Films by Women – Page 3

The Fellowship of the Fling: How our Romance Film Team Came To Be

‘I’m Having an Affair With My Wife!’ is the first U.S. romantic comedy in 17 years to star a Black woman and an Asian-American man as the romantic leads. … Just let go of the fear you have of diversity, and let art move you, because the spirit of art, taken to its logical conclusion, reflects the beauty and variety of reality. Support diverse movies, listen to diverse stories, and start telling a few of your own.

This guest post written by Jen Finelli appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

I know you’re lying.

But let’s back up a bit, before we get to your lies, and start at the beginning: at that boring, quiet alone place, where fingers hit keyboard and you — and I — have to decide what characters to write about in our films.

I’m Having an Affair With My Wife! is the first U.S. romantic comedy in 17 years to star a Black woman and an Asian-American man as the romantic leads. Lashonda and Sung-min are a stereotype-busting married couple who become upset at their marriage, seek out affairs online, and then accidentally end up having an affair with each other. The film’s directed and produced by the brilliant Samantha Mauney Aiken, and it stars Stacey Malone as Lashonda and William Jeon as Sung-min. It’s reached small-time internet fame with its crowdfunding campaign: the script ranked in the top 15% of scripts in the Austin Film Festival and finalized in the Beverly Hills Screenwriting Competition. Fans keep emailing to tell me how excited they are to finally see people like themselves in love.

But in the beginning, it was just me and my keyboard and the script. Just some mixed-race kid from who-knows-where who wanted to see more people who looked like my friends on the screen. In my sci-fi career, my protagonists have always been diverse or people of color because why the hell not, that’s what real-life heroes look like. But in romance, it’s personal: I’ve got to normalize mixed relationships. See, people blame our mixed race for my brother’s autism, and people told Mom not to marry my dad (who is himself mixed) because then she’d have mixed babies and OH MY GOSH wouldn’t that be difficult. Dang! We really need to see films where mixed race relationships ain’t no thang, where it’s totally normal, so we can change those kinds of perspectives. And dang, just in general, we need films where we show people of color in love! Because holy crap, did you know people of color fall in love and have babies, too?

You wouldn’t know it from Hollywood.

That’s the first lie, and that’s why I’m Having an Affair With My Wife! (then Seduce Me) got pitched to Samantha Aiken, on the sunny Austin, Texas day that we passed hipster graffiti and browsed the odd little art shops beyond the city’s Capitol, and ate tacos, burgers, and other unhealthy things. No big Hollywood companies, no gatekeepers, no investors, just us. After reading what brilliant Asian-American creators like WongFu Productions and actor/director Justin Chon went through, after watching what’s on the big screen, after listening to the diverse film community, it became pretty clear to me that when it comes to Big Hollywood, our kind aren’t wanted here. I never bothered to pitch anywhere else. That was my first and last pitch because Samantha gets it. I knew I could trust her with the script, that there’d be no whitewashing, no twisting of its core message, and I knew I could trust her because she had me murdered once.

Yeah, she had me killed on screen. Blood, fake tears, big-ass cameras, the works. It was just a little horror short — she’s quite ashamed of it, actually — but I got to see her directorial style, and later, got to follow her journey from big film sets like Fast and Furious 8 and Fences to tiny indie productions, documentaries, and charity films. There is nothing this woman hasn’t done, when it comes to film, and I trust her completely.

Because, see, the next lie is that you can make something diverse — and good — without input from others. It’s a lie that a mostly-white-passing writer can just sit down, spit out some stuff, and damn, it’s perfect. I write a lot about how I hate lazy writers, and how important research is even to the most fantastical story, but when it comes down to it, you need a diverse film team, not just racially or ethnically, but in experience and education.

So when we set out to find our leads, it became very, very important that they could provide an authentic perspective. You can hear more about our journey to find them on our casting podcast, but to summarize, we wanted two special things from our leads that we didn’t have already: one, we wanted a beautiful body-realistic woman, who understands that struggle, and we wanted the perspective of a Korean American man who can check us on the validity of our script. We got all kinds of applications from tiny, thin women and a few from non-Asian men, but for the most part our casting experience ripped open another lie, the lie people tell me every time I share studies like this.

“Oh, that study that shows Asian and Black directors are underrepresented in Hollywood? That’s just because Asian and Black people don’t want to get into film. You need to stop having numerical parity be a qualification for equality, blah blah blah, there’s no racism anymore, no of course I’m not listening to your anecdotes about people you know, la la la…” — et cetera, et cetera. It’s the same argument about women directors and producers, Asian and Black actors, etc etc. You hear Hollywood producers saying they can’t “find” actors for those kinds of roles, or that multiracial productions aren’t “marketable.” This is bullshit if you saw how Luke Cage turned out, or how Frozen’s female producer made off with all of America’s money, or how the latest Star Wars films made more money at the box office than any of the previous ones, or how Get Out is the “highest grossing debut based on an original screenplay,” or how films with diverse casts and women-led and women-written films are more successful at the box office — do I need to keep busting your balls about market research?

Meanwhile, we got two hundred and seventeen applications for a tiny indie film no one had heard of at the time. One guy on our audition list offered to move across an ocean for the job. Can you imagine the number of applications the big films get for those million dollar roles? Can you even fathom that?

There are no Asian and Black actors out there, my big flat ass.

We had an incredibly hard time casting our leads because of some amazingly talented runners-up. When we finally did tell William he got the part, he yelled because all his life he’s dreamed of becoming a rom-com lead; Stacey later told us that after she got off our call she danced around her room giggling. You can’t tell me only one color of person deserves those moments. These roles didn’t get handed out for free: Stacey’s a single mother who runs her own production company, and William’s worked as a pharmacist and run a restaurant to manage the cultural pressures that say acting isn’t a real job for a guy like him. Our leads have the perspectives we asked for, and they’re fighters. They’ve each mobilized a different community that’s supported us, bringing their own fans and friends to the table, and that literally pays off in dollars. We’re proud of them, and we’re proud of the experiences they bring to the team.

Because that’s what it’s all about: if you want to make a good movie, you’re depriving yourself if you choose to cast or hire only one color of person. You’re missing out on real knowledge. On these beautiful moments where, again and again, people tell us even in pre-production we’re letting them feel seen. You might even be missing out financially, in the end, because distribution and marketing aside, Seed & Spark’s diversity incentives rock.

So stop lying. Just let go of the fear you have of diversity, and let art move you, because the spirit of art, taken to its logical conclusion, reflects the beauty and variety of reality. Support diverse movies, listen to diverse stories, and start telling a few of your own.

Jen Finelli is a world-traveling scifi author who’s swum coral reefs with sharks, done pizza on the street corner with prostitutes, gotten fired from a secret organization that was trying to control the news, discovered murals in underground urban tunnels, etc etc. She’s the writer of I’m Having an Affair With My Wife, a movie you can find at mysweetaffair.com; you can find her fiction at byjenfinelli.com, and you can follow her adventures on Twitter @petr3pan.

Adolescence and Female Friendship in Gurinder Chadha’s ‘Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging’

After chronicling the clashes among family, football, and adolescence in ‘Bend it Like Beckham,’ Gurinder Chadha delves into similar territory with the ebullient coming-of-age tale ‘Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging.’ An adaptation of the 1999 novel ‘Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging’ by the late Louise Rennison, the film tells the story of Georgia Nicolson, a teenager growing up in Eastbourne, England, whose entry into the world of romancing boys is as fraught and funny as you might expect.

This guest post written by Deborah Krieger appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

After chronicling the clashes among family, football, and adolescence in Bend it Like Beckham (2002), Gurinder Chadha delves into similar territory with the ebullient coming-of-age tale Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging (2008). An adaptation of the 1999 novel Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging by the late Louise Rennison, the film tells the story of Georgia Nicolson (Georgia Groome), a teenager growing up in Eastbourne, England, whose entry into the world of romancing boys is as fraught and funny as you might expect.

Georgia falls quickly for the “sex-god” Robbie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a new boy in town, and spends the course of the film trying to win him over. In the film’s opening scene, Georgia’s friend Jas (Eleanor Tomlinson) tells her regretfully, “Boys don’t like girls for funniness.” Taking this questionable advice to heart, Georgia attempts to make Robbie fall for her by hiding her own dramatic attitude and hapless sense of humor that separate her from the other girls in town. By the end, of course, she learns the all-too-important lesson that you don’t need supermodel looks to get a boyfriend, and that your significant other should like you for yourself and not who you pretend to be.

Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging has a quite a bit in common with other movies and books in the “teen romantic comedy” genre. It is undoubtedly formulaic, and contains the expected happy ending and all-important positive message of self-confidence. Yet Georgia herself, and her attitude towards life, are what make the book and the film memorable, as Georgia is vividly crafted, full of recognizable flaws. She consistently makes the worst, most embarrassing social errors in nearly any given situation, including being caught spying on Robbie by him and his girlfriend; accidentally exposing her “knickers” to a crowd of partygoers (including Robbie) while fighting off another boy’s advances; or telling said boy that she’s a lesbian in order to avoid having to date him. For Georgia, her parents’ refusal to rent out a club for her fifteenth birthday constitutes the cruelest mistreatment, and she rather callously views her father’s job transfer to New Zealand as little more than an opportunity for her to have only one parent to supervise her misbehavior. (Of course, by the end of the film she realizes that she misses her dad and would rather have her family together.)

Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging is of opposing minds when it comes to showing how teens deal with their developing sexuality. On the one hand, many such encounters in the film are refreshingly realistic, for the most part eschewing picture-perfect kisses and idealized romantic encounters for true-to-life depictions of what being a teenager is actually like: full of awkwardness, weird mishaps, and lots of saliva. Seemingly over the course of minutes, teenage boys go from disgusting, unsanitary mysteries to objects of fledgling desire — from mere concept to attainable goal. In an early scene, Georgia’s friend Rosie (Georgia Henshaw) instructs their group of friends to sit on their hands to numb them, then to touch their chests over their clothes to simulate getting “felt up” by a boy.

On the other hand, the girls also treat sexuality in a rather cynical way: as a competition to be won, a skill to be taught and learned, and a game to be quantified and scored. Early in the film, Georgia and Jas introduce their “snogging scale,” or ten escalating forms of romantic and sexual kissing, with hand-holding while kissing at number one and “the full monty” at number ten. This scale is referenced consistently in conversations between Georgia and Jas, with them discussing their sexual experiences in terms of what number they earn on the scale. While preparing to make Robbie hers, Georgia visits the home of local boy named Peter Dyer (Liam Hess) to learn how to kiss. Peter is a local “ladies’ man” who apparently teaches snogging to all the local girls, and goes about his work with all the seriousness of a businessman. He sets a thirty-minute timer at the beginning of his lesson with Georgia, delivers questionably-sage advice, and insists that she be honest about her previous experience so that he can “evaluate” her accurately, prompting her to admit her only experience is with “the back of [her] hand.” Where other teen romances might feature the protagonist fantasizing about sharing her first-ever kiss with her crush, in the world of Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging kissing — and what comes after — is treated in a much more transactional (and perhaps more practical) way.

Another central aspect of the film’s narrative is the looming presence of beauty standards to which Georgia and her friends feel they must adhere if they have any hope of getting a boyfriend. After realizing that even to her own friends, her large nose diminishes her attractiveness, Georgia continually tries to change her looks in order to make herself more appealing to boys. While in pursuit of the kind of supermodel beauty that will undoubtedly make Robbie hers, Georgia also manages to lose some of her hair by trying to bleach it, accidentally shaves off one of her eyebrows, gives herself the appearance of having pink eye by putting Vaseline on her eyelashes, and turns her legs bright orange with self-tanner, which Robbie notices while the pair are swimming in a public pool. Yet despite Georgia’s perception of herself as unattractive and in need of beautifying, the film’s plot actually belies her claims, revealing her to be rather unreliable as a narrator. In addition to Robbie, whom Georgia wins over by the end of the film, naturally, she has to contend with two other boys who want to date her: the aforementioned Peter Dyer, he of the copious saliva, and Dave the Laugh, a boy she goes out with only to make Robbie jealous. Additionally, both Robbie and Georgia’s father comment disparagingly on her desire to keep changing herself, and that she is fine the way she is. Therefore, despite the early assertion in Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging that boys don’t like funny girls, or weird girls, or girls who don’t have the CoverGirl look, Georgia’s own travails prove otherwise, and demonstrate that she really didn’t need to change much about herself at all to get the boy she wants.

However, the film falls into some unfortunate classic teen romance narrative traps as it tries to demonstrate Georgia’s own uniqueness and establish her as the ideal girl for Robbie. Right off the bat, the film immediately draws a contrast between the inexperienced Georgia and “Slaggy Lindsay,” Robbie’s girlfriend at the beginning of the movie, and thus Georgia’s rival. (“Slaggy” basically means “slutty,” for those not of us speaking the Queen’s English.) Lindsay (Kimberley Nixon) is immediately presented as the enemy even before Robbie is in the picture, and the narrative continually backs up this assertion. Lindsay is the conventionally attractive girl who stuffs her bra and wears a thong (the horror!), while Georgia doesn’t commit those apparently unforgivable acts. Lindsay’s behavior towards Georgia over the course of the movie is presented as needlessly petty and at times cruel, even though Georgia is, admittedly, aiming for her boyfriend. Despite the fact that boyfriends can’t be stolen, it’s still a pretty selfish move on Georgia’s part, and one that manages to avoid diegetic condemnation even as many of Georgia’s sneaky and dishonest maneuvers are properly called out.

While not as prominent in the movie as in the original book, Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging also keenly traces the way that girls’ friendships change during adolescence when the specter of boys — and maturity — comes into the picture. Georgia’s “ace gang” of Georgia, Jas, Rosie, and Ellen (Manjeeven Grewal) are presented as the thickest of thieves, ready to go “boy-stalking” together, take beauty quizzes, and encourage one another’s romantic adventures. Yet the very first scene actually undermines the unity of the so-called “ace gang,” demonstrating the kind of social pressures that adolescent girls must contend with, and conquer, in order to maintain their friendships. The film opens with Georgia arriving at a Halloween party dressed as a stuffed cocktail olive, making more of a statement than she’d like in a room full of sexy angels, devils, and cowgirls. We then learn that the rest of the “ace gang” was supposed to go in matching costumes, yet the other three girls have decided to join their peers in wearing sexualized and attractive costumes without telling Georgia. It is both an establishing character moment for Georgia, an olive in a room of nymphets, as well as a recognizable betrayal of friendship on the part of her friends.

The greatest such rift in the film, though, comes from Jas, Georgia’s conventionally pretty “best mate,” who manages to snag Robbie’s brother Tom (Sean Bourke) early on in the film with little effort. She subsequently spends much of the film disappointing Georgia and frustrating her attempts to date Robbie, culminating in a recognizable yet tragic falling-out that lasts until the end of the movie. Jas correctly points out Georgia’s “scheming and pretending” as a cause of why Robbie won’t date her, while Georgia argues (also with some legitimacy) that Jas has been a rather poor friend when it comes to keeping her secrets. Georgia also manages to dig the hole between her and Jas deeper when she criticizes what she views as Tom’s lack of ambition, as Robbie wants to be a rockstar. Jas delivers the classic fatal blow to a teenage friendship when she announces that she will be attending Lindsay’s party instead of Georgia’s, because of course they are on the same day.

Of course, the party at the end — the club party Georgia so wanted at the beginning of the film — allows everything to be solved. Jas and Georgia reconcile (as Jas secretly helped Georgia’s mother plan the whole thing, conveniently fixing their friendship), Robbie and his band headline the party set, Robbie very publicly rejects Lindsay in front of seemingly everyone in town and declares his feelings for Georgia unequivocally, and her father doesn’t end up having to move to New Zealand. Indeed, the ending of Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging is the least realistic aspect of the movie — nothing in the real world resolves itself quite so easily and painlessly. Perhaps outright condemning (or at least questioning) Georgia’s perpetuation of the Taylor Swift-esque “she wears short skirts / I wear tee shirts” dynamic with Lindsay might have taken the film all the way from cliché to truly lifelike. Still, though, it’s hard not to be pleased for Georgia and her happy ending, if only because there is so much in her (mis)adventures that are very recognizable and true.

Deborah Krieger is a senior at Swarthmore College, studying art history, film and media studies, and German. She has written for Hyperallergic, Hooligan Magazine, the Northwestern Art Review, The Stake, and Title Magazine. She also runs her own art blog, I On the Arts, and curates her life in pictures @Debonthearts on Twitter and Instagram.

Courage, Death, and Love in Dorothy Arzner’s ‘Christopher Strong’

In spite of the ending or what the trailer suggests, ‘Christopher Strong’ doesn’t demonize Cynthia for her ambition and her desires; instead, the film sheds a sympathetic light on her story even as it depicts her pursuit of independence and love as an impossible one within the context of the world she occupies. The story of such a pursuit and the societal pressures attached likely felt familiar to director Dorothy Arzner, writer Zoë Akins, and star Katharine Hepburn — each of whom occupied positions of creative control in the film’s production and led successful careers in an industry still notorious for undervaluing women today.

This guest post written by Taylor Kenkel appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors. | Spoilers ahead.

When Christopher Strong first hit theaters in 1933, the RKO trailer marketed the 12th film directed by Dorothy Arzner as the tale of “…an alluring young modern who feared her own emotions… a woman of the world, bound by love and shame… a society girl defiant of scandal,” and enticed viewers with a call to “See Katharine Hepburn tackle a man’s job — to escape her emotions!”

The trailer is almost laughable, and it does the heroine a disservice by warping her story into one of salaciousness and disgrace. And far from “run[ning] away from the fires within her,” as other promotional materials suggest, the woman at the center of the film shows a unique, if flawed, sort of courage in her pursuit of independence and love — even as society tells her that she simply cannot have both.

That woman is Cynthia Darrington, played by Katharine Hepburn, in her second screen appearance— and she’s an aviatrix who enjoys independence, lives for adventure, and feels no need for romance until she meets Sir Christopher Strong (Colin Clive), a politician and a well-to-do society man who prides himself on his fidelity to his wife and dedication to his family.

The affair ends badly for Cynthia, and on the surface, the film almost reads just as the trailer spins it. But there’s more at play in this story of a woman who dares to reach for far more than what society will allow her to have; a careful reading of Christopher Strong reveals that — in spite of the film’s unsatisfying end — the criticism it levies is not directed at Cynthia herself, but at the world that simply isn’t ready for a woman of her ambition.

Christopher Strong opens on a scavenger hunt party, where the event’s hostess presents rowdy attendees with a new challenge: a woman must bring back a man who has been married for more than five years and has always been faithful to his wife, and a man must find an attractive woman over 21 who can swear she’s never had a love affair. Harry (Ralph Forbes) and Monica (Helen Chandler) both want to win, but neither of them fit the respective requirements — as Monica is younger than 21 and currently engaged in an affair with Harry, who is married to another woman.

Monica notes with delight that her father, Sir Christopher Strong, has never cheated on her mother. As Monica drives off to fetch him back to the party, Harry finds himself in something of an accidental road race as a woman speeds alongside his motorcycle in her automobile. Both narrowly avoid hitting an oncoming truck. When the woman runs over to see if she can help after Harry is thrown from the motorcycle, he laughs and declares, “Not unless you’re over 21 and can raise your right hand and swear you’ve never had a love affair!” She looks at him with raised eyebrows and quips that she can swear to it, then agrees to accompany him back to the party. Once there, everyone’s delighted to find that the woman is none other than the well-known, record-smashing aviatrix Cynthia Darrington. It is then that Christopher and Cynthia meet, and the whole event unintentionally sets in motion their doomed affair.

Cynthia and Christopher’s relationship stays platonic until an evening several weeks later, when he stops by her home to ask for advice on consoling a heartbroken Monica. Cynthia, on her way to a costume party, emerges from her bedroom to greet him while clad in a silver, form-fitting gown meant to evoke the figure of a moth. In spite of attempts to redirect the discussion, their light flirtations grow serious and they acknowledge their growing attraction to one another.

The affair picks up speed from there — and after an air show in Paris, Cynthia meets the Strong family in Cannes. There’s a sexually charged tango, a confessional boat ride, and an attempt to break off the illicit relationship even as the two admit they love each other. Cynthia abandons Strong in order to enter an around-the-world flying contest, but a stroke of fate brings the two together again shortly after she lands in New York City and wins the race. They spend the night together, and Cynthia decides to give up flying and focus her attention on the affair and on Christopher. She soon grows restless and unsatisfied — but just as she decides to return to the air once more, Cynthia finds out she’s pregnant. After being confronted in very different ways by the now married-and-expecting Monica and by Lady Elaine Strong (Billie Burke), Cynthia decides she doesn’t want to break up the Strong family or tarnish her own reputation with the scandal her pregnancy would cause. She chooses instead to commit suicide by ripping off her oxygen mask while breaking the long-sought-after 33,000 feet altitude record, after which her plane plummets to the earth and explodes as it hits the ground.

The film and its tragedy are very much products of the pre-code era, that brief period of time between the advent of talkies in 1929 and the strict enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code in 1934. It’s unlikely the film would have received the green light for production even just two years after it was made — given its depictions of “independent” women, infidelity, divorce, and out-of-wedlock pregnancy — even it if does seem to sufficiently “punish” Hepburn’s character for her actions in the end.

In spite of the ending or what the trailer suggests, Christopher Strong doesn’t demonize Cynthia for her ambition and her desires; instead, the film sheds a sympathetic light on her story even as it depicts her pursuit of independence and love as an impossible one within the context of the world she occupies.

The story of such a pursuit and the societal pressures attached likely felt familiar to Dorothy Arzner, writer Zoë Akins, and Katharine Hepburn — each of whom occupied positions of creative control in the film’s production and led successful careers in an industry still notorious for undervaluing women today. Arzner’s film industry career spanned 1919 to 1943, she was openly lesbian, and the only woman at a major studio to make the directorial jump from silent films to the talkies; Akins was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who wrote everything from plays to poetry to literary criticism; and Hepburn’s image is inextricable from the sort of headstrong characters she played throughout her prolific stage and film career.

That’s not to say the trio’s involvement made Christopher Strong problem-free, or that result isn’t informed and shaped by their respective biases and by the studio system within which they operated. But it is worth noting that, in spite of whatever personal views they might have held, Arzner, Akins, and Hepburn could only continue to find work in Hollywood if their films received studio approval and turned a profit. So much of the subversiveness in this film and others often plays out subtly, in a sort of tug-of-war between the daring and the conventional.

Cynthia Darrington’s initial success and later failure both exemplifies this back-and-forth and mirrors real-world attempts to navigate traditionally male fields while maintaining a sense of power. This is clear from the very beginning, and it’s no accident that the first frames of the film present the title card atop an image of “Boadicea and her Daughters” in the foreground with Big Ben looming behind. On a baser level, it establishes the setting and scene, but, more subtly, it visually and thematically links Cynthia to another woman who sought and gained power in a male-dominated space before meeting a terrible end.

Before she meets that end, Cynthia asserts her independence in the way relatively wealthy, educated, and white women could in the 1930s. She lives alone, enjoys intellectual hobbies, moves effortlessly from jodhpurs and trousers to shimmering costumes and flower-trimmed gowns — and, of course, she pushes both her snazzy roadster and her airplane as fast and far as they’ll go, personifying a sort of recklessness that puts most of the men around her on edge. It’s a recklessness that’s tangled up in her approach to the affair with Strong and to other objects of her desire, and the film reinforces Cynthia’s pursuit of things she can’t have through less-than-subtle visual metaphors: while clad in her moth costume, she is unable to pull her eyes away from the match she struck to light Christopher’s cigarette, and the statue built to commemorate Cynthia after her death is a twin to the figure of Icarus flying too close to the sun.

Women and their desires play a key part in Christopher Strong. Each woman in the film is unique, complicated, and resistant to stereotypes, and their relationships with one another and with the world around them change in unexpected ways. At the beginning of the film, Monica and Elaine exist as opposites: Monica is a “modern” party girl, and Elaine is the self-described “traditionalist” who disapproves of her daughter’s late nights out and of her affair with a married man. When this creates an estrangement between Elaine and her daughter, Monica finds a replacement in her relationship with Cynthia. Their friendship only ends near the end of the film, after Monica finds out about her father’s affair with the pilot she once admired. Now married and pregnant, Monica is more aligned with her mother’s “traditional” values; she sees Cynthia as a threat to familial security, even though her own relationship is the byproduct of an affair not unlike Cynthia’s own.

The deterioration of Monica and Cynthia’s friendship is a near-inversion of the peculiar evolution of the relationship between Elaine and Cynthia. Lady Strong at first views Cynthia with wariness and jealousy, but in the film’s last minutes, she sincerely thanks the woman for her influence on both her husband and her daughter. Elaine speaks in a sort of code indicating that she not only knows about the affair, but that she feels it indirectly caused Christopher to change his attitude about Monica marrying a divorced man — helping the pair avoid “wrecking” their only daughter’s life with disapproval and distance.

While Cynthia and Christopher’s affair indirectly bring the Strong family together, it evolves into a source of tension for Cynthia as she attempts to reconcile her romantic desires with her own sense of independence. And as much as Christopher is drawn to Cynthia for her courage and modernity, he does nearly everything he can along the way to stifle both — and Cynthia spends much of the film resisting his repeated attempts to assert possession and mold their relationship into one that mimics the structure of marriage, usually exemplified in his appeals to her to quit flying. After Christopher begs her to drop out of an around-the-world race, Cynthia fiercely replies, “Oh no, certainly not!” When he asks her to “never take such risks again” during their reunion afterward, Cynthia says, in a line that foreshadows events to come, “I must, and you must let me. Promise you’ll always let me do what I want to do, or we’ll both be terribly unhappy.”

This all changes just minutes later, after their first night together and during one of the film’s more “scandalous” scenes. Cynthia’s arm enters the frame as she reaches to switch on a bedside light, her wrist adorned with a jeweled bracelet Christopher has just given her. “I love my beautiful bracelet, and I’ve never given a button for jewels before,” she says, arm still stretched across the screen, “Now, I’m shackled.” Christopher once again asks her to give up flying, and it’s only after she’s “shackled” in this way that she consents — effectively clipping her own wings in an attempt to fit the structural box of their relationship. She is, at this point, unable to reconcile her feelings and their affair with her sense of independence, and so she decides to commit to the former.

But there’s another piece of jewelry at play in the “shackling” scene: a ring Cynthia wears throughout the film, the meaning of which is diametrically opposed to that of the bracelet. When Christopher takes notice of the ring, Cynthia explains that it’s her family’s crest and motto: “Virtus mortem vincit.” He promptly translates for the viewer: “Courage conquers death”, and Cynthia replies near-instantaneously that while courage conquers death, she does not believe it can conquer love. Curiously enough, “virtus,” the Latin word for “courage” in the motto, also translates to “power.” This seems to indicate that courage and power are inextricable, and combined they conquer death — and that Cynthia believes her “power” can’t conquer love because the two are fundamentally incompatible within the context of their relationship structure.

The “shackling” scene is one of many moments in the film that criticizes marriage or marriage-esque relationships and the gendered assumptions often attached. Such cynicism is a hallmark of Arzner’s work, and it’s apparent throughout Christopher Strong. The film shows us that the treasure hunt rests on a series of harmful assumptions — that convention dictates men always cheat and it’s only the rare one that’s faithful; that women will inevitably desire a “love affair” or marriage even if those institutions offer limited security while stifling their freedom; and those who don’t fit in either box are anomalies to be exhibited. At a party midway through the film, Monica’s aunt (Irene Brown) seems to comment directly on one result of accepting those assumptions when she notes that, “If every wife would only keep her misgivings to herself and her fingers crossed, marriage might sometimes be a success.” In other words: a woman must sacrifice her own agency and independence for a patriarchal conceptualization of marriage, and implicitly love, to “work.”

It’s an idea the film hints at again later on, while Cynthia waits for Christopher in an out-of-the-way restaurant. A man in the lobby recognizes and approaches Cynthia to ask about her flying career, but she tells him she’s given it all up. He laments her decision: “You had the instincts of a pioneer. And you gave all of us courage.” Cynthia dryly replies that she seems to have lost her own courage, in an indication that she equates it to power and to her former independence, and feels her relationship with Christopher required its sacrifice.

Cynthia clearly grapples with the realization that a relationship alone, if defined in those terms, will not fully satisfy her — and, moments after speaking with her admirer in the restaurant, she expresses that dissatisfaction in a powerful monologue:

“I’ve nothing to do all day but wait for you or your telephone calls or your telegrams saying you can’t come,” she tells Christopher, “I only know I want to go up again. I want to break records. I want to train hard and not eat or drink all the time. I want to get up at dawn, I want to smell the field in the morning air, not mind getting oil in my hair and on my hands, and I want to talk to the boys I’ve flown with again.”

But the realization and the attempt to re-claim her independence come too late — as just after her declaration, when she’s at the doctor to receive the all-clear to take to the skies again, she finds out she’s pregnant. When Cynthia later presents the situation to Christopher as a hypothetical one, she’s unsettled by his reply that it would be his duty to marry her if she were pregnant; and while he admits he’s not averse to the idea, he would hate hurting his wife and daughter in the process. When Cynthia says she could manage a life and a child without him, even if doing so would tarnish her reputation, Christopher replies, “Well, I wouldn’t let you.”

The outcomes aren’t ones Cynthia can accept. Abortion is unavailable to her in the context of the film, and a pregnancy out of wedlock would cause a scandal and tarnish her legacy. Even if she did consent to marry Christopher, she doesn’t want to break up the Strong family just when they’ve managed to reconcile — and after the failed attempt to make herself fit the mold of a “traditional” relationship, Cynthia also knows she wouldn’t feel fulfilled by a life defined in those terms. She’s surrounded by undesirable choices, and so she escapes from them the only way she knows how.

Cynthia’s inability to resolve her situation in any way other than permanently removing herself from it reads at first, as the trailer suggests, like an indictment of the character and her actions: she was too recklessly independent in life and in love, and her pursuit of the impossible does not come without consequence. But the last moments of the film aren’t just about Cynthia Darrington, and the spectacle of her death forces the viewer to focus on factors that lead her there. As she pushes her plane higher and higher, the film’s pivotal moments flash in a montage over the altimeter — and we realize the film is not a critique of an ambitious woman herself or of her desires, but of the society that prevents her from obtaining fulfillment and leads her to conclude she has no other option but to tear the oxygen mask from her face and let her plane crash to the ground.

The ending is a far cry from the one that Cynthia deserves, especially since the film suggests her choice is driven by the pressure to prioritize the Strong family’s conventional happiness over her own desires. And while she declares, “Courage can conquer even love,” in her final note to Christopher, the sentiment leaves us with the unsatisfying idea that she has to choose one or the other, and that the expression of her power leads her to such a drastic end.

But as imperfect and disappointing as it is, there is a tragic sort of reasoning behind the self-sacrifice. In Cynthia’s eyes, the decision to end it all while breaking an altitude record everyone thought impossible to break is an not only assertion of power, but one that allows the idea of her courage as an aviatrix to live on after her death.

It’s a faint yet important silver lining, as Cynthia’s ability to inspire the people around her with that courage is clear throughout the film. Monica gushes with admiration the first time she meets Cynthia; the city gives the aviatrix a ticker-tape parade upon her successful flight around the world; a woman asks for Cynthia’s autograph and praises her as a heroine who gave everyone at her school “courage for everything.”

As her plane falls from the sky, we are left with the smallest consolation that Cynthia Darrington will continue to live on as a symbol to others — a beacon of courage and a reminder to keep trying, climbing, flying, even if the sun threatens to burn the feathers from your arms.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Great Kate: A Woman for All Ages

Quote of the Day: Judith Mayne on Dorothy Arzner

Taylor Kenkel is an ex-copy editor who broke up with the newspaper industry after it found out about her affair with the Oxford comma. She’s now a librarian, and spends too much time thinking about 1930s-1940s film, feminism, comics, queer culture, and too many fandoms to even list. You can find her on Twitter @treegeekay, where she tweets about all of those things (and many more) when she should probably be writing instead.

Too Feminine, Too Pretty, and the Gendered Bias in the Critique of Sofia Coppola’s Films

When it comes to the critique of Sofia Coppola, her filmic style is too often described along the lines of being too pretty, too feminine, or as style over substance. … Male directors, however, who exhibit the same attention to style and aesthetics, are not held to this same ideal. … There is a double standard in the way prettiness is regarded in cinema. “Pretty” is for female directors, but for male directors, prettiness isn’t ever uttered, and reverence is received in its place.

This guest post written by Claire White appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

It seems somewhat expected to have an article on Sofia Coppola during Women Directors Week. To some, it may even seem unfair, especially since there are so many amazingly talented female directors who do not receive nearly as much, nor enough, recognition. Having not released a film since 2013’s based-on-a-true-story teen crime film The Bing Ring, the fact that she lingers in our minds is a true testament to her artistry and impact as a director. However, while being one of the most discussed women directors, it is hard to think of a female director who is under as much scrutiny as Sofia Coppola. This is especially true when it comes to her signature pretty and feminine filmic style.

When it comes to the critique of Coppola, her filmic style is too often described along the lines of being too pretty, too feminine, or as style over substance. Peter Travers from Rolling Stone enjoys her films yet felt the need to justify why he might enjoy such a feminine film: “With one critic calling it ‘frippery’ and the Internet buzz saying it’s only “for girls and gays,” Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette makes it challenging for a guy to do her a solid.” William Morris writes at The Boston Globe, “As art, the movie [Marie Antoinette] is neither shallow nor profound, just inconsequential.” For The Bling Ring, Ty Burr describes the film as “a beautiful zoo” with characters “beautiful to look at” but feels the film lacks sympathy. Amy Woolsey’s address of this supposed emptiness, published at Bitch Flicks, highlights the gendered nature of such a critique. Male directors, however, who exhibit the same attention to style and aesthetics, are not held to this same ideal. As explored in Rosalind Galt’s book Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image, prettiness in film is not exclusively female or feminine, and is thus unfair to use as a critique against women directors’ films.

With five feature films (The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette, Somewhere, The Bling Ring) and with a sixth, The Beguiled, being released later this year, Sofia Coppola has firmly established herself as a modern-day auteur. All her films are about girls and young women. She emphasizes mood, atmosphere, and slow moving narratives. Her dreamy colors and aesthetics, soft tones, use of soundtracks, and undeniable presence of the female voice have become synonymous with her name.

In his essay, “Off with Hollywood’s Head: Sofia Coppola as Feminine Auteur,” Todd Kennedy addresses the harsh critique on Coppola in the reviews of her films. He postulates:

“…the implication that a unique visual style lacks meaning because it is, essentially, pretty speaks toward the manner in which the critics seem unprepared to evaluate Coppola’s films on her own terms. Choosing to develop her own, feminine film form, she causes critics (and often audiences) not to know what to do with her films…” (2010, 38).

I suppose this is where I mention that Sofia Coppola is the daughter of esteemed 20th-century auteur Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather Trilogy, Apocalypse Now). Her lineage is part of the reason why her films are considered under so much scrutiny (not to mention the fact that women-directed films typically face more scrutiny). When seasoned cinephiles see the Coppola name on a film, I’m sure a soft, atmospheric film about five alienated sisters, or an 80s synth-pop, candy-colored romp at Versailles was not what they were expecting. In effect, Sofia Coppola as a director seems to be viewed as a little girl who was allowed to play with a film camera because of her father’s accomplishments and not necessarily as a talented director, in her own right.

Furthermore, Kennedy argues that “there is an implied, gendered language inherent of the attacks upon Sofia Coppola” (2010, 38). The implication of films being “too feminine,” as if masculinity is the default, is evidence of the sexist, masculine domination and nature of the film industry and film criticism.

Rosalind Galt outlines that prettiness in film has always been a critique, “defined by its apparently obvious worthlessness” (100, 7). But in modern cinema, it is something that is held against gender. Throughout time, film critics regard “pretty” as “merely pretty” and thus as films lacking “depth, seriousness or complexity of meaning” (2011, 6). Compared to other male directors with similar styles, this worthlessness is only ever present in regard to a women director like Sofia Coppola. Wes Anderson has cultivated a unique, decorative style for his films, but unlike Coppola, he is revered for it. Sofia Coppola’s distinctive filmic style has been parodied, but arguably not analyzed and celebrated to the extent of Wes Anderson’s films. Joe Wright’s period dramas are filled with just as much decadence and prettiness as Marie Antoinette, but he is instead praised for it.

There is a double standard in the way prettiness is regarded in cinema. “Pretty” is for female directors, but for male directors, prettiness isn’t ever uttered, and reverence is received in its place.

Let’s compare:

Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation and Damien Chazelle’s La La Land: both beautiful and visually stunning films, both pretty films. Each film was made while the respective directors were young, and both were in the early stages of their career. Both films received critical acclaim.

Sofia Coppola was the third woman (the first woman from the U.S.) to ever be nominated for the Best Director Academy Award for her sophomore feature, which she also wrote. The film received numerous nominations and awards throughout the season, and was nominated further for Best Film, Best Screenplay, and Best Actor at the Academy Awards. Sofia Coppola lost both Best Film and Best Director to the fantasy epic (and male-dominated) Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, and instead was awarded Best Screenplay — high praise for her work, but not for the film’s direction and visuals.

In contrast, Damien Chazelle’s third feature film, La La Land, a visual spectacle of music and colors that mimic glorious Technicolor—and so pretty, but almost no one utters the word (although this review does). Chazelle swept through awards season, taking the Best Director award at the Academy Awards, but it never became synonymous with a pretty film. While the film has become divisive amongst film critics, the criticisms tend to focus on its depiction of jazz, the lack of skill in the singing and dancing, the lack of LGBTQ characters, and the film’s “unbearable whiteness.” Its criticisms aren’t coded in gendered language.

Sofia Coppola’s films are regularly accused, of having style over substance, but so does La La Land. Hiding behind the spectacle and the Old Hollywood Musical revival, was an empty story which lacked the emotional impact needed to really pack a punch during the third act. What we saw of aspiring actress Mia Dolan (Emma Stone, who carried the movie) and jazz purist Sebastian only skimmed the surface of what I believe could have been intensely complex characters. We as an audience saw so little of their relationship (a montage worth of love, essentially) that when the two broke apart, the film flatlined until the next musical number. The film is pretty, a love-letter to Hollywood, and Hollywood loves itself. While it won many awards and has received praise from film critics, many critics have denounced or criticized the film, they just haven’t done so in the same gendered way as Sofia Coppola’s films.

With the domination of male directors in the film industry, women too often see themselves represented on-screen through the male lens: Laura Mulvey’s term of the Male Gaze. Through the Male Gaze, women are seen on-screen as static and eroticized objects. In effect, it is rare to see women on-screen outside of the Male Gaze. Sofia Coppola emphasizes the female voice and representing the female experience and girlhood in an array of contexts — yet all quite similar, whether it be the loneliness and isolation of the Lisbon household, of Tokyo or the Palace of Versailles — it’s enlightening to see on-screen. The double standard in film criticism and film awards diminishes the importance and achievements of the female director and the female voice on-screen.

Sofia Coppola’s latest film The Beguiled is set to be released this year with a screening at the Cannes Film Festival. She is one of three women who have been selected to screen for competition at Cannes, a number which remains too low. Set in Civil War-era Virginia at a young women’s school, led by Nicole Kidman and (Coppola-favorite) Kirsten Dunst, the girls and women’s lives are disrupted when a wounded soldier (Colin Farrell) arrives at their house. A thriller, and a remake of the 1971 Western, this film looks to be much darker and less colorful as her previous films, and is a genre-change. While “her approach” on The Beguiled “was different,” Coppola told the Los Angeles Times that she “really wanted to emphasize that lacy, feminine world.” Perhaps this film is her response to previous critiques — that she can do substance and she is here to show it to you. A radical interpretation would be the “vengeful bitches” in the film represent Coppola herself, fighting back against patriarchal society, for a soldier is the very stereotypical depiction of masculinity. The film industry better watch out, Sofia Coppola is not going to take this standing down.

Bibliography:

Kennedy, T 2010, ‘Off With Hollywood’s Head: Sofia Coppola as Feminine Auteur’, Film Criticism, vol 35, issue 1, pp 37-59

Galt, R 2011, Pretty: film and the aesthetic image, Columbia University Press, New York.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Sofia Coppola as Auteur: Historical Femininity and Agency in Marie Antoinette

Sofia Coppola and the Silent Woman

Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette Surprisingly Feminist

The Virgin Suicides: Striking Similarities Between the Lisbon and Romanov Sisters

The Repercussions of Repressing Teenage Girls in Mustang and The Virgin Suicides

Bad Girls and (Not-So)-Guilty Pleasures in The Bling Ring

The Bling Ring: American Emptiness

Othering and Alienation in Lost in Translation

Claire White is a Screen & Cultural Studies and Media & Communications graduate, bookseller, and production intern based in Melbourne, Australia. She is founder and writer of the all-female stage and screen blog Cause a Cine. You can follow her on Twitter @clairencew.

One Woman’s View: Martha Fiennes’ ‘Onegin’

Director Martha Fiennes unlocks this costume classic for a modern audience, deftly allowing the two main characters to take their share of the center stage to tell their stories. While Ralph Fiennes’ Onegin plays a familiar type of romantic male, Liv Tyler’s Tatyana is not often familiar, even in modern love stories. She does not play the martyr, pining for someone she can’t have, but rather takes stock of what she needs in life and makes her choices accordingly, regardless of how others may feel.

This guest post written by Paulette Reynolds appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors. | Spoilers ahead.

“A woman’s film is a movie that places at the center of its universe a female who is trying to deal with the emotional, social, and psychological problems that are specifically connected to the fact that she is a woman.” — Jeanine Basinger

Although film historian Jeanine Basinger was referring to a particular period of films about women in her seminal book, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, she was also one of the earliest female film critics to hone in on what are the essential elements of the woman’s film. She defines such a film as “…[Where] women actually take on heroic dimensions, bursting forth from the boundaries of female behavior to become “female heroes”…[as] a woman who defies conventional rules and redefines her life on her own terms…” Published in 1993, many of Basinger’s observations are now just breaking through the cinematic glass ceiling, thanks in part to the recent upsurge in the Women’s Movement. This awareness and celebration of female empowerment is growing across multiple media platforms, as a new generation of women artists add their voices to the demand for equal representation in the entertainment industry.

In the spirit of that celebration, I’d like to include Martha Fiennes to Bitch Flicks‘ list of women directors to honor. Fiennes falls into that category of female film directors who holds a scant résumé of two narrative films and a documentary — Onegin (1999), Indians’ Sacred Spirit (1999) and Chromophobia (2005) — yet deserves a second look, especially for Onegin, her directorial debut.

Onegin is based on the 1833 novel, Eugene Onegin, written by what many consider to be the father of modern Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin. In his celebrated story, he creates a woman of strength and empowerment in Tatyana, the first female hero of Russian literature. Martha Fiennes’ adaptation appears to focus on Eugene Onegin, a bored and aimless Russian aristocrat (portrayed by Ralph Fiennes), who’s forced back to his ancestral roots when his rich uncle dies. He reluctantly takes up residence on his new estate, which include several mansions, villages and serfs. That he is now wealthy beyond imagination — and hence, more powerful — means little to Onegin, who scorns the idle rich (while including himself in his contemptuous worldview).

A chance encounter with a young poet, Vladimir (Toby Stephens), from a neighboring estate makes his stay in the unsophisticated countryside bearable, especially when he meets Tatyana Larina, played by Liv Tyler. Tatyana’s sister, Olga (Lena Headey) and Vladimir are expecting to marry, much to her mother’s annoyance, since she looks forward to both her daughters marrying within their social circle. Onegin, with his worldly experience, can see at once that Olga is rather vain and shallow, and considers her beneath Vladimir’s station, but she suits the young poet’s youthful ego and he eagerly awaits their wedding day. Tatyana however, is not so easily stereotyped, as she is no country girl looking forward to the bridal veil. This serious young woman reads literature, which causes her mother to fear it will warp her feminine sensibilities.

During a small dinner party, Tatyana firmly voices her disagreement with the Russian policy of serfdom, something that Onegin initially shares when he states he will free his serfs and rent them his land to farm. Later, curiosity gets the better of Tatyana and she seeks out Onegin in his library. She asks him if he’ll really free his serfs, and he answers that his idle lifestyle rules out the responsibility of maintaining the land, so he really doesn’t care about the question of serfdom at all. Rather than be offended by his lack of political conscience, Tatyana values his honesty, something that she sees few people display in her small community.

While Tatyana and Olga are like oil and water, one common belief they share is in the romantic ideal of love, and Tatyana wastes no time in falling for the aloof, brooding Onegin. Her lack of experience encourages her to read about love and romance in books and she tries to make sense of why a cosmopolitan man would hang around the rural shade of an empty estate. The viewer is already aware that Onegin cares more than he’s willing to admit, and Tatyana takes a chance and shares her feelings for him in an ink-smudged letter. Once sent however, she notices her inky hands and slowly wipes them on her white nightgown, and as the quiet moonlight falls upon her we can feel her misgivings giving birth.

Tatyana’s mother invites Onegin to her daughter’s naming party and she takes the opportunity to confront him about his silence. Diplomatically, he tells her that any affair they might have would end in ruination for her, due to his dislike of marriage. “Can’t you see where this leads? A declaration, a kiss, a wedding, family, obligation, boredom, adultery.” He sees her feelings as “romantic imaginations” of a young girl that will ripen into something more meaningful for someone else at a later time. She sorrowfully states, “You curse yourself,” and no sooner are the words uttered than everything goes horribly wrong for Onegin. In the next few hours, he will be forced into a fatal duel with Vladimir and flee Russia for a more peaceful isolation.

Six years later, Onegin returns and happens to spy a woman at a ball hosted by his cousin, Russian Crown Prince Nikitin. His eyes and the camera follow this tall, dark-haired woman, who’s scarlet red gown stands out amid a sea of pale dresses and fans. She casually encircles the entire room, proud and confident, as we realize that it’s Tatyana. Onegin asks the Prince who she is, and is astounded to recognize the girl who once gave her heart to him is now Nikitin’s Princess. He asks for the next dance as a pretext to speaking with her, but she gently rebuffs him and walks away. “It’s true,” her husband confides sadly, “She doesn’t like to dance.”

In the days that follow, Onegin feverishly pursues Tatyana with his own letter and declarations of love, but it doesn’t take much to see that this Tatyana is not so easily swayed. Although she married as society expected her to do, she wisely chose a man who could be happy with an independent woman. Prince Nikitin might one day govern a country, but in the matters of marriage and sex Tatyana rules her world with a calm and steady grace. Onegin is finally able to snatch a few moments alone with Tatyana, where he begs her to run away with him. She tearfully informs him that he’s just a bit too late, finding it ironic that he would eagerly aid in her downfall, now that it is he who feels the sharp pains of unrequited love. The mature Tatyana may still care for Onegin, but she refuses to go against her own standards to ease his suffering and her discomfort. She orders him not to see her ever again and walks away, leaving Onegin to wander alone, yet again.

It might be helpful to the Western gaze to keep in mind that on one level Onegin and Tatyana represent twin aspects of the universal “Russian soul” in literature, blazing with passion just below a cool surface. Director Martha Fiennes unlocks this costume classic for a modern audience, deftly allowing the two main characters to take their share of the center stage to tell their stories. While Ralph Fiennes’ Onegin plays a familiar type of romantic male, Liv Tyler’s Tatyana is not often familiar, even in modern love stories. She does not play the martyr, pining for someone she can’t have, but rather takes stock of what she needs in life and makes her choices accordingly, regardless of how others may feel. Tyler’s well-crafted performance brings Puskin’s female hero forever into our consciousness, where she can add her voice to the growing feminine collective.

References:

Jeanine Basinger. A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930–1960 Wesleyan University Press: Middletown, Connecticut | Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1993. Print

Paulette Reynolds is the Editor and Publisher of Cine Mata’s Movie Madness film appreciation blog. Film viewing and theory are her passion, but film noir remains her first love. Paulette breathes the rarified Austin, Texas air and can be seen on Twitter @CinesMovieBlog.

‘The Love Witch’ Looks Familiar but Feels Remarkably Fresh

Yet behind the eye-catching homage to Technicolor cinematography, the retro-glamorous hair and makeup, and the stylized performances of the pitch-perfect cast [Anna Biller’s ‘The Love Witch’] is a sharp-eyed satire of how society views female sexuality as simultaneously desirable and dangerous. …It is a remarkable look at the way our modern world views and values women — a serious statement about sexual politics wrapped up in a cocoon of cats-eye liner and cake, making it all the more dangerously potent.

This guest post written by Lee Jutton originally appeared at Medium and appears here as part of our theme week on Women Directors. It is cross-posted with permission.

On the surface, director Anna Biller’s sophomore feature, The Love Witch, might look like a grab-bag of filmmaking tropes from the 1960’s and 70’s, a contemporary film designed to play on audience nostalgia for cinematic eras gone by (a recurring theme at theaters this winter; see: La La Land). Yet behind the eye-catching homage to Technicolor cinematography, the retro-glamorous hair and makeup, and the stylized performances of the pitch-perfect cast is a sharp-eyed satire of how society views female sexuality as simultaneously desirable and dangerous.

We first meet Elaine Parks (Samantha Robinson) as she drives along a quintessentially Hitchcockian rear projection of the Northern California coast in her cherry-red convertible. She devours cigarette after cigarette, continuously stubbing them out in her car’s ashtray; her long dark hair is made even longer by a shiny synthetic wig, and her eye makeup is heavy and hypnotic. She’s the ultimate honey trap, with everything about her look and attitude designed to project maximum glamour and sensuality. Through voice-over, Elaine informs us that she’s leaving her old life in San Francisco behind after the death of her ex-husband, Jerry, to move to the small town of Eureka and start anew. After Jerry left her, Elaine sought solace in the arms of a coven of witches, and is now a master (better, mistress) of love and sex spells. Obsessed with obtaining the love that Jerry always held at arm’s length, Elaine is determined to do whatever it takes to make a man fall for her, and when not actively pursuing love herself, she constantly urges her friend Trish (Laura Waddell) to do whatever she can to make her own husband happy — even at the expense of her own wants and desires. Elaine strives to embody all of men’s fantasies about the ideal woman — she cooks delicious meals, performs spontaneous stripteases in sexy lingerie, and coos words of comfort every time one of them starts feeling insecure (which is often). She both literally and figuratively casts a spell over nearly every man that crosses her path. Yet Elaine’s spells start to seem more like curses when the men she targets start meeting rather unpleasant ends.

Elaine’s coven, led by the creepy Gahan (Jared Sanford) and his partner, Barbara (Jennifer Ingrum), spends a substantial amount of time camped out in a burlesque club; dancing is how Elaine first met Barbara and was introduced to the world of witchcraft. Gahan and Barbara teach new recruits how to use dance to manipulate the male gaze, and how to embrace their sexuality as a source of power just as potent as magic. During one scene, set against the backdrop of a burlesque performance, Gahan and Barbara lecture two girls on how the history of witchcraft has been eternally tied to women’s sexuality. Women are supposed to be sensual and available, but never too aggressively — never too much. Then, men feel threatened by them, afraid that they’ll lose control of themselves (and naturally, this lack of self-control is always the woman’s fault, never the man’s). The Love Witch explores these conflicting feelings and then some, examining the ways men view women — not to mention, the ways other women view women, too. Biller fills her film with close-ups of her casts’ eyes and mouths, lingering over their heavy false eyelashes, glossy lips, and frequently imperfect teeth as though daring you to succumb to them.

Biller, a multitalented artist who also wrote, produced, edited, scored and designed the costumes and sets of The Love Witch, is clearly a dedicated scholar of the pulp fiction and thrillers of the 60’s and 70’s. The film, despite taking place in the modern day, thoroughly sticks to its retro conceit, right down to being one of the last films to cut an original camera negative on 35 millimeter film. The campy tone and stylized performances are so spot-on in regards to mid-century, low-budget horror that I kept expecting icon of the era Udo Kier to pop up at any moment. It is lovingly made down to the last detail, from the frilly and frothy Victorian tea room that the women of Eureka frequent to the jewel-toned paintings of pentagrams that decorate Elaine’s apartment. So many modern films are shot to be dark and dour; The Love Witch, by pleasant contrast, dazzles with its delightful use of color and light.

The Love Witch is lovely to look at, but like Elaine herself, it’s so much more than just a pretty face. (Speaking of Elaine: Samantha Robinson’s performance is an absolute stunner; her shy, breathy voice and fluttering eyelashes create a picture-perfect facade of feminine fragility that barely masks the seething anger and disappointment within.) It’s laugh-out-loud funny, cartoonishly violent, and so, so smart. It might look and feel like a film from the past, but at its heart, it is a remarkable look at the way our modern world views and values women — a serious statement about sexual politics wrapped up in a cocoon of cats-eye liner and cake, making it all the more dangerously potent.

Lee Jutton has directed short films starring a killer toaster, a killer Christmas tree, and a not-killer leopard. She previously reviewed new DVD and theatrical releases as a staff writer for Just Press Play and currently reviews television shows as a staff writer for TV Fanatic. You can follow her on Medium for more film reviews and on Twitter for an excessive amount of opinions on German soccer.

Teen Girls Coming of Age in ‘Clueless’ and ‘The Edge of Seventeen’

These two women directors, Amy Heckerling (‘Clueless’) and Kelly Fremon Craig (‘The Edge of Seventeen’), use their films to give a focused examination on the insecurity and self-doubt teen girls face. Cher and Nadine’s personal struggles, as well as their relationships with older mentors, reveal how patriarchal expectations shape their lives as they come of age.

This guest post written by Emma Casley appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

The Edge of Seventeen’s protagonist Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld) says, “There are two types of people in the world: The people who naturally excel in life and the people who hope all those people die in a big explosion,” placing herself firmly in the second camp. Though Cher Horowitz (Alicia Silverstone) is the star of an entirely different film released 21 years before, there’s little doubt that Nadine would categorize the Clueless character in the first group. Despite differences in tone and the personalities of their leads, both films share a similarity in subject matter: teenage girls growing up. And both films are written and directed by women – a rarity in mainstream movies.

These two women directors, Amy Heckerling (Clueless) and Kelly Fremon Craig (The Edge of Seventeen), use their films to give a focused examination on the insecurity and self-doubt teen girls face. Cher and Nadine’s personal struggles, as well as their relationships with older mentors, reveal how patriarchal expectations shape their lives as they come of age. Though the two films both focus on a very particular demographic of white, well-off teenagers, they do point to the ways in which even these girls of relative privilege suffer under the boundaries of gender roles. The films do what they aim to do well: give depth and nuance to a demographic that is often written off as being frivolous and shallow. However there are obvious limits in what these films can portray. Though casting a critical look at male privilege, both films leave issues like racial and economic inequality untouched. The success of Heckerling and Craig’s films demonstrates the need for even more diversity of voices in film rather than being the end goal of more inclusive filmmaking.

The similarities between Clueless and The Edge of Seventeen can be most clearly seen in the parallels between their lead characters. Their actions reveal how they both struggle with the immense pressure that society places on young women. Cher sees herself as an expert and mentor for her family, fellow students, and teachers; Nadine frets over her social awkwardness and isolation. Cher spends her weekend choosing non-school books to read and workout regimens; Nadine’s nights off involve crying while throwing up into a toilet while her one friend (Haley Lu Richardson) holds her hair back. Cher uses strategically delivered flowers and chocolates to woo the object of her affection; Nadine sends a painfully awkward and explicit Facebook message to her crush about “doing it in the Petland stockroom.”

Cher might present herself as more put together through reading Fit or Fat and working out to buns of steel, but this urge to constantly “improve” herself and others demonstrates how she sees herself as something that needs to be improved upon. She complains about “feeling like such a heifer” after spending the day eating candy and snacks, and after her friend declines her suggestions for sex, she worries that she wasn’t presenting herself as attractive enough: “Did my hair get flat? Did I stumble into some bad lighting? What’s wrong with me?” While it’s a line played for laughs in the film, Cher clearly isn’t so different from Nadine as she despairs that she “feels so grotesque” and outcast from her cooler peers. They just have different ways of expressing this insecurity.

It doesn’t help that the few female role models Cher and Nadine have don’t provide much reassurance that things will get any better once they reach adulthood. Nadine’s mother (Kyra Sedgwick) seems to be constantly on the edge of breaking down – struggling between her job and taking care of her children and dealing with the emotional aftermath of her husband’s death. Cher’s mother has passed away, but her teacher Miss Geist (Twink Caplan) serves as an example of what the future might have in store for her. Similar to Nadine’s mom, Miss Geist is overworked and lonely. Though Miss Geist has a happier ending in Clueless, she still demonstrates the difficulties of living up to social expectations, even as an adult. Nadine and Cher are young women struggling with insecurity and feeling like they’re failing to perform femininity in the right way and they watch as their older female mentors struggle with the exact same performance. Nadine’s mother even tells her that she comforts herself thinking that everyone is as miserable and dead inside as she is – not exactly an “it gets better” message for the teenager.

Especially in comparison to many of the male characters in both films, the women in Clueless and Edge of Seventeen are unhappy and flawed, unable to provide support for the young female protagonists. While one reading might interpret this as plain old sexism in the writing, another way to look at it is that these films showcase the wear and tear that these women experience under a patriarchal society. While Nadine and Cher feel the pressure to twist and conform to impossible standards, their male counterparts (both teenagers and adults) are allowed to just simply be. This translates into many of the male characters being mentors or supportive figures for the female characters: Nadine has her teacher Mr. Bruner (Woody Harrelson); her mother has her son Darian (Blake Jenner); Cher has her father (Dan Hedaya) and Josh (Paul Rudd). Darian might express frustration with being the only “stable” one in the family, but The Edge of Seventeen never shows him struggle to live up to gendered social expectations as his mother and sister experience. Both films portray many of the male characters in a very positive way: they act as a sympathetic ear to Nadine and Cher’s problems without having much personal stake in the matter.

However, both films also demonstrate how a lack of awareness of societal pressures on women manifests a much less positive, and much more dangerous, way in other male characters. The Edge of Seventeen and Clueless contain very similar scenes that take place between the protagonists and a male classmate while they drive together in a car. In both cases, the girls reject the boys’ sexual advances and subsequently are stranded after leaving the car to escape the situation. In these scenes, from the boy’s perspectives, they were responding to “obvious” signs that the girls were interested in a romantic and/or sexual relationship with them. But the films suggest that actually the boys simply felt their own desires and assumed that the girls would accommodate them.

In this way, the male characters in both films, whether they are understanding mentors or aggressive sexual assaulters, are ignorant of their own power. Characters like Mr. Bruner and Cher’s father can be so “good” because they’re not dealing with the same kinds of social pressures as characters like Nadine’s mother and Miss Geist are, and can instead be pillars of stability in the main characters’ lives. But their pillar-like quality can be seen in a different way: as the men stay static, then women must constantly bend and be flexible to accommodate their positions. Cher’s father and Mr. Bruner remain ignorant to this dynamic, even when offering support to the two girls. This lack of awareness shows its darker side in the two car scenes. The two boys assume that they “know best” in these situations and expect the girls to acquiesce to their advances. Neither film gives credence to this assumption. They instead give a sympathetic view to Cher and Nadine’s hurt and betrayal, pointing the finger at the dangerous presumption of male privilege. Clueless and The Edge of Seventeen show empathy for the deeply flawed female characters and the societal oppression they face. They also demonstrate how men, as kind advisers or dangerous predators, have a tendency to assume the impartiality of their views — of course they can give good advice to their students and daughters, of course they know that when a girl gets in a car with them it’s an invitation for sex. One of the main functions of male privilege is men not even knowing that they have it.

Of course other kinds of structural oppression exist in conjunction with male privilege, and both Clueless and The Edge of Seventeen center on the lives of well-off, white, suburban girls. The two films focus on giving detailed portraits of a single character so it does make sense within the context of their stories for them both to have such a focus on a particular demographic and lifestyle. However, neither film deviates from the larger film canon’s intense fixation on the stories of the rich and the white and the otherwise privileged at the expensive of other narratives. Both directors have discussed their process in writing and directing their films; Heckerling details how she fought for Clueless to focus on the girls rather than the boys, and Craig used her own experiences with self loathing and insecurity to inform Nadine’s struggles. So while it might not have been essential that these films give nuance to female coming-of-age stories, in both cases, their role as writers and directors shaped the films into stories that echoed their own life experiences. What would other women, of different backgrounds, bring to their stories if they were given more opportunities to get behind the camera?

For both Heckerling and Craig, their efforts have translated into films that bring depth to the stories of teenage girls, but Clueless and The Edge of Seventeen shouldn’t be seen as the end goal of gender inclusivity in film direction. They represent two good examples of what can be accomplished when women directors are given more control over the stories they tell, but there are still a vast array of voices that have remained unheard.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Clueless: Way Existential

Emma Casley is a Brooklyn-based film writer. Last year she participated in the New York Film Festival’s Critics Academy. She can be found wandering the streets for good coffee and also on Twitter @EmmaLCasley.

‘A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night’: A Vampire with No Name

Enter The Girl, a mostly silent observer to the rotting underbelly of Bad City. She shares a kinship with the likes of Shane and The Man with No Name — a hero with mysterious origins and questionable morality who ultimately defends those who cannot help themselves. … Once The Girl arrives, it’s essentially Amirpour’s playground as she honors and subverts Westerns and horror films.

This guest post written by Samantha Cross appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

The vampire as metaphor has had a fascinating staying power since Bram Stoker’s Dracula turned Eastern European folklore into a gothic tale of sexual repression and liberation. At times, vampires are feral beasts of horror or sexy, brooding heroes tortured by their own immortality. Or… Twilight. The point is that vampires, while we may associate them with certain traits, can be as powerful, vulnerable, and insightful as the narrative allows. Their monstrosity is subjective, giving storytellers ample room to explore the nature of vampires and the worlds they inhabit. In A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour crafts a vampire that is neither virtuous nor villain, but somewhere in between. Though she is what we would typically classify as a “monster,” it becomes clear that Bad City has more than its fair share of demons.

Billed as “the first Iranian vampire Western,” A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night exists in a deliberately nebulous space, keeping it open to interpretation. One can view it through a feminist lens as The Girl (Sheila Vand) primarily attacks men who bully and exert their own power on others, mainly coming to the defense of a sex worker, Atti (Mozhan Marnò), who’s connected to both Saeed (Dominic Rains) the local drug dealer and Arash’s (Arash Marandi) father who struggles with addiction, Hossein (Marshall Manesh). There’s also commentary to be gleaned from the frequent shots of oil rigs, the open, almost casual display of dead bodies in a ditch, and the stagnant feel of Bad City that appears to be stuck in several time periods as the director’s feelings on Iran and the country’s culture. Amirpour, however, finds the interpretation to be more reflective of the interpreter. As for her own view on the themes in her film, she told the Los Angeles Times:

“In this case, it’s really about loneliness. A vampire is the loneliest, most isolated cut-off type of creature. She also has something very bad to hide about who she is and it’s a brilliant disguise. It becomes a way to stay under the radar and underestimated. There are a million ways to read it. It will tell you more about you than it does about me.”

Upon a second viewing of the film, through my most critical eye (the left one), I think Amirpour’s ideas of loneliness, coupled with the elements of disguise and isolation, fit in perfectly with what should be called an “industrial” Western. Like John Ford, Amirpour uses her wide shots to establish the vast landscape of the film’s world, but instead of lush valleys and sweeping canyons we get a flat, barren desert where oil rigs have replaced the painted hills. We’re not meant to look upon Bad City and its surroundings with awe. We’re meant to understand how singular it is, a mirage of a vibrant city filled with vagrants and criminals who prey upon the less fortunate; a place where everyone who can is trying to get out of Dodge by any means necessary. Basic setup for your Magnificent Sevens, Silverados, or Unforgivens, right?

Enter The Girl, a mostly silent observer to the rotting underbelly of Bad City. She shares a kinship with the likes of Shane and The Man with No Name — a hero with mysterious origins and questionable morality who ultimately defends those who cannot help themselves. It’s a slow buildup to her first appearance in the movie, roughly fifteen minutes, but Amirpour devotes that time to crafting the right circumstances for The Girl to enter and sets up how one decision leads the rest of the film onward.

One such means of exploration is through a tried-and-true staple of Westerns: the standoff. The highlight of many films, it can be as simple as a duel at high noon or as action-packed as a ragtag group of hired guns staring down another group of hired guns for possession of a small town. It’s a moment of tension designed to make the payoff, ya know, killing someone, that much more intense. Amirpour flips the script, so to speak, using the standoff for the deliberate purpose of taunting The Girl’s potential victims as well as the audience. She establishes a pattern early on: observe, follow, and strike. The cover of night adds to the horror element and the heightened sound makes her footsteps audible, but The Girl stays far enough away that her marks are unnerved just enough by her presence. I’m especially fond of her shadow game with Hossein. It’s humorous but still cut with the right amount of suspicion over how it will play out given her previous encounter with Saeed earlier in the film. It’s only when she’s ready to strike that the gap closes and the standoff ends. The kill becomes an intimate yet feral moment because, unlike her male counterparts who brandish guns at a distance, The Girl’s sole weapon is her own body.

The standoff within A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night also applies to Amirpour’s use of close-ups. A lot of time is spent in keeping the tension as tight as possible, especially once we know The Girl’s game and how she executes her brand of “justice.” Because The Girl is a taciturn character, the emotional beats and her contemplative nature have to be seen up close, which, in turn, heightens the anxiety of the scene even more. The intimacy of the shots between The Girl and Arash are rife with romantic tension, but there’s a similar feeling of dread as the camera cuts back and forth. Her proximity may very well mean death for the second party. It’s a standoff created by the camera, somewhat reminiscent of Sergio Leone, but Amirpour relies more on letting the takes breathe instead of intensive cutting, letting Vand and Marandi’s eyes convey far more than the dialogue.

In many ways, The Girl resembles a comic book vigilante as much as a cowboy anti-hero. I mean, come on; a silent avenger of the night draped in black who inspires as much fear as the monsters she fights? Where have I seen that before? Batman, obviously. The heroic element was not lost on Amirpour either, though her inspiration came more from The Girl’s choice of costume:

“In Iran, I have had to wear a hijab [headscarf], and personally I find it completely suffocating. I don’t want to be covered up in all that cloth. But there was something about the chador though. It’s made of a different fabric. It’s soft and silky and it catches the air. When I put it on, I felt supernatural. But I also get to take it off.”

The themes of disguise and concealment are as endemic to Westerns as they are to superheroes. Cinematic cowboys are always running from something — the law, their past — so remaking themselves and hiding from their previous actions requires some measure of disguise, whether it’s a new name or a handy little domino mask. Either way, the conclusion is the same: you can never truly escape who you are. The Girl goes through a similar struggle. Atti asks The Girl, after a very strange conversation, “What are you?” Amirpour then cuts to The Girl back on the streets, seemingly contemplating this question, as she slowly approaches and feeds on a homeless man. It’s not the subtlest piece of character development, but it serves to address the supposed virtue of the The Girl. Stalking the villains of Bad City is easy enough, but what’s a vampire to do when they’re not readily available?

The Girl, for all intents and purposes, is hiding from herself. The chador acts as her cape and cowl but it’s also a line of demarcation. When she walks the streets of Bad City, she’s a shadow, a spectre haunting the less than savory elements of the city. When she takes off the chador, she’s a seemingly young woman who finds solace in sad songs and dances to synth-pop surrounded by musical icons. Her hunger and the nature of that hunger are never addressed until it begins to conflict with the small yet complicated entanglements known as human relationships. As a side note, when The Girl and Arash meet and speak to each other for the first time, Arash – high as a kite – is wearing a Dracula costume from a party. It’s a brilliant juxtaposition that the two begin to form their romance when both are essentially in disguise. And it’s probably my favorite scene in the movie.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, is still well worth your time if you have any interest in the work of upcoming directors like Amirpour or desire something more substantial from your vampire-themed entertainment. There are also two issues of a comic book written by Amirpour available for purchase that give you some background on The Girl.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and Scares Us

Feminist Fangs: The Activist Symbolism of Violent Vampire Women

10 Women-Directed Films for Halloween

Samantha “Sam” Cross is best described as a poly-geek, soaking up as much information as possible to better appreciate the things she loves. An archivist by trade, she’s also a fan of comic books, movies, music, and television, never shying away from talking about or analyzing pop culture minutiae. You can listen to her as the host of That Girl with the Curls podcast where she chats about her pop culture obsession in the company of friends or with special guests. Follow her @darling_sammy on Twitter.

‘Queen of Katwe’ Is a Gorgeous, Inspiring Look at a Young Black Life Fully Realized

But at its core lies a story of redemption, cultural pride, feminism, and economics — elements of a young life contending with extraordinary challenges. … ‘Queen of Katwe’ is a mesmerizing story of a life fully realized, a life that’s often overlooked and not given a chance. Its young cast, led by Nalwanga’s nuanced performance, help illuminate layers of humanity resting deep in the “slums” of Uganda, exhibiting talent well beyond their years.

This guest post written by Candice Frederick originally appeared at Reel Talk Online. It appears here as part of our theme week on Women Directors. It is cross-posted with permission.

A few months ago at the Tribeca Film Festival, I had a chance to catch the first episode of the new Roots mini-series on the History Channel (which later became a ratings success), as well as the pre-screening discussion with the actors, including the series lead Malachi Kirby, who marveled over his experience working on the project in Africa. Rarely do big screen depictions of the continent highlight its joy and beauty, he said.

I thought of his statement again recently while watching Queen of Katwe, which tells the true story of a young girl from Uganda who rises to become a chess prodigy amid challenging circumstances. Sean Bobbitt’s radiant photography, capturing the crease in each character’s smile line, the wistful yet determined furrow of their brows, and the movement of their hips as they dance with excitement, combined with the vibrant costumes and gorgeous landscape, immediately invites you into the narrative. That’s because you never feel like you’re watching the typical somber meditation of life in Africa that is relentless and one-dimensional. Rather, you’re watching life in all its shades: joyful, messy, devastating, and triumphant. Powerful.

Based on a remarkable true story, which later became a bestselling book, Queen of Katwe shines a light on the journey of 9-year-old Phiona Mutesi (portrayed by astonishing newcomer Madina Nalwanga), who, lured by the smell of porridge in her nearly depleted belly, stumbled onto a makeshift chess group and defied all the odds to become an international hero.

If this sounds like a quintessential Disney film to you, then you’re half right. Yes, it’s wholesome and finishes on a heartwarming high like many other cherished Disney stories. But at its core lies a story of redemption, cultural pride, feminism, and economics — elements of a young life contending with extraordinary challenges. As one of few girls in war refugee-turned-missionary Robert Katende’s (charmingly played by David Oyelowo) group of budding young chess stars, Phiona’s genius is at first an unwelcome threat against her male counterparts. But with time she was embraced, and was even looked up to, by everyone from her teammates to her firm yet loving single mother (Lupita Nyong’o) and even Katende himself. And years later (the film spans several years of her life, beginning in 2005), when the little Katwe team battles the upper class prep school prodigies when she takes her first ever flight across Uganda, Phiona comes face to face with the realization of how Katwe (and more specifically, the people of Katwe) are regarded–or disregarded–to everyone else. With a fighter’s passion and a fierce yearning to overcome her circumstances, Phiona simultaneously comes of age and transfixes a world of fans — ultimately going on to compete in the 41st Chess Olympiad in 2014.

Queen of Katwe is a mesmerizing story of a life fully realized, a life that’s often overlooked and not given a chance. Its young cast, led by Nalwanga’s nuanced performance, help illuminate layers of humanity resting deep in the “slums” of Uganda, exhibiting talent well beyond their years. Meanwhile, Oyelowo and Nyong’o’s performances temper the film with heart-wrenching emotion. And Mira Nair’s touching portrait of Katwe’s inspiring young queen with a dream is one to remember.

Candice Frederick is an award-winning journalist and the founder of Reel Talk Online, a website devoted to providing honest and often irreverent reviews and commentary about film from a woman’s perspective. Find her on Twitter @ReelTalker.

Céline Sciamma’s Films (‘Girlhood,’ ‘Tomboy,’ and ‘Water Lilies’) Capture the Complexities of Adolescence

French director and screenwriter Céline Sciamma of ‘Water Lilies,’ ‘Tomboy,’ and ‘Girlhood’ has gained critical acclaim for her portrayals of adolescence and coming-of-age, particularly on themes of gender and sexuality. … This undefined, yet crucial space is an uncomfortable one and Sciamma’s films excel because they embrace the chaotic ambiguity of youthful liminality.

This guest post written by Charline Jao appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

French director and screenwriter Céline Sciamma of Water Lilies, Tomboy, and Girlhood has gained critical acclaim for her portrayals of adolescence and coming-of-age, particularly on themes of gender and sexuality. Sciamma’s movies are intimate character studies, punctuated with dancing, tiny details embedded in body language, and a serious respect for younger viewers. For all the cringe-worthy or mediocre child acting that permeates film, Sciamma has a remarkable ability to draw out nuanced and organic performances in her works, oftentimes from non-actors.

I’ve never met a single person who ascribed to the idea that high school is supposed to be the best time of your life, yet the romanticization of youth persists in so much of our media. While childhood is often seen through nostalgia goggles, the reality is that adolescence is a confusing and horrifying time, defined in many western cultures as liminal. Liminality refers to the ambiguous space in between social structures — something Britney Spears famously pinpoints in her 2001 hit “I’m Not a Girl, Net Yet a Woman.” The adolescent or teenager sits on the threshold of adulthood by sitting between child and adult, figuring out their rites of passage and space within society. This undefined, yet crucial space is an uncomfortable one and Sciamma’s films excel because they embrace the chaotic ambiguity of youthful liminality.

In Tomboy, we see a 10-year-old move into a neighborhood and introduce themselves as Mickaël (Zoé Héran) in front of their new friends. This quickly develops into a double life, as we learn their family sees them as their elder daughter Laure — a tomboy with short hair. Through interactions with the neighborhood boys and their girlfriend Lisa (Jeanne Disson), we see how children as young as six already recognize and enforce notions of gender. Girls don’t get to play soccer. Boys are strong defenders. Mickaël at 10 already understands that being a tomboy (garçon manqué in French, which means failed boy) is acceptable, but being a boy without a penis is something shameful and unspeakable. Similarly, the local boys know that when that transgression occurs, they’re within bounds to reject and attack their supposed friend.

Sciamma never shies away from the very real threats young people face. Maybe it’s a kind of discomfort with childhood curiosity of “mature” ideas (with LGBTQ+ themes being unfairly treated as more mature), but Sciamma’s films make one realize how rare this is in much of our mainstream media. Sexuality, violence, and depression are all things we want to separate from children who are pure, uncorrupted, and need to be protected. When film and television do venture into the dark side of growing up, it’s often in the form of a soapy after-school special. This not only feels dishonest, it feels like a disservice.

Children under the age of 18 years old experiment, they deal with depression, and suicide is the third-leading cause of death for that age demographic. My Life as a Zucchini, which Sciamma worked on as screenwriter, is a strong example of a film dealing with difficult issues as the film follows a group of foster children, each of whom has a differently tragic background: abuse, drug use, alcoholism, violence, etc. In Tomboy, when Mickaël’s mother (Sophie Cattani) angrily forces them into a blue dress, we’re meant to understand — in addition to misgendering them — how humiliating that is and acknowledge that childhood problems some might perceive as “bumps in the road” actually have very, very high stakes.

At the same time, the physical and non-physical violence directed towards these characters are not their defining factors. When portraying characters outside the straight, cis, or white archetype, there’s a very real danger of turning people into spectacles or tropes. Poor, marginalized, or under-portrayed individuals turn into tragedy porn meant for rich consumption, or become patronizing PSAs that unintentionally other these characters. There’s a troubling emphasis on the reactions of those around the marginalized, instead of the actual figure. When faced with trials and tribulations, Sciamma’s characters express themselves in all kinds of ways without turning gratuitous or voyeuristic. While Hollywood loves the emotional outburst that builds over several acts, we know everyone deals with grief and frustration differently. Maybe it’s the simple act of regressing and sucking one’s thumb as in Tomboy, the persistent clinking of a plate in Zucchini, or just falling silent. The attention to detail in body language, lingering stares, and looks resist the idea that there is a singular female, LGBTQ, or young rite of passage.

Girlhood is another story that could have easily gone terribly awry in the hands of a different director. Along with its critical acclaim, the film has been simultaneously praised for centering Black girls as well as criticized as “a story of black femininity being presented via a white feminist gaze.” The film follows Marieme (Karidja Touré), a Black teenager from a difficult background, as she finds a community among three other girls and discovers a new world of fights, boys, and music. Like Tomboy, we vividly see structural and physical violence: adults tell Marieme she’s a lost cause and she has an abusive family life. However, there’s always an equal amount of joy and camaraderie in in Sciamma’s films, which she often illustrates through dance. One of Girlhood‘s most memorable scenes features the group of girls in a hotel room dancing along to Rihanna’s “Diamonds.” In Tomboy, Lisa dances with Mickaël in her room. In My Life as a Zucchini, the many foster children have a dance party during a vacation in the mountains. There’s plenty more — inside jokes, sports, and snow fights — but these dramatic, musical moments assert that childhood is not all darkness. After all, a movie about children that fixates only on the tragic isn’t only unrealistic, it leaves little room for hope. There’s an element of uncertainty in Girlhood‘s ending, to which Sciamma told Indiewire, “I think I’m making movies that ask questions and that make you care for the character. I think that’s more powerful than actually knowing they’ll be alright.”

Tomboy similarly omits any definitive language regarding Mickaël — they don’t plan to live this double life in advance, it just happens. Their exact gender identity is left somewhat ambiguous because it’s possible Mickaël is still figuring things out, and they might not yet have the vocabulary for words like transgender, genderqueer, non-binary, or misgendering. While narratively it allows for a small twist, it’s notable that the first time we hear our protagonist’s name is when they introduce themselves to Lisa — and the viewer — as Mickaël. At the film’s conclusion, when they call themselves Laure, it’s unclear whether this is an act of defeated conformity or a reconciliation of the double life. Very much in line with Sciamma’s statement on Girlhood, we “can’t leave the film in the room.” Instead, “you have to take it back home with you.”

There’s valid criticism of Tomboy’s refusal to name Mickaël as a trans boy, but there’s also a strength in how the film doesn’t push them to explain or justify themselves. We don’t know where Mickaël — or Laure — will end up and it’s likely they’ll grapple with much more in the future. Tomboy explores gender-policing through child characters and refuses to tie things up neatly at the end because this greater structural violence still exists. That’s not saying that children are ever too young to express their own gender identity, only to acknowledge different types of journeys. There’s a definite anxiety that stems from how much we’ve grown to care about Mickaël, but also a certain kind of reassurance for the viewer in that open-ended finale that says it’s acceptable to be a work in progress.

Diving into the mind of a child isn’t as simple as simplifying the world. It’s no surprise that Sciamma called Pixar’s Inside Out, a complex and thoughtful mapping of a young girl’s brain, one of her favorite films of 2015. When I spoke to Sciamma about her role as screenwriter on the Oscar-nominated animated film My Life as a Zucchini, she explained that thinking like a child is not, “trying to be lighthearted about everything” but to take children seriously as characters.

“We all go through this, and then when we are adults and we are addressing children we do this, like, ‘They were innocent, shiny people,’ whereas we all know how overwhelming, troubling entering the world is and how we went through dark feelings and very strong emotions.”

The popular portrayals of adolescents as happy-go-lucky, helpless, or wise beyond their years is a puzzling pattern considering the fact that we’ve all been children before. Sure, not everyone has the same kind of childhood, but I’d like to think most people recognize that childhood is oftentimes not a squeaky-clean or logical space. Sciamma’s films open up introspection to our own childhoods, illuminating moments that we might have glossed over or sanitized in our memory.

Water Lilies, a queer love story, grapples with young female sexuality, slut-shaming, and tangled affections. Our fifteen-year-old protagonist Marie (Pauline Acquart) develops feelings for the popular Floriane (Adèle Haenel), who goes between desiring an anonymous older man to her boyfriend François to wanting Marie. Marie’s friend Anne (Louise Blachère) longs for François, who’s also inconsistent in his affections. All of their experiences, while gendered, are different and reveal there’s no singular way to explore sexuality. We see this as well in Marieme’s sexual agency in Girlhood, when she makes the decision to sleep with her boyfriend. As the characters change their minds, make mistakes, and enjoy themselves, the narrative never paints anything they do as invalid or abnormal. Unlike stories that demonize, fetishize, or mystify female sexuality, Sciamma allows her characters to just be.

Childhood is also often nonsensical or inappropriate, full of jokes that don’t make sense or are vaguely offensive in their misinformation. The dialogue in a Sciamma film acknowledges this and there’s a very natural character-driven humor that comes out of unfiltered speech. Anne in Water Lilies off-handedly mentions that she thinks arranged child-marriages are cool and characters in My Life as a Zucchini talk about sex and their absent parents in ways that aren’t “right” or proper. Allowing characters to be unfiltered opens an unmediated image of youth that feels more authentic and less like a morality tale. Furthermore, it means acknowledging young carelessness without nervously apologizing for it.

Perhaps one of the most compelling elements of Sciamma’s films is that they’re not children’s stories made for adult’s eyes. Rather, they are made to speak to both children and adults. The director never speaks down to her audience. Her most recent screenplay for My Life as a Zucchini exemplifies this through stop-motion, a medium we typically associate with children’s films. In the movie, we’re introduced to all kinds of families — ones torn apart, abandoned, or rejected.

Sciamma told me she made sure “everybody has to relate to the same thing,” meaning it wouldn’t have jokes meant for adults peppered in or bits just for children. If you’re a parent watching My Life as a Zucchini with your kid, the two of you watch the same film and hopefully have a frank and thoughtful conversation afterwards. While Sciamma isn’t the only director creating powerful representation, her movies stand as a powerful testament to what children’s films can do, especially for the underrepresented children confronting gender identity, sexuality, and other issues.

In an 1971 review for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the late critic Roger Ebert identified a lack of serious children’s movies by writing:

“Kids are not stupid. They are among the sharpest, cleverest, most eagle-eyed creatures on God’s Earth, and very little escapes their notice. […] They don’t miss a thing, and they have an instinctive contempt for shoddy and shabby work. I make this observation because nine out of ten children’s movies are stupid, witless, and display contempt for their audiences, and that’s why kids hate them. Is that all parents want from kids’ movies? That they not have anything bad in them? Shouldn’t they have something good in them — some life, imagination, fantasy, inventiveness, something to tickle the imagination? If a movie isn’t going to do your kids any good, why let them watch it? Just to kill a Saturday afternoon? That shows a subtle kind of contempt for a child’s mind, I think.”

Sciamma not only respects the fictional children in her films, she trusts younger viewers to grapple with the heavy topics she’s presenting. Children’s movies shouldn’t be “just” children’s movies — flippant, shallow, or watered down. Not to fall into cliches, but if children are our future, shouldn’t our media respect their intelligence and capacity to learn?

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Movie Makers from the Margin: Céline Sciamma

Girlhood: Observed But Not Seen

Growing Up Queer: Water Lilies and Tomboy

Charline Jao is writer based in New York City who specializes in film and geeky pop culture. You can find her work over at The Mary Sue and on Twitter @charlinejao.

Versions of Yourself: Nora Ephron as Women’s Storyteller

In addition to her work in film, Nora Ephron was a journalist, playwright, and novelist; unsurprisingly, her stock in trade is words. Crucially, what she does with these words is to give women room. For these women at the center of her films, there is, above all, space. Space not simply to be the best version of themselves, but all the versions of themselves: confident, neurotic, right, wrong, flawed.

This guest post written by Katie Barnett appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

There is a moment in Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail (1998) where Kathleen (Meg Ryan) and Joe (Tom Hanks) are conversing via their AOL inboxes. “Do you ever feel like you’ve become the worst version of yourself?” he types. The two of them ponder the question, Joe criticizing his own tendency to “arrogance, spite, condescension” while Kathleen laments her own inability to conjure up a well-timed comeback in a confrontation. This discussion of the gulf between inner thoughts and actual behavior is, perhaps, a prescient nod to the ways the internet – still a novelty in the world of You’ve Got Mail – would foster these gaps between reality and projection. It is also an acknowledgement of the multiple selves one person might harbor beneath the surface.

One of the many joys of Nora Ephron’s films lies in the recognition that there may be more than one version of yourself. Indeed, her 1996 Wellesley commencement speech – the origin of Ephron’s plea, “above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim” – is built around this recognition that young women’s lives will contain multitudes, will be rife with contradiction. “You are not going to be you, fixed and immutable you, forever,” she tells the graduating class. Mutable is a state of being for Ephron’s on-screen women.

Nora Ephron began her film career in 1983, when she wrote the screenplay for Silkwood. Her first directing credit followed in 1992, with This is My Life; a year later, she would direct and write (alongside Jeff Arch and David S. Ward) the fifth highest-grossing film of 1993, Sleepless in Seattle. By the time of her death in 2012, she had directed eight films, with a screenwriting credit on seven of them, and written numerous others, including one of her best known works, When Harry Met Sally (Reiner, 1989). For her screenplays, she was nominated three times for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards. Ephron’s work as a director is difficult to separate from her work as a screenwriter; through these twin roles, she carved a space in which to craft funny, interesting, hopelessly neurotic characters, navigating life with a mixture of optimism, introspection, and the occasional flicker of disappointment.

Ephron helped to revitalize the smart romantic comedy. In Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, she made two of the 1990s’ most successful examples of the genre. Yet critical attention that considers her work as a filmmaker has been slow to emerge: the consequence, perhaps, of Ephron’s status as “woman director,” but also, crucially, of her work in a much-maligned genre. Ephron herself was archly dismissive of the pigeonholing of women’s cinema. Her list, “What I Won’t Miss,” which appeared in her book I Remember Nothing (2010), included the entry “Panels on Women in Film.”

In addition to her work in film, Ephron was a journalist, playwright, and novelist; unsurprisingly, her stock in trade is words. Crucially, what she does with these words is to give women room. For these women at the center of her films, there is, above all, space. Space not simply to be the best version of themselves, but all the versions of themselves: confident, neurotic, right, wrong, flawed. They have time to figure themselves out, and Ephron’s films do not punish them for it. This exchange, from Ephron’s final film, Julie and Julia (2009), neatly encapsulates the idea that the authenticity of these characters comes from their flaws as much as their more redeeming features:

Julie: …because I am a bitch. I am, Sarah. I’m a bitch.
Sarah: I know. I know you are.

Julie challenges Sarah – “Do you really think I’m a bitch?” – to which Sarah responds, “Well, yeah. But who isn’t?” There is no judgment on Sarah’s part. The implication here is that Julie can be a bitch (which, in this context, amounts to her realization that she can be self-absorbed), but that this does not preclude everything else she is. Being prone to a meltdown over a casserole gone wrong does not automatically negate Julie’s other qualities.

In fact, Ephron’s women sometimes have so much time to figure themselves out that the central romance almost becomes a secondary concern, as in Sleepless in Seattle, in which Annie (Ryan) and Sam (Hanks) do not lay eyes on each other until the very end of the film, brought together at the top of the Empire State Building in a meeting engineered by Sam’s son Jonah (Ross Malinger). A risky move, surely, for any romantic comedy. It is a risk that ultimately pays off for Ephron, despite the flawed notion of constructing a romance around two people who have never met, yet who are apparently perfect for each other. But consider how the space of Sleepless in Seattle functions. This is Annie’s story: it is her family we visit alongside her and her fiancé Walter (Bill Pullman); it is her workplace and her colleagues we see; it is her car where we first hear Jonah call the radio show. The romance may be contrived, may even be problematic, but it is Annie’s romance. Of whose story we are being told, we should be in no doubt.

This may seem like nothing new to a genre built around the romantic expectations of female characters, and the eventual fulfillment of these expectations. What elevates Ephron’s women is that they transcend the one-dimensional caricature of a rom-com protagonist. Instead, we find complex, changeable women, incapable of being reduced to a definitive version of themselves. In You’ve Got Mail’s Kathleen, for instance, we find a woman who is willing to believe the best of her as-yet-unmet online friend, deflecting concerns that he might be married, unattractive, or a serial killer. Yet she is also a woman who once suspected her own boyfriend of being a domestic terrorist: “Remember when you thought Frank was the Unabomber?” She is a woman who loves books, daisies, and New York City, who got a manicure instead of voting (but feels bad about it), and who is ambitious without being ruthless. Kathleen owns her own business and wants that business to be successful, but she is never reduced to the brittle caricature of an ambitious woman.

Julie and Julia orients the audience’s attention around the lives of two more ambitious women, separated by time and geography: chef Julia Child (Meryl Streep), finding her feet in 1950s France, and writer Julie Powell (Amy Adams), living in post-9/11 New York and attempting to cook Julia’s back catalogue of recipes in a kitchen the size of a postage stamp. Once again, what is remarkable about Julie and Julia is just how much space is given over to these women, to their food, their cooking, their enjoyment of both of these things. “The day there’s a meteorite heading towards the earth and we have thirty days to live, I’m going to spend it eating butter,” Julie opines, as chunks of butter sizzle invitingly in a frying pan.

The film opens on Julia and her husband Paul (Stanley Tucci) newly arrived in Paris. When the two go out to eat, Julia’s delight at French cuisine is palpable. It is her voice we hear, exclaiming over the meal; her food, her delight, that dominates this scene. When she leans over to have Paul taste the fish, the camera follows her, and she – and this accompanying sense of delight – continues to fill the frame. Minutes later, the film shifts to New York, where Julie and her husband Eric (Chris Messina) are moving apartments. Here, space is once again the preoccupation – “Repeat after me. 900 square feet,” Eric reminds Julie when she questions the wisdom of moving to live above a pizzeria in Queens, although wherever this space is, it certainly isn’t in the kitchen – and it is Julie who takes up this space. On arriving in the new apartment, she does a sweep of the bare interior, moving from room to room, as we move with her. Ephron employs a similar tactic as Julia explores the Paris apartment and the camera pans across the windows, tracking her movements. The film invites us to follow these women, and these first steps into their respective lives place them at the forefront of their own stories.

Physical space remains important in Julie and Julia, as we see an unhappy Julie crammed onto the subway and wedged into her cubicle at work, and a determined Julia sequestered in a kitchen at the Cordon Bleu cooking school, the only woman amongst a collection of male chefs, fighting to prove herself in the face of skepticism. Just as Julia must carve out a niche for herself in this male-dominated environment, Julie strives to be seen and heard from her small corner of the internet, where the physical becomes virtual, and where her mother is quick to wonder why Julie is wasting her time on strangers.

Within the film, one way that both women take up space is by talking. A scene of Julia at a French market tracks her exuberant progress through the crowd, exclaiming over the food on offer in her distinctive high-pitched voice, gesturing with enthusiasm, and practicing her less-than-perfect French without embarrassment. Julie, meanwhile, is reminiscent of Ephron’s earlier heroines, amongst them Sally, Annie, and Kathleen, prone to vocalizing her frustrations and disappointments in a bid to understand them, whether rational or otherwise. (Recall Sally’s plaintive wail: “And I’m gonna be 40!” – “When?” – “Someday!”) After Julie’s friend Annabelle writes a scathing magazine piece about turning 30, in which she belittles the direction Julie’s life has taken, Julie memorizes the offending passage and rants about Annabelle’s “stupid, vapid, insipid” brain. Just as they are allowed to be irrational at times, Ephron does not always allow her protagonists to rise above their uncharitable thoughts; indeed, this is a reminder that what Ephron achieves in her films is the foregrounding of authentic – and authentically flawed – women. “What do you think it means if you don’t like your friends?” Julie asks Sarah (Mary Lynn Rajskub). “It’s completely normal,” Sarah assures her, much to Eric’s confusion. “Men like their friends,” he points out. “We’re not talking about men,” Julie snaps back. “Who’s talking about men?”

Ephron stood by the fact that When Harry Met Sally was not about whether men or women could be friends, but about the differences between men and women. Her films are equally generous to her male characters, but at their heart these films are testament to the women who occupy them: their hopes, their fears, their triumphs, and their failures. As a filmmaker, Ephron’s astuteness when it came to people should not be underestimated; it is this quality, as much as any other, that characterizes her skill at telling the stories of the women on whom she concentrated her pen and her camera.

In that 1996 Wellesley commencement speech, Ephron reminded her audience that there would always be time – and space – to change their minds. “Maybe young women don’t wonder whether they can have it all any longer, but in case any of you are wondering, of course you can have it all,” she told them. “What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications. It will not be anything like what you think it will be like, but surprises are good for you. And don’t be frightened: you can always change your mind.”

See also at Bitch Flicks:

The Fork Fatale: Food as Transformation in the Contemporary Chick Flick

A Woman’s Place in the Kitchen: The Cinematic Tradition of Cooking to Catch a Man

Katie Barnett is a lecturer in film and media at the University of Worcester (UK) with an interest in representations of gender and family in popular culture. She learned the rules of baseball from Penny Marshall, the rules of espionage from Harriet the Spy, and the rules of life from Jim Henson. Find her on Twitter @katiesmallg.

Mexican Filmmaker Patricia Riggen Makes a Mark on Both Sides of the Border

I can’t think of another female director – in the United States, or in Mexico, who has accomplished such a feat. This is noteworthy, not only because she’s a woman filmmaker, but because she is also a woman of color. So how has she done this? Obviously talent has played a major role in her success. But more importantly, Riggen has not boxed herself into any one genre, nor has she allowed anyone else in the industry to box her in.

This guest post written by Ligiah Villalobos appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

Patricia Riggen, a graduate of Columbia Film School, has had multiple and impressive milestones in her career. Before she even directed her first feature film, La Misma Luna (Under the Same Moon), Riggen had accumulated many prestigious awards for her short films, including a Student Academy Award Gold Medal in 2003 for her narrative short, La Milpa, and the Short Filmmaking Award at the Sundance Film Festival in 2004 for her documentary short, Family Portrait.

Since becoming a feature film director, Riggen has added two more milestones. Her film La Misma Luna, which was made for under $2 million, was sold to Fox Searchlight and The Weinstein Company for $5 million – a record at the Sundance Film Festival for a Spanish-language film. The film went on to make $23+ million worldwide. (Full disclosure, I am the writer of that film). And just last year, Riggen became the first and only female Mexican director to have a movie gross more than $70+ million worldwide: Miracles from Heaven, distributed by Columbia Pictures.

But what I find most impressive about Riggen’s career is the fact that in between those two films, she directed three additional films – a TV movie and two feature films: Lemonade Mouth (The Disney Channel), Girl in Progress (distributed by Pantelion Films), and The 33 (distributed by Warner Brothers). That’s an average of one film every two years.

So how has she done this? Obviously talent has played a major role in her success. But more importantly, Riggen has not boxed herself into any one genre, nor has she allowed anyone else in the industry to box her in.

In her 10-year career, Riggen has made independent films and studio films, Spanish-language films and English-language films, female-driven films, and male-driven films. She has made adult, kid, and family films. She’s directed dramas, comedies, a music-driven film, and a faith-based film. It is truly remarkable.

I was recently asked to give a quote to an organization that was doing a campaign for Women’s History Month. This is what I said:

“Everything I’ve accomplished has been as a result of never seeing my ethnicity or my gender as a hindrance, but rather an asset.”

Looking at Riggen’s career over the last decade, I have no doubt she feels the same way.

In this Trump-era, when many are trying to build walls and close off borders, a woman filmmaker – a Mexican – an immigrant, is doing just the opposite with her films. And lucky for us, she’s just getting started.

Photo of Patricia Riggen, Don Francisco, and Kate Castillo at the 2015 Miami Film Fest: photo by Carlos Llano via Flickr and the Creative Commons License.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Girl in Progress: Female-Centric Film Tackles Strained Mother-Daughter Relationships, Single Motherhood and Navigating Adolescence

Ligiah Villalobos is a TV and feature film writer. She is best known for her feature film, La Misma Luna (Under the Same Moon). But if you’re a parent of a pre-school kid, you might have seen her name on the credits of the Nick Jr. hit series, Go, Diego! Go! where she served as the Head Writer for three seasons. You can follow her on Twitter at @JalapenoFilms.