Films by Women – Page 25

Seed & Spark: Fearlessly Pursuing a Film Career at 43

At the age of 40, I returned to school, to Fitchburg State University’s undergraduate film/video production program, to learn the craft of directing films. During my two years at Fitchburg State, I took as many classes as I could, while writing and directing two short films. I also discovered a new passion for screenwriting, which led me to the low-residency MFA program at New Hampshire Institute of Art: Writing for Stage and Screen, where I am currently enrolled.

Left to right: Actor Will Bouvier and Jennifer Potts on the set of Jennifer Potts' short film, Home. — Left to right: Actor Will Bouvier and Jennifer Potts on the set of Jennifer Potts’ short film, *Home*.

This is a guest post by Jennifer Potts.

I am a woman who has never felt the need to conform to the norms of society.

I am my own person doing this life my way and I do not want to ever be the same as anyone else…man or woman. I do not necessarily identify as a feminist, although my husband may proudly tell you that I am a female chauvinist. Sometimes I am, sometimes I’m not. I am myself. And I am a woman. I have strengths and weaknesses. I speak my mind. I am bold and often outspoken. I have secrets. I have fears. I have dreams. I am human and I am going to do this life my way.

At the age of 43, I am launching a career as a screenwriter and film director. In many ways you could say that I am starting over in the middle, but truthfully it is hardly starting over. I graduated from Drew University 23 years ago with a degree in theatre. I put my career on hold to stay home with my four biological children until they started kindergarten. A decision that was, by the way, very unpopular at the time. When my youngest started kindergarten, I looked for opportunities to work in theatre, but the closest professional theatres were over an hour away, and I had small children. I knew that I had to take life by the reigns and build a theatre.

Left to right: Producer, Jessica Killam, and Jennifer Potts on the set of Jennifer Potts' short film, Home. — Left to right: Producer, Jessica Killam, and Jennifer Potts on the set of Jennifer Potts’ short film, *Home*.

I started forming a small theatre company out of a church and, within five years, filed for nonprofit status and was the co-founder of Cornerstone Performing Arts Center in Fitchburg, Mass., with a small professional non-equity theatre. During my time as the artistic director, I produced and directed over a dozen productions, built an arts training program with youth theatre and dance companies, and oversaw the annual season of productions. After 10 years total building this theatre company, I was hungry to grow as an artist.

Jennifer Potts on the set of her short film, Home. — Jennifer Potts on the set of her short film, *Home*.

As I begin to make my own mark on the movie world, I watch a lot of movies. The movies that resonate with me the most always have a story that I just cannot get out of my head like Lars and the Real Girl and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. I am also a huge fan of Beasts of the Southern Wild and Moonrise Kingdom. For me, it all comes down to a really good story that is executed well. I have been experimenting with my own style as a screenwriter and filmmaker. My first two shorts were completely different: a quirky comedy and a suspenseful drama. I am filming my last short movie, Charlie & Poppy, this November. This is a family/coming of age drama that captures the magical relationship between a grandfather and grandson over the period of 20 years. Writing and directing shorts has given me the opportunity to hone my own style before embarking on my first feature film. The screenplay that I am working on right now will be the first feature film that I direct and it will build on the foundation I created with my shorts. I will truly begin to make my mark on this movie industry once I take this giant leap into the world of feature films. I will introduce my voice to the world, the voice of a woman with more than 40 years of stories ready to be told.

Actress, Michele Egerton, on the set of Jennifer Potts' 1st short film, Free Time. — Actress, Michele Egerton, on the set of Jennifer Potts’ first short film, *Free Time.*

I am aware that the road will be tough as a female filmmaker in a male-dominated industry. But what industry isn’t male-dominated? I have spent years navigating my way through life as a woman. I am independent and strong and, when I get rejected and knocked down, I will get up and fight even harder. I know that, at the end of the day, I am the only person who can get in the way of my career and my goals. I am the only person whose actions I have control over.

Someone recently commented on my ability to pursue my dreams stating that I was fortunate to have a husband to support me. The female chauvinist inside me started screaming and kicking and swearing. I did, by the way, choose to marry my husband. I did also stay home and raise the children that he participated in impregnating me with while he pursued his career. I did support him when he returned to graduate school twice. He is a great man – that is why I married him. He is not, however, the reason I am pursuing my career. I am the reason.

Actor, Will Bouvier, on the set of Jennifer Potts' 2nd short film, Home. — Actor, Will Bouvier, on the set of Jennifer Potts’ second short film, *Home*.

I am the woman who wakes up every morning and fearlessly pursues a career where women are lucky to ever be seen or heard. I am the writer who has the discipline to spend every morning writing the stories that have lived in my head for 43 years. I am the filmmaker who pulls together the logistical and creative aspects of the films I make, while boldly asking people for money to support each film. I am the one and only person who can make my dreams happen and I refuse to let someone else take that power away from me. This is my life and I will live it fearlessly.

Film director and screenwriter, Jennifer Potts, graduated from Drew University in 1992 with a BA in Theatre Arts. After running a theatre for years, at age 41, Jennifer attended Fitchburg State University’s film/video program where she wrote and directed two short films and received 2014 Film Student of the Year. Jennifer is working toward an MFA in Screenwriting at NH Institute of Art. Jennifer lives in Fitchburg, Mass. with her husband and five children.

“We Stick Together”: Rebellion, Female Solidarity, and Girl Crushes in ‘Foxfire’

In the spirit of ‘Boys on the Side,’ along with a dose of teen angst, ‘Foxfire’ is perhaps the most bad ass chick flick ever. Many Angelina Jolie fans are not aware of this 1996 phenomenon, where Angie makes a name for herself as a rebellious free spirit who changes the lives of four young women in New York. Based on the Joyce Carol Oates novel by the same name, ‘Foxfire’ is the epitome of girl power and female friendship, a pleasant departure from the competition and spitefulness often portrayed between women characters on the big screen (see ‘Bride Wars’ and ‘Just Go with It’). However, it does seem that Hollywood is catching on as of late, and producing films that cater to a more progressive viewership (see ‘Bridesmaids’ and ‘The Other Woman’). When I first saw ‘Foxfire’ around 16 years old, I stole the VHS copy from the video store where I worked at the time.

This post by Jenny Lapekas appears as part of our theme week on Female Friendship.

In the spirit of Boys on the Side, along with a dose of teen angst, Foxfire is perhaps the most bad ass chick flick ever. Many Angelina Jolie fans are not aware of this 1996 phenomenon, where Angie makes a name for herself as a rebellious free spirit who changes the lives of four young women in New York. Based on the Joyce Carol Oates novel by the same name, Foxfire is the epitome of girl power and female friendship, a pleasant departure from the competition and spitefulness often portrayed between women characters on the big screen (see Bride Wars and Just Go with It). However, it does seem that Hollywood is catching on as of late, and producing films that cater to a more progressive viewership (see Bridesmaids and The Other Woman). When I first saw Foxfire around 16 years old, I stole the VHS copy from the video store where I worked at the time.

Angelina Jolie’s shaggy hair and tomboy style in the film, along with her portrayal of the rebellious Legs Sadovsky, play with gender expectations, challenging our assumptions pertaining to clothing, gait, etc. Legs’ biker boots and leather jacket highlight the general heteronormative tendency to find discomfort in these roles and depictions. An androgynous drifter, Legs oozes sex appeal and promotes the questioning of authority. She teaches the girls to own their happiness, to correct the injustices they encounter, and to assert themselves to the men who think themselves superior to women. Legs’ appearance in Foxfire is paramount; she’s even mistaken for a boy when she breaks into the local high school. A security guard yells, “Young man, stop when I’m talking to you.” We see this confusion repeat itself when Goldie’s mother tells her daughter, “There’s a girl…or whatever…here to see you.”

How can we resist developing a girl crush on Angie in this role?

The film’s subplot involves a romance of sorts between artist Maddy and Legs, the mysterious stranger, while Maddy feels a large distance growing between her and her boyfriend (a young Peter Facinelli from the Twilight saga). The intensity of the “girl-crush” shared between Maddy and Legs is akin to that of Thelma and Louise; while we come to understand that Legs is gay, Maddy’s platonic love is enough for the troubled runaway. Legs also assures Maddy after sleeping on her floor one rainy night, “Don’t worry, you’re not my type.” Similar to my discussion of the reunion between Miranda and Steve in Sex and the City: the Movie, the two young women coming together on a bridge is heavy with symbolism, especially when Legs climbs to the top and dances while Maddy looks on in horror and professes that she’s afraid of heights: a nice precursor for the unfolding narrative, which centers on Legs guiding the girls and easing their fears, especially those associated with female adolescence and gaining new insight into their surroundings and how they fit into their environment.

This scene may not be aware of itself as being set up as another Romeo and Juliet visual, but we realize perhaps Legs is a better suitor than Maddy’s boyfriend, whose male privilege hinders his understanding of what Maddy needs. — While this scene may not be aware of itself as being set up as a nice Romeo and Juliet visual, we realize perhaps Legs is a better suitor than Maddy’s boyfriend, whose male privilege hinders his understanding of what Maddy needs.

In a somber and almost zen-like scene involving Maddy and Legs, they profess their love for one another outside the abandoned home the gang has claimed as their own. Maddy says, “If I told you I loved you, would you take it the wrong way?” Obviously, while Maddy doesn’t want Legs to think she’s in love with her, she wants to make clear that the two have bonded for life and are now inextricably linked in sisterhood. Maddy indirectly asks if Legs would take her with when she decides to move on, and Legs hints that Maddy may not be prepared for her nomadic lifestyle. The platonic romance shared by both young women culminates in tears and heartache when Legs must inevitably leave.

Almost as if to kiss Legs, Maddy tenderly touches her face atop the gang’s house.

Legs is the glue that binds these young women, and she literally appears from nowhere. Her entrances are consistently memorable: she initially meets Maddy as she’s trespassing on school property, she climbs to Maddy’s window asking for refuge from the rain (another Romeo and Juliet moment), and eventually takes off for nowhere, leaving the girls stupefied and yet more lucid than ever. Legs is something that happens to these girls, a force of nature, a breath of fresh air. When she tells Maddy that she was thrown out of her old school “for thinking for herself,” we can safely assume it was just that–refusing to conform to the standards of others. The unlikely friendship that forms amongst this diverse group of girls clarifies the idea that this gang dynamic has found them, not the other way around; the pressed need for the collective feminine is what brings the girls together, rather than some vendetta against men.

Although Legs tattoos each of the girls in honor of their time together, they know they won't need scars to remember Legs. — Although Legs tattoos each of the girls in honor of their time together, they know they won’t need scars to remember Legs.

Legs sports a tattoo that reads “Audrey”: her mother, who was killed in a drunk driving accident, and we clearly see in the film’s final scenes that Legs suffers from some serious daddy issues, when she angrily announces that “fathers mean nothing.” Delving briefly into Legs’ painful past, we discover that she never knew her father. The quickly maturing Rita explains to Legs, “This isn’t about you.” Each of the girls has their own set of issues within the film: Rita is being sexually molested by her scumbag biology teacher, Mr. Buttinger, Goldie is a drug addict whose father beats her, Violet is dubbed a “slut,” by the school’s stuck-up cheerleaders, and Maddy struggles to balance school, her photography, and her boyfriend, who is dumbfounded by Legs’ influence on his typically well-behaved girlfriend.

After the girls beat up Buttinger, Legs warns him to think before inappropriately touching any more female students.

In an especially significant scene, the football players from school who continually harass the girls attempt to abduct Maddy by forcing her into a van. The confrontations between the groups progressively escalate throughout the movie, and climax after Coach Buttinger is apparently fired for sexually harassing several female students. Legs shows up donning a switchblade and orders the boys to let her friend go. Of course, the pair steal the van and pick up their girlfriends on a high speed cruise to nowhere, which ends in an exciting police chase and Legs losing control and crashing, a metaphor for the gang’s imminent downfall. The threat of sexual assault dissolved by a female ally, followed by police pursuit and a car crash has a lovely Thelma & Louise quality, as well. The motivation here is to avoid being swept up in a misogynistic culture of victim-blaming. What’s interesting about this scene is that another girl from school, who’s in cahoots with these sleazy guys, actually lures Maddy to the waiting group of boys, knowing what’s to come. Meanwhile, Maddy tells Cyndi that she’d escort any girl somewhere who doesn’t feel safe, highlighting the betrayal at work here. Cyndi, the outsider, exploits Maddy’s feminist sensibilities, her unspoken drive for female solidarity and the resistance of male violence to fulfill a violent, misogynist agenda and put Maddy in harm’s way. Later, in the van, Goldie excitedly yells, “Maddy almost got raped, and we just stole this car!” as if this is a source of exhilaration or a mark of resiliency. Perhaps we’d correct her by shifting the blame from the “almost-victim” to her attacker: “Dana and his boys almost raped Maddy.”

Legs says, “Let her out, you stupid fuck.”

Obviously, these are young women just blossoming in their feminist ideals, on the path to realization, and just beginning to question the patriarchal agenda they find themselves a part of in this awkward stage of young adulthood. It’s in this queer in-between state, straddling womanhood and adolescence, that we find Maddy, Legs, Violet, Goldie, and Rita, on the cusp of articulating their justified outrage. We may also question, how does one almost get raped? While the girls of Foxfire are young and somewhat inexperienced, with Legs’ help, they quickly obtain this sort of unpleasant, universal knowledge that males can perpetrate sexual violence in order to “put women in their place.” Dana announces, “You girls are getting a little big for yourselves.” We can’t have that. Women who grow, gain confidence, and challenge sexist and oppressive norms can make waves and upset lots of people. While the girls are initially hesitant in trying to find their way and make sense of their lives, Legs is the powerful catalyst for this transition from the young and feminine to the wise and feminist. While the high school jocks attempt to reclaim the power they feel has been threatened or stolen by this group of girls, Legs continues to challenge gender expectations by utilizing violence as well.

As she hitches a ride, Legs tearfully says, “You’re my heart, Maddy.”

Not only does this film pass the Bechdel Test with flying colors, it almost feels as if it’s a joke when the girls do manage to discuss men–like the topic is not something they take seriously or that boys rest only on the periphery of their lives. While Maddy suffers silently in terms of her artistic prowess and boyfriend drama, Rita–seemingly the prudest and most sheltered of the gang–talks casually about masturbation and penis size. However, it’s important to note that when men do make their way into the conversation, it’s at rare, lighthearted moments when the girls are not guarded or suspicious of the tyrannical and predatory men who seem to surround them. The penis-size discussion between Rita and Violet, we must admit, is also quite self-serving and objectifying. Rather than obsess over their appearances or the approval of boys, the girls’ most ecstatic moment is when Violet receives an anonymous note from a younger girl at school, another student Buttinger was harassing who is thankful for what the gang did. The fact that Violet is so pleased that she could help a friendly stranger who was also a target of the same perverted teacher says a lot about the gang’s goals and identity.

Thanks to Legs, Maddy overcomes her fear of heights.

Maddy and Legs recognize something in one another, and although theirs is not a sexual relationship, it is no doubt intimate and meaningful. With an amazing soundtrack that includes Wild Strawberries, L7 (wanna fling tampons, anyone?), and Luscious Jackson, and boasting a cast that includes Angelina Jolie and Hedy Burress, Foxfire is undeniably feminist in its message and narrative. With the help of Legs, the girls find agency, and with it, each other. Although most of the girls have been failed by men in some way, Legs offers hope in female friendship and lets her sisters know that male-perpetrated violence can be combated with a switchblade and a swift kick to the balls. Legs arrives like a whirlwind in Maddy’s life and leaves her changed forever. The lovely ladies of Foxfire will make you want to form a girl gang, dangle off bridges, and break into your old high school’s art room just to stick it to the man.

_____________________________

Jenny holds a Master of Arts degree in English, and she is a part-time instructor at a community college in Pennsylvania. Her areas of scholarship include women’s literature, menstrual literacy, and rape-revenge cinema. She lives with two naughty chihuahuas. You can find her on WordPress and Pinterest.

Homegirls Make Some Noise: ‘Antônia’ and the Magic of Black Female Friendships

Classism, racism, sexism, and colorism are very real in the world of ‘Antônia.’ But the film shows us a fresh narrative of Black women succeeding despite living in a slum, despite poverty, despite violence and all the ills that pervade real life. For just a moment, I’m able to watch Black women who are free to be themselves. They don’t have to unpack external baggage based on a checklist of intersections involving their skin color, social status, or gender. That is a rare treat. It’s their tight friendship that sustains them. Music is friendship, and friendship is music.

Antonia One Sheet “Antônia Movie Poster” — *Antônia* Movie Poster

This guest post by Lisa Bolekaja appears as part of our theme week on Female Friendship.

Antônia is a Brazilian film from 2006 that I watch at least once a year. Its fictional female characters are ones that I consider my cinema family, ladies who I like to visit with for a spell and reminisce about rap music and female MCs. It’s an uncomplicated story, and perhaps even a little melodramatic. However it boasts one of cinema’s rare contemporary explorations of Black female friendship while navigating the hyper-masculine world of hip-hop. The simple slice-of-life storytelling using real-life female MCs resonates with authentic sisterhood.

Antônia chronicles the rise and fall (and rise again) of four young women from Sao Paulo who sing backup for a male rap group called “Power.” Scratching out a basic living in the Brasilandia favela are Preta, a single mom who recently left her cheating husband; Mayah, a songwriter into fashion as much as her lyrical prowess; Lena, a hardcore lyricist who juggles her music career with her insecure boyfriend; and Barbarah, a martial arts expert who lives with her closeted gay brother.

These four women, friends from childhood, named their group after their respective grandfathers who coincidentally all had the name “Antonio.” What makes them all so special to me is the fact that all four women have an exuberant agency and a nuanced security in their Blackness, which is refreshing to see onscreen. From their hair, clothing, skin color, to the way they walk and rap, there is a sense that they have never doubted that they were fly and worthy of respect. This confidence they display doesn’t come from the stereotypical and clichéd tropes of the sassy Black woman, or the Black chick with neck swiveling finger-pointing “attitude,” or the hyper-sexualized Black female dimepiece. Even the tiresome “strong” Black woman trope is absent in this film. These women are vulnerable, assertive, flawed, supportive of one another, and critical of one another. This confidence comes from their collective need to persevere in the face of undeniable hardships.

Walking above favela “Barbarah (Leilah Moreno), Lena (Cindy Mendes), Mayah (Quelynah), and Preta (Negra Li) — Walking above favela: Barbarah (Leilah Moreno), Lena (Cindy Mendes), Mayah (Quelynah), and Preta (Negra Li)

Although the film is only 90 minutes long–time for only light character sketches at best–the subtext I read is a world of complexity and pride beneath each woman. At one point, while waiting for a train after a late night performance, they sing a cappella about their love for the curl in their hair and being “Criollo” (Creole in the sense of being Black Brazillians who, like Black Americans and others outside of the African Diaspora, exist because of blendings of African, Native, and European blood). Mayah even raps this in one of her rhymes, which reinforces the notion of self, a self rooted in the pride and knowledge of Black cultural history. I’ve never really seen that in a contemporary film before.

While most American films featuring Black female friendships deal with misogyny, rape, drug use, damsels in distress, broken families, crime, poverty, and the often contrived horrors of being…gasp… single—flicks like Sparkle, Dreamgirls, Set it Off, Waiting to Exhale, The Color Purple, Daughters of the Dust, et al (notice that I had to reach way back for titles) — Antônia stands out as the one rare film where the Black women are the captains of their own ships, beholden to no one but themselves. Men support them, but don’t run them. They are sexual beings without being overwhelmingly sexual. (Mayah loves high heels and mini-skirts when she performs, but her attitude shows us it’s just for her pleasure and not for the male gaze.) Having a young child doesn’t deter Preta from performing; she brings her young daughter Emília to rehearsals where the women help care for her there and also outside of performing. Men don’t save them physically; they can handle male bullies with one kick from Barbarah’s Capoiera skills. Most importantly, they don’t wait for someone to discover them. Early on Mayah convinces the male rap group Power that the group Antônia has a hot song that they should consider opening their next show with. The guys agree and back them up. The women even tell the rap fans directly that they are feminist because they spit it in their lyrics to predominately male audiences. The real beauty is that their feminism is centered in a deeply Black female narrative vein. Alice Walker calls this being “womanist.” And the audience will deal.

Antônia surpasses the well-known Bechdel test and what I call the People of Color Agency Test: 1.) More than one Black person or PoC, 2.) Who speak to each other, 3.) About anything other than saving/serving White characters. That is the greatest joy I get from this film–watching beautiful, talented, and engaging Black women live their lives and cultivate their friendship without the heavy burden of structural racism brow-beating them All-The-Damn-Time.

The favela in the film is evidence of historical shenanigans. The scene of the women singing “Killing Me Softly” at a private and very White birthday party (because it’s less threatening musically) speaks volumes visually, especially when we know the group’s core audience is very Black and very rooted in the public streets. Classism, racism, sexism, and colorism are very real in the world of Antônia. But the film shows us a fresh narrative of Black women succeeding despite living in a slum, despite poverty, despite violence and all the ills that pervade real life. For just a moment, I’m able to watch Black women who are free to be themselves. They don’t have to unpack external baggage based on a checklist of intersections involving their skin color, social status, or gender. That is a rare treat. It’s their tight friendship that sustains them. Music is friendship, and friendship is music.

When an up-and-coming promoter and new manager of the group tries to shape Preta’s image into a solo career, one pleasing to a cross-over audience, Preta lets it be known that toning down her Blackness is not what she’s about. Singing mainstream pop hits is not her goal. Rap is. Without her sister-friends and their powerful energy, performing means nothing.

Mom and Daughter “Emília (Nathalye Cris) and Preta (Negra Li)" — Mom and daughter: Emília (Nathalye Cris) and Preta (Negra Li)

The only negative criticism I have of the film is that I wish the music, the literal sounds backing the lyrics of the female MCs, was just as good as the tracks the men had. Scenes in a local hip-hop club bristle with a restless kinetic energy when male performers inhabit the stage, but for some reason, the backing track for the ladies’ signature song is softened to a listless and defanged pop sound. This music doesn’t match the fierce content of the lyrics. The writer/director Tata Amaral ran an open casting call for local female rap talent, and the casting of real-life MCs makes a huge impact on the performances. The actors, Negra Li (Preta), Cindy Mendes (Lena), Leilah Moreno (Barbarah), and Quelynah (Mayah) hustled for this dream in their real lives. They know how to spit fire on a mic. They wrote their own verses performed in the film and those verses deserved beats that slayed.

Ultimately it was friendship that brought Antônia together as children. Nurturing that friendship is the only thing that stabilizes their chaotic lives while hustling for the showbiz dream. The simple narrative and the real-life raw talent of the women playing Preta, Mayah, Lena, and Barbarah makes Antônia a rich film that broadens the role of Black female friendships in cinema. It’s the friendship that makes me watch this film so often. And as corny as it sounds, I also get a happy ending. Perhaps if there were more films showing Black female friendships being nuanced, vulnerable, and just plain regular (no Super-Duper Negroes, no Magical Saviors, no There-Can-Only-Be-Exceptional-Black-Folks), I probably wouldn’t have to watch it so much. Antônia will always be in my regular film viewing rotation. I wish I had friends like these young women. The Sistren are here. Don’t sleep on ‘em.

Lisa Bolekaja co-hosts a screenwriting podcast called “Hilliard Guess’ Screenwriters Rant Room” and her work has appeared in “Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History” (Crossed Genres Publishing), “The WisCon Chronicles: Volume 8” (Aqueduct Press), and in the upcoming Upper Rubber Boot Books anthology, “How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens.” She can be found on Twitter @LisaBolekaja

Making Sure Female Friendship Films Aren’t Forgotten: ‘Take Care of My Cat’

The film is about the evolving friendships of five young South Korean women as they step away from their technical high school into a less certain world. Their degrees of closeness shift as they consider their futures in the face of particular restrictions in work and life opportunities due to gender and class discrimination.

This guest post by Adam Hartzell appears as part of our theme week on Female Friendship.

Before I knew about the Bechdel Test, I knew about Take Care of My Cat, the 2001 debut film by South Korean director Jeong Jae-eun that is a required text for those interested in New Korean Cinema.[i] Among the many admirable and compelling aspects of the film, I found it most compelling that it had almost nothing to do with boys.[ii] As film scholar Chi-Yun Shin put it, “These women are defined not by men but by themselves and with each other.”

Tae-hee, played by the incredible Bae Doo-na of The Host and Cloud Atlas, continues to work at her family’s sauna and is the hub of the friendship network. She does her best to keep everyone together. Hye-joo (Lee Yo-won) is the social climber, but she is not played for cliché. Her character–at risk of caricature–is provided more depth than is usual for someone of her type. Hye-joo’s closest friend in high school was Ji-young (Ok Ji-young). But Ji-young’s economic situation, living alone with her frail grandparents in a much poorer part of Incheon, results in limited employment options. She doesn’t have the money to keep up with Hye-joo’s status-seeking desires. She wants to go to art school, but her family lacks the funds to enable this pursuit. Then there are the Chinese-Korean identical twins, Bi-ryu and Ohn-jo (played respectively by the Lee sisters, Eun-shil and Eun-ju). Their characters are less developed than the others, but their presence serves as acknowledgement of South Korea’s own specific multicultural make-up, something rarely acknowledged in the film industry at this time. Another character of interest here is the poet with cerebral palsy [iii] who dictates his poetry to Tae-hee. All these characters are, in their own ways, outsiders in relation to the growing South Korean economy only recently recovering from the IMF crisis.

Along with these characters, there is the cat that is passed between them. A stray that was found by Ji-young, it is given as a present to Hye-joo. When she returns this gift, it signifies rejection of their high school friendship that may no longer hold in their adult lives. The cat finds its way into the hands of all the women and represents an attempt to communicate what is unspoken between them. Jeong has said regarding her intent with the cat, “I had hoped for the girls to be like cats – flexible, independent, complex, to have the tendency to leave if they are not happy with their owner.”

In addition, mobile phones play a vibrant part in the communication, miscommunication, and refusal to communicate between the young women. Jeong displays the text on screen alongside the characters in an early creative effort to represent texting on film, of which South Korean cinema was an early pioneer. Finally, the gorgeous soundtrack works off the bleeps and tones of cellphones in its dreamy underscoring of this liminal period in the lives of these young women.

With the exception of the twins, each woman confronts discrimination directly. Ji-young does not have family or other connections necessary for the referrals required for certain jobs. Expectations are made by a male co-worker that Hye-joo should have laser vision corrective surgery. Tae-hee must deal with her father’s continued preference to her younger brother, leading to a confrontation with her father in a restaurant that includes a Korean literary reference. [iv] Explaining how Ji-young and Tae-hee fully resolve these forms of structural discrimination would result in my having to reveal plot points that I don’t want to reveal here. Let me just say that Tae-hee finds a connection with the temporary migrants in South Korea, Filipinos and Burmese, adding yet another layer to the feelings of isolation and exclusion these young women feel in the country of their birth.

Director Jeong Jae-eun has given us a wonderful exploration of female friendship through young women, whose position in their society is not stable. Allegiances shift as class rears a greater presence in their adult lives. As all great direction and scripts do, Jeong mostly shows rather than tells how these women connect and how they fail to connect. Early on in the historical prevalence of mobile technologies, Jeong demonstrates the myth in the promotional hype that such tools will keep us closer. She shows how they also keep us apart in how the tools are used and how class barriers limit access to such tools. Although it didn’t do spectacularly at the box office, Take Care of My Cat so touched its intended audience that it inspired an uprising of support to bring it back to theatres after being pulled sooner than fans wanted.

When New Korean Cinema emerged on the international film scene, part of what made it unique as a national film movement was the significant presence of not one, but three women directors. Along with Jeong, there was Lim Soon-rye and Byun Young-joo. Lim’s first two films were, interestingly, about male friendship (Three Friends and Waikiki Brothers). Lim would go on to direct a 2008 film partially about female friendship, a film based on a real-life South Korean women’s Olympic team handball squad called Forever the Moment. I think I can go on record and say it’s the greatest team handball film ever made. [v] Sports films in South Korea do not tend to do well, so it is a tremendous achievement that Lim garnered box office success for that film. Byun is most famous for her trilogy of documentaries on “Comfort Women,” which involve her friendship with women survivors and their own friendships with each other. Although Ardor and Flying Boys are less appreciated works, I am actually a fan of those feature films by Byun. Her most recent film, Helpless, actually garnered a best director from the industry. Back to Jeong–she moved on from Take Care of My Cat to a film partially about male friendship (The Aggressives). That film did not perform well at the box office and we had to wait seven years before Jeong took the director helm again, this time with critically well-received documentaries about architecture.

The reason I mention this women triumvirate of New Korean Cinema, besides pointing out how they all have directed films focusing on female friendship, is that in spite of their solid work and that of the women directors who joined them later, such as Park Chan-ok, Bang Eun-jin, and Gina Kim, I find myself discouraged that Jeong and other quality films by women directors, such as Kim’s excellent Invisible Light from 2003, often don’t make it on lists of significant films of the New Korean Cinema movement. Such lists are often dominated by the opposite of friendship, the male violence of films like Old Boy and I Saw The Devil.

Case in point: recently Indiewire, which on all other levels is a strong advocate of women’s films and focuses considerable coverage to pointing out gender discrimination in the U.S. film industry, posted a “primer” this summer on what they mislabeled as the “Korean New Wave.” (See the first endnote.) In that primer they completely dismiss the impact of women directors in South Korea. In their parenthetical excuse, they say they were only looking at films with “a measure of international distribution.” This is disingenuous since Take Care of My Cat received considerable international distribution for the time and Hong Sangsoo’s 2013 film Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, which made their list, has received almost next to nothing. [vi]

This erasure of women directors partly happens because we privilege the stories told by male directors, particularly those that are violent or action-oriented as Indiewire’s list of “essential” films demonstrates. Films about women’s lives where relationships are given precedence don’t fall into the male fight club preferences of many casual references to the South Korean film industry. Take Care of My Cat is a canonical text of New Korean Cinema. To leave it off your list is like leaving off Bong Joon-ho’s 2003 masterpiece Memories of Murder. Films about female friendship, the hard work of caring for others while negotiating room for independence, is just as much art, is just as engaging as, if not more than, watching a bunch of guys beat the crap out of each other. Ignoring films by the women of New Korean Cinema is part of a longer tradition of dismissing the women’s labor that makes art and entertainment possible. Take Care of My Cat’s erasure reminds us that we need to take care of our films and make sure that the exceptional works by these women aren’t forgotten or underappreciated. Such systematic forgetting makes it harder for the South Korean women working in the industry now and in the future to bring us their stories.

[i] Some writers have confused the “New Korean Cinema” and “Korean New Wave” film movements. For an example of this confusion, see Indiewire’s “10 Essential Films of the Korean New Wave” (June 26, 2014, credited to ‘The Playlist Staff’) where none of the films listed are part of the Korean New Wave but are actually part of New Korean Cinema. In the scholarly literature “Korean New Wave” denotes certain films made in the 1980s to the mid-90s that first started to address the cultural suppression and censorship at that time in South Korea’s history and were closely connected to the democracy movement. “New Korean Cinema” began in the late 1990s when censorship laws loosened and higher production quality became available. Then another confusing moniker entered the picture, “Hallyu,” which refers to the global pop culture phenomenon of South Korea films, television dramas, and pop music. The launching of the film segment of “Hallyu” began with Shiri (1999) by Kang Je-gyu. Mistakes in naming the wrong movement are primarily due to the names not being distinct enough. The fact that they both have “New” in them doesn’t help. Add to this that Hallyu means “wave” and you can see why Indiewire and others might mix up the movements and their origins. There are several books one can read to clarify this confusion, see for example Chi-Yun Shin and Julian Stringer’s New Korean Cinema (University of Edinburgh Press, 2005), Darcy Paquet’s New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Wave (Wallflower Press, 2010) and Directory of World Cinema: South Korea (ed. Colette Balmain, Intellect Ltd., 2013).

[ii] There is a young man who conveys romantic interest toward one of our characters, Hye-joo. Hye-joo brushes him off. But her romantic refusal is not “punished” or seen as her core flaw. Her friends are more upset with her general rudeness to him rather than any gender expectation that she should find the right man quickly or else she’ll regret it.

[iii] This character is played by an actor of similar embodiment, which is still rare casting for any national film industry.

[iv] The literary reference is to a novella by Cho Se-hui, the title of which goes by a few translation variations but I will use this one – A Little Ball Launched by a Dwarf. It’s a bit of a plot spoiler to mention the actual dialogue so I won’t here.

[v] If anyone knows of another team handball film, I seriously would love to know since sports films are one of my other film interests.

[vi] I am assuming by “international distribution” the authors mean what most folks intend by that phrase, distribution outside of film festivals.

Adam Hartzell has been a contributing writer to Koreanfilm.org since 2000. He has written for various websites (Fandor, sf360, VCinemaShow), the quarterly Kyoto Journal, and has a chapter in The Cinema of Japan and Korea (Wallflower Press) along with contributions in Directory of World Cinema: South Korea (Intellect Ltd). He writes often about the films of Hong Sangsoo such as for a retrospective of his work held in San Francisco and a paper delivered at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Seattle in 2014.

When Friendships Fray: ‘Me Without You,’ ‘Not Waving But Drowning,’ and ‘Brokedown Palace’

Not all friendships are built to last. Teenage friendships are little romances between two people–tiny beautiful, impossibly fragile things that break apart upon touch or close examination. Just as a true romantic relationship between two unformed people rarely lasts, so often we grow out of our early friendships. Because so much of growing up means developing into a person who can live in the world, films about the ends of friendships can be just as satisfying coming of age stories as the typical narratives of beginnings. Each ending after all, is the beginning of something else.

This post by Elizabeth Kiy appears as part of our theme week on Female Friendship.

Not all friendships are built to last.

Teenage friendships are little romances between two people–tiny beautiful, impossibly fragile things that break apart upon touch or close examination. Just as a true romantic relationship between two unformed people rarely lasts, so often we grow out of our early friendships.

These friendships are among the most intense in your life and that intensity often burns out too fast. It can feel giddy and feverish just like a teenage romance, where you can’t bear to be apart, talk all night on the phone, keep boxes of sentimental objects and stay up all night together. But you don’t know then who you really are and this relationship, that you eat and sleep and breathe, can either end up a warm memory or, in many cases, the last barrier to true adulthood.

Though close friendships often form between larger groups, the view of teenage friendships we most often see on film is this singular sort of passionate fire. These films succeed on the strong performances of two leads, as character studies of two highly developed characters. Other people are interesting, but they never seem quite as important.

What is some interesting in these films is how they explore this one difficult question: If you’ve aways been one of two, how do you become one, a singular person without missing something? Because so much of growing up means developing into a person who can live in the world, films about the ends of friendships can be just as satisfying coming of age stories as the typical narratives of beginnings. Each ending after all, is the beginning of something else.

It can be difficult to tell what these kinds of films are saying about friendships. Are they simply too pure, to beautiful to exist in the real world? Are they things that hold us back, trap us in fantasy worlds so vivid they make real life seem like a dream (see: Heavenly Creatures)?

What about toxic friendships (see: Albatross, Ginger and Rosa) ? Teenagers are so much more vulnerable to these sorts of things because perfect symbiotic connections seem so desirable.

Holly follows along through Marina’s experimentation

In Me Without You, a British film spanning the 1970s and 80s, Holly (Michelle Williams) and Marina (Anna Friel) initially have little in common, but develop a close, almost symbiotic, connection, due to proximity. They’re neighbors and they’re the same age. As they grow up, they follow each other into the same music and subcultures, Marina most often dragging Holly along, and it’s unclear whether they would have liked the same things if they weren’t so closely tied together. Later, when their friendship has broken down, they continue to be tied together, now by their daughters’ friendship.

For most of her life, Holly has lived in Marina’s shadow. Marina is exuberant and witty, outgoing and almost glitters in her everyday wear, more like costumes, pirates and ballerinas, then everyday outfits, she’s impossible to lose in a crowd. Meanwhile, Holly is softer and too often scared. She lives in Marina’s shadow not only because she feels most conformable there, but because Marina demands it. Marina’s brightness fascinates Holly, who casually accepts her cruelty, too nice and too needy to do anything that could hurt her. As Holly begins to come into her own and get noticed for her intelligence and beauty, Marina sees it first and does everything she can to sabotage her.

Mousy Holly feels overshadowed by her friend Marina

The betrayal is a little cliche. Marina sleeps with Holly’s boyfriends and subtly chips away at her self-confidence to keep Holly as her mousy, lesser friend. Throughout the decades, Holly falls in and out of her attraction to Marina’s brother Nat, and it appears that he is her soulmate. Eventually they get together, but not without the cost of Holly and Marina’s friendship.

For Holly, growing up comes to mean realizing that indulging Marina and following her demands isn’t making her happy. As the title says, Holly needs to figure out who she is without Marina and learn to be this person. The friendship ends as she realizes the Marina needs her more than she needs Marina, it’s just holding her back from growth.

Though the viewer is meant to identify with Holly, writer-director Sandra Goldbacher succeeds in giving just enough insight into Marina to understand her rationale. She is not cruel for the state of it, but is hopelessly insecure and jealous of light she sees in Holly. She tries so hard to be exciting and cultivate an alluring persona, but Holly doesn’t even have to try to be interesting. Moreover, as Holly is developed as such a sweet and intelligent, it’s hard to completely fault her judgement. At different points her in life, Marina was the friend she needed. And she loves her, she can’t be all bad.

Alice and Darlene enjoy vacationing together before college

Likewise, Alice (Claire Danes) in Brokedown Palace is the wild, even fearless friend who tries to convince quiet Darlene (Kate Beckinsale) to live a little. You’ve either been this girl or you know her, either way, you’re a little frightened (and thrilled) by her influence. Alice convinces Darlene to take chances she otherwise would have avoided, usually things Darlene had secretly wanted to do anyway. Alice convinces her to go to Thailand, to sneak into the pool at a fancy hotel and hang out with some skeevy seeming guys they meet. This ends up getting the girls sent to a Thai prison for smuggling heroin they (allegedly) had no idea was in their bags.

Suffering through prison together, the girls’ friendship becomes strained

It’s any traveller’s biggest fear and the girls, fresh out of high school, not at all streetwise and sure being American grants them certain privileges, make all the worst possible decision at every juncture, but really the horror of their imprisonment is overshadowed by the horror of betrayal. Alice and Darlene find themselves in (an often pretty racist portrayal of) Thailand where everyone is poking at them and yelling in languages they can’t understand with no one to turn to except each other. But as time passes and it becomes clearer and clearer that this is not just a misunderstanding, they lose their faith in each other. Darlene’s parents have always hated Alice and tell her she deserves to be in prison for being a bad influence on their daughter. Darlene even begins to agree, believing Alice forced her to do things against her will. In the end, Alice pays the price for being the wild friend, accepting for responsibility for the crime, and sacrifices her life for Darlene’s freedom by offering to serve both their prison terms.

Due to the film’s ambiguity, its ultimately unclear whose fearlessness was their downfall. Was Alice telling the truth when she accepts full responsibility or had Darlene attempted to strike at independence and excitement on her own?

The friendship between Sara and Adele feels familiar and realistic

Devyn Waitt’s ethereal indie, Not Waving But Drowning, begins with Adele (Vanessa Ray) and Sara (Megan Guinan) literally breaking apart. High school is over and Adele is leaving their tiny Florida town for New York City, where she imagines bigger and better things await. Sara, the more level-headed of the duo, is staying behind and continuing to live a teenage life, she sleeps in her parents’ house and rides to and from her volunteer job with her father.

Yet through their separate journeys, the girls attempt to maintain the symbiosis that had kept them afloat so far. On their own, they have a host of adventures, both good and bad, that become increasingly difficult to share with each other. For Adele, life in New York is not as glamorous as she imagines, she moves into a messy apartment with four guys she barely knows and gets a job cleaning office buildings. Things seem to improve when she becomes friends with a girl who lives across the street, who seems to have the glamorous life she’d dreamt of.

Meanwhile, Sara teaches art classes at a senior’s centre and finds it difficult to get the residents interested. She is drawn to Sylvia (Lynn Cohen), a rebellious elderly woman who smokes pot in her room and leads trends at the centre.

Not Waving But Drowning cribs from two very different coming of age templates: an older person-young person intergenerational friendship and a silent reaction and recovery from trauma narrative.

Sara indulges her rebellious side by spending time with Sylvia

Separated, they try to be figure out what kind of people to be without each other. For Sarah, this means attempting to replace her more daring friend with this woman who reminds her of Adele. Sylvia even becomes a role model to her, as she is fascinated by a photograph of young Sylvia in New York at her age. Later, when she visits Adele, she attempts to recreate the picture.

Adele’s road is harder. Her new friend Kim (Isabelle McNally) abandons her when she is raped on a rooftop and she spends a long time struggling with the event. She has a hard time connecting to the world she so recently lived in, the world of her friendship with Sarah, riding in cars and singing, trading inside jokes and leaning on each other. In picking Kim, she had attempted to chose a friend completely different from Sarah, someone more like the person she wanted to be herself. As Kim disappoints her, her own view of herself and what she can be is shattered.

Adele struggles to create an identity of her own

The friendship between the girls is strained, but it is not irrevocably damaged. By the end, they’ve had lives apart and have secrets they keep from each other, something they never had before, but they still feel comfortable sleeping in the same bed like children. Sara plans to move to New York, but will this fix things? Can they ever be as close as they once were?

The true test of a friendship isn’t whether is lasts, but who it lets you be. These teenage friendships encouraged a symbiosis that made it impossible for the girls to live alone and that was why they faltered. We need more films that explore the toxic aspects of friendships, particularly teenage friendships, to help us learn to recognize them.

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Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

What ‘Now and Then’ Taught Me About Friendship

Summer has always been a magical time where childhood lingers, and every time I get on a swingset again, or have a hankering for a push pop, or throw on my ‘Now and Then’ soundtrack, I think of my childhood and feel invigorated with that rush of youth. I think of Taylor and Sara, and a time when we were so eager to make our own adventures. I also think of those four girls from the Gaslight Addition; somehow they affected my life by making me appreciate what it means to be and have a true friend in this wild world.

This guest post by Kim Hoffman appears as part of our theme week on Female Friendship.

I was pretty excited about Sara’s 11^thbirthday party. Her mom owned a print shop and I was told we’d be having cake and playing games there; I enjoy the smell of paper so it didn’t seem like an odd place to have a party. After Sara opened presents we were outside at a picnic table lit by a floodlight from the print shop, glittering and bedazzling hats and T-shirts.

Sara’s birthday was in March, and just a few months before, a group of us went to the movies to see a new film called Now and Then. Since then, it was all any of us could talk about. We’d gone back to see it countless times, and one of those times, we were the only ones in the whole theater, a group of four or five of us girls, running around, doing cartwheels and singing and dancing. (I’d be remiss not to mention that I actually still have the original soundtrack, and it’s in my car as we speak.)

What Sara hadn’t told us was that her mom’s print shop was located right next door to a crematorium. It was a small grey building with a giant stone yard, filled with coffins of all sizes. I saw that my finished hat masterpiece was drying next to one that said the same thing as mine, “Teeny,” speckled with orange and yellow flower power decor. A blonde girl walked over with an impressed-looking grin on her face. “Wow, you actually look like Thora Birch,” she said to me. A few other girls formed around us and we all began to gush over our favorite movie of the year. A fancy car drove by at that very moment and we all squealed, pumping each other with a sugar high as if one of the actors from the movie was in our neighborhood, you know—cruising by the print shop and the crematorium on a dark Saturday night.

Now and Then wasn’t just a coming-of-age ‘90s girl movie. It was intersecting itself into my life as an 11-year-old fifth grader; I was same age as the characters in the film. And I felt we were all doing this “growing up” thing together. I cut out any clippings from magazines I could find on the movie, though it wasn’t hard because Devon Sawa, who played wormy Scott Wormer, was a common household name among girls my age. He was a teen heartthrob all over the pages of Tiger Beat and Bop and I instantly obtained both the movie soundtrack and the film score (and amassed a huge pile of pinup photos of Sawa). In 1995, there was a resurgence of the trippy hippie ‘60s style and I was obsessed with rock ‘n roll for the first time. The only thing my bedroom was missing was a lava lamp. You could say I didn’t care all that much about the boys in my class, just what my friends and I would do over the weekend at our upcoming sleepover. I savored this new art of forming real bonds with girlfriends.

Now and Then is a film about four friends: Samantha, Teeny, Roberta, and Chrissy, who are growing up in the Midwest in the ‘70s (though much of the film was shot in Savannah, Georgia). A couple of decades have passed and Chrissy (played by Rita Wilson) is pregnant, living in her parents’ old home, and married to a guy she once thought was a mega dork. Teeny (Melanie Griffith) is a blossoming actress in Hollywood, with, as Roberta puts it, “Long legs, a tiny waist, and large, perky breasts.”

“Roberta you know how I feel about swearing,” Chrissy says back.

“Chrissy, breast is not a dirty word,” Roberta insists.

Which leads me to Roberta (Rosie O’Donnell), who has become a doctor and according to Chrissy, “Lives in sin with her boyfriend.” But more on that in a moment. Last but never least is Samantha (Demi Moore), a writer, and the narrator of this film; she is sarcastic, jaded, and arguably depressed. She explains that she hasn’t been to the Gaslight Addition in years (the neighborhood where all the girls grew up, which looks like any other midcentury American neighborhood). Now the girls reunite at their familiar stomping grounds for the arrival of Chrissy’s baby—and boy is she ready to pop. Waddling around in the house in a bow-tied muumuu dress, Chrissy opens up her home to her old friends, who awkwardly situate on the plastic-covered couch as if nothing’s changed in 25 years. Roberta is helping Chrissy around the house and offers the girls a beer, Samantha slinks into the backyard in all-black threads perfect for a moody writer, and Teeny inches through the yard in her heels, wearing a pearly white skin-tight skirt and matching jacket. As they play catch-up, they stare up at the treehouse they spent so much of their time as kids saving up money for, and slowly that eternal summer of their youth begins to skim back to the surface…

In our own little ways, my friends and I were making our own pacts for the first time—Sara, me, and our friend Taylor, plus the new girls we’d just met at Sara’s birthday. We would ride our bicycles from Taylor’s to Sara’s house, singing and laughing, stopping downtown at an old diner in the hopes we might see Janeane Garofalo in character as Wiladene, diner waitress by day, clairvoyant mystic by night. You could say I was enamored by this new, untapped part of me that the film was bringing out. I had a mix of confidence and fear—to explore, not just on our bicycles, but also in our minds—through séances and tarot cards, music and making up stories. (We commenced our friendship that night at Sara’s birthday party when we snuck over to that crematorium and had our first-ever séance.) We were in search of Dear Johnny in our own ways. But as our knees bobbed against one another’s and we formed a circle that night, I simply felt that brief but blissful form of excitement you feel when you’re a kid.

Now, the line about Roberta and her boyfriend “living in sin” is somewhat of a discussion among fans of the film, because word has it that from the beginning, Roberta’s character was written to be gay. I. Marlene King, writer, producer and director of Pretty Little Liars, was the writer on Now and Then. In earlier versions of the script, Chrissy says, “Roberta, for example, has chosen to be alternative, but she is still normal. She hasn’t been married four times or gone through a series of monogamous relationships…or wear all black. She’s happy. Aren’t you Roberta?” When the girls flash back to that summer when they were kids, we meet young Roberta (played by Christina Ricci), binding her chest and stumbling over her macho brothers wrestling in the hallway. Her mom died when she was four, and she is deeply bothered by it, refusing to succumb to any bullshit standards set aside for girls and the ways girls are supposed to dress or act.

Instead, Roberta is the girl at the softball game who’s throwing punches at boys or pranking her friends in a not-so-funny incident where she fakes drowning. She’s constantly testing her limits and the trust she so craves with the people in her life. But what she doesn’t yet understanding is that she needs to give others a chance to get through to her, too. Samantha (played by Gaby Hoffmann) is next to kin when it comes to tough-girl stuff because she’s in the midst of her parents’ divorce, and she’s completely in favor of rebelling against her clueless mother—which also means punching out a boy at a softball field if the moment calls for it, especially if she’s standing up for a friend. (I bet Sam is a Libra.) I used to wonder if there wasn’t more to Roberta and Sam’s relationship, especially because I could totally see Rosie O’Donnell and Demi Moore’s grown-up versions getting together and living “alternatively” as Chrissy puts it. Whatever happened in post-production to cause anyone to add in that line about Roberta’s boyfriend is a terrible shame.

Young Teeny (played by Thora Birch) is the girl who sits on her roof and memorizes lines from old movies playing on the big drive-in screen. Her parents are always hosting lavish parties while she floats about in her room upstairs, obsessing over actresses from the Golden Hollywood heyday. Teeny is down for everything and anything, but we quickly get the sense that it’s all smoke and mirrors and in truth, she’s the least experienced, at least for right now. She stuffs her bra with vanilla pudding-filled balloons to bide her time before she reaches adolescence. (She got the idea from the Wormer boys after they surprise-attack the girls with water balloons.) Sex, dating, and romance—it’s all mysterious and lusty to her and she is rushing to grow up. In one of my favorite scenes in the movie, Teeny is making all the girls take a quiz and she discovers she’s a sexual magnet, “attracting men from all four corners of the world.” The look on her face as she reads her results say it all–she’s googly-eyed over all this possibility.

Sam is nothing like Teeny, but she doesn’t try to act prudish, she just prefers to focus on other things, like books, magic, science, and what really happened to Dear Johnny. She’s the one with the bag of candles and cards who’s happy to tote her wares to the cemetery. Sam has to look out for her little sister, but she also has to contend with her mom’s new dating life. Here, she’s expected to act mature and mind her manners, while she sees her mom dressing differently and gushing over a man who isn’t her father. Her only way to cope is to escape, and her friends support that; in their not-as-R-rated way, they’re basically saying, “Fuck that. We’re your family.” Sam and Teeny make great friends because they’re so out of each other’s way and they so easily understand this place their at in their lives—with Sam’s parents’ divorce and Teeny’s parents being nearly as absent under the same roof.

Roberta and Chrissy have a special bond that’s set to the side too, because they’re so opposite yet they balance each other’s personalities to a tee. Chrissy (played by Ashleigh Aston Moore) feels Roberta is her best friend. I can’t imagine what Chrissy’s mom must think of that—what if Roberta were to track mud into her pristine home? Chrissy’s bedroom is perfectly tidy and manicured pink. She is completely sheltered by her mother’s discussions about sex—and probably still believes a garden hose and a watering can are involved. She’s the last in line when the girls hit the road on their bicycles, and she’s the first one to say, “I’m not doing that,” when she feels uncomfortable or nervous. But a little mild giggling and convincing and the girls have Chrissy believing in herself and feeling connected to them in no time. Despite her doubts that she isn’t as pretty or skinny as the other girls, Chrissy manages to find her place in the group by just being Chrissy. That’s why Roberta makes such a great best friend. For her, friendship and acceptance isn’t about appearances. Chrissy has a heart of gold. A promise is a promise with her.

There is purpose to these friendships in Now and Then like there is purpose to Chrissy’s naivety about sex, Samantha’s imaginative curiosities, Teeny’s desires for passion in romance and career, and Roberta’s capacity for strength and weakness in equal measure. See, it was easy for all of us little girls who loved the film to attach ourselves to a character we related to or liked a lot because we too were on the verge of something—and being on the verge of anything is a beautiful and surreal feeling. When you’re 11, or 12, or 13, you are a part of this magical in-between moment that connects childhood with adolescence, and the friends you have during those few years may be some of the most important friends you will ever have—not because of how long they’ll be in your life, but because they’ll be the first people on board in your life journey who are up for the same adventures you are, and they’ll challenge you somehow—maybe to get in touch with your emotions when you’re embarrassed you cried in front of them, maybe to remind you that you’re all in this together. It’s the age where you’re searching for something, anything, and you’re old enough to find those things with your friends.

It wasn’t that long after Now and Then that I became the class scapegoat—they had decided I was weird. Instead of leaving it at that, they just had to hammer away at my self-esteem for good measure. What happened to riding our bikes, playing in our backyards, jumping into swimming pools and playing slumber party games? Now, friendship was considered by how much you impressed some queen bee, how far you’d go to stake your coolness. An eighth grade girl named Tara once saved me from a bathroom incident where a girl I once thought was my friend was mocking and making fun of me. I thought, “Here’s a true Roberta.”

I treasure the time around 1995 with an appreciation that goes soul deep. Those friends opened my eyes to the kinds of friends I would look for later on in my life, hoping to attract by weeding out the fair-weathered friendships, hardened, jealous-types, and egocentric bullies. Forget the thrill of being popular, well-liked, admired and noticed—those accolades are blips on the maps of our lives. Instead, relish in your weirdness, the glue that makes you who you are, and remember that embracing something weird is not a bad thing, it’s actually a wonderful thing; that’s the lesson I learned as a kid, when we snuck in to see Now and Then for the umpteenth time. Summer has always been a magical time where childhood lingers, and every time I get on a swingset again, or have a hankering for a push pop, or throw on my Now and Then soundtrack, I think of my childhood and feel invigorated with that rush of youth. I think of Taylor and Sara, and a time when we were so eager to make our own adventures. I also think of those four girls from the Gaslight Addition; somehow they affected my life by making me appreciate what it means to be and have a true friend in this wild world.

All for one and one for all.

Kim Hoffman is a writer for AfterEllen.com and Curve Magazine. She currently keeps things weird in Portland, Oregon. Follow her on Twitter: @the_hoff

We’re All for One, We’re One for All in ‘A League of Their Own’

At the end, many of the league’s players reunite to be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Old friendships rekindle and emotions soar. After following these women through what must have been the best time they ever had in their youth it is refreshing to see authentic portrayals of them as older women. It feels like their lives are unfolding before my eyes.

This guest post by Rhianna Shaheen appears as part of our theme week on Female Friendship.

I’ve seen quite a few female friendships on screen that I’ve liked, but I never get tired of A League of Their Own (1992). As an alumna of a women’s college, this film especially hits home, making me nostalgic for my Bryn Mawr days. Each time I watch it I become homesick for that place and that community where we were all young pioneers in our own way. I often project myself onto older Dottie, imagining myself old and grey at my class reunion in a similar fashion to the film’s ending sequence. Instant tears!

While narratives about groups or duos of female friends are common to the “chick flick” genre, large and diverse casts of women seem to be a rarity in film and TV unless it’s high school rivalries or incarcerated women. Not only does this provide us with a limited scope of representation but it also perpetuates harmful stereotypes that affect young women as well as a society that equates women’s leadership to being “bossy” or “pushy.”

The media’s portrayal of women and female friendships is too often characterized by catfights and “bitchiness” toward each other in the competition for a man. These harmful images of girls and women have become so pervasive to our culture that large communities of women are often viewed as detrimental to progress or success. Male friendships and communities are encouraged at a young age through sports teams and Boy Scouts, while communities of women are stigmatized by the patriarchy as “bitchy,” “too emotional,” or “too much drama.”

I myself was under a similar delusion before I applied to three of the Seven Sisters Colleges. Most people who tried to dissuade me either pointed to the lack of male students as being a deficit to my happiness or some other gross sexist, homophobic stereotype. A League of Their Own celebrates so much of what makes largely female communities special and the bond between the individuals so powerful.

A story told about the founding of women’s professional baseball could have taken many directions. I am thankful that it did not fall into any of those ugly stereotypes in order to propel the narrative. The women in this film have relationships with each other that are put first over any relationships they may or may not have with men. As a result, we have a film that provides us with three-dimensional portraits of women and the intricacies of their friendships during a time of transition in the 1940s.

Dottie takes charge when Coach Dugan proves useless

When the Rockford Peaches first come together for their first ever game as a team they look to their manager and former baseball star Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks). To their surprise he treats the whole thing as a joke citing, “I don’t have ballplayers, I’ve got girls. Girls are what you sleep with after the game, not, not what you coach during the game.” He comes into the locker room drunk and completely useless. Without a lineup for the game, Dottie Hinson (Geena Davis) steps up and quickly assumes the role of coach for a good majority of the film. Despite a drunken manager and the sexist heckles from the empty stadium, these women pull together a lineup and easily win their first game.

Mae (Madonna) gives Shirley (Ann Cusack) reading lessons

As these women spend more time together they learn to grow as ballplayers and sisters. Many of my favorite scenes are the brief vignettes that occur throughout the film that give us a deeper glimpse into their lives and character. Early in the film, Dottie and her younger sister Kit (Lori Petty) stand up for Marla Hooch (Megan Cavanagh) when talent scout Ernie Capadino (Jon Lovitz) rejects her as possible player due to her plain looks. Both sisters refuse to go with him unless he accepts Marla, who is as good of a player as any of them. On the bus, Mae teaches her teammate Shirley how to read by having her sound out the words from a smutty novel. When asked about her choice of literature Mae responses: “What difference does it make? She’s reading, okay? That’s the important thing.” In the same sequence, Doris (Rosie O’Donnell) opens up about her abusive boyfriend back home to the other women. She discusses the importance of this league and the support of her teammates in shaping her own self-esteem: “I mean, look. There’s a lot of us. I think we’re all all right.” While these players may clash at times there is none of the cattiness or “girl hate” concocted by the patriarchy.

The Peaches garner more publicity to save the league

The next problem becomes the fact that the women’s league isn’t bringing enough fans into the stadium or profit to the owners of the league. When there’s talk of closing them down these women band together and “give them everything [they’ve] got” to save the league. A photo of Dottie doing the splits while catching a ball behind home plate hits the cover of Life magazine and the crowds soon follow. Even “All the Way” Mae brainstorms ways to help their publicity drive: “What if at a key moment in the game my, my uniform bursts open and, uh, oops…my bosoms come flying out? That, that might draw a crowd, right?” While the league’s owner, Mr. Harvey (Garry Marshall), is not convinced of its worth until after Kit has been traded off to another team, there’s no doubt that the camaraderie between these women singlehandedly kept morale high and saved major league baseball through World War II.

No matter what team they’re on... — No matter what team they’re on…

...the bond between sisters cannot be broken — …the bond between sisters cannot be broken

While A League of Their Own serves mostly as a “memory movie” in which Dottie relives the memory of something she thought “was never really important to [her],” the most satisfying part of the film has to be the fast-forward to the reunion. At the end, many of the league’s players reunite to be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Old friendships rekindle and emotions soar. After following these women through what must have been the best time they ever had in their youth it is refreshing to see authentic portrayals of them as older women. It feels like their lives are unfolding before my eyes. As pioneers for women in sports, they become immortalized into history through an exhibit dedicated to them. However, it’s only when they sing their Victory Song that the unending power of their sisterly bond truly can be understood:

We are the members of the All-American League.

We come from cities near and far.

We’ve got Canadians, Irishmen and Swedes,

We’re all for one, we’re one for all.

We’re All-Americans!

While ALOTO is sometimes called the “ultimate chick flick of sports” I would challenge that notion.

1. That label is problematic in the larger scheme of film culture. “Chick flick” often suggests a plotline that centers on love and romance, which, excuse me, is extremely nebulous and could be any film. The way it is thrown around in “filmspeak” often implies frivolity and artlessness, making it taboo for film lovers to love or engage with these films. Even worse, is it argues that men and women are inherently different even though there is no equivalent for films geared toward male audiences, ostracizing the experiences of women or female lead stories.

ALOTO is rather a deconstruction of that very term, because it does not present the story of the first All-American Girls Professional Baseball League as the “male version” of x,y, or z movie but instead presents a true female experience in a little-known chapter of American sports history that all audiences can appreciate and find relatable.

2. A League of Their Own is an excellent film, with great direction by Penny Marshall, remarkable acting, and superb writing – it gave us some of the most memorable lines in film history. (“There’s no crying in baseball!”) My question is: how was this film not considered for ANY Academy Awards in 1993? The truth is that films about female friendships are still not taken seriously and condemned to the seemingly second-rate status of “chick flick.” Meanwhile, dude-friend movies (Good Will Hunting, The Shawshank Redemption, The Lord of the Rings) or dude-baseball movies (Field of Dreams, Moneyball) flourish and are considered universally hilarious (Dumb and Dumber, Anchorman, The Hangover) or Oscar-worthy.

While I could ruminate on this until my hair falls out, the truth is my energy would be better spent on the many stories still waiting to be told. I can only hope that A League of Their Own inspires others to believe as I do that the female bond is a powerful narrative arc worthy of being explored outside its current limited representation.

Rhianna Shaheen is a student filmmaker and artist with hopes of writing more in the future. She recently graduated from Bryn Mawr College with a BA in Fine Arts and Minor in Film Studies and Art History. She currently spends most of her time on an epic quest for a fulltime job. Check her out on twitter!

‘Walking and Talking’ With Non-Toxic Women Friends

A short clip at the beginning of writer-director Nicole Holofcener’s first film, 1996’s ‘Walking and Talking,’ lets us know that Amelia (Catherine Keener) and Laura (Anne Heche) have been friends since adolescence. Both are in their 30s and living in New York City–Laura with her boyfriend Frank, and Amelia alone in the sort of sunlit airy apartment someone with her job, even in a pre-gentrified New York (which, like many films from then and now is also mysteriously bereft of people of color), would never be able to afford.

This post by Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on Female Friendship.

The pathetic lack of movies that pass the Bechdel test highlights another deficit in films: the screenwriter often forgets to give the women characters close women friends. An alien from another planet trying to figure out human behavior would get the impression from most movies (and a lot of TV) that women barely spend any time with other women. The alien would never guess that that the person an unpartnered woman (or one with a partner) is likely to confide in, to call in times of crisis or to just relax with, is not her guy “friend” (the one she might end up having sex with) but another woman, perhaps someone who she has been close to for years.

A short clip at the beginning of writer-director Nicole Holofcener’s first film, 1996’s Walking and Talking, lets us know that Amelia (Catherine Keener) and Laura (Anne Heche) have been friends since adolescence. Both are in their 30s and living in New York City–Laura with her boyfriend Frank, and Amelia alone in the sort of sunlit airy apartment someone with her job, even in a pre-gentrified New York (which, like many films from then and now is also mysteriously bereft of people of color), would never be able to afford.

Catherine Keener (in one of her first prominent film roles) and Anne Heche (before she dated Ellen DeGeneres) both look beautiful in most of the scenes without looking fussed over. Heche wears overalls and at one point wears a t-shirt with a hole in it to bed (much more likely sleepwear than the lingerie we see movie and TV women in long-term relationships wearing) while Keener, who has a job at the classified section of a newspaper (which, along with the landline phones–and long-distance bills–places this film firmly in the ’90s) wears–gasp–the same outfit more than once to her workplace.

The two women are allowed to be flawed in ways that women and girls in films rarely are. Laura is a therapist (she’s still in school but is close enough to getting her degree that she sees clients) and we can see that she’s neither great nor terrible at her job: she forgets one of her clients has a child–even though she had previously advised him to build a closer relationship with his son. During a session with another client, while he describes an angst-ridden sexual encounter, she becomes distracted as she fantasizes about fucking him.

Amelia has a penchant for saying the wrong thing: when she first sees Laura’s engagement ring she says it looks “fake,” but rushes to apologize and make amends when she realizes her mistake. She’s also surprisingly game and sweet with her ex-boyfriend’s father, who suffers from Alzheimer’s. When he repeats the same idea twice, she answers both times, “That sounds great,” with equal, unforced enthusiasm. Keener has worked with Holofcener in each of the director’s films but Amelia is both much funnier and kinder than the characters Keener played in Lovely and Amazing and Holofcener’s most recent release, the overrated Enough Said.

The women’s complexity also colors their relationships with men. We see Laura at turns deeply in love and irritated with the man who becomes her fiancé, Frank (Todd Field, who is better known now as a writer-director: his films include In The Bedroom and Little Children). Walking does a good job of showing how, especially in long-term relationships, those two emotions can be close to the surface at the same time.

Amelia is single and we see her mixed feelings about her best friend’s upcoming marriage from the beginning. I could have done without the heavy-handed symbolism of the 14-year-old cat, Big Jeans, the two women apparently shared when they were roommates–before Laura moved in with Frank–who is stricken with cancer (and given little chance of recovery). Still the film’s sharp wit saves even these scenes as when, just after they get the diagnosis Laura gently tells Amelia “I think you should put her down.” When Amelia motions to let the cat out of her arms, Laura says, “No, I mean…”

walking-and-talkingcat — The two friends are so close they even share a cat

Laura and Amelia are allowed to behave imperfectly the way male characters are allowed to be in many films, but women hardly ever are: Laura accepts the invitation from a waiter who has a crush on her to see him in a play and hangs out as his “date” afterward. Amelia has sex with the video clerk who has a crush on her (Kevin Corrigan, who was also excellent in a similar role in Slums of Beverly Hills ) even though she describes him as “the ugly guy” to Frank and Laura.

More importantly, Holofcener doesn’t let the characters wander too far from their core as decent human beings (something at which she has been less successful in her other films). When a screenwriter concedes a woman has woman friends, the “friends'” sole purpose can sometimes be to betray the friendship, so I was pleasantly surprised that when Amelia drops by to see Laura (when she’s out with the actor/waiter) and finds Frank alone (and ends up sharing hits off a bowl with him), they didn’t have sex, even though in everyday life most people are able to be friends with their friends’ partners–without ever fucking them.

The film captures the shifting dynamic of a single person’s interaction with a couple, sometimes finding a surprising affinity with a friend’s partner, sometimes the third wheel. And sometimes forming a united front with her friend, as when Frank, during a road trip, asks, “Do we have to listen to this vagina music all the way?” Both women simultaneously tell him, “Yes.”

We also see Laura cuts her “date” short, and Amelia decides she actually likes “the ugly guy”–and no longer thinks he’s ugly. We hear, at one point, in the background, Liz Phair (during her Exile in Guyville era): a good musical equivalent for the ups-and-downs of these women’s messy, romantic lives.

When it was released the film was a cornucopia of great, new talent: besides Holofcener herself (who has never made another film nearly this good), Heche, Keener and Field, Liev Shreiber (in one of his first film performances to receive any notice) plays Amelia’s ex-boyfriend, Andrew, and manages to make the character’s sad-sack neurosis charming. The film shows that all of these actors have a great gift for comedy–and makes me wish more movie comedies were worthy of them.

Although the women have tense moments and sometimes argue, they, like Frank and Laura, always eventually make up–and nothing they say or do to one another is bad enough that their friendship seems toxic, also a welcome surprise. Walking and Talking makes clear how important their relationship is to both women, even as they enter different stages of their lives. At the end when, just before Laura walks down the aisle, Amelia, wearing a pretty dress, hands her a shot of whiskey, we know these women–and their friendship–will be just fine.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veN5fuM-AwI”]

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

Lessons from Underrated Coming of Age Flicks: Part 2: Back To School Edition

Even you’re not in school, September feels like a time for beginnings. It’s when you met the people who would become your close friends, bought new school shoes, and settled into a new year. With that in mind, I decided to look at a selection of coming of age films loosely based around school and learning. As an extra bonus, all five films come from female writer-directors.

See Part 1 here: Lessons from Underrated Coming of Age Flicks

Even you’re not in school, September feels like a time for beginnings. It’s when you met the people who would become your close friends, bought new school shoes, and settled into a new year.

It’s also when you were a bundle of nerves. Will my classes be too hard? Will I wear the right thing? Will anyone want to hang out with me?

I still feel that way in September, and I don’t think it’s an accident; I still have a lot to learn about life–we all do.

With that in mind, I decided to look at a selection of coming of age films loosely based around school and learning. As an extra bonus, all five films come from female writer-directors.

The D.A.R. support each other in their career ambitions.

All I Wanna Do/Strike!/The Hairy Bird (written and directed by Sarah Kenochan, 1998 )

It’s 1963 and headstrong Odette “Odie” Sinclair (perennial 90s coming of age star Gaby Hoffman) is being sent to Miss Godard’s Preparatory School, an all-girl boarding school, against her will. Her parents have discovered she plans to have sex with her boyfriend and believe the all-girl environment will keep her safe from boys. It’s this tension between ambitious girls and their growing attraction to men that sets the films conflict in motion.

At Miss Godard’s, Odie joins the D.A.R. (Daughters of the American Ravioli), a group of girls (including Kirsten Dunst) with the shared belief that they can be more than wives and mothers. When they discover plans for the school to go co-ed, the D.A.R. girls are torn. They like boys and want them about, but at the same time are concerned that the pressure to look good and appear feminine would detract from their learning. In addition, they believe the teachers will concentrate on teaching the boys as their education is seen as more important. First, they try to sabotage the plans and make the boys at a near-by school appear as sex-crazed drunks, then they take over the school and hold a strike.

Writer/director Sarah Kenochan based the film loosely on her own school experiences in that period and it definitely feels true to life. In addition to being immensely quotable (“Up Your Ziggy With a Wa-Wa Brush!”), it’s packed with memorable, off-beat characters and great 60s fashion. Though it’s set in the 60s, the central conflict of girls fighting for the quality of their education and their ability to be successful career women is something we can all relate to.

Lesson: Though many think otherwise, feminism doesn’t mean hating men. You can have crushes and romances without giving up your self and your ambitions. It may have been harder to learn these lessons in the 60s, especially as they didn’t always appear true, but unfortunately women are still fighting for recognition of these basic truths.

Hanna finds herself attracted to her best friend

Emporte-Moi/Set Me Free (directed by Léa Pool and written by Pool, Nancy Huston, Monique H. Messier and Isabelle Raynault, 1999)

In 1963, the Canadian province of Quebec was having a crisis of identity (and many feel it still is). Much of the population felt they needed to their own country rather than a part of Canada. This identity crisis is mirrored in teenage Hanna (Karine Vanasse). Her life is marked by in-betweens: she is not a child or an adult, she is not technically Catholic or Jewish (as her mother is Catholic and her father is Jewish), and as she begins to experiment, she finds she is neither straight nor gay.
She attempts to create an identity for herself by imitating her favourite film star, French New Wave star Anna Karina in the Godard film, Vivre Sa Vie. In one scene, the film cuts between shots of her and Anna Karina doing the same dance. This imitation gets her into trouble when she experiments with prostitution, which she sees as romantic because of Karina’s role in the Godard film, and is raped. After her attack, she finds her own voice by picking up a video camera and creating her own images.
The film feels earnest, identifying its main characters as a clearly working class family, several of whom are struggling with depression and highlighting the appreciation of movies and music so crucial to teenage dreams.

Lesson: You are never going to fit into an image. Your glamourous stars may have tragic pasts, you may have uncool conflicts and interests. Our favourite characters and stars even have fictional, streamlined images meant to tell us the stories we want to hear. They’re never as awkward or as painful as real life.

Harper meets Connie at her sister’s wedding, where she is an overlooked bridesmaid

Guinevere (written and directed by Audrey Wells, 1999)

Harper Sloane (Sarah Polley, now an acclaimed writer-director herself) is Harvard bound and not happy about it. She’s an overlooked younger sister from a buttoned-up, patrician family concerned with status and wealth. Though she plans to attend law school in the fall, she secretly feels uncomfortable about the decision though she’s never thought about what other kind of life there could be for her.

Enter Connie Fitzpatrick (Stephen Rea), a 40-something bohemian photographer, and the only person who sees her secret discomfort. They become lovers and Connie invites her to move in with him, his latest in a long line of muses all of which he calls, “Guinevere.” As a Guinevere, she has to learn some kind of art (Connie’s practices are often referred to as a school she will eventually graduate from), and Harper decides to take up photography. She follows him as an apprentice, not out of her passion for it, but because she enjoys seeing what he does. When she begins to enjoy it and gains confidence, however he is weary about even letting her take a single picture.

Guinevere is set apart from other films with similar stories of romance between young girls and older men, by the constant assertion that Harper is 19 and the relationship is between two adults, though they are often posed as teacher and student. Great care is also taken to show the reality of the relationship, as Harper ends up having to work to support him as his alcoholism and bohemian principles won’t let him. He is not a “sugar daddy” that takes her every care away.

Despite this, it’s unclear what the film’s stance on Connie is, as it makes his program look quite attractive. It helps Harper come out of her shell and establish a fulfilling career. When she returns to him years after their break-up, she is very affectionate toward him and sees it as her responsibility to take care of him as he dies.

Lesson: There’s a fine line between discovering your passion and coming into your own. Be sure you’re really discovering who you are, not who others, your family, your friends, even your mentors and lovers, want you to be.

Bethany graduates valedictorian in a class of one and sees the graduation ceremony as a prolonged humiliation

Sassy Pants (written and directed by Coley Sohn, 2012)

To Bethany Pruitt (Ashley Rickards), pink is the colour of oppression. All her life she’s been homeschooled and forcibly sheltered by her impossibly, even cartoonishly cruel mother June (Anna Gunn). June forbids her to go out with people her own age, has as never let her have a job and steals the money she has saved to go to college. Later on, when Bethany escapes, June even tricks her into coming home by telling her her grandmother is dying. As a budding fashion designer, Bethany’s predicament comes to her clearest in the wardrobe full of baby pink clothes her mother has bought for her.

So begins Bethany’s trip to independence. She packs up whatever clothes are salvageable, moves in with her father and his boyfriend and gets a job at a cool clothing shop where she falls in with a bad crowd and finds herself manipulated by a co-worker. But Bethany doesn’t stay down for long, she works hard and enjoys some success designing clothes for a small store. It’s refreshing how the fact that it is very hard to make it in the fashion world is never on Bethany’s mind, she’s just trying to break into its periphery.

The portrayal of Bethany’s mother, June, is the most contentious aspect of the film. She appears to be a terrible mother and possible sociopath through most of the film; however, it’s possible to interpret this view of her as Bethany’s point of view. In the last act, June’s humanity is carefully revealed and she becomes a sympathetic character.

Lesson: Even the worst monsters have their human moments. You don’t have to forgive the cruelty but you can try to understand it.

Vanessa and her FUBAR friends plan their strategy for Snowstream Survivor

Dear Lemon Lima (written and directed by Suzi Yoonessi, 2009)

Dear Lemon Lima is a charming story about outcasts fighting back, not with force but with friendship. It follows 13-year-old Vanessa (Savanah Wiltfong), a half Eskimo (note: Vanessa and the other characters refer to her as Eskimo, though this is not usually seen as a politically correct term) girl attending an Alaskan prep school on an ethnic scholarship. Vanessa is uncomfortable with the Eskimo cultural identity because her mother is Caucasian and she does not have a relationship with her father and his culture. It represents otherness to her, so she clings to her whiteness, claiming “I’m from Fairbanks!” as proof of normalcy.

To complicate matters, she has recently been dumped by her boyfriend, Phillip, whom she believes is her true love. They had a very close relationship, where she called him “Strawberry” and he called her “Onion.” The fact that Vanessa sees herself an a onion, sour and not easy to like, is interesting. She yearns to fit in and be popular, choosing to use the ordinary backpack from her ex’s parents over the cool sealskin bag from her grandmother. In school, she finds herself clumped into the FUBAR (military slang meaning fucked up beyond all recognition) group. The other outsiders who aren’t worried about their status and feel they have reclaimed the word FUBAR, are ready to befriend her, but Vanessa brushes them off.

It’s this that originally makes Vanessa difficult to identify with. In addition, Philip is so ridiculously terrible its hard to believe she still wants him. Then again, she’s a teenage girl blinded by love and sure popularity is the only important goal in life, so she’s probably more like most of us than we’d care to remember. Eventually she realizes she’s too good for Philip and becomes the leader and advocate of the FUBARs so it’s clear she realizes her mistakes.

An interesting facet of the film is its examination of cultural appropriation. Each year, the school holds a competition called the Snowstorm Survivor championship where the school’s all-white student body (Vanessa is the sole native student) compete in events inspired by native games. These activities include a cringe inducing scene where white students dress up in eskimo costumes and do elaborate cultural dances. In addition, Vanessa realizes her scholarship was sponsored by a known racist who instituted the program as a PR move. By the end of the film she connects to her Eskimo heritage by forming a Snowstorm Survivor team that values the principles of the World Eskimo Olympics, a games intended to bring people together rather than tear them apart through competition.

Lesson: Cheer for everyone, have fun and don’t worry about pointless competition and popularity contests. You’ll regret the friends and the fun you didn’t have.

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Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

Sex, Silver Service, and Fairy Tales: ‘Sleeping Beauty’

In her debut feature, 2011’s ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ director Julia Leigh examines consent, voyeurism, and passivity through the character of Lucy, a beautiful college student who sleepwalks through life as if it doesn’t involve her. Lucy becomes a literal Sleeping Beauty when she takes a job that involves her being drugged to unconsciousness while men are allowed to do anything they please to her naked body, with the exception of penetration. She exists in an eroticized, dream-like landscape and the film often feels like a painting come to life.

In her debut feature, 2011’s Sleeping Beauty, director Julia Leigh examines consent, voyeurism, and passivity through the character of Lucy (Emily Browning), a beautiful college student who sleepwalks through life as if it doesn’t involve her. Lucy becomes a literal Sleeping Beauty when she takes a job that involves her being drugged to unconsciousness while men are allowed to do anything they please to her naked body, with the exception of penetration. She exists in an eroticized, dream-like landscape and the film often feels like a painting come to life.

As a character, Lucy is defined by what we as an audience don’t know about her, the blank spaces in her characterization that match those in her working life and it is as if we have slept through parts of the film along with Lucy. Her passivity in life mirrors her sleeping, as she moves around, distant from her surroundings and unattached to anyone. She is also indifferent to her job, in one scene she haphazardly applies lipstick and is told to take the work seriously, as “it is not a game.” Lucy’s narrative arc is her process of waking from the stupor she has existed in.

Lucy is shot several other times in silent, passive positions. There are prolonged sequences of her sleeping, both in her original student apartment and her luxury pad, blinded by her sleep mask, as well as sitting alone while waiting at the bar, and on her way to meet her boss, Clara (Rachael Blake). Much of the film actually happens around Lucy while she waits, listens, and sleeps. Even when she is awake, things are done to her and her body: she sleeps with strangers because of a coin toss, endures a painful bikini wax and a test where she is examined like an animal as part of her job interview, and has lipstick roughly applied to her mouth, meant to match her labia. There is a marked focus on Lucy’s mouth throughout the film, from the opening where a scientist puts a tube down her throat as an experiment to the end where she hides a camera in her mouth and is later awakened by mouth to mouth resuscitation.

Lucy’s only real connection is with her ailing friend Birdmann

However, there are moments of rare activity from Lucy, usually brought about by unfortunate circumstances, where is person beneath her icy shell is revealed. She tends to a sickly friend, Birdmann (Ewen Leslie) and gets into bed with him when he overdoses, though she makes no effort call for help. More crucially, she becomes active when she decides, without an provocation, that she wants to know what happens when she is asleep. Though she this would allow the men to be blackmailed, she purchases and smuggles in a small camera.

Early on, the men who will come to be Lucy’s clients are introduced as a dramatis personae at the silver service dinner which suggests they are members of a secret society. This suggests they are microcosms of different types of clients of sex workers, such as the one who is abusive and takes out his frustrations on her as a woman he is allowed to beat inside of a wife, and the one who falls in love with her and just wants to hold her.

At the silver service dinner, Lucy is set apart for her youth and beauty

Lucy is much younger than the other women in the film and her youth, beauty and pale coloring cause her to be placed on a pedestal. As the silver service dinner, she is covered up with virginal white lingerie while the other women wear black bras with cut outs that reveal their breasts. She is the sole women in white and the main attraction, and even when she makes clumsy mistakes, she is continuously praised.

Because of the value placed in Lucy’s beauty, there is a tension between her and Clara. She scoffs at Clara’s suggestion that her vagina is a temple worthy of respect and ignores her warning that the money earned from her work should be seen only as a temporary windfall not a permanent income she can depend on. These scenes suggest Clara may have been in Lucy’s position one day and aged out of the role. In light at the story’s fairy tale connections, it is interesting that a woman, Clara, is the one who puts her to sleep and looks at her as a commodity.

Lucy is examined by Clara before given the job

In the film’s extended and graphic nude scenes, Lucy’s passive, often sedated body can also be examined by aroused audiences, a notion that suggests audiences use nude star as Lucy’s clients do, as she can never know what they do with her image. Once the nude image is out there, it, like Lucy’s consent to be used by the men while sedated, cannot be controlled and consent cannot be rescinded.

In addition, her motivations for agreeing to this work are left unexamined. Unlike films like Belle De Jour, where a bored woman turns to sex work without seeming financial need, it is never suggested that anything Lucy enters into is her fantasy. Instead, it seems to be something she does without thinking, a path she enters down because she cannot think of anything else to do, and only late into it, when she realizes she is making good money, does she begin to live in the luxury it affords her.

Lucy burns her earnings: is the money unneeded or is she unstable?

However, the constant suggestions of traumas in Lucy’s life: her relationship with Birdmann, mentions of her mother, and of the absence of family or friends, as well as her casual proposal to an acquaintance who alludes to parts of her character he finds flawed, may suggest a conflicted or even ailing mental status. In some scenes, Lucy, as a college student, appears to have great need for money, as she allows herself to be used for science experiments, works in an office doing filing and photocopies and lives in grotty apartment with roommates who are openly apprehensive to her about her failure to pay rent. In one scene where she burns the money she has earned from silver service waitressing, suggesting she either feels no need for the money or has become mired in the surreal sort of magic in the film and barely registers the experience was real. Because she stares at the burning money as if it has cast a spell over her, the second possibility seems most likely.

Lucy consents to be used for science experiments

Sleeping Beauty also raises questions of whether sex work is unfairly stigmatized and separated from other menial work. It is suggested that Lucy, highly confident and assured of her attractiveness as she is, has taken her looks into account and believes sex work would be easier and more lucrative than her other jobs. It is also posed as not dissimilar to consenting to be a guinea pig for science experiments with uncertain results, as she had previously done.

Though she has consented to the sexual nature of her sleep work, Lucy is not even given an opportunity to consent to her involvement in her final client’s suicide, plans which were clearly known to Clara as she appears unsurprised he is dead. In this final scene, Lucy realizes that her actions have weight, even if she doesn’t remember them, as she becomes part of these men’s lives. By signing over her body and memory, she allows them ownership of her and knowledge of her as well as agreeing to trust they will not penetrate her. Many of our most beloved fairy tales romanticize passive, sleeping women, such as the original version of Sleeping Beauty, where the prince rapes the unconscious girl. Though Lucy gives her consent, it is unclear whether person can ever consent to something that would happen while they were unconscious as there is no way she can object if she changes her mind or it crosses the line.

It is questionable whether Lucy can consent to things that would happen while she is not conscious

Depending on one’s interpretation of Lucy’s mental state throughout the film, its ending can be taken one of two ways. Either it suggests, Lucy, a literal Sleeping Beauty is waking up to the reality of her life and can begin to live a “normal life” or she is entering into a mental breakdown she has been staving off with her detachment. In addition, the dead man lying in beside her may remind her of Birdmann, whose death she did not fully grieve over and suggests she has been forcing herself not to become attached to him either. With either interpretation, Lucy regains her autonomy and awareness of reality only after negative events, which casts her sex work and her sexual encounters in a wholly negative light. She awakens into the film’s stark reality, where there are no happily ever afters even when the cinematography is this lovely.

As Lucy awakes, not with a kiss but with a slap to the face, it becomes clear that Leigh’s tale of detachment is no fairy tale.

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Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

Exposing Real Lies: ‘Reel Injun: On the Trail of the Hollywood Indian’

What does an “Indian” look like? If you are like most Americans, your answer will fall somewhere between Disney’s Pocahontas character, Johnny Depp’s depiction of Tonto, and the Washington NFL team logo. That’s because your education, family, friends, and society have no idea what actual, living Native peoples look like thanks in large part to Hollywood film representations. The 89-minute documentary ‘Reel Injun: On the Trail of the Hollywood Indian’ (2009) will begin to correct some of those misrepresentations floating around in your brainpan.

What does an “Indian” look like? If you are like most Americans, your answer will fall somewhere between Disney’s Pocahontas character, Johnny Depp’s depiction of Tonto, and the Washington NFL team logo. That’s because your education, family, friends, and society have no idea what actual, living Native peoples look like thanks in large part to Hollywood film representations. The 89-minute documentary Reel Injun: On the Trail of the Hollywood Indian (2009) will begin to correct some of those misrepresentations floating around in your brainpan.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbDvteUUrm4″]

What will really blow your mind is when I say that “Indians” don’t exist. “Indian” was the term Columbus labeled the indigenous peoples of this land because he thought he was in India. So this mistake has become the generic name for all 500+ nations that still remain in this land. Charming. And in Hollywood films, Native peoples exist only as stereotypes. Thomas King (Cherokee) writes in his latest tome, The Inconvenient Indian, “Indians were made for film. Indians were exotic and erotic. All those feathers, all that face paint, the breast plates, the bone chokers, the skimpy loincloths. . .The only thing film had to do was to collect such materials and cobble them together into a series of functioning cliches. Film dispensed with any errant subtleties and colorings, and crafted three basic Indian types. There was the bloodthirsty savage, the noble savage, and the dying savage.”

The history of this practice is laid bare in Reel Injun and will shock and amaze you. Director Neil Diamond (Cree), and co-directors Catherine Bainbridge, and Jeremiah Hayes craft an alternative narrative to the one you think you know. For instance, did you know that the most famous “Indian” actor, Iron Eyes Cody, was Sicilian, not Native?

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65PpeJkix5g”]

Did you know that the story you think you know about Crazy Horse and Custer isn’t true? Or that in many “classic” Hollywood westerns where Native actors are speaking a Native language, they are making fun of the scene or their fellow white actors instead of saying the lines presented in English on screen? Or that in the 1930s, Native Americans directed and acted in films from their own perspectives? Or that the headband seen so often on Native characters in westerns was because of the costume department and has absolutely nothing to do with real Plains cultures?

After a scene in a Hollywood costume vault, Ojibway film critic Jesse Wente says, “This is actually, while probably not calculated, an ingenious act of colonialism. You are essentially robbing nations of an identity and grouping them into one.”

Reel Injun starts off by reminding viewers that Hollywood has represented “Indians” in over 4,000 films for over 100 years before launching into a film clip smorgasbord that washes you with image after image that reinforces Thomas King’s statement.

The director/narrator, Neil Diamond, does a simple voiceover as the camera captures young Native kids watching one of those ubiquitous Hollywood westerns where “Indians” are the enemy. His voiceover: “Growing up on the reservation, the only show in town was movie night in the church basement. Raised on cowboys and indians, we cheered for the cowboys, never realizing we were the indians.”

Diamond’s stated goal is to “make sense of the world’s enduring love affair with the Hollywood indian. . .this image has captured the world’s imagination.” From the silent era when Native Americans were directing and acting in films to the twentieth century when representations of Native peoples remained wildly inaccurate and fantastical.

Cree director of Reel Injun, Neil Diamond.

Adam Beach, John Trudell, Russell Means, and Chris Eyre are among an impressive list of interviewees in the film and their comments are dispersed among historic photographs, film clips, and images of iconic American landscapes. About 13 minutes in, Chris Eyre explains, “The reason that indians were projected so heavily into movies was the romance of the tragedy, Greek-Roman tragedy.”

Philip J. Deloria addresses the representation of Native peoples in film in his book, Indians in Unexpected Places, writing, “Films, of course, never repudiated the sensibility of Indian violence found in the Wild West. Indeed, they were key to the shifting of Indian violence from nineteenth-century possibility to twentieth-century titillation and metaphor” (55).

At one point, director Diamond visits one of the many summer camps held in America every year that keep “Hollywood’s notion of the noble savage alive and well,” where little white boys romp and play and fight dressed in face and body paint and grunt and shout and vocalize the Atlanta Braves’ “tomahawk chop” tune under the watchful eye of their white leaders. Before he meets this group of campers, Diamond says, “I wonder if any of these kids have ever met a Native person. Or if their image of us comes only from the movies. I hope I don’t disappoint them.”

In The Inconvenient Indian, King provides a guiding perspective with which to consider the documentary Reel Injun, as well as any representations of Native peoples you may see on film or TV: “The good news is that none of these Indians was a threat. To the White heroes in particular and to North America in general. None of them ever prevailed. What we watched on the screen over and over was the implicit and inevitable acquiescence of Native people to Christianity and Commerce. No matter what happened, the question that was asked again and again on the silver screen was: Can Indians survive in a modern world? And the answer, even in sympathetic films such as Broken Arrow, Little Big Man, and Dances with Wolves, was always: No.”

Reel Injun won Gemini Awards for Best Direction and Best Visual Research and was nominated for Best Original Score in a Documentary Program. Available to stream on Amazon and Netflix, this documentary would make a wise and balanced addition to any classroom studying film, film history, Native Americans past and present, as well as issues of representation or identity.

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Dr. Amanda Morris is an Assistant Professor of Multiethnic Rhetorics at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania with a specialty in Indigenous Rhetorics.

On Not Giving Women Filmmakers A “Free Pass”: ‘Kelly & Cal’

Many actresses, especially those in their 30s and older, find themselves relegated to playing “the mother” for much of their careers. Most of these films (like the recent indie hit Boyhood) seem to go out of their way to tell stories from anyone but the mother’s point of view. For a short time Jen McGowan’s Kelly & Cal (also written by a woman: Amy Lowe Starbin) seems like it will be a welcome contrast to this norm. At the beginning we see a closeup of the tired, stressed face of new mother, Kelly (Juliette Lewis), as we hear the pleasant, disembodied voice of Kelly’s OB/GYN, who indulges in the (relatively recent) abhorrent practice of referring to women who are pregnant or have recently given birth as “Mom” (instead of calling them by their names) while she rushes Kelly through her six-week checkup. The doctor isn’t the only offender: “How was your day, Mommy?” Cybill Shepherd’s squeaky clean mother-in-law later asks when she visits for dinner.

We again see closeups of Kelly’s unhappy face as she (and we) hear her baby constantly crying, interrupting her even when she tries to masturbate–after her husband proves more interested in TV than in sex. We learn Kelly’s name only when she introduces herself to Cal. They meet over her fence as Kelly sneaks a cigarette and Cal asks if he can have one too. Cal is supposed to be 17 or l8, but the handsome and not untalented Jonny Weston, who plays him, is–and looks–26. Throughout the film, whenever he talks about attending high school I felt like correcting him, “Don’t you mean graduate school?” The actor visibly being well past his teens makes Cal’s banter seem particularly inappropriate and creepy.

He tells Kelly (whom he’s just met) “You have great breasts,” then admonishes her that if she didn’t want him to comment on them she shouldn’t nurse her son with the curtains open (sort of like how some men feel free to advise celebrities never to pose for private nude photos if they don’t want the world to see them).

Kelly immediately tells him, “Get away from my house,” then sees he uses a wheelchair as he rolls back toward his own place. That evening she tells her husband she feels bad that she yelled at someone who is “handicapped,” the word used to describe Cal throughout the film, even though “people with disabilites” has been common parlance–including in the Americans With Disabilities Act–for over 25 years. I guess we should be grateful the film doesn’t have any queer characters, so we don’t have to hear them called “homosexuals.”

She used to be "wild" — She used to be “wild”

The movie really goes off the rails after Kelly appears at Cal’s garage apartment (his parents’ house hasn’t been equipped with ramps) as an apology, but quickly leaves (Juliette Lewis is quite funny in this scene; she’s better than the film deserves) when Cal continues to talk explicitly about sex (this time about his own prowess even after the accident that caused his spinal cord injury). Her actions are perfectly in keeping with everything else we’ve seen so far from Kelly. So the audience is left to wonder why, the next day, she goes back to visit Cal as if nothing has happened. If Kelly were meant to be a damaged character, a woman who felt that being in the company of someone who humiliates her by talking explicitly about her body (which he spied on while she was behind closed doors in her own house, feeding her son)–and then told her all the sexual things he could do to her–is all she deserves, I could accept this plot point. But as the part is written (up until that point in the film) and as Lewis plays her, Kelly is a level-headed sort, even if she feels lonely and out-of-place in her new role as a suburban stay-at-home mother. Kelly and Cal’s “friendship” in this context makes no sense and seems to bolster the philosophy of street harassers and “pickup artists” that talking explicitly to women they barely know (and who don’t seem open to their sexual attention) is the way to attract them.

For extended periods that follow, the film (which seems long but is actually only 110 minutes), in the tradition of soap operas, seems to forget Kelly has a baby. We see her freely drinking beer and other alcohol when before she had demurred explaining that she was still breast-feeding (if the TV series Please Like Me can be trusted, apparently breastfeeding mothers can pump their milk before the occasional drunken night out, but the movie doesn’t care enough to offer this explanation). She and Cal spend lots of time alone together, after which she often goes home to an empty house–when new parenthood means (as the start of movie makes clear, and shows is a major part of Kelly’s frustration), except for brief respites when others take over, the baby is always there.

No, really she was "wild" — No, really, she was “wild”

We get a tiny subplot that goes nowhere about Kelly once being “young and wild” and “in a band” which seems cribbed from a Wikipedia entry about “Riot Grrrl,” especially when the characters repeatedly mispronounce “Sleater-Kinney” as “Sleeter-Kinney.” The film also uses a Cyndi Lauper song, the polar opposite of “wild,” as one of of Kelly’s favorites. Kelly ends up kissing Cal because his harassment somehow ends up charming her. She also does a little breaking and entering and graffiti with him as foreplay.

Cal, on the other hand, inhabits the trope of the disabled character who feels like life is no longer worth living. A person with disabilities who becomes suicidal is such a cliché that When Billy Broke His Head, a too-infrequently seen documentary about disability–directed by a disabled man–had a sequence that was a montage of disabled characters in film after film announcing their intentions to kill themselves. Audiences would object if every woman in films wanted to off herself–or if every person of color did. And we’re glad that modern queer characters in dramas like Weekend, Keep The Lights On, and Pariah survive to the credits because in the past the rule seemed to be that one (or more) of a film’s queer characters must die by the end. But the disabled character (and there’s usually only one), if he or she isn’t busy being an inspiration to others, is, in too many films and TV shows otherwise on the brink of suicide. We could use more characters like Winston (Clifton Collins Jr.) in Sunshine Cleaning, who was missing an arm, but was neither depressed nor awe-inspiring, just a person trying to get through life.

A film with real distribution (it opens on Sept. 5) directed by a woman as well as written by one is a rare enough occurrence that I wish I didn’t have to point out all that’s wrong with Kelly & Cal. But if a film has the same old sexist (not to mention ableist) tropes, we have remember why we wanted more films by women in the first place–and see that maybe this particular example isn’t solving the problem.

As Susan Sarandon (in The Celluloid Closet) said of their love scenes in The Hunger, no one needs to get drunk to kiss Catherine Deneuve. In the same way, nobody needs to lower their standards to love the films of women like Stacie Passon, Miranda July, Dee Rees, Sarah Polley, and Andrea Arnold. But film distributors still treat an acclaimed queer woman’s film about a queer woman, Concussion, as subpar: last year the rapturous reviews it received from a number of influential critics came too late for it to have a real run in many cities that might have embraced it, (including mine which is full of art houses and is in the first state to legalize queer marriage). One Cut, One Life the documentary co-directed by and featuring Lucia Small was the best film I saw at the Independent Film Festival of Boston (where I saw Dear White People, Belle, and Obvious Child) and probably the best documentary I’ve seen this year (a year that included Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me and Anita) but even though it plays at The New York Film Festival Sept. 29 it still doesn’t, as far as I know, have a distribution deal. The only way to fight against this tide is to keep praising good films by women–and not dilute that praise by heaping it onto other films that happen to have women’s names on them.

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

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