Ren Jender – Page 2 – Bitch Flicks

Trans Women of Color In a Theater Near You: ‘Mala Mala’ and ‘Tangerine’

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

Whenever people who aren’t queer make a film about queers, I’m always very wary about seeing it. Over 30 years ago, I had made up my mind to go to my first queer bar, but stopped in a revival movie house to see a film beforehand, which contained a surprise: an explicit male-male rape scene. The victim was the main character, in a jailhouse. His attacker was his cell mate, a grotesque, possibly mentally disabled, bald giant who had some teeth missing: he smiled as he came and sent a shiver of revulsion through the audience. No reviewer had warned about this scene, probably because this portrayal of a queer character was typical for the time. After the film was over I didn’t go to the bar. I just headed home instead.

Maybe sitting through years of shitty queer characters in films and TV has sensitized me, because, even though I’m not trans*, I often get a similar, sickly feeling about films and TV with trans* characters made by people who aren’t trans*, most recently the two (or maybe it was one and a half) episodes of the Emmy-nominated Transparent I watched when (cis) people I respect raved about it. The trans women I’ve known seem very unlike the long-suffering main character (played by a man in a dress: Jeffrey Tambor, who is winning awards for the role). They also don’t seem like the martyr played by Jared Leto (another award-winning man in a dress) in the clips I’ve seen from Dallas Buyers Club. The trans women I’ve known also aren’t the metaphorical punching bag Transamerica‘s Felicity Huffman (for once a woman — though a cis one — in a dress: perhaps why she didn’t win as many awards) played either.

In the first few scenes of the recently released documentary Mala Mala (directed by Antonio Santini and Dan Sickles) about trans* women in Puerto Rico I briefly had some trepidation when the camera (the striking cinematography is by Adam Uhl) couldn’t resist (like director Abdellatif Kechiche with his star in Blue Is The Warmest Color) an objectifying focus on the ass of trans activist Ivana. She tells us she wanted her hips and thighs to resemble those of the Latina women she admired, even though her frame is quite slender. Though proud to be Puerto Rican (and often acting as a spokesperson for trans rights there) Ivana considers herself “made in Ecuador” where she had her procedures done.

But the film has enough different types of trans* people (including some drag queens and others who don’t consider themselves women: I would have liked to see interviews with the dark-skinned Afro-Latinas we see in performance) and spends a lot of time letting us get to know them (without seeming to waste a moment) that I forgot about the fascination with Ivana’s butt. We first meet Ivana when she is distributing condoms to trans women sex workers on the street. We get the low-down on what sex work is like for trans women from Sandy who tells us she and other trans women have to be more beautiful than the cis women sex workers on the street or they won’t attract clients.

Some of the trans* people we also get to know are: an older woman who laments what she sees as a lack of reflection in younger trans women, a drag queen with an interest in corporate law whose role model is Marilyn Monroe, a trans guy who isn’t able to get testosterone, and a drag queen who carefully differentiates herself from “prostitutes” and becomes a contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race. By focusing on nine people who often have differing opinions, the film gives us a taste of the richness and variety found within the trans* community. And because the film stays focused on these nine, we see them go through transformations that transcend the physical. Sex worker Sandy allies herself with Ivana, while also wondering why the funds set aside for trans* women in Puerto Rico don’t do more for them. They band together with other trans* women to form a new trans* rights group with Sandy telling us that they will wear shirts up to her necks and pants that cover their legs (in contrast to her usual short, low-cut dresses) so legislators will focus on their faces and what they have to say. Kickstarter-funded and executive-produced by veteran of the New Queer Cinema Christine Vachon, Mala Mala is beautiful to look at (from Puerto Rico’s green hills and blue ocean to neon tinted street scenes) and is one of the best and most moving films–narrative or documentary–I’ve seen all year.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rftiozFCa8″ iv_load_policy=”3″]

Tangerine, a comedy (directed by Sean Baker who also co-wrote the script with Chris Bergoch) that had its premiere at Sundance is about trans women of color sex workers and has been getting some surprisingly glowing reviews. Maybe because I kept comparing it to Mala Mala, I was disappointed. I can see what people reacted to: the two main characters, Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor) are vivid and funny (and played by talented, trans women). The film is also stunning to look at: co-cinematographers Baker and Radium Cheung give us a Los Angeles that has never looked more crisp and unforgiving in its sunniness, especially amazing considering the film was shot entirely on iPhones (equipped with special lenses, but still). Perhaps those who love this film were reminded of the early work of John Waters or Pedro Almodóvar, but those two, at least before they became big-time directors were part of the milieu they made films about, which isn’t the impression I get about Baker (who has also worked as a TV producer). Some of the interplay between the characters seems pretty generic: the plot, if there is one, focuses on Sin-Dee trying to track down the woman (“A real bitch with vagina and everything”) Sin-Dee’s pimp, Chester, “cheated” on her with. Waters and Almodóvar didn’t have the tightest plots in their early films either (one of Waters’ films centered on Divine getting “cha-cha heels”), but the details seemed more acutely observed–and nobody said about their films, when they were first released, that they seemed like anyone else’s.

Tangerine has some good comic moments: I was especially taken with a scene, shot from the inside of the front windshield, of a blow job received during a car wash and Rodriguez’s peerless reading of lines like “I promise, I promise” in response to Alexandra asking her to not cause “drama.” But we see how little we know about Alexandra and Sin-Dee’s interior lives when we spend time with Armenian immigrant cab-driver, Razmik (Karren Karagulian). Unlike the rest of the characters, Razmik has the ability to surprise us and to make us wonder what he’s thinking–or what he’ll do next. A film with trans women actresses this good shouldn’t have a cis man be its most interesting character. If trans women start making their own films with iPhones, maybe we’ll see characters that match these women’s talents.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALSwWTb88ZU” 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

‘3 1/2 Minutes, 10 Bullets’ and the Aftermath in ‘The Armor of Light’

Marc Silver’s documentary ‘3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets’ which airs on HBO Monday, Nov. 23, won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance and is an attempt to remind us of the particulars in the shooting of Black, suburban teenager, Jordan Davis, on the third anniversary of his death.

The following is partly a modified repost.

Enough unarmed Black people have been shot by white people (including cops) in the past few years that, except for the most famous cases, the circumstances of each shooting has begun to blur into the others. We hear a victim’s name that sounds faintly familiar and we have to ask ourselves, “Wait, what happened to him (or her) again?” We know the victim ended up dead but we forget what took place before–and in the few cases in which the killer is put on trial, what took place afterward.

Marc Silver’s documentary 3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets, which airs on HBO Monday, Nov. 23, won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance and is an attempt to remind us of the particulars in the shooting of Black, suburban teenager, Jordan Davis, on the third anniversary of his death. The three and a half minutes of the title refers to the total amount of time Davis and his friends were in a car at the combination gas station and convenience store when he was shot and killed by a white man, Michael Dunn, who had parked next to their vehicle. As is mentioned in the film, the media glommed onto the dispute between the two being about “loud music” when the shooting was, at its core, about white fear of Black people.

The film focuses on Dunn’s trial (the verdict of which I had forgotten) in which he famously claimed that Davis had a gun (which no witness saw and we see police tell Dunn in their own video “There were no weapons in the car,”) and so used the same “stand your ground” defense (in which one doesn’t have to be threatened to shoot and kill but just to “feel” threatened) under the Florida law which was the basis for George Zimmerman’s acquittal. Dunn had, according to his fiancée, Rhonda Rouer, downed many rum and cokes before the incident (they had just come from his son’s wedding reception) so was probably driving drunk–and could have been pulled over for doing so. But of course no additional consequences exist for grabbing and shooting a gun while under the influence.

Dunn, with his dead eyes, a mouth that always seems on the verge of a smirk and a voice that sounds like that of a mild-mannered cartoon character is not a bright man, as his jailhouse letters and phone calls (excerpts of which we hear over stunning footage of Jacksonville: the cinematography is also by Silver) attest. We hear Rouer at one point tell him firmly that they should discuss the legacy of his actions (he postures himself as some kind of cultural hero) “at another time.” She was probably cognizant that whatever he said to her could be used against him. He readily admits to being a killer but repeatedly denies he’s a racist, though his remarks about other prisoners and the teens, including Davis, in the car he shot at say otherwise.

In spite of his claims, and his high-priced attorney trying to sew doubt in the jurors’ minds (and media coverage of the trial giving equal time to the defense’s arguments, no matter how specious) we come to understand Dunn shot and killed Davis because the teen annoyed him. Throughout the trial and outside the courtroom, Dunn expresses as much remorse for this killing as another person would for swatting a mosquito or a gnat. He’s an extreme example of a mindset that many white people in the US have, including those in Jacksonville, and we hear (briefly) from another local racist (who also probably doesn’t consider himself a racist) outside the courthouse and see, in beach footage, one woman’s swimsuit bottom is decorated with a large Confederate flag.

The courtroom drama of 3 1/2 Minutes is as compelling as that of any narrative film. Outside the court, the film features Davis’s parents, Ron Davis and Lucia McBath, talking about their son and even includes home movies of when he was a baby, so I didn’t expect the moment I started to cry would be during Rouer’s testimony. She was, after all, the person who partied with Dunn in their hotel room after she knew that he had shot Davis (the film never reminds us that the two drank more and ordered pizza after the killing) and apparently she never told Dunn to turn himself in (Dunn was arrested when they returned home, but only because a witness noted his license plate). In the jailhouse calls with Dunn she’s supportive and talks about how much she loves and misses him, as Dunn, convinced he’ll be acquitted says the first thing he’ll do when he’s out is “make love” to her. When she’s first sworn in, the camera focuses on her shaking hand (she even raises the wrong hand) as she takes the oath. With her final testimony we find out why she’s so distraught. In her earlier testimony she had told the jury about the conversation she and Dunn had before she had left the car to go into the store (a little before he shot Davis) “He said, ‘I hate that thug music,’ and I said, ‘I know,”’ and the resignation and hopelessness in her voice at that earlier moment takes on a deeper meaning.

I’m not sure why I cried during her testimony. Perhaps because if more white people told the truth (the bar is so low) either about their actions or about those of their fellow white people, more of the victims’ families might see some justice.

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

We don’t see much of the anti-gun advocacy, Davis’s mother, McBath, took up after Davis’s death, except a brief look at her testimony before Congress, in which the oily piece of slime known as “Ted Cruz” counters her. We never hear much of what she’s thinking during the trial: the in-depth interviews are with Davis’s father. In 3 1/2 Minutes we mainly see McBath cry and sometimes pray, which I’m sure she’s done plenty of, but is not all that she’s done.

To see the aftermath of the trial, watch the excellent and multi-layered documentary The Armor of Light, the first film directed by Abigail Disney who has had a prolific career as the producer of films including She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, Pray The Devil Back to Hell, and Vessel. Much of the film’s promotional materials emphasize the trajectory of Rob Schenck, a white Evangelical minister and fixture of the far right, who comes to see his “pro-life” views must include a stand against the National Rifle Association (NRA). But the more interesting person in the film (who gets about equal screen time) is McBath. Her dentist father was part of the NAACP in 1960s Illinois, so McBath immediately understands the racial aspect of her son’s killing and others like it, but Schenck doesn’t bring up race until the film is more than half over. We in the audience see a marked difference in how a white congregation and a Black congregation react to his new rhetoric against guns and the NRA.

What goes unsaid in the conversations of right-wing, white men and the repeated montage of white guys at gun shows is the connection between gun violence and masculinity: the popular fantasy articulated by many of the men to be “a good guy with a gun” who stops “a bad guy with a gun” by shooting him, something which even many police officers rarely, if ever, do. While the men talk about “protecting their families” I thought about all the women who are threatened or killed by guns their own husbands, boyfriends, and acquaintances point at them, a concern to which these men seem purposefully oblivious. Instead, they talk about the government taking away their guns with the same vehemence they would about government taking away their balls.

Also fascinating is McBath’s meeting with Schenck in which both cite Bible passages to make their points, but which concludes with McBath in tears telling him, “It’s vitally important that you help. They will listen to you.” McBath states later, when she is alone on camera that although she doesn’t “condone” abortion, she would never interfere with another woman’s reproductive choice, but feels like she and Schenck have some common goals around guns, saying, “This is what this is all about: fighting for life.” We see her (again) testifying in front of Congress, and she eventually quits her job to devote her time to being the spokesperson for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.

I couldn’t help being a little cynical about Schenck’s intentions. He keeps citing the Bible and Jesus for his newfound, anti-gun mindset but with his long support of right-wing politicians (including members of the Tea Party) I wondered if he had read any of the many Bible passages in which Jesus ministers to the poor, the people those same politicians build their careers disparaging while defunding public programs meant to benefit them.

We see the slow, frustrating course McBath and Schenck have ahead when Schenck meets with three other anti-choice stalwarts (all white men, of course) across a table and tries to persuade them the NRA is antithetical to Christian values, asking, “Is that a pro-life ethic?” Two of the men yell at him in response, but he seems to sway the third, a triumph we can’t help hoping will repeat itself at other tables across the country.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSP0Soy8ACk” 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

‘The Assassin’ We Want To See

Because ‘The Assassin’ packs nearly every kind of arty, intersectional-feminist fan’s fantasy into one movie. It centers around a woman of color (it takes place in China in the middle ages and its director is Taiwanese, so most of the actors are Taiwanese too) whose main scenes are with other women of color (this film has relatively little dialogue but passes the Bechdel test with no problem).

I was out of town for a long weekend and then catching up on what I had missed when I found out Hsiao-Hsien Hou’s The Assassin was having its last showing (a late matinee, not even an evening show) in my art-house-friendly town. I wasn’t even aware the film had begun its run. I dropped everything to see it, and if this movie is playing nearby, so should you.

Because The Assassin packs nearly every kind of arty, intersectional-feminist fan’s fantasy into one movie. It centers around a woman of color (it takes place in China in the middle ages and its director is Taiwanese, so most of the actors are Taiwanese too) whose main scenes are with other women of color (this film has relatively little dialogue but passes the Bechdel test with no problem). The main character, Nie Yinniang (Qi Shu) is the assassin of the title, an action heroine (or maybe an anti-heroine: for much of the film we don’t know) with beautifully choreographed martial arts scenes: this film unlike some other films of the Wuxia genre doesn’t feature the ridiculous airborne hijinks that defy suspension of disbelief.

The Assassin, as a historical costume drama also shows off its high-born characters in sumptuous period robes, their homes decorated with curtains and tapestries as fine, if not finer than their clothes: we even see some of the palace intrigue through these gauzy, wafting borders, as if we, like the main character are spying through them. And this film is stunningly shot (by cinematographer Ping Bin Lee): one of the only subtitled films in which I missed at least a little of the dialogue because I was too busy looking at what was onscreen. The Assassin even has a little, old-fashioned black magic in its plot, which made me love it even more.

What the film doesn’t do is pander to a Western audience: the story is apparently well known in China in many different incarnations, but not in the US. Still, I much prefer a film that makes me sometimes wonder what’s going on to one like The Walk with its over-explanation and bad performances obfuscating its emotionally-fraught (my palms and even the soles of my feet were sweaty) 3D action scenes. The Assassin isn’t in 3D, but the moves are so fast, smooth and quiet they’re like dance captured on film (although these scenes probably use some form of camera trickery I couldn’t spot it). The camera astonishes elsewhere too. At one point we are looking, in a long take, at a curtained alcove of the Governor’s palace and we suddenly see Yinniang standing there, listening in the shadows, and we’re not sure if she just appeared or if we didn’t notice her before.

We watch much of this film as a dance performance. Yinniang is often silent: more than one critic has compared her to the sometimes ambiguous main characters in Westerns. We know that she is trained as a killer and see her kill at the start of the film, but we also see that she won’t murder a target in front of his young son. Her teacher, a nun says, “The way of the sword is without compassion,” but we don’t know, for the majority of The Assassin, if that way will turn out to be Yinniang’s and are often looking at her face–and her actions–for clues.

In other words, we’re looking at a taciturn, complex main character not uncommon in movies about men (especially Westerns) but pretty much unheard of in films about women (not just her teacher but also one of Yinniang’s fighting opponents is a woman). At the behest of her teacher, Yinniang returns to her hometown to kill her cousin, Tian Ji’an (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s Chen Chang), the independent Governor of her home province, but her mother, not knowing the reason for her return puts her into the fancy, movement-constricting robes other women wear. We see Yinniang trying on the outfit and then wearing her signature black coat and wrapped boots for the rest of the film. And unlike other long-haired women action-adventure heroines she actually has her hair tied in such a way that it won’t get in the way of her fighting.

We find out later that Yinniang was at one time betrothed to her cousin and the two were given matching pieces of carved jade to formalize this arrangement. When she makes her first attempt on the Tian Ji’an’s life she leaves behind her piece. “She wanted me to recognize her before taking my life. She wanted me to know why,” he says.

But the film doesn’t waste much time portraying Yinniang as heartbroken, though her quiet, watchful demeanor is in keeping with the trauma she has endured, in both the separation from her family at a young age and her conscription into killing. At the same time, she also has a romantic interest (Satoshi Tsumabuki) who, from the expression we see on his face, seems to realize no woman is as hot as the one who pushes a bad guy in front of you at the right moment to stop an arrow that was headed for your chest.

Hsiao-Hsien Hou won “Best Director” at Cannes for this film, so I don’t understand the lack of fanfare for The Assassin now. In contrast to several acclaimed films I’ve seen lately, I was never bored during The Assassin and wished the film lasted longer. At the matinee I spotted three, youngish Asian women (three more than I would expect at that showtime, in that neighborhood) in the audience as the lights came up, one of whom was beaming at what she had just seen. If only film distributors and male critics would realize a lot of women like (and unlike!) her would love to see this terrific-looking, well-acted, martial-arts film about a complicated, Asian woman who is nobody’s victim or martyr.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSoXoOAY1zU” 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 appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

‘Heart of a Dog,’ Not the Life of a Wife or Widow

Anderson was working on her film, ‘Heart of a Dog’ (in theaters now; it will be shown on HBO at a later date) when Reed died and she then took a year off before finishing the documentary. The film contains a loosely connected series of stories and images but is mostly a meditation on grief and death with a focus on her dog, a rat terrier named Lolabelle. What it isn’t about, at least not directly, is Reed, though he has a cameo in the film.

When Lou Reed died just over two years ago, a lot of people focused on the person he had spent his last years married to, performance artist, musician and composer Laurie Anderson. I’m always very wary when the public reacts to the private lives of well-known people, whether commenting on Halle Berry’s latest divorce or on Anderson, who has been internationally known since the early 1980s, but whom many seemed to first take notice of as Reed’s widow. She reacted to this sudden thrust into the spotlight (Anderson works and tours constantly but Reed’s was a more familiar name and face) with a rare thoughtfulness and grace. She wrote about how she and Reed met and came to be married with humor and a distinct lack of sentimentality (after their impromptu wedding, she had to rush out to perform in a concert). Still I hoped the demotion from being known as an acclaimed artist in her own right to being known mostly as the wife of a famous, dead artist didn’t last.

Anderson was working on her film, Heart of a Dog (in theaters now; it will be shown on HBO at a later date) when Reed died and she then took a year off before finishing the documentary. The film contains a loosely connected series of stories and images but is mostly a meditation on grief and death with a focus on her dog, a rat terrier named Lolabelle. What it isn’t about, at least not directly, is Reed, though he has a cameo in the film. When Anderson talks about “we” and “us” in relation to the dog we can presume she is talking about Reed, but she never mentions him by name. While Anderson describes in detail the last moments of her mother’s life, anyone looking for a similar scene about Reed (Anderson has written about his death, but doesn’t include it here) will be disappointed.

I admire Anderson’s resolve in not letting the voyeuristic tendencies of the public dictate the content of her work, and, as a longtime fan, was prepared to defend this film against the sexist snark I’ve seen directed toward it in some reviews. One male critic complained the narration was delivered in a “sing-song” voice, which is a little like complaining that Bob Dylan’s vocals are “too nasal.” Anyone who has listened to any of Anderson’s work (although she is a performance artist, most of her recorded work is audio; Dog is only her second full-length film after Home of the Brave, a filmed concert from 1986) will recognize the cadence she uses in the narration here, first describing a dream in which she gives birth to her dog. Doctors present Lolabelle to her in a pink blanket saying, “It’s a girl!” She explains that the birth had been a kind of performance because she had arranged for the doctors to say scripted lines and for the dog to be sewn into and then removed from her abdomen–which caused Lolabelle considerable discomfort. Anderson explains, “She wasn’t a puppy.”

The story/dream comments both on the role of dogs and cats as surrogate children (especially for those of us who aren’t raising kids) and of our own manipulation of our animals, so they will seem more child-like to us. Other sequences are less evocative: Anderson talking about the distinctive qualities of rat terriers reminded me of every dog person who has bored me with arguments about the superior traits of whatever breed of dog they happen to have. And Anderson’s illustrations of her dog’s entrance into the Tibetan Buddhist version of purgatory are striking and detailed, but perhaps not the best vessel for her talent.

When Anderson brought up her Buddhist beliefs I cringed a little. As a white person who has spent a fair amount of time in rooms full of white, privileged people who are also interested in Buddhism, I would gladly live the rest of my life without hearing one more of them begin a sentence, “My teacher says…” And I would recoil even more from a documentary narrator who intoned, “My pastor says…” Godard’s Goodbye to Language, in the scenes of his own dog, Roxie, showed more of the mystical dimension of our relationship to our animals than any of the “spiritual” talk in Heart of a Dog does.

To be fair, Anderson’s other work shows she is much more than a woman who loves dogs and has a Buddhist teacher: her most recent live installation featured a man who was imprisoned in Guantánamo. And in the film, her unique storytelling style is a perfect fit for the death of her mother who, “in a high voice I had never heard from her before,” formally thanks everyone gathered in her room for coming and hallucinates animals looking down at her in the bed from the ceiling. Anderson also tells a harrowing story from her childhood, but when Anderson mentions that she never really loved her mother, we never get more than a few hints about why.

I’m always complaining about films that have great cinematography and acting and an inadequate script, but besides the snappy animated version of Anderson we see at the start of the film, Dog’s visual components can’t equal the high points of the narration. After the umpteenth scene that has superimposed rain droplets streaming down, like tears on a face, over vintage footage of Anderson and her siblings as children or a contemporary rural snowscape, I wanted to say, “Okay, we get it. Let’s move on.” This film’s disjointed structure and emotional reticence would make a better album than a movie. An album also doesn’t demand an engaging overall story to hold our attention, but many of the scenes in this fairly short (75 minute) film had me (briefly) nodding off.

The film would probably connect more with an audience if Anderson had included more references to her and Reed’s relationship, but I respect her refusal to make this film about death about his death. Heart of a Dog, even as a love song by Reed plays over the closing credits, is a reminder that Anderson was much more than a wife and remains much more than a widow.

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

Girls and Women in the Middle of Nowhere: ‘The Wonders’ and ‘Bare’

In some ways Wolfgang could be a stand-in for all the directors and other outsiders who naively idealize and misinterpret contemporary rural settings and the business of farming.

In a scene early in Italian writer-director Alice Rohrwacher’s The Wonders the main character, an adolescent girl named Gelsomina (a radiant Maria Alexandra Lungu), her short-tempered beekeeping, farmer father (Sam Louwyck), her slightly younger sister Marinella (a charming Agnese Graziani) and her two youngest sisters, twins who delight in not doing what they’re told and making messes, are taking a break from the hard work of the farm to splash and scream in an impossibly crystalline body of water. Then a man, fully dressed in black pants and shirt makes his way through a shallow lagoon and tells them they must be quiet. “We’re shooting,” he says. When they follow him back to an idyllic small waterfall set against a backdrop of a rock cliff, we see “the shooting” isn’t the hunters we heard at the beginning of the film but a camera crew and a beautiful, white-wigged, costumed, famous TV host (Monica Bellucci) shooting a promo for a new reality TV series that will take place in the region and feature local, farming families competing against each other on camera for a large cash prize.

“Countryside Wonders will be here,” the host announces to the camera and even after the shoot is finished, Gelsomina who, as the oldest, is her father’s main helper in transporting the bees, collecting honey and even removing stingers from his neck, can’t stop staring at the host who gives her one of the jeweled clips from her wig. Gelso wants the family to be part of the competition, but her father, Wolfgang, whose Italian is clearly not his first language and seems to have some vaguely apocalyptic beliefs that have driven him into farming with his family in the countryside, says, “We don’t need that crap.”

In some ways Wolfgang could be a stand-in for all the directors and other outsiders who naively idealize and misinterpret contemporary rural settings and the business of farming. Rohrwacher shows us not just the hard work and financial precariousness of the farm, that just one forgotten chore can potentially put into ruin, but also little slights, like when a customer at the farmers’ market asks if the price of the farm’s honey has gone up, in a tone that implies it’s not worth what the family is charging.

Wolfgang’s neighbor, who grew up in the area, is more philosophical about the reality show, “Maybe we will get some jobs or some tourists.” When he’s on the show, wearing the ridiculous costume the producers force all of the contestants into, he knows just what role he should play, complimenting the host, telling her he’s always wanted to be on her show, lamenting his status as a bachelor and getting the women in his family to sing a “traditional” song for the audience. Gelsomina’s stunt, in which she lets bees crawl out of her mouth while the troubled, 14-year-old boy who lives with the family whistles, is met with much less enthusiasm from both the host and the live audience.

The Wonders could also refer to the film’s gorgeous cinematography shot by Hélène Louvart, whether the scene includes that unnaturally glass-like lake, the crumbling farmhouse, the Tuscan countryside or the open, tender faces of the women and girls (including the girls’ mother, Angelica, played by the director’s sister, Alba Rohrwacher). The beekeeping scenes are surprisingly absorbing, as Gelsomina in her protective suit removes the swarming insects from the thick branch they coat into an open container or finds a pile of dead bees and in the bottom of another and declares them, “poisoned.” I have only a slight fear of bees, but I shuddered at some at these scenes, so anyone with a more serious phobia might want to look away. And anyone who has ever questioned the sanitary standards of small farms will want to look away from a number of scenes showing the gathering of honey in this family operation.

As beautiful and well-acted as the film is, I couldn’t help thinking once the credits rolled, “Is that it?” Although the film has opportunities for great emotional sweep it consistently avoids them by deliberately cutting away or downplaying action that would engage us more fully with these characters and their story. In some shots Lungu looks like she could have been painted by Modigliani and the film itself is more of a static portrait than an emotionally moving story. We spend a lot of time looking into Lungu’s face, but besides her desire to be on TV and get closer to the farmhand, we never really find out what she’s thinking.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEOS5iy0Y4M” iv_load_policy=”3″]

Stateside, another new film from a women-writer director that takes place far from the city is Natalia Leite’s Bare. Glee’s Dianna Agron and Paz de la Huerta (believably androgynous and a little grubby) are respectively, Sarah, a meek, young woman in small-town Nevada, working (and getting fired from) a series of menial jobs and Pepper a sexy, shoplifting drifter in a truck.

Inside this film’s sometimes over-the-top melodrama it has some acutely observed moments, like when Sarah’s best friend disparages a woman they both know, then over a period of time, the two of them become best friends and Sarah is the one they whisper about. We see the aimless wandering of the group of slightly past-high-school kids who don’t have anything like college plans, drinking, driving and shouting in the wide Nevada deserts and canyons. Other films show scenes like these only as preludes to disaster: this one just lets its bored, restless characters blow off steam.

Agron and de la Huerta have great chemistry and unlike many similar films about young women together, Bare doesn’t shy from showing these two characters having sex and, at least on Sarah’s part, falling in love. The film also has a more realistic take on working in a strip club than we are used to seeing in films, though the way the film equates dancing naked for money as degradation, the same way it makes Sarah’s sexual awakening with Pepper coincide with her being able to really let loose onstage, is a little retro. Agron is a lot better than I expected her to be (Glee isn’t exactly renowned for its great dramatic performances) and the film is beautifully shot (by Tobias Datum) but, as is too often the case with both indie and Hollywood films, the script is nowhere near the level of the performances or cinematography–and a good script is what makes a good movie. Maybe someday both Hollywood and the indie world will learn this lesson.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8p5RhFZTm0″ 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 appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

‘Room’ for Being More Than “Ma”

Because the kidnapped-but-survived ending is the happier one, even though a real-life victim has suffered through an ordeal, we want her to answer our questions. How did you survive? Why didn’t you escape before? What are you going to do now? The new film ‘Room’ directed by Lenny Abrahamson and starring Brie Larson as the abducted woman we know in the first part of the film only as “Ma” attempts to give us some possible answers.

Trigger Warning: Rape, Sexual Assault

The American public’s morbid fascination with women and girls held captive by their rapists, in some cases for years, stems in part from the many missing girls, presumed dead, we’ve all read and heard about. Because the kidnapped-but-survived ending is the happier one, even though a real-life victim has suffered through an ordeal, we want her to answer our questions. How did you survive? Why didn’t you escape before? What are you going to do now? The new film Room directed by Lenny Abrahamson and starring Brie Larson as the abducted woman we know in the first part of the film only as “Ma” attempts to give us some possible answers.

Ma lives with her five-year-old son, Jack (Jacob Tremblay) in the place they call “room,” a converted garden shed with a bed, table, tub, sink, skylight, kitchenette and heat and electricity. They are kept there by the man who abducted Ma seven years before, when she was 17. We see Jack and Ma’s daily routine, waking up in the same bed, Jack saying, “Good morning,” to the pieces of furniture, doing exercises together, having meals, watching an old TV and splashing each other in the bath at night. Then Ma puts Jack to bed in a closet (called “wardrobe” even though they are presumably in the US: the out author of the original book who also wrote the screenplay, Emma Donoghue, is originally from Ireland and the production is an Irish/Canadian one) so when their captor punches the security code to open the door and rape her in the bed, as he does every night, Jack won’t see.

Ma has tried to make their lives seem almost normal to Jack, with homemade toy boats floating in the top of the toilet tank and bedtime storybooks. But we see signs of how constricted their lives are: the tops of the knives Ma uses to make dinner are blunted and because she can’t see a dentist or doctor she loses a tooth and has an old wrist injury that pains her. Jack’s hair is so long that we at first mistake him for a little girl–apparently their captor will not let Ma keep scissors in the room. At one point the kidnapper, angry at Ma, cuts off the electricity and heat on a frigid day, which they spend in layers and scarves, eating peanut butter sandwiches. Sometimes during a “normal” day they scream at the skylight. After which Ma says, “I guess they still can’t hear us.”

Ma fluctuates between depression, some days not wanting to get out of bed, and desperation, as she brainstorms ways that she and Jack can escape. She is always stretched three ways: trying to keep Jack safe and somewhat sheltered from what she’s going through (which means appeasing her captor but also telling Jack when they’re alone, “He’s not our friend”), trying to be a good parent and thinking about how to get the both of them out of “room.”

First she needs her son to understand why they need to leave. She tells him, “Do you remember how Alice wasn’t always in Wonderland? I wasn’t always in Room. I’m like Alice.” With his reluctant help, she devises one plan that fails then, worried that their now unemployed captor will no longer be able to feed them, she comes up with a much darker–and scarier–scheme in which Jack must pretend to be dead and escape while the captor goes to bury him in a secluded spot. Anyone who watches horror movies (or even the trailers for horror movies) will be filled with dread during the moments when first the kidnapper, then Jack seem to be wavering from Ma’s plan, but in spite of the glitches, both Jack and Ma are eventually freed.

Instead of being locked in room, Ma (we find out her name is Joy) and Jack, have an implausibly brief stay in a hospital room, one high above the ground, in a corner with floor-to-ceiling windows and a panoramic cityscape view (like the rest of the film, beautifully shot by cinematographer Danny Cohen) which makes Jack’s question, “Are we on another planet,” seem perfectly reasonable. But after the scenes in the hospital, part two of the film is a lot less compelling, not just because we no longer have a nemesis for the two main characters, but because the imagination and craft that went into the first part of the film seems to desert the screenwriter. Joy and Ma hole up with her mother (Joan Allen) and Leo (Tom McCamus) the man she lives with after her divorce from Joy’s father, in their suburban house. The media stalking Joy outside the door make leaving impossible.

But Joy seems to have very little life of her own outside of being “Ma”: a deficit that cannot be attributed only to the character’s untreated trauma. While Joy looks at an old yearbook photos of her friends, no one from her old life (besides her parents and Leo, who was a friend of the family before he moved in with her mother) seems to have any contact with her, even as her story is gaining national attention. As Joy sits on the floor of her childhood bedroom we see an electric guitar in the background which could easily be exchanged for a Bible or a buzz saw without changing anything we know about Joy–because, except for a brief outburst at her own mother, we never get to know her beyond her role as Ma. She never seems interested in going back to school or doing anything with her life other than caring for Jack. The movie doesn’t seem to care either.

I was able to suspend my disbelief, at least momentarily, in the first part of the film. I still wondered, for example, if the kidnapper raped Joy every night and she did not have any type of birth control why she had only one child. But the screenplay neglects most of a kidnapping’s aftermath, so in the second part I questioned most of what was onscreen. We see Joy and Jack watching a TV report on their case, but we don’t see how Joy would have to shield Jack from hearing all the gory details of her imprisonment, over and over, in the media. The script ignores that her face would be one that many people recognized, and with that recognition she would carry a stigma of being best known as a rape survivor, and her son recognized as the product of that rape, a facet explored only in a brief and unsatisfactory scene with Joy’s father (William H. Macy). Worst of all, Joy and her ordeal would become fodder for the internet with everyone commenting and even joking (remember Joan Rivers saying of the women Ariel Castro held captive in his home that they should have been grateful for the free rent?) on the terrible circumstances she had survived. I thought of how Elizabeth Smart, a real-life, long-term abductee, has turned the notoriety foisted on her around, by becoming a spokeperson on the issues her case highlighted. I despaired that her fictional counterpart was a lot less interesting than she turned out to be.

Brie Larson gives a very strong performance as Joy and actually looks like a woman held captive (and later, one still suffering the after-effects) as opposed to the prettied-up version another film would present to us. But I couldn’t help comparing this performance to the one she gave in Short Term 12, another role of an unglamorous trauma survivor, but one in which, in spite of its disappointing baby-makes-everything-okay ending, the audience was allowed to see the character as more than just a sometimes very troubled mother-figure (which she also played in her job as a counselor to at-risk teens). Jacob Tremblay is also very good as her son, though maybe because of An Open Secret or maybe just because so many talented child actors in the past have become adults without many prospects, I worry about what will happen to this excellent, young actor, more than I worried what would become of his character or of his mother’s, a bad sign for any film.

I realize I’m in the minority, that a lot of audience members and critics (especially women) love this film, but sometimes a “strong woman” at the center of a film, even one played by a talented actress, isn’t enough. We need our women protagonists, even the ones written by women, to be more than just “Ma.”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C6fZ-fwDws” iv_load_policy=”3″]

‘Girlhood’: Observed But Not Seen

‘Girlhood’ starts on a peak note: a slow-motion scene of what looks like Black men playing American tackle football on a field at night, wearing helmets, shoulder pads and mouth guards, so we don’t realize–until we notice the players’ breasts under their uniforms–that they are all girls.

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

When Boyhood was making its victory lap through critics’ circles and award ceremonies, I wasn’t the only person who thought, “I want a film called Girlhood.” We all got our wish near the beginning of this year when the out writer-director of Water Lilies and Tomboy, Céline Sciamma, gave us the art house US release Girlhood about a French, Black teenager, Marieme (Karidja Touré). The English title isn’t an exact translation of the original French Bande de Filles (“Group of Girls”) which was in production long before Boyhood was released–and perhaps even before that film was called Boyhood: the original title was 12 Years. Still, I was eager to see Sciamma’s film–until I read about its “bleak” ending and some talk from women of color that they found the writer-director’s take on Marieme’s life lacking. When the film played at my local art house as a revival months after its first run, I went to see it. I’m glad I did, but now I understand both reactions: the effusive praise and the cringing.

Girlhood starts on a peak note: a slow-motion scene of what looks like Black men playing American tackle football on a field at night, wearing helmets, shoulder pads and mouth guards, so we don’t realize–until we notice the players’ breasts under their uniforms–that they are all girls. Marieme and the rest of the team all live in the same neighborhood so after the game they walk home together with each saying “Good night” to the rest as she leaves the group to go home. Marieme is the only one left at the end, making her way up to her family’s apartment, where we see that she and her sister, who is a couple of years younger than she is, (Marieme is 15 or 16 at the beginning of the film) are the ones raising their much younger sister, cooking her meals and doing the dishes while their mother works. Their older brother is a physically abusive, petty dictator who kicks Marieme out of the living room when he comes home, so he can have the computer soccer game she was playing to himself.

Marieme finds out that she is flunking out of school and an unsympathetic counselor won’t listen to her excuses, or allow her to redeem herself. Dejected, she leaves, then just outside the school meets up with a group of three girls about her age, also not attending classes, who invite her to go to Paris with them (the film seems to mostly take place in the Parisian suburbs). At first she turns them down but when she notices the attention they receive from a group of local boys (including a friend of her brother’s she’s attracted to) she decides to go to Paris with the other girls after all.

In the city the girls unapologetically take up space, whether blasting music and teaching each other dance routines in a crowded metro car (with the white passengers turning their backs on them, pretending not to notice) or shaming and shoving a white clothing store clerk who profiles them. Marieme is entranced and becomes a permanent part of the group. She exchanges her long braids for the long straight weave/wig similar to that of the leader of the group Lady (Assa Sylla) and intimidates one of her former football teammates into giving her money that the group pool into a night in a motel room (with extra for food and booze). While she’s partying with her friends her brother calls, but Lady, while taking a bath, instructs her not to answer. She tells Marieme, “You do what you want.” When Marieme repeats the words back to Lady, she says she should look in her bag for a gift, a necklace that spells out “Vic.” “As in ‘victory,'” Lady tells her. We later find out “Lady” isn’t her real name either: it’s “Sophie.”

In another highlight the girls lip sync to “Diamonds” (the Sia Furler song sung by Rihanna) while in the room, wearing the new dresses they’ve shoplifted, dancing (shot stunningly by cinematographer Crystel Fournier) like they are in their own music video. But the high life never lasts–afterward when Marieme, now known as “Vic” returns to the apartment her brother chokes her, telling her to never ignore his calls again.

By this time Vic’s nearly silent mother knows that she is out of school and has arranged for her to join her at her job cleaning hotel rooms. We see the defeated expression on Vic’s face as she scrubs a bathroom sink but aren’t prepared when, at the end of the shift, Vic grabs the supervisor’s hand, as in a handshake but squeezes and twists it until the supervisor agrees to tell her mother that she doesn’t have a position for Vic after all.

We’re used to seeing teenaged protagonists, especially those who suffer physical abuse at home, turn to petty crime and violence in film, but they’re rarely girls: the only other unapologetically violent, girl-protagonist that comes readily to mind is Reese Witherspoon’s Vanessa in 1996’s Freeway. We see Lady and the others in the group call out insults to other groups of Black girls which sometimes leads to nothing and sometimes culminates in scheduled fights (complete with a crowd of spectators filming the event with their phones). One of these fights leads to a humiliating defeat for Lady and the chance for Vic to avenge it. In Vic’s fight, she not only takes off the other girl’s shirt, as the girl did to Lady, she takes out her switchblade and cuts off the girl’s bra as well. When she comes home, her brother, who apparently saw the fight on YouTube, instead of hitting her (as he usually does when he calls her into a room) invites her to play computer soccer with him.

When Vic sees her younger sister with a group of other girls her age robbing a woman’s purse she ‘s upset. On the train ride home she implies she too will swear off stealing and fighting–only to find her brother waiting for her in the apartment with a beat-down, angry that she’s had sex with his friend (this boyfriend is one of the only Black men or boys in the film who is presented as more than a cardboard thug).

Sciamma is at her best when the girls are alone together (including an early funny scene between Marieme and her slightly younger sister) and also as in her earlier films when her characters seem to be exploring their sexual orientation and gender expression. Unlike every other woman or girl character in a movie, when Vic is in a dress and high heels it’s only until she can change into sweats and sneakers. At one point she wears her hair in short cornrows and binds her breasts, to protect herself as a woman alone on the street, but she continues to wear her “disguise” when she is at home as well. The scenes when she talks to Lady in the bathtub as well as a later dance with a sex worker/roommate have a sexual tension to them that Vic’s scenes with her boyfriend (even as she, just before they have sex together for the first time, objectifies his bare ass) don’t equal.

But during other scenes I felt Sciamma was observing these girls as a sociologist or tourist might, as opposed to truly seeing and understanding them or giving their scenes the same nuance the white male director of Our Song gave to the girls of color who were his main characters. The sometimes careless cinematography doesn’t help; although Touré is photographed beautifully in most of the first part of the film (she’s never lovelier than when, in the presence of the boy she likes, she looks down and smiles) in some latter parts she’s poorly lit (a persistent problem of white photographers and cinematographers with dark skinned actresses/subjects), so we can’t clearly make out her features.

Other reviews made me dread a downer ending. Needlessly degrading or deeming “hopeless” a woman or girl character is one of the biggest clichés writers, especially male ones, have at their disposal and I’m not the only woman who is sick of it. But the last shot of Vic isn’t any more hopeless than the one of another, very famous teenaged protagonist in French film who had also gotten into a lot of trouble, Antoine Doinel in François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. And unlike him, Vic wears a look of determination on her face as she walks purposefully away from us.

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

‘A Ballerina’s Tale’: Misty Copeland in Good Times and Bad

Misty Copeland, the focus of the new documentary, ‘A Ballerina’s Tale’ (which is directed by Nelson George and started its run in theaters this week) was recently promoted to principal dancer with the American Ballet Theater and with her viral Under Armour commercial (which had a nice body-diversity message)–as well as an autobiography and talk show appearances–might turn into a ballerina the general public knows and loves, the first in decades.

When I was growing up in the ’70s and early ’80s, opera, classical music and ballet were part of mainstream culture in a way they aren’t today. Although I had no interest in opera, I knew who sopranos Beverly Sills and Leontyne Price were, the former because she was a favorite on talk shows, the latter because she’d made a special appearance on The Odd Couple. Classical concerts aired regularly on PBS and NPR, often simultaneously so fans, like my father, could listen to the music on a stereo instead of through tinny, built-in TV speakers. Ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev was in movies and like other famous people of the era was photographed at the infamous disco, Studio 54. Mikhail Baryshnikov, besides having a burgeoning acting career also starred in more than one prime-time, network-TV dance special.

Although ballet centers many of its works on ballerinas (thanks in part to New York City Ballet founder and choreographer George Balanchine), women dancers in the ’70s were less well-known to the general public; one year Gelsey Kirkland (who became better known for her eating disorder and cocaine addiction) was in the spotlight, then Leslie Brown, who played a supporting role opposite Baryshnikov in the ballet film The Turning Point was. A few years later Natalia Makarova (who had been Baryshnikov’s dancing partner) won a Tony for playing a Russian ballerina in a Broadway revival of On Your Toes. We haven’t had a classical star whom most TV audiences could identify for a long time–and we haven’t had a ballerina they would recognize for even longer. Misty Copeland, the focus of the new documentary, A Ballerina’s Tale (which is directed by Nelson George and started its run in theaters this week) was recently promoted to principal dancer with the American Ballet Theater and with her viral Under Armour commercial (which had a nice body-diversity message)–as well as an autobiography and talk show appearances–might turn into a ballerina the general public knows and loves, the first in decades.

We meet Misty as she is still trying to become the first Black woman principal dancer in the American Ballet Theater (when the film was shot she was still a “soloist”). The film glosses over the disputes between her family and her then-mentors in the years before she came to New York, though we do see some early home video footage of her dancing in California with her voice-over telling us, “I first discovered ballet at 13.” She started considerably later than most ballerinas do, but her talent was obvious even then.

In the present day we see Copeland at the barre but also in street clothes walking around New York or the cities the company tours. Much like Serena Williams has changed what a women’s tennis champion is supposed to look like, Copeland is changing what a prima ballerina looks like. Her face and hair are similar to many other ballerinas, as well as her petite size and extremely low body-fat, but she also has highly defined muscles in her arms and shoulders and bulging, powerful thigh muscles visible through the leggings she wears outside the studio. Her body is also much curvier than what we think of as a “ballerina build.”

Management at ABT saw that Copeland was struggling early in her time in New York where she had no family (unlike most other ballet dancers, no one in her family had the resources to move to New York City with her) and no other Black dancers in the company to talk to. ABT board member Susan Fales-Hill who says of Missy, “She always stood out. She had what you can’t teach and you can’t learn. She had a fire,” was asked to mentor Copeland. Fales-Hill wisely introduced Misty to many who were the first Black women in prominent roles in their respective fields–which helped give Copeland a perspective of her position–and also gave her folks who could prepare her for being the “first” too. So many films about artists seem to focus on the white, male artist achieving alone, but this documentary shows what many of us know from real life, that artists need support systems in place–and women and people of color often have to build their own.

In one of the best scenes we see 80ish former ballerina Raven Wilkinson, a star in the Ballet Russe in the ’50s (eventually she went to Europe to dance because in the Jim Crow South she was barred from staying in hotels with the white dancers). She and Copeland hold hands across their bodies ballet-style and as Wilkinson hums the Swan Lake score they both go through the same head movements of the lead role, which each played decades apart.

At age 29, Copeland’s career seems to be taking off; she plays the lead in The Firebird and is prominently featured in the banners and posters for the performances, but she suffers an injury (stress fractures on her tibia) that requires surgery and a long recovery period. Here we really get a sense of what a dancer has to go through to get her body to do her bidding. Along with the usual stretching, massage and manipulation we see Missy endure difficult therapeutic exercises and a painful looking encounter with a chiropractor. She makes her first return to performance in a non-taxing, guest role. When she comes off stage, she tells the camera, “I’m glad that’s over.”

As Copeland and other dancers interviewed attest, ballet is a “crazy perfectionist” profession with pain, sweat and strain the norm in performances that are supposed to look effortless. George underscores the force and strength needed by letting us hear the insistent soft tap of Misty’s toe shoes hitting the floor when she dances in rehearsal, a sound usually drowned out by an orchestra.

A white director probably would have left out much of the talk of racism in ballet, but hearing it discussed openly as an obstacle to be overcome, is refreshing. Fales-Hill asks directly,”Where are the Black ballerinas?”

Victoria Rowell, an actress who had her start in ballet says she was simply never promoted in the New York City Ballet while her friends, white dancers at her level, were. She states that Balanchine (who was still in charge of NYCB at that time and had great influence over all of ballet) once said that a ballerina should have skin “like a freshly peeled apple,” which not only leaves out Rowell (and Copeland) but also slights the first ballerina Balanchine choreographed his version of The Firebird around: Maria Tallchief was Native American (and his third wife!)

This film could use more footage of Copeland dancing–and in the scenes where she is dancing (or rehearsing) the camera is either too close, so we don’t see her whole body or too far away, so we don’t see the emotion on her face. Logistics of filming dance are always challenging, but La Danse, Frederick Wiseman’s documentary about the Paris Opera Ballet, as well as Wim Wenders 3-D game-changer, Pina, are excellent blueprints. Although George probably didn’t have the budget those films had (Tale is Kickstarter-funded) I wish he had taken some pointers from them.

Still Copeland is a great subject and ballet, like opera and classical music has a rapidly-aging fanbase, a problem we see offset by the many young girls (including girls of color) seeking out Misty for autographs after her performances. Like Serena Williams has done for tennis, Copeland has drawn new fans to ballet from the Black community and beyond.

Copeland is now in her thirties, so her time as a principal dancer will probably last less than a decade. But she has such a warm, lovely screen presence, producers would be wise to put her in front of a camera even when she’s no longer on pointe. But by that time Hollywood will have to chip away at its long legacy of racism, the way we see the ballet world is just starting to do in theirs.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Y2h6fz2XzQ” iv_load_policy=”3″]

Lies The Government Tells Us: ‘(T)ERROR’ Plus New Lyric R. Cabral Interview

To see a portrait of the inner workings of the FBI we have to look to films like the new documentary, ‘(T)ERROR,’ co-directed by Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe, which opens in the US starting tomorrow, Oct. 7.

The following is partly a repost; scroll down for a brand new interview with filmmaker Lyric R. Cabral

In most movies, US government agents, whether they are from the FBI, like Mulder and Scully, or from the CIA, like Melissa McCarthy’s character in Spy, invariably play the hero (or heroine) thoughtful, competent, and above all, ethical. The news tells a different story; FBI protection was a key factor in organized crime head Whitey Bulger escaping prosecution for his crimes (which included murder) for decades. When the FBI was investigating the Boston Marathon bombing they interrogated an unarmed immigrant friend of the bombers, and even though he was not implicated in the crime they shot and killed him. Only a few months ago, after targeting a Boston-area Muslim man with surveillance for a number of months, the FBI (teaming with local police) stopped him near a CVS parking lot to “talk” to him. They ended up shooting him dead right there–at 7 a.m. on a workday morning.

To see a portrait of the inner workings of the FBI we have to look to films like the new documentary, (T)ERROR, co-directed by Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe, which opens in the US starting tomorrow, Oct. 7. In a highly unusual coup, an FBI informant Saeed aka “Shariff” (who used to be Cabral’s neighbor) agrees to be followed by the camera (though he complains to Cabral during closeups, “You’re always getting the fucking headshots”) as he talks about his past cases and sets up a current one.

Saeed is an older Black American Muslim whom we see pull up stakes from his home (so he is away from his young son) and his job as a cook in a high school cafeteria to move to a strange city with his dog and his weed, working on getting entrée into the life of a younger American jihadi, Khalifah al-Akili, who makes mildly inflammatory YouTube videos but seems not to do much else. We see Saeed haggling with the FBI about money (he does not seem to earn much–at all–for his efforts) and admonishing them to stop being so obvious about setting this guy up.

Meanwhile, al-Akili, using Google and a piece of mail he sees on Saeed’s car dashboard figures out his FBI connection early in their acquaintance. We find out later that Saeed started his career with the FBI because he himself was charged with a crime, and then set up a man who was a friend of his to escape punishment, a chilling reminder of the questionable use of informants in the US justice system. This cycle perpetuates to the end of the film–someone barely getting by (al-Akili lives in public housing and does not seem to have a car) preyed upon by someone nearly as desperate, Saeed, as the FBI eggs him on. Saeed seems unrepentant about his targets, saying, “I don’t have no feelings for them. You making the Islam look bad, you gotta go,” but as he smokes blunts and bakes a succession of cakes he seems bent on convincing not just the directors and us, but himself too.

Interview with Lyric R. Cabral

I talked to Lyric R. Cabral, the co-director of the film (who has also worked as an acclaimed photojournalist) by phone a week after the back story behind (T)ERROR was featured on a segment of This American Life.

This interview was edited for clarity and concision and contains spoilers.

Bitch Flicks: When you first knew Saeed, and he was your neighbor and you were spending time hanging out in his apartment, did you ever think, not that he was an informant, because that seems so far-fetched, but that he wasn’t being 100 percent truthful with you?

Lyric R. Cabral: He had a lot of marijuana, like pounds of it in his place. And lots of money there too. One time he took out $2,000 (in cash) right in front of me. But I was busy. I was a student, so I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to fact-check him.

BF: After you found out he was an informant and you knew how much he had lied to you and everyone else was it difficult for you to trust other, new people that you met or believe what they said?

LRC: No, because I feel like I’m a good judge of character in spite of everything–and I didn’t feel like I would know two informants.

BF: Although Saeed sometimes complains when you film him in the movie, he did agree to be in this documentary, which you remind him of. Why do you think he did agree?

LRC: It’s his personality; he’s anti-authoritarian. He’s always kept papers, like old plane tickets that prove that he was in Germany at a certain time as, like, a fact check. And he knew because of the way I’d been with him, even after I found out he was an informant, that I would be fair. Not that I would idealize him but that I would be fair with him. I also think he thinks of his legacy. He has a 9-year-old son and some medical issues, so I think he wants to leave behind some answers for him.

BF: Previously, Saeed had turned in a friend of his, who, we find out in the film was pretty clearly entrapped. Saeed puts up a big front onscreen, but do you think he regrets this or any of the other times he has helped put someone in prison?

LRC: Tariq says they were friends, but Saeed says they only got to know each other as part of the sting operation. The FBI tries to match up people who have the same personality traits (as informant and target). Saeed did start to like him, but by then, because Saeed was wearing a recording device, he couldn’t really stop the operation from happening. The most he could do was turn the device on or off. So he would turn it off when Tariq would start talking about certain things. Or so he says. I do think Tariq weighs heavily on his mind, especially because he will be getting out (of prison) in two years.

BF: You’ve said that you became a filmmaker because you felt your work as a photojournalist sometimes couldn’t tell the whole story. Did you ever feel your previous work had been misunderstood?

LRC: Not really. But you can only show or say so much in a photo and a caption. I felt like filmmaking could show more nuance.

BF: I know you had a successful crowdfunding campaign after the film was completed and shown at festivals because legal worries made insuring the film very expensive. Has the FBI, which doesn’t come off very well in the film, contacted you or your co-director? Have either of you had any experiences that made you think you were being followed or otherwise spied on?

LRC: We tried to get a comment or statement from the FBI back in October of 2014 and they still haven’t given us one. We haven’t been harassed at the border when we have traveled internationally with the film. I did get a piece of malware on my computer though. After we were on Democracy Now someone sent me an encrypted message offering more information–and the keys (encryption) didn’t match up. So then I just emailed the address (without encryption). I got an attachment and my computer started acting crazy. We’re trying to track down who sent the attachment now.

BF: In the film, what turn of events or detail surprised you the most?

LRC: When Khalifah al-Akili was arrested. He was going to give a press conference the next day (about FBI harassment/entrapment). He had just gotten a plane ticket (to get to the conference) 12 hours before. I was surprised how quickly the government can act when they target someone.

BF: (T)ERROR is your first full length documentary. Do you have any advice for women who are making their first documentaries?

LRC: Patience. For anyone starting out, that’s my advice. Filmmaking can take a lot longer than you think. And unexpected expenses can come up, like the (high) insurance premium we had to pay. We started filming in October of 2011 and the film is being released this October, so that’s four years.

BF: Has either just knowing Saeed or making the film changed how you think about the government?

LRC: I didn’t realize how much an informant could set up, that the informant isn’t just observing but is acting and leading. I’m surprised by how much the government depends on these human relationships (between the informant and the target). (Cabral asked the following to be included in this answer in an email she sent shortly after the interview.) I would add, that first meeting Saeed, at the age of 19, informed me that I am a person of surveillance interest to the US government, particularly the FBI. Saeed’s disclosure, which in a way I appreciate because it told me that in essence I was a POI (person of interest), assures me that the government has taken interest in my journalism, personal activities, and social network (at the least because these are things which I openly shared with Saeed, throughout our relationship). Thus I have been able to adjust my communications and behaviors, knowing that active government surveillance may be taking place.

‘Viaje’ and ‘Love Between the Covers’: Women Who Aren’t What We Expect

What will surprise no one who reads ‘Bitch Flicks’ is: films directed by women and told from a woman’s point of view are often the last to get distribution–and more likely to have limited theatrical runs or are released only on VOD and streaming services, skipping theaters entirely. Two great films by women I saw during the spring are still very much on my mind and will be playing film festivals in October.

Going to film festivals means watching the sometimes dispiriting process of which films get picked up for distribution and which ones languish: the best documentary I saw last year, One Cut, One Life didn’t get its brief, limited theater run until this spring, 13 months after I’d seen it. At the same time, an offensive piece of pap like Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (which shared some of the same elements with One Cut, One Life) was everywhere, at least until word-of-mouth could debunk the puzzlingly rapturous reviews it received.

What will surprise no one who reads Bitch Flicks is: films directed by women and told from a woman’s point of view are often the last to get distribution–and more likely to have limited theatrical runs or to be released only on VOD and streaming services, skipping theaters entirely. Two great films by women I saw during the spring are still very much on my mind and will be playing film festivals in October.

Writer-director Paz Fábrega’s Viaje (non-Spanish speakers: say “bee-YAW-hey”) which plays the London Film Festival Oct.11 and Oct. 15, is the more realistic counterpart to Sleeping With Other People (which I enjoyed in spite of its conventionality) in its portrayal of how couples meet, pass the time and get to know each other. Shot in lustrous black and white (by Esteban Chinchilla) the film follows two Costa Ricans in their late 20s, Pedro (Fernando Bolaños) and Luciana (Kattia González) from their first drunken encounter in the city waiting for the bathroom during a costume party (Pedro dressed as a bear, Luciana as a schoolgirl: at first she’s not interested but then returns to where she left him) through a shared taxi ride in which they both agree (and high-five) on the best way to have a family. Luci says, “I think I could have kids if I could raise them with one person, but could still go on dates sometimes and it wasn’t an issue.”

Pedro, always the joker, then suggests, “Let’s have a kid together… you can go out on Fridays and I’ll go out on Saturdays.” When they discuss the advantages of sharing parenting with a queer couple, the cab driver (whom we don’t see: the choice of shots in the film is often quite shrewd–and its stills are beautiful enough to fill any coffee table book) cannot resist interrupting and berates them for not wanting the traditional family life that he and his wife have. Pedro and Luci don’t argue and resist rolling their eyes: we’ve seen they had to wait forever for this cab.

The “trip” of the title is on a bus to a national park situated around a volcano, where Pedro has work studying biology for his graduate degree and a hungover Luciana (still in her costume, with no luggage other than her purse) has spontaneously agreed to accompany him. The film has a leisurely pace, especially once they are in the wilderness (in spite of its 70-minute length I found myself nodding off a couple of times) but its pleasures (the beauty of the Costa Rican landscape and the chemistry between Bolaños and González, whether their characters are about to have sex or are just shooting the shit) and surprises (this film might seem like loose, funny improvisation at first but by the end we see it’s cleverly scripted) are genuine ones that many will recognize from their own lives–and which rarely, if ever make it into the movies.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6xxvVuWra4″ iv_load_policy=”3″]

On Oct. 14 and Oct. 16, Mill Valley Film Festival in California will be showing writer-director Laurie Kahn’s Love Between The Covers, a feminist, bad-ass, diverse documentary about the successful authors of romance novels. The women (most of whom attend romance novel conferences and other similar get-togethers shown in the film) talk about a “pay it forward” philosophy in which each explains how veteran writers helped her out at the beginning of her career and so she now helps writers who are just starting out.

Every time I expected this film to let me down it proved me wrong. When I thought, “Oh, it’s going to be all straight women,” it included as one of its main players a queer writer, Radclyffe (Len Barot) a former surgeon who writes about queer women. When I thought the film would be all white women it included, again as part of its main focus, Beverly Jenkins, a Black woman whose novels feature Black protagonists. We also see other women of color and queer women in one-off scenes and interviews. And nearly everything the women tell us in this film is a revelation. As Jenkins says of the romance sector (which includes its legions of fans) “You have nothing like this in science fiction. You have nothing like this in fantasy. You have nothing like this in mysteries. We are the shit.”

For those of us who aren’t romance novel readers, the film is not only a pretty good case to reconsider, but also has Nora Roberts, a superstar of the genre (she employs at least two men in her immediate family as part of her empire) setting straight those who might dismiss romance novels as “formulaic.” She tells us most genres adhere to a formula, including mysteries: for a whodunnit, the author had better reveal who the murderer is at the end!

Other genre fiction doesn’t get the flack romance novels do, namely because romance novel readership is nearly all women–and romance novel sales are what support more literary writing (which sell just a small fraction of books) in the publishing industry. As one author says, “We’re the ones who keep the lights on.” Another interviewee tells us it’s not unusual for a romance fan to read a book a day.

Although the writers are in the business of Happily Ever After (HEA) stories, they aren’t under the thumb of traditional gender roles and family life: more than one woman says that she started writing because of how bored and frustrated she was as a stay-at-home Mom. They also show no hesitation in cutting lose men who don’t respect their work: two of the authors (who also write together) divorced their husbands and then decided to move in (platonicly) together. We also see how hard the women work: in-demand authors are expected to write more than one full-length book (sometimes many more than one) a year, every year and they (or their assistants) are expected to engage with fans on their own websites, on social media and in person as well. Love Between the Covers is my favorite documentary of the year so far and could easily turn out to be the best one I see in 2015. Go to the theatrical showings of these films while you have the chance.

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

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

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 will be will direct an episode of ‘Transparent’ this coming season), and in many aspects is the answer to those who dismissed ‘Blue’ as a product of the male gaze.

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

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 will direct an episode of Transparent this coming season), 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 is also written and directed by a queer woman, 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″]

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‘Grandma’–and Lily Tomlin–in a Minor Key

Paul Weitz, who is about my age and is probably still best known as the director of ‘American Pie,’ grew up with Tomlin too, which may be why he centered his latest film, ‘Grandma’ (for which he also wrote the script) around her. 76-year-old women are not often the leads in mainstream American movies, especially not current ones, so I suppose I should be grateful, but I kept wishing this vehicle (and I don’t mean the antique car Tomlin’s character drives in the film) were a better one.

Lily Tomlin was the first woman on television who ever made me laugh. She appeared on Laugh-In as Ernestine, the telephone operator with the ’40s hairstyle and quick temper who snorted at her own jokes, back when the US had telephone operators–and only one phone company. Tomlin was also Edith Ann, a little girl about my age in an oversized rocking chair who ended every monologue by lisping, “And that’s the truth,” and blowing a raspberry.

I didn’t see Nashville when it first came out though my parents did, and afterward my father played its soundtrack incessantly. When I saw the film as an adult I didn’t really care for most of it–except the scenes with Tomlin’s not-at-all-comic (but Oscar-nominated) role, the married, gospel singer, a mother of two, young, deaf children, who has an affair with the young up-and-coming singer/songwriter (Keith Carradine). He has sex with many women but only has eyes for her. When he invites her to a club to watch him perform, she shows up but has obviously never been to a nightclub before. She is struck motionless when Carradine’s character sings a love song he’s penned (many of the actors in the film wrote their own songs, including Carradine, who won a “Best Original Song” Oscar for this one) looking straight at her. The camera doesn’t look away from her either.

Paul Weitz, who is about my age and is probably still best known as the director of American Pie, grew up with Tomlin too, which may be why he centered his latest film, Grandma (for which he also wrote the script) around her. 76-year-old women are not often the leads in mainstream American movies, especially not current ones, so I suppose I should be grateful, but I kept wishing this vehicle (and I don’t mean the antique car Tomlin’s character drives in the film) were a better one.

One of Weitz’s best ideas is to make Tomlin’s character queer, since none of us knew as children in the ’70s that the woman who wrote much of Tomlin’s most famous work, Jane Wagner, was also her romantic partner. The two legally married a couple of years ago, the final unambiguous, public “coming out” of many in that generation (and those who are a little older). Although Tomlin has maintained in interviews that she was always open about her sexuality and the media simply didn’t report it, the history some of us remember is a little more complicated. In the ’90s writer Armistead Maupin (Tales of the City) objected to Tomlin narrating The Celluloid Closet (which he wrote) a ’90s history of queers in film because he felt having a semi-closeted narrator was antithetical to the film’s message.

In the film Elle Reid (Tomlin) is a lesbian poet whose heyday was in the ’70s: she’s now an underemployed academic whose talent and reputation is enough to attract a much younger girlfriend, Olivia (Judy Greer). Greer has a warm presence and hilariously wears the anti-fashion sometimes donned by queer women of a certain age (batik pants!), but we see no chemistry between these two characters who are supposed to be hot and heavy lovers, so their breakup in the first scene is a blessing. When Elle’s only granddaughter Sage (Julia Garner) comes to her and confesses, “I’m pregnant,” Elle is too broke to give Sage the money she needs for an abortion. So the two set off in Elle’s old car (which actually belonged to her late partner, Vi) to try to track down the money for the procedure. Another nice touch is that this film doesn’t make a big deal about abortion; Sage is a high school student who seems to have self-esteem issues and her boyfriend (Nat Wolff) isn’t exactly great father material (Elle asks him, “Why didn’t you use a condom, or for humanity’s sake get a vasectomy”), so this choice makes the most sense for Sage, the way it does for many women and girls in real life. I’ve loved Garner in other films, but here she doesn’t demonstrate much of a flair for comedy, especially in reaction shots–or maybe she doesn’t seem skilled in comparison to a master like Tomlin.

The problem is the script isn’t very funny and when it’s serious, it’s not very acutely observed. Everything this film knows about women’s studies and lesbian poets could have been cribbed from a Wikipedia page (though Weitz knows some queer women writers, and is familiar enough with the work of Eileen Myles to quote it at the very beginning of the film). Some straight men can make very good films about queer women–Show Me Love and Blue Is the Warmest Color (with some reservations) are two of my favorites. But Grandma doesn’t really go much under the surface; Elle misses Vi (who was Black–directors, when we ask for more characters of color onscreen, we don’t mean dead ones whom we see only in still photos and drawings), and had good sex with Olivia and that’s… about it. When we see Elle trying to raise money by selling her first editions of famous feminist books, one by a notorious homophobe, Betty Friedan, and another by transphobe Germaine Greer–even though we find out Elle’s friendly enough with one trans woman (Laverne Cox, majestic as always) to have lent her money–Elle doesn’t let on that she might have any objections to these authors or that she knows anyone who does (and with plenty of transphobes among some self-described feminists, especially older ones, today, this detail would be a relevant one).

Although we see artifacts of ’70s Southern California (a dream catcher and wind chimes in Elle’s home), we don’t get a sense of Elle as a person who lived in that time and subculture the way a film that was actually shot in the ’70s, the underrated, under-seen detective story The Late Show, gives us; Tomlin’s character in that film wrote affirmations on her mirror. An interesting film could be made about a character like Elle’s transition from ’60s free spirit to 2010s misanthrope (which Sage confuses with “philanthropy”), perhaps with a script by Wagner (if she’s not retired) since she did such a good job writing the transformation of feminist women and not-so-feminist men from the ’70s to the ’80s in Tomlin’s ’80s hit, one-woman, stage show The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.

As in Tangerine the straight writer-director tips his hand by making a straight white-guy supporting role the most complex and best thought-out character in the film–Sam Elliott’s, Karl, an old flame of Elle’s (who explains this relationship to Sage as, “I knew I liked women. I just didn’t like myself”)–completely avoids cliché, the only character to do so. Elle’s daughter and Sage’s mom is a cold workaholic, the type of woman we’ve see in movies before, over and over. Elle is the dirty-talking, no-filter, “surprisingly” antagonistic stereotype many older women are called on to play these days, which stretches back to Dorothy on The Golden Girls and beyond: nearly 50 years ago, when Tomlin’s Laugh-in co-star Ruth Buzzi played her most famous character, an older woman who hits men with her handbag, it was already a tired trope. When people talk about how in this supposed “golden age” of TV that premium television is “just like” film, Grandma is the type of predictable, middle-of-the-road, haphazardly written movie that they mean. My advice is to watch other films and see if they change your mind.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XspFo3jiVR8″ iv_load_policy=”3″]

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