Laura Dern in the movie "The Son": She won't be silenced

Faces are playgrounds for emotions.

There are enigmatic and energetic, erotically offensive and intellectually restrained forms of expression with which this playing field is equipped.

In this regard, Laura Dern is one of the best actresses of her generation, along with Kate Winslet, Julia Roberts and Cate Blanchett.

Her gaze: a subtly orchestrated search movement.

Her smile: sometimes timid irritation of the other person, sometimes self-disguise in doubt and resentment.

Her mouth: a seismograph that translates the most sensitive impulses into facial expressions.

That mouth alone would be worth an entire article.

But isn't this finding trivial?

How could an actress who has been shaping Hollywood for four decades not have a talent for mime?

How could her face, repeatedly projected into the audience's consciousness as a powerful cinematic image, not appear special?

Counter-question: Aren't there actresses whose vitality is primarily revealed through their voice and physical posture?

Would one explain the artistic ability of a Jennifer Aniston or Angelina Jolie with physiognomic finesse?

Ambitious cinema works with a socio-political agenda

Some samples of her most important films: Laura Dern in the thriller "Blue Velvet" (1986) by David Lynch.

She plays the harmless

, over whose girlish face the big, burning questions of love are already flitting.

Dern, again directed by David Lynch, in "Wild at Heart", now four years older, as the seductress and seduced whose lover (Nicolas Cage) opens the gates of hell with his wrath on the world.

In "Wild at Heart" she blurs the boundaries between pleasure, pain, devotion and disgust in such a disturbing way that gender clichés no longer come into play.

Hetaera, saints, bigots or wicked: she plays the roles that literature and cinema offer us as the embodiment of a tricky desire with a single trembling of her lips, a lustful, hunting look.

Her career has spanned big and small film roles.

Some of them are relevant to cinema history even if they are classified as banal in terms of acting.

The dinosaur expert in Jurassic Park.

The space soldier in the blockbuster franchise Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

Dotted between these banging great works: Appearances in comedies, auteur film dramas, some by the dozen, others, such as "The Master" and "Little Women", ambitious cinema works with a socio-political agenda.

Since the mid-1990s, she has benefited from the logical cast point of the series boom: Because epic, sweeping series need more actresses, she is cast again: in the revival of "Twin Peaks" (2017), the David Lynch series from 1990, in which she also played a leading role.

In Big Little Lies, the three-season spousal cheating drama that earned her an Emmy in 2017.

In "Big Little Lies" she is Renata, a successful blonde long duped by her husband, who uses brutal arrogance to defend herself against being expelled from her ancestral milieu.

Here she mimics the derailment;

the face is a tableau in which narrow-mindedness is combined with feminist-boosted acumen.

It's great hours and minutes to watch Laura Dern

how she holds the hateful face in front of the male narcissist.

You can hardly act more recklessly against your own image as a screen beauty.