Polley stays true to indie roots

TORONTO — If Sarah Polley were a country, she would be on high alert, code orange. The fine-boned veteran actress seemed to hover above the restaurant banquette where she sat, her huge blue eyes apparently unburdened by eyelids. She was expounding on the slippery sensation of being interviewed.

"I'm actually a really gregarious, loud person who laughs a lot, but if you get me into an interview, I start playing a role of myself instead of myself, and accommodating this image of me that's very serious," she said. "So these days I'm trying to be less precious, less earnest, and not worry about it so much." She paused, then burst out laughing. "Oh, (gosh). I sound earnest about not being earnest!"

Earnestness may not be of much use to the average young movie star, but it's a quality befitting a writer-director, which Polley, at 28, has become. This month, before sitting on the jury at the Cannes Film Festival, she joins the ranks of indie auteurs with the release of her first feature, "Away From Her."

Over lunch in the heart of the fast-gentrifying downtown neighborhood where she lives, Polley was reflective, particularly about her struggle to reconcile a social conscience with the narrow expectations Hollywood maintains for beautiful blondes. In 1999, she was the one starlet on the crowded cover of Vanity Fair's Hollywood issue who publicly scolded the magazine for crediting Tommy Hilfiger as her clothier when the overalls she wore actually came from a vintage store in Toronto, purchased by her own hand.

With a few exceptions — dealing ecstasy and hanging with Katie Holmes in "Go," slaying zombies in the remake of "Dawn of the Dead" — Polley the actress has rarely left the borders of the independent film world. She has worked with a long list of the best studio-free directors around, including Atom Egoyan (on "Exotica" and "The Sweet Hereafter"), Wim Wenders ("Don't Come Knocking") and David Cronenberg ("eXistenZ").

"Away From Her" keeps her squarely in the independent milieu. An adaptation of the Alice Munro short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," it features a rare lead performance from Julie Christie, who stars opposite the pedigreed Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent ("The Shipping News"). The pair play Fiona and Grant, a long-married couple confronting Fiona's Alzheimer's. Fiona enters a nursing home, and Grant watches — helplessly at first, then furiously — as his wife becomes inexplicably bonded to another patient, a mute in a wheelchair played by Michael Murphy ("Manhattan").