Ren Jender – Page 5 – Bitch Flicks

‘Dreamcatcher’: Bringing Kindness to the Conversation About Sex Work

Because Myers-Powell spent 25 years as a “prostitute” (she does not use the term “sex worker” or “sex work,” perhaps because the women we see don’t use these terms either) on the same streets where she now does outreach, she understands the complexity of these women’s lives. She tells one young woman (one of the few white women she encounters) on a deserted-looking stretch of road, “This is one of the most dangerous spots,” and that even though she liked to think of herself as tough back in the day she never would have been there at night.

Written by Ren Jender.

“I used to be right out here too,” says Brenda Myers-Powell, the focus of the new documentary, Dreamcatcher (directed by Kim Loginotto, who won an award at the most recent Sundance for the film) as she and her coworker wind their vehicle through parts of their native Chicago that no tourist guide includes.

Over 20 years ago I was doing similar work to Myers-Powell’s, distributing condoms and talking with sex workers who worked the streets in my city. The emphasis at that job was safer sex education and HIV testing, but sometimes our clients needed more. One woman asked for and received a ride to detox (though we found out she left the next morning) and after we handed a scared-looking, visibly pregnant woman our condoms and information the driver did a U-turn and put a card for a treatment center (where our outreach van had its office) into her hand. Months afterward we saw that she had become one of the clients there.

When I hear debates about sex work and human trafficking these days I think of that woman and realize neither side would have done her much good. Some “empowered” sex workers would have thought her exploitation and drug addiction–along with the homelessness and violence she might have faced after leaving sex work, weren’t any of their concern. And worldwide efforts to stop “human trafficking” often assume no woman would willingly choose to do sex work; though people have no trouble understanding the difference in other kinds of human trafficking–a woman who works for wages as a maid and is free to quit is different from a maid who never receives her pay and is beaten if she tries to leave. They also ignore the danger law enforcement poses to sex workers themselves. Raids and arrests are, unsurprisingly, not very effective forms of outreach.

“That’s why I hardly ever come out here,” says the young woman, not entirely convincingly.

Myers-Powell asks her to have coffee, and we see the two, throughout the film, develop a relationship. When I saw Dreamcatcher at the opening night of the recent Athena Film Festival, Myers-Powell told the audience after the screening, “The first time I ask them: what do they want? And probably nobody has ever asked them that before.”

We see the cycle of sexual exploitation of some of these women starts in childhood. In a school-based “at-risk” group of girls that Myers-Powell facilitates, every girl in the room includes rape at an early age, often by someone in her own household, as part of her history, just as Myers-Powell does. When we see her speaking to another group she says, “I’m here to tell each and every one of you today,” and here her face softens, “it is not your fault.”

Myers-Powell has also worked to clear her own criminal record, as well as that of other women, successfully arguing that trafficking shouldn’t result in its survivors being charged with breaking the law. When she announces to the group that she no longer has a record she does a little dance in celebration.

Dreamcatcher is the foundation Myers-Powell’s co-founded; she told the audience at Athena that she started it in 2000, with no money, doing the outreach with her friend in a Ford Focus. Myers-Powell is glamorous (at one point she shows off her impressive wig collection), perceptive, and witty (at Athena she mentioned being directed to “‘social services,’ who are never very social”), but most striking is her unfailing kindness to the women and girls she encounters in the film, including parents we in the audience might judge more harshly. Even when she finds out one girl is making the mistake she herself has made, becoming pregnant at a very young age, Myers-Powell, without a wig or makeup, talking on the phone from her bedroom, is more resigned and sad than angry, but still not defeated.

DreamcatcherMothers — Brenda and the biological mother of her young son

When I worked in human services, many of the people who worked alongside me were, after their own troubled histories, trying to “give back,” but most of them couldn’t hide their frustration and disappointment with clients, like a mother who is hardest on the child who reminds her of herself at that age. Myers-Powell seems to bring none of this baggage to her work . When she speaks to an obviously impaired in-law (whose young son she is raising) and tells her how much she enjoys talking together when the woman is not high, she doesn’t have any edge in her voice. She means it.

In her remarks after the film, Myers-Powell said that she uses her experience to help others by asking herself, “What would’ve saved me?” She credited the people who had been kind to her when she was hospitalized (after a john beat her up and dragged her body from a car, scraping the skin off her face): “A lady doctor…would kick it with me every day. She said, ‘You’re funny. You’re smart. You’re beautiful,’ And I knew I wasn’t beautiful.”

When she got out of the hospital she went to Genesis House, of which she said, “It was a home…And I hadn’t had a home in years…I spent two years there and when I left I was a diva. I was ready for the world.” Now she’s trying to give others the same chance.

In a lot of ways the women and girls Myers-Powell does outreach to are the ones we, as a culture, pay the least attention to: they’re poor, often victims of abuse and usually Black or Latina. I couldn’t help noticing at the fancy, opening-night screening how many people around me, mostly men, tried to distract themselves from the women and girls in the film, either by talking loudly or, in one extreme case, showing a video on his phone to his seatmates, even after I told him more than once, through gritted teeth, to stop doing so. Let’s hope this film encourages others to not just look the other way.

Dreamcatcher will be on Showtime next Friday, March 27, 9 p.m. ET/PT and will be On Demand March 28 – May 22

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMPXhevhw0U” 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

Interesting Lives Made Dull: ‘Still Alice’ and ‘Queen and Country’

I had been curious to see what the filmmakers would do with this adaptation of the Lisa Genova novel. The writer-directors are a married gay male couple (Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer) who not only made the underrated ‘Quinceañera’ (the rare film about Chicanos that doesn’t have a white savior or even a white main character), but also live with the relatively recent ALS diagnosis of Glatzer (whose disease has progressed enough that he can’t speak or eat without assistance). While ALS is not the same as the Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease the title character has in ‘Alice,’ I thought Glatzer’s experience might give the film more insight than the usual able-bodied writer and director’s view of disability. What I didn’t expect from this film was how mild and polite it is about the challenges and loss Alice (Moore) faces.

Written by Ren Jender.

Like apparently many others, I was avoiding this year’s blindingly white “boy” and “man”-centered Academy Awards, so I missed seeing Julianne Moore win the Oscar as Best Actress for her performance in Still Alice. Instead, at the suggestion of Indiewire’s Women and Hollywood I was on my way to see a film with a woman protagonist: Still Alice. I didn’t have a lot of choices. I’d already seen Wild, Two Days, One Night, and Ida and had no desire to see Gone Girl; the only other films about women nominated for major awards. I ended up going right back home: the theater was closed for emergency roof repair. When I saw the film the next Sunday, I thought maybe I should have taken the previous week’s circumstances as a sign.

I had been curious to see what the filmmakers would do with this adaptation of the Lisa Genova novel. The writer-directors are a married gay male couple (Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer) who not only made the underrated Quinceañera (the rare film about Chicanos that doesn’t have a white savior or even a white main character), but also live with the relatively recent ALS diagnosis of Glatzer (whose disease has progressed enough that he can’t speak or eat without assistance). While ALS is not the same as the Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease the title character has in Alice I thought Glatzer’s experience might give the film more insight than the usual able-bodied writer and director’s view of disability. What I didn’t expect from this film was how mild and polite it is about the challenges and loss Alice (Moore) faces.

As an expert on dementia writes, we should feel a lot more tension in the final diagnostic test Alice takes (and fails) because the stakes are so high. Similarly when one of Alice’s children is found to have the gene that means a 100 percent chance of developing the disease as well, we hear a phone call and then… nothing else, not even a hint, in later scenes, of how this information would affect the way an adult child would see and react to the deterioration of a parent.

The only fire in this film are the interactions between Alice and her youngest daughter Lydia (played by Kristen Stewart in a performance that reminded me of her meaty roles in Adventureland and The Runaways). In a family of over-achieving professionals (brother Charlie is in med school, sister Anna is a lawyer), Lydia is a struggling actress who has always had a prickly relationship with her Type-A, college professor mother (even after she is diagnosed, Alice continues to teach at Columbia and prepares, alone, the entire Christmas dinner, from scratch, for the whole family).

After Alice has to leave her job, she tells Lydia all the things she wants to see while she can still take them in, ending with, ” I want you to go to college.”

Exasperated, Lydia tells her, “You can’t just use your situation to get everything you want.”

As anyone who has had family members who need care can attest, sometimes the people who step up and help can be as surprising as the ones who are suddenly “too busy” to stop by. Lydia is the one who asks her mother (as Alice again prepares food for the whole family–even moderately advanced Alzheimer’s can’t save women from doing all the work in the household) to describe what she is experiencing. Alice wears a “memory impaired” medical bracelet but also has moments of clarity. She answers, “I can see the words hanging in front of me and I can’t reach them.” Then she adds, “Thanks for asking.” If the film had made these two characters its main focus it could have been a worthy successor to Quinceañera and the unlikely, symbiotic duo at its core: a pregnant teenager and her macho, closeted, gay cousin.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrXrZ5iiR0o” iv_load_policy=”3″]

Equally disappointing is Queen and Country, the latest–and what is being billed as the “final”–film, from 82-year-old writer-director John Boorman, whose long career includes Excalibur (probably due for a revival since its medieval setting is so much like Game of Thrones–and it features a young Helen Mirren) and the film to which Queen is a belated sequel, 1987’s great, autobiographical comedy, set in World War II London, Hope and Glory.

Queen begins with one of the closing scenes of Glory in which 9-year-old Bill, the director’s stand-in, finds, after an idyllic summer in his Grandfather’s house on the Thames, his friends dancing around the school building, on fire after the Germans bombed it. The opening day of school is postponed. “Thank you, Adolph,” says one of Bill’s friends as he smiles and looks to the sky.

Queen jumps to a decade later, when Bill is conscripted into the British Army to serve what was then the requirement of two years duty. Although Callum Turner (Glue) as Bill is physically believable as a grown-up version of Sebastian Rice-Edwards, who played Bill in Glory, he lacks the earlier Bill’s watchfulness: seeing his older sister let her boyfriend into her bedroom through her window or overhearing his mother and friend-of-the-family Mac talk about their romance (which predates and overlaps both their marriages). The earlier film was through young Bill’s eyes but we saw clearly into the lives of the other characters, especially the women and girls in the family.

This time around we are, for most of the action, stuck with just Bill and his erratic, “immoral” army friend Percy (Caleb Landry Jones, grating in a poorly conceived role) as they try, in small ways, to sabotage the small-mindedness and tedium of non-combat army life. They teach typing to fellow conscripts but stray from the official lesson plan, dictating to the class “Arses. a-r-s-e-s.” They conspire with Redmond (Pat Shortt playing the role of the funny Irish friend, which, in British productions has historically been the equivalent of the funny Black friend in American movies and TV) to get back at the officers who constantly malign them.

They also try to pick up women. After a double date with two nurses, Percy and Bill try to peep, Animal House-style, into the nurses’ dorm. Percy on the shoulders of Bill sees a more realistic scene than Animal House’s topless pillow fight: women in curlers and practical bathrobes but tells Bill he’s seeing “20 student nurses in various states of undress.” When Bill gets on Percy’s shoulders one of the nurses they went out with, Sophie (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) sees him and slides down her dress to press her bare breast to the window pane.

Bill pursues an upper-class older woman (of 24!) “Ophelia” (Tamsin Egerton playing a badly written role in the woman-with-psychological-problems mold) while Percy makes a connection with Bill’s married sister Dawn (Vanessa Kirby, every bit as irritating as Jones. She’s no match for the original Dawn, the sublime Sammi Davis). Bill’s other sister never appears or is mentioned. In the mother’s big scene she and Bill have a conversation about her affair that is two sentences long–as if Boorman wanted to remind us of her infidelity, but wasn’t quite sure why. After two long hours the film comes to its conclusion just as Alice does, not with a bang but a whimper.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5oVLWqRSUU” iv_load_policy=”3″]

‘Cinderella’ Or Why Do Mostly Straight, Mostly White Guys Make All The Big Studio Movies?

Nothing is glaringly wrong with this ‘Cinderella,’ but if our sole criteria for these middling, dull, straight-guy directors and writers is that they didn’t fuck up too much, we’re in trouble. This affirmative action for mostly mediocre, mostly white guys could also help explain the selection of this year’s Oscar nominees–and why the ratings for the ceremony, along with audience attendance at theaters, is rapidly shrinking.

As I sat waiting for an evening preview screening of Disney’s latest Cinderella to begin (and because I didn’t have my phone to distract me–everyone had had theirs confiscated in an asinine and outdated measure to prevent piracy), I couldn’t help noticing that the vast majority of the audience were a somewhat diverse group of women and queers–except for the guys talking loudly behind me. They were so straight, one of them said Last Tango In Paris was the ideal date movie. Since at least one of these guys talked about having a son I marveled that either man had ever succeeded in getting a woman to have sex with him, even once–and wondered what these two were doing at Cinderella. Then I remembered they were seated in the “press” row: they were film critics.

Film criticism suffers a lot because white, clueless, straight guys like the ones seated behind me make up the majority. These critics all tend to like films about straight, white, male protagonists like themselves (with the occasional, historically inaccurate, white male gay stand-in to show how “open-minded” they are), one of the many reasons this year’s Oscar nominees were nearly all white people (and the Latino who won big awards did so for making a film about a white, straight guy).

But the movies themselves suffer when only straight guys are allowed to make them: not only are Cinderella’s filmmakers, director Kenneth Branagh (Thor and at the beginning of his career movies with Emma Thompson like Dead Again) and writer Chris Weitz (who with his brother, Paul, made American Pie–Weitz is part Latino, but the vast majority of characters in his films are white guys) men, their previous films have been singularly bereft of queer flair–memorable costumes and hairstyles and a sense of how women talk when they’re alone together–that make up the Cinderella story.

Chris Weitz, as a director, took over the Twilight franchise right after the original film, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, proved to be a box office bonanza. Since then no women have directed the big YA adaptations, even those centered on women and girl protagonists. Similarly, Sam Taylor-Johnson the woman director of the successful (in both the financial and critical sense) recent Fifty Shades of Grey film (with a built-in audience that is mostly women) seems to be poised to be unceremoniously dumped from the franchise–which I’m sure the producers will be quick to tell us has nothing to do with her being a woman, though, odds are, she’ll be replaced by a man. Even when women directors succeed with big studio films they’re treated like failures.

In feminist documentaries like She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, we see that women in the 1960s at newspapers and magazines were unfairly pigeon-holed into writing for the “women’s section,” but women directors now, 50 years later, don’t even get to helm the few “women and girls’ stories” big studios choose to tell.

Nothing is glaringly wrong with this Cinderella, but if our sole criteria for these middling, dull, straight-guy directors and writers is that they didn’t fuck up too much, we’re in trouble. This affirmative action for mostly mediocre, mostly white guys could also help explain the selection of this year’s Oscar nominees–and why the ratings for the ceremony, along with audience attendance at theaters, is rapidly shrinking.

The film chooses the most familiar parts of the stories (Cinderella is a folktale that has many different iterations including some very old ones from Asia) but also tacks on a syrupy-sweet beginning in which “Ella” (played as a child by Eloise Webb and as an adult by Downton Abby’s Lily James) spends an idyllic childhood with her father (Ben Chaplin) and mother (Agent Carter‘s Hayley Atwell, unrecognizable in a blonde wig and eyebrows) before her mother dies from that disease women in films often get that keeps them looking good on their deathbeds. She tells her daughter who, like her, is so virtuous she has no discernible personality, “Have courage and be kind,” a case of the bland leading the bland.

We’re introduced to Ella’s CGI mouse friends (much more creepy than the animated ones in the 1950 Disney Cinderella—as she kept scooping them up I couldn’t help wondering if she washed her hands afterward) with whom she can communicate, as she also does with a farmhouse menagerie of animals running across the yard. The film has a seemingly willful ignorance of why those animals are there; when we see scraps on Cinderella’s plate they’re just vegetables, even though the goose, in the 19th century English setting the nameless, timeless kingdom the film takes place in resembles, would most likely be Christmas dinner.

Ella’s father remarries, bringing into the house the evil stepmother, here called Lady Tremaine (Cate Blanchett, in a succession of 1940s-inspired gowns, hairstyles and hats that, like her sojourns on the red carpet, show what a great clothes horse she is) and the two stepsisters (Holliday Grainger and Sophie McShera) who, the film is careful to point out are “ugly” on the inside. With their overcurled hair and pursed lips, wearing busy print dresses, the two aren’t terrible to look at, exactly, just tacky.

When the father dies (some versions of the tale have him survive and take part in Cinderella’s degradation) the stepmother banishes Cinderella to sleep in the attic and to become the household’s only servant. Because she sleeps by the dying embers of the fire to keep warm the stepsisters christen her “Cinder-ella.”

Trying to escape the drudgery of home, Cinderella rides her horse into the forest and meets the Prince (Richard Madden, Game of Thrones’ Robb Stark) who is on a hunt. Cinderella, not knowing who he is, talks him out of killing the stag (another instance of creepy CGI) she has just warned to run away. When they part The Prince says, “I hope to see you again, Miss.” Back at the palace the King (Derek Jacobi) pressures the Prince to take a wife and The Prince asks that the palace hold a ball, open not just to gentry but all the young women in the kingdom, so that he might meet the nameless “country girl” again.

CinderellaHBCarter — Helena Bonham Carter as the Fairy Godmother

We see Cinderella working on her dress, one of her mother’s that she has altered, and inevitably her stepmother and sisters tell her she is not welcome to attend the ball with them, “It would be an insult to take you to the palace dressed in these old rags.” When they leave Cinderella’s fairy godmother (Helena Bonham Carter) appears first disguised as a beggar woman, then after Cinderella gives her a crust of bread and milk revealing her true identity. Her wand exudes the same sparkles as that of the “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” godmother of the 1950 Disney version, but that effect seems more like laziness (it’s very familiar from other films) than an homage.

The transformation of the pumpkin, mice, lizards, and goose (actually a gander) into respectively, the golden coach, horses, coachmen and driver–and then back again–is the most magical in the film. Less successful is the transformation of the fairy godmother and Cinderella, whose hair and gowns end up looking more like the garish stepsisters’ than they would in a Cinderella directed by Pedro Almodóvar, John Waters, Jane Campion or Gina Prince-Bythewood (the dresses also don’t equal the storybook descriptions of spun gold and silver). It’s like Branagh made a conscious decision to not pay too much attention to “girly” detail like gowns and hair. Also barely adequate, perhaps for similar reasons, is the styling of the Prince. Plenty of women and queer men enjoyed looking at Richard Madden in Game of Thrones (and some of us remember him fondly as the gay EMT in the UK version of Sirens), but here he’s dressed in gaudy jackets, clean-shaven, with his curly hair dyed dark and shellacked into a long pompadour, so that he looks like Zac Efron without the self-tanner. And even though we don’t know where the kingdom is, he’s made to drop his Scottish accent for an English one, that, even to my American ears, sounds shaky.

CinderellaCoach — Cinderella in the golden coach

In spite of her ballgown, James is radiant and doesn’t get stuck in gooeyness of her character, but she has the same odd affect she did in Downton (where she appeared just as I was giving up on the series): even when her character is supposed to be upset she always seems on the verge of breaking into one of her big, bright smiles. Most disappointing is Blanchett, whose stepmother is never given a real reason for her cruelty (besides money, which the movie pays scant attention to, and her own perfunctory rationale that she still grieves for her first husband, which we see no evidence of) so Blanchett has nothing to play except in one brief scene, when she blackmails the Grand Duke (Stellan Skarsgård). Blanchett is talented enough that not only has she convincingly played Bob Dylan, but she made him sexier and more appealing than he’s ever been himself, so Branagh and Weitz really dropped the ball here. The stepmother could have been a great villain, like Ben Kingley’s Snatcher in The Boxtrolls. Instead, she just looks great, like a blonde, chic Joan Crawford in her prime.

An interesting difference between this version of Cinderella and most of the other earlier versions is that it has a little diversity in it. Some of the princesses who arrive at the ball aren’t white. The Prince’s footman (Nonso Anozie) as well as a few of the townspeople are Black. But this tiny, tiny step in the right direction made me wish someone had been bold enough to make the decision to cast a Black actress as Cinderella. Then we would have the reason for the stepsisters’ and stepmother’s irrational and instant hatred of her, no matter how kind she is to them, and also the King and Duke’s reluctance to let The Prince marry her, since, in too many places, those same attitudes survive today. I would have loved to have seen what Lupita Nyong’o (who, like Blanchett, has shown on award show red carpets that she can wear the shit out of great gowns) could have done with the role, but as it has since its beginning, Walt Disney still barely believes in white, brunette princesses, let alone Black ones. I doubt I was the only person in the theater wondering how many more white, blonde storybook heroines I could take.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20DF6U1HcGQ” 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

‘Summer’: Portrait of a Recognizable Human

When the family sits down to eat, a platter full of pork chops is placed in the center of the table just as Delphine announces she is a vegetarian. As the others interrogate her (a tedious line of questions familiar to many vegetarians) and one of the men even offers her a plate full of rose petals to feast on, she tries to walk the tightrope many women do–in all sorts of conversations–of not wanting to be seen as a “bother,” but still trying to stick up for her own beliefs.

Written by Ren Jender as part of our theme week on Unlikable Women.

“Difficult” women in movies, as in life, are often more a matter of nomenclature than behavior. A male lead in a film can show up drunk at his wife’s workplace, humiliate her and punch her boss, and the director/writer will posit that he had his reasons. But a woman character who doesn’t want to fuck the male lead, or even indulge his crush on her, we are supposed to read as “difficult.” Women in film are so often ornamental plot devices that when one acts in a way that distinguishes her, as Rebecca West said in her famous quote about feminism, from a doormat, we’re a little shocked. Looking to differentiate her from the ever-patient, doe-eyed, “wise” horde of “supportive” girlfriends, wives and mothers we’re used to seeing onscreen we use “difficult” or “unlikable” when what we mean is “recognizably human.”

Just because I can discern this pattern doesn’t mean I’m immune to it. When I signed up to post about “unlikable women” I thought of Eric Rohmer’s 1986 film Summer (also known as The Green Ray) and its main character Delphine (played by Marie Rivière, who with Rohmer, co-wrote the great script), a single 30-ish woman who can’t seem to find any peace of mind in the month-long summer vacation that is part of French life. But as I rewatched the film (a favorite that I last saw four and a half years ago) I realized, during my previous viewings, I was wrong to think of Delphine as a hopeless pain in the ass who gets in her own way. Although she complains about things that don’t bother others (at one point she says about a sunny outdoor meeting spot that the light there “hurts my eyes”) and she shuts down her friend Manuella’s (María Luisa García) suggestion to stay with Manuella’s grandmother in Spain, we can see the two have a playful relationship. As they talk about meeting men, Manuella pats the calves of the nude statue next to them and says, “This one should be right up your alley. He’s very handsome.”

When Delphine lets her guard down, as with her own family (at least some of whom are, in real life, related to Rivière–part of the dialogue in this and other group scenes seems to be mixing nonfiction into the narrative), especially the older members and children, we see she is solicitous and, as she later defensively describes herself “sweet.” But in another scene when her “friend” (Rohmer regular Béatrice Romand) badgers her about being single and lonely–and blames her reluctance to go on vacation alone, adding “I tell you, that’s how you meet people”–Delphine dissolves into tears. She laments to the one friend who comes to comfort her that she doesn’t want to go on vacation by herself or go camping in cold, rainy Ireland with her family. She, reasonably, wants a warm, seaside vacation and a real bed to sleep in. This friend then invites Delphine to her own family’s place in Cherbourg.

Although it’s by the sea, Cherbourg (the setting of the classic Jacques Demy musical starring a very young Catherine Deneuve) isn’t a traditional vacation spot. It’s a military port (the two women meet a man who is a sailor, in town for just one night) with weather that the characters’ sweaters tell us is chilly, even in July. The worst part is that Delphine’s blonde friend is happily ensconced in a couple, as are all the other adults in the household, so Delphine goes from being the third wheel to being the fifth or the seventh. She does find some refuge when she spends time with the children there, but even then one older girl asks her if she has a boyfriend and, as she did earlier, Delphine pretends she and her ex are still together.

When her friend and boyfriend are leaving to return to Paris, Delphine, whom we have seen crying alone on outdoor, solitary walks, begs to go back with them. She then tries a mountain getaway (where at least the guy who gives her the cabin keys seems happy to see her) but doesn’t even last a whole day there. Back in Paris, by chance she runs into a friend at a café who, when she announces she got married, Delphine asks, “Again?”

The friend says, “This time it’s serious,” and tells Delphine she now has a 17-month-old son, but also that hers is no happily-ever-after scenario (the implied conclusion whenever anyone talks about Delphine meeting someone). She offers Delphine her brother-in-law’s apartment in Biarritz, a popular resort, which she grabs.

Finally Delphine is in the vacation spot she wants, but the apartment is cramped and outside space is tight, both on the beach and in the water. Although Delphine, with her lanky body, looks like she could have come from a vacation catalog as she trots through the water in a tiny, iridescent bikini (briefly taking off the more modest, dark, one-piece she usually wears over it) she’s still lonely, seeing couples everywhere as she explores alone, at one point eavesdropping on the conversation a group of old friends on an outdoor bench have about the book The Green Ray.

One day on the beach she meets blonde, chatty topless Lena (Carita) from Sweden, the polar opposite of Delphine. Lena loves to go on vacation on her own and tells Delphine she is better off without a fiancé since hers is always jealous when she looks at other men. Lena spends a lot of time pointing out good-looking guys to Delphine and arranges for a double date. Delphine flees the scene even though the man she’s fixed up with seems reasonably attractive and nice as he confesses his own loneliness (though like more than one of the French “straight” guys in this film, his manner and outfit, to US eyes, seem like those of a gay man).

At the train station Delphine meets a man (Vincent Gauthier), a cabinet-maker, also on vacation, and she impulsively changes her route for him. As with the sister with all the suitors in The Makioka Sisters we immediately see why Delphine goes with this guy and has rejected all the others. As they sit in a café she explains to him what, we realize as she speaks, we’ve seen throughout the film, that she can’t play the games with men that Lena plays (she told the double-date guys she was from Spain) or the games she tells us she played back in Paris, having sex with men then the next day going back to being strangers. She and her date watch the sunset, and once again she cries, hoping against hope that she will finally see the sign that she’s found the person, in her own time, in her own way, who is right for her–not the ones others think that she should pursue. The final shot reassures us that after the hoops we make ourselves and others and even the universe jump through as we try to find what we need, we might, in spite of ourselves, attain it.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1aar4IDUvU” iv_load_policy=”3″]

‘The Boxtrolls’: Better Than Its “Man in a Dress” Jokes

In a nice contrast to many children’s films and books, the character at the start who goes against the mob is a girl, Lord Portley-Rind’s daughter, Winnie (voiced by Elle Fanning in a mid-Atlantic accent passing as British). Although Winnie, in her pink ruffled dress and blonde ringlets might look like other storybook heroines, her fits over never being believed or taken seriously by adults and her morbid fascination with the boxtrolls make her more like Daria than Alice in Wonderland. When she asks another character if boxtrolls ate his parents, she adds, “Did they let you, I mean, make you, watch?”

Written by Ren Jender as part of our theme week on the Academy Awards.

Critics are loath to say out loud that well-made (and even some not-so-well-made) films, like the rest of pop culture, influence us in every way–fashion, language, and politics. But the proof that critics understand the political power of film comes to light in indirect ways: critics aren’t giving much publicity to the racist but groundbreaking and, in its day, critically acclaimed film, The Birth of a Nation in this, the year that marks a full century since its premiere. And since a North Carolina man shot, execution style, his Muslim, charity-minded neighbors (and a rash of anti-Muslim actions have followed) the (mostly male) cadre of critics who previously were singing the praises of American Sniper, a film that depicts Muslims as perfectly appropriate, shoot ’em up targets, stopped doing so.

Deciding what to write about The Boxtrolls (directed by Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi), a film I enjoyed on many levels but which contains some destructively retrograde messages–mixed in with its mostly progressive ones–was difficult. I should make clear that I’m not usually an eager consumer of entertainment designed for children. I don’t have kids of my own and although I liked the one Harry Potter book I’ve read I never felt the need to read the others. But The Boxtrolls is beautiful to look at (and comes from LAIKA, the same folks who gave us Coraline)–stop-motion animation set in a steam-punk version of 19th century England. With a great deal of economy (the clever script by Irena Brignull, Phil Dale, Adam Pava, and Anthony Stacchi is based on the book, Here Be Monsters! by Alan Snow) the film sets up the premise: boxtrolls, small monster-like creatures who get their name from the cardboard boxes they wear and draw themselves into, turtle-like, at the first sign of danger, scavenge the town streets at night for scraps and goods they can take to their underground lair. Archibald Snatcher (played, magnificently, by Ben Kingsley–it’s the best role he’s had since Sexy Beast; he should play villains more often!) is an opportunistic striver who seeks to elevate his station, first by demonizing the harmless boxtrolls and then capturing all of them, making the streets “safe” for the townspeople and collecting his reward from the town’s ruling elite, headed by Lord Portley-Rind (voiced by Jared Harris) who resembles the king in a deck of cards and has about as much depth.

Winnie’s curiosity about the boxtrolls ends up with her encountering them in their own lair–and meeting Eggs, named after the box he wears, (and voiced by Isaac Hempstead Wright) a human boy adopted by the boxtrolls who doesn’t realize he’s not one of them, though he’s twice their height. After he disavows all the ways he is different from his adopted kin he can’t really argue when Winnie suggests, “Then let’s see you fit in your box.”

WinnieEggsBoxtrollsSmall — Winnie and Eggs

The two work together to try to stop the machinations of Snatcher (whose name, manner and appearance seem to be a tribute to the “child catcher” in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) though as in most films, the boy takes on the main role in vanquishing the villain. In spite of how vivid the animators and Fanning make Winnie, this film does not even come close to passing the Bechdel test. One of the few women characters, Winnie’s mother, is played by the great Toni Collette but she barely gets a line in. And the boxtrolls must reproduce by cloning because we never see one who’s female.

But the huge problem at the center of The Boxtrolls are the scenes when the screenwriters, to show how propaganda can influence the actions of otherwise reasonable people, have Snatcher put on a corset and an evening dress and assume an alter-ego, a red-haired, French chanteuse who sexily sings about killing boxtrolls while she charms all the men in town (who don’t seem to see beyond the wig). I’ve written before about the history of murderous trans* women in film but I was particularly surprised to find this trope–along with the one in which a trans* woman hides her identity and the men who were attracted to her are chagrined once she is outed–in a film that aggressively courts a progressive audience.

Not only is The Boxtrolls full of messages about not dehumanizing those who are “different,” and that adoptive families are just as loving as other families, but it also has kind of an Occupy moment when its boy hero tell others, “Stand up for yourselves. Don’t be afraid anymore.” At the end of the film over the credits we hear “The Boxtrolls Song” an explicitly pro-queer-family anthem by Eric Idle (of Monty Python fame) that includes in its laundry list of different kinds of families those with two Moms or two Dads.

I was sad that this otherwise delightful, humorous (some of Kingley’s lines made me laugh like I haven’t since Obvious Child), anti-capitalist film nominated for a Best Animated Feature Oscar had to pollute itself with “man in a dress” jokes, especially considering that these jokes couldn’t be mere throwaways–stop-motion films take years of painstaking effort to create (which could also explain the “Occupy” theme). I wondered if anyone involved in the film knew that a generation ago, making fun of the rest of the queer community would have been considered acceptable children’s entertainment too.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2dFVnp5K0o” iv_load_policy=”3″]

‘Below the Line’: Women Cinematographers’ Panel at Athena (Part 1)

Caryn James: There are some really appalling numbers about women cinematographers in the industry. In a study done last year by Celluloid Ceiling for the year 2013, of the 250 top-grossing films, only 3 percent had women cinematographers which was 1 percent more than the previous year and for some reason a decrease from 1998. And just to get a sense of the range here, 6 percent of those films were directed by women, 17 percent were edited by women, 25 percent had women producers. But only 3 percent of women cinematographers in that group. Why do you think that is? Are there historical reasons for that ? What is going on?

(L-R) Kirsten Johnson, Nadia Hallgren, Reed Morano

Written by Ren Jender.

The following is a transcription (edited for concision and clarity) of the first part of the panel “Below the Line” held Saturday, Feb. 7, 2015 at the Athena Film Festival. The panel featured women cinematographers Kirsten Johnson (Derrida, Pray The Devil Back To Hell, Citizenfour), Reed Morano (The Skeleton Twins, Frozen River) and Nadia Hallgren (Citizen Koch, Searching for Sugar Man) speaking with Indiewire critic Caryn James

Caryn James: There are some really appalling numbers about women cinematographers in the industry. In a study done last year by Celluloid Ceiling for the year 2013, of the 250 top-grossing films, only 3 percent had women cinematographers which was 1 percent more than the previous year and for some reason a decrease from 1998. And just to get a sense of the range here, 6 percent of those films were directed by women, 17 percent were edited by women, 25 percent had women producers. But only 3 percent of women cinematographers in that group. Why do you think that is? Are there historical reasons for that ? What is going on?

Kirsten Johnson: I was really excited to see that study. But I thought, “That doesn’t really apply to me.” Because the 250 top-grossing movies obviously we know what those movies are and there aren’t that many women. But I just came back from Sundance where I was on the US Documentary jury and you know, there are two women programmers at the Sundance Festival and I was on this wonderful jury. I did statistics on the US Documentary this year at Sundance and there were listed 19 cinematographers who were men, one cinematographer who was a woman. I went back through the numbers and out of 16 films several of them were codirected. So there were 15 men and there were eight women directors. In two of those cases the women did not list themselves as cinematographers even though they shot their own films: which is this interesting thing of a devaluation of the role and also an expectation of women in the documentary field: “I don’t have any money. I have to shoot this film myself. But I’m not really good at this. Sometime when I get some money I’ll hire someone else.” I think that’s often the case with women documentary directors who shoot their own work and certainly don’t consider it a profession.

'Pray The Devil Back To Hell' (Kirsten Johnson, cinematographer) — *Pray The Devil Back To Hell* (Kirsten Johnson, cinematographer)

The number that really made me sad was the subject matter of the films. So of the 16 films there were only three that had major women characters. One of those was the mother, Lucia McBath, of Jordan Davis who was shot, so she was one of an ensemble of people featured in the film. The other was How to Dance in Ohio, an ensemble piece about teenagers with autism. A couple of those teenagers were girls. And the third one was Hot Girls Wanted which was a study of amateur porn so the women who had the presence on the screen were 18-year-olds being exploited by the amateur porn industry. The rest of those 16 films, including the ones made by women, were all about men.

Caryn James; How do you account for that? Even at Sundance where you’d expect things to be more equitable. Are there historical reasons why it’s tougher for women to break into that area?

Reed Morano: I don’t know. I feel like expectations have been set up by the industry. Also it could be subconscious thinking. I mean just speaking from having made my own feature with a woman lead: it took a long time to get financing but even a longer time to get a male lead that would play second to her. I think maybe there’s a fear: you want to get the movie made, and it’s harder to get it made with a female central character.

Kirsten Johnson: I think we could break this down into several different categories. The world Reed is from is a primarily fictional world and Nadia and I are in documentary.

Caryn James: Well how did you all become cinematographers in the first place? Nadia, what was your impulse for becoming a cinematographer? Was it something you always wanted to do? Or just floundered into, the way most of us do in our careers?

Nadia Hallgren: Well I started out in still photography, black and white photography, as a kid. Someone gave me a video camera and then I started to make my own films. People seemed to respond to them. I ended up making a short film that screened at a local film festival in the Bronx, where I grew up, and I met Michael Moore’s longtime producing partner. And she liked my film. We talked and I told her I wanted to shoot films and she ended up hiring me and promised me if there was ever a chance to shoot on the film she would give it to me. And she did. That’s also how I met Kirsten who was one of DPs (director of photography) on Fahrenheit 9/11. Before we wrapped shooting I told her I wanted to be a cinematographer. I wanted her to teach me stuff and she did. It was through encounters with women that gave me an opportunity. You realize you are going to be part of this boys’ club. There were plenty of times when I was in vans with ten guys who were talking about football and I couldn’t really relate. Finding your way to other women who are supportive is key: other cinematographers, directors, producers willing to bring you in.

Oscar Winner 'Searching For Sugar Man' (cinematographer: Nadia Hallgren) — Oscar Winner *Searching For Sugar Man* (cinematographer: Nadia Hallgren)

Caryn James: So how does that work if there aren’t all that many women in the field? Who are the people who helped you along? Who are the cinematographers who mentored you?

Kirsten Johnson: I went to film school in France. I was encouraged to go into the camera department since there was no way they were going to let an American into the directing department. I discovered cinematography. I discovered I love the camera. I moved to New York and I didn’t know anybody. I was working for the Shoah foundation interviewing Holocaust survivors. Those were all male cinematographers. One of the things in this field is: you have to fun to be with because you’re going on long trips and going to be spending long hours with people. It’s like the most important part of the job. If people want to hang out with you, they’ll hire you. And one of the other things that I learned, maybe before becoming a cinematographer, when I made this choice after college to move to Senegal because I was interested in African cinema. And I didn’t know anything, but I wanted to do it so badly. I bluffed things. I have tried to mentor folks because there was nobody to mentor me except for women directors.

When I moved to New York, there were five women who were cinematographers, like I could name all of them. They were all busy working . None of them had time to talk to me. I met with women directors like Barbara Kopple, who wanted to work with women and wanted to work with me. But I didn’t yet have that much experience. Going to Senegal and not knowing anything taught me to try. You can’t study cinematography. You learn it by doing it. And for some reason many more young men are so cocky about this, like, “I can do this. I can hold this camera.” So I started saying that too. You just say “yes” and then you learn it on the job.

Caryn James: That really is the kind of thing that speaks to the kind of confidence women should have in general. Is there something specific about working with the camera? One of the things that might have been historically factored in here was the idea that these poor, little women can’t lug around big, heavy equipment, so they shouldn’t be doing this, which is not so much the case anymore. The other thing is a lot of it is technical. You need to know science and things like lenses: not the “girly” thing to do. Is that a factor in keeping women out of that area more than other areas?

Kirsten Johnson: Well also, when you’re on a feature film you have to run a crew and most of that crew are men. So you’re the boss of men. Whereas working in documentary you’re doing it all yourself. You have to have some kind of mastery over the actual camera. But you can sort of practice that and get that under your belt. But I think in the case of features…

'The Skeleton Twins' (cinematographer: Reed Morano, ASC) — *The Skeleton Twins* (cinematographer: Reed Morano, ASC)

Reed Morano: You run a crew of men and also they’ll find out really fast if you don’t know what you’re doing. The only way to run a crew successfully is if you have their respect and they have confidence in you and you know what you’re talking about. You don’t have to overprove yourself, but the things you ask for have to make sense. You’re not running people around in circles. You know what you want. You’re not waffling. You make immediate decisions. I’m about to do a show right now for HBO, a pilot, with my key grip and gaffer who are probably a good 20 to 30 years older than me and they’ve been in the union forever and probably were making movies long before I was. And they’re awesome. They totally respect me and are psyched to do it.

Caryn James: How did you get there?

Reed Morano: Well personally all the films I had to do before I got into the union were with friends and peers, male or female. And you learn how to work with guys. I came up as a key grip as well which is typically, that’s a very male-dominated job. Because it’s basically heavy lifting. I remember the first time I was gripping and I had to receive a 4 x 8 feet sheet of plywood from a guy on top of a truck. I was like, “I don’t really know if I can do this. Okay, I’m doing it. And I’m not wearing (work) gloves because I’m a girl.” It was like a learning curve. And like you were saying, people have to like you.

Caryn James: What has been the turning point in your career? Has there been a moment when you really got some help or made some breakthrough that made you think “I can do this”?

Nadia Hallgren: I think the moment comes and comes. I think it’s an ongoing evolution. Being a cinematographer, every new experience kind of does that for me. I’m always surprised at what I learn and that that teaches me something about myself.

Caryn James: Did you go to film school?

Nadia Hallgren: No

Caryn James: So how did you know what to do?

Nadia Hallgren: I would stare at magazines. And I loved composition. I didn’t know why or what I was doing. It was just very attractive to me. Then I got into a photography program, a community program in the Bronx. I still didn’t understand what I was doing, but a lot of it was just watching movies, talking to people about movies, trying to understand what was happening in front of me and just doing.

Caryn James: Reed, did you go to film school?

Reed Morano: Yeah, I went to NYU and I went with the intention of writing and directing. And then when I got there, just from the very first shoot as a PA (production assistant) I just couldn’t stop watching what the DP was doing. I was like, “That must be the most amazing job,” because you make everyone see what you see. You control that. I asked everyone: to become a DP what do I have to do? And the only advice was: take every technical class. Everyone at NYU wants to be a director, so no one wants to take technical classes. Then I would tell everyone, “I want to shoot your movie.” They all didn’t care because they just wanted to be directing. So I shot a few. At the time I was in film school everything was pretty much shot on 16 mm or 35. It was a big, scary, cool moment, but everyone was in it together which was helpful and you came out of it with sort of a reel but not really. You get to make your mistakes with other students. The “doing” part of it for me was the most important part. I don’t think I really learned how to light until a few years after film school.

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, new film from out gay, Québécois prodigy Xavier Dolan (he’s 25 and this film 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” (she’s flawless in this role, certainly better than the other Best Actress nominees I’ve seen)–as opposed to “Best Supporting Actress.” But this film kept confounding 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).

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, the 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, new film from out, gay, Québécois prodigy Xavier Dolan (he’s 25 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” (she’s flawless in this role, certainly better than the other Best Actress nominees I’ve seen)–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).

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.

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, possibly 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.

MommyTrio — 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.

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‘Killer of Sheep’ A Slice of Life of Watts in the ’70s

The son then picks on other kids, including his younger sister. Stan’s (nameless) wife yells at the kids too, because of her own frustrations, both with Stan’s depression and the “friends” of his who stop by, like the ones who talk about killing someone they know and ask for his help. After he turns them down she goes off on them, shouting, “Wait just a minute you talk about being a man. Don’t you know there’s more to it than your fists?”

Written by staff writer Ren Jender as part of our theme week on Black Families.

When I was a kid in the ’70s, Happy Days, which took place in ’50s, was one of the most popular shows on TV; my sixth-grade teacher showed daytime reruns to the entire class during lunch as a method of crowd control. My mother, who had grown up during the 1940s and ’50s told me, “The ’50s weren’t really like that.” I think of her whenever I see films (like the execrable Inherent Vice) that take place during the time I grew up. The differences between the ’70s and now are deeper than just a matter of hairstyles, fashion, and phones.

We can see that difference clearly, and beautifully, in Black writer-director Charles Burnett’s haunting first film, Killer of Sheep, shot on weekends in the late ’70s in the Watts section of Los Angeles (the cinematography, which features painterly black and white images, is also by Burnett). More than once we see kids (with no adults around; most kids in those days–including those in the suburban, mostly white neighborhoods where I grew up–were “free-range kids”) playing in groups in dusty, hazardous-looking outdoor spaces which reminded me of the bombed out ruins the London boys of the WWII-set Hope and Glory play in, right down to one boy using a tool to make a dangerous item go “bang”–in Glory, it’s a hammer and nail to a stray bullet. In Sheep, one young boy uses a plumber’s wrench to bang at the strip for a toy cap gun to set off its small traces of explosive material. The ruins in London were because of enemy bombing. In Watts they might have been a vestige of riots in the 1960s or just a sign of many cities’ general neglect of their Black neighborhoods. But the children do have the run of the place; the film captures an era before gun and police violence made the streets fatal for many of them. When one boy tells another he’s going home to get his BB gun, I couldn’t help thinking of 12-year-old Tamir Rice who, a few months ago, police shot and killed in a playground just for carrying the same item.

The neighborhood’s busted-up fences, dilapidated cars, and a garage with a big enough hole in the door that children slip easily in and out through it seem to have etched themselves into the careworn features of the title character, Stan (played by Henry Gayle Sanders, a familiar face from small and “guest-star” roles on ’70s and ’80s television). One woman tells him he’d be handsome if he smiled once in a while.

Stan works at a slaughterhouse (we see the animals first alive then killed, skinned and decapitated on the assembly line) and lives in a small one-story house (decades before the internet chic of “tiny houses“) with his wife and two children. We see that the family doesn’t have much, but like a lot of other low-income people, Stan points to others who are worse off. He tells an acquaintance, “Man, I ain’t poor. I give away things to the Salvation Army. You can’t give away nothing to the Salvation Army if you’re poor.”

KillerOfSheepDogHead — Stan’s daughter (Angela Burnett) and a friend

Stan has to have a long discussion with a man and his array of family members to get a car motor for the amount of money he can afford. He and his friend painstakingly carry this heavy, unwieldy conglomeration of metal (the muscles in the arms and chests of the actors, when most people didn’t go to the gym, shows evidence of the hard, physical labor many Black men did for work at the time) down a couple of flights of stairs, resting more than once along the way and hoist it into the back of his friend’s pickup truck, which injures the friend’s finger. Stan asks, more than once, if they can push the motor all the way toward the cab but his friend says it will be fine where it is. When his friend starts driving the motor immediately falls into the street, sliding downhill a little. They both agree it’s ruined, so they drive away, leaving the motor where it fell.

Stan has a beautiful wife (Kaycee Moore who would later appear in Daughters of the Dust) who cares for and loves him, but she can’t make him forget his troubles. He dances with her to Dinah Washington singing “This Bitter Earth” (“What good is love/ Mmmmmmmm/ That no one shares”), but is too melancholy to have sex with her. She’s jealous as she watches him freely accept affection from their young daughter (Angela Burnett) in a way that he won’t with her. The audience understands that with the daughter the pressure’s off, but his wife cries as she watches the two of them.

Stan yells at his son (Jack Drummond) for being “country” when the son asks his Mom for money, specifically because he calls her “madea” (a form of address for mother figures Tyler Perry did not invent). The son then picks on other kids, including his younger sister. Stan’s (nameless) wife yells at the kids too, because of her own frustrations, both with Stan’s depression and the “friends” of his who stop by, like the ones who talk about killing someone they know and ask for his help. After he turns them down she goes off on them, shouting, “Wait just a minute you talk about being a man. Don’t you know there’s more to it than your fists?”

KILLER OF SHEEP (1977) — Kids leap across the gap between building roofs

No director has captured as well as Burnett does here the dynamics of children (of any race) at play. Stan’s daughter, for no particular reason, wears a cartoon dog mask as she stands in the house and goes outside (the way one of my best friends when we were about her age used to wear a long, blonde wig). In one moment, among a group of boys, a pretend fight turns into real one in which someone gets hurt. Kids leap back and forth between two low buildings about six feet apart in a way parents (and directors) would never, ever let happen now. We see children try to advance in the pecking order and find themselves literally beaten down afterward. A young boy on a bike tells two older girls doing The Bump on a street to get out of his way, but the two girls and their friends gang up on him until he runs away, leaving his bike behind.

One of the scenes most evocative of the ’70s I knew features Stan’s daughter playing on a cluttered floor with her (white) baby doll as she sings along to Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Reasons” on the radio, making up her own nonsense lyrics to replace the more sexually suggestive ones of the song (as kids today do with hip-hop lyrics). Filmmakers so rarely just hold back and let us see how little girls play, especially when they are by themselves. And this scene with different music and maybe a different doll (for me it was Barbie or Dawn dolls) could have come from the lives of young girls through the ages.

As in real life, the film has neither a happy ending nor a tragic one. A day at the racetrack is derailed by a flat tire. Stan goes in for another shift at the slaughterhouse. We again see the living sheep and the assembly line. As we hear “This Bitter Earth” once more, I burst into tears.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nXw-8MXhVE” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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‘Inherent Vice’: The White, Male Writer-Director’s New Clothes

I can count on one hand the times I’ve fallen asleep in a theater; at ‘Vice’ I suspect my body was telling me this film was never going to get better, so why not do something more worthwhile with my time? I did rouse myself to catch the end of the scene and the rest of the film, but it never did improve. All of its scenes, save one, would have the same coherence if its talented actors barked instead of saying their lines–and if they did so, some Anderson fanboy would still (as I overheard one after the screening I attended) insist to the unlucky woman walking alongside him, “He’s playing with narrative!”

After I sat all the way through the adventures of Marky Mark and his 13-inch prosthetic penis in Boogie Nights, I thought I was finished with Paul Thomas Anderson films, but at the behest of a woman I was in a new relationship with, I absorbed the bullshit and bombast of her favorite film, Magnolia (though I remember very little of it), several years after it came out. As I watched, I remember thinking that the woman I’d dated years earlier who’d liked the same films I had (her favorite was The Unbearable Lightness of Being ) was otherwise a terrible girlfriend. So maybe the fact that this other woman (who would later become my spouse) loved Magnolia was a good sign. I was, of course, wrong.

Anderson’s latest film, Inherent Vice, takes place in a southern California hippie community just as the feel-good counterculture of the ’60s was slowly souring into the disillusionment and heroin and cocaine addiction of the ’70s. The main character, Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix, decades too old for the role–the counterculture’s catchphrase was “Never trust anyone over 30”) lives by the beach and smokes a lot of pot, but he also works as a private detective, which is why his ex “old lady” Shasta (Katherine Waterston) comes to his place, in a sojourn from what was then known as the “straight” world, her hair pulled back with a barrette wearing the kind of clothes, the narrator (musician Joanna Newsom) notes, she had always sworn she never would. Shasta seems to be on the brink of tears as she says, “I need your help, Doc,” and we in the audience can imagine a complex history between these two.

Inherent_ViceCover — Katherine Waterston and Joaquin Phoenix try (and fail) to make sense of it all

In 1970, hippies were so commonplace, the guy who drove the ice cream truck in my suburban Kansas neighborhood had a ponytail, a beard and a mustache, but in another few years hardly any hippies would be left, except for some scattered on communes, farms and “intentional communities.” Ray Magliozzi explained the end of the counterculture era as: all the previously “unemployed bums” and “wackos” “went out and got jobs.” Although writer-director Olivier Assayas’ Something In The Air touches on a similar sea change in Europe, someone could make a good film about this largely unexplored time of transition (which could also be described as a defeat) in the US–but Vice is not that film and Anderson is not that director.

I don’t need a tight plot to have a good time at the movies, but I fell asleep during Vice. I couldn’t resist closing my eyes when Owen Wilson (whom many of us wish would go back to writing films: Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums are much better than any film he’s only acted in) playing one in a long line of the film’s ridiculously named supporting characters (none of whom I could keep track of or give a shit about) says, “And your question is: which side am I on?”

I can count on one hand the times I’ve fallen asleep in a theater; at Vice I suspect my body was telling me this film was never going to get better, so why not do something more worthwhile with my time? I did rouse myself to catch the end of the scene and the rest of the film, but it never did improve. All of its scenes, save one, would have the same coherence if its talented actors barked instead of saying their lines–and if they did so, some Anderson fanboy would still (as I overheard one after the screening I attended) insist to the unlucky woman walking alongside him, “He’s playing with narrative!”

INHERENT-VICEBeach — Parts of this film are pretty to look at. Not enough reason to see it though.

Anderson has claimed in interviews that he was influenced by Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye and the original book’s author Raymond Chandler’s famous explanation to the screenwriters (including William Faulkner) who were adapting another of his novels, The Big Sleep, that he had no idea who the killer was. But Anderson hasn’t learned the first thing from either film or from Chandler who might not have known who the murderer was, but knew his characters inside and out, and let his readers know them too. Altman understood the value of a good script: he asked the same woman screenwriter who had adapted Sleep, Leigh Brackett to write Goodbye. Altman was also famous for encouraging his actors to improvise, but in his very best work (like Goodbye and McCabe and Mrs. Miller) he never sacrificed a deep attention to even minor characters’ moods and motivations–and probably also left a lot of flat, improvised dialogue on the cutting room floor. Altman knew that the audience needed to have a sense of the characters’ inner justifications, even if the audience disagrees with them or is shocked by them (as with the brutal violence against women Marlowe’s friend Terry Lenox and the gangster Marty Augustine perpetrate during Goodbye). Altman was a notorious pothead himself who was a part of the new school of directors who were able to thrive in the ’70s as a direct aftereffect of the counterculture, but even in his comedies (like M*A*S*H) he didn’t surrender story and character to some sort of vague, giggly, stoner aesthetic the way Anderson does in Vice.

For reasons I can’t fathom, Anderson always attracts good actors to his films and seeing the ones in Vice struggle to find something worthy in his shitty (Oscar-nominated!) script (based on the novel by Thomas Pynchon, whose work I’ve never read and, if it’s anything like the dialogue and narration in this film, never will) is painful. In odd moments with a gesture or line reading they succeed–Jena Malone chomping her teeth and Eric Roberts when he first catches the eye of Phoenix, but these shots last seconds and the movie lasts two and half hours. The only sustained rapport two characters have with each other (and the only time they connect with the audience) is in the scene when Shasta returns to Doc’s bungalow with her hair loose wearing the outfit the narrator has told us she wore when they were together. Waterston and Phoenix are both excellent as they talk and drink beer, sustaining a tension and a melancholy otherwise absent from the film. The sex they end up having isn’t the hearts and flowers we would expect from hippies either. But one good scene can’t save Inherent Vice, which seems more like a bet than a film. I can imagine Anderson stating to one of his cohorts, “$100 says I write a script that makes no sense and still get the money to make a movie out of it!” He won and everyone else–not just the audience but all the women and people of color whose great, coherent scripts are left unproduced–lost.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZfs22E7JmI” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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‘The Imitation Game’ and ‘Citizenfour’: Secrets Then and Now

A stereotype in popular media about very smart people is that they must have some great deficiency in other areas of their lives–as if someone with extraordinary intelligence being able to make friends and get laid would be unfair to the rest of us. The only reason I can surmise for the positive reviews The Imitation Game, a highly fictionalized new film about gay, World War II codebreaker Alan Turing is that it confirms all the “normal” audience’s worst suspicions about “genius” and queer life, without offering any meaningful insight into either.

Sometimes I wish the mainstream film industry would stop making movies about queers. The rare times that a queer person is allowed to be the main character in one of its movies, as in this one, he (almost always a “he”), like the rare main character of color is usually unrealistically isolated from the community he comes from, a trope fostered from before Stonewall to the ’90s to now: we are oh-so-tragic and oh-so-alone. Because he has no peers to rely on, the main gay guy invariably confides in the straight guy (particularly ridiculous in The Imitation Game’s 1940s setting) just like in movies set in the Civil Rights-era South, Black people have all their deepest conversations–and bonds–with white people. When a film shows the rare group of people of color relying on each other, as in Selma, awards snub it and prominent white guys denounce it. When a film like the underrated Pride shows a group of queers working together, the blurb on the back of the DVD makes sure it doesn’t offend any “Christian values” by mentioning something as crass as LGBT identity.

“Homosexuals”–as they were known then–could be arrested during the time the film takes place (as Turing was after the war, one of the few parts of the film that isn’t doctored) and imprisoned both in England and elsewhere, but that didn’t stop them from existing or having sex with each other–and straight people knew them even if they didn’t acknowledge that they did. World War II was a vehicle for many queers from the US (and probably those in the UK too) to find each other, no longer isolated in their small hometowns. But even before the war, academia (where Turing came from) was, notoriously, also a refuge for gay men. The arts were another. Accounts from those who knew him say that Turing was quite open about his sexuality (instead of the anguished confessions we see here): and then, as now, straight people (and I’m presuming most of the people interviewed were straight) were always the last to know. Also unchanged in the intervening years: the rules for men in power or ones with powerful friends were different: actor John Gielgud was arrested in the same time period as Turing was for having sex with another man, but faced neither imprisonment nor the forced hormone treatment Turing accepted instead of a prison sentence.

Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley) and the guys

All the most interesting twists of the story are the ones the film avoids. As part of the huge wartime operation at Bletchley Park Turing had helped win the war against the Nazis (in fact his team’s decryption might have been the deciding factor) but he couldn’t tell anyone about it–nor could anyone else. Some powerful people did write letters of support for him during his trial, but they couldn’t say precisely why they were writing them. If his work during the war hadn’t been secret the charges against him probably would never have come to trial–or been made in the first place.

Instead, what passes for drama in this film are pedestrian scenes that are the invention of screenwriter Graham Moore. Even though there’s no historical evidence of any such incident we get more than one sequence in which Turing’s supervisors attempt to destroy his work. “You will never understand the importance of what I’m creating here,” Benedict Cumberbatch, as Turing, cries in the first film performance I’ve seen that is best encapsulated by the phrase “the gnashing of teeth.”

These scenes might be a reflection of the vanity of its hack filmmakers (writer Moore along with director Morten Tyldum). “I’m afraid these men would only slow me down,” the film’s Turing says about the team of other codebreakers. Not only does this film leave out all the other people (including some Polish cryptologists who made a valuable prototype) who helped Turing get to the point where he could successfully design and run Bombe (not “Christopher”: the name Turing gives his codebreaking computer in the film– after his first love!) but in the film he’s also perpetually misunderstood and under-appreciated by others the same way white, male writer and director “auteurs” seem to often feel they and their own work are, even as they dismiss (and underpay) the many other people who make their films possible and enjoyable. Maybe this parallel is the reason for the spate of “great man” films and the awards they always seem to collect this time of year.

The lone woman with a decent-sized part in the film is Joan Clarke (played by Keira Knightley) Turing’s fellow cryptanalyst who becomes his friend and, for a time, is engaged to him. Unlike the ridiculous scene in the film when Turing breaks up with her, the real-life Clarke was reportedly “unfazed” when she found out her fiancé was queer, because in those days (as the film touches very briefly on) marriage was the only way for most young women to get away from the control of their parents.

And even though a big deal is made of Joan Clarke being one of the only woman cryptanalysts, like “Rosie The Riveter” stateside, 80 percent of Bletchley Park’s employees were women. The codebreakers were popularly known as “Dilly’s girls” after the (male) head of the operation, none of which is reflected in Game. Thanks for erasing the historical contributions of women again, mainstream film industry!

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5CjKEFb-sM” iv_load_policy=”3″]

Another film about genius and secrets making the rounds of top ten lists and awards is Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour, the documentary about Edward Snowden, who acted as a whistleblower by releasing evidence of the US’s widespread and unconstitutional spying on its own citizens.

You’d never know from the many news accounts about Snowden that Poitras was the first person he made real contact with when he decided to go public. Poitras reads his first message aloud on the soundtrack, “Laura, at this stage I can offer nothing more than my word. I am a senior government employee in the intelligence community. I hope that you understand that contacting you is extremely high-risk.”

The film makes clear, hilariously, that when Snowden first tried to get in touch with Glenn Greenwald, who is usually given the credit for bringing Snowden’s story to the rest of the world, Greenwald couldn’t learn to use the encryption Snowden (who knew how volatile this information was) insisted on, so Snowden moved on to Poitras (who was well-versed in encryption after the government had seized footage from her previous documentaries, including one about the Iraq war). After a time Snowden suggesting that she bring in Greenwald–when presumably she could instruct him what he needed to do to get his encryption skills up to snuff.

Citizenfour, I had to keep reminding myself, shows us history in the making. We meet Snowden before his first media interview. We see him in the hotel room in Hong Kong where he was first holed up when the story broke. I had to keep telling myself what I was seeing was important because most of it is otherwise pretty dull.

We never find out much about Snowden beyond what we’ve seen in other media. He is a man who is preternaturally sure and calm about what he’s done, perhaps because, as an autodidact (he has a GED) at the top of a highly skilled field, he was able to think for himself on the implications of the work he was being asked to do.

We do see the travails of another whistleblower who went through more traditional channels and is still suffering blowback for it, to show us why Snowden released the info to the media directly. And we see Snowden upset at how the girlfriend he lived with and left behind in Hawaii is treated by the government in his absence. But as a friend remarked as we left the theater, “Watching Edward Snowden stare at his laptop isn’t very exciting.”

Although Snowden was sure he would be tried and imprisoned for his actions, saying in one of his preliminary messages to Poitras, “In the end if you publish the source material I will likely be immediately implicated,” he eventually saw that he could, with help, escape and chose to do so. But the scenes that should build up tension and our empathy for him (even those of us who admire his actions and sympathize with his plight) fall flat.

An exception is when we see Snowden’s face on video blown up to epic proportions in a main Hong Kong Square, just after his first big media interview, and then cut back to Snowden still in his hotel room, trying to change his appearance so he won’t be recognized (and abducted) on his way to the airport. Otherwise we don’t feel like we are in Snowden’s shoes in this film, even as we spend much of our time looking and listening to him. At the end we see Snowden has reunited with his girlfriend in Russia (where he has been trapped since the US government cancelled his passport–just before he could catch the second leg of his escape flight). We see them through a window, preparing dinner together, from a distance, an apt metaphor for how well we have come to know Snowden in this film ostensibly about him.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiGwAvd5mvM” 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

Doing The Extraordinary in ‘Two Days, One Night’

Women in films are even less likely to engage in this kind of dispirited struggle. Instead an actress usually plays the wife, mother, or girlfriend whose job it is to be “strong” and rub the hero’s back while he battles against his own obstacles. She talks reassuringly to him whenever he doubts himself, the exact same way Sandra’s husband does with her here.

In one of the first scenes of Two Days, One Night, the newest release from the Belgian writer-directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, we see the main character Sandra (played by a dressed-down Marion Cotillard) receive some bad news on the phone. She says out loud to herself afterward, “Don’t cry.”

Sandra, we later find out, has been on sick leave from her job for the past few months because of clinical depression. The phone call is from her friend at work, Juliette (Catherine Salée), who tells her that the rest of the laborers at their place of employment (which seems to be a small manufacturer of solar panels) have voted to accept a €1,000 bonus (about $1,200), which the foreman has offered in exchange for their agreement to lay Sandra off (Western Europe: a fairytale land where a boss asks his workers for permission to lay off their colleague–and offers them money to do so). The overwhelming majority of the workers (all but two of the 16 of them) have voted against her.

Juliette tells Sandra the foreman has misled the others into thinking if they didn’t agree to get rid of Sandra one of them might be laid off instead. So as the plant’s big boss is leaving the parking lot in his sports car to start his weekend, Juliette and Sandra plead with him to hold another vote, with a secret ballot, first thing on Monday morning. He just wants to get out of there, so he agrees.

Two Days, One Night — Sandra (Marion Cotillard) and her husband (Fabrizio Rongione)

For the rest of the film Sandra, with the support of her husband (Fabrizio Rongione), and to a lesser extent, Juliette, tries to convince the others (after finding their home addresses and tracking them down) to let her stay. Of course voting against Sandra was easy when they didn’t have to face her and hear her say that she doesn’t want to be jobless and swear that she’s ready to go back to work (even as we in the audience, who have seen how frail she still is, wonder if she’s telling the truth).

One of her coworkers (part of the handful of Black and brown immigrants also more likely to be let go) is unexpectedly emotional; Sandra looks confused as he weeps about voting against her on Friday and thanks her for the chance to redeem himself. Others, including a woman Sandra had thought was her friend but refuses to see her, are surprisingly cold–or outright hostile. They want that €1,000 and don’t care if getting it means she will lose her job. Some make excuses and tell her they’re not the ones who set Sandra’s continued employment against their bonuses. She replies, quicker and more astutely than we expect, that the choice isn’t of her making either.

2Days1NightCoworker — A coworker begs Sandra for forgiveness

Cotillard, her hair in a straggly ponytail, wears skimpy, summer tank tops, but is so slouched and tense for most of the film, her body is like a backwards “S.” She comes across as both convincingly desperate and working-class (not something all red-carpet actresses are capable of). Like Violette, Two Days, One Night isn’t afraid to show its protagonist at her worst. Sandra, like Violette, hates the thought that the concessions the others are making for her are motivated by pity. She constantly wants to give up, taking to her bed in the middle of the day, even as her husband gently pushes her saying, “Why not try?” and “Don’t give in. You have to fight.”

This film, like Violette, challenges the lie that most films tell, especially those released in time for awards season, that after a few minor setbacks a protagonist will, with uplifting music on the soundtrack, stand up straight and face adversity head-on with courage and maximum photogeneity. But the people who do extraordinary things often do them after a lot of bone-crushing rejection. They feel like miserable failures. They cry. They consider quitting all the time. We all like to think we face the trouble that comes our way like Wonder Woman, but when events take a turn for the worse we’re more like Dr. Smith on the old TV show Lost In Space, crying in an increasingly hysterical voice, “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.”

Sandra’s quest is not just an indictment of capitalism but also touches on the responsibility we feel for our fellow human beings–how deep (or not) our empathy runs for the people we talk to and work alongside every day. Seeing Sandra’s surprise at who votes for her and who votes against her makes us wonder how well we know our own coworkers. We see her smile after one small triumph and in her next encounter we see her literally knocked down. We count with her as she accumulates four then five votes and when she talks to a man who just wants his money see her wisely clam up about which coworkers are voting for her. The long, frustrating, seemingly impossible task in front of Sandra could stand in for a number of others: writing a book, staying in a marriage–or making a movie.

And after we, along with Sandra, have nearly given up hope for her getting her job back, we see her become unexpectedly resilient–and the solution to her problem become more complex. Her late transformation reminds me of the redemption of another depressed character in a French-language film, Delphine in Eric Rohmer’s great Summer. Just as we hear the wonder in Delphine’s voice in the last line of that film, we hear a newfound strength and certainty in Sandra’s voice as she talks on the phone to her husband at the end. The two days and one night of the title have changed her, maybe forever.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06BNjqSsGqo” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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‘A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night’ and Scares Us

Nice girls aren’t supposed to walk alone in the dark, even in the movies. So in the generically titled ‘A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night,’ the debut feature from writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour we in the audience wonder what a woman in a black cloak (a traditional Iranian garment called a chador) is doing on the streets of a largely empty desert town in the wee hours. We see her witness a pimp (Dominic Rains) exploit and then cheat a sex worker (Mozhan Marnò). We soon find out the woman in the chador, The Girl–we never find out her name (played, unforgettably, by Sheila Vand) is no ordinary woman, but a vampire with fangs that retract like a cat’s claws–or a switchblade.

Nice girls aren’t supposed to walk alone in the dark, even in the movies. So in the generically titled A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, the debut feature from writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour, we in the audience wonder what a woman in a black cloak (a traditional Iranian garment called a chador) is doing on the streets of a largely empty desert town in the wee hours. We see her witness a pimp (Dominic Rains) exploit and then cheat a sex worker (Mozhan Marnò). We soon find out the woman in the chador, The Girl–we never find out her name (played, unforgettably, by Sheila Vand) is no ordinary woman, but a vampire with fangs that retract like a cat’s claws–or a switchblade.

The film takes place in a parallel California which contains a Farsi-speaking, Iranian enclave called “Bad City.” We know we’re not in Iran because the pimp has visible tattoos and later we see a woman in public with her hair and much of her body uncovered. Also The Girl wears her chador in such a way that we see her hipster, stripey, boat shirt (too short for modest dress) and skinny jeans underneath.

In spite of its surface differences, the film to which Girl has the greatest parallel is probably David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Like that film, every sumptuous, black and white shot is framed and lit with care, creating an alternate universe for the audience to lose themselves in. And as in Eraserhead, even what we hear is fussed over in a way that grabs our attention: incidental sounds are recorded close. The proximity doesn’t alienate us, the way less skillful dubbing in other films often does, but gives us a heightened sense of intimacy, as if we are almost touching the characters.

When The Girl interrogates The Street Urchin (a young boy played by Milad Eghbali) the film shows a truth that many films, including horror films, elide–but that the other recent acclaimed horror film directed by a woman, The Babadook, also addresses–the first person who scares us when we are children is often a woman, whether it’s a mother or another woman authority figure. Tilda Swinton has said that her character in Snowpiercer was based on a particularly terrifying nanny from her own childhood. Few lines in films this year have been more chilling than the one The Girl leaves The Street Urchin with after she threatens him: “Be a good boy.”

Like Michael Almereyda, who, in the ’90s made a stylish black and white film about a woman vampire among New York hipsters, Nadja (its star, Elina Löwensohn, had eyes you couldn’t look away from, much like Vand’s) Amirpour combines familiar elements in an unfamiliar way for maximum resonance. In Almereyda’s modern day New York Hamlet (from 2000), he famously incorporated a video of Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh talking about “being” in the background of a scene, priming us to later hear Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy.

In Girl Amirpour gets at how women in modest Muslim dress (including those from Iran) are used for xenophobic and anti-Islamic fear-mongering (often in the guise of “feminism”) in the US (like in the recent ad campaign for Homeland) but also uses a chador’s resemblance to a cape to give us an eerily familiar–but new–“Dracula” silhouette. When The Girl rides on the skateboard The Street Urchin leaves behind (after he runs away from her in terror) the chador billows around her as she rolls down the road, and she becomes, without CGI trickery, a bat in flight.

Americans often read chador on women to mean vulnerability, but like the frail-seeming, pale, young, blonde Mae in another beautifully-shot, vampire Western (also directed by a woman, the pre-Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow) 1987’s Near Dark, who, when her cowboy boyfriend lassoes her as a “joke” takes hold of the rope and pulls him in, The Girl has hidden reserves of strength. The Girl becomes an avenging angel in black, attacking the men we see abuse women, using her “traditional” quiet passivity to draw these guys close. As the abusive men do with the cat who is many times in the frame (rarely has a filmmaker caught how much of our daily lives our animals witness) they ascribe motivations and personas to The Girl which are more about their own perceptions than about who she is or what she is thinking.

Like a number of films Girl has an early scene, fast becoming a campy cliché, in which a woman suggestively sucks the finger of a man. But when The Girl takes the pimp’s forefinger into her mouth, he gets more than he bargained for.

And as we do with Mae, we see that The Girl is lonely, and a hapless, good-looking guy, Arash, played by Arash Marandi touches something in her. When they meet, he’s coming from a costume party where he’s taken some of the club drugs he was dealing and is still wearing a vampire cape as he stares into a street light. She immediately becomes protective of him.

Vand’s presence burns through the screen. She has the intensity of the great silent actresses–and in many of her scenes, the ones in her room plastered with ’80s music posters, dancing by herself to Farsi synth-pop records or even when she interacts with other characters, she often does not speak. This film is low on back story but Vand’s face, especially her huge dark eyes (we see her put on her heavy eyeliner in the bathroom mirror before she goes out) tells us what she is feeling in every scene.

Amirpour’s camera (the magnificent cinematography is by Lyle Vincent) lingers over Arash’s beauty–his high cheekbones and large, long-lashed eyes under a dark, curly version of James Dean’s pompadour–in a way few male filmmakers would. His clothes (a plain white t-shirt and jeans that hug his muscled body) also evoke Dean’s. And even though the pimp, Saeed, is a villain, meant to repel us, Amirpour lets us take in the attractiveness of his body, especially in a shirtless scene with The Girl when his pants hang very low and we see the full extent of his tattoos–and his muscles.

LA has enough Iranian-Americans in it that some have nicknamed it “Tehrangeles” (after Iran’s capital), but I can’t think of another film produced near there (Girl was actually filmed in Bakersfield) in which most (or all) of the cast is of Persian descent, but no one is a terrorist or a relic from the old country. These characters speak Farsi to each other but, except for Arash’s father, with his drug addiction and collection of pre-revolutionary framed photos of family (complete with 60s-style teased hair on the women), these people aren’t living in the past–even The Girl’s retro record collection, clothes and bobbed hair reflect present-day fashion.

We can never know for sure, but just as with Black actress Gugu Mbatha-Raw giving two terrific, completely different star-turns in movies in one year but the media still largely ignoring her, I wonder if Amirpour’s flawless visual sense, skill with actors and unique reworking of a genre many of us thought didn’t have an original angle left would garner more attention if she were a white guy. Girl is distributed in partnership with VICE‘s film arm and has even made some year-end, top-10 lists, but I had to go to New York to see it and whole countries (like Canada) have yet to get even limited distribution. Nevertheless Amirpour continues to work on films unimpeded. Her next work is about cannibals. I can’t wait until its release.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YGmTdo3vuY”]

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