She burst into peals of laughter when we told her that for us she’s always been the woman who was chased by Christian Bale with a chainsaw. Naked. “No, I didn’t see everything! We wore discreet coverings,” grinned Cara Seymour when we asked her about playing Christie in the 2000 black comedy horror flick, American Psycho.

And where did we find her? The 52-year-old English actress was at the 22nd Kolkata International Film Festival, where her latest film, A Woman, A Part, was shown on Wednesday at Nandan. Directed by Brooklyn-based film-maker Elisabeth Subrin, who was also present at the screening, A Woman, A Part is a contender in the Women Directors’ Films category at the festival. 

Cara, who has played Tom Hanks’s stepmother-to-be in You’ve Got Mail and the gangster Hell-Cat Maggie in Gangs of New York, plays former stage actress Kate in this film. “I love the way Elisabeth doesn’t take even a moment for granted. She questions where there’s often just silence, she finds new ways to look at things,” said Cara, who has been in the movies for 20 years.

“My film is about a woman who is a television actress and she is very unhappy because she feels she has become a commercial, not a person,” said Elisabeth, speaking about her protagonist Anna Baskin, played by Maggie Siff. Cara plays Anna’s former friend, who stops being an actress but doesn’t stop loving the art of acting. 

This is Cara’s first time in India and while she is aware that there is a rich culture of cinema here, she is only familiar with Satyajit Ray. “I only know Satyajit Ray movies. I saw the Apu Trilogy… beautiful,” said Cara, whose next is a small movie on industrial poisoning of workers in the 1920s in America. 

(Above) Cara with writer Nabaneeta Dev Sen, who attended the screening of A Woman, A Part. 

Text: Samhita Chakraborty, pictures: Pabitra Das