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" Sharp-eyed movie angels must be watching over Pauline Burlet&amp;#039;s career. When the astonishing young Belgian actor was five years old, a local woman who taught drama courses invited her to come by. &amp;quot;This sounds silly, but I really liked it,&amp;quot; Burlet says, &amp;quot;and when I started going to casting calls for children to do advertising and commercials, I liked that, too.&amp;quot; At age nine, she went on her first feature-film audition, which happened to be for La Vie en Rose, Olivier Dahan&amp;#039;s hugely successful 2007 biopic of tragic, beloved French chanteuse \u00C9dith Piaf, starring Marion Cotillard. Dahan wanted flashback scenes of Piaf as a young girl, and with Cotillard observing, he cast Burlet on the spot. Burlet&amp;#039;s youthful resemblance to Cotillard was uncanny. You could put it down to happy coincidence\u2014only now, at age 17, Burlet has done it again, this time with B\u00E9r\u00E9nice Bejo. Her wonderful new film, Iranian director Asghar Farhadi&amp;#039;s The Past, lets us see just how deep Burlet can go. The director is expert at depicting how a marriage can slowly break apart. His A Separation won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2012; he will likely be a contender for the second year running with The Past, in which not one but three fractured romantic pairings implacably collide, while the various children of these entangled adults\u2014collateral damage\u2014try to cope amid the chaos as well as they can. There&amp;#039;s pain enough to go around, of course, but its molten core is embodied in Burlet&amp;#039;s haunting, devastated teen\u2014a girl on the cusp of womanhood, with good reason to be frightened of and furious at her mother, the beautiful, feckless woman who means so much to her, and whose face is reflected in her own, which only makes the daughter want to flee. Bejo and Cotillard are both beautiful women, but they don&amp;#039;t look at all alike. So how can Burlet look like both of them? &amp;quot;I think, in a way, there&amp;#039;s something like a chameleon about me,&amp;quot; Burlet says. &amp;quot;When I&amp;#039;m in the presence of these women, I&amp;#039;m able almost to adapt myself so that I resemble them more.&amp;quot; This is remarkable wisdom coming from a teenager. Burlet already knows that the best acting is an art, and the best artists know how to give themselves away. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/a13949/actress-pauline-burlet-profile/?src=rss>