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Isn’t
she lucky NEW ORLEANS - Britney Spears doesn’t want to be Britney Spears. At least for a couple of hours. “My biggest wish is that people would just go see this movie and forget about who I am and just see Lucy,” Spears says of the stifled small-town teen-ager she plays in her first film, “Crossroads,” which will open nationwide today. “But I know that’s very hard because it’s hard to separate the two, because I am who I am.”
Who she is is the biggest solo pop star in North America. This means Britney can get a movie made just because she is Britney. She is the first female pop singer in history to have her first three albums debut at No. 1. If her latest album, “Britney,” has failed to reach the stratospheric heights of her first two sets of sex-drenched bubblegum, it is not, she reminds us, ready for the cutout bins yet. “I’m still working the second single,” Spears says in a baby-doll drawl, “and three of the songs are in the movie, so it will be around awhile, I hope.” So she hopes, will Britney Spears. “Crossroads” is, in her words, the attempt to “take it to the next level.” Ever since she hit the jukebox jackpot at age 17 with “... Baby One More Time,” she has been inundated with offers to make a movie, but she says her first priority was to establish herself as a singer. Critics would argue over whether she has in fact done that, but few would deny that she’s worked every attribute she has to the max or that she’s created an image — sweet virgin playing sexy dress-up, or sexy undressed-up — that has inspired a million fantasies, in teen-age girls and boys alike, not to mention a few older fans who, uh, like to keep up with kids today. On this day, Spears isn’t exactly projecting power, but she does seem as natural as any 20-year-old can curled up on a couch in an expensive hotel suite, with a protective publicist hovering within hearing distance. Though she has been “plained down,” as she puts it, for her role as a small-town honor student in “Crossroads,” today she’s full-bore Britney. She’s dressed in a sheer top and lower-than-low-rise jeans cut to show a lot of belly — a lot rounder and softer than the one displayed in her videos. When she is asked any question beyond “Is making movies harder than making records?” she looks at the interviewer as if he’s speaking Croatian and says, sweetly but blankly, “I don’t understand what you mean.” And you can almost believe her. At 20, she has been in show business more than half her life, having starred in an off-Broadway show at age 9 and joined “The All-New Mickey Mouse Club” at 11. By her own admission, she has nearly all her needs taken care of, by her mother, Lynne Spears; a cadre of managers, record producers and minders, and her “sweeter-than-anything” boyfriend Justin Timberlake, the ‘N Sync heartthrob. Still, it’s difficult to know whether she’s really stumped by the questions or savvy enough to stonewall politely. For example, she says “Crossroads” was the result of her “brainstorming about a movie,” having been unimpressed by all the scripts she had been offered. She was inspired by the fact that “to this day, I still have the same three best friends I’ve known forever. Then I started to think of different story lines where I could go, and that’s where the writer came in and really helped me.” Britney plays Lucy, who, after graduating from high school, defies her overprotective father (Dan Aykroyd) by going off with her grade-school best friends Kit (Zoe Saldana) and Mimi (Taryn Manning) on a road trip. Mimi, who is pregnant, is going to Los Angeles to audition for a record contract, while Zoe wants to visit her fiancé there. Lucy wants to be dropped off in Phoenix, to visit the mother (Kim Cattrall) who abandoned the family when Lucy was a baby. Their driver is a handsome guitarist (Anson Mount) who, rumor has it, was in jail for murder. In the film’s first 10 minutes, Lucy is seen in her underwear twice. The first time, she’s miming to a Madonna song, which Spears says “is my little tribute.” The second time, she’s disrobing for a planned deflowering that she can’t go through with. Lucy, it turns out, is a virgin. “It’s a little embarrassing, because when we made the movie, none of that stuff was being talked about,” says Spears. “That stuff” is British tabloid reports that Spears is no longer the proud virgin she has told various interviewers she was. Spears makes it clear she doesn’t want to reopen that can of worms. But she does say she can’t live up to her fans’ expectations, “because I have no idea what those expectations are.” Asked how she feels about having the most private areas of her life invaded, she retreats to the boilerplate: “It’s all part of it, and I have to accept that. I’m blessed to be here right now, and if that’s the worst I have to deal with, I’m really, really lucky.” A lot of musicians would agree with her there, and undoubtedly, so will a lot of actors when “Crossroads” hits the screen. She says an album every two years, a movie every two years and “a lot of really good vacations in between” sounds like “a pretty good plan.” Her goal, she says, is to become a better performer and a good actress. |
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