Reykjavík Grapevine - 23.09.2016, Page 29

29The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 15 — 2016
owhood, and ‘Lulu in the Nude’,
about a married woman’s midlife
crisis. “She had to fight for her
characters,” Didda reflects—po-
tential producers questioned her
films’ focus on less than glamor-
ous people.
Too Perfect,
Too Beautiful
Solveig cast Didda for the first
time in her 2003 film ‘Stormy
Weather’. “She’d been looking for
an actress,” Didda remembers,
“but everyone was too perfect, too
beautiful. She saw me in Prikið,
ordering a coffee, looked into my
eyes and smiled. I thought she was
mistaking me for someone else. I
said, ‘You’re wrong,’ but she just
knew.” Didda says she exclaimed
to the filmmaker something like,
“I’m not an actress, I’m a poet,”
which Solveig actually admired:
for many years, she didn’t have
the self-confidence to declare to
strangers, “I’m a filmmaker.”
“After that,” Didda says, an-
swering the occasional call from
Solveig to be a new film “was al-
ways a little extra adventure in
my life.”
Over the course of the decade
in which Didda played Anna three
times, Solveig drew from Didda’s
wardrobe, her photos, her poems.
“I liked that it was good enough
for her,” Didda reflects. “I guess it
was good enough for me. I would
sometimes tell her, ‘My charac-
ter would not do this—because I
would not do this.’ But everything
she found beautiful about me was
something I had wanted to fix.
She treated me and my life with
the utmost respect.”
Didda has had time to think
about Solveig’s films: she sees a
lot of Solveig in Agathe, who is al-
ways “trying to find answers, to
do the right thing.” As Anna, she
thinks, “I’m there to support her
character.”
“We put ourselves somewhere
in our work,” Didda muses, and
though Solveig’s films are reliably
delightful, the delight was hard-
earned. The filmmaker struggled
with her cancer for some time,
but quietly: in part, Didda sug-
gests to me, because she was wor-
ried that news of her ill-health
would give financiers a reason to
withdraw their support for her
projects. And her work was her
life, especially towards the end:
Didda has indelible memories of
Solveig directing through her ill-
ness, “bleeding from her mouth,
not wanting to stop.” ‘The Aquat-
ic Effect’ is the fruit of Solveig
Anspach’s labour to leave one fi-
nal film behind; come Opening
Night at RIFF, there might not be
a dry eye in the house.
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