Films by Women – Page 9

How Women Directors Turn Narrative on Its Head

Marielle Heller (‘The Diary of a Teenage Girl’), Miranda July (‘Me and You and Everyone We Know’), and the women directors of ‘Jane the Virgin’ are infusing elements of whimsy into their work in strikingly different ways, but to similar effect. The styles they’re using affect the audience’s relationship with their stories and with the characters themselves by giving the viewer an insight that traditional narratives don’t provide.

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

Marielle Heller, Miranda July, and the women directors of Jane the Virgin are infusing elements of whimsy into their work in strikingly different ways, but to similar effect. The styles they’re using affect the audience’s relationship with their stories and with the characters themselves by giving the viewer an insight that traditional narratives don’t provide.

Marielle Heller’s film, The Diary of a Teenage Girl (based on Phoebe Gloeckner’s hybrid graphic novel of the same name) depicts a coming-of-age narrative — a narrative that film audiences have seen hundreds, if not thousands, of times — in such a way that turns the genre into something fresh and spectacular. Our teenage hero is budding comic artist Minnie Goetze (English actor Bel Powley), who lives in San Francisco with her sister Gretel and her single, swinging mother (played by Kristen Wiig). Heller opens the film with a low angle shot of Minnie’s behind as she walks through a park and her voice-over narration reveals: “I had sex today: Holy Shit.”

Minnie’s narration certainly gives us a glimpse into her mind, her feelings, and her emotions. Heller uses this trope to good effect and doesn’t overdo it. But it’s not the voice-over that shows us our true Minnie. It is Heller’s use of animation that allows the audience insight into Minnie’s mind, because we see things come alive in the instant she feels them. Heller uses Sara Gunnarsdóttir’s original artwork and animation to let us “see” Minnie’s thoughts and feelings. Gunnarsdóttir’s work is certainly inspired by Gloeckner’s early original drawings, and some of those drawings appear in the film itself (Gloeckner was a consultant on the art and animation).

The art itself is excellent, but the way Heller uses it is the real magic. Minnie is a girl whose imagination makes the static things around her come alive — the drawings on her wall and in her diary, the stars painted on her bedroom walls and ceiling, the cover of Aline Kominsky’s comic. It’s an effective and creative narrative tool to develop Minnie’s character. But Minnie doesn’t just animate things she already sees; she also creates objects out of her feelings. Hearts appear in the bathtub as she thinks about Monroe (her mother’s boyfriend with whom she has an affair) and, later, flowers bloom out of the receiver as she talks to him on the phone; feathers cover her hands and body and give her wings as she feels empowered on an acid trip; fireworks light up the sky when Minnie and Tabatha kiss for the first time. These are beautiful, sweet, and romantic additions that emphasize what we already sense Minnie is feeling.

But Heller is smart to not let the animation just be sweet; she also uses it to bring us down to understand Minnie’s lowest points. When Minnie feels rejected after Ricky calls her “intense,” we see her self-portrait animated as a giant holding the tiny boy between her thick fingers and then tossing him down to the ground; when Minnie hears Tabatha and Mike talking, she imagines them as black and white grotesque heads and bodies pressing in on her claustrophobically as she realizes she is not just in the apartment to eat a grilled cheese sandwich. The animations make Minnie round, full, and a character whose emotions we, the audience, can truly know, and a girl whose story we can truly feel.

The women directors of television’s Jane the Virgin also use expected and unexpected devices to infuse whimsy. Max Thornton, writing about the series soon after it premiered in 2014, said that it has a “jocular self-awareness,” and this is absolutely true. But that silliness and breaking of the fourth wall is not only done to make us laugh, but also to tell a story in a way unlike any other.

The show uses an omniscient narrator (voiced by Anthony Mendez) and text that appears across the frame as though it is being typed immediately (complete with clicking keyboard sounds) to give backstory, explain character motivations, and stand in for what we, the audience, might be thinking. It allows us to know so much more than the characters know at any given time, but also to know just what Jane (Gina Rodriguez) is thinking and feeling. We are intimately connected to Jane, her feelings, and her story.

To date, there are thirty-eight episodes, or “chapters” of Jane the Virgin, each one using a combination of stylistic devices that include the aforementioned voice-over and text as well as dream sequences, imagination sequences, and animation. Although not every episode is directed by a woman, almost 60% are, and all episodes include a writing credit for show creator Jennie Snyder Urman. The second episode, directed by Uta Briesewitz, and the thirty-seventh episode, directed by Melanie Mayron, provide a good framework to look at how the show uses unconventional narrative devices to tell a great story with a specific and consistent style.

Whereas the pilot, directed by Brad Silberling, sets up the excellent premise, world, and characters of Jane the Virgin, it’s not until the second episode, “Chapter Two,” directed by Uta Briesewitz, that the women of the show (including Briesewitz herself) really start to fly their true colors. This episode brings up issues of family, class, marriage, and sacrifice — both the male expectation of a woman’s sacrifice as well as the reality of a woman’s sacrifice. These themes are introduced and navigated using flashback, imagined scenes, and animation, as well as, of course, tropes from and conscious references to the telenovela genre.

Michael, Jane’s fiancé, is so focused on the fact that Jane once kissed Rafael, that he mishears Rafael as saying, “I used to make out with Jane a lot.” Playing with reality and fantasy this way, Briesewitz gets us into Michael’s head and reveals his insecurities in a way dialogue doesn’t always do. As Petra, Rafael’s wife, explains the moment she realizes he stopped loving her, a single, magical, animated teardrop falls from her face and onto the ground. We feel for her character and our sympathy is reinforced as the narrator reveals that (after two episodes of lying) she is finally being truthful. All of these whimsical pieces make up an episode that illustrates the true strength and sacrifice of the show’s women: Jane changing her entire life to make her best decision about the pregnancy and telling Michael, “I get to be selfish now, not you”; Xiomara (Xo), Jane’s mother, sacrificing herself during Jane’s quinceañera by doing some embarrassing song-and-dance karaoke in order to save Jane from seeing her date make out with another girl; Xo standing up to Rogelio when he pushes her in an effort to meet Jane for the first time.

A more recent episode, “Chapter Thirty-Seven” directed by Melanie Mayron (who also plays the part of Jane’s new graduate school advisor), employs Jane the Virgin’s tried and true stylistic techniques to cover sub-plots dealing with post-traumatic stress, new motherhood and infant bonding, a woman’s need to be validated by other people, and romance between sexagenarians. Our ever-present omniscient narrator gives us the low-down on what’s going on in our characters’ heads, as well as, possibly, in our own heads as we watch. But there is added whimsy through animation: hearts float from Rogelio’s chest when he hears that Jane and Michael are back together and engaged to be married (nearly identical animation to what Heller used in The Diary of a Teenage Girl); Mayron uses flashbacks to show simultaneous narratives as Michael rescues Rogelio from his stalker-kidnpapper (remember: telenovela!), and then uses animated arrows to point to elements in the frame that Michael sees; green check marks appear whenever a scene has passed the Bechdel Test, and red X’s appear whenever a scene has failed; and finally, in one of the most (or least?) subtle, Mayron the grad school advisor character is telling Jane that she needs a “frame” for her work, and Mayron the director cuts to a scene with a literal frame of a shot on Rogelio’s telenovela. This woman knows how to have fun. (And can we give this episode extra credit for mentioning the Bechdel Test in the first place [as well as for mentioning book clubs and Family Matters]?).

It feels appropriate to leave Miranda July for last, since she seems to exist in her own wonderful world. Her films are both stylistically consistent and unique, and she uses whimsy in her writing and her directing in a way that helps her, her characters, and her audience deal with big, dark ideas.

Some might dismiss July as twee, but they would be making a huge mistake. July’s work is, perhaps, cute sometimes, at least on the surface. In her debut feature film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, July plays performance artist Christine Jesperson, who puts white ankle socks on her ears to get the attention of a shoe salesman named Richard (played by John Hawkes), and July has Richard’s six year-old son Robby catfishing a woman over instant messenger by telling her that he wants to “poop back and forth” with her, forever.

And those things are adorable, but July’s subject matter sure as hell is not. Me And You And Everyone We Know deals with connections and disconnections, with heartbreak and humiliation, with sex, with death. In the first five minutes of the film, Richard sets his own hand on fire in front of his two young sons. Soon later, a middle-aged man woos two teenage girls by posting hand-written signs in his living room window explaining the sexual things he’d like them to do to him, and to each other. And just as soon as Richard and Christine seem to have made an honest connection — a connection that is all Christine wants — Richard immediately turns on her, telling her that she doesn’t know anything about him: “I could be a killer of children,” he says, destroying their connection in a matter of seconds. July uses the sweetness, the innocence to offset the darkness of the film as well as make it an even more striking comment on humanity.

July’s second film, The Future, is even more stylistically interesting and uses techniques similar to Heller’s and the Jane the Virgin directors’ to tell a story about infidelity, depression, and death. And, strangely, it’s even cuter than Me And You And Everyone We Know. It’s narrated by a cat named Paw-Paw (voiced by July). Yes, you read that right: it’s narrated by a cat.

The cat is the marble that starts the entire Rube Goldberg machine that is The Future. Sophie (Miranda July) and her boyfriend Jason (Hamish Linklater) decide to adopt the cat, but he is injured and cannot come home with them for a month. This gives the couple the push to use that month as though it’s their last month living life as they know it: they quit their jobs, Sophie disconnects the Internet to focus on making dance videos, and she begins a secret affair with a man she calls on the phone spontaneously in an effort to pull herself out of a kind of depression.

And Paw-Paw the cat does a voice-over narration as he watches the clock, waiting for Sophie and Jason to pick him up. July turns that particular storytelling device on its head, but she doesn’t stop there. She also creates a personified crawling T-shirt (Sophie’s security “blanket”) that inches closer and closer to her until she must finally put it on (leading to an interpretive dance in the middle of her lover’s master bedroom). July also includes a scene where Sophie must deal with her disconnection from her friends and her former life, and she does this by showing the friends pregnant, then with infants, then toddlers, then teens, and so on until the children stand before Sophie, grown adults with their own children. It is of course, all in Sophie’s head, but the startling absurdity of the scene jars the viewer into understanding how helpless she feels in this moment.

Just as with Me And You And Everyone We Know, The Future tells a story that has been told before: people splitting up and being unhappy and then happy, and unhappy, and then finally — hopefully — happy again. But July uses an unconventional whimsy to show us life’s sweetness, its hopefulness, and, sometimes, its tragedy.

This is what women — at least the women at the helms of these films and shows — are doing so well. They are playing with story, with expectations, and with the genre of narrative film itself. And the playing is not always for fun, and it is not even always successful. But it is always appreciated.

Laura Power teaches English composition and creative writing at a two-year college in Illinois. You can read more of her work at Cinefilles and Lake Projects and follow her on Twitter @chicagocommuter.

The Anti-Celebrity Cinema of Mary Harron: ‘I Shot Andy Warhol,’ ‘The Notorious Bettie Page,’ and ‘The Anna Nicole Story’

I’ve always thought Mary Harron’s work was the perfect example of why we need female directors. I think the films she produces provide a perspective we would never see in a world unilaterally controlled by male filmmakers. Harron appears to specialize in off-beat character studies of the types of people a male director may not gravitate towards, nor treat with appropriate gravitas. She treats us to humanizing takes on sex workers and sex symbols, angry lesbians and radical feminism and makes them hard to turn away from.

This post by staff writer Elizabeth Kiy appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

I’ve always thought Mary Harron’s work was the perfect example of why we need female directors.

I think the films she produces provide a perspective we would never see in a world unilaterally controlled by male filmmakers. Harron appears to specialize in off-beat character studies of the types of people a male director may not gravitate towards, nor treat with appropriate gravitas. She treats us to humanizing takes on sex workers and sex symbols, angry lesbians and radical feminism and makes them hard to turn away from.

Her work is so different from what we are used to that, it’s usually depressing to read anything about the making of her films, which always seem to struggle for financing and spend years in development hell.

Harron’s film are like long monologues, focusing on the experiences of a single, larger than life character. In my head, I’ve compared them to less glossy magazine profiles.

Though she is best know for her controversial take on American Psycho (which starred Gloria Steinem’s stepson, Christian Bale), I find her biopics, a triptych focusing on Bettie Page, Valerie Solanas, Anna Nicole Smith, her most interesting works.

These are difficult women to portray in an even handed fashion. Their personas and actions have transcended the truth of who they are and in the cases of Bettie and Anna Nicole, tend to be seen rather than heard. They are also women who have appeared difficult to defend and explain from within a feminist framework.

Harron, who wrote for Punk Magazine in 1970s New York, mixes feminine aesthetics and masculine grit to find beauty in the often ugly experiences of her subjects. She takes daring subjects and portrays them in a formalistically unique style, using different film stocks, gorgeous cinematography and fast kinetic edits to portray different time periods. The Notorious Bettie Page, uses a Wizard of Oz style switch from black and white to lush colour, to portray the character’s feelings of freedom. She lets her actors breathe and inhabit the characters and when her films succeed, they do on the lead character’s stand out performances.

Though it is often unclear what she is trying to say with them. As a whole, her oeuvre does not present a cohesive sense of auterusim or even stick to a specific genre, medium or perspective. Harron’s main interest appear to be intriguing stories.

If her films do have one message, it’s that people are more complicated than we assume. They don’t make a snap judgement about the characters. Mary Harron doesn’t tell us Valerie Solanas was “crazy” or Bettie Page was exploited or Anna Nicole Smith was a gold digger. She says, there are good and bad parts of everyone. What seems to matter is being interesting.

I Shot Andy Warhol (1996)

I Shot Andy Warhol is a little art scene movie about Valerie Solanas (Lili Taylor), a lesbian writer famous more for the delusions that lead her to (non-fatally) shoot Andy Warhol in 1968 than for her feminist treatise, the S.C.U.M. manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men).

The film is Valerie’s show, portraying her as a desperate person living on the fringes of society and struggling to make a living, who comes face to face with Warhol’s beautiful world and its superstars and hopes to be invited in. She comes to believe Warhol is trying to control and exploit her when she cannot get him to produce a play of hers.

The film doesn’t seem to take a stance on Solanas, but allows the audience to try to understand her based on what they have been shown. We are helped along by Taylor’s performance, intense to the point of being frightening, which makes her character come alive.

The Notorious Bettie Page (2005)

In Harron’s portrayal of the life of 50s pin-up Queen, Bettie Page (Gretchen Mol), we meet a woman who is a living contradiction. She is portrayed as an innocent who doesn’t understand the idea of pornography yet enjoys posing naked. Even the most aggressive bondage scenes where she is tied up and gagged seem to be a great game for her.

Though the film is about pornography, Harron skillfully avoids giving us overtly sexualized or salivating gazes of her star. The nude scenes are either awkward as Bettie fumbles unsure in the beginning or triumphant in portraying Bettie’s proud nudism and her sun-kissed body, glowing. I think Gretchen Mol’s portrayal of Bettie really helps here; she is wide-eyed and perpetually stunned. The way she inhabits the character makes her sexuality seem natural. She enjoys her body and the film’s switch to technicolor emphasizes that happiness.

However, it’s a film with a lot to unpack. Because Harron opens it with scenes of Bettie’s rape and abuse, it’s easy to believe she’s suggesting Bettie’s sexual openness is because of her rape. It’s gets slightly heavy-handed in one point where she is invited to show a private moment in her acting class and she begins to take off her clothes.

The relatively short span of Bettie’s life Harron focuses on cuts out her later mental illness and the extent of her evangelicalism. It’s discomforting to see younger Bettie enjoy her work when contrasted to older Bettie whose conversion suggests she begins to view what she participated in as exploitative.

The Anna Nicole Story (2013)

The Anna Nicole Story is a Lifetime movie, it’s campy and trashy, but it has aspirations. Harron gives Anna Nicole the Marilyn Monroe treatment, telling us that she is a misunderstood bombshell hiding a deep sadness. Though, the device of the ghostly figure of an older glamorous Anna Nicole guiding her through her life is a bit much.

There’s a fine line between campy trashy and exploitation trashy and Harron is fairly successful here. For the last years of her life, evidence that Anna Nicole Smith was mentally unwell and struggling with drugs was turned into a joke and her weight gain was excoriated by men who just wanted her to get hot again. While Anna Nicole was various exploited and exploitative herself, the film tries to rein in her image to something palatable to the viewers at home. Agnes Bruckner tries to make her seem human, but though we are left unsure of the motivations behind many of her stranger actions.

It seemed like every interview Bruckner did for the film was about the enlarged breasts she sported as Anna Nicole. She was asked “How were they made? or “How did they feel?” over and over.

In the finished picture, too much fun is had with Anna Nicole’s breasts, whose size the film enjoys exaggerating and displaying, though this may come with the territory. The scene where she bring cantaloupes to display the size of implants she want is played for laughs, as is the revel of her new large breasts getting her attention at the strip club.

As it’s a Lifetime movie, Harron is hampered by a PG rating, a low budget and shot production schedule, but she still gives us something interesting to explore.

She always has.

Elizabeth Kiy. is a Canadian writer and journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. Someday she will take over the world.

Sofia Coppola and The Silent Woman

Many films touch upon the theme of female isolation, but I remain fascinated with Sofia Coppola’s three major cinematic creations that explore the world of The Silent Woman: ‘The Virgin Suicides,’ ‘Lost in Translation,’ and ‘Marie Antoinette (2006).’ Each film delves into this enigma, forming a multifaceted frame of reference for a shared understanding.

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

The Silent Woman. You see her everywhere and yet she’s not noticed at all. She exists between the spaces of Everything’s Fine and I’m Okay. She’s your mother, sister, that next door neighbor and your best friend. Most of the time she’s you, too. She often speaks in monosyllables and can also be quite the chatterbox…

When I first heard the phrase, The Silent Majority, I thought it referred to women. After all, the men I saw exercised power: In the boardrooms, between the sheets and at the dinner table — men spoke firmly, authoritatively and with absolute conviction that what they said carried all the weight of a solid gold bar at Fort Knox.

Of course my first frame of reference was visual and women in the real world matched what I saw in the movies. They had no real power and never spoke with any assertiveness, and when they did, they were quickly silenced with an exasperated look, a dismissive declaration, a well-placed joke or a baby. Many films touch upon the theme of female isolation, but I remain fascinated with Sofia Coppola’s three major cinematic creations that explore the world of The Silent Woman: The Virgin Suicides (1999), Lost in Translation (2003), and Marie Antoinette (2006). Each film delves into this enigma, forming a multifaceted frame of reference for a shared understanding.

Sofia Coppola’s directorial career began with The Virgin Suicides. The family surname belongs to her father, film giant Francis Ford Coppola, known for his male-centric masterpieces The Godfather epic and Apocalypse Now. But a popular Coppola project — Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) – would later serve to inspire her own seven-year creative streak.

Peggy Sue Got Married sticks out like an odd sock in Mr. Coppola’s resume, a film about faded prom queen Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner), who travels back in time to solve an identity crisis. Sofia played her younger sister and goes unnoticed, but the theme of isolation reverberates throughout, as Peggy Sue marvels at how things have changed, but still remain the same — for her, anyway. Ms. Coppola’s film trio borrows a few familiar chords from Peggy Sue for us to recognize: All three occur in different times (The Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette) or cultural places (Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette), featuring naive young blond women (the five sisters, Charlotte and Marie Antoinette), who communicate poorly with their inept male counterparts: a nerdy group of boys in The Virgin Suicides, Charlotte’s workaholic husband, and Marie Antoinette’s clueless Boy King.

Yet The Silent Women, with their inability — or refusal, in the case of the virgins — to connect, diverges from Peggy Sue, whose adult life experiences enrich her inner voice, allowing her a measure of power. Their Nordic blondness also makes them more alluring than Peggy Sue, which is the gold standard of beauty that women are taught to admire from afar. The ironic connector allows them to drift through life, seemingly unaffected, when their fate demands that they adapt to society’s demands or perish.

The Virgin Suicides, is the first in Sofia Coppola’s trilogy about the strangled voice of Woman, narrated from the perspective of one admirer, whose subjectivity and biological entitlement flaws our gaze. The five Lisbon sisters, including Lux (played by Kirsten Dunst), form the mysterious inner circle of bored suburban girls, where their exotic surname separates them even more from their 1970s humdrum surroundings. And from the diseased tree looming ominously on their property, to their father’s chats with plants and Mother Lisbon’s terse commands at the dinner table, we suspect there will be no fairy tale ending.

The youngest daughter, Cecilia, succeeds in killing herself, and our collective dread for the remaining sisters is subdued as the parents try to relax their hold over the restless teenagers. This allows them some temporary freedom, but when Lux violates the curfew after a sexual tryst with Trip (Josh Harnett), everything goes into lockdown. Yet it hardly seems to matter to the girls, who lounge around their rooms as though they’re enjoying an extended sleepover. Lux begins to act out, having random sex on the roof, her behavior mirroring the experience with Trip on the night of the Homecoming Dance. As she stubbornly relives it for everyone to see, we become part of her guilt and sorrow, and like the boys watching, we can only make guesses in the dark. Lux’s name, meaning ‘light’, hints that she is merely illuminating the scene for us, and whatever answer we arrive at will have to suffice.

The narrator, now a disillusioned adult, and his old neighborhood buddies continue trying to unravel the mystery that was the Lisbon girls, “We knew the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love, and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.” Triggered by hormones and too much free time, they spin endless fantasies about them, gleaned from personal belongings and the pop psychology of the times. Their perspective lulls them — and us — into a false arrogance that they’ve plumbed the depths to reveal their secrets. This deepens as we think they’re communicating with them through shared music over the telephone. But the common link of music and feelings becomes something different for each group, as the girls are just marking time and the boys think they’re actually connecting on a meaningful level.

A small pivotal scene occurs between Lux and her mother — whose first name we never know, played to perfection by Kathleen Turner. Lux complains, “I can’t breath in here.” Mrs. Lisbon’s automatic response, “Lu, you are safe, in here,” neatly shuts down any further attempts at communication. Her mother’s desire to keep them safe only intensifies their estrangement from a society that they never wanted to inhabit anyway.

Eventually the girls follow their pioneering sister to a collective death. The men — including a remorseful Trip — are left behind, bewildered by too many questions and no real understanding of these sublime young women.

Ms. Coppola’s second film about female detachment is the commercially successful Lost in Translation. It marked her first scripted venture, where she won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and a Golden Globe for her efforts. Lost in Translation follows the interweaving threads of a brief encounter set against the high-rise hustle and bustle of Tokyo, Japan. The male gaze is again emphasized: Bob (Bill Murray) is a famous actor and John (Giovanni Ribisi) is a celebrity photographer, signaling the dual nature in the preoccupation of looking. But Bob has reached the stage where he is tired of being looked at and John is too self-absorbed to really see. Inserted into this dynamic is Charlotte (Scarlett Johannson), John’s neglected wife.

The beginning sees Bob and Charlotte attempting to relate to their surroundings, each other and their spouses. He sticks close to the hotel culture, surviving with a sour face and brittle humor, deflecting his wife’s long-distant communications by sticking to a well-worn script of automatic replies and bland compliments. Charlotte is acutely aware that she is a stranger in a strange land, where her travels only reinforce the solitary nature of her existence. Coppola employs large landscapes – both cultural and historical — to emphasize how lost Woman is without a voice of her own, disconnected from the very society that layers her life with expectations and carefully placed parameters of behavior. This refrain is repeated in The Virgin Suicides, where most of the action is confined to the Lisbon home. Here, her travels leave her sad, as she and John dissolve into petty disagreements and estranged silences.

John goes on a photo shoot, leaving Charlotte and Bob to explore Toyko together. Bob, older and wiser, shares his knowledge about marriage with Charlotte. She complains about being ‘stuck’ in her life, reeling off her short list of failed careers. He encourages her to keep writing and here a seismic shift transforms Lost in Translation into an autobiographical post-it note for us: Sofia Coppola’s earlier career choices and recent divorce are echoed in this scene, and the connection to her mentor-father now changes Bob into a paternal figure, who acts as an emotional buffer for Charlotte against the harsh realities buried within her life decisions.

As they say their goodbyes Bob whispers something into Charlotte’s ear, which becomes the shared moment of intimacy that they’ve been avoiding. As Bob and Charlotte disengage and he disappears, she slowly walks towards us, and we’re reminded of the film’s beginning, where she came into view with her back facing us. Now, contentedly smiling to herself as the crowd swirls busily around her, we sense that she will survive and grow stronger.

Lost in Translation acts as the fulcrum in Sofia Coppola’s trio, giving way to her third film, Marie Antoinette. Visually stunning, with opulent costumes and breath-taking views of the elegant 700-room Versailles Palace, Marie Antoinette reunites us with Kirsten Dunst as the 14-year-old Austrian princess who would become Queen of France.

Marie Antoinette, wrapped in a cocoon of wealth and privilege, begins a journey supremely ignorant of the world events that will affect her life, as she is handed off to the French government. At the Austrian-French border, she’s forced to surrender all of her belongings for traditional French accessories, introducing Marie to the lengths she’ll be expected to go for King and Country. Princess Marie arrives to a hostile court, where the courtiers refer to her as an ‘apple strudel.’ King Louis XV quickly marries off Marie to Prince Louis Auguste, since their sole function is to produce an heir for France. But Louis’s disinterest, their sexual naiveté and Marie’s inability to communicate produces nothing but gossip and blame, which gets directed at her, of course.

The princess will turn into an extravagant queen whose continuous spending left France stone broke — or so the story goes. Her husband, Louis XVI, (Jason Schwartzman) — just as clueless as Marie — contented himself with hunting and studying locks, while the government made political decisions that hastened the country’s eventual downfall. But Sofia Coppola’s film reveals a young girl who was never allowed to use her voice, sacrificed as a pawn by both Austria and France.

“Letting everyone down would be my greatest unhappiness,” she confides to her Ambassador, but that seems to be Marie Antoinette’s secondary function. She spends her formative years at Versailles bewildered and overwhelmed, often tearfully breaking down behind closed doors. Her mother writes ultimatums, her brother counsels about sex, and her Ambassador wails about her refusal to engage in political intrigue. Her emotional isolation is further heightened by every personal activity, which serves as ritualized theatre for the court’s entertainment.

Marie’s spending sprees, gambling and hard partying become more extreme in her desperation to feel something more than boredom and inadequacy. Coppola’s attention to Marie Antoinette’s clothing points at the language of fashion as a forceful communicator of power. Power statements for the monarchy were tucked into every inch of wig height, where prestige was judged by the width of a skirt and the suffocating amount of embellishment. Yet hidden within the satin and lace was a woman who was screaming to get out.

Marie Antoinette’s sad end marks our final film of Sofia Coppola’s Silent Woman saga, and their collective search for an empowered voice. The Academy nominated Sofia Coppola as Best Director for Lost in Translation — only one of three women to be nominated by the Academy until 2009. Kathryn Bigelow then became the first woman director to win an Oscar, and sadly, no other woman has been nominated for directing since. While most of Hollywood’s directors are still men, The Silent Majority is steadily raising her voice — on film projects, in the boardrooms, and globally — firmly, authoritatively and with absolute conviction.

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.

Kelly Reichardt’s ‘Wendy and Lucy’: Heartbreak in a Panning Shot

Through the course of the film, Kelly Reichardt’s pacing is so deliberate that even the most ordinary moments seem intensely significant. Reichardt’s framing traps Wendy in shots as much as her broken-down car and lack of money trap her in the town.

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

A version of this post previously appeared at Bright Lights Film Journal. It now celebrates the recent release of Certain Women, a series of vignettes set in small-town Montana directed by Kelly Reichardt and starring Kristen Stewart, Michelle Williams, and Laura Dern.

The lateral pan 50 minutes into Wendy and Lucy kills me. The 2008 movie follows a simple enough story: girl and dog travel through a train-yard town, girl’s car breaks down, girl loses dog, girl finds dog in a better situation, girl leaves alone on a freight train. It is one in a series of stories from the writer/director about someone “passing through.” Through the course of the film, Kelly Reichardt’s pacing is so deliberate that even the most ordinary moments seem intensely significant. Reichardt’s framing traps Wendy in shots as much as her broken-down car and lack of money trap her in the town. But I cannot escape the lingering grasp of that pan. It just breaks my heart every time I see it.

Having lost her dog during a day-long stint in the local police precinct for shoplifting food, Wendy begins a search for Lucy who was left tied to the bike rack outside of the grocery store. Wendy tapes an “I’m lost” flyer with Lucy’s picture and description to a storefront window and walks away, but her movement doesn’t draw the camera’s gaze. All I see is the scene Wendy leaves behind: a soda machine and passing cars reflected in the glass that now holds the symbol of a tragic loss, simultaneously the symbol of a hopeful return. Then the camera starts to shift. Slowly. Too slowly. Is Lucy in the alley? Is there something written on that wall which seems to take minutes to glide over? What draws the camera’s gaze since it didn’t swish to keep up with Wendy when she walked away? Where is the camera taking me and where is this story going?

The distance traveled in that pan seems infinite: from the window, then along the building’s wall, and finally around the corner to see Wendy walking toward a fenced-off field (at which point she beckons to Lucy in a voice much smaller than Michelle Williams’ presence). In order to cover the apparently infinite space, that pan seems to last an eternity. Actually, it takes only a few seconds to cover a short distance, and the pan is only one among many employed in the film; but damn if it doesn’t crush me in a way no mere pan should.

A conventional pan should be a horizontal pivot of the camera which reveals a lateral view of scenery or action, particularly by following a moving subject. But Reichardt’s pan breaks the mold and imposes narrative significance to a cursory moment in Wendy’s story. The solitary pivot point of the pan doesn’t give me a stationary place of reference to make sense of the movement, and what is revealed in the course of the pan is not an environmental relationship between the storefront and Wendy. Rather, the pan shows me that I am limited in who I can see, what I can know, and where I can go. I’m just as bound to the isolation and desperation of a search without a foreseeable end as Wendy is as she calls out yet again and wonders about Lucy’s fate. (And I begin to wonder if Reichardt is telling a story about a drifter or documenting the reality of moving from film to film without a view as to her own professional future. As sad as that prospect seems, I reenter the film and think about the impact of that pan.)

The connection between Wendy and Lucy is severed, so even the story’s focal point seems lost. Wendy worries about Lucy and puts every effort into finding her, only to leave her once she is found. Wendy’s impoverished situation makes each of the choices she faces seem binary. Either she loses some of the limited money she has or she tries to steal food. Either she reclaims Lucy or she leaves her in a stable home. Either she moves forward or backward. Unlike so many other road movies, Wendy never feels the freedom of open possibilities. She is moving on a track from point A to point B, and she does not diverge from a determined path. Her journey is like that pan, slowly moving from one place to another, and whatever she experiences is just another point on a line that must be traveled in order to reach the destination.

I think the pan itself actually makes me feel the grief that follows the loss of a friend. On the surface, it is devoid of meaningful content; but maybe the effect is supposed to underscore the contextual space that opens for Wendy in a life without Lucy and foreshadow Wendy’s solitary departure from the town. The steady movement of that pan etches a line across the horizon of possibilities within the film: there is no freedom experienced in this traveler’s tale since Wendy is shackled by financial and social limitations as she journeys across the country. The function of that pan in some way binds me to Wendy as I eventually catch up to her, but the camera lacks any purpose that extends beyond finding a familiar character to latch onto. It is as if the camera’s gaze merely seeks a place to rest from this unending unknown, and that might be Wendy’s true quest in the film.

Thus attached to that pan, my motivation for attentive analysis is lost, as absent as Lucy from Wendy’s field of view. I don’t know where to find meaning and instead I find myself on shaky ground, if any at all, as if no tripod could support the weight of interpretation. The delay leading up to that pan makes the camera seem lethargic, imposing its own sigh in the midst of a sad situation. During that pan, the camera doesn’t just pivot: it floats from the flyer’s symbol of a search to the distraught searcher, both of which are disconnected from the object of the search; and I am left hanging like the flyer, one copy from a stack just like it, posted alongside other flyers for other lost dogs. Stripped of conventional purposes such as establishing a relationship to other characters or demonstrating the vastness of the environment, that pan makes me hover and drift. I am a ghost doomed to haunt the Oregon landscape, trapped alongside Wendy in this lost world.

Wendy’s ordeal in the film is comprised of just a few days in a longer journey; but that short time slowly develops into systemic uncertainty with increasingly intense vulnerability to invasions by unknown others and explores the bitter circumstances involved in negotiating the mundane details of a marginalized life. In the middle of the film, that pan evokes a sense of alienation and suggests Wendy’s lonely departure alongside an empty space. By the end of the film, Wendy has no safety net, no social network, no clarity of purpose… just like me with that pan. A life without significant attachments, an inability to escape the trappings of necessity, the meandering that accompanies an indefinite future: all conveyed painstakingly in a simple pan, an occasion fit for heartbreak.

ThoughtPusher might live somewhere near you (especially if you have a neighbor who blasts New Order or Tears for Fears most nights), but certainly is a cinephile who has no interest in being followed or asking to be liked.

Why ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’ Is One of My Favorite Films

The character was created to be an icon, a model for Roberta and other women like her, an image to hold in our heads of what life could be like if we just unleashed our inner pop star. But she’s also real enough that it feels like you might spot her in a hip nightclub, dancing uninhibited and having more fun than anyone else there just because she’s being herself.

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

It isn’t referenced much in any well-informed, critical film discussions. It isn’t typically put forth as a shining example of 80s cinema, or women-directed cinema, or Madonna-starring cinema. It probably isn’t used in many film classes. It isn’t especially well-remembered today, except as a kind of style footnote within the singer’s long and storied career. And yet, I would easily count Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan among my favorite films.

I remember the very first time I ever saw this movie. I was about 16, and I was home sick with a bad cold. I was in a fog all day but couldn’t sleep, so I hazily watched movies on cable TV all afternoon. Desperately Seeking Susan came on one of our movie channels and I immediately fell for its hip 80s New York world. I grew up in a boring suburb across the river from New York City, and easily imagined myself crossing the tunnel and joining a rock band and living a super-cool city life and having wild but sexy fashion sense when I got older. I especially romanticized the punk/new wave scene of the 70s and 80s, when there was graffiti everywhere and cool musicians hanging out on every corner, and young people could live in crumbling bohemian apartments and no one ever seemed to need a day job. I wanted to be an independent young woman who exuded confidence and had street smarts and wore red lipstick and could somehow eat a puffy cheeto without getting cheese dust all over her body. Instead, I was stuck in my small town with my awkward teen body and a personal style that took many more years to cultivate into anything I could be comfortable with.

Basically, I was a Roberta. And I wanted to be a Susan.

Combining wacky caper with romantic comedy and class satire, Desperately Seeking Susan is about a bored, lonely housewife named Roberta living in Fort Lee, NJ, who longs for something to spice up her cookie-cutter existence. She knows she’s desperate, but she’s not sure for what, she just has a vague feeling of dissatisfaction, of disconnection from her bland husband and yuppie friends. It takes a total movie-comedy moment (in the form of an amnesia-inducing bump on the head) to free her from the lifestyle she had fallen into; a large portion of the film is dedicated to her coming into herself and finding her personality. Being mistaken for Susan means she can model herself after Susan, or at least everyone’s image of Susan. Without her memories and without any connection to her real life, Roberta is suddenly able to do anything, and to be anybody, a thought which obviously excites her. She starts (and immediately quits) smoking, makes out with a near-stranger, learns to perform magic, dresses to kill, and foils a murderous criminal plot.

Madonna’s character Susan, on the other hand, is introduced as a sexy new wave nomad, breezing her way through relationships and hotel rooms across the country, presumably charming everyone she meets and never having to pay for anything herself. She wears mesh tops and chunky jewelry, her bold lipstick is never smudged, and she dates a cute boy in a rock band. She is effortlessly cool and fully self-assured, full of ideas and never ever boring. She struts around New York City without a care in the world, believing that everyone can come to her, and everything will work out the way she wants it to. She embodies the New York downtown scene of the early 80s, a movement Madonna herself was involved in before she catapulted to fame around the time of the film’s release, which gives her an authenticity that couldn’t be captured with an outsider actress. The character was created to be an icon, a model for Roberta and other women like her, an image to hold in our heads of what life could be like if we just unleashed our inner pop star. But she’s also real enough that it feels like you might spot her in a hip nightclub, dancing uninhibited and having more fun than anyone else there just because she’s being herself.

While not all of Roberta’s exploratory adventures actually suit her, she seems able to find a happy medium between her former good-natured housewife self and the wild-girl persona that was thrust upon her. And yes, part of that happens through finding love, real love that isn’t the watered-down marriage she’d been stuck in for four years. But the story isn’t about finding yourself through a man, or any relationship, it’s about finding yourself outside of those things. One of my favorite exchanges of the movie is towards the end when Roberta confronts her dopey (and hilariously terrible) husband, Gary, after he finally tracks her down to the club where she’s working as a magician’s assistant. “Look at me,” she says. His response is, “I looked at you, you look ridiculous.” “I mean, look at ME, Gary!” she implores. Her face and her inflection speak volumes, and it’s clear this is the most weight she has ever given to the word “me,” that this is the first time she really understands what the word means. And finally she asserts, “I’m not coming home with you.” It’s a really good moment.

I’m not saying Desperately Seeking Susan should be held up as some great, under-appreciated feminist text. I’m not saying Susan should be considered a role model, or that she served as mine specifically (for one thing, she smokes, so that’s a dealbreaker). What I am hoping for is a little respect. This film is primarily remembered for Madonna’s fashion and a string of musical cameos (John Lurie, Annie Golden, Richard Edson, Anne Magnuson, etc.), but it would be great if it was more often cited as what it is to me: A significant entry into the never-big-enough genre of empowering women’s stories. Because, as a former sick teen sitting at home on the couch, forever uncool and unsure, it was nice to watch Roberta becoming her own person for the first time, and to witness Susan just being Susan. It still is.

Alex Kittle is an artist, writer, retail buyer, and curator who lives and works in the Boston area. She is passionate about many things, including horror movies, 80s new wave, feminist art history, crossword puzzles, and science-fiction. You can find her at almost any given time of day hanging out on Twitter at @alexxkittle.

Euzhan Palcy’s ‘A Dry White Season’: Black Lives in a White Season

It is doubtful that anyone else could have made ‘A Dry White Season’ as poignantly relevant as Euzhan Palcy did. Her eye for the upending effects of apartheid on Black families brings their grievances to bear. … The meaning behind Palcy’s work resounds clearly: Black lives matter in 1976 South Africa as they do in 2016 America.

This guest post written by Shara D. Taylor appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

Young, Black people take to the streets to peacefully protest unequal treatment. Officers in military gear face them in battle formation and order them to disperse. The protestors sing in unity, refusing to cower at the threat. The officers indiscriminately shoot canisters and bullets into the crowd and begin beating anyone within striking distance. They unleash dogs and wield batons against the backs of Black residents as helicopters whiz overhead. After the tear gas clears, parents find their little ones and shuffle them into safer quarters.

This could be a recent description of the streets in Ferguson, MO, Baltimore, Chicago, or another U.S. city where Black Lives Matter activists have fought against police brutality and harassment.

But, it is not. It is a breathtaking scene from Euzhan Palcy’s seminal film A Dry White Season (1989).

Set in South Africa in 1976 during the reign of apartheid, it stands as a testament to the continuous assault on Black lives around the globe. The story reflects Black South Africans’ struggle for freedom from a system that devalues and maims them with impunity. As the first Black woman to direct a film for a major studio, Palcy handles her subjects with such care and reverence that it becomes impossible to ignore their modern incarnations.

Scenes of everyday life punctuate the film. Black residents escape reality by drinking beer in crowded dining halls, as white residents play rugby in lush green fields. Black folks resist the heavy hand of a corrupted justice system, while white people roll around in well-manicured lawns with their babies.

Their lives touch in an uneasy social stratification that allows them to intersect without intermingling. Even as Black domestic workers toil in the homes of white families, their lived experiences exist on the periphery of their employers’ purview.

Gordon Ngubene (Winston Ntshona) works as a gardener for Ben du Toit (Donald Sutherland). When police cane the buttocks of Ngubene’s son Jonathan (Bekhithemba Mpofu) and leave deep wounds without cause, du Toit’s response is telling: “They must’ve had a reason.”

It never occurs to him that a system set in place to protect him would abuse its authority. It is easy to imagine him responding “all lives matter” to “Black lives matter.” His worldview rests comfortably in the idea that Black people always make trouble for themselves. Any other explanation upsets his blindly privileged life.

Concerned about his son having a criminal record, Ngubene turns to his employer for help. Du Toit asks the boy if he clearly explained his situation to the court. When Ngubene reminds him that Jonathan is merely a child, du Toit dismisses it as a “minor matter” and offers treatment for his physical wounds. It again becomes apparent that du Toit lacks the socio-political awareness that would give him pause at such a troubling offense.

Du Toit’s 21st Century American contemporaries likely would label Jonathan as a “thug” who “got what he deserved,” in much the same way they have shown their contempt for Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. Indeed, du Toit’s houseguest goes unchecked for referring to Black children as “bloody savages.” His wife Susan (Janet Suzman) quickly changes the subject as the family gathers for a meal. All the while, Jonathan and du Toit’s son Johan (Rowen Elmes) absorb the messages of their fathers, all but ensuring a perpetual cycle of black oppression and white obliviousness.

During the earlier-mentioned protest, Jonathan goes missing at the hands of police. Officers deny having a record of his arrest. This sends his father on a mission to find him. Ngubene and his wife Emily (Thoko Ntshinga) search hospitals and makeshift mortuaries crammed with dying and dead children. Their quest yields nothing.

When Ngubene returns to work in the du Toit’s garden, du Toit and Johan watch a helicopter fly overhead, noting that it is the third one of the day. Instead of inquiring about the safety of Ngubene’s family, du Toit demands to know where he has been for two days. When Ngubene explains the unrest that has taken place in his community, du Toit responds with disbelief, as expected. Nevertheless, he makes a call to lawyer Ian McKenzie (an excellent, post-retirement Marlon Brando) to inquire into the whereabouts of Jonathan. He finally receives word that the boy is dead with police blaming the protests for his death.

McKenzie provides a pragmatic, if cynical, view on the South African legal system. He describes justice and law as distant cousins who do not speak to each other in this country. He should know. His courtroom victories result in changes that mute his arguments.

The unbelievable suicide of Ngubene while in police custody compels du Toit to ask McKenzie for his assistance in prosecuting the officers involved. As he discovers how deeply embedded corruption is within the court system, du Toit relents his harsh stance on the plight of Black South Africans. This comes at a steep price for him and his family and proves too late for the untold number of South Africans who have perished under apartheid rule.

Similar to the lives witnessed in Ava DuVernay’s magnificent Selma (2014), the characters in A Dry White Season become part of the world beyond the screen. They inform the viewer’s understanding of what it means for Black people to live under a racist regime. They want their humanity respected, their rights acknowledged, and their lives protected. Supporters of Black Lives Matter want the same. It seems a simple premise that remains elusive to a violent power structure rooted in white supremacy.

It is doubtful that anyone else could have made A Dry White Season as poignantly relevant as Euzhan Palcy did. Her eye for the upending effects of apartheid on Black families brings their grievances to bear. She also captures the damaging psychological effect on white people who finally realize their beneficiary status in an oppressive system.

The meaning behind Palcy’s work resounds clearly: Black lives matter in 1976 South Africa as they do in 2016 America.

Shara D. Taylor watches films to break the monotony of her raging urban planner lifestyle. Her interests include Hip-Hop, A Different World, Back to the Future, and everything directed by Ava DuVernay. You can send her pleasant tweets @sharas_soapbox.

Movie You Need to Be Talking About: ‘Advantageous’

Directed and co-written by Jennifer Phang, ‘Advantageous’ is a surprisingly touching and purposeful film that revitalizes certain elements of the sci-fi genre while presenting two powerful voices in women filmmakers: Jennifer Phang and Jacqueline Kim.

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

You may remember when I first mentioned Advantageous among several other Sundance films I was anticipating this year. Well, full disclosure, I kinda forgot about it until it popped up in my “recommended” Netflix queue last weekend. Why didn’t anyone tell me it was out this weekend?! Anyway, I caught up with it and I have to tell you, it exceeded my expectations. It’s a small film that tackles a massive issue in a very vulnerable way, yielding a story about a mother’s love, self-worth, and youth obsession.

Advantageous is set in a not-so-distant future (actually, if not for the flying cars, it would be identical to modern times), and follows Gwen (Jacqueline Kim, who also co-wrote the screenplay), a woman working for a technically advanced wellness company that equates beauty with youth and helps women sustain their value by offering a unique procedure that preserves their age. Ironically, as the spokesperson for the company, Gwen finds herself in the position where she has to consider this procedure for herself once she is let go from her job due to her “advanced age.”(By the way, she’s probably, like, 40 — if that — but still bad for business). As I said, not very far off from today’s times.

Though the basis of this film is familiar, what makes the film so special are the relationships between the characters and Kim’s compelling performance of a woman drawn to desperate measures. As the mother of a young daughter in a society quick to invalidate women, Gwen sees a hopelessness in Jules’s (her daughter) future and wants to be able to at least be a role model for her, someone she can be proud of. Through Kim’s visceral performance, you feel the agony of each passing day which is only making Gwen older. Another day without work, without promise, and without a real life for herself. You feel that in every scene Kim is in (which is most of them, if not all), the utter claustrophobia of Gwen’s life.

There’s a heart-crushing moment in the film in which Gwen admits that Jules is the only thing that makes her happy. You feel this most in the quiet, bittersweet scenes the mother and daughter share, which ultimately serve to hasten her life-altering decision. But it is only toward the end of film that we realize the cost.

Directed and co-written by Jennifer Phang, Advantageous is a surprisingly touching and purposeful film that revitalizes certain elements of the sci-fi genre while presenting two powerful voices in women filmmakers: Phang and Kim. I look forward to seeing what they have in store next.

https://youtu.be/hgTgRBxY0nw

Creator/blogger of Reel Talk Online, Candice Frederick is a writer for hire, lover of snark, former magazine journalist, and co-host of the podcast, “Cinema in Noir.” She is also a Personal Lifestyle Contributor for Black Girl Nerds, and member of the Online Film Critics Society, Alliance of Women Film Journalists, and LAMB (Large Association of Movie Bloggers).

Kathryn Bigelow’s ‘Near Dark’: Busting Stereotypes and Drawing Blood

Both brutally violent and shockingly sexy, ‘Near Dark’s influence can be felt nearly thirty years later on a new crop of unusual vampire dramas that simultaneously embrace and reject the conventions of the genre. … Yet among all these films about outsiders, ‘Near Dark’ will always have a special place in my heart for being the one to show me that as a filmmaker, I was not alone in the world after all.

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

There were many reasons why I felt like an outsider while studying film and television production at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Some were related to class; I felt as though everyone around me had more money (and fewer student loans). Some were related to my lack of practical production experience; prior to film school, I had never operated a camera apart from a few silly movies starring action figures. Some reasons, I am willing to admit, were inside my own introverted, antisocial head. However, it was my taste in film that really made me feel as though I did not belong at a school with “arts” in its name. I like action movies packed with stylish fight sequences, zombie movies so gory that every frame is splattered with brains, and science-fiction movies crammed with special effects. As a writer and director, I aspired to be Peter Jackson, Edgar Wright, Quentin Tarantino, Guy Ritchie and Robert Rodriguez all rolled into one frenetic package, which makes you feel a bit awkward when everyone around you worships at the art-house altars of David Lynch and Terrence Malick. It’s also a bit awkward when you realize that all of the directors you look up to are men.

When I was in my final year at NYU, Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Director. This was already a big deal, but it was all the more important to me because she had won it for directing The Hurt Locker, a tense, literally explosive drama about a troubled bomb diffuser in Iraq. Here was a woman making films that were dark, disturbing, visually compelling and packed with action — all things I aspired to include in my own work — and getting recognized for it by the Hollywood establishment. Delving deep into Bigelow’s wide-ranging oeuvre, which includes Soviet submarine thriller K-19: The Widowmaker and Keanu classic Point Break, inspired and reassured me while I was struggling to pinpoint my own identity, both as a filmmaker and a woman.

My favorite Kathryn Bigelow film, and the one I feel the most kinship with as a filmmaker, is her second feature, Near Dark. Released in 1987 at the height of a bloodsucker boom led by The Lost Boys, it manages to stand out from the pack thanks to its improbable but incredible combination of the vampire genre with that of the Western to create one weird, pulpy masterpiece. Before watching Near Dark, I primarily expected to encounter vampires in eerie, overcast Eastern European locales filled with fog and ancient history; to encounter them smashing across the broad, sunburnt plains of Texas in a battered motorhome was shocking and refreshing. Near Dark’s vampires are never referred to as such, nor do they have the chivalrous manners and old-fashioned elegance of many of their forefathers. Rather, they’re a marauding band of leather-coated drifters who wouldn’t be out of place in the world of Mad Max, coated liberally with blood, sweat and dirt. Both brutally violent and shockingly sexy, Near Dark’s influence can be felt nearly thirty years later on a new crop of unusual vampire dramas that simultaneously embrace and reject the conventions of the genre.

Near Dark opens with a close-up of a bloodsucking creature, but not the one that you expect — it’s a mosquito, hovering on the arm of farm boy Caleb Colton (an achingly young Adrian Pasdar) until he smacks it away. Driving into town to meet some friends, he spies an innocent-looking blonde pixie of a girl emerging from a shop while licking a vanilla ice cream cone. What follows is an all-American meet-cute laden with vampire innuendo that poor Caleb just cannot comprehend.

“Can I have a bite?” Caleb drawls, oozing earnest Southern charm.
“A bite?”
“Yeah. I’m just dying for a cone.”
“Dying?”

The girl, Mae (Jenny Wright), is not just any pretty girl. She’s a honey trap, luring unsuspecting victims into the clutches of her nomadic vampire family. Caleb behaves as though Mae is the prey, the object to be pursued and hopefully won; little does he know, it is entirely the other way around. When he tries to impress her with a lasso, she grabs hold of the rope herself and reels him in, shocking him with her strength. “I haven’t met any girls like you,” Caleb says, attempting to flatter her. “No,” Mae replies in a tense voice, “You sure haven’t.”

The instant, almost animal attraction between Caleb and Mae is obvious, and they share a long, romantic night driving around the Texas plains before Mae begins to panic that she won’t be home before sunrise. Caleb assumes she’s only afraid her daddy will punish her for being out all night, and coyly asks for a kiss before she goes. What he gets is far more than he bargained for — a passionate, hungry kiss, sure, but one that culminates in a nasty bite on the neck and the sight of his bright red blood dripping down Mae’s white chin as she hops down from his truck.

Soon it is morning, and Caleb finds himself staggering across the fields towards his father’s farm, weakened by the harsh rays of the rising sun, with telltale smoke sizzling up from his slowly roasting skin. Before he can make it to safety, he is scooped up by Mae and her gang in their motorhome. They’re ready to suck him dry — that is, until Mae mentions to the others that she did a bit more than just reveal her true nature to him. By biting him, he has become her responsibility –and potentially, her mate. Furious, the rest of the vampires reluctantly agree that Caleb can stay alive a little bit longer and be given the chance to learn to live like one of them. In other words, to live by the cover of darkness, luring (usually via hitchhiking) and killing innocent people without hesitation in order to survive.

“What do we do now?” Caleb, dumbfounded by his new immortal status, asks Mae.
“Anything we want, until the end of time,” she replies.

During Caleb and Mae’s first meeting, Caleb oozes confidence and plays at dominance, the way most boys do when trying to win over a girl. However, once he becomes a vampire, the reversal of stereotypical gender roles is striking. Caleb becomes entirely dependent on Mae. It is only her attraction to him that keeps the rest of her family from killing him on the spot, and it is only her willingness to kill for him and allow him to drink her own blood that keeps him alive in the days that follow. Caleb needs Mae, and because of this, their intimacy grows in new and bizarre ways. In one particularly passionate scene, Mae bites open her own wrist and clutches Caleb’s desperate, hungry head to her while he feeds, until he almost kills her in his fervor.

Despite his obvious need to consume blood, Caleb cannot bring himself to take a life, whereas the other vampires seem not only to kill to live, but also to live to kill. They’ve survived so long by any means necessary that they don’t hesitate to wipe out the entire clientele of a rundown roadside bar for both food and fun (a scene of creative carnage that rivals the equally deadly tavern scene in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds). The gang includes Jesse (Lance Henriksen), the charismatic leader who fought for the south in the Civil War; Jesse’s mate, Diamondback (Jenette Goldstein), whose big blonde hair and skintight ensembles can’t help but remind you of another iconic Eighties femme fatale, the android Pris in Blade Runner; Homer (Joshua Miller), who was turned as a boy and perpetually struggles with having an ancient brain trapped inside a child’s body; and the particularly vicious Severen (a delightfully unhinged Bill Paxton), who introduces himself to Caleb by informing him, “I’m gonna separate your head from your shoulders. Hope you don’t mind none.” They all speak in a bizarre, stylized version of Southern dialect that drips in menace and the occasional old-fashioned turn of phrase that comes from having lived long enough to take credit for starting the Great Chicago Fire. But Mae, the youngest of the vampires, is different. She kills to keep herself alive, but she seems to take a lot less sick joy in it than the others, and the more time she spends with Caleb, the more their heartless behavior seems to turn her off. By being with Caleb, she is reminded of what it was to be human — after all, she was one herself not so long ago.

Near Dark doesn’t have much in the way of plot; Caleb is dragged around Texas by the vampires, the timer on his existence counting down faster and faster, while his father and little sister search for him. The pulsating beat of the awesomely Eighties electronic score by Tangerine Dream adds to the urgency. It all culminates in an explosive finale with numerous characters meeting horrific ends via spontaneous combustion under the cloudless blue Texas sky — beautiful, and without mercy. There’s a happy ending that some might think a cop-out, as it goes against traditional vampire lore. Yet, rejecting traditional and expected vampire tropes is one of the things that makes Near Dark such a memorable film. Nothing about it is expected. It breaks all of the rules and makes up its own along the way. This Southern-fried story of young love, lust and lost innocence has as much in common with Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show than any Dracula movie.

Today, Near Dark’s legacy lives on in films like A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, from another promising woman director, Ana Lily Amirpour. In a film described as “the first Iranian vampire Western,” Amirpour brings vampires to another unfamiliar locale — this time, a dead-end Iranian town called Bad City. Here, a nameless bloodsucking girl (Sheila Vand) prowls the dark, empty streets in a chador, using her deceptively delicate and feminine appearance to lure and attack men who abuse women. Like Mae, she is much stronger than she initially appears. Independent film icon Jim Jarmusch also recently experimented in the vampire genre with Only Lovers Left Alive, which stars Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston as an ancient, moody, bohemian couple holed up in rundown Detroit. While less of a direct descendant of Near Dark than A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, ones feels that this sexy, slow-moving story could not have been told without its more frantically passionate predecessor. Here, the horror aspects of the traditional vampire story take a backseat as the film explores how love can be powerful enough to survive enough dark moments to fill multiple lifetimes. The loneliness inherent in being immortal seems to be the one constant among all vampire films, even the most untraditional ones — and yes, even Twilight. Yet among all these films about outsiders, Near Dark will always have a special place in my heart for being the one to show me that as a filmmaker, I was not alone in the world after all.

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. You can follow her on Medium for more film reviews and on Twitter for an excessive amount of opinions on German soccer.

Female Becomingness Through Maya Deren’s Lens in ‘Meshes of the Afternoon’

Her most famous work, ‘Meshes of the Afternoon’ becomes, in this way, a reading of a woman working with and against herself through splitting into multiple iterations of herself. Most importantly, the film unpacks the notion that not only is the dream-landscape of a woman complex, it is bound tightly to her, defining who she is and guiding her constantly through the world like a compass.

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

What is it about Maya Deren that continually lures viewers to her body of work? Is it the enigmatic images that comprise her films? The depth of her symbolism? The notably non-mainstream depictions of the female form and psyche? Perhaps it is all of these things. One thing is for certain: Deren was unlike any woman working in film during the first half of the twentieth century. Consistently cited as a revolutionary in cinema, Deren lived and breathed the lifestyle of a working intellectual. She was seemingly cut from the large swath of men working in the postmodern arts of the WWII era and yet destined to re-shape it.

It’s easy to forget that there were active movements of artistic change working in film in the 1940s: Among the hard-boiled crime noirs, screwball comedies and heroic war epics being pumped out by Hollywood, there was also an equally tangible thrust towards surrealist and avant-garde aesthetics in film. The European approach to Surrealism, Dada and Futurism were swirling and manifesting into one great push towards what would be recognized as a post-modern art movement in America.

Well-educated and well-versed in the arts, Deren’s first foray into the arts was as a dancer. But her restlessness in dancing meant she did not succumb to traditional trajectories like her female peers — often settling to be chorus girls or struggling actresses. When it came to art, she was compelled to fulfill her own vision. The themes and ideologies she worked into her films are direct product of the culture in which she was working, yet it was wholly unlike anything being exhibited. Questions surrounding the social, spiritual and psychological place of woman are at the heart of Deren’s films. She was working against the Hollywood machine, against a male-dominated art form and against socio-normative ways of portraying the female self. This is what makes Deren so notable: her films deal with the uniquely female issues of time and the body in a considerate and challenging manner.

Deren’s rejection of the Hollywood machine fully emerges in her style, editing, storyline and characterization. Her push towards re-contextualizing the female body in relation to space and time can still strike us as wholly fresh and challenging. Her most famous work, Meshes of the Afternoon becomes, in this way, a reading of a woman working with and against herself through splitting into multiple iterations of herself. Most importantly, the film unpacks the notion that not only is the dream-landscape of a woman complex, it is bound tightly to her, defining who she is and guiding her constantly through the world like a compass.

In the documentary In the Mirror of Maya Deren, Deren’s voiceover speaks carefully to us:

“What I do in my films is very distinctive. They are the films of a woman and I think that they’re characteristic time quality is the time quality of a woman. I think the strength of men is in their great sense of immediacy. They are a ‘now’ creature. A woman has strength to wait because she has had to wait. Time is built into her body in the sense of becomingness. She sees everything in terms of the stage of becoming.”

Who or what does Deren become in Meshes of the Afternoon when time reconfigures her mental and physical self?

In Meshes of the Afternoon, we are presented with a simple mystery: What is haunting Deren and why? Is she dealing with real or imagined trauma? In order to find the true answer, we watch as time breaks Deren apart. Fragmenting her real body into multiple dream bodies, she must reassemble herself in order to understand herself. What we find out is that freedom is the separation of herself in life — through death — from the man who has tethered himself to her. He has brought her into a home which now feels destructive and alien to her. The key to release is, ultimately, death, leading her to the dreamlike sea, away from the claustrophobic villa that was slowly destroying her.

The film uses rituals here to better tease out the idea of how a woman can find release from a problem; in this case, the problem of a restrictive relationship. As Deren’s multiple selves enter into the house, examining the abandoned and cluttered space, they work in concert to work out the best means of release. With each step closer to the solution, the dream seeks to throw Deren off the scent, to disorient her enough to wake up back to the comfort of romantic confinement. To what lengths is she willing to go to be free? We watch the key and knife presented repeatedly. The women sit as the table, each representing a different path and trying to take the key to fulfill a separate purpose. Is escaping the confines of this house, and by extension the relationship best done with a key to open a doorway to a new world, to step into a better space? Or is it a knife to both destroy and release that which hurts her so deeply? More importantly, will the hooded figure be the person to release her or further harm her? Ultimately, it is only through death (decided through much struggle) that she can free herself and find freedom in the open waters of the afterlife.

What makes Meshes of the Afternoon so vital is not only its toying with a traditionally linear time narrative, but also its critical characterization of the fraught nature of a woman solving a problem so often attributed to her gender: the role she must play in a romantic relationship. By illustrating the doubts and confusions that occur when a woman comes to a love-based impasse, the film seeks its resolution in the psychological complexity that is woman herself. For if women are heteronormatively socially programmed to devote their entire being to the care and love of a man, then Meshes of the Afternoon makes the argument that a woman must find complete physical, mental and spiritual release in order to find herself again. The woman here feels so constricted and defined by a relationship that she must seek a dramatic escape. In her home, in her body and in her romantic life, she is caged. Released through death is what a woman becomes as time ekes out its purpose to weaken the female self.

We can appreciate that Meshes of the Afternoon is different in nearly every way from the typical cinematic fare of 1943. Deren’s thorough rejection of narrative made way for audiences to experience the psychological drama of a woman. In both this film and her successive short films, Deren vitally infused the fraught, passionate, dreamlike, maniacally repetitive and deeply complex nature of woman into each frame. In reframing female issues through the repurposing masculine art forms, Deren cemented herself as an eternally important female artist and director.

Allie Gemmill is a film journalist based in Tampa, FL. She is the founder and creative director of The Filmme Guild, a feminist film salon dedicated to examining the intersections of women and film. Follow her on Twitter and Medium.

Women with a Camera: How Women Directors Can Change the Cinematic Landscape

What I saw… was the problem women have faced for centuries: the popularity of woman as art subject, not as creator. What critics and award judges seem to love are not so much women’s stories, but women’s stories told by men. Stories in which women’s agency is strictly and safely in the hands of a male auteurs. … We need more women filmmakers — not as a way to fill quotas, but because women’s stories are different, unique, and need to be told.

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

The Oscars came and went, lacking (as usual) women nominees in the Best Director category. As a teenager I decided that I wanted to be “the first woman to win the Oscar for Best Director.” Every year, as one man after the other won the coveted award, I also started questioning if my goal had any possibility of materializing. Then Kathryn Bigelow won Best Director in 2010, and (while I obviously had to modify my original plan of being the “first woman”), Bigelow’s victory gave me hope that it could be done — that young, aspiring girls could dream of being outstanding movie directors.

But then again, when I considered that Bigelow had won for The Hurt Locker, I also secretly dreaded that the only way for me to gain any recognition was to make what’s perceived as a “dude” movie: male-centric, revolving around masculine themes, and downplaying women and their personal perspective. “A female perspective will never win,” I thought, and unfortunately I’m still right. Throughout the history of the Academy Awards, only four women have been nominated for Best Director: Lina Wertmüller in 1977, Jane Campion in 1993, Sofia Coppola in 2003, and Bigelow in 2010. The difference between the three women nominees and Bigelow is that their movies were about women. Not to downplay Bigelow’s victory, but as Melissa Silverstein points out:

“When [Bigelow] makes a movie about men at war she gets the win, but when she makes a movie about war with a central female character she gets snubbed.”

Women get awarded for making movies about men, while movies about women — or featuring a female lead — typically receive an award or nominee if they’re directed by men. But this phenomenon (or I could say “tendency”) happens almost every year, and it’s not simply restricted to Hollywood.

When asked to name 5 female directors, Tom McCarthy (director of Spotlight) defended himself by saying, “I don’t want to play that game. There’s a gender gap everywhere … so to put it on the Academy or Hollywood is ridiculous.” McCarthy is right. The Oscars are not the problem; the industry is the problem. While rightly criticized for lack of diversity, the Oscars (or any award shows) are the end of the line, where all the discrimination and prejudice propagated by the industry puts on a gala, and gives itself a little golden statuette. The Academy Awards are simply the symptom of a much bigger cultural problem, in which women’s input or perspective is downplayed, stifled, or treated with lesser importance than its male counterpart. But more so than other art forms, cinema has a huge gender (and race) problem.

As Silverstein pointed out, movies about women directed by men seem to receive higher praise and recognition. Look at the praise surrounding Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida, Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Colour, or Christian Petzold’s Phoenix. These grand, critically-acclaimed art films, which give off airs of being “important” films about women’s stories and their inner lives, unfortunately left me empty and disappointed. What I saw was a discrepancy between the fabricated victories on screen, carefully crafted stories by men that pulled at our heart strings — stories of women rising from the ashes, or undergoing a sexual reawakening — victories that did not reflect what is happening off screen, where the voices of women directors are often downplayed, ignored, or told to calm down. It’s a hollow victory to celebrate a fictional character’s triumph on screen, while overlooking all the women directors who are relegated to the dusty file cabinets of cinema history. What I saw, when I watched Ida or Phoenix, was the problem women have faced for centuries: the popularity of woman as art subject, not as creator. What critics and award judges seem to love are not so much women’s stories, but women’s stories told by men. Stories in which women’s agency is strictly and safely in the hands of a male auteurs.

I’m not suggesting that men shouldn’t make movies about women, since some of my favorite women-centered films were directed by men, like Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977), or Stuart Heisler’s Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (1947). But what’s the deal here? If movies about women sell, and get rave reviews, why aren’t more women making them? If men are capable of giving us such nuanced and complex portraits of women’s lives, imagine what women directors (if they were given more opportunities) could contribute to the discussion. In cinema, revolutionary change does not begin on the screen, it starts with the people behind the camera — change stems from the creators, and when there are so few female creators, there is not much change either. Leigh Janiak, director of Honeymoon (2014), gave a succinct response to the lack of female directors:

“We are influencing culture, which is why it’s so dangerous, I think, not to have more women making movies.”

It’s not the movies, but the filmmakers, who have the power to chance the direction of our cultural narrative.

Producers don’t hire women directors because they assume they either can’t direct an action flick, or that they’ll cry on set. But why push for a woman to direct the next Superman or James Bond film? Why waste female talent on mindless formula movies that cater to teenage boys, when there are many more interesting stories to tell. But that’s one issue with the film industry, which is constantly comparing and trying to hold women up to men’s standards. So who cares if a woman didn’t direct Apocalypse Now or the next Superman. I don’t see any male director giving us Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman…, Věra Chytilová’s Daisies, Jane Campion’s The Piano, Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood, Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Ava DuVernay’s Selma, or Claire Denis’ Chocolat. A true victory in cinema would not entail women competing with men, or trying to gain membership to the “boy’s club,” but in being able to celebrate women’s stories — their strengths, and their uniqueness — on and off screen. We need more women filmmakers — not as a way to fill quotas, but because women’s stories are different, unique, and need to be told. The female perspective is capable of challenging the dominant point of view, and that’s why women’s contribution matters. No quota or female superhero will fix the gender issue if female agency is not given the focus and respect it deserves.

The Oscars and all the glitzy film awards, then, are not the problem, and they may never matter. What’s more important: joining a club of mostly white dudes, or creating and experiencing art that changes the cultural landscape? Why conform, or downplay women’s creative force and imagination to match the dull guidelines of boring older white men? And most of all, why seek their approval. If we try to infiltrate the system, we run the risk of conforming to it; and when we seek the approval of the system, we become part of it. It may be a while before we see gender equality in the Academy, or even at Cannes. But 10 or 20 years from now, what influences minds and culture will be the artwork, not the awards, or even the critic’s praise. And the art that will be remembered is not chosen by the Academy, but by us.

See also at Bitch Flicks: #OscarsSoWhite: The Fight for Representation at the Oscars

Emanuela Betti has an M.A. in Cinema Studies. She’s a cinema aficionado, part-time astrologer, and occasional eccentric. You can follow her on Tumblr and Twitter @EmanuelaBetti.

‘Concussion’: When Queer Marriage in the Suburbs Isn’t Enough

The queer women we see in sexual situations in ‘Concussion’ are not cut from the same Playboy-ready cloth as the two women in ‘Blue’: one client is fat, another is an obvious real-life survivor of breast cancer and some of her clients, like Eleanor herself, are nowhere near their 20s anymore.

This repost by staff writer Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

How many distinctive, acclaimed films about queer women can be released in American theaters at the same time? If we extrapolate from the actions of film distributors in 2013, the answer is apparently: only one. Concussion was named one of the top 20 films of that year by Slate’s Dana Stevens and was also named one of the top films of 2013 in Salon. Shortly after its premiere, at Sundance, The Weinstein Company acquired it for distribution. For most films that acquisition (and the later support from reviews in traditional media) would mean a national release, but the film had a very limited run in theaters that fall and never played a theater in my art-house-friendly city. The film was on Video On Demand, iTunes, and Google Play, but deserves much more attention than most films that never have a national theatrical run.

This film about a queer woman is, unlike the same year’s Blue Is The Warmest Color, directed and written by a queer woman (Stacie Passon who was nominated for “Best First Feature” in the Independent Spirit Awards and directed an episode of this past season of Transparent) and in many aspects is the answer to those who dismissed Blue as a product of the male gaze. Instead of a teenage protagonist, the main character in Concussion, Abby (played by Robin Weigert: Andrew O’Hehir in Salon summed up her performance as “OMFG”), is a 40-something, stay-at-home Mom, married to another woman and living in the suburbs.

When her son accidentally hits her in the face with a baseball, we see the confusion and blood in the family car ride to the hospital, as she moans to no one in particular, “I don’t want this. I don’t want this. I don’t want this.”

In the ER Abby says she is going back to work in the city (and that she really means it this time). Abby doesn’t need to work for money: her spouse, Kate, is a divorce attorney, kept busy by the dissatisfied wives in their social circle. We see the wives’ well-maintained bodies in slow motion, at the beginning of the film, in spin and yoga classes as David Bowie sings on the soundtrack, “Oh you pretty things…”

Passon knows this world well She lives in the town (Montclair) Abby does. She is married to a woman and has children, one of whom accidentally hit her in the face with a baseball. The parallels between her life and Abby’s may be why the character and setting seem so fully realized.

Abby for the most part blends in with her straight women friends but we see she’s different from them–and not just in her orientation. She reads books while she vacuums. When a friend is circulating a “new motherhood” survey for an article in a parenting magazine, Abby writes of dreams in which she sticks her then newborn son in the microwave–and other dreams in which she and her son are married. She writes, “My poor baby, I didn’t know whether to kill him, fuck him, or eat him.”

At times Abby’s queerness does separate her from the other women. When Abby mentions to her friend that one of the group of women they work out with is “cute,” the friend (played by Janel Maloney) reproaches Abby, “She’s not a lesbian!”

Abby starts work with a contractor to refurbish a city loft. As they transform the apartment, she transforms too, first hiring women to have sex with her and then working out of the loft as a high-priced escort, “Eleanor,” whose clients are all women.

A woman character turning to sex work for reasons other than money is usually a male artist’s conceit, as in Luis Buñuel’s great Belle de Jour, which features stunning, beautifully dressed, doctor’s wife, Catherine Deneuve, working in a brothel while her handsome, attentive (but clueless) husband sees his patients. In women’s memoirs of sex work (like Michelle Tea’s Rent Girl) the money is the point of the work (as it is with most work).

A sex worker character whose clients are all women (when the vast majority of sex work clients are men) is also usually the creation of a straight male artist–and is usually a male character so the work avoids any explicit same-sex scenes.

Perhaps because Concussion turns that last trope on its head (or perhaps because New York is a big city that can cater to many kinds of tastes) we accept the conceit of a woman over 40 seeing women clients (for $800 a session) every day. The queer women we see in sexual situations in Concussion are not cut from the same Playboy-ready cloth as the two women in Blue: one client is fat, another is an obvious real-life survivor of breast cancer and some of her clients, like Eleanor herself, are nowhere near their 20s anymore.

Robin Weigert doesn’t have a Barbie Doll face or a porn model’s body, but does have a passing resemblance to the young Ellen Barkin. Weigert exudes the same confidence and sexiness–reminding us those two qualities are often one and the same.

Concussion has a scene similar to one in Blue in which a straight man interrogates a queer woman about her sexuality. But because Abby is in her 40s, the mocking tone she takes with him is completely different from what we hear from the 20-something main character in Blue, Adele.

In Concussion are we seeing the female gaze? Well, we’re definitely seeing one woman’s gaze, that of Passon. The sex scenes in Concussion, unlike Blue, don’t seem like outtakes from an amateur porn video, but flow from the other nonsexual encounters in the film. (Concussion’s expert cinematographer is David Kruta.) We also don’t see full frontal nudity from any of the actresses, and although we see the bare breasts of some of Eleanor’s clients, we never see hers. Eleanor/ Abby is both a psychological and corporeal enigma to us.

Some clues for her motives are in the scenes between Abby and her spouse. They are affectionate and loving with each other, even when they’re alone, but the sex has gone out of their marriage. After a disastrous first encounter with an escort, we feel Abby’s ache of longing when a second “better” escort begins to touch her. Later we see Eleanor’s first client, a 23-year-old virgin, react to Eleanor’s touch in much the same way.

In the city we see Abby in punk rock t-shirts (vintage Blondie and the now-defunct C.B.G.B) and boyshort underwear and in the suburbs we see her fitting in with her friends in yoga pants and an expensive down-filled jacket. At a suburban dinner party the guests talk about their days hanging out in pre-gentrified downtown New York clubs, Squeezebox and The Limelight, and we realize yes, many of the club kids of the ’90s have become comfortable, suburban Moms and Dads.

The loft is decorated with posters for Louise Bourgeois and The Guerrilla Girls and has Diet For a New America on the bookshelf, distinct touches some of us in the audience recognize from our own living spaces. In the dialogue we hear echoes of conversations we too have had (or overheard) at parties: “I finally took the Myers-Briggs.” Writers of satire often seem to want their audience to hate the people, especially the women, they create (the Annette Bening character in American Beauty is just one example). Passon’s satire is much trickier–and kinder. She wants us to recognize these people. She wants us to recognize ourselves in them.

The film Passon says inspired Concussion is from the 1970s: Jeanne Dielman.., (and was also written and directed by a queer woman, the late Chantal Akerman). In Concussion, as in Dielman, we see the first signs of the housewife/sex-worker protagonist starting to unravel when she fails to stick to her usual daily routine: Abby misses picking up the kids after school for the first time in six years. Unlike Dielman, Passon’s film captures the monotony of domestic tasks, but doesn’t ask the audience to endure that boredom themselves.

Although Concussion was made before queer marriage became legal in New Jersey, the film brings up some interesting questions about the queer community’s quest for “equality.” What if we become just as disenchanted with being soccer Moms as straight women sometimes do? What then? At the end Abby throws herself into a home renovation project, the way so many of our married friends, straight and queer do, and we marvel at the mystery of other people’s marriages, not just in the film, but all around us.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8Wg–Mh8YY” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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

Why ‘Eve’s Bayou’ Is a Great American Art Film

The story of a family burdened by salacious and supernatural secrets in 1962 Louisiana, the movie has become one of the finer American films in the Southern gothic tradition; but with a Black director and an all-Black cast, ‘Eve’s Bayou’ has been unceremoniously booted from its deserving recognition as the fantastic, moody art film it is.

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

When Eve’s Bayou, the writing and directorial debut of filmmaker Kasi Lemmons, opened in 1997, Roger Ebert named it the best film of 1997 and it was the top-grossing independent film that year, but that didn’t stop it from being canonized, years later, as just “one of the finest works by a black filmmaker” (Time) and a “contemporary classic in black cinema” only. The story of a family burdened by salacious and supernatural secrets in 1962 Louisiana, the movie has become one of the finer American films in the Southern gothic tradition; but with a Black director and an all-Black cast, Eve’s Bayou has been unceremoniously booted from its deserving recognition as the fantastic, moody art film it is.

Lemmons’s family drama is told from the perspective of Eve Batiste — played with gut-wrenching sophistication by a then 10-year-old Jurnee Smollett-Bell — who is the descendant of a woman, a slave, also named Eve, and her master. Though not all Southern gothic stories, which typically explore dark and grotesque themes set in the South, delve into the supernatural, this one does. Eve’s well-to-do family is steeped in the sixth sense, most visibly via Debbie Morgan’s Aunt Mozelle, a woman who can foretell the future yet, tragically, cannot see her own fate, as well as with the title character, Eve, whose budding clairvoyance takes a dark and consequential turn. Samuel L. Jackson plays the patriarch, a successful yet philandering doctor whose indiscretions and, specifically, a “did he, didn’t he” moment with his eldest daughter (Meagan Good) disrupt the Batiste family forever.

As a director, Lemmons’s wide, sweeping shots of the hazy Louisiana bayou enhance the spirituality of the place; at the same time, she does not get lost in the expansive Batiste estate. Her critical director’s eye focuses in on three, four, five members of the family at a time, creating such an intimate environment that, as a viewer, you feel uncomfortably crowded in with the Batistes — their dread is your dread.

Still, it’s Lemmons’s mixing of time, of past and present in a single shot, that is her most haunting storytelling technique. When Aunt Mozelle, who is cursed to life live as a perpetual widow, recounts the murder of one of her husbands to niece Eve, the involved players appear in a mirror behind Eve and Mozelle, in which Mozelle jumps from past to present in her narrative, moving in and out of the mirror in time. It’s a chilling scene — made even more otherworldly by Smollet-Bell’s wide-eyed wonderment — and it underscores the psychological scarring the film’s future events will have on its characters.

When I googled the best Southern gothic American films, a list that Eve’s Bayou certainly belongs on, the most frequently recognized works were A Streetcar Named Desire, 1991’s Cape Fear, The Beguiled (a little-known Clint Eastwood film), and Robert Mulligan’s 1962 film version of To Kill a Mockingbird. The poetic southern charm of Elia Kazan’s Streetcar; the guilt-ridden anguish of Cape Fear; the deadly temptation in The Beguiled; these themes echo in Lemmons’s debut work. Still, Eve’s Bayou’s defining strength as a Southern gothic work is in the way Lemmons chooses to share the Batistes’ misfortunes with us, through little Eve’s eyes. As with To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s literary classic, the loss of childhood innocence is the disturbing truth that we’re forced to reckon with here.

That Eve’s Bayou is now recalled by critics only within a “Black cinema” narrative discredits Lemmons’s beautiful and haunting art film. There’s more to this film than the color of the stars and the woman who made it; though their blackness is certainly important. “I’m an artist. I know my history, I know my roots,” Lemmons has said. “Of course I’m a minority, but that makes it interesting.” One does not need an inherent understanding of Black life in order to empathize with the characters involved in Eve’s Bayou. In making the film, Lemmons shot with an eye towards universality. “When I was making Eve’s Bayou, I thought that everyone should be able to understand it and relate to the story,” she told the A.V. Club in 2001. “They’re people that you’re looking at.”

If Eve’s Bayou has not been recognized alongside the aforementioned films as one of the best in Southern gothic cinema it is because of the way that films created by Black directors are perceived, as being created within a vacuum, intelligible only within a Black-experience context. When The Best Man Holiday beat analysts’ opening-weekend box-office estimates three years ago, the critics were left scratching their heads as to how a Black-led film could have crossover appeal. As I wrote in 2014, the myth around “Black movies” needs to be dispelled. That a film made by a Black woman director is only expected to appeal to a limited number of people, yet equally (if not sometimes more) niche works created by, say, white men are celebrated as universal truths has a dehumanizing effect on Black directors’ works.

But Lemmons’s studied focus on complex and interesting Black characters (she’s also directed Samuel L. Jackson as a detective-esque homeless man in The Caveman’s Valentine and 2007’s Talk to Me stars Don Cheadle as real-life 1960s shock jock Ralph “Petey” Greene) is anything but apologetic: “[These stories] are what I really want to say in a life-mission way. . . . You can’t hold me to one subject or one culture in terms of my art.” In the last few years, Lemmons has been attached to direct an adaptation of the New York Times’ best-selling biography The Other Wes Moore for HBO and to adapt Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, two works of literature that, if Eve’s Bayou is any indication, will be beautiful, black-led artistry on-screen.

Also at Bitch Flicks: Eve and the Second Sight, ‘Eve’s Bayou’ Belongs in the Canon

Amirah Mercer is a writer and editor who focuses on storytelling in fashion and pop culture, with a sharp lens on race and gender. She is currently a copy editor for VanityFair.com, where she also writes for the site’s Style and Culture section. Her recent stories for VF.com have explored black single womanhood on the show Being Mary Jane, in discussion with show creator Mara Brock Akil, and how Instagram “It girl” Violet Benson staked a claim in a male-dominated online-comedy field. Her work has also been featured on Salon, HelloGiggles, and Mic.