Dolly Anna

By Roger Franklin

Remember little Anna Paquin, the bright-eyed imp from Lower Hutt in bonnet and bloomers who won an Oscar for Jane Campion's The Piano? Or perhaps what comes to mind is her heart-tugging turn in Fly Away Home, the tale of young girl who finds love and healing with a nest of orphan goslings?

Sweet? That is an understatement. Whenever a director needed a fresh and innocent child, particularly one with a mind of her own, Paquin topped the list.

Who could question such a choice? A natural actress with a gift for accents, butter wouldn't melt in this kid's mouth.

Not anymore - and especially not for anyone who has had the immense misfortune to catch Hurlyburly, her latest flick.

That's not to say she doesn't do a good job as a runaway teen who becomes the eager plaything of three much older men. Far from it - she's terrific, perhaps the only bright spot in an otherwise abysmal waste of celluloid.

It's just that the 16-year-old's performance is such a departure from anything she has played before. Critics in the United States haven't been sure whether they should be outraged, appalled or simply stunned by the unexpected transformation.

It's as if they took their seats expecting Shirley Temple and ended up watching Debbie Does Dallas.

Clad - more or less - in teeny-tiny cut-off jeans and a halter top, Paquin strolls like some half-pint hooker into the newly released movie version of David Rabe's hit Broadway play.

Within minutes, the amorous urchin is the tender meat in a sexual sandwich as Sean Penn fondles her leg and Kevin Spacey coos in her ear.

Later, she will be beaten by a hulking Chas Palminteri, smoke a lot of dope and use language that would see her expelled if it was ever uttered in the playground of the exclusive Los Angeles school she now attends.

Not since Jodie Foster played a teenage prostitute in Taxi Driver has anyone so young projected such a sense of eager availability.

"So, you want to go upstairs?" asks Penn's sleazeball casting agent, a man who seems to inhale cocaine with every second breath. And, of course, she does.

Casual sex, endemic drug use and the soul-deadened cynicism of Rabe's take on modern Hollywood are the coin of the realm in Hurlyburly.

Paquin, whose mother was on the set for all the raunchy scenes, insists that it was a privilege to be cast.

"It's such a great script - intelligent and funnily written, and the dialogue is so snappy and fast-paced. I enjoyed reading it so much and simply wanted to do it," she explains.

American critics think she has gone from playing mother goose to starring in a prize turkey. While most have hailed Paquin's performance, all but a few have showered the movie with undisguised contempt.

"Paquin's small but significant part sums up everything that is wrong with Hurlyburly," ranted one reviewer. "If there's a prize for best acting in a worse movie, give it to this unbearable film. Excruciating."

Yet that is not the way Paquin sees it. From the way she talks about the project, it is impossible not to conclude she would have walked over hot coals for this opportunity to prove that she is just as comfortable handling Hollywood wolves as she was rearing Canada geese.

"Fly Away Home was fun at the time, but I'm not making little girl movies anymore," she says, just in case anyone has failed to noticed that halter top.

"Besides, it's not a sudden, huge transition. It's a very gradual change that has taken place over three years."

Paquin, who lives with her divorced mother, is entitled to her opinion - but that last comment is surely delusional.

Before she was cast as Hurlyburly's low-rent Lolita, Paquin's roles had followed a predictable course. After The Piano, the Oscar role she landed by accident when she accompanied her elder sister to a casting call, there was the huge box-office hit Fly Away Home.

She was 11 by that stage and hot as a cheap pistol, as they say in Hollywood.

At 12 she was the young Jane Eyre and, a few months later, she played a tomboy terror in a panned TV version of novelist Carson McCuller's The Wedding Party.

Not one of those parts gave the slightest hint that Hurlyburly's calculating Donna, a 16-year-old who cheerfully trades sex for a place to sleep, was waiting eagerly in the wings of Paqin's imagination.

"Despite everything she is, she's in complete control of everything she does and is a very strong person for that," Paquin says of Donna.

"In many ways I think she is the only person in the film who is in control of her life.

"You can kind of figure out what kind of person she is and what kind of life she's had. She obviously hasn't had a particularly stable environment. She'll do whatever she needs to survive and take care of herself.

"It means living on an elevator, it means living in an elevator."

Which makes Donna's life rather different from the one Paquin enjoys.

Still too young to see her own performance in Campion's R-rated classic, she leads a surprisingly dull existence - at least by her own account.

Even last year's move from Wellington to Los Angeles hasn't been enough to keep her fully occupied, nor the challenge of fitting into a new social circle without her father, who remained in New Zealand after the divorce.

"I'm hardly a bad girl," she explains. "I study hard. For fun, I hang out with my friends, go to parties, talk about boys, listen to, like, Jane's Addiction at a friend's house. I mean, when you're 16, there's not a lot to do.

"The reason I don't go to acting school is that I really want to go to regular school with typical kids, like this prep school I'm in. I do well at my studies. I do seem to get mostly As."

All of which no doubt helped as background for her next role, as a savvy younger sister caught up in the teenage angst at a trendy LA high school in She's All That (due in New Zealand cinemas on April 1).

As for Hurlyburly, she offers no apologies for causing all that consternation.

If only the rest of the world could see the film in the same clear and simple light that she used to illuminate Donna's character, her life would be a whole lot simpler.

"This is all just acting, you know," says Anna, who helped the wardrobe department design Donna's scanty costume.

"I don't really have sex with those men, or they with me! And I don't say those naughty words in real life."

Co-star Spacey has spent enough time in Hollywood to see rising talents flop and fail. He is sure that fate is nowhere in Paquin's future - something he attributes in part to her willingness to step outside the sugar-candy mould of Fly Away Home.

"She was 15 years old when we made this film and I would look at the quality of her work and the depth of her commitment and honesty and would think, `Oh man, where's she going to be in 10 years from now? The answer - right up!"

Pictured: Anna Paquin.