal lover played by Bud Cort. The 80-year-old zest for life reinvigorates the 20-year-old lad's outlook.
In Basinger's own life, all the public knows of her private life now is that, since her 2002 divorce from her second husband, actor Alex Baldwin, she lives as a single mom with her eight-year-old daughter Ireland Eliesse. Basinger recently declared she would like to stay single for a while and attend to raising Ireland.
On screen, the nudity and sexuality is no joke, although both Basinger and Bridges exchange a little mutual admiration banter.
"I enjoyed Kim's naked scene," Bridges says with a grin when the subject first comes up.
"I was very comfortable with yours," Basinger says of Bridges' nudity in the movie.
"There is a lot of nudity in the film," Bridges adds, referring to scenes showing knockout Mimi Rogers in a full-frontal scene after a live modelling class that also involves a complicated love-sex relationship with Bridges' character. "Mimi is really out there on display! Speaking of game, Mimi was really game, just showing the whole package there."
Critically, because this is a John Irving novel (A Widow For One Year) that was adapted to the screen by writer-director Tod (Kip) Williams, there is a serious subtext to everything we see. That presented a challenge to the filmmakers and the actors when it came to things sexual.
"Sexuality, it's such a major part of all our lives," Bridges tells the Sun, "and it's so difficult to portray in a movie without snapping the audience out of it, out of the story. At least, I find it that way. If I see a film and it's got a sex scene in it, it usually just yanks me out of the story. I'm thinking about how they shot the scene, how the actors must be feeling, how it looks like a commercial -- now the camera creeps up the leg -- and all kinds of different things. God, I just don't like it at all.
"But, every once in a while, a film will really handle it well. I remember Breaking The Waves -- I thought the sexuality in that was terrific. And I thought that Kip did it very well, too, in The Door In The Floor."
Basinger was attracted to the film, following her recovery from painful back surgery early in 2003. The lure was Williams, his script and her complicated, moody character Marion, who, as the movie begins, has retreated into a dark hole of depression because of a tragedy involving the couple's two teenage sons.
"I loved Marion's -- this is the word that I'm using -- aloneness," Basinger says. "And I loved Kip. I could and would not have done this piece without Kip. And it was just perfect timing for me to meet Marion. She was rather quiet and got to be somewhat the voyeur, and it was kind of interesting for me. It was kind of internal. Everything was very internal."
For Bridges, The Door In The Floor taps into something he finds attractive in John Irving's fiction. "He's so great," Bridges says of the way in which Irving explores the notion "that marriage is comedy and tragedy. It's really terrific.
"And Kip did such a great adaptation of it. That was a big plus for me, when I heard that John was in support of it. I think that Tod bought the rights for a buck or something from John."
As for his own character, Bridges plays a children's book author named Ted Cole. Meanwhile, he indulges himself by doing drawings of married women, usually with their children at first, later alone and finally naked. An affair then ensues and things get messy. His wife, Basinger's fractured character, seems to know all about his lifestyle.
"There were kind of slippery spots," Bridges says, "but the place where I could first grab onto the guy was his drawing. I love to draw so, when I saw that in the script, I thought, 'Oh, maybe I can do some drawing here.' That led into it. And, of course, I have kids. I have daughters of my own so that was a big handle for me. And then there's some ambiguity in there about his motives, which were kind of fun to play around with."
Don't ask for a detailed explanation. "I'm a big movie fan," Bridges says with a smile, "and I find, the less I know about a movie going in, the more I enjoy it. So, especially (with) the ambiguity of the picture and the role, I find I want to dance around it and not spell out too much. But it was fun to talk about that stuff with Kip. And he was so helpful, such a wonderful director."
All this turns The Door In The Floor, which juxtaposes depression and vibrant hope and longing, into alternative programming for the summer season. It sits in stark contrast to a comic book blockbuster such as Spider-Man 2 or the forthcoming Catwoman.
"I don't keep my finger on the pulse too attentively," Bridges says, "but it seems like the people who finance films bet on those $200 million movies (the top end for the reported budget on Spider-Man 2) and they figure that's a safer bet than the smaller movies. But, thank God, there are still small, independent films like The Door In The Floor.
"I kind of miss the middle ground. Maybe that's coming back, I don't know. But you can do some great stuff low budget, like The Door In The Floor. I'm really pleased with the way that that turned out."
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