Ren Jender – Page 8 – Bitch Flicks

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

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

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

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

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

Near the beginning of their excellent documentary One Cut, One Life (which will be shown as part of the Woods Hole Film Festival July 28), Small and Pincus, each seeming to take a turn behind the camera, discuss plans to collaborate on their final film together (they had previously worked on the post-Katrina documentary The Axe In The Attic). Ed has been diagnosed with a fatal disease which would eventually turn into leukemia. Lucia is working through her grief over the deaths of two of her close friends, one from a hit-and-run driver, the other murdered by an ex-boyfriend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Cut, One Life Trailer from Lucia Small on Vimeo.

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

Female Purity Is Some Bullshit: My Problem With ‘Ida’

Religious devotion is a tricky quality to depict in any medium: so many of us have seen piety as hypocrisy both in film and in life that we’re prepared to laugh at or to dismiss deeply held religious beliefs onscreen. In work made for mostly secular audiences, filmmakers who want to show deeply religious characters have to answer the question: if piety isn’t a joke, what exactly is it?

Sincere, spiritual belief in the Korean Zen film Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring (which, for long stretches is, in all but name, a silent film) is shown in very specific ways, most compellingly when the young monk pours the ashes of his teacher into the water and we see the fish start to consume them. A very different viewpoint comes from Luis Buñuel, the anticlerical director of Simon of the Desert when he shows the audience that the “goodness” and faith of religious ascetic, Simon, interferes with his ability to understand and connect with other people–which is why his efforts to improve their lives never quite hit the mark.

The title character of Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida (Agata Trzebuchowska) starts out as Anna, a young novitiate in Poland in 1962, ready to take her vows when her mother superior tells her she must first visit her only living relative, an aunt whom she has never met, nor even heard about before. When the aunt, Wanda (Agata Kulesza), first sees Anna at her door she doesn’t even bother greeting her, just stares at her face for an uncomfortably long time. When Anna introduces herself, Wanda tells her that she knows who she is.

Anna comes in and they talk, Wanda says “They never told you? You’re a Jew.” Anna’s parents (her mother was Wanda’s sister) were slaughtered during World War II and Anna/Ida was brought up as an orphan in the convent. Wanda shows Anna/Ida photos of her family (including Anna’s mother, who looks just like her) and asks because Anna’s hair is covered with a wimple “You’re a redhead too, aren’t you?”

Anna/Ida wishes to find out how her parents were killed and where their remains are buried, so she sets out for the small town in the countryside where they lived and died. Wanda accompanies her, chauffeuring her in the shiny car that, like her spacious apartment, fur-collared coat and tailored dresses, are a perk of being a powerful Communist Party member (she works as a judge) and provide a stark contrast to how most of the others we see in the film live.

Wanda and Ida act as good cop/bad cop with Wanda’s past as a prosecutor put to use when she interrogates those who might know where and how her sister and brother-in-law were killed, while Anna’s wimple and cross serve as entrée through doors that even Wanda’s position as a powerful Party member can’t open. One of the many things the film gets right about the period is the deference laypeople show Anna. In the 60s and early 70s, years before the sexual abuse scandals came to light, a lot of Catholics, especially older people, still looked at nuns and priests with reverence. Even as a farmer’s wife rebuffs Wanda’s efforts to find out about the death of Ida’s parents, she asks Ida to bless her baby.

The excellent Enemies, A Love Story, from the late Paul Mazursky, is one of the few other films that shows surviving European Jews living with the aftereffects of World War II’s mass genocide without, as in The Pawnbroker and Sophie’s Choice, giving us flashback scenes to the camps themselves. But Ida is different in that it takes place in the country where the genocide happened–and where we see precious little soul-searching about it. We find out Ida’s mother and father never made it to the camps, or even into the presence of a Nazi soldier or bureaucrat, but were killed, like livestock, by a neighbor. He knew no one would punish him for their deaths.

He murdered the family to gain possession of the small, run-down farmhouse we see at the start of Ida and Wanda’s search, its dinginess a testament to just how little it takes for someone to lose all morality. When Ida asks the man why he didn’t also kill her, he tells her, “You were tiny. No one would know you were a Jew,” and the arbitrariness that spared her is as bracing to us as a slap.

The film presents but never quite answers a question that still persists in places like Rwanda today: how does one continue to live with the people who wanted to kill you and all the people like you, or at least didn’t try to stop those who wanted to see you and your kind dead? Anna/Ida, without revealing her relation to them asks the town priest if he knew her parents. His answer shows a continuing indifference to them and to their fate: Jews mostly kept to themselves, he says. That indifference is something Anna/Ida might have shared before she knew who her parents were and how they died.

The black and white cinematography of the film, by Ryszard Lenczewski and Lukasz Zal, is striking: at one point we see the spindly, dark trunks of trees pushing up between the gravestones in an abandoned cemetery like an Edward Gorey illustration come to life. And Ida passes the Bechdel test with flying colors (as they look for clues about her murder, the two women talk about Ida’s mother, but hardly at all about her father, whom Wanda holds responsible for her sister’s death). But a pass or fail of the Bechdel test alone doesn’t determine the worth of any film: in spite of the talent of both actresses, and the deep issues the film brings up, these two characters, in the end, inhabit unconvincing gendered stereotypes.

In the same way that some popular memes have placed men in poses adopted by women in magazine layouts to show the inherent sexism of these photo shoots, we can see how these characters are lacking by imagining the roles rewritten as men. “Adam” is scheduled to soon take his vows as a monk when he is told by one of the Brothers at the monastery that he should first visit his Uncle Waclaw, his only living relative. Waclaw tells Adam he’s Jewish: his real name is “Ira.” The uncle is a former prosecutor who degrades himself by sleeping with a lot of women and frequently getting drunk. But unless we’re seeing a film from director Steve McQueen, no male character succeeds in degrading himself by having sex with a lot of women. And hard drinking often telegraphs the man is the hero.

“Ira” never loses his temper or even cries when he encounters the evidence of his parents’ murder and the confession from the man who killed them. The closest he comes to a stand (outside of his determination to find out what happened to his parents) is a placid-faced, silent and motionless refusal to shake the hand of the farmer when he agrees to show Ira the grave in exchange for Ira dropping any claim to the farm.

The hitchhiker the uncle and Ira pick up would be the woman singer in the jazz band instead of, in Ida, the male saxophonist (the singer would feel safe alone with two men in the car because one was wearing monk’s robes) and later when the monk comes to listen to the musicians jam after their gig, the singer could tell him, looking over his smooth, wide-eyed face (as the saxophonist tells Ida) “You have no idea the effect you have on (wo)men, do you?”

As Wanda’s character could be summed up as a screwed-up “slut” (a word she calls herself and for which there is no male equivalent), Ida/Anna seems to serve as a bastion of purity. The problem with purity as ascribed to everyone from the Virgin Mary through Snow White to every dull, “good” woman rescued by “the hero” is: “pure” is a better descriptor of soap than it is of a human being. In films as in life, purity is rarely an attribute assigned to men, only to women and girls just like “strong” in the emotional sense of the word, is.

I wouldn’t categorize the two main women characters in Pawlikowski’s earlier film, the compelling My Summer of Love (its star Emily Blunt, in the role that brought her to the attention of Hollywood) as ultra-realistic either, but their actions and words seemed to have concrete (if sometimes complex) motivations: those two weren’t the opaque characters Wanda, to some extent, and Anna/Ida, especially, turn out to be. When Anna/Ida makes a life-changing decision toward the end, her expression is as serenely impassive as it was at the beginning, as if nothing had happened to her during the course of the film. Ida seems poised to forget everything she’s learned in the 80 minutes we’ve been in her company–including her own name.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXhCaVqB0x0&feature=kp”]

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

‘Kate Bornstein is a Queer and Pleasant Danger’: A Portrait With Missing Pieces

We have to turn to documentaries to find transfeminine characters in film who are fully formed (and also actually played by transfeminine people) whether they are the stars of ‘Paris Is Burning,’ the lesser known (but still excellent) solo portrait ‘Split’ or are part of the protagonist’s life as seen in ‘Southern Comfort.’ Trans director Sam Feder’s ‘Kate Bornstein is a Queer and Pleasant Danger’ (although it is named after Bornstein’s memoir the film is not an adaptation of the book) is the long overdue documentary on trans performer, writer and thinker Kate Bornstein (and will play as part of Outfest in Los Angeles on July 12).

When I was a kid, one of the first trans* characters (the asterisk denotes the spectrum of gender identity) I saw onscreen was at a drive-in: she used martial arts to kick the shit out of some cisgender straight guy and held a gun to the head of another. If you haven’t actually seen Freebie and the Bean (and you shouldn’t), you might think those scenes sound pretty cool, but that character (and I’m using the word loosely) is one in a long line of dangerous, deceptive, twisted trans* women. The revelation that a “man” is wearing a wig and a dress while killing or assaulting victims–as in Psycho or later in Dressed To Kill and Silence of the Lambs–is a “shocking” twist, meant to further repulse the audience.

Recent efforts haven’t fared much better: films have just traded one trope for another. Instead of the evil trans* woman we now have the suffering trans* woman whose main function is to endure whatever cruelty and degradation the filmmakers wish to throw at her in Transamerica or the recent Dallas Buyers Club, a film I haven’t seen out of principle (I was on the fringes of AIDS activism in the 90s: straight men weren’t the protagonists of that story), but which seems predicated on a trans woman suffering and acting as a human sacrifice so the formerly transphobic “straight” guy star can show the audience how compassionate and accepting he’s become.

We have to turn to documentaries to find transfeminine characters in film who are fully formed (and also actually played by transfeminine people) whether they are the stars of Paris Is Burning, the lesser known (but still excellent) solo portrait Split or are part of the protagonist’s life as seen in Southern Comfort. Trans director Sam Feder’s Kate Bornstein is a Queer and Pleasant Danger (although it is named after Bornstein’s memoir the film is not an adaptation of the book) is the long overdue documentary on trans performer, writer and thinker Kate Bornstein (and will play as part of Outfest in Los Angeles on July 12).

Bornstein–with her trademark Anna Wintour bob, facial piercings, tattoos, and multicolored glasses–is someone whose work is as distinctive as her appearance. I’ve seen and heard her many times through the years, mostly in performances, readings and interviews, but I’ve read just a small fraction of her impressive output. So in a lot of ways, I felt like I either knew not enough or too much to be part of the intended audience for this film. Occasionally the film would tell me something I didn’t already know, as when we find out Bornstein’s first person account and resource about staying alive in spite of suicidal thoughts: Hello Cruel World was dedicated to a friend’s son who had killed himself. But more often as the film acts as a kind of “Kate Bornstein 101” we see performances and listen in on readings that are familiar to many of us. I would’ve liked more of Kate (or someone) reading the work she usually doesn’t include in her performances and readings.

The sequence in which Bornstein talks about her estranged daughter, Jessica, with the woman who is the daughter’s biological mother just left me with more questions. Both parents were Scientologists at the time and because the daughter is still active in Scientology she is forbidden from seeing Bornstein, but what of her other mother? We don’t find out, the same way we don’t find out why a pre-transition Bornstein was a single parent for part of Jessica’s very early life.

We feel the ache Bornstein has for the absence of her daughter (and grandchildren, whom she has never met) 40 years after she last spent time with Jessica. Perhaps partly because of this loss, Bornstein takes on the role of actively encouraging and nurturing younger transfolk. She says she looks forward to the world these 22-year-olds will preside over, and it’s them she’s talking about when she asserts she would like to be remembered as “someone who looked after her kids.” But in spite of the mutual love she and the younger generation of trans people have for one another, like a lot of loving parents, Bornstein seems, at times, to have trouble listening to her children. Bornstein, along with other prominent transfolk of her generation, Mx Justin Vivian Bond and Jack Halberstam defends the label “tr*nny”–but in the film she seems to confuse the word with trans identity itself, which is puzzling since Bornstein was one of the first public figures to identify primarily as “trans” instead of as a man or woman– a decision she explains during a performance/lecture captured in the film.

kate-bornsteinphotosession — Kate during a photo session

Like the other well-known trans people who wish to celebrate the word “tr*nny,” she doesn’t distinguish between being able to claim the label for herself and using it for other trans people–especially trans women–who consider the word a slur. Some who advocate for its use have likened “tr*nny” to “queer” which was also once a controversial, reappropriated label (one that still makes many straight people uncomfortable), but the difference is that “trans” can pretty much always be used instead of “tr*nny”, but “queer” isn’t always interchangeable with the more respectable “LGBT”: a lot of us who identify as “queer women” would object to being called “lesbian,” “bisexual,” or the completely clueless “gay.” A better analogous word to “tr*nny” might be “f*ggot” which some gay men call themselves but don’t wish those outside their community to call them–ever.

Bornstein has had a lot of influence, not just on younger trans people, which we see, but also on other trans writers and performers, none of whom are interviewed in the film. Instead we see repeat scenes of Bornstein in her brownstone apartment, interacting with her animals. I spend a lot of my time petting my cat and telling her how wonderful she is too, but in a fairly short film about someone with as many ideas as Bornstein has (and as many different types of lives she’s led), including more than one of these scenes seems like wasted time.

We also don’t see the sea change that has happened in the past few years: instead of white people (most of them, except for Bornstein and a few others, transmasculine) at the forefront of trans visibility and advocacy, as they were in the 1990s and 2000s, now women of color like Janet Mock and Laverne Cox are the face of the trans community. And because those women have a larger platform than writers and performers like Bornstein ever had (Mock is a former editor at People.com and Cox is featured in the wildly popular Netflix show Orange Is The New Black), more people know them, following them on Twitter and their appearances in the media. And as Bornstein has made trans suicide an issue she tries to draw attention to, Cox and Mock have both used their fame to publicize issues the mainstream media might not otherwise cover–and which white trans activists have also been slow to rally around, like the unjust imprisonment of trans women of color Cece McDonald and Jane Doe. So seeing Bornstein portrayed in a vacuum in the film is frustrating. We see her with friends, with her partner Barbara Carrellas, adoring college-age audiences and in one blink-and-you-miss-it scene the men behind Original Plumbing who acknowledge their debt to her, saying, “You came before us and carved out space.” But we don’t really see or hear prominent trans activists and public figures talk in any depth about her influence on their own work and lives–even those who have written and talked about that influence elsewhere. This omission seems especially glaring since Bornstein herself has publicly expressed admiration, on Twitter and elsewhere, for those who have come after her.

Know what makes me proud? @janetmock grand marshal #SFPride, @Lavernecox grand marshal #nycpride. Wow. #NeverThoughtIdLiveToSeeTheDay #trans

— Kate Bornstein (@katebornstein) June 30, 2014

Though Bornstein has had a litany of serious health problems in recent years, we still see her with a vaporizer pen for much of the film (she quit smoking and vaping in 2012 after a cancer diagnosis). At the end Kate faces a health crisis and comes to an epiphany. She states, “For the first time in my life I realize I want to stay…I’m doing everything I can to make that happen.” As a coda we find out her current prognosis is good. She might just live long enough to see those college kids in charge after all.

Trailer for Kate Bornstein Is a Queer and Pleasant Danger from sam feder on Vimeo.

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Editor’s note: corrections have been made from the original review, which made it sound as if Bornstein continued to smoke after a cancer diagnosis; she quit the day she found out.

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Women Who Steal: ‘The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne’ and ‘Lift’

The eponymous center of Kirk Marcolina and Matthew Pond’s documentary ‘The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne’ (the opening night selection of the Roxbury International Film Festival) is an anomaly, a woman who steals and is not only unrepentant, but takes great pride in her skill. Doris is a slim, elegant, 80-something African American who has spent much of her life stealing jewelry, from a watch in the Jim Crow southern town where she grew up, to top-price diamonds she accrued while staying in luxury hotels throughout Europe.

In films and TV male characers are usually the ones who get to have all the fun, especially when their characters commit crimes. Women characters aren’t allowed the relish many male characters take in stealing–and getting away with it. Though some exceptions to the rule exist–Bridget/Wendy in The Last Seduction and Melina Mercouri’s character in Topkapi–more often women play party-pooper roles like Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight as the U.S. Marshall trying to capture George Clooney’s escaped, bon vivant bank robber.

The eponymous center of Kirk Marcolina and Matthew Pond’s documentary The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne (the opening night selection of the Roxbury International Film Festival) is an anomaly, a woman who steals and is not only unrepentant, but takes great pride in her skill. Doris is a slim, elegant, 80-something African American who has spent much of her life stealing jewelry, from a watch in the Jim Crow southern town where she grew up to top-price diamonds she accrued while staying in luxury hotels throughout Europe.

Part of Doris’s ability to steal undetected was, she explains, her creation of a persona, whether she played the “nurse” to a white accomplice or, while wearing impeccable clothes, she casually mentioned to the jewelry store staff the name of her famous (though not well known enough for anyone to know better) “husband.” We spend a lot of time hearing Doris’s stories and even see, when Doris meets with a jewelry store proprietor (who shares Doris’s obsession with gems: they seem to get along well), a security officer approach her to tell her that she can’t be in the store because of outstanding charges against her. She tells him that she didn’t know the restrictions applied to the whole mall and not just Macy’s and she leaves without an argument, explaining politely and meekly to him that she knows he’s just doing his job. Later she tells us, in a very different tone and stance, that she knew the best way to play the situation was to show the guard more respect than he deserved. As we hear from an academic, “Doris Payne for me is someone who manipulates people. I mean, that’s her job.”

Doris’s stories become more far-fetched: in Switzerland she sews a diamond into her girdle, dropping the setting into the sea, and later escapes “through cornfields” after she is taken to a hospital, eventually catching a cab to the airport where she boards a plane out of the country. So we begin to wonder whether she is playing us the same way she played the guard (though one of the directors confirmed in the Q and A afterward that records show Doris was indeed arrested in Switzerland–and did escape). The screenwriter who adapted Doris’s life story into a script (optioned by Halle Berry but progress on production seems to have stalled) says, “Doris is the protagonist and the antagonist in the screenplay Doris Payne writes herself every day.”

DorisPaynemugshot2 — Another vintage mugshot of Doris

We also wonder about the current charges against her. Doris has an excellent lawyer (whom the co-director explained in the Q and A, ended up working pro bono for Doris, which wasn’t the lawyer’s original intention) who exploits every angle to make the jury doubt Doris’s guilt. Doris herself interjects “facts” about the main witness/clerk’s testimony which make us think her identification of Doris is erroneous. With people of color more likely to be accused of stealing and white people (like the witness) more likely than people of color to mistake one Black woman for another, we go back and forth on ascertaining Doris’s guilt even as we see (or don’t see) her steal a ring in front of the camera, while she talks to an outdoor jewelry vendor with her friend from childhood, Jean.

Is Doris, like some older shoplifters, addicted to the thrill of stealing? We see, that, in spite of her expensive-looking clothes she shares a room–and a small closet–with another woman in a halfway house. So does she steal because she has no other means of support? The co-director mentioned during the Q and A that because Doris has spent her life as a jewel thief, she doesn’t have Social Security–and the estimated 2 million dollars worth of jewels she has stolen isn’t much when divided over her career of 60 years. Doris also takes obvious pleasure in recounting her adventures, so excitement and money are probably both factors in her continuing to steal.

The prosecutor at her trial says, “She has made a lifelong career out of stealing and taking advantage of people.” As the judge at the end wonders what to do with her, so do we. Prison seems even more of a waste of resources for Doris than it does for other nonviolent criminals: it doesn’t deter her (she has been imprisoned before, including the time when her white ex-boyfriend/accomplice turned her in as part of a plea deal) and because of her advanced age, even a truncated sentence could mean that she would die behind bars. The filmmakers, with their clumsy reenactments, don’t seem quite up to dissecting the complexities that Doris’s life presents, but we still think about them, even after the movie is over.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQ5Cwax-aik”]

Lift, the closing selection from the festival, is a film which the festival originally premiered in 2001, when the star, Kerry Washington, was largely unknown. The movie, filmed on location in Boston and Roxbury offers a fictional counterpoint to Doris Payne. The protagonist, Niecy (Washington) is a chic window-dresser, who uses wire cutters, a big, bulky sweater and fake credit cards and identities to shoplift expensive designer clothing, which she either sells to people she knows in her neighborhood or keeps for herself or her family.

Washington isn’t quite the actress here that she was in the excellent Our Song (released shortly before Lift started filming), and the script by co-directors DeMane Davis and Khari Streeter has a muddled and clichéd it’s-all-Mom’s-fault subplot about Niecy’s relationship with her mother (Lonette McKee), but the scenes of Niecy trying to navigate between her criminal, personal, and family lives present questions that don’t have easy answers. Her extended family know (like everyone else in the neighborhood) that she steals, but are (except for her mother) glad for her gifts–since, except for her mother, they don’t have much money themselves. They also enjoy her company: we rarely see in films criminals who are “good” or even “normal” people when they aren’t breaking the law.

But unlike in Doris Payne, we see that Niecy’s “victimless” crimes do have consequences. Greed, revenge, and a distaste for leaving witnesses behind means people get hurt, and although Niecy isn’t directly responsible, she’s not blameless either. In spite of a “silver lining” ending that seems tacked on, when Niecy finally decides to stop stealing, she does so too late–for herself and for her loved ones.

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‘Anne of Green Gables’: 20th Century Girl

What makes good television programming “for children” is elusive. No demographic is unanimous in its tastes, but children differ from one another more than other groups: what fascinates a 4-year-old can bore an 11-year-old and vice versa. Add to this problem that most critics and programming creators are not children themselves, and we can see why most children’s programming is so terrible: because it, even more than other types of art, is based on, to quote Jane Wagner “a collective hunch.” Still, like a Supreme Court justice famously said about pornography, most of us, even those of us who don’t have children, can recognize excellent children’s programming when we see it, like the 80s made-for-television ‘Anne of Green Gables,’ based on the book by Lucy Maud Montgomery.

Written by Ren Jender as part of our theme week on Children’s Television.

When I was a kid, in the 1970s, children’s television was…strange. As more than one person has pointed out many programs from that period–with their talking golden flutes, soft-rock singers who are part insect, part human and a bizarre underworld in a magician’s hat–seem to owe more to late 60s psychedelia than any common guidelines–besides the obvious ones that prohibit sex, swearing and gore. As critic Pauline Kael pointed out in a review of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a lot of films that are meant “for children” (including some Disney films) have scenes in them that leave their intended audience profoundly upset, like the death of Bambi’s mother or Dumbo’s mother (hmmm, another mother) chained and imprisoned. Kael recommended a list of films made for adults that were also appropriate for children because all too often films “for children” are the repository for acting that’s too awkward, plots that are too recycled, and scripts that are too terrible to pass muster with an adult audience.

What makes good television programming “for children” is similarly elusive. No demographic is unanimous in its tastes, but children differ from one another more than other groups: what fascinates a 4-year-old can bore an 11-year-old and vice versa. Add to this problem that most critics and programming creators are not children themselves, and we can see why most children’s programming is so terrible: because it, even more than other types of art, is based on, to quote Jane Wagner, “a collective hunch.” Still, like a Supreme Court justice famously said about pornography, most of us, even those of us who don’t have children, can recognize excellent children’s programming when we see it, like the 80s made-for-television Anne of Green Gables, based on the book by Lucy Maud Montgomery.

The title character (played to perfection by Megan Follows) is a girl (12 years old at the beginning) who is at turns dreamy, dramatic, exploited (as an orphan at the turn of the 20th century, her role in the households that “take her in” is often to care for many other younger children) and impetuous. She recites from books of poetry to get away from the drudgery of her everyday life and speaks to her own reflection in window panes to allay her loneliness. Although she encounters cruelty (as many other girl protagonists in literature, films and TV set in that era do, especially those who are orphans), her love of literature and her imagination have given her a combination of hopefulness and resilience not often seen in other girl characters.

The place where she finds what would now be called a “forever family” is an unlikely one–a small town on Prince Edward Island, Avonlea, in the title home of Marilla (Colleen Dewhurst) and Matthew (Richard Farnsworth) an unmarried brother-sister pair who are closer to the age of grandparents than most foster or adoptive parents would be. Originally they had requested from the orphanage a 13-year-old boy to help out on their farm, and when they see the orphanage has sent them a girl, plan to send her back. But loquacious Anne first charms Matthew, then stern Marilla (who is also reluctant to send Anne to another large family which seems intent on working her to death), so Anne stays for “a trial” that soon ends. She becomes a permanent member of the family.

Dewhurst and Farnsworth were award-winning stage and movie stars in the latter part of their careers, but they don’t have the vanity in their parts that more contemporary stars would: their worn tan faces, with prominent cheekbones, make them look like the older, hard-working (though prosperous) denizens of a farmhouse that these characters are. And because they, along with Follows, are so skilled, they bring a resonance to their scenes, especially those where they show their love for Anne. Farnsworth is especially endearing in a scene at the general store when he postpones buying a party dress for Anne (an item which, as a bachelor farmer, he’s never bought before) by asking for twenty pounds of sugar. Anne never takes their name (her own last name is “Shirley”) and calls them by their first names, never “Mom and Dad” or even “Aunt and Uncle” but the three are very much a loving, if non-traditional family. When the pair see Anne off to a larger town so she can continue her education, Matthew tells Marilla how lucky they were that the orphanage sent them her instead of a boy, Marilla answers, “It wasn’t luck. It was providence. He knew we needed her.”

Although the book was first published in 1908, very close to the time it portrays the TV movie (which has the look of a theatrical release, full of beautiful Prince Edward Island vistas) doesn’t have the sexism that can mar the literature of the past. Everyone (even the town gossip) takes Anne’s education (and the accolades she wins for her studies) seriously, though, in keeping with the period, Diana (Schuyler Grant) Anne’s “bosom friend” who accurately predicts when they first meet, “we’re going to get along really well”, is not allowed to continue school past a sophomore high school level and is instead expected to learn how to keep house.

The other characters are very much of their time too, in their dress, their speech (Marilla, when Anne tells her she doesn’t know how to pray, later tells Matthew she’s a “heathen”) their wall-papered, quilted and curtained houses and unsullied landscapes. Green Gables never has the kind of careless anachronism that even programs that pride themselves on their period accuracy, like Mad Men, do.

Gilbert (Jonathan Crombie) the boy who will become Anne’s love interest (though not until the very end, and with no kissing, so children who hate love scenes are safe) teases her when they first meet, at the town’s one-room schoolhouse, calling her “Carrot” because of her red hair. But instead of giggling, pouting or crying (the go-to reactions for girls in literature, TV and movies) she breaks a slate (which the children write on instead of paper) over his head.

Both Anne and Diana are drawn to Gilbert, but they don’t compete for his attention, realizing their friendship is far too central to their lives to ruin for a boy, even in their small town where the selection of potential “beaus” is limited. Green Gables is full of observations about living in a small community (which can also apply to living in the super-small communities of family–or a relationship): often showing Anne finding affinities and support from characters (many of them women) who seem unlikely allies at first.

Gilbert, although he is often Anne’s main rival for prizes and scholarships at school still respects her intelligence: early in their acquaintance he is rumored to tell a friend, “smart is better than pretty.” But Anne, though she begins Green Gables in pigtails, a smock and a tattered straw hat becomes a poised Gibson girl and a teacher by the end, with a cameo at her neck and gloves on her hands, her hair worn “up”–both beautiful and smart.

(All stills accompanying this review are © Sullivan Entertainment)

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czJi_FpLBYY&feature=kp”]

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‘Uncertain Terms’: A Pregnant Teenager and a So-Called “Nice Guy”

The obsession of glossy celebrity magazines with “baby bumps” and “post baby bodies” (both of which were completely absent in the 80s from People and Us– and made them a lot more interesting to read) doesn’t extend into actresses playing complex protagonists who are visibly pregnant for most if not all of the action. There’s ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ and ‘Juno’ and… ? Full-term pregnancy for most women is a big fork in the road, with life changes that extend beyond bikinis and maternity wear, but in films it’s more like a plot device, so we can hear and see how the male protagonist feels about the pregnancy (as in ‘Knocked Up’ or the recent ‘Locke’), as if we don’t already have more than enough films in which men let us know what they think about women’s experiences.

The obsession of glossy celebrity magazines with “baby bumps” and “post baby bodies” (both of which were completely absent in the 80s from People and Us— and made them a lot more interesting to read) doesn’t extend into actresses playing complex protagonists who are visibly pregnant for most if not all of the action. There’s Rosemary’s Baby and Juno and… ? Full-term pregnancy for most women is a big fork in the road, with life changes that extend beyond bikinis and maternity wear, but in films it’s more like a plot device, so we can hear and see how the male protagonist feels about the pregnancy (like in Knocked Up or the recent Locke), as if we don’t already have more than enough films in which men let us know what they think about women’s experiences.

So I was excited to see up-and-coming indie director Nathan Silver’s Uncertain Terms (showing tonight, June 17, as part of the Los Angeles Film Festival) which is set at a group home for pregnant teenagers. India Menuez (so memorable as the American hippie girlfriend in Olivier Assayas’s Something In The Air) plays one of the teenagers, Nina. Menuez has worked as a model, but has the type of beauty that isn’t typically featured in magazines. With the deep copper red of her long, full, wavy hair cascading from her high forehead past her narrow shoulders, her pale skin possessing the glint of gold leaf, her face often in repose, Nina resembles both a Renaissance portrait of the Virgin Mary and the woman in Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini painting–complete with pregnancy bump.

But Nina, like the rest of the residents at the home (which includes It Felt Like Love‘s star, Gina Piersanti in a small role), don’t talk like they come from the past, especially in the support group in which they tell the stories of their pregnancies. “I was drunk. There were three guys,” says one. Carla (Cindy Silver, the director’s mother), who manages the house, tells the story of going to a home during her own early pregnancy–which is why she runs the house today. She admonishes the girls to stop fighting, but as they continue with GED studies, one silently writes on a notebook which she shows to the other, “Your (sic) a cunt.” For one girl’s birthday party they dance to “My Neck, My Back” with each other, their late-stage pregnancy bellies becoming just another curve they move in time to the music.

The girls are allowed “visitation” three times a week so we meet Chase (Casey Drogin) Nina’s pierced boyfriend who can never keep a job even though she will be having their baby very soon. “Just don’t fucking worry about it,” he tells her.

uncertain_termsChaseNina — Nina and Chase

Robbie (David Dahlbom) is at the home (the rainy, lush green woods surrounding it seem to be in upstate New York: the excellent cinematography by Cody Stokes reminded me of Jody Lee Lipes framing of a similar setting in Martha May Marcy Marlene) to get away from his troubled marriage, which he at first doesn’t tell his Aunt Carla about as he completes odd jobs she needs done around the site. He sleeps at night on an air mattress in the basement and smokes pot on the house steps where Nina joins him to take a hit or two herself. When he tells her he’s pretty sure she’s not supposed to be doing so, she laughs and says, “I feel like I should be smoking for two.”

I wish the film had continued to show the girls in all their complexity, but instead it devolves into scenes we’re familiar with from other films and TV written by men (the script is by Silver and Stokes as well as Chloe Domont): a girl climbs into a much older man’s bed and he leaves. And even though her leaving his room later might look to everyone else like he had an inappropriate sexual encounter with her, he didn’t. And if he had, that encounter would have been all her fault. I am tired of directors and screenwriters of both independent and big budget entertainment continually showing male characters in what looks like compromising or criminal positions and then make them all a big misunderstanding–like Louie’s recent show about the title character “accidentally” hitting a woman he has sex with.

Nina, who needs someone to talk to in the face of her boyfriend’s burgeoning unreliability and verbal abuse, has long conversations, then flirts, with Robbie–in a manner obvious enough that the other girls notice. This competition between the girls for a much older guy’s attention seems unseemly and unlikely. As we know from their background stories, most of these girls have had devastating experiences with boys fairly recently, and will soon give birth, so hooking up with someone new probably wouldn’t be first priority. Also the girls would make fun of a man like Robbie, who is old enough to have started to lose his hair, the same way they make fun of him when he says, “tie the knot” instead of “get married.”

uncertain_termsNinaRobbie — Nina and Robbie

Robbie has conversations with Nina about her relationship with her boyfriend that could just as easily be about his relationship with his wife (an over-the-top villain who saddles him with debt, cheated on him–of course–and now harasses him to get back together: the buzz of his phone is a constant background noise in all of Robbie’s scenes). Robbie, because he’s so much older, sees that Nina and Chase’s relationship won’t improve–and pretty much tells her so. What the script neglects to do is explore how an older man could use the age discrepancy (and the life experience that goes with it) to manipulate a teenager at a very vulnerable point in her life. Age-related manipulation is a pretty common story: most teen pregnancies are the result of an encounter or relationship with an older man.

Male staff at institutions of every kind (including penal and therapeutic ones) are often caught sexually abusing women patients/residents/prisoners to the point that some facilities choose to no longer employ men in direct care positions. Silver and his co-screenwriters including these cliched, unrealistic scenarios where the girls are “seductive” or as in Orange Is The New Black “in love” with a man who works onsite is more than lazy writing: it, like an endless loop of similar scenes from past movies and TV, provides a ready-made excuse for some real-life asshole to say, “She wanted it, your Honor, I swear.”

Robbie at one point says to Nina, as if he were a teenager himself, “I just want to be with you.” This scene reminds me of the Ryan Gosling character’s offer to marry Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine to help her raise her unborn child. The difference between the characters is Gosling’s, with his ukelele and his dare-devil stunts on the bridge is, unlike Robbie, a dreamy, reckless kid himself and doesn’t foresee how the dreariness of home life and dead-end jobs will kill the love he and Williams’ character have for one another (as the latter part of the film shows).

uncertain_terms_birthday — A birthday party at the home

Robbie is only supposed to be 30, but the actor looks older and the apparent age of the aunt (who had her son–who seems close to Robbie’s age–very young) would also seem to place him in an older bracket, so his pairing with Nina is even creepier. Menuez was born in 1993, but Nina’s soft, open face, mercurial nature and especially her breezy, unwarranted optimism about Chase, make her seem very much a teenager.

In Robbie’s final confrontation with his wife he carries and physically restrains her to keep her from going someplace he doesn’t want her to. Seeing the wife yell at and even slap a pregnant girl afterward shows us Robbie was “right” to try to prevent her from entering. Again, I’m pretty tired of seeing, especially in indie films, “nice guys” with reasonable explanations for doing abusive, criminal things to women (as also happens in the latter part of Blue Valentine). At the end of Uncertain Terms we’re supposed to think that (spoiler alert) if not for his drunk, psycho, violent, cheating wife, 30-year-old Robbie could have had a perfectly loving, balanced and beautiful relationship with a pregnant teenager, something those of us with life experience of our own might be skeptical about.

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‘Dear White People’: Satire, But Serious

Writer-director Justin Simien’s crowd-funded ‘Dear White People,’ which will play the Los Angeles Film Festival on June 18 and will have its US release (and real distribution) later this year, feels like a similar breakthrough. The film follows four African American students at prestigious Winchester University: gay (though he says he doesn’t believe in “labels”) student newspaper reporter Lionel (Tyler James Williams); straight-arrow, high-achieving son of Winchester’s Dean, Troy (Brandon P Bell); ambitious aspiring reality TV star, Coco (Teyonah Parris); and Sam (short for Samantha) White (Tessa Thompson), the acid-tongued, outspoken college radio host of the title program, which includes proclamations like “Dear white people, breaking news: the amount of Black friends required to not seem racist has now been raised to two. Sorry, your weed man Tyrone does not count.”

When Go Fish was released 20 years ago, a straight guy friend who was in his 50s (we had met at a former workplace) couldn’t understand why I liked the film. We usually had very similar tastes in movies: both of us had enjoyed watching Winona Ryder playing a slacker in Reality Bites and had shaken our heads over how overrated Kieslowski’s Blue was. I tried to explain to him why Fish was special: the women in it looked like, dressed like, talked like and even had similar haircuts to the queer women I knew. The writer/star and writer-director were out queer women and their film had a real release and real distribution, instead of just being relegated to festivals or one or two nights at the smallest independent theater in town, the way most other queer films–especially those made by and featuring women–had been. But all his life this guy had been seeing films about straight men, by straight men and starring straight men (or at least men who could convincingly pass as straight), so he couldn’t understand why I would make such a big deal of seeing on the big screen some part of my community recognizably reflected back to me.

Writer-director Justin Simien’s crowd-funded Dear White People, which will play the Los Angeles Film Festival on June 18 and will have its US release (and real distribution) later this year, feels like a similar breakthrough. The film follows four African American students at prestigious Winchester University: gay (though he says he doesn’t believe in “labels”) student newspaper reporter Lionel (Tyler James Williams); straight-arrow, high-achieving son of Winchester’s Dean, Troy (Brandon P Bell); ambitious aspiring reality TV star, Coco (Teyonah Parris, whom at first I didn’t recognize in modern hair, dress and light contacts: she also plays Dawn on Mad Men); and Sam (short for Samantha) White (Tessa Thompson), the acid-tongued, outspoken college radio host of the title program, which includes proclamations like “Dear white people, breaking news: the amount of Black friends required to not seem racist has now been raised to two. Sorry, your weed man Tyrone does not count.”

The film’s tagline: “Being a Black face in a white place” is an issue sometimes brought up online (as in the viral “I Too Am Harvard” video) and elsewhere but pretty much never addressed in film: Black students navigating majority white campuses in which individuals, policy and curriculum are often either unfriendly toward or clueless about the needs of students of color. Winchester’s President wants to dismantle the all-Black dorm students gravitate to. He is either misreading the consolidation of Black students as “reverse racism” (Sam later explains to the Dean why there’s no such thing) or fears the Black students banding together will be too strong a foe for his administration.

Sam, although “political” had previously shown no taste for campus elected office but runs as a protest candidate for “head of house” against the incumbent, her ex-boyfriend Troy, who will not fight the administration decision to break up the house. To everyone’s surprise–including her own–Sam wins.

Because we’re not used to seeing films that feature more than one Black person (and often not any) in an environment full of both opportunity and microaggressions, we haven’t before observed the different approaches students (and others) take in walking this minefield. Confrontational Sam tells the campus “humor” magazine’s core of white, frat brothers (including the son of the University’s president), “On behalf of all the colored folks in the room let me apologize to all the better qualified white students whose places we’re taking up,” then throws them out of the house’s dining hall. Troy jokes and plays cards with the same group, hoping to earn a byline at the magazine: the president’s son Kurt (Kyle Gallner) brags it’s the main pipeline to Saturday Night Live’s writing staff (which makes “Winchester’s” parallels to Harvard more explicit–and is perhaps one way to understand some of the problems the real-life SNL has had in diversifying their cast of performers and writers).

Coco wants to use the fraternity and magazine to further her own goals, while the brothers use her inclusion to deflect charges of racism–and she doesn’t care what activists like Sam think of her affiliation. Conflict-averse Lionel just keeps moving–from the frat at the very beginning of the film to dorm after dorm hoping the next place he lives is the one where he isn’t the target for harassment: for his sexual orientation at the frat and for not being “Black” enough at Sam’s hall.

There’s more plot (so much more) but all of it is a fairly flimsy pretext for one-liners (many of which feel like they were gathered over a lifetime) and sketches like “The Tip Test” which begins “”Your waitress mistakes you for someone who looks like you–Black–who once ran up a $30 bill and left a dollar tip.”

Like Looking, White People also examines interracial relationships, and as in Looking the white people in those relationships don’t (with one notable exception) come off very well. But I was disappointed that the film didn’t explore the impunity with which racist (or even just microaggressive) white guys will sexually harass, demean and even assault women of color: the film’s main villain, Kurt (whose irredeemability is on the level of Joffrey in Game of Thrones) doesn’t lay a hand on (or even use any slurs to describe) Sam or Coco in spite of his deep hostility to the former and his proximity to the latter. With the barrage of rape threats outspoken women (especially women of color) continue to receive over social media, the film’s neglect to include that kind of backlash in Sam’s storyline makes it seem a little spotty. Tessa Thompson’s perpetually unimpressed but engaged face and clarion voice are the ideal vehicle for Sam’s pronouncements, but the script suddenly asking her, at the end, to become Julia Roberts in Notting Hill also fell flat–and is a missed opportunity to depict how activists need supportive relationships, even ones their peers might not approve of.

Coco though skillfully played by Parris (her skeptical double takes could populate an entire feature) also seems incomplete. The character is so calculating that only rarely, like at the climactic blackface party do we have a clue what she is really thinking and feeling. She’s also one of the few characters who doesn’t seem to come from an affluent or middle class background and has darker skin than the others, but the script barely addresses this disparity.

Even though Sam is presented as the main protagonist in the film, Simien is better at fleshing out his Black male characters. Nerdy Lionel with his notepad, passive demeanor, huge, messy afro, whom we see from the beginning (when we are introduced to all the different cliques of Black students at Winchester) is a misfit even among the other queer Black people is a fully formed person and Williams plays him, including his transformation at the end, well. Simien is an out gay man and I’m probably not the only one who wondered how autobiographical Lionel is. Bell’s Troy at first seems like nothing more than a dapper A-student and class officer, but then we learn that he wants to deviate from his father’s carefully laid plans for him–and that in spite of his clean cut persona and protests to the contrary, he spends a lot of time smoking weed.

LionelDearWhitePeople — Lionel (in front)

Dear White People cites as its influences both Spike Lee’s School Daze and National Lampoon’s Animal House, tackling a lot of thorny issues under the cover of its humor (not all of which is successful) and bringing to light scenes most audiences won’t have seen in movies before. The Independent Film Festival of Boston screenings where I saw White People were packed (as were its screenings at Sundance which were declared “one of the hottest tickets“): if its main release follows suit, many people will be going to and talking about this film. In one scene White People makes fun of the dearth of Black people in movies (one activist demands from the ticket seller at a movie house “I want my $15 back for Red Tails II.”) Perhaps the best thing Dear White People will do, like Go Fish before it, is to become a gateway for films and television in the same vein. In the two decades since Fish’s release series and films from queer women have become an indelible, if still small, part of the larger culture, from Ellen’s “Puppy Episode” to, for better or worse, The L Word–which the filmmakers of Fish had a hand in–and The Kids Are All Right to last year’s fantastic Concussion. Fish’s influence has spread so far that today 20-something queer women themselves, much like my straight friend back in the day, can’t understand why anyone made a fuss about the film in the first place.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwJhmqLU0so”]

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‘Obvious Child’: Allowing Women To Be Funny

Women in comedy are often held to a double standard that’s rarely talked about, even in the tiresome and wrongheaded “Are Women Funny?” debates. A better question might be “Are women allowed to be funny?” Because while male comedians famously defend their right to make jokes about any topic they want to women who draw on their own outrage, experience and even their own bodies receive an extra layer of censorship.

Women in comedy are often held to a double standard that’s rarely talked about, even in the tiresome and wrongheaded “Are Women Funny?” debates. A better question might be, “Are women allowed to be funny?” Because while male comedians famously defend their right to make jokes about any topic they want to, women who draw on their own outrage, experience and even their own bodies receive an extra layer of censorship. Elayne Boosler, a comedian popular in the 80s, talked about asking the powers that be why she hadn’t yet gotten her own cable comedy special. The executives told her that featuring her in a special of her own was out of the question, because she touched her breasts during her act. When she watched the specials of other comedians popular at the time, like those of Robin Williams she said, “I realized I had my hands on the wrong thing.”

Later when Sarah Silverman was with Saturday Night Live, she wrote in response to legislation that required abortion waiting periods: “I think it’s a good law. The other day I wanted to go get an abortion. I really wanted an abortion, but then I thought about it and it turned out I was just thirsty.” Even though SNL, then as always, was in dire need of lines that actually make people laugh, she wasn’t allowed to include it. She made it part of her stand-up act instead.

The protagonist of writer-director Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child, an aspiring stand-up comedian in Brooklyn named Donna (Saturday Night Live’s Jenny Slate) starts out the film doing a routine that breaks the taboo about women speaking about their own body parts and functions (which leads to a great payoff scene later in the film) as well as making fun of her relationship with her current boyfriend. After she comes offstage, triumphant, her boyfriend informs her he’s dumping her: he and her best friend have been having an affair and want to get together. Instantly Donna is reduced to a pile of tears and insecurity, soothed at home by her level-headed, caring roommate, Nellie (Gaby Hoffmann).

SlateObviousChild — Jenny Slate as Donna

One night, still vulnerable, Donna gets drunk with her gay comedian friend Joey (Gabe Liedman) after she bombs onstage and meets Max (Jake Lacy), a blue-eyed computer nerd, who is dazzled by her. Although the trailer often shows Slate in unflattering hats and poses, we can see why Max is drawn to her: even though she’s still an emotional mess, she looks great (while not at all resembling most kewpie-doll model-actresses) with her long, dark, hair loose, wearing a tight sleeveless t-shirt, and, after she embarrasses herself onstage, has a fun, nothing-left-to-lose affect. He gets drunk with her and they end up having a one-night stand (after raucously stumble-dancing in his apartment to Paul Simon’s title song).

Weeks pass and a casual remark from her roommate causes Donna to think that she might be pregnant. She tells Nellie of her drunken encounter with Max, “I remember seeing a condom. I just don’t know…what exactly it did.” After a pregnancy test confirms her suspicions, she schedules an abortion at a clinic.

Here Obvious Child also veers away from other films, which sometimes mention abortion as an option for unplanned pregnancy, but make sure it’s never something nice girls, like Juno, the Michelle Williams character in Blue Valentine, or the character Katherine Heigl played in Knocked Up ever go through with–even though, in real life, 30 percent of women in the U.S. opt to have an abortion during their reproductive lifetimes. In keeping with that reality, Nellie has had an abortion (when she was much younger) and tells Donna what to expect.

In the middle of this crisis, Max reappears and he and Donna still have a spark between them, but she’s reluctant to go out with him because she doesn’t want to tell him about the abortion–and risk his disapproval. During a wine-fueled dinner Nellie, Joey, and Donna debate what she should do. Nellie offers a spirited defense that the abortion is none of Max’s business, after which Joey tells her he agrees with her but adds, “You’re scaring the dick off me right now.”

As interviews and other reviews have mentioned, no one in Obvious Child is anti-choice, again a nice respite from other movies, but this film, which hews so closely to the romantic comedy formula in most ways (except in its attitude to abortion), could use some tension. Everyone, even Donna’s business professor mother (Thirtysomething’s Polly Draper), who disapproves of Donna’s unremunerated comedy career, supports Donna wholeheartedly in her decision to abort, so the stretching of this film from its origins as a short begins to show. Max, in particular, could use some fleshing out, but instead with his big, clear eyes and irreproachable behavior at every turn he’s more like a fantasy of the perfect man than a character.

Where Obvious Child succeeds is in letting women be funny, not in the faux-humor of humiliation that too many comedic actresses in movies are subjected to these days, but in actual laugh-out-loud funny lines and situations (most of which are woven deeply into the context of the movie, so they don’t make it into the trailer) that reminded me, in spirit if not in content, of Roseanne Barr during her 80s heyday (before her current incarnation as an unfunny, anti-trans crank). Slate is wonderful as Donna (the role she also played in the short) and pulls off a late laugh line about the abortion (yes, there is one) with aplomb. Former child star Hoffmann who radiates no-nonsense kindness and compassion makes us wish more movies featured her. And Lacy, although he isn’t given much to do, is a believable Max and has a nice chemistry with Slate.

HoffmannSlateObviousChild — Nellie and Donna

My main quibble with this film is one that many of us bring up repeatedly with similar works, but it still doesn’t seem to ever be addressed. In a film that takes place in Brooklyn, the only person of color who has a name is Donna’s Asian American gynecologist. The only Black people we see are, first, a woman with no lines who crosses a street (really) and, second, a comedian onstage who talks about his father being a crack addict. In a film that rights so many wrongs about gender-stereotyping a lot of us would like (and, at this point, expect) a cast that better reflects racial as well as gender (and sexual orientation) diversity especially when that film takes place in Brooklyn. Hoffmann is actually part Latina (her father’s last name was Herrera), but we never get any hint that her character is less than 100 percent white.

Geena Davis recently wrote that screenwriters could automatically achieve gender parity in scripts simply by making half of the characters women, and the writers of Obvious Child (along with Robespierre, Karen Maine, Elisabeth Holm and Anna Bean) could have done something similar with this script to make it less white: Nellie could easily have been made a Latina (instead of just played by a part Latina actress), Joey could have been played by a Black actor (a Black comedian from Brooklyn is not terribly unusual). Hoffmann even could have played the lead with a Latino actor cast as Donna’s father instead of Richard Kind: although in many ways, Slate is the incarnation of Donna, Hoffman and Draper would make a more believable daughter and mother, both physically and temperamentally.

Yes, women should support Obvious Child when it opens in theaters this coming weekend, but as more filmmakers attempt to expand the limits imposed on white women in film and on television, we (critics and audiences) need to continue to put pressure on them to provide roles for others who have traditionally been ignored or stereotyped. White people shouldn’t be the only people we see as fully formed characters onscreen, any more than white men should be.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cabI_CzXGD4&feature=kp”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

‘Wish You Were Here’: Sex and Obscenities by the English Seaside

In the words for women that have no male equivalent–like “bitchy,” “slut,” and “hag”–we can easily discern sexism, but we can also see it in words and phrases that mean something different when applied to men than when applied to women–or when applied to boys rather than girls. A boy who is “acting out” is often a euphemism for a boy who is physically threatening or harming others or (less likely) himself. A girl, especially an adolescent girl, who is said to be “acting out” is sometimes harming herself (and even more rarely harming others), but is more likely behaving in ways that, in a bygone era, would have been called “unladylike” (when no one ever used the word “ungentlemanlike”). She’s loud; she’s crude; she’s inconsiderate–all things girls and even adult women are rarely allowed to be. When she is seeking out her own pleasure she is “acting out sexually,” another phrase with no male equivalent.

This post by Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.

In the words for women that have no male equivalent–like “bitchy,” “slut” and “hag”–we can easily discern sexism, but we can also see it in words and phrases that mean something different when applied to men than when applied to women–or when applied to boys rather than girls. A boy who is “acting out” is often a euphemism for a boy who is physically threatening or harming others or (less likely) himself. A girl, especially an adolescent girl, who is said to be “acting out” is sometimes harming herself (and even more rarely harming others), but is more likely behaving in ways that, in a bygone era, would have been called “unladylike” (when no one ever used the word “ungentlemanlike”). She’s loud; she’s crude; she’s inconsiderate–all things girls and even adult women are rarely allowed to be. When she is seeking out her own pleasure she is “acting out sexually,” another phrase with no male equivalent.

Emily Lloyd’s Lynda, the main character of 1987’s Wish You Were Here is a textbook example of a girl (Lloyd, like her character, was 16) “acting out” in every way in a sleepy, English seaside resort town. The film is set in the early 1950s, and though the town has a postwar patina contemporary audiences have enough distance from to find picturesque, the sun barely breaks through the clouds over grey sea walls and piers, and the salty wind from the ocean has faded all the building signs. Wide shots show the dinky dance hall and rollerskating rink even at their busiest, are never really full. Against this backdrop Lynda rides her bike, has a penchant for colorful language (or the 50s British version of it: her favorite phrase is “up yer bum”) and likes to show off her underwear to boys her age–and to men.

She can barely wait to lose her virginity, making out with a boy in full view of an older man who threatens to tell Lynda’s stern father, a World War II veteran, hairdresser and “Freemason.” We can see Lynda become disenchanted with the boy when he runs scared. She wants someone who has as little use for propriety as she does.

She seems to find a good match in the young bus conductor, Dave (Jesse Birdsall), who takes her dancing and then to his grandmother’s house–empty while she is away. Lynda waits for him in bed, and he comes out of the bathroom in bright yellow pajamas and smoking a cigarette with a holder. He asks,”Do you fancy me?”

She laughs, “Not half as much as you fancy yourself.” Because it’s the early 50s Lynda has no knowledge of birth control and doesn’t even know what condoms are (or how they work) until her boyfriend informs her that he’s wearing one. We see both Lynda’s and Dave’s faces as they have sex, a study in why the sexual revolution and feminism couldn’t happen soon enough: Lynda, at first wide-eyed and then unimpressed at how quickly it’s over, and Dave pumping, straining and sweating but not really paying much attention to how much pleasure Lynda is getting out of it. But Lynda, taking another condom out of the package, tells him that they have all night to practice.

In the morning Dave’s uncle comes by for an unexpected visit, grilling Dave (“I heard you brought a girl here”) while Lynda hides under the bed, stifling laughter as she watches the man’s dog snatch a used condom from the floor. When the uncle leaves they watch from the window as he discovers what the dog has in its mouth–and he sees the two of them looking down at him. In the small town where everyone knows each other and each other’s business, the uncle informs her father–who then warns off the boyfriend for good.

Lynda’s father takes her to a psychiatrist, for whom Lynda proves a challenge. When he asks her to recite every obscenity she knows going through each letter in the alphabet, she pretends she’s stumped at “f” as he becomes increasingly impatient. Her father, wary of the expense, doesn’t schedule her for any more visits. Lynda’s encounter with psychiatry and the powers that be could have been a lot worse: “promiscuity” was a condition that could get young women committed to mental hospitals in those days, or, just across the water in Ireland, to lifetimes of unpaid labor.

From the earliest parts of the film we notice the bookie friend of Lynda’s father Eric (Tom Bell) looking at Lynda. Lynda refers to him as “Long John Silver” because of his lopsided (perhaps war-injured) gait: he is a tall, hatchet-faced, rail-thin, middle-aged man in a suit. One day he asks to come into the house even though her father is out, and while they are alone in the parlor, he mocks her, tells her she’s all talk and gets ever closer until he works his hand into her underpants–and we see her eyes grow wide again. She doesn’t say yes and she doesn’t say no, but she also doesn’t try to get away from his touch. When they are interrupted (but not caught) he whispers to her to meet him in the backyard later that night.

At first she’s determined not to go, but she’s starved for attention and affection; her boyfriend is with someone new, her mother is dead and her father, absent for much of the war, barely knows her. In spite of Lynda’s modern attitudes to sex and swearing, she’s a creature of her time (and of the movies she goes to see) when she asks Eric if he loves her. He tells her no, and also confirms that her father wants to be rid of her. She stays anyway.

Lynda is given to telling off (or showing up) the stodgy, older, often hypocritical people around her, and in some of those scenes we can see how, a decade early, other people in small-town England are primed for the rebellion of the sixties: the tea room waitresses in their black-and-white-uniforms (along with a 60 -or 70-something woman pianist) applaud her outburst, and, after Lynda causes a commotion at the bus company where her father has arranged for her to work, the other workers boo when the boss tells her she’s fired–and cheer when he tells them that they’re fired too.

Lynda’s tirades (like the song “Take This Job And Shove It”) are the sort most people fantasize about but never actually follow through with. But unlike in fantasies we see the aftermath, where Lynda is staring out her bedroom window in the dark or crying over tea, distraught. She’s in the wrong time as well as the wrong town, so her victories over the hypocrites around her are Pyrrhic ones, and we see her actions have consequences.

Her father catches her coming back from sex with Eric in the backyard shed and tells her that she can’t continue to behave this way because he’s “respectable.” His concern has nothing to do with her own well-being but with her reflection on him. He does not think to confront his friend about the affair. When his daughter asks about his own sexual relationship with a woman he brings to the house, he says, as if he need give no further explanation, “I’m a man.”

Lynda leaves home and tries to move in with Eric in his room above the movie house, but Eric is no comfort to her, taking off her clothes on the unmade bed that takes up most of the space as she sobs about her confrontation with her father. Later she informs Eric she’s pregnant, and following the lead of shitty men throughout history, he asks, “How do you know it’s mine?” Lynda, instead of being hurt, the way we expect women in movies to be, parries right back, “If it walks with a limp and thinks with its prick, I’ll know it’s yours!” Lloyd is fantastic in this scene as she is in the rest of the film. The script by director David Leland was the perfect vehicle for his young star who is alternately hilariously rude and vulnerable, an unusual mixture for a woman or girl character in films, TV or literature even today.

Lynda, at the end, has a kind of triumph over the town’s insularity (and the woman on whom the story was originally based went on to become a famous madam) but after a few high profile projects (and even more high-profile firings) Lloyd’s career shrank to very occasional, very small roles. The film industry continues to not have much tolerance for women and girls who “act out” in real life no matter how talented they are.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJY1Koru_Fs”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane, and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

‘We Are The Best’ or Why You Should Be a Lukas Moodysson Fan

“This sucks!” So says one of the main characters of writer-director Lukas Moodysson’s latest, ‘We Are The Best’ (which opens in the US on May 30). Diminutive, mohawked, 13-year-old Klara (Mira Grosin) is reacting to the live show in which she sees the worst of what middle school in early 1980s Stockholm has to offer: girls with long blonde hair in pastel leotards dancing stiffly to The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me.” Although Klara, like her best friend Bobo (Mira Barkhammar), listens to punk music, has short hair, and wears the mildly bohemian fashions of the time (scarves and oversized jackets those who were teenagers in that era will recognize), boisterous high-spirited Klara is no nihilist. She is the kind of young iconoclast who has been a mainstay in literature since Mark Twain’s ‘Huckleberry Finn’ (and even before, going back to ‘Lazarillo de Tormes’)–the kind which girls and women in films (and even in literature) are rarely allowed to be.

“This sucks!” So says one of the main characters of writer-director Lukas Moodysson’s latest, We Are The Best (which opens in the US on May 30). Diminutive, mohawked, 13-year-old Klara (Mira Grosin) is reacting to the live show in which she sees the worst of what middle school in early 1980s Stockholm has to offer: girls with long blonde hair in pastel leotards dancing stiffly to The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me.” Although Klara, like her best friend Bobo (Mira Barkhammar), listens to punk music, has short hair, and wears the mildly bohemian fashions of the time (scarves and oversized jackets those who were teenagers in that era will recognize), boisterous high-spirited Klara is no nihilist. She is the kind of young iconoclast who has been a mainstay in literature since Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (and even before, going back to Lazarillo de Tormes)–the kind girls and women in films (and even in literature) are rarely allowed to be. Klara and her friend Bobo–with their highly defined likes and dislikes in music–are also one of the only instances in film in which girls (and even women) are allowed to have taste in (and opinions about) something other than boys and clothes–without the filmmaker or screenwriter denigrating them or their opinions.

Like most 13-year-olds, Klara and Bobo spend their time outside of school trying to alleviate boredom: hanging out at the park or the recreation center, where they cringe at the heavy metal cacophony of teenage boys rehearsing. When the director tells them that whoever has signed up for the rehearsal space is allowed to play as loud as they want, Klara and Bobo see the band has neglected to sign up for their current rehearsal time, fill in their own names instead and succeed in kicking the boys out. For the rest of their allotted time they whale on the instruments the center provides (a bass and drums), shout into the microphones, and have a great time. Their “band” is born.

During the school show they see the reserved, tall, blonde Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne) play classical guitar and instead of making fun of her, as they have in previous years, notice that she is talented. They need a guitarist for their band, so they invite her to join.

Hedvig, although conventionally beautiful (LeMoyne in oxford shirts, big sweaters, and hardly any makeup convincingly looks both like a shy teenager from the early 80s and a supermodel on her day off) has no friends at school, always eating lunch alone; the other students have deemed her an outsider because she is “Christian.” But when she accepts Bobo and Klara’s offer, the band of two outsiders becomes three, and they all happily share a lunch table from then on, nicely capturing the transition when teenagers see the value not just in the things but in the people they had previously dismissed as “weird.”

The girls throw their considerable energy into the band (and even play a gig at the end), with Hedvig teaching chords and time to the others, and Bobo and Klara composing anti-sports lyrics to a song when the gym teacher in school orders them to run laps. But we can see they’re still adolescents, in the way Klara and Bobo obsess over teenage boys in a punk band from the suburbs, or egg each other on when they decide to cut Hedvig’s hair (after which Hedvig’s mother lectures them in a surprisingly thoughtful way). The band becomes a cause and a solace to the girls, a way to get through the agony of middle school.

Although Klara’s main lament is that her parents and brothers are alternately boring and embarrassing, and she will never play as well as Hedvig, Bobo has a rougher time. She wears glasses and has cut her own hair into a short, unflattering style which, unlike Klara’s, never looks “edgy,” just awkward. The boys she likes never seem to like her back, and Bobo’s mother practices the type of sunny but apathetic parenting also featured in the contemporary-set Palo Alto. At a party in their apartment her mother points out Bobo’s homemade haircut to the guests, one of whom says, “It’s such a good cut on you,” a statement so patently untrue that it hurts Bobo more than an insult would. After a different night of humiliation, Bobo asks Klara to tell her one good thing and Klara answers, “You’re in the best band in the world,” another lie, but one that is infinitely more comforting to Bobo.

Moodysson also wrote and directed one of my favorite queer girl coming-of-age films Show Me Love (its original Swedish title translates as Fucking Amal) and the ensemble comedy about a commune in the 70s, Together. Klara’s parents and Bobo’s mom could be the characters from Together ten years later: they’ve outgrown the commune, but they still have the same struggles–Klara’s parents arguing about divvying up the housework and Bobo’s mother paying too much attention to her own problems and not enough to her child. The scenes in which Bobo and Klara get drunk from the dregs of cups from Klara’s brother’s party echoes scenes both in Together where the kids drink the wine the adults have left in their glasses, and in Show Me Love when Elin tries one pill from every bottle in her mother’s medicine cabinet to see if they make her “feel anything.”

We Are The Best isn’t quite as sharp or funny as those two previous films. It could use some queer characters: these short-haired, outcast girls in a band together all seeming to be completely straight doesn’t ring true (though Hedvig, even though she’s a year older, doesn’t seem as interested in boys as Klara and Bobo–hmmm). And because the girls are so close, I expected at least one of their harassing classmates to yell “dyke” at one or all of them, which never happens, even though, at that time, queer panic (even in liberal Sweden) was in full swing among adults and would undoubtedly be worse among adolescents. Also anyone who’s not Swedish (or hasn’t spent a lot of time in Sweden) who is expecting to hear familiar music from the 80s (except that Human League song) will be disappointed. Still, the film is delightful and, like Moodysson’s other films, has special insight into the lives of adolescent girls (it’s based on an autobiographical graphic novel by the director’s wife, Coco Moodysson, and features their own daughter in a small role). His touch with the young performers is expert: we never doubt the reality of these girls, their personalities (Grosin’s jaunty, smiling bravado is especially wonderful) or their friendship, all the more extraordinary considering that the actresses are the ages of the characters they play (Grosin was actually younger–11–during filming). Because of their commitment to the band, Klara and Bobo stop fighting about a boy (which could have ended their friendship) and, in the end, all three even earn the respect of the heavy metal band. The girls’ band might not be the best in the world, but it turns out to be the best thing in their world.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R33H0ONZcSY”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane, and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

‘She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry’: An Incomplete Portrait of The Women’s Movement

When the young, hippie-ish movie star Shailene Woodley said in an interview that she wasn’t a feminist, a lot of women pointed out that she didn’t seem to know what feminism was. Perhaps Woodley and other women of her generation (she is 22) don’t know what feminism is for the same reason fish don’t know what water is–because it’s all around them and has been for the entirety of their lives.

But looking at contemporary movies and television series (especially those written by men) that take place in the 1960s and early 70s when “the women’s movement,” as it was then called, flourished, one would be hard-pressed to see any evidence of feminist thought, protest or even the untenable circumstances that led women of the era to become feminists. On Mad Men, two women in the late 1960s work in top positions in a not particularly progressive advertising firm. Sexual harassment there is barely a factor: Joan’s “date” with the guy from Jaguar was just a one-time thing–and she became a partner because of it, so in this alternate universe of the 1960s powerful men exploiting the women they work with for sex is unusual and for the women, choosing to acquiesce is a really great career move. Also women in these positions get substantial raises without even asking for them, when in reality women had to sue (or threaten legal action) both to be able to work in a “man’s job” and then to take home anything that resembled a man’s salary (women’s salaries for the same work are lower, even to this day).

Mary Dore’s Kickstarter-funded She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry looks to correct this revisionist history in one of the first documentaries (along with PBS’s Makers which aired last year) to try to offer a comprehensive view of the early days of the women’s movement using archival footage and interviewing the women who were on the frontlines. We don’t see Gloria Steinem, but we do see and hear from an array of (mostly white) other women with varying degrees of fame, from Kate Millett (who along with Steinem was all over the media as a spokesperson for feminism in the early 70s) to less well-known names like Village Voice writer Ellen Willis, former SNCC organizer Fran Beal and early reproductive rights activist Heather Booth. Seeing footage of the women from 40 years ago and then seeing them comment today (or sometime in the 2000s as Willis does, since she died in 2006), we see that the women have, in some ways, broken away from the strict feminist hard-line (which they may never have fully subscribed to, but was very much at the forefront of the early 70s feminism) of no makeup, no hair dye, and no plastic surgery. At least one of the talking heads (Against Our Will writer Susan Brownmiller) has written at length about these personal choices (remember: one of the catchphrases of the movement was “The personal is political”) and the film could use more women talking about themselves and their ideologies shifting through the years, underneath their identity as principled feminists.

We hear very little, beyond the familiar narrative of how-I-discovered-I-needed-feminism, of the ways in which the women’s goals and ideals have changed from their 20s to their 60s or 70s (and beyond), when those of us (especially activists) who are no longer in our 20s know such change is, for most people, inevitable. The closest the film comes to exploring these issues is when Willis tells us that without the feminist movement she doesn’t think she would have been able to both have her career (which, from an early age, she was determined to make happen) and her daughter–and she considers choosing to be a parent one of the best decisions of her life.

Although it’s similar in its conventional structure (the film makes a few passes at experimentalism–actresses reciting feminist writing in front of archival backdrops–which fall flat), Angry is more thorough and less forgettable than Makers (just a few months after seeing it, the only image from the PBS series that sticks with me is a woman in a construction hat), but still seems to put the same, big happy-face sticker–perfectly acceptable to the most middle-of-the-road feminists of today–on what was, like The Black Power Movement, The Young Lords, AIM, and the original Stonewall uprising a revolutionary movement. Popular feminist writers of the time like Shulamith Firestone (whom we see and hear briefly in archival footage) weren’t early prototypes of Sheryl Sandberg offering tips on how to combine a corporate career with raising a family, but true radicals, who called for the destruction of both the nuclear family and capitalism.

The aftermath, when the revolution didn’t come (as it also didn’t for Black, Latino, Indian, and queer radicals), left many activists devastated and depressed: women in feminist groups turned to “trashing” each other (a phenomenon briefly touched on in the film, but more thoroughly explored in this essay by Susan Faludi) and less well-known activists denounced (and even forcibly ejected) some of the early feminist “leaders” (like the Occupy movement, feminism was supposed to be “leaderless”).

While some women, like Marilyn Webb, are philosophical about being “trashed,” Shulamith Firestone (and undoubtedly many other less well-known women) never recovered from her “sisters'” betrayal. Firestone didn’t participate in feminist activism again (though she lived to be in her 60s), eventually developed severe mental illness, spent much time in psychiatric hospitals (documented in her novel Airless Spaces) and died alone and, for many days, undiscovered, in her cluttered apartment.

Angry makes us think that, except for a few isolated incidents like the one that Webb describes, and generational differences (which are mentioned only in passing), along with the tensions between queer women and straight ones in the movement (queer, white feminist activists Karla Jay and Rita Mae Brown narrate that conflict), feminism was one, big, happy family. In fact, even straight, white women who were bestselling superstars like Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique) and Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch) (though she is mainly known today as a transphobe, Greer was, at one time, a fascinating and provocative writer and thinker) had conflicts both in personality (dishily recorded in Greer’s later writing) and in their approach to feminism. In the film’s archival footage of the infamous Town Hall debate with literary blowhard and unrepentant anti-feminist Norman Mailer, Greer gets a laugh when, asked about “the sexual revolution,” she references the quote Gandhi gave when asked his thoughts on Western civilization: “‘I think it would be a good idea’.”

Also largely unexplored are tensions between women of color and white women in the movement, even though (or maybe because) those tensions still exist today. Although a few women of color are interviewed and featured in archival footage in Angry, their inclusion seems perfunctory. In the Q and A after the screening I attended the filmmakers were careful to emphasize that they could tell only so much of the story of early days of feminism (and that they wanted to mostly focus on the work of organizers), but the film seems to go out of its way not to mention prominent women of color of the time: Shirley Chisholm, the first woman, Black or white, to seek the Democratic nomination for US presidency (in 1972, right in the middle of other actions noted in the film); Angela Davis, then a leader in the Black Power movement; Dolores Huerta, leader (and organizer) of the mostly Latino farm workers union; and Alice Walker, one of the first women (of any color) to write bestselling and acclaimed works of fiction that were unapologetically womanist/feminist. Even if the filmmakers were trying to avoid material more thoroughly covered in other documentaries, the omission of these women–along with that of civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer at the beginning, when white women speak about their own experiences in the civil rights movement and how “inspiring” they found the Black women within it–risks flinging this film into irrelevance. Keeping these women out of the discussion is as careless and puzzling as omitting mention of bell hooks, Roxane Gay, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and even Beyoncé in an overview of feminism today.

She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry won an audience award for “Best Documentary” at The Independent Film Festival of Boston (where I saw it), but for the standing ovation I kept my butt in the seat. Although I see the importance of the film, and understand that we need many more films about second-wave feminism (what we really need is a detailed and multi-part series which covers these events, like the great Eyes on the Prize covered the civil rights movement), I was also a little bored and sleepy in parts, even though I’m interested–to the point of obsession–in the subject matter. The filmmakers said in the Q and A that they wanted to show, among other things, how to organize around issues, but we could learn as much about activism and organizing from the failures of the women’s movement as we can from its successes: a film with a less sunny outlook would have been a better one. “This is what a feminist looks like,” a crowd chants as we see examples of many different kinds of feminists in a present-day march. Next to those women, She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry’s portrait of “This is what feminism looked like,” seems lacking.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LweMAgcY1Pw”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane, and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

Girls, Consent, and Sex in ‘Palo Alto’ and ‘I Believe In Unicorns’

Films set in high school are often about boys; films which feature high school girl characters complex enough to surprise an audience (one measure of good screenwriting) are relatively rare–‘Say Anything’, ‘Mean Girls,’ ‘Clueless’ and from earlier this year ‘It Felt Like Love.’ ‘Palo Alto,’ the first film directed by Gia Coppola (niece of Sofia and granddaughter of Francis), who also wrote the script (based on the stories of James Franco) focuses on several main characters in high school, including April (‘American Horror Story’s’ Emma Roberts, whose auburn hair and dark eyebrows recall her Aunt Julia’s). We see her as she plays soccer, babysits, goes to boozy parties and is alone in her room.

Films set in high school are often about boys; films which feature high school girl characters complex enough to surprise an audience (one measure of good screenwriting) are relatively rare–Say Anything, Mean Girls, Clueless and from earlier this year, It Felt Like Love. Palo Alto, the first film directed by Gia Coppola (niece of Sofia and granddaughter of Francis), who also wrote the script (based on the stories of James Franco) focuses on several main characters in high school, including April (American Horror Story’s Emma Roberts, whose auburn hair and dark eyebrows recall her Aunt Julia’s). We see her as she plays soccer, babysits, goes to boozy parties, and is alone in her room.

April’s mother and stepfather, like some of the other parents we see later in the film are perfectly pleasant to April but seem to have never grown up themselves. April’s mother interrupts her constant kitchen cell phone conversation with “Jamal” to coo at her daugher and make her the occasional meal. April’s stepfather (a nearly unrecognizable Val Kilmer) holes away in a separate part of the house, drinks from a mug that has his own photo on it and rewrites April’s term paper even though she asked him to merely look it over. Neither one ever asks April where she’s been or when she’s coming home; “cool” parenting becomes a study in benign neglect.

Disaffected, wealthy young people aren’t new subjects for a film, but perhaps because Coppola is not far from the age (and background) of her characters some of the details resonate: the way “friends” pour alcohol down the throat of one of the main characters who is late to a party so he can be as drunk (or drunker) than they are, the game of “I Have Never” at the party which becomes an opportunity to reveal others’ secrets told in confidence, the banter between girl athletes who think their coach is cute (“What do you think his o-face looks like?”), the bedroom of Emily (Zoe Levin)–whom the others call “blow job queen,” a label she does her best to live up to–full of little-girl knick knacks and stuffed animals.

Palo Alto is based on the book of short stories of the same name by James Franco (who plays April’s coach, Mr. B.; she babysits his young son). Franco also helped get financing for the film. No one should confuse Palo Alto with one of Franco’s many projects that would elicit zero curiosity from the public if his name weren’t attached, and I haven’t read the book, which may be to blame, but in spite of how much time we spend with April, and in spite of Roberts, who radiates intelligence and wariness in the role, I didn’t have much emotional investment in the character.

The storyline about April and her coach is initially a promising one. He’s relatively young and good-looking and pays special attention to her, very like some of the real life scenarios in which teachers have sex with high school students. But April doesn’t seem ditzy or desperate enough to think sex with her teacher is a good idea, and he doesn’t seem smooth or clever enough to work through the natural resistance of a student with a stable (if lax) home life and a thoughtful nature. In the late 70s and early 80s when I went to high school, all of us suspected one of the girls in my class was having an inappropriate relationship with the biology teacher–the sexual tension between them was apparent from 50 feet away, even when they were just talking to one another in the hall. Teachers and students today would have to be more discreet, and the lack of depth in Franco and Roberts’ connection fits with later developments in their story, but we never get the feeling much is at stake when they fuck (which we don’t see) let alone when they find themselves attracted to one another–even though he’s endangering his job, abusing his position and breaking the law, and she is putting herself in the position to be hurt, exploited or both (and could also easily turn him in to the authorities).

Coppola does a better job of verisimilitude with Emily who seems surprised that her many hookups with boys don’t turn into relationships or even into friendship. At one point she has sex with a boy, Fred (Nat Wolff) she’s hooked up with before, and he invites other boys to also have sex with her; whether the sex Emily has with them is consensual is unclear. Coppola has Fred tell the story in voiceover without showing any of the action (or even the lead-up to it), an intriguing choice that keeps a possibly nonconsensual encounter from titillating the audience–and keeps the audience from deciding for ourselves whether the sex seems consensual or not.

Perhaps because of the sex scenes, Emily is played by an adult, as is April, who nevertheless makes a convincing teen in her yellow sweatshirt and skeleton hoodie. But when we see the travails of Teddy (Jack Kilmer, Val’s son with Joanne Walley) in the film, the two actresses’ relative maturity stands in stark contrast to Kilmer’s tender face touched with vestiges of baby fat–he is 18, not just playing a teenager, and the difference between him and the other actors takes us out of the movie. Seeing the other actors share scenes with Kilmer reminds me of an English stage actress who wondered, when she was a very young woman, why she couldn’t get larger roles playing against the older women in the company. “I didn’t realize (a thirty-something actress) could play a teenager on stage and it would work–unless you put a real teenager right next to her.”

Kilmer has been described as “androgynous” but “amorphous” is a better descriptor, and, much like a similarly soft and young-looking Gina Piersanti in It Felt Like Love, his being the age of the character is an essential element of what makes him so good in the part. Teddy is a teenager we’ve known and maybe even been, but one we don’t often see onscreen. He is sensitive and artistic, but afraid of being ridiculed by his best friend, Fred. So Teddy is unable to say “no” to Fred even when he knows he will end up getting in trouble (and maybe even end up in court) because of him. We see that he genuinely cares for April, but that he lets a jealous Fred drag him away from her more than once. Palo Alto is a film in which we often dread what teens will do next, so at the end, when Teddy finally does the right thing, and, in her own way, so does Emily, we breathe a sigh of relief.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7Q3oeHsIj0″]

Writer-director Leah Meyerhoff’s I Believe In Unicorns is a much more minor film than Palo Alto but has some similarities–a high school girl has her first sexual relationship with an older man. The main character, Davina (Natalia Dyer), lives with and cares for her mother who uses a wheelchair and also doesn’t have full use of her hands (Meyerhoff’s own mother, Toni Meyerhoff, plays the part. She has multiple sclerosis and Meyerhoff cared for her when she was growing up).

Davina spends a lot of her time awash in fantasies that seem like those of a much younger girl (her room is also like a younger girl’s); one sequence involves fireworks (it evokes a similar scene in Beasts of the Southern Wild) and others involve a stop-motion animated unicorn and dragon in a forest. Meyerhoff’s talent as the director of experimental shorts is apparent in these scenes, but her script does not come close to equaling it. The mother is nearly silent (which may be because of her disability), and we don’t get a sense of what happens to her when her daughter runs away to be with a man/boy who has already graduated, Sterling (Peter Vack)– even though the mother seems to have no one else to help care for her.

We see brief glimpses of what the film could have been: the kiss Davina exchanges with her friend Clara (Amy Seimetz) when asked how Sterling kisses, Davina squatting down and spitting up after performing oral sex on Sterling for the first time and Davina and Sterling’s encounters which alternate between the two of them feasting on each other’s mouths teenager-style to rough sex that is sometimes just under and sometimes over Davina’s line of consent. Sterling alternately abuses Davina and cries in fear that he will abandon her and Dyer’s presence is lovely and vulnerable throughout the film. “Do you really like me or is this just temporary,” she asks him in a heartbreaking moment. Although Vack is a competent performer, he looks distractingly like a male model (he could have come from the cover of a romance novel), which makes the “real” sequences seem just a dystopian continuation of the fantasy ones, a problem not helped by the two of them never seeming to completely run out of money and having clean, shiny, flawless hair after living out of a car for an unspecified period of time. We also don’t know for sure until toward the end of the film that Sterling is an adult (although an emotionally stunted one). Vack is obviously an adult: his height and muscled body threaten to overwhelm the petite Dyer (who was 17 when the film was shot) in their scenes together, but because so many films put adults in high school roles we don’t realize how creepy Sterling is from the beginning. He not only has sex with a girl who is not yet an adult, but also chooses one who looks even younger than she is–and she’s still enough of a kid to place animal miniatures on the dashboard of his car.

In the question and answer period after the film, Meyerhoff explained how difficult casting Davina was and how the filmmaking team went through hundreds of actresses before they found Dyer. It’s a familiar story (similar to Hittman’s casting of Piersanti in It Felt Like Love). I wish this writer-director had put that same effort into writing a coherent script for her talented actors.

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane, and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.