That face.
    Molly Parker is striding through Kensington Market, wearing a secondhand fake leopard skin coat, black T-shirt, worn cords and scuffed boots - the kind of grungy, funky Market look that is repeated a dozen times over in this downtown part of Toronto.  She's had a ton of press since Kissed came out last year, from the Rolling Stone to the cover of Hollywood's trade paper Variety, and won a best-actress Genie.  As star of the art-house hit, Parker has become Canada's answer to Parker Posey, queen of the independents with the same kind of skinny, geeky glamour.  But as she squints against the wind, no one recognizes her.
    However, when she sits down for a ginger ale and a cigarette in a local bar-cum-pool hall, head turn.  Not everyone realizes she's the Vancouver actress who played that necrophiliac in Kissed, a hit at the Toronto film festival, Cannes and with the critics everywhere.  Right now, with makeup and eyes wide open in the shadowy bar, she is obviously, radiantly someone.  What makes Parker real star material is that even without the lipstick and mascara - when she looks like a bratty 10-year-old, all freckles and sharp angles - there is something in that blank slate of a face that comes alive on the camera.
    In Twitch City, a half-hour, six-episode series beginning Monday at 9:30 p.m. on CBC, Parker plays Hope, the boring, ake-nice girlfriend whose main occupation is going to job interviews.  When her uptight boyfriend goes to jail after accidentally killing a bum, she becomes involved with his roommate Curtis (played by Don McKellar), an agoraphobic TV addict who charges Hope $200 per month to live in a closet.
    Like any respectable Canadian production, Twitch City is quirky - no laugh track, subtle pacing, etc. - but the production values are top notch, as is the direction by Bruce McDonald (Highway 61, Hard Core Logo).  No doubt about it, Twitch City is going to boost the celebrity of all the film talents involved.  Especially Parker, the show's redeeming angel.
    Parker is nothing like Hope, though she kept a lot of her clothes including the worn ankle-high boots she is wearing now. ("I hate shopping.  I get most of my clothes from wardrobe sales.")  They're both sweet and pretty and very nice, but Parker is much more the person that Hope could be, with a few years of assertiveness training, a fashion makeover, ambition, determination and better instincts.
    "Molly is highly intelligent, articulate and has a very good sense of material," says Susan Cavan, whose company Accent Entertainment co-produced the series with Shadow Shows and CBC.  "She's very good at understanding characters, but even more important she has a sense of humour." What her character does in Twitch City, says Cavan, is provide "the moral centre between two guys, not that she educates them that much."
    Parker agrees with the assessment.  "Hope's one of those women who need to help people all the time.  She wants to be a saviour to men, which a lot of women do.  I've certainly done it," she says.
    As she sips her drink and reminisces fondly about how much fun the Twitch shoot was, what a great director McDonald is, and how admirable McKellar's Curtis, she imparts a real affection for Hope.  Even if she still looks like a dork.  "She's terminally unhip," says Parker with a laugh, "but she tries really hard."  Costumes include an obnoxious, brown plaid car coat, a series of ghastly shirts and cardigans and a fluffy turquoise tuque that makes her look demented - which Parker actually bought after the show wrapped.  "I love it.  I still wear it." But without coming right out and saying it, Parker seems to identify more closely with the woman she played in director Lynne Stopkewich's unusual tale Kissed.
    "Hope is really opposite from the character in Kissed," she says.  She describes Sandra Larson, who works in a funeral home and finds spiritual and physical completion in her union with dead young men, as "a woman who totally lives outside of her relationships with men in terms of what is expected of her, whereas Hope totally lives in that world of male expectations.

    Like the self-contained Sandra, Parker is reserved and poised, but transparently emotional, leaning forward to enthusiastically state her love of working with women directors, withdrawing self-consciously when the photographer joins us at the table.  But even when she's uncomfortable she forges ahead similar to the way Sandra tried to explain herself to her boyfriend in Kissed, attempting to say what she means regardless of how it might be received.
    "The good thing about Kissed is that it's a love story," says Parker.  "It's very rare to see women control their sexual lives in movies.  You never see that happen without the woman being punished for it."
    The movie was made four years ago, but only in the last year, after festival raves and the movie's release in the United States, have Stopkewich and Parker seen their faith in the bizarre tale rewarded.
    "I've been on 15 planes since Dec. 1," says Parker, who after this mid-January is about to fly off to Utah for the premiere at the Sundance Film Festival of Under Heaven, written and directed by another woman, Meg Richmond.  During three weeks in Los Angeles last month, Parker had 37 auditions; Toronto-based Alliance Communications recently flew her over to London to read with Ralph Fiennes (The English Patient) for a part in Sunshine, an epic historical drama directed by Istvan Szabo (Mephisto) that will be shot in Budapest.
    Parker, dismayed that news of the Fiennes audition has leaked out, is circumspect about the details, saying only, "Whether I get the part doesn't matter.  I'm reading with some great actors and directors."

    Parker knows she is in a good position.  She studied ballet for many years while growing up in the bedroom community of Maple Ridge outside Vancouver.  Neither her parents nor her younger brother have ever been in show business, but an actor uncle helped her get an agent when she was 15.  In the 10 years since, she has done her fair share as an assembly- line bit player, from no-name movies of the week to series like Poltergeist and The Sentinel, to a major part in last year's TV-movie Intensity.
    "For a lot of years I did American TV shows in Vancouver.  You work so fast and no one really cares what you do as long as you say your lines and don't bump into the furniture."
    For Parker, Kissed opened the doors artistically even before it brought critical success and more opportunities.  "Working with Lynn, it was the first time in a long time that a director talked to me, asked me what I thought.  I was almost paralyzed - 'Don't ask me, I'm just an actor.'  But when someone gives you freedom to make those kinds of choices," says Parker, the ideas just started coming.
    "I'm 25, I'm a woman.  As an actress that gives me seven to 10 years to really make it happen." She may want children, she may eventually want another life, possibly as a producer, because acting "is so intangible.  You can see it at a theatre or on television, but it's not like being a chairmaker. ... I like the idea of making something from beginning to end."

    For now, however, she's just "going to work really hard," focusing on the film instead of television.  She made an exception for Twitch City because of its "filmic quality," and the people involved: along with McKellar, her co-stars include Daniel MacIvor as her hapless boyfriend Nathan, and Bruce McCulloch as odious talk-show host Rex Reilly.
    She has three films lined up when she returns from Sundance.  The first to be shot in Montreal, is Ladies Room, a feature made up of three shorts, with Parker's segment directed by yet another woman, Nadine Schwartz.  Parker plays a hot young actress tangling with two older divas before they go onstage.  "it's about women and about how the aging process affects actresses."
    Next, also in Montreal, is an American feature, Waking the Dead, directed by Keith Gordon (Wild Palms).  Parker plays the girlfriend of a man obsessed by the woman he loved 10 years before.  Then it's back to Toronto for Jesus Freaks, directed by Lori Lansens, about a young woman left alone when her fervidly Catholic grandmother dies.  Two squeegee boys on the lam show up; one of them is the spitting image of the girl's much-worshipeped portrait of Jesus Christ and "she believes the rapture has come," says Parker.
    Of all the scripts being offered to her these days, she's, because of the parts and the directors; but an added bonus is "I get to stay relatively close to home."
    Based in Toronto, she has so far not been tempted by the siren call of Los Angeles.  "that city is really hard on women.  I see them in their cars.  They look so sad, with their bleached blond hair and their sunglasses.  Unless you're 22 years old and perfect..." she trails off with a shrug.
    "That's what I appreciate so much about working in Canada.  There's way more film work now, you with really great people, and still walk down the street and have a life.  You can win a Genie and no one watches it or cares," she says without a trace of irony.
    After the interview she's heading home to do laundry - and looking forward to it.  Living in a house not far from Kensington Market, she loves cooking, gardening and the "luxury of domesticity."  She moved to Toronto last year, not for work, but "for love." She won't say who he is or what he does, except that her hectic schedule is not a problem.  "I live with the most wonderful, most secure man I've ever met."
    Besides, she adds, "Whaddya gonna do?  Complain about it?  I've spent so long trying to get work and now I have it.  I'm so lucky."