Ren Jender – Bitch Flicks

The Women of the New York Film Festival 2016

The New York Film Festival (NYFF) wraps up this weekend. Here are the best of films about women or directed by women (or both) that still have NYFF weekend screenings (including some “encore” shows on Sunday) or are streaming or open today in theaters: including Ava DuVernay’s ’13th,’ Kelly Reichardt’s ‘Certain Women,’ and Pedro Almodóvar’s ‘Julieta.’

Written by Ren Jender.

Julieta

I wanted to laugh when writer-director Pedro Almodóvar said after the press screening that this film is a “restrained” one. Compared to his other films, Julieta is subdued, but it also shows that even when he tries, Almodóvar can never tamp down his love of bright colors, ’80s fashion, overwhelming emotion and dramatic music — thank God! Julieta is one of his best films, a meditation on secular guilt, focusing on one woman’s life. Julieta (non-Spanish speakers: say, “who’ll-YAY-tah”) has all the little regrets most of us have, but circumstances beyond her control lead to some of those regrets becoming deep sorrow. He and Canadian writer Alice Munro (who wrote the short stories the film is based on) are a perfect, if unlikely, match. And Munro is two for two, so far, in films I’ve seen based on her work: Sarah Polley’s Away From Her (with Julie Christie as the “her” of the title), another very different examination of guilt, was magnificent.

I was a little hesitant about Julieta before I saw it: Almodóvar swings wildly from making films that are my favorites to making ones that bore and offend me at the same time. The trailer shows that its lead actresses spend time in bad wigs (the film spans 30 years and in one amusing scene, we see the covered face of the actress who plays the younger Julieta, Adriana Ugarte, and when she’s uncovered she is Emma Suárez, the actress playing the older Julieta) but the wigs are the only non-outstanding elements in Julieta.

Praising a male director like Almodóvar for putting women characters at the center of his films and making them multilayered, with complicated lives that don’t revolve around men may seem retro. But after sitting through Paterson, with its I Love Lucy wife who has a wildly different ambition every day and plies her husband to fund her far-fetched “dreams,” and the fraudulent Manchester by the Sea, which in spite of some good acting (by Michelle Williams and Casey Affleck — and only those two), has not one main woman character who seems to have a job or much of an identity beyond “wife/mother/girlfriend,” congratulating male directors for not being cavemen is apparently still necessary.

Karl Marx City

This documentary about the pervasive spying — using ordinary citizens as well as trained professionals — in the former East Germany where the co-director (with Michael Tucker), Petra Epperlein, was born and raised, blends satiny black and white cinematography with clips of vintage surveillance film and video. We follow Epperlein back home as she tries to get some answers about who was an informer and who wasn’t.

Epperlein transcends the divide between personal documentaries and the “talking heads” kind as she interviews everyone, not just her own family, but those in charge of disseminating the files meticulously kept on nearly everyone in the country until that country didn’t exist anymore. One of her best friends in school had parents who were officials who spied on the populace; she gets them to talk about their work (which they now regret). Epperlein explains that in a place where, the joke went, in every gathering of three people, one was an informant, people couldn’t trust one another so, “everyone was the enemy,” including, perhaps, her own father. Epperlein doesn’t just expose this culture of mistrust, she recreates it in this extraordinary film.

13th

At first, I was slightly disappointed with Ava DuVernay’s documentary but she confirmed when she spoke after the press screening something I had suspected: this film is not really meant for those of us who have already heard Bryan Stevenson speak about racism in the justice system or for those who have already seen Angela Davis, in a vintage clip from The Black Power Mixtape, speak about the particular history of violence Black people in this country have faced. 13th is an overview of the oppression of Black people by the U.S. criminal justice system meant for people who haven’t been exposed to this info in other venues — which is the majority of those who will see it on Netflix (the producer of the film, currently streaming it).

Still I can’t help wishing the film had fewer professors and writers explaining events — though one does have a great riff on how Angela Davis, when she was on trial, presented herself differently than other Black defendants would. Much more powerful is the cross cutting of Donald Trump’s incitements of violence, violence against protesters at his rallies, and a clip from the Civil Rights era in which an older man in a suit is attacked by young white men. Also unforgettable are the clips of the original Birth of a Nation with commentary explaining that the burning cross was an invention of the film, becoming a signature of the real Ku Klux Klan after it was reinvigorated by Birth of a Nation’s heroic portrayal. Don’t tell me harmful stereotypes in film don’t foster violence ever again.

Toni Erdmann

I liked this feature from German writer-director Maren Ade, but I’m shocked so many other people like it too. Toni Erdmann has no score, no real laugh-out-loud moments past its first ten minutes, and its “jokes” go on for far too long. But as Ade explained after the press screening, the film is about humor but it’s not a comedy. A bear-like father (Peter Simonischek) puts on a (bad) wig and tells strings of lies in front of his grown, corporate-consultant daughter (Sandra Hüller), but unlike many “jokers,” his impulse doesn’t seem sadistic. As he glances out of the corner of his eye at his daughter Ines, he seems nothing more than a little boy who wants to play. Ines is matter-of-fact about the ruthless nature of her work, but she’s also melancholy and frustrated.

This film isn’t the kind that ends with the daughter giving up her career to start a clown college with her father. The changes the characters go through are small ones, and the connections they make are fleeting. But this lack of an easy resolution and the film’s portrait of the mendacity and absurdity of the corporate world are precisely what resonates with its audience.

Certain Women

I fell asleep during part of writer-director Kelly Reichardt’s new film, and sleep is legitimate criticism: whatever is happening on-screen isn’t engaging the viewer. But Lily Gladstone, the Indigenous actress who plays the young, soft-butch, half-Crow rancher in the film’s last interlude is an actress I could watch all day. Gladstone is the only one of the main cast who is from Montana, where the film takes place (and where Maile Meloy, the author of the collection of short stories the movie is based on, is from). The openness of her smile, her calm voice, and steady gaze make her character, Jamie, stick with us in a way the other characters (including Kristen Stewart’s Beth, the adult ed teacher and lawyer Jamie has a crush on) do not. Gladstone is beautiful wearing little to no makeup, but she looks like a woman who works on a ranch: she’s not as sylphlike as the other actresses in the film, and her hair, even when she’s trying to look “nice” is unstyled. I hope Gladstone becomes the big star she deserves to be, but I also hope she can remain unscathed by Hollywood’s physical expectations for actresses. We’ll see.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YH5_4osOZK8″]

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Village Voice, The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the The Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

‘Best of Enemies’: When Politics Was All About Men

Out queer writer Gore Vidal was prescient in discussing the danger of self-labeled “conservative” Republicans (“reactionary” has always been a better term for them). In 1968, as part of network news coverage of the political conventions Vidal debated William F. Buckley, the loathsome “conservative” stalwart… In their debates, Vidal describes Buckley’s rhetoric as “always to the right and almost always in the wrong.” The debates are the focus of Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s documentary ‘Best of Enemies.’

Written by Ren Jender.

When the media or an individual claims Donald Trump is the Republican presidential candidate who most directly scapegoats marginalized groups, I think of all the decades Republicans have wallowed in their slander of queer and trans people. That slander is a big part of the reason I have no tolerance for hearing or reading that Democrats and Republicans are “just as bad” as one another and why I don’t see people who vote Republican and Republican candidates themselves as adorably quirky, the way white-guy, late-night talk show hosts seem to.

Out queer writer Gore Vidal was prescient in discussing the danger of self-labeled “conservative” Republicans (“reactionary” has always been a better term for them). In 1968, as part of network news coverage of the political conventions Vidal debated William F. Buckley, the loathsome “conservative” stalwart perhaps best known these days for his proposal in The New York Times, during the the peak years of the AIDS crisis in the ’80s, that infected people should be forcibly tattooed with their status on their buttocks and forearms. In their debates, Vidal describes Buckley’s rhetoric as “always to the right and almost always in the wrong.”

The debates are the focus of Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s documentary Best of Enemies, released last year and streaming this month on pbs.org, but anyone looking for context on either man’s opinions (like Buckley’s views on people with AIDS) will have to look elsewhere. The curse of gotta-hear-both-sides “balanced” journalism that legitimized the presidential campaign of Donald Trump is very much in evidence in Best of Enemies, as we see white guy after white guy lionize Buckley (so few women are in this documentary that one wonders if the filmmakers counted the woman in archival footage asking Buckley on Laugh-In, “Do you think mini-skirts are in good taste,” or the woman in a white bikini shown from behind on Miami Beach, as part of the film’s gender balance). He employs many of the same methods we see Trump using today, though Trump’s speeches are on a middle-school reading level, so he doesn’t have Buckley’s much vaunted vocabulary (which Vidal points out Buckley uses to distract, not illuminate).

Vidal wrote incisively about the debates and Buckley in an article in Esquire (which stung Buckley enough that he sued the magazine). One of the essay’s many truths leaps out in the wake of current events — and recent debates: “…There is a demagogic strategy in all this. If one is lying, accuse others of lying.”

Vidal came from the same patrician background as Buckley (Vidal was the grandson of a senator and the step-brother of Jackie Onassis) so like native Californian Joan Didion writing on Ronald and Nancy Reagan, he was able to get under the skin of Buckley and look into his corrupt soul:

“…Joe Kennedy’s sons and Senator Gore’s grandson changed as they made their way in the world, learned charity or at least good sense, but not Bill — he is still the schoolboy debater echoing what he heard in his father’s house…”

During a final debate when Vidal angered him, Buckley said in his affected, nails-on-the-blackboard accent, “Now listen you quee-ah, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face.” What most riled Buckley in that Esquire article was Vidal’s implication that he was a closet “quee-ah” himself. Vidal cites two gay publications of the era which outed Buckley, and later writings (including novelist Alexander Chee’s wonderful remembrance of working as part of the coterie of gay cater waiters in the Buckley residence in the ’90s) have implied the same, but those avenues remain unexplored in this film.

The film applies its misguided, “even-handed” approach when portraying both men in later life. We’re supposed to see Vidal as pathetic and mostly forgotten (even as his late biography Palimpsest was one of his best-reviewed books) but hanging out in an Italian villa with a young, cute “friend” seems a much more pleasant old age than the one Buckley evinces in later clips when he tells Charlie Rose he’s ready to stop living. Although the film states the election of Ronald Reagan was a triumph for Buckley, as time progressed more and more of Buckley’s opinions (his support of Joe McCarthy, his view that Martin Luther King belonged “behind bars,” and something he says in the debate “Freedom breeds inequality”) were discredited, so much so that they seem like they could have been written for The Onion.

Buckley died before Vidal did, and Vidal was able to give him the send-off Buckley earned, “RIP WFB — in hell.” But really Vidal had written Buckley’s obituary years before in Esquire, when he described Buckley’s on-air homophobia during their debate:

“…In full view of ten million people, the little door in William F. Buckley Jr.’s forehead suddenly opened and out sprang that wild cuckoo which I had always known was there but had wanted so much for others, preferably millions of others, to get a good look at.”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzgfQvB2dvA”]

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing on Bitch Flicks has also been published in The Village Voice, The Toast, Rewire, xoJane and The Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

‘As I Open My Eyes’ to Sex and The Police State: An Interview with Director Leyla Bouzid

Two things that make Leyla Bouzid’s new film ‘As I Open My Eyes’ distinct from these other [portrait of the artist, coming-of-age films] are: the lead who resists family pressure by joining a band is a young woman and her parents have more to be concerned about than what the neighbors think. The action takes place in Tunis, Tunisia, in 2010, before the Revolution, so any kind of rebellion, even artistic, can draw the attention of the police and lead to arrest — or worse.

Written by Ren Jender.

“My uncool parents won’t let me be an artist (or writer)” is such a common plot for coming-of-age films that a repertory theater could show a different one every night and fill at least a full month’s calendar. But girls and women usually need not apply as leads in the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man genre. In these films, the wife and/or girlfriend of the main character rarely has a personality of her own. The male protagonist has a meddling (or mostly silent) mother. We see sisters as troubled or as comic relief, like in writer-director David Chase’s Not Fade Away, a lackluster semi-autobiographical account of a not very successful band in the 1960s.

Two things that make Leyla Bouzid’s new film As I Open My Eyes distinct from these other films are: the lead who resists family pressure by joining a band is a young woman, Farah (Baya Medhaffar) and her parents have more to be concerned about than what the neighbors think. The action takes place in Tunis, Tunisia, in 2010, before the Revolution, so any kind of rebellion, even artistic, can draw the attention of the police and lead to arrest — or worse.

But Farah is a teenager (she’s 18), so she doesn’t believe she’ll get into trouble with the authorities. As her mother (Ghalia Benali) tries to dissuade her from performing with the band, which includes Farah’s slightly older, manbun-wearing boyfriend, Bohrène (Montassar Ayari), Farah says, “Everyone’s scared for nothing.”

Her mother sighs as she tells Farah, “I used to be like you.”

Like girls and young women all over the world, Farah blithely lies about why she’s late coming home which sends her mother into paroxysms of rage and frustration and leads her to vow to never speak to her daughter again. But the fractured family puts on a good front for their other relatives during Ramadan Iftar as they talk of Farah becoming a doctor and avoid any mention of her musical ambitions.

Bouzid, who is from Tunisia, (she now lives in France) co-wrote the script with Marie-Sophie Chambon and they capture the balancing act required of those who live under a police state. Even the band discusses which songs are (and aren’t) safe to play. When one member asks, “Aren’t we censoring ourselves,” we can see how younger people chafe against the restrictions that have defined their parents’ lives.

A great deal of the film takes place during the band’s performances and rehearsals, the songs commenting on the political situation of the country, similar to Cabaret‘s juxtaposition of musical performances and increasing oppression. But the music is North African with a tinge of punk: Farah’s style of singing sometimes reminds us of X-Ray Spex’s Poly Styrene and Farah and her bandmates pogo to one song. Farah’s great curly meringue of hair (like her mother, Farah looks like a different person with her hair pulled back) is offset by an early-’80s-style “tail.”

Medhaffar is fully committed as a singer, sometimes seeming to be nearly moved to tears by what she sings, but she shines offstage as well. Too often, a teen lead is played by an actor several years older, a glaring discrepancy at that age. Medhaffar, if anything, seems younger than 18, perfect for the stubborn, determined, and love-addled Farah. Bouzid and Medhaffar expertly capture the intoxication that is a young woman’s first love and first (good!) sexual experience. Benali is also excellent, so much so that I wished the script added more clarity to her backstory. As I Open My Eyes is the second film I’ve seen written and directed by a Tunisian woman about a Tunisian woman becoming an artist (the other is Satin Rouge), a genre I hope we see more of — and not just from Tunisia.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgx_48jQAmE”]

I had the opportunity to talk with Leyla Bouzid, the director and co-writer of As I Open My Eyes, by phone last month. This interview was edited for concision and clarity.

Bitch Flicks: Baya Medhaffar is not just a great singer but also so good in the scenes that show her emotional and physical attachment to her boyfriend. Were there films that feature a young woman’s first love — and sex — that you were influenced by? Were there mistakes you’d seen in other films that you wanted to avoid?

Leyla Bouzid: We wanted to show the emotion. It’s her first love. The kiss at the start of the film is the first kiss and the time they make love is the first time she makes love, even if she doesn’t say it’s her first time. She just says, “It’s the first time I’ve seen a guy naked.” I was always thinking what was important for her. Because in other films, especially films from the Arab world, the issue would be she’s not a virgin anymore. This is not the truth; it’s not the real feeling this young woman would have. And I wanted the film to be very organic and very tactile, that we feel what you feel when someone is touching you for the first time. What I thought about were Jane Campion’s films, like The Piano. When the lovers touch each other you can really feel it. It’s a feminine way of showing love and attraction.

BF: I liked that the mother character starts out as seeming completely unreasonable, but then as the film goes on we see that she’s not. I’m wondering if you gave the actress Ghalia Benali [who is also a singer] any special direction.

LB: Ghalia was very afraid that we would think her character is hysterical. We talked a lot about the mother’s path. At the beginning of the film, she’s protecting her daughter so much that we think, “She’s crazy.” But at another point of the film we think, “She was right.” I pushed her to become this very protective mother. She trusted me. She said that how she was in the first part of the film reminded her of her own mother when she first started singing.

BF: Although the music is North African it also, especially in Medhaffar’s singing had a punk feel. And Farah has one of Patti Smith’s ’70s album covers hanging in her bedroom. What bands did you want Farah’s band to sound like or be influenced by?

LB: In Tunisia, there is not that much of a rock scene. There was when I was really a teenager but not during the period in the film. But there are a lot of Western bands that make rock and punk in Lebanon and Egypt and I was influenced by them. A band called Adif: it’s the band of the composer of the film [Khyam Allami]. It’s really rock but melancholy. I was also influenced by the Lebanese group called Mashrou’ Leila and by Maryam Saleh and Tamer Abu Ghazaleh. The idea was to have this mixture of traditional rock and traditional Tunisian music.

BF: The film takes place before the Revolution in 2010. Six years later, what do you think Farah would be up to? Do you think she would do as you did [Bouzid, like Deniz Gamze Ergüven, writer-director of Mustang attended the French film school La Fémis] and leave Tunisia?

LB: I think she’s still in Tunisia. She’s probably able to sing and has an audience and more of an ability to do concerts, but if she stays she’s probably disappointed — or depressed. When I was searching for the actress to play Farah, I met a lot of young women that were 22, 23 years old [which would be about Farah’s age now] and they were all kind of depressed. When I told them the story of Farah, they said, “Oh this is the story of my life, but I gave up and now I’m stuck with my family.” When watching the film, we can decide what happens. At the end it’s open, if she continues to sing or not.

BF: Your father is an acclaimed Tunisian director. Did you learn anything from him?

LB: The most useful thing I learned from him is: it is really hard in our country to make a film. In Tunisia making a first feature before turning 30 is unusual but part of why I could do it is because I had seen my father, how difficult it was every time for him to make a new film. Even though he was so famous in Tunisia it was still hard for him to get financing. I think when you start in cinema, it’s a dream and people idealize it. I didn’t. I knew it was really complicated.

BF: Muslims in France have been in the news lately. Your home is in France. Do the bans on Muslim women dressing how they want concern you?

LB: Yeah, I think really it’s just an empty, I don’t know how to say, a non-event. What the hell do you care about the clothes women wear when they swim? I’m relieved that the French courts stopped this. Politically, it was a very, very, very bad sign.

BF: Surveillance from the state, especially in the form of surrogates, like the “friend” of the band, is a big part of the film. Did you have experiences with state surveillance when you were in Tunisia? Did you know anybody who did? In the U.S., Muslims have been very much targeted in surveillance. Is the same thing happening in France?

LB: Yes, in Tunisia this event in the film, it really happened to me, but not in the same situation. When I was 16 and 17 years old, I was in a cinema club. We were all young. Some were 22 and I was the youngest I think. And we met every Saturday and talked about cinema and started to make our films. There was a guy who was the only one who had his own apartment, so we were always having parties at his house. If we were doing something we had to hide or we wanted to make out or whatever, we always went to his house. And after 3 years, I found out that he was a cop and that he was there to watch us. This is something that happened to a lot of people. Also, all the taxi drivers, they were working for the police, so every seventh person in Tunisia was a cop.

In France, let’s say the atmosphere has been really special for the past two years. It’s more speeches and the media and especially television are openly racist and Muslims are targeted in that way. There is more suspicion. I have a neighbor who’s Jewish but her skin is brown. She looks much more like an Arab than I do. And she told me she’s getting a lot of harassment every day. Individuals say to her, “Go back to your home,” and, “We don’t want Arab people here.”

BF: I’ve now seen two feminist films from Tunisian women writer-directors: yours and Raja Amari’s Satin Rouge, which feature women who find themselves through artistic expression. Can you tell me how you’ve been influenced by other women artists in or outside Tunisia?

LB: In general women directors are very inspiring, like Jane Campion, but also Tunisian women directors, like Moufida Tlatli. Also, other artistic women and singers, like Patti Smith. I really liked what she wrote in her books. And Bjork. And Frida Kahlo: these kind of women who are really creating things.

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and The Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

The Women Men Rescue (or Choose Not To): ‘The Witness’ and ‘Disorder’

Saving a beautiful woman from danger is such a pervasive male fantasy that right now, no matter where you are you could probably see an example of this trope by randomly flipping through channels or wandering into a multiplex. But what if the man was never able to save the woman? Or what if he has problems of his own that keep him from being a stereotypical hero?

Written by Ren Jender.

[Trigger Warning: discussion of explicit, fatal violence against women and rape]

You’d never know from watching movies that statistically men are much more likely to harm women than rescue them. Saving a beautiful woman from danger is such a pervasive male fantasy that right now, no matter where you are, you could probably see an example of this trope by randomly flipping through channels or wandering into a multiplex. But what if the man was never able to save the woman? Or what if he has problems of his own that keep him from being a stereotypical hero? Two new films, respectively James D. Solomon’s documentary The Witness and Alice Winocour’s French thriller Disorder, attempt to answer these questions.

The Witness tracks Bill Genovese, a Vietnam veteran and a person with an amputation who uses a wheelchair, as he tries to find out 40 to 50 years later (the film took a decade to make) what really happened the night his older sister, Kitty Genovese, was stabbed to death (and although it’s not included in the film also raped by her murderer) in front of her own Queens apartment building in 1964. Kitty Genovese’s killing became the stuff of front page headlines and sociology classes when an apocryphal story in The New York Times stated that 37 (the number was later amended to 38) of her neighbors, awakened by her screams, saw her being stabbed from their bedroom windows but none called the police or offered any other help which might have saved her life.

The truth, uncovered in more recent articles is: although neighbors heard her screams, nearly none of them knew what was going on (some thought she and her killer were a drunk married couple having an argument) especially since the scene was quiet and Kitty was out of sight for some time between her murderer’s initial attack (interrupted when a neighbor shouted at him through the window to get away from her) and when he fatally wounded her (after which a woman neighbor and friend of Kitty’s held her in her arms as she was dying).

The original news story was a manipulation of facts that made a compelling resume builder: Abe Rosenthal, who later became the long-reigning executive editor at The New York Times wrote a sensationalistic book based on the fabricated story. When Bill interviews Rosenthal, he still insists the original account was the correct one. Some other journalists who covered the story when it was still new, like the late Mike Wallace, are more philosophical. “It was a fascinating story,” he says, one that was apparently too good to let the facts get in the way.

What actually happened is more complex. One surviving neighbor Bill interviews on camera says, “I heard someone yelling, ‘Help, help,’ and I called the police,” though no records of her call are on police logs. As Bill explains to us in his narration, we don’t know if the station neglected to write down the call or if the woman is telling this story to make herself feel better about her own actions (or inaction) that night.

We also see, unlike in most narrative films, how uninterested some people are in the truth. Kitty’s killer, Winston Moseley (he has since died) who raped and killed at least one other woman and later, in an escape from prison, raped another and held hostages at gunpoint, refuses to meet with Bill and instead offers in a letter an obviously fictitious story about being framed. Moseley’s son, who was 7 at the time of the murder, is a minister who wears a shiny cross, but seems to believe another of his father’s stories (that contradicts everything we know about the case): that Kitty called him a racial slur and he snapped. The son also seems unwilling to accept that his father was responsible for the other murder (which, like Kitty’s, he confessed to after he was arrested for stealing a television) in which he set fire to his victim while she was still alive. Instead, the son states that, for years, he and the rest of family had believed that Kitty was related to the infamous New York Mafia Genoveses (she was not).

Because most of the memories of Kitty and the analysis of her death come from men, we feel a little removed from her. When one man talks about how his mother (the woman who held Kitty in her arms as she died in the hallway) often had coffee with Kitty and would “talk about whatever women talk about,” it’s as emblematic of the film’s distanced viewpoint, as the blurry, nearly faceless image we see of Kitty in clips from an old home movie which are interspersed throughout the film.

Bill is in nearly every frame of the film’s live action — most of the recreated scenes are rendered in the delicate, evocative animation of The Moth Collective. Even as we see him moving in and out of his wheelchair, wearing gloves to pull himself up the stairs to an otherwise inaccessible apartment and narrating the film, he remains something of a mystery. Why does he wait to find out the real story until 40 years after his sister died? By the time he tracks down the witnesses who testified at the trial, most are long dead. One of the only insights into his mindset comes from his wife: “The choices that he made in his life were all related to the fact that no one helped his sister.”

Bill also has a willful obtuseness when he wonders why Kitty, whom he was close to, never came out to him at a time (she died five years before Stonewall) when people who told their families they were queer were disowned. Kitty being a fairly out queer person (in a highlight, after her partner, Mary Ann Zielonko, tells Bill that the patrons at the bar where she worked didn’t know Kitty was queer, two of them tell Bill everyone at the bar knew and considered her “one of the boys”) makes me wonder if Karl Ross, one of the only witnesses who did see what was happening and was close enough to halt the murder, failed to do so because of homophobia — or a fear of police since he too may have been gay. Mary Ann says of Ross, “He knew us.” He owned the pet shop where Kitty bought a poodle for Mary Ann as an apology after an argument.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4irXjYt_LM”]

In Disorder, co-written and directed by Alice Winocour (the co-writer of Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Oscar-nominated Mustang), the woman in peril is Jessie (Diane Kruger), the wife of a shady and very wealthy businessman, and her protector is a paid bodyguard, Vincent (Matthias Schoenaerts) back from a stint in Afghanistan and suffering from PTSD (as well as some hearing loss, the doctor at the beginning tells him — and us).

We see Vincent try to do work as he deals with the sounds (all the electronic beeps and boops of modern life) and sights that trigger him. Wariness is actually part of his job description, but at first we’re unsure if Vincent’s has more to do with his internal struggles than it does with anything going on around him. Silly us: this film is a thriller. Of course the main guy’s paranoia is justified.

The film manages to squeeze a surprising amount of tension out of a not-terribly-original situation before its first violent incident (which is punctuated, stunningly, by a cracked windshield and a brief blackout) but falls apart soon afterward. The film has lots of overheard conversations and pieces of information that never really come together in coherent form, which might reflect what a paid protector would overhear and understand but doesn’t really engage the audience. The violent aggressors are the opposite of a menace in their cute, black, ninja outfits and masks. No matter what Vincent’s skills as a fighter (never impaired by psychological problems so obvious that Jessie asks his coworker directly, “What’s wrong with him?”) always flatten them, so the action becomes monotonous.

Winocour’s film was apparently influenced by her suffering PTSD from a traumatic childbirth experience (she and her daughter are fine now), a phenomenon women I’ve known have also experienced, but something I have never seen captured on film. I desperately wished Disorder was about women’s trauma instead of the tired cliché of a male soldier’s suffering. The film also doesn’t give us any insight into Jessie’s point of view. She looks great in the backless floral evening dress she wears to a party early in the film, but in every scene she is so much an object she might as well be tied in pink ribbon. This lack of attention to the character is especially shocking and disappointing because Winocour co-wrote Mustang, an instant feminist classic that is flawlessly attuned to its girl protagonists.

Additionally the husband and his cohorts are all from the Middle East: the only person of Middle-Eastern descent who doesn’t seem sinister is Ali, Jessie’s Keane-eyed, curly-haired, young son. France’s traditional anti-Arab sentiment and more recent anti-Muslim policies (on the same beaches where Jessie and Ali frolic) make the ethnicity of the bad guys seem not strictly coincidental and more than a little racist. Skip this film and see Mustang (again) instead.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMThvaCTAm0″]

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

‘Mission Blue’: “No Ocean, No Us”

Audiences have to look to documentaries like ‘Particle Fever,’ about the discovery of the Higgs boson, to see women scientists in prominent roles on film. The Netflix documentary ‘Mission Blue’ focuses on one woman scientist, Sylvia Earle, a former chief at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and pioneering oceanographer and marine biologist who is on a quest to save the world’s oceans from dying.

This (slightly edited) repost by staff writer Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on Women Scientists.

When characters on TV shows or in feature films encounter “a scientist,” that person is usually a man. The rare times when actresses play scientists in mainstream films (besides the obvious recent example of Ghostbusters) they’re more likely to be a punchline than a real character, like Denise Richards in the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough. Audiences have to look to documentaries like Particle Fever, about the discovery of the Higgs boson, to see women scientists in prominent roles on film. The Netflix documentary Mission Blue focuses on one woman scientist, Sylvia Earle, a former chief at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and pioneering oceanographer and marine biologist who is on a quest to save the world’s oceans from dying.

If that last sentence seems like an exaggeration, you should probably see this film. Earle, (now 80, but 79 when the film was released nearly two years ago) has been scuba diving as part of her research for the past 60 years (where she got her undergrad degree was one of the first places to adopt this “new” technology) and has seen firsthand the destruction that pollution and overfishing have wrought — even in areas “in the middle of nowhere” we (and she) think might be unaffected. She points out plastic bags and bottles she encounters on the ocean floor along with long stretches of dead coral and hardly any fish in places where both previously flourished.

She asks, “How can we use the ocean and not use it up?” She’s not afraid to take on the fishing industry, describing her stint at NOAA: “I went to one meeting of the fisheries council. And I was never allowed to go again.” When she warned of the (still) impending extermination of bluefin tuna (because of overfishing) she earned the nickname, “The Sturgeon General.” She resigned from her government position so she could further ocean conservation without being tethered by politics.

The film isn’t all doom and gloom. We also see, in some stunning underwater cinematography (both reminiscent of the Jacques Cousteau documentaries and surpassing them) places where ocean life is plentiful: huge schools of fish that seem like shimmering silver walls along with harmless whale sharks and sea turtles touchingly unwary of divers. Earle is a great advocate of everyone exploring the ocean in this way, theorizing that people care more about wildlife and its environment if they can see it: if wildflowers, birds, trees and deer were hidden away from us we might not have many protections for them either. Earle points out that even though she’s not “big and muscly,” she’s been diving her entire adult life and was able to convince her own mother, at 81, to give it a try. She loved it.

The film shows us the deep sea animals that Earle first encountered over 30 years ago in a special atmospheric diving suit she, along with her third husband, helped design. The natural flashing luminescence of fish and other sea creature at these depths look like city neon signs and gaudy Christmas displays all at once.

We also hear of Earle’s own journey first as a child allowed to explore, alone and for hours at a time, the wild places around her home (as few children now get the chance to do) and later her career as a scientist. She is careful to include herself when she says repeatedly that no one foresaw the depletion of a resource — the ocean and its inhabitants — that seemed too vast for human beings to impact. But now Earle says, “No ocean, no life. No ocean, no us.”

Earle became a scientist before second-wave feminism, when hardly any women entered that profession and we see in the media coverage of her accomplishments (when she was often the first or only woman but usually called a “girl”), the sexism of the era, which she undoubtedly encountered on the job as well. But the film’s co-director and interviewer Fisher Stevens (yes, the same one who acted in films like Short Circuit — but more recently was a producer for The Cove) doesn’t ask about these instances, only gushes about how “beautiful” she was. Earle is polite to him, but, at 79, she might be wondering when she will finally be excused from the unofficial beauty pageant all women are subjected to.

This film could use more women. We barely see Earle interacting with other women scientists or divers in Blue (except very briefly in Australia and in vintage footage of her time as part of an all-woman team of researchers) though many more women are in the field now than when she started her career. Not enough women are behind the scenes either: the film was directed and written by men. When we consider Earle is not just a scientific pioneer, but also writes books about ocean conservation for the general public (including one released to coincide with this documentary — as well as children’s books) and is an effective enough speaker for lay audiences that she won a substantial monetary award as part of TED Talks, the omission of her from the film’s writing team is baffling. If her own writing had been included, some elements, like a casual mention of the acidification of the ocean (thanks to carbon dioxide emissions) might have been better explained.

I also would have appreciated more of Earle’s take on her personal life. She was married three times and had three children (with the addition, for about a decade, of stepchildren too) but as her daughter (who now runs the deep sea equipment company Earle founded) tells us she “wasn’t June Cleaver.” Earle was taking part in underwater expeditions halfway across the world from her family at a time when wives and mothers were expected to make their homes and their husbands (and their husbands’ careers) their first priority. Her marriages suffered because of her absences, even though each of the husbands shared her interests. In this era of Lean In and “having it all,” I’m sure I’m not the only one who would like to hear in more detail about the experience of someone who attempted this balancing act before most of the so-called “experts” were born.

When we see the “Happiness is being in over your head.” sticker (illustrated with a scuba diver) in her office we think Earle may be a lot more interesting than the documentary makes her (an impression that Earle in interviews seems to confirm), but she’s still able to get in some good, informative quotes like, “What we’re doing to the ocean, what we’re doing to the planet as a whole comes back to us in bigger storms, more powerful storms, more frequent storms.”

A better film might have tied in Earle’s past status as an outsider (when she was one of the few women in her field) and rebel (in not conforming to the ’50s and ’60s cultural expectations of what a wife and mother should be) to her current role as an environmentalist. When we see (in graphic footage) gleeful fisherman cutting the fins off living sharks and then dumping their mutilated bodies into the ocean to die, we can’t help thinking that this boys’ club gives its members permission to behave badly — as most boys’ clubs do. Because she’s never been one of the boys, Earle can see their cruelty — and its consequences — more clearly: she even films a fishing boat “vacuuming” up its catch — from the vantage point of the fish.

In spite of its flaws, Blue is well worth seeing — and succeeded in making me want to try scuba diving. Some of the shots in the film seem more magical than the brightly colored, hologram illustrations in my childhood copy of The Little Mermaid. As Stevens accompanies Earle through storybook seascapes I thought, “This is the ‘beauty’ he should be gushing over.”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1wp2MQCsfQ”]

‘Concussion’: When Queer Marriage in the Suburbs Isn’t Enough

The queer women we see in sexual situations in ‘Concussion’ are not cut from the same Playboy-ready cloth as the two women in ‘Blue’: one client is fat, another is an obvious real-life survivor of breast cancer and some of her clients, like Eleanor herself, are nowhere near their 20s anymore.

This repost by staff writer Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

How many distinctive, acclaimed films about queer women can be released in American theaters at the same time? If we extrapolate from the actions of film distributors in 2013, the answer is apparently: only one. Concussion was named one of the top 20 films of that year by Slate’s Dana Stevens and was also named one of the top films of 2013 in Salon. Shortly after its premiere, at Sundance, The Weinstein Company acquired it for distribution. For most films that acquisition (and the later support from reviews in traditional media) would mean a national release, but the film had a very limited run in theaters that fall and never played a theater in my art-house-friendly city. The film was on Video On Demand, iTunes, and Google Play, but deserves much more attention than most films that never have a national theatrical run.

This film about a queer woman is, unlike the same year’s Blue Is The Warmest Color, directed and written by a queer woman (Stacie Passon who was nominated for “Best First Feature” in the Independent Spirit Awards and directed an episode of this past season of Transparent) and in many aspects is the answer to those who dismissed Blue as a product of the male gaze. Instead of a teenage protagonist, the main character in Concussion, Abby (played by Robin Weigert: Andrew O’Hehir in Salon summed up her performance as “OMFG”), is a 40-something, stay-at-home Mom, married to another woman and living in the suburbs.

When her son accidentally hits her in the face with a baseball, we see the confusion and blood in the family car ride to the hospital, as she moans to no one in particular, “I don’t want this. I don’t want this. I don’t want this.”

In the ER Abby says she is going back to work in the city (and that she really means it this time). Abby doesn’t need to work for money: her spouse, Kate, is a divorce attorney, kept busy by the dissatisfied wives in their social circle. We see the wives’ well-maintained bodies in slow motion, at the beginning of the film, in spin and yoga classes as David Bowie sings on the soundtrack, “Oh you pretty things…”

Passon knows this world well She lives in the town (Montclair) Abby does. She is married to a woman and has children, one of whom accidentally hit her in the face with a baseball. The parallels between her life and Abby’s may be why the character and setting seem so fully realized.

Abby for the most part blends in with her straight women friends but we see she’s different from them–and not just in her orientation. She reads books while she vacuums. When a friend is circulating a “new motherhood” survey for an article in a parenting magazine, Abby writes of dreams in which she sticks her then newborn son in the microwave–and other dreams in which she and her son are married. She writes, “My poor baby, I didn’t know whether to kill him, fuck him, or eat him.”

At times Abby’s queerness does separate her from the other women. When Abby mentions to her friend that one of the group of women they work out with is “cute,” the friend (played by Janel Maloney) reproaches Abby, “She’s not a lesbian!”

Abby starts work with a contractor to refurbish a city loft. As they transform the apartment, she transforms too, first hiring women to have sex with her and then working out of the loft as a high-priced escort, “Eleanor,” whose clients are all women.

A woman character turning to sex work for reasons other than money is usually a male artist’s conceit, as in Luis Buñuel’s great Belle de Jour, which features stunning, beautifully dressed, doctor’s wife, Catherine Deneuve, working in a brothel while her handsome, attentive (but clueless) husband sees his patients. In women’s memoirs of sex work (like Michelle Tea’s Rent Girl) the money is the point of the work (as it is with most work).

A sex worker character whose clients are all women (when the vast majority of sex work clients are men) is also usually the creation of a straight male artist–and is usually a male character so the work avoids any explicit same-sex scenes.

Perhaps because Concussion turns that last trope on its head (or perhaps because New York is a big city that can cater to many kinds of tastes) we accept the conceit of a woman over 40 seeing women clients (for $800 a session) every day. The queer women we see in sexual situations in Concussion are not cut from the same Playboy-ready cloth as the two women in Blue: one client is fat, another is an obvious real-life survivor of breast cancer and some of her clients, like Eleanor herself, are nowhere near their 20s anymore.

Robin Weigert doesn’t have a Barbie Doll face or a porn model’s body, but does have a passing resemblance to the young Ellen Barkin. Weigert exudes the same confidence and sexiness–reminding us those two qualities are often one and the same.

Concussion has a scene similar to one in Blue in which a straight man interrogates a queer woman about her sexuality. But because Abby is in her 40s, the mocking tone she takes with him is completely different from what we hear from the 20-something main character in Blue, Adele.

In Concussion are we seeing the female gaze? Well, we’re definitely seeing one woman’s gaze, that of Passon. The sex scenes in Concussion, unlike Blue, don’t seem like outtakes from an amateur porn video, but flow from the other nonsexual encounters in the film. (Concussion’s expert cinematographer is David Kruta.) We also don’t see full frontal nudity from any of the actresses, and although we see the bare breasts of some of Eleanor’s clients, we never see hers. Eleanor/ Abby is both a psychological and corporeal enigma to us.

Some clues for her motives are in the scenes between Abby and her spouse. They are affectionate and loving with each other, even when they’re alone, but the sex has gone out of their marriage. After a disastrous first encounter with an escort, we feel Abby’s ache of longing when a second “better” escort begins to touch her. Later we see Eleanor’s first client, a 23-year-old virgin, react to Eleanor’s touch in much the same way.

In the city we see Abby in punk rock t-shirts (vintage Blondie and the now-defunct C.B.G.B) and boyshort underwear and in the suburbs we see her fitting in with her friends in yoga pants and an expensive down-filled jacket. At a suburban dinner party the guests talk about their days hanging out in pre-gentrified downtown New York clubs, Squeezebox and The Limelight, and we realize yes, many of the club kids of the ’90s have become comfortable, suburban Moms and Dads.

The loft is decorated with posters for Louise Bourgeois and The Guerrilla Girls and has Diet For a New America on the bookshelf, distinct touches some of us in the audience recognize from our own living spaces. In the dialogue we hear echoes of conversations we too have had (or overheard) at parties: “I finally took the Myers-Briggs.” Writers of satire often seem to want their audience to hate the people, especially the women, they create (the Annette Bening character in American Beauty is just one example). Passon’s satire is much trickier–and kinder. She wants us to recognize these people. She wants us to recognize ourselves in them.

The film Passon says inspired Concussion is from the 1970s: Jeanne Dielman.., (and was also written and directed by a queer woman, the late Chantal Akerman). In Concussion, as in Dielman, we see the first signs of the housewife/sex-worker protagonist starting to unravel when she fails to stick to her usual daily routine: Abby misses picking up the kids after school for the first time in six years. Unlike Dielman, Passon’s film captures the monotony of domestic tasks, but doesn’t ask the audience to endure that boredom themselves.

Although Concussion was made before queer marriage became legal in New Jersey, the film brings up some interesting questions about the queer community’s quest for “equality.” What if we become just as disenchanted with being soccer Moms as straight women sometimes do? What then? At the end Abby throws herself into a home renovation project, the way so many of our married friends, straight and queer do, and we marvel at the mystery of other people’s marriages, not just in the film, but all around us.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8Wg–Mh8YY” iv_load_policy=”3″]

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

A Joyful ‘Mavis!’ Plus Q & A with Director Jessica Edwards

Director Jessica Edwards includes plenty of the Staples’ less familiar music (which still sounds fresh and striking: I predict most people who see this documentary will quickly add a Staples Singer channel to their Spotify and Pandora selections) as well as photos and TV clips from their appearances stretching back to the 1950s. Although Pops had a smooth, clear voice, Mavis usually had the lead vocal even at the beginning. Like Amy Winehouse her style and virtuosity were already an adult’s when she was still a young teen.

Written by Ren Jender.

At one point during Mavis!, the new documentary about legendary soul singer Mavis Staples that is airing on HBO this month, we see an old clip of Staples’ father, Roebuck “Pops” Staples who founded The Staples Singers, the family group that brought fame to all of them. A host of a TV music show asks the tired question: how does he feel about performing secular music after years of performing at churches as a gospel group? With no malice or a second’s hesitation Pops answers that he thinks of the “freedom songs” they sing as exactly the same as gospel: simply “the truth.”

Watching Mavis Staples in the film, still touring at 75, after more than 60 years on the road (she remarks about one of their early records that no one could believe a petite 13-year-old girl was the lead singer: they thought her strong, low voice was a man’s) we can’t help noticing she seems to have inherited both Pops’ good nature (though band members tell us she lets them know when she finds their performances lacking) and his certainty. Her band, now made up of white musicians decades younger than she is, her older sister, Yvonne, and a woman in her late thirties/early forties with a nose ring in a T-shirt that reads “Black Weirdo,” still performs an a cappella gospel song to warm up before going onstage.

Director Jessica Edwards includes plenty of the Staples’ less familiar music — which still sounds fresh and striking: I predict most people who see this documentary will quickly add the Staples Singers to their music selections — as well as photos and TV clips from their appearances stretching back to the 1950s. Pops had a smooth, clear voice, but Mavis usually had the lead vocal even at the beginning. Like Amy Winehouse, her style and virtuosity were already an adult’s when she was a young teen.

Although the Staples family was based in Chicago, Pops had been part of the Great Migration from the South. He grew up in the same part of Mississippi as some of the great blues legends who influenced his own style of guitar playing, making it distinct from other gospel musicians. In the 1950s and 1960s, rock and roll radio stations played gospel music after midnight, which Bob Dylan explains, is how he discovered the Staples Singers, as did other white musicians of the era. Some of the songs we hear with Pops on lead have more than a passing resemblance to more familiar radio hits from white rock and roll bands in the 1960s. Levon Helm, of The Band, tells us their own harmonies were directly influenced by The Staples Singers.

When the Staples and Dylan appeared on the same stages (including on an early TV musical omnibus) Mavis and Dylan had a puppy-love romance — and Pops expanded their repertoire. After first hearing “Blowin’ in the Wind” he told Mavis and the rest of the family, “We can sing that song.” He was particularly struck by the lyric, “How many roads must a man walk down/ Before you can call him a man?” When Pops, a man who had fled the Jim Crow South when Black men were still called “boy” sang those words, they were especially poignant.

Pops also attached the group early on with the Civil Rights Movement, becoming an acolyte of Martin Luther King in 1955, at a time when one of the white experts interviewed tells us, “Very few gospel singers took an interest in Civil Rights.” Pops began to write songs inspired by the movement including “Why Am I Treated So Bad?” one of Dr. King’s favorites.

Like a lot of other performers with a similar background, Mavis traded an audience that was once nearly entirely Black (as in a terrific clip we see of the Staples Singers live performance in Watts Stax, a filmed all-star concert and fundraiser for the pre-gentrified Oakland of the early 1970s) to one that is now, we see at appearances like the Newport Folk Festival, nearly entirely white. Mavis still mentions Dr. King to them and seems to see her continued performing as a way of elevating those who hear her music. She tells them and us, “I’ve weathered the storms. I’ve fallen down and I’ve gotten back up.”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-orbaWz5yRQ” iv_load_policy=”3″]

When Mavis! was shown as part of the Athena Film Festival, the director of the film, Jessica Edwards, fielded questions from the audience. The following is a transcript of that Q and A, edited for concision and clarity.

What was it about this story that made you want to make this film?

Jessica Edwards: It was really Mavis that made me want to see this movie and therefore make this movie. I had seen her perform in Brooklyn, in Prospect Park a couple of years ago and I had known a little about this soul-era Stax stuff, but I went to the show that night and I left feeling rejuvenated. When I went home to watch the documentary, so I could learn more about her, there wasn’t one.

Can you tell us more about what you learned about her as you were making the movie?

JE: The incredible thing that I found about her was that her and her family really touched on almost every genre in the history of American music: anything that influenced the way that music is made now. She influenced all these makers that then became paramount in terms of what American music became, like Bob Dylan. And Dylan himself has influenced so many people. You think about him listening to the family late at night and then what he became, the idea that she was so part of this fabric of music in this country.

One of the things that impressed me is that you portrayed her and her music and kind of the intersection of music, culture and politics. Was that a conscious decision on your part or was it just an outgrowth of who Mavis was?

JE: You know the Civil Rights Movement didn’t end for Mavis in 1968. For her, the Civil Rights Movement is now. For me music is culture. I’m not a very religious person, but music is a spiritual experience for me and always has been. The idea that music can facilitate change in a way that some other things can’t, that was really solidified for me. The message of Dr. King was not completely mainstream in the mid-fifties and Mavis and her family were instrumental in terms of this grass-roots movement of going from church to church to church in the South and bringing these messages of equality.

How much was Mavis involved the making of this film?

JE: Mavis didn’t see the film until it was finished. In fact, it took her a while to get on board. She was like, “I’ve been talking to the press forever. I don’t need to do this. Like, nobody wants to hear about me.” But when we started to talk to her about the kind of film we wanted to make and how it really was not only her legacy, but the legacy of her family and the legacy of their music, she came around. She trusted us. I offered to come to Chicago and screen it for her before it was screened publicly. And she said, “Nah, I’m gonna watch it with the people.” Then she sat in the theater with a thousand people and watched it for the first time. That was a little nerve-wracking for some of us. But she loved it. The first time she watched it, she doesn’t really remember what it was. All these memories just kept flooding back. I sat directly behind her, and the first time Bob Dylan comes on the screen and he says all these wonderful things about the family, she just started giggling like she was 15 years old. She watched it more recently. We screened it in Chicago a week or so ago and she came up to me after and she was like, “I finally saw the movie, this time. It was really good!”

I have a question about process from the inspiration to okay, now how do I get this to really happen?

JE: This movie took about two and a half years to make which in documentary-land is incredibly fast. It’s like a snap of the fingers. And basically, once she agreed I went and visited her and we would drop in on her on the road. We would film the show. We would spend some time backstage. And then we would go back to Chicago when she was home. The way I structured the shooting was, we did it for her 75th year. Otherwise I would still be shooting. The woman is touring all the time and I’d never end the movie. The movie is also self-financed. Luckily, we have HBO as a broadcast partner. They’re like a fairy godmother of documentary films.

I almost like cried at the moment where Mavis is listening to the song Pops played and she’s getting choked up. How are you able to get such intimate, candid moments without feeling like you’re getting in the way?

JE: I think people who’ve made a hundred films will have the same question. This is my first feature length film and I always feel nervous in those situations, but my DP, he was, like, ruthless, so, as nervous as I was, he’d be like, “Just keep filming.” I hired people who have done this way more than I have, so I could learn so much. So the next time I do this, I won’t ever cut either. Whether you’re filming something that’s too intimate or not, ultimately you can make the decision of whether you’re going to use it later. It’s much better to have it, because you don’t know whether you’re going to need it. In that particular scene, I was sitting underneath the soundboard. I wanted them to talk to each other, not talk to me. I knew that I’d have to ask them questions at the same time to get them talking. I was crying my eyes out, bawling under the sound board like a baby. And as soon as we got that scene, I knew that we had a movie.

I just wondered if you could speak to the finances of the movie, how did it work out for you? And what’s next for you?

JE: I have a production company and the executive producer of this film is my partner, like my baby-daddy partner. We work together on a lot of stuff, so he raised a lot of money through commercial work basically while I was shooting. So he would work on commercial jobs which would pay for this film. It opens the question of sustainability especially if you live someplace expensive like Brooklyn. But I knew, if we felt this passionate about Mavis and because she has so many fans, people would want to see the movie. We’ve had such a wonderful response. I feel like we made the right decision to be late on our rent a couple of months. Now I’m doing a lot of work with 360 Video. I really am enjoying the challenge of making something really short and non-linear. There are a couple of documentaries in the pipe, but for every one you make you have to pitch ten, so I think I’m, like, at six. It’ll hit any minute.

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published inThe Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

‘Spotlight’ on the Wrong People

‘Spotlight’ isn’t the kind of film that just changes some facts (though I never understand “based-on-a-true-story” films that do so: if you’re going to fictionalize their lives why not fictionalize their names too?), it’s one where the most basic plot summary contradicts what happened.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape and sexual abuse]

We’re winding down to the Oscar ceremony no thinking person is looking forward to. The Black director who should have been nominated last year, Ava DuVernay, and the Black director who should have been nominated this year, Ryan Coogler, will be in Flint, Michigan with other Black celebrities on Oscar night, raising funds for and drawing attention to the majority-Black community whose water was poisoned as a result of government misdeeds. I see some outlets still trying to pretend this ceremony is like all the others. Among the fluff articles about white nominees are ones that focus on the “real” people behind the film Spotlight, which is nominated as it has been at other galas (it swept last night’s Spirit Awards) for multiple awards, even Best Supporting Actress. (One writer posited that Rachel McAdams got a nomination for a performance that consists of her mostly listening, nodding and taking notes because she “dared” to wear unflattering chinos, just like a real reporter would).

Spotlight centers around the intrepid editors and reporters (the vast majority of whom are male) of The Boston Globe, claiming they are the only reason we know the extent of child sexual abuse perpetrated by Boston archdiocese priests and the cover-up by the archdiocese itself. For those of us who know the facts around this basic premise, the film plays as a long, elaborate, tedious lie. Spotlight isn’t the kind of film that just changes some facts (though I never understand based-on-a-true-story films that do so: if you’re going to fictionalize their lives why not fictionalize their names too?); it’s one where the most general plot summary contradicts what happened.

Instead of the investigation beginning, as it does in the film, with a powerful man looking solemnly into the middle distance and declaring “I know there’s a story here,” it began with a young woman reporter, Kristen Lombardi at the alternative weekly The Boston Phoenix, with the encouragement and guidance of her out, queer, news editor (previously a longtime reporter at Boston’s LGBT paper) Susan Ryan-Vollmar.

As has been reported elsewhere, Lombardi’s story was published nearly a year before the first “Spotlight” story and shares with it a number of “discoveries”. One of these “discoveries” is a turning point we see in the film: Mark Ruffalo’s Woodward-and-Bernstein-esque Mike Rezendes (in one of the few performances that has made me dislike the actor) interrogating an expert on sex-offender priests and inferring from his data that a far greater number of the offenders existed than anyone had previously thought. Not only did Lombardi do the interview with the same expert first, she also literally did the math to come up with the number of probable offenders.

Lombardi has been gracious in interviews, explaining, “I was aware that there was a bigger story that I couldn’t tell because I didn’t have the resources,” and that the ability to stick with the story week after week was something only The Globe could do. But she also wishes she had gotten some credit. Although repeatedly given the chance to acknowledge her contribution, editor Baron, (played by Liev Shreiber in the film: the real-life Baron has moved on to another, larger newspaper as one character in the film “predicts”) has steadfastly refused to do so. With at least one of his colleagues admitting that Lombardi broke the story, Baron’s continued silence seems like a tacit admission of guilt. In the film, Rezendes says that no one in town saw Lombardi’s cover story in The Phoenix, which is laughable considering the very streets we see the film’s reporters endlessly walking up and down would have had, at that time, on every corner big, bright, red boxes full of free copies of The Phoenix. Its cover story, including the one about Law and the cover-up, would be facing anyone on the sidewalk, through the box windows at each intersection.

Tom McCarthy, the co-writer and director, did interview Lombardi as research for the script, but he decided her role wasn’t important enough to include in the final cut of the film. Instead McCarthy decided to focus on white-guy, mainstream newspaper mythology, and that focus not only makes the film untrue, it renders it dramatically inert.

Nearly every scene of this film involves two (or more!) men of a certain age glowering at each other: over a conference table, a golf game or a shadowy bar like in some Saturday Night Live parody while spouting dialogue that could have come from a comic book.

“You’re going to give me their names and the names of their victims!”

“Are you threatening me?”

“They knew, and they let it happen!”

The film suggests, nonsensically, that Rezendes, Baron, and the lawyer who represented many of the victims, Mitchell Garabedian (played by Stanley Tucci) were willing to go against the Catholic Church because they were respectively, a Jewish bachelor who didn’t like baseball, someone from a Portuguese family and someone from an Armenian family: all so-called “outsiders”.

But the real outsiders were those who realized, before the scandal hit, that the Catholic Church was far from the benevolent institution each of the male characters in Spotlight seem to think it is at the beginning of the film. The people with ties to the Catholic Church were (and are) the same ones who shout at women as they enter Planned Parenthood and other clinics that perform abortions in Boston. Six years before the scandal broke, John Salvi had shot and killed people in two of these clinics in Brookline, the town next to Boston, and pointed to his Catholic beliefs as the reason.

Ryan-Vollmar would have seen firsthand, as a reporter for a queer paper, that the Catholic church had tried to block every state law (including, eventually, the one for marriage) that gave queer people the same rights as everyone else. And The Phoenix, like many alternative newspapers with roots in the 1960s was founded because mainstream papers like The Globe did not cover events or politics in ways that confronted the existing power structure.

Women, especially in the past, were much more likely to listen to and believe allegations of rape and sexual abuse perpetrated by men in power than… men in power were. One of the many omissions the film makes is that women, usually relatives of the victims, were among the very first whistle-blowers on the church’s cover-up of sexual abuse–and were ignored for years.

Spotlight goes so far out of its way to make its story all about white guys it should have all of us questioning every “based on a true story” film from now on. Let’s not let another smarmy white-guy writer-director shrug his shoulders, smile, and say he would have loved for women to play the leads in his film, but the “facts” got in his way.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg5zSVxx9JM” iv_load_policy=”3″]

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

A Compromised ‘Carol’

If only ‘Carol’ the much lauded movie from director Todd Haynes (adapted by Phyllis Nagy from Patricia Highsmith’s novel ‘The Price of Salt’) were as good as its trailer, a one minute ten second masterpiece of close-ups, pitch-perfect period detail and barely contained emotion.

If only Carol, the much lauded movie from director Todd Haynes (adapted by Phyllis Nagy from Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt) were as good as its trailer, a one minute ten second masterpiece of close-ups, pitch-perfect period detail and barely contained emotion. On paper Carol is a film I should worship, a love story about queer women, based on a novel by a queer woman and adapted into a screenplay by one. And its director is one of the few people who came out of the new queer cinema of the early ’90s who still works regularly in film.

Haynes’ previous theatrical release I’m Not There was a miraculous rendering of everything I otherwise hate — bio-pics about musicians, Bob Dylan fandom, films set in the Old West and disjointed narratives — into a transcendent viewing experience. Not everything in I’m Not There made sense (no one but Haynes himself seemed to know what was going on in the scenes with the young Black child traveling with a guitar) but when the weird-ass chances Haynes took worked, like casting Cate Blanchett as the Dylan of the mid-1960s, or having a band (made up of current indie musicians) in the Old West section of the film sing “Going To Acapulco” to a corpse propped up on a stage with them, the results were as thrilling as they were original.

I should have known Carol wasn’t for me when, before I had a chance to see the film (which took a month to make its way to my art-house friendly city — and is still in relatively few theaters compared to macho Oscar-bait The Revenant) some well-known, straight women critics who waxed rhapsodic about Carol compared the relationship between young department store clerk Therese (Rooney Mara) and older, married, wealthy housewife Carol (Cate Blanchett) with that of a mother and daughter — or a mentor and her protégé. Even if these critics meant well, their mindset de-sexes queer women (something straight people have a history of doing). What love affairs between women most resemble are… other love affairs. And what any couple needs, if the audience is going to root for them in a film, is chemistry, not vague bonding around sisterhood and lipstick.

As iconic-looking Blanchett is in early ’50s hair and costumes (by Sandy Powell) her performance is so over-the-top she takes us completely out of the movie. Evident even in stills, the way she looks at Mara is how an alien from outer space ready to tear off its human disguise to swallow her whole might, a gaze not dissimilar from the one Blanchett, playing the stepmother, directed toward Cinderella.

In much of Carol Blanchett’s performance she seems to be telegraphing the audience, “I’m acting! In real life, I’m not queer at all,” continuing an ignoble tradition that includes two other talented, blonde movie stars: William Hurt in Kiss of the Spider Woman (which won him an Oscar) and Philip Seymour Hoffman in Flawless. By 2006, when Hoffman won his Oscar for playing Truman Capote without histrionics, I thought the old method of playing queer characters had gone out of style for good. In brief moments of Carol we see Blanchett reach under the broad surface of the character. Toward the end, in her speech to a room full of lawyers about custody of her daughter she touches us, and early on, when Therese is talking to Carol on a hallway phone and tries to confirm if she’s reading Carol’s interest in her correctly we see Carol’s vulnerability. Therese says, “I wanna ask you things, but I’m… I’m not sure that you want that…,” and Carol pleads in desperation, “Ask me, things… Please…” But through most of this film Blanchett doesn’t mine the depth of feeling the film’s story demands.

Mara’s performance is much more natural, but because she’s playing against Blanchett’s hamminess, her wide-open stare registers more like that of a schoolgirl who hasn’t done her homework gaping at her teacher than the obsessive protagonist of Highsmith’s novel who, on impulse, sends beautiful, rich, Carol a Christmas card after briefly helping her in the store. In the film, Therese instead sends Carol back the gloves she left on the store counter, making the main character (and no matter how the producers campaigned for the film’s acting award nominations, Therese is the main character of both the novel and the movie) more timid and dull. The film’s Therese is also stripped of ambition: the character in the novel, an aspiring set designer, is often networking with people who might be in the position to employ her or ones who can introduce her to someone who can — and never misses a chance to take on a set-designing job, not even to be with Carol. The Therese in the film takes photos and has to be pushed and prodded (by a man, even though in the 1950s, most men were not exactly eager to encourage women in their careers as artists) to have any faith in her own talent. We also aren’t privy to her thoughts as we are in the novel, so we don’t know that even as she remains quiet she’s taking everything in and making shrewd (and sometimes cruel) observations.

Sarah Paulson as Carol’s ex, Abby, is a relief in no small part because Paulson, an out performer who has never seemed fully at ease in previous big screen roles, knows she doesn’t have to overplay to convey the bond between the women. When Abby and Carol talk, Paulson’s smartypants smile and skeptical eyes show the two have the ease of people who have long since forgiven each other’s transgressions. Paulson also reminded me that my favorite part of Far From Heaven, Haynes’ other ’50s set, Douglas-Sirk-inspired drama, was Patricia Clarkson as another wisecracking best friend.

Haynes has in Carol (with art direction by Jesse Rosenthal and cinematography by Edward Lachman) perfected the look of a Sirk melodrama while modernizing it, with the more “realistic” hyper-pigmented reds and mint-greens of 1950s-era color photos along with the fuzzy resolution of snapshots taken at that time. But Haynes seems not to have learned the first lesson from Sirk’s films (or from two other gay male directors influenced by Sirk: Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Pedro Almodóvar): tastefulness is the opposite of passion. When Blanchett and Mara have one of countless drinks together, without any part of their bodies “accidentally” touching the other’s, when the film avoids any on-camera exchange of confidences (which do happen in the novel and the screenplay: a blossoming romance between women doesn’t need both touch and talk, but it does need one or the other) the audience doesn’t experience tension, just boredom.

When the sex scene finally happens, it plays like something from adolescent fanfiction, after a makeover, when the two women stare steadily and silently at each other in a mirror. We then get tasteful toplessness and (finally) some touching (strictly above the waist) from the two leads. In the novel, which includes neither the makeover nor the mirror, the two women have sex for the first time after they each say, “I love you.” And in roundabout, metaphorical, 1950s parlance Highsmith makes clear the sex is a revelation for Therese. The one redeeming part of the scene in the film is Carol looking at Therese’s naked body and almost smiling as she says, ” I never looked like that…”

What puzzles me most about Carol is: with so many queer people at its helm why does the film come off as enervated and somewhat clueless about queer issues (like Carol seeming to be sincere when she says she likes her therapist, when psychotherapy of the 1950s was invariably conversion therapy)? Carol pales in comparison to two other films centered around queer love stories which didn’t have openly queer people heading their productions: Brokeback Mountain and Blue Is The Warmest Color. Brokeback, which famously shows heated love scenes between its main characters, takes place at least partly post-Stonewall, but is a wrenching portrait of the closet’s effect on the couple. In Carol, even as its bittersweet “happy” ending is kept intact, the film doesn’t acknowledge that if the two women stay together, even in New York, even in “progressive” circles they’ll have to lie to nearly everyone (except other queer people) about their relationship for at least the next two decades (even Highsmith waited many years before she let the novel be republished under her own name, not the original pseudonym). And that secrecy took its toll on queer people, even those in happy relationships, as Edie Windsor (whose relationship with her eventual spouse started in New York over ten years after the one in the film) has stated in interviews. As bad as the naked sex scenes in Blue Is the Warmest Color were, that film did get right the thrill of queer first love (and lust), the sacrifices the main character made for it, and how few straight people she bothered to come out to, even in France, even in 2013.

The makers of Carol know a lot more about queer life than the director and co-writer of Blue does, but I think those behind Carol set out to make a film about queer characters that straight people can congratulate themselves for enjoying. The sex scenes will neither skeeve them out nor turn them on. The homophobia of the time (like that of more recent times — and of now) is softened, present only in characters we don’t feel invested in, so straight viewers are free to ooh and aah over the costumes, cinematography and art direction, guilt-free.

Of course plenty of queer people seem to enjoy this film too: the critics’ group I’m part of gave every award it could to Carol (after the Oscars snub of the film in “Best Picture” and “Best Director” categories). As someone who came of age in the ’80s and ’90s when many of us dutifully went to see every highly imperfect queer film released, I understand the tendency to want to support queer representation in movies. But I much prefer Haynes when he lets his freak flag fly, as in I’m Not There and when he speaks directly and knowingly to a queer audience as in Velvet Goldmine (which should be essential viewing for everyone mourning David Bowie right now). Maybe the lesson here is that Haynes’ features should always be period films about musicians. A glance at IMDb shows that his next film is an as-yet-untitled project about the life of Peggy Lee.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjHU34cpD1U” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together and a staff writer at Bitch Flicks. Last week at The Toast, she interviewed Deniz Gamze Ergüven, the writer-director of the Oscar nominee ‘Mustang’ which everyone should see.

Rewritten History: Affecting in ‘Brooklyn’, Not So Much in ‘Suffragette’

I was surprised at how enjoyable and skillfully made ‘Brooklyn’ is: I cried when everyone else did and gasped when the rest of the audience did too, but in spite of its excellent art direction and affecting performances the film is mostly hokum. New York in the 1950s is a place where no one the main character hangs out with smokes (when all of the men and the majority of women were smokers). Most of the characters barely drink (just one glass at Christmas) and, except for a child’s brief outburst at a family dinner table, (“I should say that we don’t like Irish people”) none of its white, working-class, ethnic characters have any problem with any other ethnic group.

I’m never enamored of the cleaned-up, ambiguity-free nostalgia that movies, especially mainstream ones, serve to their audiences in the guise of “history” so I avoided John Crowley’s Brooklyn (written by Nick Hornby from the novel by Colm Tóibín) about an Irish immigrant, Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) in the US. The Irish have been romanticized in films as early as The Quiet Man (a new release when the film takes place) and romanticized among Irish Americans for as long as the Irish have been coming to the US. But when Brooklyn began raking in awards (especially for Ronan) I decided to see it.

I was surprised at how enjoyable and skillfully made Brooklyn is: I cried when everyone else did and gasped when the rest of the audience did too, but in spite of its excellent art direction and affecting performances the film is mostly hokum. New York in the 1950s is a place where no one the main character hangs out with smokes (when all of the men and the majority of women were smokers). Most of the characters barely drink (just one glass at Christmas) and, except for a child’s brief outburst at a family dinner table, (“I should say that we don’t like Irish people”) none of its white, working-class, ethnic characters have any problem with any other ethnic group. In the actual 1950s, my mother, just a few years younger than Eilis is in the film, lived in an Irish American neighborhood in Boston, much like the one the film shows in New York and wasn’t allowed to date Italian boys because, her father explained, “They beat their women.” We never find out what the main characters in Brooklyn think of Jewish people (since the church still taught then that the Jews killed Christ, that opinion probably wasn’t favorable) because none of them encounter any, even though plenty of Jewish people lived in Brooklyn in the 1950s. And Black people in this film are at the farthest periphery: two women in a crowd crossing a street and a Black couple is shown on the beach at Coney Island.

Eilis’s family in small-town Ireland is prosperous enough that her sister works as a bookkeeper and they live with their mother in a decent house, but Eilis immigrates anyway to a sales clerk job, arranged by a kindly priest (Jim Broadbent), at a department store in New York. In other words, she’s the kind of immigrant even the Republican party of today would like: white and “respectable.” She’s not the kind who comes to the country without papers, or has to learn English, scrub floors or work as a nanny and she doesn’t have an impoverished family in her home country to worry about. When being well-cared-for in her new home becomes too much for Eilis, her suddenly sympathetic boss (Jessica Paré) has the priest swoop into the store break room and tell Eilis he’s signed her up for bookkeeping classes at Brooklyn College. He tells her, “Homesickness is like most sicknesses. It will pass.”

Priests in the US at the time took collection money from their parishioners and gave them very little in return so to have one dole out college tuition after arranging a sales clerk job seems far-fetched, and for the recipient of both favors to be a young “marriageable” woman the priest barely knows seems like something from a parallel universe. For women in the 1950s, especially those in the working class (even ambitious ones like Eilis) the endgame was marriage, not a career. “Real” men (especially working-class ones) didn’t let their wives work outside the home (unless the family was poor), but Eilis’s middle-class, Italian-American, plumber boyfriend (Emory Cohen, a standout in a very good cast) walks her home from her night classes and loves hearing about her studies. His parents and his brothers seem equally charmed instead of exchanging nervous glances and asking, “You’re not a career girl, are you?” The only way a daughter-in-law in that type of family in the 1950s could work would be in her husband’s business — and even then she probably wouldn’t be given a salary for the first decade or so.

What priests did then (and for decades afterward) was browbeat women for working when they had children at home: if they encouraged women to go to college, the goal was for the women to find husbands there and never work outside the home again. If their husbands then beat or neglected them, the priests told the women they must be at fault (this mindset was a secular one at the time too) and they must never, ever get divorced. At the boarding house where Eilis lives she talks about marriage with a woman whose husband has left her for “someone else.” We never have a clue, in all of Eilis’s longing for her old hometown that a woman in that same situation wouldn’t be able to get divorced in Ireland until the very last part of the 20th century, a detail that a woman screenwriter or director probably wouldn’t leave out.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15syDwC000k” iv_load_policy=”3″]

Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette (with a screenplay by Abi Morgan) is another film I put off watching, because even with its creaky plot device of seeing historical events through the eyes of a fictional “composite” character the film apparently still managed to leave women of color out of the fight for British women’s suffrage as well as omitting another integral element, the queerness of some of the most famous suffragettes.

The film isn’t as bad as I feared it might be (or perhaps it just looked good compared to the film I saw just before it: The Danish Girl) but its problems are not just because it’s about white, straight women. Carey Mulligan does what she can with the lead role, Maud, who works at the laundry and is radicalized by a coworker–and by witnessing police beating up “Votes for Women” protesters. The film could do a much better job of integrating present-day concerns with what happened to “radicals” then, with its scenes of not just police brutality and political groups using bombs and violence as a means to bring about change, but the treatment of political prisoners and the force-feeding of hunger-strikers.

We see Helena Bonham Carter in another old-fashioned role: the audience/main character’s guide to the movement but we don’t see what we do in Brooklyn’s portrait of the women in the boarding house: the sense of the group of women as a clique, a cornerstone of the women’s suffrage movement which needs to exist in any radical political movement. If a woman’s family and old friends think her ideals are anathema, she needs to find peers who share those ideals and who will be her new friends — and new family. Except for a few, not very compelling scenes, we don’t get the sense of Maud as part of a group that supports her, just that she’s an outcast from her old life. The film contains very little we haven’t seen before and what’s new in it is allowed onscreen only very briefly: like the idea that Maud, who has worked most of her life including her childhood, would find motherhood her first opportunity to engage in play.

The film instead becomes a guessing game of what horrible thing can happen to Maud next. Suffragette has the chance to contain more dramatic tension when a police captain asks her to be an informant in exchange for dropping charges (another situation with present day parallels). He tells his men, “We’ve identified weaknesses in their ranks. We’re hoping one of them will break.”

But instead of considering the offer or pretending to inform while acting as a double-agent, Maud just writes an impassioned letter to him about the righteousness of her cause. In the end, Maud is just as dull and unimaginative as the film is, which is a shame, because the real-life figures in this fight were never boring.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=056FI2Pq9RY” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

’45 Years’: A Lifetime of Honing Talent

When we first meet her, Kate seems, like a lot of older women, serene in the unspoken knowledge that she’s at least a little too good for her unshaven, bumbling husband, Geoff (Tom Courtenay) who may or may not have the early symptoms of dementia.

The end of the year, just in time to qualify for the Oscars, is when we usually get at least a few films that feature actors we first saw when they were young and beautiful (or in the case of a performer like Bill Murray, not so beautiful) who, now that they’re around retirement age, are playing either irascible old coots (and their gender-switched twins: old ladies who swear a lot) or characters who show that life invariably becomes pathetic and tragic for those who age, as the leads in Michael Haneke’s Amour did a few years back. You’d never know from these films that some of the most powerful men in the mainstream movie industry are approaching or are over 70 (women in the business apparently are not allowed to be that age and keep their jobs)–and they aren’t shitting their pants nor have their personalities magically changed into the curmudgeonly but loveable stereotypes their own films are littered with.

Out writer-director Andrew Haigh best known for the film Weekend and as the co-creator of the now-cancelled HBO series Looking has decades before he turns 70, but in his new film 45 Years (opening Dec. 23) which he adapted from a short story by David Constantine, he treats the older, straight, married couple who are the film’s focus with the complexity that other filmmakers reserve for characters under 50. Charlotte Rampling plays Kate, a retired schoolteacher living in a home in rural England with her husband. Confident and warm but with razor sharp cheekbones, she wears boots and jeans for her daily morning’s walk with the dog as if she just stepped out of a Land’s End catalog, senior division.

When we first meet her, Kate seems, like a lot of older women, serene in the knowledge that she’s at least a little too good for her unshaven, bumbling husband, Geoff (Tom Courtenay) who may or may not have the early symptoms of dementia. She’s the one who knows where to find the German dictionary in their house when he needs one and corrects him when he gets the facts of an old news item wrong. But she doesn’t seem to resent her role as the competent, dependable spouse and brings a lot of tenderness to her interactions with Geoff, holding his hand or bringing him tea when he’s upset and preparing every meal and cleaning up afterward without complaint. I always notice, in films as in life, when women are the ones doing all the cooking and dish washing and 45 Years is one of the few films–and one of the only ones directed by a man–which seemed to notice along with me.

Kate is also the one who plans their social calendar, including the big party in a rented hall for their 45th wedding anniversary, delayed from the one they planned for their 40th when Geoff had open heart surgery. She’s even sure of the songs that should be played, politely insisting, “No Elton John”

The use of music in this film is some of the best I’ve ever heard–without any of the selections being obscure or surprising. These songs are precisely the ones that would play on an older person’s car radio and for their anniversary party and we’ve heard them many times before, but in this film, especially in the song that plays over the closing credits, we hear them in a new way, just as Kate comes to see her marriage with a new perspective. The other touches in the film are equally expert, from the cinematography of Lol Crawley to a supporting performance by Geraldine James as the couple’s (especially Kate’s) longtime friend.

So many other films (like the the execrable Youth) can’t show older characters without making cheap jokes about their bodies and diminished capacities. Even when we see this couple getting ready for bed and sex the two are never held up for ridicule, though Geoff , slowly pounding around the scar on his bare chest, like a superannuated Tarzan, seems to be making fun of himself. The film is about Rampling’s Kate but it wouldn’t work if Geoff were not equally well-written and Courtenay weren’t such a good foil. His Geoff is not above flattering Kate or playing the fool to appease her suspicions. In an early scene he defuses what in a shorter marriage might have turned into an argument with a wide-eyed admission, “I don’t remember.”

Seeing an older woman in crisis in a film without also seeing her humiliated (or looking very disheveled) is unusual. And we’re affected more by the increasing uncertainty Kate feels because of the calm we’ve seen her radiate in the early scenes. Haigh never robs Kate of her dignity, even during her dinner table confrontation with Geoff, “I’d like to be able to tell you everything I’m thinking,” she says, “but I can’t.”

Haigh does what more filmmakers should do with older performers: incorporate our own memories of them as younger actors into their characters, the way we see in older relatives and friends the traces of their younger selves. Sarah Polley proved she understood this desire when at the beginning of Away From Her (the first film she directed) she showed the woman who will be played by Julie Christie when she was in her twenties–and the young actress had a ’60s hairstyle Julie Christie might have worn and had the young Christie’s energetic and playful presence. Haigh pointedly avoids showing us what Rampling and Courtenay’s characters looked like when they were younger because we (at least those of us who watch British movies) already know–from the films the actors made in the era their characters discuss. The early ’60s which Geoff relives when he gets a reminder of a tragedy that happened then, is also when Courtenay starred in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. The mid-sixties, when Geoff and Kate first met at a dance, was when Rampling made her film debut in Georgy Girl opposite the equally young Alan Bates and Lynn Redgrave.

Many films have characters who are a little (or a lot!) slow on the uptake, so that the audience can congratulate themselves on how much smarter they are than the people onscreen. Several times during 45 Years we assume Rampling’s Kate is overreacting, but as the movie continues, we understand that a woman married to a man for 45 years knows him better than we do. She questions him and knows what to ask when she feels like he could be hiding something from her. Sometimes Kate second-guesses Geoff so accurately that her intuition seems supernatural, until we realize we are just seeing the result of a very long relationship. And unlike the dreary, hackneyed revelations of By the Sea, what Kate finds out shocks us as much as it does her: it isn’t something Geoff could have “forgotten” to tell her.

When (not if) Rampling is nominated for awards for playing Kate, she’ll be called a “sentimental favorite” but her performance, like the relationship at the film’s center is a culmination of experience. Rampling was a fixture of “swinging ’60s” London who hung out with The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix. Over the course of her long career, she’s worked with an astonishing list of talents: Visconti and Ozon were her directors and she was the leading lady opposite both Paul Newman and Robert Mitchum. The last look and gesture she leaves us with in 45 Years is the unmistakable answer to a question we’ve been asking ourselves throughout the last scenes of the film. If she wins awards for this role, it will be because she’s earned them, not because she’s outlasted her peers.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXAnjA9tAnQ” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

‘The Danish Girl’ and ‘Youth’: Why We Need To Stop Giving White Guys Oscars

Another way for a male actor to win an award is to put on a dress and play a trans woman (see Jared Leto and ‘Transparent’) which explains why we now have ‘The Danish Girl’ in theaters, directed by Hooper and starring Redmayne as trans pioneer Lili Elbe. At least one trans woman has already pointed out how this film, like ‘Blue Is the Warmest Color’ before it, has scenes that could have been lifted from porn (not the best place to find versimilitude) but also how the script forces Elbe into the “tragic degenerate” trope, just like queer characters invariably were in the bad old days.

Nearly five years ago, when Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech swept the Oscars I wasn’t displeased. Sure it was yet another film by men about men in which the women barely had speaking parts, but Colin Firth gave a great tortured performance in the lead and the screenplay–like the film itself–seemed to understand it wasn’t telling the “feel good” story many critics and audience members mistook Speech for: the screenwriter has said that when he told the Queen mother (the film depicts when she became Queen) that he was working on the script, she asked him to not make a film of it until after she was dead–because it would bring back too many bad memories.

I skipped Hooper’s next film: Les Misérables because it gave every sign of being the kind of gooey movie I would detest. It also had Eddie Redmayne in it and after sitting through the supposedly “based on a true story” nonsense of My Week With Marilyn in which Redmayne starred (opposite an underrated Michelle Williams playing Marilyn Monroe), I had had enough of him. Last year Redmayne won an Oscar for playing Stephen Hawking in the bio-pic The Theory of Everything proving that an able-bodied actor has a good chance of getting an Academy Award for playing a disabled person (and as long as the able-bodied keep winning, disabled people will never be cast to play these roles themselves).

Another way for a male actor to win an award is to put on a dress and play a trans woman (see Jared Leto and Transparent) which explains why we now have The Danish Girl in theaters, directed by Hooper and starring Redmayne as trans pioneer Lili Elbe. At least one trans woman has already pointed out how this film, like Blue Is the Warmest Color before it, has scenes that could have been lifted from porn (not the best place to find versimilitude) but also how the script forces Elbe into the “tragic degenerate” trope, just like queer characters invariably were in the bad old days.

The whole film feels very dated (and not just because it takes place in the early 20th century) but also, in spite of it being “based on a true story”, false. Like a bad TV movie made ten or twenty years ago, this film posits that Lili (who starts out as Einar) had a wife, Gerda (Alicia Vikander) who had no idea her husband was anything other than a regular guy, even though Lili was a longtime model for Gerda’s work as an illustrator and painter. When Lili wants to transition, Gerda is surprised and hurt saying, “But Lili doesn’t exist. We were playing a game.” and later cries, “I need my husband! I need to hug my husband,” just like the suburban wife of a trans woman might say on Maury.

The real-life Gerda Wegener was queer and, while the couple lived in Paris, did not keep secret her relationships with women, so the film misses the opportunity to show that the feminine qualities of Lili may have been what attracted Gerda in the first place, a possibility shows like Maury and movies like this one never consider. The film also gives short shrift to the gender politics of the time, never detailing the obstacles a woman artist like Gerda would face in that era and downplaying Lili’s decision when she transitions to stop painting–even though she had won acclaim as an artist when she was “Einar”.

This film fails on so many levels, it’s hard to pick any one aspect, but Eddie Redmayne deserves special mention. A man in a dress playing a trans women is always objectionable, but Redmayne is so woefully miscast in this role, I’ll go to any protest of the awards he will probably be nominated for. Lili Elbe was one of the first people to undergo gender affirming surgery and the toast of Paris, going to parties and modeling for Gerda in the latest, revealing fashions but Redmayne’s Lili is a whispery, skittish, drag queen full of shame (at least at first) who wears matronly dresses that come up to the neck and stretch down nearly to the ankle. Other trans woman pioneers (in the US, a generation after Elbe) were not shy, retiring or ashamed: think of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera: they, along with many femme gay men of the time became more open in their presentation as they became more outspoken in their advocacy: they developed pride in themselves to deflect the shame mainstream culture thought was their only option. In this way and many others, their mindset was much more in keeping with the rest of us in 2015 than that of anyone associated with The Danish Girl.

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Nearly two years ago Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty won an Oscar for best foreign language film and again, even though it was a film made by men about men, I’d enjoyed it and was happy. I didn’t know then that award would give Sorrentino the momentum to make one of the worst films I’ve seen in a theater in a long time: Youth.

In a lot of ways Youth takes the indulgences I could ignore in The Great Beauty: the whining of pampered, older, male characters and the fascination with the grotesque (but of course never, ever combining the two to find the grotesque in pampered, main older male characters) and proceeds to make an entire movie out of them. And the whisper of misogyny in Beauty becomes a scream in Youth. Michael Caine is the lead, a retired composer, and his vocal intonations are so familiar from the acting he’s phoned in through the years that, even if he were giving a good performance, at this point we wouldn’t notice. Harvey Keitel is wasted (except very briefly in the reading of one of his last lines) as his best friend, a film director, as is Rachel Weisz as the composer’s grown daughter and Jane Fonda as an aging actress wearing too much makeup (I can’t believe people are talking about nominating Fonda for an award for this role. Her part isn’t a character, it’s an incoherent tempter tantrum). Like The Great Beauty, Youth has great cinematography (again by Luca Bigazzi) but when the results are this loathsome, I’m reminded of how much I would rather see a dimly lit, poorly shot film with a great script than another monstrosity with great stills. As other critics have pointed out, if this film is a leading contender for an Oscar we’re in trouble–or maybe it’s the Oscars, and their increasing irrelevance, which are.

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender