MulletProof
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ahh, thanks dylan!. 
[psst, i too love the twirling.. it looks like so much fun
]
[psst, i too love the twirling.. it looks like so much fun
]
Vahina Giocante
- Thread starter 1karina1
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Article from Stella Magazine 27.05.07
With a career in take-off and a wildly romantic new man in her life, is it any wonder Vahina Giocante has so much to say for herself? Marianne Macdonald meets the young ballet dancer turned actress being hailed as the new Bardot
In the dark, sumptuous lobby of the Hôtel Costes in Paris, where I am meeting the 'new Bardot', the French actress Vahina Giocante, it is impossible to miss the angular, chiselled maître d'.
'I'm trying not to be a girl who seduces men, because it can hurt myself'
She stalks round like a model, and when Giocante and I take our seats in the closed bar she tells us, in no uncertain terms, to get out. Giocante instantly fights back.
'This is intolerable!' she exclaims in French to the embarrassed waitress hovering by our side. 'I spend a fortune here, having lunch, having dinner - I'm here all the time!'
'Sorry,' she says, when we sit down elsewhere, 'but she was so rude. Some people are just unhappy in their personal lives - they have to take it out on everyone around them.'
Giocante, who turns 26 next month, is a different kettle of fish. In her sexy, fitted peasant top and jeans, with her small dancer's build, roughly highlighted blond hair and direct, slate-blue eyes, she gives the impression of depth and maturity beyond her years.
She has been acting for more than a decade and is now breaking through internationally after her coming-of-age film, Lila Says, received rave reviews in America (it is being released in Britain on DVD next month).
In it she plays a hypersexual teenager who lives in an Arab enclave of Marseilles. Full of life and energy - too much, perhaps - Lila tries to control the world around her with her new-found sexuality, but her shocking, naive sex talk and mischievous games lead to a terrible climax.
In the meantime she falls in love with Chimo, a sensitive, poetic Arab boy who is the only person who really respects her.
Directed by Ziad Doueiri (a former cameraman for Quentin Tarantino) and nominated for the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema, Lila Says reveals much about poverty, emotional damage and, as Giocante points out, love.
'A lot of people see Lila as a victim,' she says, taking a puff of a long cigarette. 'I don't. She's playing a game, but very innocently. She has no limits. She's very, very free, actually.'
Famous in France for the frank sensuality of her acting parts, she was named Vahina - the word for 'welcome' in Madagascar - by her Corsican father, Pierre, who lived there for seven years.
She has an Andalusian mother, Catherina, and grew up the second of eight brothers and sisters in a village called Vero in the south Corsican countryside.
'My father wanted a big family,' she says. 'And in Corsica it's easy to have a lot of children because you're in nature and it's safe.' Her father has a business growing vegetables. She smiles.
'He's very strange, my father, because he's also a techno-electro DJ. He's very young in his mind and travels a lot. My mother lives in the mountains. They're not together. She's a social worker, a bit like a little girl. I love my parents. Really, I love them. But they are like children!' Is that hard?
'It used to be when I thought I had to support them. Now? I'm totally free of them.' She brushes her hands. 'My childhood was wild. I was always outside, in the mountain, in the rivers, inventing games. But I wanted to be a dancer, so at 12 I joined the Marseilles opera.' So young! 'Yes, but it brought me a lot of maturity. Ballet was Two years after leaving home for ballet school in Marseilles, Giocante was discovered by a casting director on a beach. That encounter led to her starring role in the cult movie Marie Baie des Anges, in which she gives a prize-winning performance as Marie, a damaged teenager who meets a sullen street kid named Orso and runs away with him to a deserted island.
'She was 13 and a half and knew how to act anything,' said Manuel Pradal, the film's director, recalling the moment he met her. 'She had a rare beauty and was a dancer for the Marseilles opera. We had already seen 7,000 girls, and then she showed up, like an extraordinary reward for our work.'
'He said that?' says Giocante. 'Ah, that's amazing.' She reads the quote to herself. But didn't she turn down the part at first?
'Because I thought my mother had to pay. I said, "We don't have enough money!" They laughed and said, "We're going to pay you." I thought, "Interesting!" because it would pay for my ballet shoes and school, which were very expensive.'
Is she like her latest character - the shocking, sensual, carefree Lila? 'Yes. It's necessary for me to be free. You know how sand trickles from your hand? I can't stand being trapped. I'm very, very imaginative, too: I've got my own world inside. And I'm free in my body because I was a dancer.'
She takes another puff of her cigarette. 'Also, I don't care what other people think about me. For example, that girl' - she means the rude maître d' - 'was projecting something which didn't belong to me.'
Although Giocante seems like a free spirit, she also appears wise -perhaps because she is a mother already. She had her son by her first love, a musician called Martin Gamet, at 20.
'Sometimes a woman of 40 is not ready for a child. But when I was 16 I met a man I wanted to be one with.' She and Gamet broke up three years ago; Nino is now five.
She gets out a picture - a blond, blue-eyed cherub who could easily be a film star himself. 'He's like an angel,' she says. 'We have a lot of fun because he has a young mother ready to play. I bring him with me in my travels, we discover the world together.'
Giocante is thoughtful for a moment. 'I know about unconditional love, the mother with the child. With my child it's like that,' she muses.
'But I think most men are frightened of love, of women. I went through a big, big ordeal last year. You know sometimes you have to go down, to explore the darkness? You have to lose everything - your confidence, your faith, your soul? And then you come back like a child, reborn, wow!'
She grins. 'I think everybody has to go through that.'
She surfaced - she won't say what the trigger was - just before she met her now boyfriend. For the past year or so she has been with Ora-Ito, the French designer who, at 21, promoted imaginary products for real brands - a Louis Vuitton bag, a case for a Mac laptop - advertising them on the internet as if they really existed.
The 30-year-old has won a prize for his (real) aluminium Heineken bottle, designed Adidas and Joop perfume bottles and done advertising campaigns for Levi's.
'He's the most amazing person I've ever met. A total genius! Not easy to live with!' Giocante says. 'He has a thousand ideas, he's totally passionate and impulsive.'The couple live in the Marais district of Paris. How did they meet? 'Oh, it's a very beautiful story. We were at a party and I played a game with him. I kept running away and sticking out my tongue, like cat and mouse. Then he asked for my number and I said, "I never give my number to anybody." He said, "Can I at least accompany you, to déposer - drop you home?" I said, "OK, why not?"'
So he knew where she lived? She smiles. 'Yes. Two days after I received in front of my door a box, and in it was a new phone, and he had written, "Now I've got your number...
" He put a message saying he would be at the Baron club, this very trendy place, at a certain time and, if I wanted to meet him, to come; if not, it's OK. I thought, "Wow, that's so romantic and unusual."' As if on cue her phone rings. 'It's him!' she exclaims. 'I'm just telling the story of how we met,' she says into the receiver in French.
'Then for one week we didn't touch each other,' she continues, putting away the phone, 'not even a kiss. Nothing. Then I had to work on a test for a James Bond film and he helped me, he played Bond. Then he wrote me a note saying, "Do you want to make a remake of From Russia with Love?" And he came with two plane tickets to Moscow.'
I ask if many men try to pick her up. 'I'm trying not to be a girl who seduces men, because it can be a weapon and it can hurt myself,' she says unexpectedly.
'Also it's a kind of mask if you're always seductive. I think it's a good thing to be totally honest with yourself, and this is my path right now, being in my essential truth and learning who I am.'
Giocante has made 15 films since Marie Baie des Anges, almost all French, the most recent a comedy called 99 francs, which she is taking to Cannes.
But, she says, 'I'd like to move to London. My boyfriend needs to for his work and it would be good for me to improve my English. I want to continue to act for 20 years, and then I'd like to be an anthropologist.
'I don't have any more secrets now,' she says, smiling. 'And I'm very secretive, you know.' I tell her she seems very open. 'No! I tell you 0.001 per cent!'
source: telegraph.co.uk
With a career in take-off and a wildly romantic new man in her life, is it any wonder Vahina Giocante has so much to say for herself? Marianne Macdonald meets the young ballet dancer turned actress being hailed as the new Bardot
In the dark, sumptuous lobby of the Hôtel Costes in Paris, where I am meeting the 'new Bardot', the French actress Vahina Giocante, it is impossible to miss the angular, chiselled maître d'.
'I'm trying not to be a girl who seduces men, because it can hurt myself'
She stalks round like a model, and when Giocante and I take our seats in the closed bar she tells us, in no uncertain terms, to get out. Giocante instantly fights back.
'This is intolerable!' she exclaims in French to the embarrassed waitress hovering by our side. 'I spend a fortune here, having lunch, having dinner - I'm here all the time!'
'Sorry,' she says, when we sit down elsewhere, 'but she was so rude. Some people are just unhappy in their personal lives - they have to take it out on everyone around them.'
Giocante, who turns 26 next month, is a different kettle of fish. In her sexy, fitted peasant top and jeans, with her small dancer's build, roughly highlighted blond hair and direct, slate-blue eyes, she gives the impression of depth and maturity beyond her years.
She has been acting for more than a decade and is now breaking through internationally after her coming-of-age film, Lila Says, received rave reviews in America (it is being released in Britain on DVD next month).
In it she plays a hypersexual teenager who lives in an Arab enclave of Marseilles. Full of life and energy - too much, perhaps - Lila tries to control the world around her with her new-found sexuality, but her shocking, naive sex talk and mischievous games lead to a terrible climax.
In the meantime she falls in love with Chimo, a sensitive, poetic Arab boy who is the only person who really respects her.
Directed by Ziad Doueiri (a former cameraman for Quentin Tarantino) and nominated for the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema, Lila Says reveals much about poverty, emotional damage and, as Giocante points out, love.
'A lot of people see Lila as a victim,' she says, taking a puff of a long cigarette. 'I don't. She's playing a game, but very innocently. She has no limits. She's very, very free, actually.'
Famous in France for the frank sensuality of her acting parts, she was named Vahina - the word for 'welcome' in Madagascar - by her Corsican father, Pierre, who lived there for seven years.
She has an Andalusian mother, Catherina, and grew up the second of eight brothers and sisters in a village called Vero in the south Corsican countryside.
'My father wanted a big family,' she says. 'And in Corsica it's easy to have a lot of children because you're in nature and it's safe.' Her father has a business growing vegetables. She smiles.
'He's very strange, my father, because he's also a techno-electro DJ. He's very young in his mind and travels a lot. My mother lives in the mountains. They're not together. She's a social worker, a bit like a little girl. I love my parents. Really, I love them. But they are like children!' Is that hard?
'It used to be when I thought I had to support them. Now? I'm totally free of them.' She brushes her hands. 'My childhood was wild. I was always outside, in the mountain, in the rivers, inventing games. But I wanted to be a dancer, so at 12 I joined the Marseilles opera.' So young! 'Yes, but it brought me a lot of maturity. Ballet was Two years after leaving home for ballet school in Marseilles, Giocante was discovered by a casting director on a beach. That encounter led to her starring role in the cult movie Marie Baie des Anges, in which she gives a prize-winning performance as Marie, a damaged teenager who meets a sullen street kid named Orso and runs away with him to a deserted island.
'She was 13 and a half and knew how to act anything,' said Manuel Pradal, the film's director, recalling the moment he met her. 'She had a rare beauty and was a dancer for the Marseilles opera. We had already seen 7,000 girls, and then she showed up, like an extraordinary reward for our work.'
'He said that?' says Giocante. 'Ah, that's amazing.' She reads the quote to herself. But didn't she turn down the part at first?
'Because I thought my mother had to pay. I said, "We don't have enough money!" They laughed and said, "We're going to pay you." I thought, "Interesting!" because it would pay for my ballet shoes and school, which were very expensive.'
Is she like her latest character - the shocking, sensual, carefree Lila? 'Yes. It's necessary for me to be free. You know how sand trickles from your hand? I can't stand being trapped. I'm very, very imaginative, too: I've got my own world inside. And I'm free in my body because I was a dancer.'
She takes another puff of her cigarette. 'Also, I don't care what other people think about me. For example, that girl' - she means the rude maître d' - 'was projecting something which didn't belong to me.'
Although Giocante seems like a free spirit, she also appears wise -perhaps because she is a mother already. She had her son by her first love, a musician called Martin Gamet, at 20.
'Sometimes a woman of 40 is not ready for a child. But when I was 16 I met a man I wanted to be one with.' She and Gamet broke up three years ago; Nino is now five.
She gets out a picture - a blond, blue-eyed cherub who could easily be a film star himself. 'He's like an angel,' she says. 'We have a lot of fun because he has a young mother ready to play. I bring him with me in my travels, we discover the world together.'
Giocante is thoughtful for a moment. 'I know about unconditional love, the mother with the child. With my child it's like that,' she muses.
'But I think most men are frightened of love, of women. I went through a big, big ordeal last year. You know sometimes you have to go down, to explore the darkness? You have to lose everything - your confidence, your faith, your soul? And then you come back like a child, reborn, wow!'
She grins. 'I think everybody has to go through that.'
She surfaced - she won't say what the trigger was - just before she met her now boyfriend. For the past year or so she has been with Ora-Ito, the French designer who, at 21, promoted imaginary products for real brands - a Louis Vuitton bag, a case for a Mac laptop - advertising them on the internet as if they really existed.
The 30-year-old has won a prize for his (real) aluminium Heineken bottle, designed Adidas and Joop perfume bottles and done advertising campaigns for Levi's.
'He's the most amazing person I've ever met. A total genius! Not easy to live with!' Giocante says. 'He has a thousand ideas, he's totally passionate and impulsive.'The couple live in the Marais district of Paris. How did they meet? 'Oh, it's a very beautiful story. We were at a party and I played a game with him. I kept running away and sticking out my tongue, like cat and mouse. Then he asked for my number and I said, "I never give my number to anybody." He said, "Can I at least accompany you, to déposer - drop you home?" I said, "OK, why not?"'
So he knew where she lived? She smiles. 'Yes. Two days after I received in front of my door a box, and in it was a new phone, and he had written, "Now I've got your number...
" He put a message saying he would be at the Baron club, this very trendy place, at a certain time and, if I wanted to meet him, to come; if not, it's OK. I thought, "Wow, that's so romantic and unusual."' As if on cue her phone rings. 'It's him!' she exclaims. 'I'm just telling the story of how we met,' she says into the receiver in French.
'Then for one week we didn't touch each other,' she continues, putting away the phone, 'not even a kiss. Nothing. Then I had to work on a test for a James Bond film and he helped me, he played Bond. Then he wrote me a note saying, "Do you want to make a remake of From Russia with Love?" And he came with two plane tickets to Moscow.'
I ask if many men try to pick her up. 'I'm trying not to be a girl who seduces men, because it can be a weapon and it can hurt myself,' she says unexpectedly.
'Also it's a kind of mask if you're always seductive. I think it's a good thing to be totally honest with yourself, and this is my path right now, being in my essential truth and learning who I am.'
Giocante has made 15 films since Marie Baie des Anges, almost all French, the most recent a comedy called 99 francs, which she is taking to Cannes.
But, she says, 'I'd like to move to London. My boyfriend needs to for his work and it would be good for me to improve my English. I want to continue to act for 20 years, and then I'd like to be an anthropologist.
'I don't have any more secrets now,' she says, smiling. 'And I'm very secretive, you know.' I tell her she seems very open. 'No! I tell you 0.001 per cent!'
source: telegraph.co.uk
MulletProof
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thanks, karina! 
I need to come back with the time to inhale the entire thing!.
I need to come back with the time to inhale the entire thing!.
lost in kyoto
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She's so gorgeous. I've been a fan for the past 6 years
chocolatestain
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I agree with "oh, the french". They seem to be able to get away with anything!
Anyway, she got a gorgeous face. Such sharp features, they're almost masculine. I wish we got more candid pics though
MulletProof
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^boo, I can't see any of your pictures, nieska. 
moussemaker
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chocolatestain
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that cover is gorgeous! she looks really, really good.
