Author: Ren Jender

Lies The Government–and Movies–Tell Us: ‘(T)ERROR’ and ‘Me and Earl and the Dying Girl’

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, showing this Sunday, June 14 as part of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. 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.

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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. Just last week, 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, showing this Sunday, June 14 as part of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. 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 who makes 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, the jihadi, 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 (the jihadi lives in public housing and does not 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.

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The lie the designated Sundance “breakout” movie Me And Earl And The Dying Girl (which opens this Friday, June 12) tells is familiar–that the experiences of white, straight guys are the only important ones; the main white guy can learn valuable lessons thanks to women and people of color, but nothing they do or say could possibly be as fascinating to us. The “me” of the title is Greg (Thomas Mann) a senior in high school, quirky in that cliché movie way that never crosses into weird or creepy and creative (he makes films at home with pun titles of famous works). His only friend is Earl (RJ Cyler), the Black best friend as stereotype: Earl’s main attribute is his repetition in more than one scene of the word, “titties.” Greg’s mother (Connie Britton) (she along with Nick Offerman who plays Greg’s Dad and Molly Shannon, who also plays a parent in this film, wrest what they can out of the script which bestows no human qualities on them, just more quirks) commands him to visit a girl, Rachel (Olivia Cooke), newly diagnosed with cancer, saying, “You might be someone who could make Rachel feel better.” He hasn’t hung out with Rachel since grade school and she greets him at her house by saying, “I don’t need your stupid pity,” but the two begin a friendship anyway.

Too bad Rachel is really the manic, pixie, dying girl (the one way the movie doesn’t fall into predictability is that she and Greg never embark on a romance) since we find out, too late, she is an artist as well, but her aspirations and thoughts get short shrift. Olivia Cooke does well with a limited role and gives us a glimpse of how much better the movie could have been in one scene when she gives Greg a pep-talk about his future, but when he asks about hers, she suddenly goes quiet.

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This film could use a lot more “girl” (Olivia Cooke)

 

Alfonso Gomez-Rejon directed the script by Jesse Andrews based on his own YA novel; future filmmakers of similar material should note that no one over 20 gives a shit about high school social hierarchy. The film has great art direction and soundtrack selection (with artists like Brian Eno and vintage Velvet Underground), but nothing can disguise or improve its white-guy narrative of “Person unlike me who changed my life for the better,” which seems more fitting for an undergrad college entrance essay than the basis for a film.

Earl has received puzzlingly decent reviews and its trailer seems to have piqued the interest of people who should know better, To try to understand how retrograde this film is, think if it were instead Me, The Girl and Dying Earl. The “me” would still be the white guy, his best friend a white girl who says “balls” a lot (which actually would make her a more nuanced character than most teenaged girls in movies, including this one) and Earl would be a variation of The Magical Negro, this one with terminal cancer who, as a last good deed, gives Greg precious guidance–and a plot that shows us all what a great guy Greg is. No one would hesitate to call bullshit on that film, so I’m unsure why no one is complaining about this one. I was also disappointed that a contemporary film that takes place in the suburb of a large American city doesn’t include any queer students in its high school especially since Greg, Rachel, and Earl would all be more interesting–and their sexless bond more true-to-life–if one or more of them were queer.

As I sat through Me and Earl I couldn’t help thinking of the Sufjan Stevens song “Casimir Pulaski Day” which covers some of the same ground–dying high school girl, quirkiness and a straight-guy narrator–but in less than six minutes reaches depths of feeling this film never comes close to. To equal the duration of this film you could instead listen to that song about 17 times–and save yourself $12.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qfmAllbYC8″ 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

‘Spy’: Truly Funny and Truly Feminist

The melding of feminism and marketing means that certain crappy, mainstream films try to convince us our duty is to shell out money for them just because they’re directed by women, written by women or star women. This marketing, of course, is the best way to kill movies directed by, written by or starring women once and for all, by force- feeding us films that are supposed to be “good” for women but which give us no pleasure when pleasure, or something like it, is why we go to movies in the first place.

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An advantage of getting older is being able to predict what types of maintream entertainment I won’t enjoy and then being able to cheerfully avoid them. I have never even seen a clip from Breaking Bad: the fulsome interviews with the (male) cast and creator on NPR were all I needed to hear. In the many years people have been posting “hilarious” Saturday Night Live clips I’ve found only “Brownie Husband” and Tiny Fey as Sarah Palin funny, so now I just skip them. With movies I am a lot more susceptible to hype, especially if the film is about a woman or women. I’ve been let down enough times that, for about the past decade, I’ve seen hardly seen anything at the multiplex, especially “comedies” which rarely make me laugh out loud or even smile. After sitting through The Devil Wears Prada, I decided I would no longer believe anyone who said, “You’ll like this one.”

The melding of feminism and marketing means that certain crappy, mainstream films try to convince us our duty is to shell out money for them just because they’re directed by women, written by women or star women. This marketing, of course, is the best way to kill movies directed by, written by, or starring women once and for all, by force-feeding us films that are supposed to be “good” for women but which give us no pleasure when pleasure, or something like it, is why we go to movies in the first place. What I find especially galling is when a film that is supposed to “empower” women ends up making one the butt of the joke, but instead of being a joke just because she’s a woman (as she would be in the usual bro-comedy) she’s a joke because she’s fat, or not white or because her appearance doesn’t conform to the ultra-femme standard of most women characters in movies. I feared that Spy, which opens this Friday, June 5, and stars Melissa McCarthy (who has been in more than one of the type of films I’ve described) might be another disappointment, but was pleasantly surprised.

The film starts out strong with a pre-credit sequence in which McCarthy’s character, Susan Cooper, from an office in Washington DC, guides spy Bradley Fine (Jude Law) through various ambushes and traps in an Eastern European mansion/castle using an earpiece, a contact lens camera and surveillance technology–plus her own expertise. She’s the super-competent office assistant that most powerful men have back at the office. She never falters and he, in the mold of James Bond and Jason Bourne never does either until the end when he confronts a villain and makes a huge error (which, in context, made me laugh out loud). At first Susan says, “Oh my God, why, why did you do that?” But then, like all great office assistants she immediately takes the blame, saying she should have taken additional measures to prevent the incident, even though we see she has already taken more than enough.

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Agents Cooper and Fine

 

Susan has a crush on Fine (who wouldn’t? Law here is at his most charming and, unlike in some other recent roles, has hair) which keeps her in his thrall. She confesses her desire to be a real spy only to her office mate, Nancy (a wonderful Miranda Hart, whom some might recognize from Call The Midwife), who tells her, “You play it too safe.”

Also on hand is Allison Janney (in one of the brusque, take-charge roles she does so well) as the agency boss who has no patience with Susan until she realizes “We need someone invisible,” in the field. Janney’s character also counsels Susan, saying that Fine, by telling her she was best at her job as his helper was actually holding her back. Susan is eager to take on the sophisticated false identity that she’s seen Fine and the other agents given but always ends up as a variation of a frumpy, Midwestern cat-lady, a sly dig at the type of roles actresses who aren’t slender, like McCarthy, are typically asked to play.

When Nancy and Susan visit the gadget sector of the agency, instead of the cross between a hovercraft and a Segway we see a good-looking man in a suit and tie thoroughly enjoying himself on, Susan receives a bottle of “stool softeners” that are actually  poison antidotes along with equally unglamorous accessories. Once in Europe she runs into another agent (who is supposed to be lying low) Rick (Jason Statham making fun of his usual “tough guy” roles) a bungling braggart who takes every opportunity to disparage Susan’s skills as a spy, even as we see that she brings the same efficiency to her work in the field as she did back in the office.

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Susan and Nancy

 

In a world where “satire” is used as a descriptor for works like Entourage, the word might not have much meaning, but Spy, in the tradition of the best satire, makes fun of conventions we might not have realized we were sick of–like the cat-lady typecasting. Also, while male action heroes like 007 and Jason Bourne never make a wrong move, no matter how extreme the situations they find themselves in and shoot and kill others with all the sensitivity of a giant swatting at flies, two of the women in Spy who kill react more like the rest of us might: neither plays it cool.

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Rose Byrne as Rayna and Melissa McCarthy as Cooper (front)

 

I kept on waiting for the film to go wrong, for someone to humiliate Susan for her size, which miraculously never happens. Others doubt her skill and the villainess Rayna (Rose Byrne, having a ball as a spoiled, rich Daddy’s girl with a British accent) rips apart her fashion sense, even after Susan changes into flattering, chic evening wear, but no one ever comes close to making a fat “joke” or comment, which has to be some kind of milestone: imagine if Will Smith or Denzel Washington had spent a good part of their careers being the butt of racist jokes–and how different their careers would then be today.

I haven’t before seen McCarthy in a role I’ve liked, so was gratified to see how good she was in this one, which calls on her to take on multiple identities, sometimes switching personas in the middle of a scene. Writer-director Paul Feig (the director of Bridesmaids who is also one of the only male directors to publicly support the ACLU action on behalf of women directors in the industry) gives us the same settings as the real Bourne and Bond films use: European casinos, lakefront estates and helicopters, but isn’t so dazzled by them that he forgets to include jokes, good ones. For once no one is making fun of the office ladies (Hart’s Nancy also gets her turn in the field) but of those who make fun of the office ladies, like Rick, who by the end grudgingly admits that Susan has done a good job though we see he’s still not the smartest guy. I even liked the celebrity-as-himself cameo (Fifty Cent, who gets a great last line) and some of the physical comedy, which is a first for me.

The film isn’t perfect. I could have done without Peter Serafinowicz’s terrible Italian accent as a lecherous fellow agent and would remind everyone involved that Europe (not to mention Washington DC) has plenty of people of color and encourage them to cast some in speaking roles (the villains here are Eastern European, so we don’t even get Arab actors, though Bobby Cannavale, who is half Cuban, plays one hard-to-kill baddie). The film also includes a scene where Cooper and Nancy tear down a friendly, thin, well-dressed woman agent behind her back and an instance where a newly glammed-up Cooper delights in being the target of street harassment, false tropes that a woman writer-director probably wouldn’t have perpetuated. But Spy is so much better than any other film in its genre (and unceasing in its feminism: the solidarity between the women characters continues right through the end) that even those who put together the trailer must not have been able to believe it, since they strung together–badly–moments that make the movie look like the usual summer mediocrity. It’s not! Instead we finally have an action-adventure comedy that is truly funny and truly feminist–and almost makes me look forward to my next trip to the multiplex.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAqxH0IAPQI” 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

‘Mommy’: Her Not Him

I went into ‘Mommy,’ the magnificent film from out, gay, Québécois prodigy Xavier Dolan (he’s 26 and this feature is the fifth he’s written and directed) knowing that Anne Dorval, who plays the title character, was being touted in some awards circles as a possible nominee for “Best Actress” in 2014 (she’s flawless in this role, certainly better than the other Best Actress nominees I saw)–as opposed to “Best Supporting Actress.” But this film (which won the Jury Prize at Cannes) kept surpassing my expectations by keeping its focus on her and not the one who would be the main character of any other film: her at turns charismatic, obnoxious and violent 15-year-old, blonde son, Steve (an incredible Antoine-Olivier Pilon).

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This slightly modified repost by Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on Bad Mothers.

The misunderstood, screwed-up manboy/hero is such a persistent trope in films that audiences are often tricked into empathizing with characters whose actions are more deserving of our scorn. At the end of Blue Valentine, when Ryan Gosling’s character separates from his wife, Michelle Williams’ character, and leaves the daughter they’ve raised together, I heard someone nearby say aloud, “Poor guy.” But Gosling had, just a scene before, shown up drunk at Williams’ workplace to terrorize and humiliate her (and ends up assaulting her boss, which results in her losing her job). The director and co-writer, Derek Cianfrance, could barely manage to see these actions from the point of view of Williams’ character: the one with whom our empathy would more naturally lie.

I went into Mommy, the magnificent film from out, gay, Québécois prodigy Xavier Dolan (he’s 26 and this feature is the fifth he’s written and directed) knowing that Anne Dorval, who plays the title character, was being touted in some awards circles as a possible 2014 nominee for “Best Actress”  (she’s flawless in this role, certainly better than the other Best Actress nominees I saw)–as opposed to “Best Supporting Actress.” But this film (which won the Jury Prize at the 2014 Cannes) kept surpassing my expectations by keeping its focus on her and not the one who would be the main character of any other film: her at turns charismatic, obnoxious and violent 15-year-old, blonde son, Steve (an incredible Antoine-Olivier Pilon).

We first meet Dorval’s character, Die (short for Diane), after we see, from a distance, a car crash into hers at a good speed. She staggers out after opening the jammed door, her head bleeding as she curses out the other driver. In the next scene we see her walking in extremely high heels along a hallway filled with several inches of water to meet with the director of the “youth facility” (one small step from a detention facility) where her son has been staying. The resigned bureaucrat behind the desk is more like real-life people who work in social services than the young idealists and abusive villains we usually see in movies. She explains that Steve has set a fire (the reason for the watery hallway) that injured another student, so he’s being expelled into Die’s care. Die objects, but the director tells her she has no choice–unless Die wants to commit him. Die astutely points out that doing so would put him in the pipeline to prison, which she doesn’t want. The director tells her, “We save some, we lose some,” and “Loving people doesn’t save them,” but no one, certainly not Die, can be as philosophical about their own child.

“Skeptics will be proven wrong,” Die retorts. Besides having a sexy wardrobe of high heels, tight jeans, sheer shirts and short skirts (a contrast to how unwilling most films are to acknowledge mothers as sexual beings) we see she also signs her name like a 12-year-old girl–complete with hearts.

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Mother and son

 

Steve has some psychiatric diagnoses and no impulse control, so even though he has a loving, teasing, quasi-inappropriate relationship with his good-looking, tart-tongued, probably alcoholic mother, their lives together are measured in the moments between his abuse and violence, some directed toward her, some directed to others. In one of the only scenes in the film that fall flat he makes racist remarks to a Black cab driver, the only person of color we see onscreen. Young, aimless white guys have targeted their anger at Black and brown people through the ages, but filmmakers, especially young ones like Dolan, should understand that audiences need to see POC characters as more than anonymous victims–and more than one in a film that is over two hours.

At one point Steve goes to the mall and in a beautifully stylized sequence (the expert cinematography is by André Turpin) we see him shouting and whirling around with a shopping cart. He shows joy and energy along with the intermittent charm we’ve already witnessed. But when he goes home and shows Die the goods he’s brought with him, including a necklace for her that spells out, “Mommy,” she tells him he has to return this stolen merchandise. He then starts shouting and smashing things, chasing Die, and at one point strangling her until she hits him in the head with a glass-covered picture frame and he retreats. As Die cowers in a locked closet, pleading with Steve through the door to take his medication, she hears him talking calmly to someone and when she ventures out she sees the neighbor from across the street (to whom she has never spoken) dressing the leg wound Steve suffered in the confrontation. Kyla (Suzanne Clément, every bit as great as her co-stars) is about Die’s age and the two have similar features but their personalities and circumstances differ. Kyla has a form of aphasia that seems to be the result of a breakdown. She is “on sabbatical” from her job as a high school teacher and, as we have seen in previous scenes she spends a lot of time facing away from the husband and daughter she lives with, observing Steve and Die through her home’s front window.

 

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Mother, son, and friend/tutor

 

The three have a convivial dinner together and while Steve is out of the room, Kyla and Die down shots while Die explains that she can’t ever call the police or alert hospitals after an incident like the one that afternoon because the authorities might then take her son away from her. Die states, “Life with Steve is a roll of the dice,” and, “When he loses it, you best scram because it gets ugly.” When Steve returns he encourages them all to dance and sing along with one of his favorite songs.

Kyla, who feels superfluous in her own household, accepts Die’s request to tutor her son while Die goes to a job interview. We see Steve testing Kyla by acting up with her the way he does everyone else, even touching her breasts, but when he pulls a necklace from around her throat and refuses to give it back, Kyla shows the reserves of rage quiet people often have, pushing Steve flat onto the floor. In a lesser movie this scene would be the prelude to a sexual encounter, but Dolan instead makes us see, as Kyla does, that in spite of his bravado and violence Steve is just a screwed-up kid.

What follows is a chronicle of three misfits who, for a time, find what they need in one another. Kyla is Die’s confidante, the only person who really understands her and the situation with her son. Steve likes having Kyla as his tutor and is on his best behavior (which is by no means perfect) in her presence. And Kyla has fun and feels like she has a purpose when she is with Die and Steve. In a bravura moment, the square frame of the film is seemingly stretched by Steve’s own hands into widescreen as Oasis’s “Wonderwall” plays on the soundtrack.

We see, when Die is interrupted as she prepares dinner with the others, that the idyll can’t last (and the screen shrinks back to a square). The classmate at the facility whom Steve injured with fire is suing. The knock at the front door was to serve a subpoena. Still, Die scrambles to “save” her son and in another widescreen sequence imagines a parallel life for him, graduating from high school, going to college, getting married, becoming a parent–and growing tall.

At one point Steve wonders what will happen when his mother doesn’t love him anymore, but she explains to him that he is much more likely to stop loving her than the other way around. In the end we see that no matter the circumstances their bond will continue. But the two women who had been such close friends (friendship between two 40-something women is an unusual enough focus for a film that one would think it rarely occurs offscreen) can hardly face each other anymore. The other’s presence reminds each of what she would most like to forget.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7rtSqI0ZeA” 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

‘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.

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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.

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Lady and “Vic”

 

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.

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The girls dance and lip sync to “Diamonds”

 

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″]

 

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.

 

‘Bessie’: A Mainstream Portrait of Black Queer Women by a Black Queer Woman

The difference between ‘Bessie’ and the similar bio-pics about Black performers of the Jim Crow era is in the details. We see Bessie (played by Queen Latifah, in the affable, spirited persona she usually brings to roles: she’s also in good voice even though no one could be Smith’s equal) fail the “paper bag test” a Black impresario uses for the women he recruits to his revue. Smith is darker than the paper bag (as is Latifah, though not as dark as Smith was) so in spite of her talent, she’s out. Later, when she has her own revue, she uses the same test, but this time the recruits have to be darker than the bag, eliminating the women Bessie calls, “high yellow bitches.”

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In some ways writer-director Dee Rees’s Bessie (showing tonight on HBO) about “The Empress of the Blues” singer Bessie Smith, is a story we’ve seen before, complete with feathers, spangles, and bootleg liquor as the action meanders through the 1920s, but a script (written by Rees, the late white playwright Horton Foote, plus Christopher Cleveland and Bettina Gilois) about a queer Black woman (Smith was bisexual) by an out queer Black woman who also directed is unusual, especially on a platform as popular as HBO. The only other recent example I can think of is Rees’s last film, the theatrically released, indie, coming-out drama, Pariah.

The difference between Bessie and the similar bio-pics about Black performers of the Jim Crow era is in the details. We see Bessie (played by Queen Latifah, in the affable, spirited persona she usually brings to roles–she’s also in good voice even though no one could be Smith’s equal) fail the “paper bag test” a Black impresario uses for the women he recruits to his revue. Smith is darker than the paper bag (as is Latifah, though not as dark as Smith was) so in spite of her talent, she’s out. Later, when she has her own revue, she uses the same test, but this time the recruits have to be darker than the bag, eliminating the women Bessie calls, “high yellow bitches.”

We see Bessie mentored by the slightly older blues singer Ma Rainey (also the subject of one of August Wilson’s most famous plays) and with Mo’Nique in the role we get a taste of the complex interplay of Black women we saw in Pariah between the main queer character, Alike (played by Adepero Oduye) and her homophobic mother (Kim Wayans). Rainey (Mo’Nique is terrific in the role and made me wish she were in more films) at first is a mother/teacher figure showing Smith that she should deliver her songs teetering at the front edge of the stage as she explains, “If you not riskin’ nothing, neither will they.” She also instructs her to find people in the audience to focus on and sing to, “The blues is not about people knowing you. It’s about you knowing people.”

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Mo’Nique as Ma Rainey

 

With these two characters Rees is, again, one of the few filmmakers showing an audience one queer Black woman (Rainey, though she had a husband who was also her business partner, was as out as one could be in those days, singing, “Went out last night with a crowd of my friends/They must’ve been women, cause I don’t like no men”) offering guidance to another (we see Smith in multiple scenes with a girlfriend, Lucille, played by Tika Sumpter). When the two singers are relaxing in a saloon, Rainey is openly affectionate with her girlfriend and when she notices Smith nervously looking around, afraid to be seen in public with her girlfriend, Rainey tells her she shouldn’t care what other people think. Rainey and Smith are both presented as sexual, desirable beings (Latifah in one non-sexual scene reminiscent of Viola Davis in How To Get Away With Murder, removes her wig and makeup while also topless) in spite of both Latifah and Mo’Nique being over 40 and neither possessing the model-thin body type that is the default for most modern-day actresses.

But as Smith develops her stage presence and her great voice (we see the performers don’t have microphones, a condition which favors those who can easily reach the back row with no amplification, as Smith, and later in musical theater, Ethel Merman, did) we see Rainey look warily at her and eventually demote her from a starring role in the revue. Smith with her brother strikes out on her own and eventually outshines her mentor, both because of her talent, but also because of timing. The peak of her popularity as a live performer was just right for the nascent recording industry, which made better quality records of Smith’s work than of Rainey’s.

We see that Smith is reluctant to release “race records” because of the racist imagery used to promote them. But when she  fails to be “respectable” enough for the Black nationalist record company during her audition (after a fawning invitation letter the very light-skinned president of the company signs “Yours in negritude”), she makes records for Columbia, a white-owned company, which offers her a flat fee, but no royalties, and features her photo, not a caricature, on the covers. The records become so popular, the Black farmworkers in the fields all stop their work to wave to her train car as it makes its way from town to town for live shows.

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The real Bessie Smith

 

Smith grew up in a violent household (like many children of that era) and we see that she doesn’t hesitate to use her fists or a makeshift weapon at hand if she needs to. When we first meet her she receives a scar from one of these fights and we see it throughout the rest of the film, to remind us of these beginnings. I could have used fewer flashbacks to violent incidents when she was a little girl, especially since, unlike the at times violent mother in Pariah, Smith’s abusive older sister Viola (Khandi Alexander) is neither as nuanced in the script nor in her performance as Kim Wayans’s Audrey.

We also see Smith’s relationships with men (even as Lucille remains a member of her revue as well as Bessie’s girlfriend, a portrait of, for a time, fairly happy polyamory) including her husband Jack Gee (played by The Wire’s Michael Kenneth Williams, his distinctive facial scar perfect for this volatile character) who becomes her manager and, because of his propensity for violence, her sometime protector in the business deals that commonly cheated Black performers. We see both how she should get far away from this man and how his presence works to her advantage–and that she may very well have seen this paradox too.

I wish the film had used more period music (as well as more music that includes Smith’s voice, not Latifah’s) instead of the score which could have been lifted from pretty much any movie covering any era, the orchestra always intruding, telegraphing to us what we should be feeling instead of letting us feel. The last time I heard a score that distracted and irritated me to this extent–while still being completely forgettable–it was by the same composer: Rachel Portman. I know we need more women composers in film, but I much prefer the work of innovators like Mica Levi. I also wish the film had made its center the relationships with Rainey and Lucille (the publicity for the film, especially that targeted to queer women makes these two roles seem much bigger than they turn out to be). We’ve seen the story of the abusive husband-manager before (though Smith’s was probably one of the earlier examples) and the performer whose fortunes fall as her popularity does as surely as we haven’t seen complicated relationships between queer Black women, especially not on HBO.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FhmzwXfgz8″ 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.

 

‘One Cut, One Life’: Love, Death, and Jealousy

First person documentary filmmakers Ed Pincus and Lucia Small are no strangers to letting an audience in on their family “secrets”: Small in ‘My Father, The Genius,’ a film about her own father and their ambivalent relationship, and Pincus in ‘Diaries,’ in which he filmed both his girlfriend and wife in 1970s Cambridge, the latter–in one scene that seems to sum up the post-hippie atmosphere of the time and place–nude and playing a flute.

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The following is a slightly modified repost by Ren Jender.

Artists who use their own lives as the subject matter for their art always have to make a decision about how much revelation is too much. David Rakoff, whom many know from his work on This American Life, wrote frankly and transcendentally about his declining health (including an inability in his last years to use one of his arms) after he was diagnosed with the cancer that would eventually kill him. But Rakoff  didn’t have to worry that his revelations would hurt those closest to him; he lived alone, without a partner or children.

When they reveal “everything,” those artists who are in relationships aren’t just exposing their own lives to the public–they can’t help also exposing intimate details about their loved ones. Author Ayelet Waldman has received criticism for revelations about both her husband (author Michael Chabon) and her kids in her work. Sex writer and essayist Susie Bright swore off using her personal life as fodder for her work years ago and though she seems to be in a successful decades-long relationship (and sometimes collaborates with her now adult daughter), her writing doesn’t have the same spark as it did earlier in her career.

First person documentary filmmakers Ed Pincus and Lucia Small are no strangers to letting an audience in on their family “secrets”: Small in My Father, The Genius, a film about her own father and their ambivalent relationship, and Pincus in Diaries,  in which he filmed both his girlfriend and wife in 1970s Cambridge, the latter–in one scene that seems to sum up the post-hippie atmosphere of the time and place–nude and playing a flute.

Near the beginning of their excellent documentary One Cut, One Life (which will be in theaters starting Wednesday, May 13), Small and Pincus, each seeming to take a turn behind the camera, discuss plans to collaborate on their final film together (they had previously worked on the post-Katrina documentary The Axe In The Attic). Ed has been diagnosed with a fatal disease which would eventually turn into leukemia. Lucia is working through her grief over the deaths of two of her close friends, one from a hit-and-run driver, the other murdered by an ex-boyfriend.

Ed and Lucia
Ed and Lucia

 

Ed, who is over 70, has other health issues (he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s some years before and speaks slowly and carefully), but they agree that they can probably work around them. The problem is Ed’s wife, Jane, who is adamant that she doesn’t want them to film what might be the last months of his life. We’re so used to wives being a drag on “great” men in film (Pauline Kael referred to this role as the “‘please don’t go up to break the sound barrier tonight, dear’ type”) that we’re ready to think of Jane as the villain until she tells us, “I have enough to deal with in my life right now. My husband has received a death sentence, and I don’t see why I have to give him over to anybody else.”

Jane, who was filmed over five years in Diaries, is familiar with the intrusion a camera is in one’s day-to-day life and has no desire to relive it. She’s also insecure about Ed’s feelings for Lucia.

Ed documented his and Jane’s open marriage in the 70s, but after Diaries was completed they moved to Vermont to run a flower farm. When they made an appearance at a screening of Diaries in the 90s, with matching glasses and grey hair, their arms around each other, they seemed to have become a more conventional couple.

In the 2000s, Ed’s introduction to Lucia reignited his interest in filmmaking (though he still kept the farm). Lucia tells us that she became close to both Ed and Jane (who was a member of the feminist health collective that wrote the original Our Bodies Ourselves) during the making of Axe, but then they, by mutual agreement, distanced themselves when the film was finished. Lucia tells us that aside from a few “flings” she hasn’t been in a relationship in years and that working together for as many hours as a film takes, mixes up her feelings of love and intimacy, though she clarifies that her relationship with Ed is platonic.

Ed Pincus
Ed Pincus

 

Ed seems less intent on keeping boundaries clear. He tells Lucia he loves her and at one point Jane catches them alone in a situation that sets off alarm bells for her–and like photographers in a war zone, Ed and Lucia immediately pick up their cameras and start shooting the conflict. Whenever we see Lucia talking to the camera, she looks drained; the elements in her life that might distract her from her grief instead serve as reminders. Her big, black dog originally belonged to the woman who was murdered. Her cute New York apartment was the one she shared with the woman who was killed in the hit-and-run. But when Jane looks at Lucia she sees a blonde 25 years younger than she is, whom her husband seems to adore.

Mixed up in all of this drama is Ed’s worsening health. Receiving bad news on camera he simply says, ” Well, that’s sobering.” In stunning cinematography we see the seasons at the farm: fall, winter, spring, summer and then spring again, when a newly cue-ball-bald Ed tells the camera that the doctor had said he probably wouldn’t live past March, so he’s grateful. Ed lived two seasons longer and died in November of 2013. When I saw the film last year as part of the Independent Film Festival of Boston, Small did a poignant Q & A after the screening. One of the first things she told us was Jane had chosen not to attend.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maC94kPWbQI”]

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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 appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

‘Iris’: One Older Icon’s Portrait of Another

The center of the film is Iris Apfel, who although she had a successful career as an interior and textile designer when she was younger (she and her husband/business partner, Carl, who turns 100 during the film, talk briefly about her work at the White House and he lets slip that “We had a problem with Jackie,”) became well known to a wider public when, as a last minute substitution for another exhibit, a collection of the distinctive outfits she put together for herself (always pants and a top often accessorized by trademark layers of big heavy necklaces which catch the eye like the iridescent breast plumage of exotic birds) became a surprise hit. The exhibit traveled from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Norton Museum of Art in Florida and the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts–making her a star at 84.

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In the exact same way that movie and TV actresses have become thinner as the rest of the population have become larger, characters in movies and TV are becoming younger as the population ages. Not just Harry Potter, but a plethora of underage protagonists (often from books in the young adult–YA–category) are onscreen, enough to make me want to never again watch a film in which all the main characters attend high school. Being very young isn’t usually interesting, even to those who are very young, a reality YA novels and films themselves seem to acknowledge with popular dystopic settings in which young teenagers fight for their lives instead of worrying whether they studied enough to get a decent grade on the history test.

Current mainstream and even “indie” narrative film portrayals of older women are pathetic: women graduate from being the girlfriend to the wife to the mother to the grandmother without ever accruing a personality; even those quirky, cranky grandmas who talk dirty for “comic” relief are a tired trope that should be retired immediately. Documentaries are the few films where older women are allowed the complexity they have in real life (like the grandmother we currently have running for the US presidency). Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me showed a woman toward the end of her career (and close to the end of her life) who, despite some serious health problems, wasn’t the mess our worst suspicions about older people, particularly older women, might make us think she would be. Instead she was a funny, frank woman who was trying to figure out each day–just as those of us who aren’t in our 80s try to do.

Iris, currently in theaters (which I saw as part of the Independent Film Festival of Boston), is one of the last documentaries directed by Albert Maysles (who died in March at 88) a pioneer of cinéma vérité, which even those not familiar with the term recognize as the predominant style of documentaries today. The center of the film is Iris Apfel, who although she had a successful career as an interior and textile designer when she was younger (she and her husband/business partner, Carl, who turns 100 during the film, talk briefly about her work at the White House and he lets slip that “We had a problem with Jackie,”) became well known to a wider public when, as a last minute substitution for another exhibit, a collection of the distinctive outfits she put together for herself (always pants and a top often accessorized by trademark layers of big heavy necklaces which catch the eye like the iridescent breast plumage of exotic birds) became a surprise hit. The exhibit traveled from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Norton Museum of Art in Florida and the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts–making her a star at 84.

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Iris in her Park Avenue apartment

 

At 93 she continues to wear outfits that sometimes straddle the edge between “genius” and “over the top.” She also does work associated with fashion–debuting (and selling out) a collection on the Home Shopping Network, beautifully styling several career women (including three Black women with wildly different body types and style preferences) as part of a special event for the women’s clothing store (now online only), Loehmann’s (Apfel has her own memory of the original “Mrs. Loehmann” who told her when she was a young woman, “‘You’ll never be pretty, but it doesn’t matter. You have something much better. You have style'”), attending fashion events and even making an appearance on a magazine cover (the outfit the stylists put her in is, of course, the least flattering one she wears in the film).

But she also has the concerns of an older person, telling us she feels the same as an older woman she knew when she was young who told her, “Everything I have two of, one hurts.” Her husband has also “not been feeling well” and is anxious about her well-being too, so she keeps from him that she has broken her hip (which she gets surgery for). Her nephew tells us that she’s told him that she keeps herself busy to stave off depression. She has begun sending away a lot of her outfits to be stored for posterity and to sell off the many items the couple have kept in storage which can’t fit into the Park Avenue apartment crowded with so many one-of-a-kind pieces (like a life-size wooden ostrich whose wing flips up to reveal a small built-in bar) it looks more like a specialty shop–or movie set–than a place where people live.

But none of these complications keep Iris from being delightful company–telling us how all the older women she socializes with have a crush on the filmmaker, her relish in haggling with a Harlem shopkeeper about items she wants to buy or a sudden intense alertness, like a cat stalking prey, when she sees a runway fashion that captures her fancy. Iris, in spite of interests many people consider superficial, is an incisive wit and not in the least flighty, hesitant or forgetful in conversation. When asked why she never had children she simply states that she wanted to work, to travel (her search for items that no other designer could provide led her all over the world), that she didn’t want her child to be raised by a nanny and concludes (in defiance of the paradigm of women “having it all”) “you can’t have everything.”

She and her husband, Carl, aren’t the cantankerous older couple we’re used to seeing onscreen but two people who complement one another (Iris buys the brightly colored and intricately patterned pants he wears with fairly conservative shirts and jackets) and after nearly seven decades together they still seem to enjoy each other’s company. She’s also not critical about what others choose to wear. At one point the photographer Bruce Weber tells her that he hasn’t once heard her badmouth anyone else’s fashion sense and she says, “I can’t judge… It’s better to be happy than well-dressed.”

Maysles, whose much lauded career included Grey Gardens and Gimme Shelter, doesn’t just coast on his reputation in Iris: he brings a perspective a younger filmmaker probably could not. We see a tinge of melancholy in the well-wishes, speeches and cake at Carl’s 100th birthday and that mood seems more in keeping for a man whose health isn’t great and may not make it to his next birthday than the relentlessly cheerful “Happy 100th to you” shout-outs of morning television, always delivered by people who aren’t close to that age themselves. Iris’s life is neither filled with loss nor one long, jaunt of constant happiness, but a combination, like the lives the rest of us will lead.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fo8jwJ_2l0c” 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

When Being Fat Isn’t A Big Deal: Jenny Gross on ‘Winners and Losers’

The default body size also extends to actresses who are not meant to be “decorative.” In writer-director Andrea Arnold’s powerful, excellent ‘Red Road,’ from the UK, star Kate Dickie has a nude scene which is neither meant to be nor is erotic, but her body has as little fat as that of a professional marathon runner. When women see these bodies as “the norm” in films and TV even those of us fortunate enough not to hate our bodies (and even those of us who are not habitually called slurs because of our size) have to fight against the tendency to ask, “What exactly did my body do wrong to be so unlike that of nearly every woman I see onscreen?”

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This post by Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on Fatphobia and Fat Positivity.

“Fat” isn’t just a loaded term when referring to actresses, but also a relative one. The late Joan Rivers infamously called Kate Winslet “fat” at red carpet appearances during the awards season for Titanic, even though Winslet seemed about the same size as she was in the movie, then the most financially successful of all time. Rivers’ pronouncement had enough power that Winslet was one of the few young women who came to the Academy Awards that year in long sleeves: to hide her “fat” arms. At the time Winslet was probably still well below the average size of women in the US (and the UK).

I grew up in the ’70s and although TV and movies then had more than its share of super-skinny actresses (especially noticeable in that era before most actresses had breast implants or muscles from working out), their bodies were much more in line with that of the general Canadian, US and UK population, since the average body size of those populations was smaller than the average body size (of both men and women) today. And the actresses on American TV, especially those who weren’t young (some of the most popular characters on the highest rated shows like Bea Arthur on Maude, Isabel Sanford on The Jeffersons and Jean Stapleton on All In The Family were in their 50s) weren’t expected to have the bodies (or faces or hair) of young teenagers–unless they were young teenagers.

As the general populace in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia have developed larger bodies than they had in past decades, most of the actresses from those places have shrunk. Although I was pleased to see Melissa McCarthy as the star of a film that makes good use of her talents (and is blessedly free of fat-shaming or slurs) in a preview screening of Spy (which I will review in full in June, when it’s in theaters), I couldn’t help noticing how sylphlike her equally hilarious Australian co-star, Rose Byrne, is. “Model-thin” has become the default body type for most actresses who wish to have a career in the English-speaking market and beyond: and of course fashion models now are also skinnier than they were in the ’70s and ’80s.

The standard ultra-thin body for an actress is common enough that when I saw the young actress Pauline Etienne topless in the French film Eden (a film I don’t recommend) I was surprised to note that not only did she have naturally large breasts (which are, after all, comprised mainly of fat) but her stomach, while flat was, unlike those of most contemporary actresses, not concave, let alone showing visible abdominal muscles. The default body size also extends to actresses who are not supposed to be “decorative.” In writer-director Andrea Arnold’s powerful, excellent Red Road, from the UK, star Kate Dickie has a nude scene which is neither meant to be nor is erotic, but her body has as little fat as that of a professional marathon runner. When women see these bodies as “the norm” in films and TV even those of us fortunate enough not to hate our bodies, even those of us who are not habitually called slurs because of our size, have to fight the tendency to ask, “What exactly did my body do wrong to be so unlike that of nearly every woman I see onscreen?”

The four main characters of "Winners and Losers" Jenny (Melissa Bergland) is second from the left
The four main characters of “Winners and Losers” Jenny (Melissa Bergland) is second from the left

 

The casual inclusion of a fat woman as one of four main characters on the soapy Australian TV series Winners and Losers feels like a triumph–especially because the body and weight of Jenny Gross (played by Melissa Bergland) are never the center of her storyline, any more than they are of the other leads: model-thin Bec (Zoe Tuckwell-Smith) and Sophie (Melanie Vallejo) and Frances (Virginia Gay) whose body is closer to average size. Jenny is, hands down, the most consistently well-dressed woman on the show, wearing vintage and faux-vintage fashions that look great on her and work well with her cherry-red hair and cat-eye glasses (which the actress wore to the audition and the producers decided to make part of her character). In a perhaps unwitting bit of verisimilitude the matching bridesmaid dress she was called on to wear with two of the other characters at the wedding of a third was equally unflattering to each actress (and body-type).

Although we in the audience are briefly reminded of the abuse fat women can receive, these moments never overtake the show, not even for one “very special episode”.  At one point a “player” who is using Jenny refers to her as a “cash cow” (the four women were “losers” in high school but after their reunion became “winners” when they jointly bought a lottery ticket with a large payout) with a laugh on the “cow,” and as with the other three main women characters, we know Jenny was bullied in high school (with remarks centering around her size). In another episode Jenny confronts her older sister, when she briefly visits home, that she too needled Jenny about her weight (Jenny’s parents and other siblings do not and are very close to and supportive of her) but otherwise Jenny has similar problems to the other three main women. She dates the wrong guys (one of her early boyfriends came out as gay, which was my original reason to start watching the series). She was the center of a love triangle for some episodes, spent a period drinking and partying too much, saw her mother through a breast cancer diagnosis and treatment and found out, in the most recent season, that she carries the gene that marks her as likely to develop breast cancer too.

Jenny waits with her sister to find out if she has a gene that will make her likely to develop breast cancer.
Jenny waits with her sister to find out if she has a gene that will make her likely to develop breast cancer.

 

She’s also not always the fat girl who wants everyone to like her: she can be quite cutting (and Bergland has a great touch with these lines) as when she informs a boyfriend with whom she is on the outs that he can’t hope to recover the pants he misplaced during a drunken night out because, “You lost them along with your wallet, your phone, your keys and your dignity.” When Rhys, the boyfriend from several seasons ago confessed to her that he was gay, he said about Sophie finding out (after he tried to kiss a mutual gay friend, Jonathan), “I thought she was going to beat the shit out of me.”

To which Jenny replied, “I kind of wish she had.”

Jenny and her latest boyfriend, Gabe
Jenny and her latest boyfriend, Gabe

 

Although Jenny is something of a late bloomer who lost her virginity at 27 (to Rhys) and at that time still lived at home in her childhood bedroom, filled with stuffed animals, the show is free from “Woe is me, I can’t get a boyfriend because I’m fat,” speeches. The show also avoids the cliché in which the fat woman is the f*g hag with no sex life of her own: although Jenny remains friendly with Rhys after he comes out, Frances is the one who is best friends with a gay man, Jonathan (Damien Bodie)–and Frances has had boyfriends of her own too. In the seasons since Rhys (who eventually settled down with Jonathan), Jenny has had a number of love interests, equally, if not more, handsome than the boyfriends and husbands of the other main characters on the show.

So the question remains: why, when I know several such women in real life, do I have to look halfway around the world to find a main woman character on TV who is beautiful and fat, who wears the cutest outfits, has love interests and all sorts of concerns (each episode of this series never has just one crisis when it could fit five) that have nothing to do with her body size? Perhaps US show creators will one day have an answer for me.

 

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

Tribeca Reviews: Lost Children in ‘Meadowland’ and ‘The Armor of Light’

In a close-up Sarah takes a piece of a (year-old) cookie that is trapped deep in the car seat and puts it in her mouth, like a communion wafer: she closes her eyes and, for the first time since before her son went missing, we see her face smooth, for a moment, into bliss. The only other time we see her free from tension and sorrow, is when, in another stunning shot, this one on a rooftop, she states with great confidence, “My son is alive.”

 

MeadowlandCoverSmall

 

Written by Ren Jender.

Meadowland, part of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival (playing this Friday, April 24) has a great first scene–a husband and wife in the front seat of a car with their young son chattering and eating cookies in the back. What we know (from every synopsis of this film) is: the son will soon go missing. So the short car ride and trip to the gas station convenience store becomes a thriller in which we wonder: will it happen now? How about now? At the terrible moment when both parents realize their son is lost the camera lingers separately on their anguished faces, then we’re immediately transported to a year later: the mother, Sarah (Olivia Wilde) drunk at their friends’ apartment while the husband, Phil (Luke Wilson) sits on the couch wearing a tight smile. Wilson turns in another solid performance as a working class guy: after a similar role in The Skeleton Twins, whose cinematographer, Reed Morano, is Meadowland’s director (her first time directing).

The couple, we see in a cab ride home, are still stung with grief, especially since they’ve never found out what happened to their son. A detective visits with vague leads about what might have happened to the boy (the worst scenario possible, perhaps caught and eventually killed by a serial pedophile), but Sarah refuses to even glance at the photos of the suspect.

Morano acts as the film’s cinematographer as well as the director (a more unusual combo than one would expect) and, as in her work in Kill Your Darlings, The Skeleton Twins, and the first season of the recently cancelled Looking, she has a stunning visual sense: impressionistic shots of sky and clouds, and one scene with the camera looking an animal directly in the eye. She also shows a gift for working with actors. In a close-up Sarah takes a piece of a (year-old) cookie that is trapped deep in the car seat and puts it in her mouth, like a communion wafer: she closes her eyes and, for the first time since before her son went missing, we see her face smooth, for a moment, into bliss. The only other time we see her free from tension and sorrow is when, in another stunning shot, this one on a rooftop, she states with great confidence, “My son is alive.”

Olivia Wilde, as Sarah, Director Reed Morano shooting behind her
Olivia Wilde, as Sarah, director Reed Morano shooting behind her

 

Throughout much of the rest of the action, Wilde as Sarah, with dark circles under her large pale eyes and hollows under her cheeks, resembles the figure in the Munch painting The Scream, especially when she wears a yellow hoodie to wander the city by herself, sometimes imagining she catches a glimpse of her son on the crowded sidewalk, another time teetering too close to the edge of the subway platform.

Phil is a New York city cop, and the film’s script operates under what–considering recent headlines–seems like the naive assumption that he mainly acts as a kindly social worker, as when he comes in for a repeat noise complaint from a young couple who aren’t getting along. Also in the mix is Phil’s brother, Tim (Giovanni Ribisi) who comes to stay with the couple “temporarily.” It’s the sort of role in which the screenwriter (Chris Rossi) asked himself, “How can I convey this character is a self-medicating, self-loathing fuck-up,” so gives him a line early in the film in which the character says… he’s a self-medicating asshole. Ribisi’s performance is equally unsubtle.

Sarah works as a teacher and starts to identify with an autistic student who gets in trouble for stealing school library books about his favorite obsession, elephants. She finds out he is also a foster kid. Rossi can’t seem to stop himself from piling terrible circumstances onto this kid: when Sarah follows his surly, neglectful foster mother (Elisabeth Moss, at first shot from the back and at a distance so we don’t recognize her from Mad Men) after she drops his lunch off at school, Sarah sees her disappear into a gas station bathroom to turn a trick, and when Sarah later engages her in conversation, the woman denies she has any children. She wears sweatpants with “Juicy” across the ass and bright, heavy, blue eye shadow just in case we didn’t get the point that she’s supposed to be tacky as well as a “bad” Mom.

Rossi’s penchant for overkill ruins the film in the last third, in which Sarah becomes increasingly desperate and unhinged. Meadowland is one of those movies in which to show how full of self-loathing a previously level-headed character played by a beautiful actress is, she fucks a really gross (in every sense) guy after we in the audience have repeated to ourselves, ”Please don’t fuck the gross guy. Please don’t!” Sarah also cuts into her arm, has a breakdown in front of her students, tries a highly addictive drug, and takes actions creepily parallel to those the police suspect someone did to her own son.

Pauline Kael once wrote that critics often cry “art” when they should be saying “ouch” and though Kael has been dead for years, this film shows that trend, which she wrote about a half-century ago, is still going strong. Everything that is terrible in Sarah’s life (and Sarah, not Phil, is the film’s central character) just gets worse (with a tiny sliver of redemption at the end that is too little, too late): an adolescent’s idea of “realism.” Better films show us grief over the loss of a child in a more nuanced context. In The Accidental Tourist, William Hurt’s character, Macon, meets a slightly older boy who resembles his dead son (and is the age he would have been had he lived) and the encounter gives Macon some closure. In The Orphanage the mother’s last interaction with her son happens while he is having an incredibly violent tantrum. We sense that part of her effort to reunite with him is to make sure this memory isn’t the last one the two have of each other.

An additional note I mention often in my reviews: maybe I’m a dreamer, but I’m hoping Meadowland will be one of the last films set in New York in which every main character is white. John Leguizamo plays a member of Phil’s grief support group, and Sarah has Black colleagues and students, but otherwise the film might as well take place in Oslo. When I think of a teacher married to a cop in today’s New York City, I don’t picture two white people–or even two straight people. The current mayor of New York is a white guy married to a queer Black woman, but film directors and producers still can’t imagine anyone would be interested in seeing a movie about a similar family onscreen.

Lucy McBath (right) in 'The Armor of Light'
Lucy McBath (right) in The Armor of Light

 

Another film at Tribeca about a mother’s grief for her son is the excellent and multi-layered documentary The Armor of Light (playing this Saturday, April 25) 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 Lucy McBath, the mother of a Black teenager, Jordan Davis, shot inside a car at a gas station. Davis’s killer invoked Florida’s “stand your ground” laws in his defense, which state that anyone who “feels” as if his life is in danger is free to shoot and kill the person he thinks is a threat. McBath, whose dentist father was part of the NAACP in 1960s Illinois, immediately understands the racial aspect of this 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 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 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 Royal Road’ Standing Still

Olson is one of the only butch-identified filmmakers who also makes films about butch identity. The closest another recent film has come to including “butch” anything was ‘Blue Is The Warmest Color,’ a film from a straight male director in which a straight actress, Léa Seydoux, played a recognizable butch. In that role Seydoux was still firmly within the bounds of what straight male directors and producers deem “fuckable“–conventionally pretty and sexy even with short hair, minimal makeup and “tomboy” outfits.

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Written by Ren Jender.

Writer-director Jenni Olson’s latest film, The Royal Road, which received good reviews when it played Sundance earlier this year and will be the closing night offering at Art of The Real, April 26 at the Lincoln Center in New York, has a structure similar to Olson’s 2005 film The Joy of Life: personal narration accompanying static shots of California vistas. All the scenes in Road, as in Life, are living snapshots, still except for moving water, wafting smoke and cars making their way down the roads, absent of people (except in the narration), even the drivers unseen.

Olson is one of the only butch-identified filmmakers who also makes films about butch identity. The closest another recent film has come to including “butch” anything was Blue Is The Warmest Color, a film from a straight male director in which a straight actress, Léa Seydoux, played a recognizable butch. In that role Seydoux was still firmly within the bounds of what straight male directors and producers deem “fuckable“–conventionally pretty and sexy even with short hair, minimal makeup and “tomboy” outfits.

In Road, Olson talks about gender dysphoria and identifying with men, name-checking Hitchcock and Vertigo as well as filming at a couple of its famous locations. But Olson doesn’t seem to have a much deeper understanding of the women in Road’s narration (Olson also does the voice-over) than Hitchcock did of the “troubled” women characters in his films: men who ignore women’s wants and needs have historically portrayed women as “mysterious” or “unpredictable” the same way traffic can be “unpredictable” when you are busy staring at your phone. Olson calls the women “crazy” when a better description would be “fucked up” and Olson admits to being a bit of a fuck-up too.

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The film could use more of Olson’s writing, whether we hear about the “square lips” of one woman Olson becomes obsessed with or this description of Los Angeles. “I’m invigorated by the sense of possibility here. People believe that good things will happen at any moment,” which immediately evokes the confident, charismatic people one finds in LA, so convinced they will attain success, their continued obscurity ends up surprising the rest of us as much as it does them. I would have liked more observations like this one and more detail instead of the generic history lesson we get about El Camino Real (the Royal Road of the title), which seems lifted directly from an unimaginative professor’s PowerPoint presentation.

The problem with movies from queer filmmakers about queer people, like films about feminism from feminists, is that we don’t have nearly enough of them, so we expect the few that we see to be all things to all people. Although I fight this desire in myself I can’t help wishing The Royal Road was more vivid: bolder and dirtier. Olson says, “I want to tell you a story of love and loss in San Francisco that reveals more about me than I ever expected to say,” but in this age of first-person essays that are volcanoes of folly and regret, the revelations in the film seem as innocuous as a very young child’s church confession.

At one point Olson talks about identifying with Casanova, whose memoirs were so scandalous that an uncensored version of them couldn’t be published until 150 years after his death. In contrast Olson’s memories of the two women in Road are weirdly chaste–we don’t have a sense of Olson ever getting lost in desire and possibility, let alone the two women, one in San Francisco, the other in Los Angeles (specifically Los Feliz or “The Happy Place” as Olson sardonically translates it) doing so.

Life’s focus on suicides off the Golden Gate Bridge (and Olson’s advocacy for barriers to prevent people from being able to throw themselves off the side) meant that film felt a lot more urgent and emotional than this one does. The women are closed off to Olson, who in turn feels closed off to us, the way an artist should never be with an audience. I didn’t have to fight sleep during Road the way I did during Goodbye To Language but something nagged at me during its even briefer run-time (65 minutes): I should feel a lot more affinity for a 50-something American queer who chases after “unavailable” women than I do for an 80-something straight, French-Swiss guy who loves his dog–but I don’t.

Late in the film, Olson tells us, “All I want to do is read novels and go to the movies,” touching on the collective predilection for getting away from horrible headlines and messy incongruities to give ourselves over, during our rapidly shrinking leisure hours, to dramas that take place in another time (Mad Men, Downton Abbey) or in another world (Game of Thrones). But Olson never gives us the same chance to do the same in Road. Olson says, “I’m inordinately obsessed with the stories of others, seeking within them the key to sharing my own,” but the stories in the film aren’t ones we are likely to obsess over too, which may be this film’s tragedy.

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

‘Goodbye To Language’: The Case for Women To Watch “Uncommercial” Films

I never believed the big film executives who, just six years ago, seemed to have unshakeable faith that 3-D technology would save blockbuster films from piracy and audience indifference. It didn’t, the same way 3-D in the 1950s didn’t save big films from losing a lot of their audience to television. But ‘Goodbye To Language’ is the third 3-D art film made by a master I’ve seen (the others are Werner Herzog’s exploration of prehistoric cave paintings, ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams,’ and Wim Wenders’ magnificent tribute to the work of modern dance choreographer Pina Bausch in ‘Pina’). The jury’s still out on whether this technology will “save” the art film, but great directors are doing creative and unexpected things with it.

GoodbyeLanguageCover

Written by Ren Jender.

When I told people I was going to see Goodbye To Language-–the latest film (in 3-D) from 84-year-old, legendary writer-director Jean-Luc Godard (it won him the Jury Prize at Cannes as well the US National Society of Film Critics award for Best Film)–the first question they asked me was, “What’s it about?”  I had to confess that most of his films I’ve seen I remember well, but still really couldn’t say what they’re “about”. Godard’s films, except for his first, Breathless, a crime drama, don’t have clear cut plots but are instead a collection of original ideas and scenarios. All of the subsequent Godard films I’ve watched: Weekend, Masculine Feminine, Alphaville, and Contempt from the ’60s (which I saw in the ’80s and ’90s) and Passion from the ’80s (which I also saw in the ’90s) contain indelible images and sequences I think of often, even now, decades later.

Although Godard has continued to make films throughout his life (a glance at his IMDb page shows that he has directed an average of about two films a year since his first feature 55 years ago) many of them have received mixed notices, have failed to get real distribution in the US or both. In the ’60s, ’70s, and early ’80s, subtitled “art” films were much more a part of cultural currency. Instead of treatises on Mad Men, US critics then wrote about the latest from Bergman, Truffaut, Buñuel–or Agnès Varda. But in more recent decades the assumption from film distributors has been that hardly anyone wants to read subtitles–even though lots of us like to read–and the best foreign language films continue to be more interesting than their American counterparts as well as more likely to focus on women and queer characters. Subtitled films’ reputation as “uncommercial” became a self-fulfilling prophecy at theaters and in the home video market.

Godard himself seems aware of this turn of events when toward the beginning of Goodbye To Language he poses the question: what happens to art that becomes “outdated”? He shows two people looking at used paperbacks, discussing Solzhenitsyn, a Soviet dissident whose novels were on American bestseller lists and won awards in the ’60s and ’70s, who has since been eclipsed by the likes of Jonathan Franzen. No matter how much I hate Franzen, I’m not nostalgic for bygone days (no woman or queer person can afford to be) and Godard doesn’t seem to be either. Language’s later scenes, where he shows Mary Shelley, may be his only cinematic foray (out of his 118 stints as director) into the past–and Shelley’s scenes are just a small part of this compact (70 minute) feature.

I never believed the big film executives who, just six years ago, seemed to have unshakeable faith that 3-D technology would save blockbuster films from piracy and audience indifference. It didn’t, the same way 3-D in the 1950s didn’t save big films from losing a lot of their audience to television. But Goodbye To Language is the third 3-D art film made by a master I’ve seen (the others are Werner Herzog’s exploration of prehistoric cave paintings, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and Wim Wenders’ magnificent tribute to the work of modern dance choreographer Pina Bausch in Pina). The jury’s still out on whether this technology will “save” the art film, but great directors are doing creative and unexpected things with it.

GoodbyeRedhead

I haven’t sat through a film in which 3-D knives and guns and spurts of blood seem to invade the audience and I probably never will. But at one point during Goodbye To Language I wondered why a chair was suddenly blocking the screen in the theater–I was trying to look around it–until I realized the chair was part of the film, much like the empty onscreen red theater seats of Pina dissolved into the real seats in front of the screen.

In Language Godard seems to be reflecting life as most of us, who rarely if ever indulge in gun or knife play, know it. We see simple moments: a hand grasping a railing or a boat moving through the water and they overlap our own memories, more real and more evocative to us than gore and weapons. I roused myself from nodding off several times (something I hadn’t had to do during previous Godard films) and my subconscious thoughts began to blend with the film, the way in those first few seconds of waking in bed one believes one’s dreams actually happened.

Five days before, I watched a preview screening of a good, funny, feminist action-adventure film (Spy starring Melissa McCarthy, which I’ll review in June, when it’s released), and I was very aware of the difference between the two viewing experiences. As much as I enjoyed Spy, it, like other films of its genre, was too cluttered and noisy to give me the time or space for any thoughts of my own.

Godard plays with our expectations. He seems to be saying, “You want action? I’ll give you action!” We hear a gunshot, dramatic music (his use of music here reminds me a little of how music was used in Under The Skin) and some yelling. We see some blood as well as nudity and sex. He, along with his expert cinematographer, Fabrice Aragno, recognize some of the foibles of 3-D technology, like the airplane in the distant sky in Forgotten Dreams that through 3-D glasses seemed like an insect in front of our faces and corrects them–and overcorrects for faded color (especially noticeable in Herzog’s film). In some of Language’s scenes they gradually dial up the brightness and saturation to make the sky, grass and leaves into abstractions.

Roxie!
Roxie!

 

A woman (played by Zoé Bruneau) is at the center of a number of the scenes. Women are the focus in many of Godard’s other films and as in those films we see Bruneau’s nude body from every angle–except perhaps the soles of her feet. We see her naked in mundane situations, the way one sees the nude body of a romantic partner. Meanwhile, her naked male partner usually has his crotch out of camera range or in “tasteful” shadow. The woman, “Ivitch,” is often the one talking, but she’s not the protagonist, any more than the dog (Godard’s own dog, Roxie) at the center of many other scenes is.

Because of middling reviews I avoided other recent Godard releases–when a critic who is easier on films than I am describes a movie as “frustrating” I know to stay away. Other critics complained of the “sour” outlook in those films, which seems absent in Language, perhaps in part because of the calming, clear-eyed presence of Roxie in front of the camera. Whenever people talk about or share photos of their dogs, cats, and babies, they risk being bores (I am also a bore when I talk about my cat–she’s so cute and her fur is so soft!), but they are also trying to show us their best selves, the ones that have tender feelings for beings smaller and more vulnerable than they are, beings who also rely on them for their survival. Godard doesn’t ridicule us–or himself–for our obsession with animals, but shows us why we love them. If Roxie trusts Godard, we feel like we should too.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mB5Grs_neA”]

 

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

‘Saving Face’: About Chinese American Women, Not Based on a Book By Amy Tan

Like ‘Chutney Popcorn,’ ‘Saving Face’ is one of the few films focused on queer people of color and their families. Having those two elements together might seem like a modest achievement, but ‘Pariah’ is one of the only recent films that also includes both. Mainstream movie makers apparently think queer people of color don’t have families, but instead are deposited as eggs in a sandy, warm spot by a pond until they hatch and make their way, independently, into the world.

SavingFaceMotherDaughter

 

Written by Ren Jender as part of our theme week on Asian Womanhood in Pop Culture.

During writer-director Alice Wu’s 2004 romantic comedy Saving Face one of the main women characters goes into a video store and looks at the “Chinese” shelf of DVDs: it’s The Joy Luck Club plus a whole lot of porn. In spite of East Asians making up an increasing part of the international film market (and American films increasing reliance on the rest of the world to make money at the box office), we still have hardly any mainstream films starring actresses of East Asian ancestry (or of any other Asian ancestry). Rinko Kinkuchi is a Japanese actress who has had success in Babel, Pacific Rim and most recently Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter and Lucy Liu has an established career, but we see relatively few Asian women stars in American films–and never more than one at a time.

Saving Face, which focuses on three Chinese American women (all of whom are also played by Chinese American actresses), came during what was, especially compared to more recent releases, a wave of films centered on people of color and their immigrant families (Bend It Like Beckham, The Namesake) along with some rom-com fluff which featured queer protagonists (Imagine Me and You and a litany of forgettable movies on the LGBT film festival circuit). Like Chutney Popcorn, Saving Face is one of the few films focused on queer people of color and their families. Having those two elements together might seem like a modest achievement, but Pariah is one of the only recent films that also includes both. Mainstream movie makers apparently think queer people of color don’t have families, but instead are deposited as eggs in a sandy, warm spot by a pond until they hatch and make their way, independently, into the world.

Michelle Krusiec as Wil
Michelle Krusiec as Wil

 

The characters of Saving Face don’t so much subvert stereotypes as present another side to them. Wil (short for Wilhelmina, played by Michelle Krusiec) is a high-achieving second-generation New York City surgical resident–who is also queer. Wil’s mother, Hwei-Lan Gao–mostly referred to as “Ma” (played by Joan Chen)–is the scolding, guilt-inducing first-generation immigrant, but also stunningly beautiful, and, at 48, pregnant and single. Wil’s girlfriend Vivian (Lynn Chen) has a career as a ballerina which, because it’s part of the classical arts, her doctor father approves of–but what she really loves is modern dance.

Even though Wil is the main character, she’s the least interesting of the three, though, refreshingly, she is one of the few women protagonists in film who wears pants and men’s cut shirts and jerseys throughout, with no “makeover” scene. We all know women, of every sexual orientation, who wear those clothes every day, but actresses in movies and TV seem to sport skirts and cleavage for every occasion. Wil also wears her long hair in a ponytail, not an unusual look for a busy medical resident, but one not usually seen on women main characters in movies even those doing jobs or activities (like fighting bad guys) that make loose, long hair impractical.

When Wil’s grandparents find out her long-widowed mother is pregnant they throw her out of their house in Flushing, Queens. The Chinese American community there also ostracize her, so, in a sitcom-like scenario she comes to live with Wil. As in most American films (Obvious Child is one of the few exceptions), even though the pregnancy is unplanned and disrupts her living situation and social standing, no one ever offers abortion as a solution, though it’s a procedure one out of three American women will have during her reproductive lifetime.

“Ma” is sad and shaken, but not enough to keep her from redecorating the apartment with a lot of red as well as blaring Chinese devotional music while she meditates. Women characters who are almost 50 hardly ever get this much complexity and screen time but giving it to a working-class (her job is at a hair salon), first-generation immigrant who is also sexy and vulnerable is unheard of. Joan Chen is so good in the role, even the queer supremacist in me wishes the film were more about her than her comparatively dull daughter.

Lynn Chen as Vivian
Lynn Chen as Vivian

 

Gorgeous, flirty Vivian is an Asian American woman we don’t often see in films, a queer, confident femme. She tells Wil she’d like to meet her mother, something that Wil at first says, will never happen. But Vivian convinces her, “Just tell her I’m a friend. A nice Chinese girl….I’ll fake it.”

We see Wu teasing Chinese American stereotypes throughout the film. When her mother is about to go an a date, trying to find a husband before the baby is born, Wil tells her to change out of the matronly black dress she’s wearing. Wil holds up another of her mother’s dresses, but her mother dismisses it, saying “Chinese people cannot wear yellow.” When Wil gives her mother a questioning look she says (in English), “On sale.” We also see anti-Black sentiment isn’t confined to white people with some of the remarks Wil’s mother makes about Wil’s Black neighbor Jay (Ato Essandoh)–and with this character we also see that an Asian-American screenwriter can use Black characters as tokens the same way white screenwriters do.

Joan Chen as "Ma"
Joan Chen as “Ma”

 

In a lot of ways the film feels like it takes place earlier than just a little over a decade ago and not just because of its landline telephones. Eleven years of queer rights legislation and legal marriage in parts of the US (now a reality in a majority of states) make queer people a lot less likely to be closeted to their own immediate families (even conservative, immigrant ones), so Wil’s behavior around her mother seems as alien to us as the time before (most) everyone had a smartphone. Later we find out that Wil isn’t closeted, that her mother knows, but is in denial. In contrast, Vivian’s mother, from the same first-generation immigrant community (but also somewhat ostracized because she’s divorced) knows that her daughter is dating Wil and doesn’t have a problem with it. She casually leaves a message on the answering machine–which the couple hear while they have sex, “Did Wil show up? Thought you may wanna talk after she leaves. Oh, maybe she’s still there? OK. Bye.”

Of course in the template for this kind of film even the most entrenched homophobia never lasts long. Nothing serious ever does: when a minor character dies, the mourning is so short-lived I expected someone to tell us the death had been a misunderstanding. The ending of Saving Face reminded me of Big Eden from 2000 where the denizens of a small town in the Montana all gather around an interracial male couple slow-dancing at the end and no one looks at them with anything less than benevolence–when at least some of these folks would probably be Ted Cruz supporters. But instant queer acceptance in small, sheltered communities might not be any more unlikely than a world where American movie executives continue to ignore the people who make up more and more of their audience.

 

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