‘Ukraine is Not a Brothel’: Intimate Storytelling and Complicated Feminism

Green’s intimate reporting and the incredible cinematography and editing that makes the film stand out accomplish the goal of respecting, questioning, and empowering these women activists. Green, in examining those fighting against the patriarchy, exposes and dismantles the patriarch who was running the show.

 

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Ukraine is Not a Brothel

Written by Leigh Kolb.

“Ninety nine percent of Ukrainian girls don’t even know what feminism is.”

This is the sentence that opens Ukraine is Not a Brothel, which premiered in the US last weekend at the True/False Film Fest in Columbia, Mo. The film chronicles Femen and uncovers the patriarch behind the movement.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_AysixuBhQ”]

 

The aim of Femen–the topless feminist protest organization that began in Kiev four years ago–is to shock the masses and raise awareness for that 99 percent of girls who are growing up in a society that treats women as second-class citizens and to dismantle the fact that Ukraine is seen as a hub for prostitution and sex trafficking. Director Kitty Green (who makes her feature-length documentary debut with the film) was struck by the image of a Femen protestor holding a sign over her bare breasts that said, “Ukraine is Not a Brothel,” and Green embedded herself with the group for a year, serving as their videographer while collecting footage for the documentary.

 

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In one of the opening shots, one of the Femen activists has her body painted.

 

Femen says that they fight against the patriarchy and against sexism in all forms. In a Q&A after the film, Femen leader Inna Shevchenko (who was featured prominently in the film and has since moved to France) said that the goal of Femen is “fighting patriarchy and its global weight.”

Inna noted that the way Femen uses their sexuality–by running and screaming while naked, and not by posing or trying to attract the male gaze–is a core part of the protest. “We are trying to provoke,” she said, but in a different context.

Everything about Femen sounds pretty great, and their goals and messages are a shocking but valuable chapter of feminist protest.

But it’s more complex than that.

 

It's not that simple.
It’s not that simple.

 

Just as the feminist movement as a whole has its issues, Femen isn’t all that it seems.

During the pre-fest Based on a True Story Conference in conjunction with the Missouri School of Journalism, Green explained to an audience that while she was living with and filming the women of Femen (she was arrested eight times and was abducted by the KGB with them, as well), she started to realize that the movement was actually run by a man who no one knew about. She said that he was abusive to the women, and she had to “shift ideas and expose him,” instead of simply filming the women. She had to secretly film him, and admitted only after she was almost ready to leave the country admit to the women that she was going to expose him.

“They needed to break away from him,” she said, and it was a difficult moment in their relationship, and in Femen. (In an announcement that got cheers from the opening-night crowd, Inna said that it’s been a year since they’ve had contact with Victor.) Green considered the women she lived with to be friends and family, and her “heart broke” when she would hear Victor yelling at them, and the next morning they were holding signs that said “This is the new feminism.”

The film does a beautiful job of dealing with the complexities and paradoxes of Femen–and really, all of feminism. Ukraine is Not a Brothel highlights the Ukrainian protestors–their lives, their struggles, and their goals–while also shining a light on feminism as a whole. Green’s intimate reporting and the incredible cinematography and editing that makes the film stand out accomplish the goal of respecting, questioning, and empowering these women activists. Green, in examining those fighting against the patriarchy, exposes and dismantles the patriarch who was running the show.

The documentary also quietly examines the difficulties that feminism has with other aspects of its modern identity. Worldwide, prominent feminists are often conventionally attractive (white) women. Third-wave feminism grapples with its relationship with sex work. Women are not widely exposed to or immersed in feminist theory. Women’s bodies are still sexualized, even when we try to use that sexuality in protest. Men still think they have the power, even in progressive movements. And oftentimes they do.

It’s all complicated. And Ukraine is Not a Brothel doesn’t offer solutions–except that the women need to be free from the patriarchal influences that are pushing and abusing them.

Green said, “Victor never thought I was capable of this. I was the young blonde girl who sounded like a child when I spoke Ukrainian. I was not taken seriously, and this gave me power.” She pointed out that women in journalism have a perceived weakness that can give them great power. “I want to keep making films about young women,” she said, hoping that this power can help her tell more stories.

If Ukraine is Not a Brothel is any indication, we can be excited and hopeful for the stories that Kitty Green has yet to discover and tell.

Inna pointed out that in all of the unrest and revolution in Ukraine right now, she gets messages from people there who tell her “You were first!” and credit Femen for being a galvanizing force in Ukrainian protest.

In the same way that Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer purposefully vacillates between humor and intense seriousness, between laughing young women and the same smiling faces screaming and being dragged away by police, Ukraine is Not a Brothel highlights the serious and violent struggle women are fighting against worldwide. These are specific, localized fights that have spread their influence around the world.

Women’s power–especially when they break free from patriarchal forces–is on display in this remarkable documentary. From Green’s intimate storytelling to the protesters’ screams, we are reminded that feminism in all its forms needs to be stripped down and critiqued while we respect and humanize the women putting up the fight and figure out ways to fight with them.

 

 Recommended Reading: Kitty Green on KGB kidnappings and Ukrainian violence, Kitty Green Exclusive InterviewWhite doesn’t always mean privileged: why Femen’s Ukrainian context mattersFemen’s Topless Sextremists Invade the US

 


Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri. 

 

 

 

 

So, Your Dad Wrote a Romantic Fantasy: ‘Winter’s Tale’

The monogamous, heteronormative, patriarchal narrative is strongly entrenched in our culture. Women, in particular, are taught to seek out one person, their “soulmate.” We’re told that only that one person will make us happy and whole, and that only that person should fuck us (after we’re married, of course) for ever and ever. This is the Romantic Myth, and it kills.

Theatrical release poster.

Written by Andé Morgan.

The recently released dramatic fantasy, Winter’s Tale (based on the 1983 novel of the same name by Mark Helprin), was adapted for the screen and directed by Avika Goldsman. It features Colin Farrell and Jessica Brown Findlay as star-crossed (haha) lovers, and Goldsman-regulars Russell Crowe and Will Smith as the heavies.

Farrell is Peter Lake, an orphan thief who lives in the rafters above New York’s Grand Central Station circa 1916. While escaping crime boss Pearly Soames (played here by an over-inflated Russell Crowe) on a magical, metaphysical, metaphorical white horse, Lake comes across an Upper West Side mansion that’s just too juicy to pass up. Inside, he surprises the lone occupant, Beverly Penn (Findlay), an heiress to the Penn newspaper fortune and victim of tuberculosis (they call it “fever” because this is a period piece, dammit!). Beverly, by the way, plays the piano very enthusiastically, can see that “everything is connected by light,” and stoically comments, “You never think you’re as old as you’re ever going to be.” Because so many loving, lasting relationships begin with home invasion, Beverly asks Peter to stay for tea. We learn that she was born in England, which conveniently explains why she has such an awful English accent when all of her kin speak ‘Murican.

Stranger with a gun? Serve 'em some tea!
Stranger with a gun? Serve ’em some tea!

Tea time with the armed robber goes well because love-at-first-sight, so Beverly invites Peter to join her upstate at the family castle. We then get some other rom-com standards: never-been-kissed, what-are-your-intentions-with-my-daughter?, ruffian-in-a-tuxedo, last-dance, and magic-mechanic.

Meanwhile, Pearly goes to visit Will Smith, who is currently being stored in a dark room under a bridge (really, a good place for him). Mr. Smith is Lucifer, of course, and Pearly (superpower: glowering) is one of his demons (or a human who became a demon, or a human-demon hybrid, who knows?). Pearly wants to kill Beverly because of love and miracles, or something. Unfortunately, the devil is a stickler for the rules, and since the northlands are out of Pearly’s jurisdiction, no dice. Being a demon, Pearly goes behind the Devil’s back (lack-of-omniscience slam!) and calls in a favor from an angel (Pearly really has more depth than I’m giving him credit for; he enjoys finger painting with blood, and really wants a pair of shiny angel wings, aww).

Pearly deploys the Standard Female Incapacitation Attack.
Pearly deploys the Standard Female Incapacitation Attack.

So Beverly is poisoned (by light, naturally) from afar by Pearly, and expires after some now-or-never sex (kind of a lot of O face for a PG-13 movie. MPAA, won’t you please think of the children?). Peter tries to save her with his miracle, True-Love’s-Kiss, but to no avail. Apparently, Beverly had all the magic, because Peter gets bridged by Pearly and goes on to spend the next 100 years (Bev’s miracle) making street art and growing a beard.

Colin Farrell as Jaret Leto as Peter Lake.
Colin Farrell as Jared Leto as Peter Lake.

With a little help from a ~***magical negro***~, Peter regains the memories he lost when Russell Crowe Brooklyn accent-ed at him. He then uses his holy lips to save the life of the Abby (Ripley Sobo), the Littlest Cancer Patient. After he defeats Pearly in the Final Battle, he rides off into the sunset to be reunited with Beverly (now a flaming ball of gas).

From the snark, you can probably tell that this movie was a big glob of romantic fantasy cliches and pseudo-spiritual ridiculousness propelled by Mammon and held together by Warner Bros.’ hubris. Unfortunate, but sadly, not unexpected. However, I do take issue with the film’s central conceit. As we are told over and over – by children, demons, and Findlay’s narration – each one of us has a miracle, and we can only give it to our One True Love.

Clean-shaven, white horse, evening wear.
Clean-shaven, white horse, evening wear.

The monogamous, heteronormative, patriarchal narrative is strongly entrenched in our culture. Women, in particular, are taught to seek out one person, their “soulmate.” We’re told that only that one person will make us happy and whole, and that only that person should fuck us (after we’re married, of course) for ever and ever. This is the Romantic Myth, and it kills. It fails to recognize the reality that people fall in and out of love, or that people are fully capable of loving more than one person, sequentially or concurrently. By reinforcing this destructive myth, movies like Winter’s Tale perpetuate slut-shaming, self-hatred, and discrimination against divorcees and polyamorous people.

Strong female characters? None. Yes, the film passes the Bechdel Test, if you count discussions about starlight and cooking. But please, don’t waste your time, and please, please don’t take your child to see it.


Andé Morgan lives in Tucson, Arizona, where they write about culture, race, politics, and LGBTQ issues. Follow them @andemorgan.

‘Someone Marry Barry’: I Just Liked It, OK?

The general premise of ‘Someone Marry Barry’ is that every group of friends has a “Barry, “or someone who is wildly inappropriate and generally fails at life. Barry’s friends decide the best approach to mitigating Barry’s awfulness is to find him a girlfriend, because I guess he’ll be “tamed” by having regular sex with the same vagina and/or having someone to wash his boxers for him? Their plan backfires when Barry gets into a relationship with Melanie (Lucy Punch), who is just as inappropriate and obnoxious as he is (also even more funny, from the viewer’s perspective).

I am sometimes exhausted by being a “film critic,” if you’ll allow me to be so bold as to claim that title for myself. My dad used to say, “It’s hard to be Robin” when I’d get worked up into a lather over what seemed to him like minor infractions. And those little frustrations have a tendency to mount until you’re mad as hell and not gonna yadda yadda. Feminist burnout is real.

Someone Marry Barry film poster
Someone Marry Barry film poster

So sometimes I just want to turn off my critical brain, set aside my gender lens, and enjoy a comedy if it makes me laugh despite whatever failings it might have, either as a work of cinema or as an artifact of gender in culture. And that’s what I did with Someone Marry Barry.

I watched Someone Marry Barry on a break from my 2014 Oscars Death Race (™ Sarah D. Bunting) which has been a particular challenge this year not only because of the bleakness of this year’s crop (and its inclusion of The Wolf of Wall Street, which I hate hate hated) but because of my limited access to recent releases in South Africa. Someone Marry Barry is one of those movies that is “in theaters” (allegedly) at the same time it’s released to on demand video services. So maybe I’m extra on it’s side because of the populism of it’s release structure? Or maybe I just needed to laugh at a romantic comedy.

Lucy Punch and Tyler Labine making Someone Marry Barry look much sweeter than it is
Lucy Punch and Tyler Labine making Someone Marry Barry look much sweeter than it is

The general premise of Someone Marry Barry is that every group of friends has a “Barry,” or someone who is wildly inappropriate and generally fails at life. Barry (Tyler Labine, whose career path has gone from “Burnout Teen” to “Loser Manchild,” which he can hopefully ride out until he’s of sufficient vintage to play “Dirty Old Man”) ruins funerals, gets his friends fired by inappropriate talking about the boss’s daughter, and is a bad influence on their children.

Barry (Tyler Labine)
Barry (Tyler Labine)

Barry’s friends decide the best approach to mitigating Barry’s awfulness is to find him a girlfriend, because I guess he’ll be “tamed” by having regular sex with the same vagina and/or having someone to wash his boxers for him? Their plan backfires when Barry gets into a relationship with Melanie (Lucy Punch), who is just as inappropriate and obnoxious as he is (also even more funny, from the viewer’s perspective).

Barry's scheming bros (Thomas Middleditch, Damon Wayans, Jr., and Hayes MacArthur)
Barry’s scheming bros (Thomas Middleditch, Damon Wayans, Jr., and Hayes MacArthur)

And man, if I had my feminist Wheaties this morning maybe I could explain how this is a subversive rejection of the Apatow-ian trope of “boys will be boys, good thing there’s all these shrews around to crack the whip.” Or maybe reject it because being given a LadyChild alongside the ManChildren doesn’t really resolve the issues inherent to that archetype. And is also not particularly groundbreaking (see Bad Teacher, in which Lucy Punch had a supporting role, or anything else Lucy Punch has been in, really).

I could also take Someone Marry Barry to task because the other women in the movie are… actually I have no idea what the other women in the movie do other than have shiny hair. One of them is really bitchy and her doormat boyfriend is inspired by missing Barry to leave her… I think?

Barry and Melanie's inappropriate love.
Barry and Melanie’s inappropriate love.

What I do know: Someone Marry Barry made me laugh A LOT. As much smack as I’ll talk about Tyler Labine and Lucy Punch always playing the same characters, this really is perfect casting and it pays off. Lucy Punch in particular is at the top of her game. While the movie has pretty weak story structure and character arcs and all those other things we should fairly expect from actually good movies, it has a lot of hilarious dialogue delivered with gusto. Even the shiny-haired bitch, playing the most tired of roles, cracked me up several times (I will be stealing her whiny expectant delivery of “Juice. I need juice.” for all my future demands of my partner).

So I’m just gonna give my critical side a break and give Someone Marry Barry my stamp of approval.

Clueless's Travis Birkenstock expresses my feelings for me
Clueless’s Travis Birkenstock expresses my feelings for me

(THAT SAID: Why on earth is this movie not called Somebody Marry Barry? Why waste this perfect opportunity for delightful assonance when there is literally no difference in meaning between someone and somebody? Is there are short film from 1917 called Somebody Marry Barry? There’d better be a suitable explanation for this. Ugh, it IS hard to be Robin.)


 

Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living Cape Town, South Africa.

What Happens After The Good Guys–And Gals–Win: ‘The Square’ and ‘Eufrosina’s Revolution’

But mainstream movies have so much asinine fakery in them, from CGI that looks as if it came off the side of a van in the 1970s to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, audiences hunger for the real. In a time when big American news media are shutting down their offices in other countries (to save money) and more and more Americans are getting their news through the Daily Show and the Colbert Report Jehane Noujaim’s ‘The Square,’ which is nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary and just won The Director’s Guild Award in the same category and Luciana Kaplan’s ‘Eufrosina’s Revolution,’ which was part of Hot Docs and was shown in New York’s 2014 Athena Film Festival follow up on international current events with a thoroughness that is anathema to our amnesia-prone mainstream news media.

AhmedSquare

Documentaries are the type of feature-length films much more likely to be directed by women: 39 percent of documentaries have women directors as opposed to 18 percent for narrative features. Perhaps not coincidentally documentaries are also some of the lowest-grossing films at the box office, the brussels sprouts of the film world–good for you, but not the first thing anyone orders off the menu.

But mainstream movies have so much asinine fakery in them, from CGI that looks as if it came off the side of a van in the 1970s to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, audiences hunger for the real. In a time when big American news media are shutting down their offices in other countries (to save money) and more and more Americans are getting their news through the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, Jehane Noujaim’s The Square, which is nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary and just won The Director’s Guild Award in the same category, and Luciana Kaplan’s Eufrosina’s Revolution, which was part of Hot Docs and was shown in New York’s 2014 Athena Film Festival, follow up on international current events with a thoroughness that is anathema to our amnesia-prone mainstream news media.

AidaGlassesSquare

The Square is Noujaim’s kickstarter-funded  Netflix-distributed documentary of what happened in Egypt after the popular overthrow of longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Noujaim, who previously directed Control Room (2004) and Startup.com (2001) has had a successful career in the US, but was born in Egypt and like a lot of people with roots there returned to the country after the massive protests in Tahrir Square.

What she finds in Tahrir is…confusing in ways which will be familiar to anyone who has taken part in large political protests, especially those that carry the possibility of police retaliation, like the Occupy protests that started later in 2011 (in part inspired by the Arab Spring). To try to make the movement coherent, Noujaim chooses to focus on individual protestors from diverse backgrounds. The documentary’s main “character” is photogenic, committed, twenty-something Ahmed, who comes from a poor family (he tells us he had to fund his own grade-school education by working as a street vendor). We also meet Khalid, a British-Egyptian movie actor (The Kite Runner, United 93 and Green Zone) who has come back to the country to join the revolution, Magdy, a member of The Muslim Brotherhood who was tortured under the Mubarak regime and Aida, a fillmmaker and actress in shocking pink, leopard-patterned, eyeglass frames who is, along with Khalid, a co-founder of a citizen journalism (including video) organization (an important component of activism all over the world). I had to look up a description for Aida, unlike the others, since we see much less of her and hear much less about her life in the film, a particularly maddening omission from a woman director.

Aida in Tahrir Square
Aida in Tahrir Square

The people who gathered in Tahrir were not only men: separate, long, security lines for men and women straggled from the square in the days leading up to Mubarak’s overthrow. A photo taken in the weeks before, which received world-wide circulation featured a rear shot of a woman throwing rocks at the police, her head wrapped (most likely to protect from tear gas) and one butt-cheek covered by flowery underpants (which looked like they could have come from Urban Outfitters) spilling out from her skinny jeans (a hazard all of us who have worn skinny jeans know too well). The too-brief scene with Aida wondering if, after fleeing the square, she should go back, even though doing so would risk arrest, torture and death, is as tense as a scene in a fictional thriller. When we also see the tireless human rights lawyer Ragia Omran, smart phone pressed to her ear, with her head down as she crouches on a bench, trying to get protestors out of jail (or dead protestors autopsied), we want to see more of her and hear more of her story, but we don’t.

In another scene we see Magdy’s wife and middle-school-aged daughter (unlike Aida and Omran, both wear hijab) talk about the stalled progress of the revolution, with the daughter bursting into tears of frustration and fear. The protests were full of women in hijab and this film could use more of their opinions, especially when members of The Muslim Brotherhood start talking about using The Koran as a basis for the new constitution.

Director, Jehane Noujaim
Director, Jehane Noujaim

The events depicted in the film will have everyone in the audience questioning mainstream American media coverage, as Ahmed and others are against the elections the American media applauded. The rapidly shifting alliances among Egyptian citizens are personified in Magdy’s son who, shortly after Mubarak’s ouster complains that the revolution is like a test that protestors had taken and done well on but didn’t put their name on, so nobody knows it’s theirs. Later in the film, after subsequent protests he confesses that, on instruction from The Brotherhood, he has helped in forcibly and violently evicting other protestors from the square.

Morsi, the Brotherhood leader who “won” the election was ousted himself this past summer  (the fiilmmakers returned to add an update to the film, which had premiered in January of last year at Sundance) and journalists covering Egypt, including some from Al-Jazeera continue to be jailed with other innocent people. Egyptian protests aren’t the simple feel-good story from 2011 anymore and current international media coverage is minimal. The citizen journalism organization that Aida co-founded no longer has a website.

We in the United States shouldn’t be too quick to feel superior: protestors were chased off the Occupy sites too, sometimes violently . Whistleblowers here have gone to prison or into exile and the journalists who helped disseminate their info to the world are threatened with imprisonment themselves. When we see the smiling, lying, uniformed Egyptian officials in the film, I couldn’t help thinking of our own smiling, lying, suit-wearing politicians. We may be more like Egypt than we think.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twB2zAOzsKE” autohide=”0″]

In Eufrosina’s Revolution (directed by Luciana Kaplan), we see the fallout from another uprising, this time in a small town in one of Oaxaca, Mexico’s beautiful, lush, mountainous, and most poverty-stricken regions. Eufrosina Cruz is an indigenous (Zapotec) woman who grew up in Santa María Quiegolani and left to get an education. She returned to help the people she grew up with, founding community organizations and eventually running for mayor of the town. Because of a provision in the Oaxaca constitution that gives the indigenous people the right to run their communities according to their own traditions, even though she was elected, she wasn’t allowed to serve–because women are not traditionally in leadership positions in her community. She went on a publicity campaign to draw attention to this issue and eventually succeeded in getting the constitution changed so it honored the rights of indigenous women to vote and to run for local office.

Eufrosina Cruz
Eufrosina Cruz

Eufrosina’s trajectory, like that of the protestors in The Square, is an often confounding and disappointing one. Like The Square, a lot of the action takes place off camera (a problem elegantly solved in Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell, which shockingly was not nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar), and like political progress in general, Cruz’s path is full of stops and starts and seeming dead ends. Her office is broken into and a business that supported her community organization is robbed as well. We see an interview with an indigenous woman from the same area who questions Cruz’s motives and claims, and we see a poison-pen flyer circulated against her. Corrupt officials promise to build a bridge across a river, but give the municipality a big truck (!) instead.

In spite of her mistrust of state and federal politicians (she tells us that if she were dressed in the traditional shawls and skirts of the women of her hometown, instead of in a business suit, they would never bother speaking to her) she accepts a position with PAN, one of Mexico’s main political parties, a conservative one which opposes abortion rights and same-sex civil unions, in the hope that she can continue to get justice for her community. But she also wonders if she is the token indigenous feminist in the party. At the end she laments that even with all the opposition she faced in the past, she was never scared, “But now I’m scared.”

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfcAGDTXQZQ” autohide=”0″]

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

“Love,” Death, and Penises in ‘Stranger By The Lake’

“Mind if I get naked,” the main character of ‘Stranger By The Lake’ asks a fat, older shirtless man in the middle of a conversation. The two characters are at a nude men’s beach, so the question isn’t unexpected, but in a film which isn’t porn (and this film is not porn), male actors are rarely asked to be nude, and when they are, we most often see their backsides only. In non-porn films actresses are usually the ones with their clothes off, a situation that echoes the famous poster from the Guerrilla Girls which asks if women have to be naked to get into the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Women are still a tiny minority of film directors but naked women in films are plentiful, the stills forever appearing on websites where commenters can criticize every aspect, no matter how trivial, of the actresses’ bodies and debate whether the women are “hot or not.”

StrangerPoster

“Mind if I get naked,” the main character of Stranger By The Lake asks a fat, older shirtless man in the middle of a conversation. The two characters are at a nude men’s beach, so the question isn’t unexpected, but in a film which isn’t porn (and this film is not porn), male actors are rarely asked to be nude, and when they are, we most often see their backsides only. In non-porn films actresses are usually the ones with their clothes off, a situation that echoes the famous poster from the Guerrilla Girls which asks if women have to be naked to get into the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Women are still a tiny minority of film directors but naked women in films are plentiful, the stills forever appearing on websites where commenters can criticize every aspect, no matter how trivial, of the actresses’ bodies and debate whether the women are “hot or not.”

Stranger By The Lake (directed by Alain Guiraudie) won accolades (Best Director and The Queer Palm Award) alongside Blue Is The Warmest Color at Cannes, but is only now being released in the US, in what is generally considered to be the worst month of the year for a film to open. Movie distributors seem not to realize that an explicit film about male cruising (and this film has more penises in it than most porn films do), especially one as well-reviewed as Stranger, has the potential to attract an audience beyond just gay men: many women, straight and queer, are curious about the type of anonymous, repercussion-free sex shown in the film–because it’s not available to us (in spite of one man in the film who insists women sometimes come to the cruising site). We wonder about the option of sex being just another stop on the way home, after getting milk and bread at the supermarket and picking up the dry cleaning.

 

The main couple at the lake
The main couple at the lake

 

This phenomenon of women being interested in sexual encounters between men is also nothing new: yaoi comics in Japan depict often explicit relationships between men and its audience, as well as its writers, have always been mainly women. In other countries, explicit slash fan fiction is almost exclusively written by women, including queer women, and most of the sex is between men. Although some claim this focus on male sexuality is a form of misogyny, the rationale might be more complex.

Women in porn and other sexually explicit video and film are regularly degraded both on camera and off (see the controversy around Blue Is The Warmest Color). In a culture that seems to place so little value on a woman’s sexual pleasure and autonomy (if we take the films of our culture to be its mirror) we shouldn’t be surprised that women of all sexual orientations would look to gay men’s porn and sexually explicit material about men to see onscreen sexual interplay that doesn’t degrade women. The two films I can think of in which women are allowed to have explicit sex (which coincidentally seems to not be simulated) with men and are not somehow punished or denigrated for it were directed by gay men: the late Patrice Chereau’s Intimacy (in which award-winning actress Kerry Fox takes a penis into her mouth on camera) and John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus, in which Sook-Yin Lee’s character sexually experiments: one scene has her straddling the penis of a reluctant husband.

Straight men are the only audience who might be squeamish about seeing a film which centers around anonymous sex between men, features copious amounts of full-frontal male nudity and even has a couple of scenes in which the sex is obviously unsimulated (these scenes are cut into the action and so do not involve the actors we see). But marketers are pretending all the rest of us would react to this film like a thirteen-year-old boy who wishes to convince the world he’s straight: “Eww, penises.”

 

Franck and Henri
Franck and Henri

 

The script (written by director Guiraudie) is pared down to its essentials. The action takes place completely on a men’s nude beach by a lake and the cruising spot in the woods right next to it. We don’t find out the name of the main character, Franck (Pierre de Ladonchamps) until he introduces himself to the man who fascinates him, Christophe Paou’s Michel (as opposed to the fat man we never see naked but whom Franck enjoys talking to: Henri). Franck and Michel exchange names after the first time they have sex, just one day after Franck has witnessed Michel intentionally drown a fellow beachgoer.

I was fortunate to see a screening with the director present. In the question and answer period after the screening, I asked why the sex scenes, even though they contained some of the same material as porn, didn’t remind me of porn. The director speculated that we are not used to seeing scenes with “waggling organs” (he spoke in French but had someone translating by his side) that move the story along–as the sex scenes in this film do. He also mentioned that because the explicit scenes were cut into the other action, the scenes didn’t need to drag and play out over real time the way they do in porn clips.

 

strangersunshine

The director said that Franck “falls in love” with Michel before the murder. We can construe the whole film as a metaphor for romantic love itself, much like in Michael Winterbottom’s first film Butterfly Kiss in which timid, sensitive Miriam (nickname: Me) runs away with murderous Eunice (nickname: Eu) and Me does her best to convince Eu that the trail of bodies (like so much we learn about our romantic partners) Eu leaves in her wake doesn’t bother her.

“Falling in love” isn’t something we expect to happen in a cruising spot, but the director used the phrase repeatedly, reminding me of author Edmund White‘s description of 70s cruising and anonymous sex as something that involved the heart, not just the genitals. The men at the beach do have a camaraderie together. Franck hugs and kisses a regular beachgoer with grey hair (played by the director) and sometimes makes plans to meet with him at the club–though he doesn’t go into the woods with him. Franck and Henri have dinner together (offscreen) more than once. The  bond among the men extends even to the ever-present masturbating voyeur, to whom one man shouts, “We’re talking now. We’ll be fucking later. Come back then.” But the murder victim’s car is conspicuous in the tiny parking area. His towel remains laid out, empty, on the small beach like a grave, and no one remarks about it. The camaraderie goes only so far.

 

Franck in the water
Franck in the water

 

Franck eschews condoms in his encounters with men (not just Michel) in the woods, absurdly saying to one with whom he has barely exchanged five words, “I trust you.” The chance Franck takes in pursuing Michel is similar. Soon after the drowning, the two men swim together, alone at night, an almost identical scenario to the one in which Michel (who with his mustache and dimples resembles a young Tom Selleck) drowned the other man. Franck is hesitant, but gets into the water with Michel anyway.

The conflation of sex and death is also clear in a scene in which we see a man crying out and moving under another man in the tall grass near the woods. We are unsure: are they having sex? Or is one man killing the other? The movie points out the twisted logic of most film content and ratings: we are much more likely to see in a (non-porn) film a fatal wound gushing blood than we are to see a penis ejaculating.

After the drowned man’s body is found, a police detective questions the men at the cruising spot, a strategy that doesn’t seem like it would yield much success: even before the murder the beach and woods are places for them to keep secrets. Most of the men don’t know each other’s names. Henri had, until recently, a longtime girlfriend who doesn’t seem to have known that he also had sex with men. We find out the voyeur has a jealous husband who one day accompanies him to the beach. Besides lying about the murder, Franck tells the detective, “I don’t come here often,” when we see that he’s there every day.

 

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Because queer characters in film were vilfied for so long, movies with murderous, violent or manipulative queers in them can give off the stink of homophobia: The Talented Mr. Ripley and Notes on a Scandal are two examples of films which angered me. Guiraudie, like other queer directors handling similar material,  (see Todd Hayne’s Poison) seems to avoid this problem perhaps simply because the murderer is just one of many queer characters in the film.

Queerness, like nudity in Stranger is the norm: those who are straight and keep their clothes on are the outliers. The effect of seeing so many penises, presented so matter-of-factly in a film is like being at a nude beach ourselves: the naked flesh isn’t remarkable, so we don’t gawk. This ubiquity and also perhaps the knowledge early on that Michel is a murderer (and we don’t find out much more about him beyond his attractive, smiling surface) kept me from finding the film erotic, in spite of its explicit content. But it is a compelling portrait of characters reaching out for connection, trying to overcome their loneliness, afraid of the void. When, at the end, Franck cries out into the dark, he could be any of us.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgcEGKn7waI” autohide=”0″]

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

Lack of Strong Female Characters in ‘RoboCop’ Reboot

To be honest, with ‘RoboCop (2014)’ I was expecting a fairly straightforward attempt to cash in on late 80s nostalgia with a shiny, lightweight, brand-recognition film. I expected that the oppressively satiric nature of the original would be lost or watered-down, and that character development would take a back seat to gunplay and explosions. And I was… sort of wrong. The most poignant scene came in the first few minutes of the movie and featured a convoy of military drones clearing a village in the Middle East. Through the cold eyes of an unfeeling news crew, we’re very quickly confronted with the question of what constitutes ethical use of drones when civilians are in the line of fire.

Joel Kinniman as Alex Murphy in "RoboCop" (2014)
Joel Kinniman as Alex Murphy in “RoboCop” (2014)

Written by Andé Morgan.

It would be reckless to examine RoboCop (2014) without first considering the original film. RoboCop (1987) is widely considered one the benchmark movies of the late 1980s and for good reason. While it superficially resembled its “light” action movie and sci-fi contemporaries, RoboCop (1987) was something special. The film had it all: heady themes, iconic imagery, and that essential 80s feel (i.e., FORD TAURUS EVERYWHERE). Most importantly, it was a Paul Verhoeven film.

Verhoeven is the Dutch director and filmmaker behind RoboCop (1987), Total Recall (1990), Basic Instinct (1992), and Starship Troopers (1997). He was born in 1938 in the Netherlands. In 1943, his family moved to The Hauge, the location of the Nazi headquarters in the Netherlands during WWII. His neighborhood was bombed repeatedly during the war; fascism, death, and destruction became a part of his childhood life. Consequently, it’s no surprise that Verhoeven’s creative hallmark is a combination of visceral violence and omnipresent socio-political satire.

The original (i.e., better) ED-209.
The original (i.e., better) ED-209.

RoboCop (1987) was Verhoeven’s breakout film in the United States. In the near future, Detroit is about to implode due to financial mismanagement, corruption, and crime (sound familiar?). To stave off the collapse, the city government has made a deal with Omni Consumer Products (OCP) to essentially privatize the flailing police force in exchange for allowing the company to raze the slums and build a shiny corporate kingdom, Delta City, within the shell of Detroit. Towards that end, OCP has directed its robotics division to develop law enforcement droids (including the iconic ED-209). In order to test a cyborg design, OCP needs fresh meat, so they assign officers, including Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) and his partner Anne Lewis (Nancy Allen), to unusually dangerous beats in the hope that they’ll be killed. Murphy is brutally murdered in the line of duty, and his body is transferred to the “RoboCop” program. While he is initially successful at enforcing the law and reducing crime, RoboCop/Murphy soon begins to struggle with memories of his past life with his wife and child.

The original cut of the movie was so violent for the times that it received a X rating. The film was filled with satirical elements that addressed themes of media callousness, desensitization to violence, unchecked capitalism, authoritarianism, political hypocrisy, and gender equality. Some elements were subtle and some were not so subtle (e.g., my favorite, the Nukem board game). However, it’s also worth noting that a more primary theme was the question: What makes a man a man? Phallic imagery is strong. For example, the question itself is prompted in our minds by the conspicuous absence of a penis structure between RoboCop’s legs. Is a man still a man if he is mostly metal, and he no longer has a penis? The answer is yes, as long as he has a big-ass gun. In one scene, we see RoboCop shoot an attempted rapist in the junk, thereby using his penis-equivalent firearm to assert his masculinity by destroying the male genitals of his rival. In another, penultimate scene, Murphy uses his long, pointy “interface spike” to kill the main antagonist.

Nancy Allen as Anne Lewis.
Nancy Allen as Anne Lewis.

While feminist author Susan Faludi (I know you’re not a flapper, please don’t send me letters) said that RoboCop (1987) was one of “an endless string of war and action movies [in which] women are reduced to mute and incidental characters or banished altogether,” one could argue that the Anne Lewis character was hardly inconsequential. Rene Denfeld, for example, referred to Anne Lewis as an example of a notabley “independent and smart” female character. I agree more with Denfeld’s assessment. While Allen’s character did sometimes stray into squadette cliches, she certainly could not be described as a faux action woman. The relatively equitable nature of her relationship with Murphy is a standout for the era.

The new (CGI, unfortunately) ED-209.
The new (CGI, unfortunately) ED-209.

The reboot, directed by José Padilha, is not a line for line, scene for scene, reproduction. In the new story, OCP robots (“drones” is the term used in the film to keep things contemporary) are in widespread use overseas by the military. Pesky (and unusually effective) politicians have been successful in preventing the domestic use of drone technology. To exploit a legal loophole, OCP CEO Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton) wants his scientist, Dr. Dennett Norton (Gary Oldman), to make a new, legal law enforcement cyborg. Detective Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) is, conveniently, critically injured by a bomb planted under his car on the order of a local crime boss. Norton picks Murphy for the RoboCop program. Murphy rejects his new robotic life and asks to be euthanized, but Norton persuades him to carry on for his wife, Clara (Abbie Cornish), and their son.

To be honest, with RoboCop (2014), I was expecting a fairly straightforward attempt to cash in on late 80s nostalgia with a shiny, lightweight, brand-recognition film. I expected that the oppressively satiric nature of the original would be lost or watered-down and that character development would take a back seat to gunplay and explosions. And I was… sort of wrong. The most poignant scene came in the first few minutes of the movie and featured a convoy of military drones clearing a village in the Middle East. Through the cold eyes of an unfeeling news crew, we’re very quickly confronted with the question of what constitutes the ethical use of drones when civilians are in the line of fire.

In fact, the film is heavy (and by heavy, I mean Samuel L. Jackson heavy; dude was in like every other scene) on the satire from start to finish, but it just isn’t as well done as in the original. The movie feels a bit sanitized, rendered, and dour. Aside from the references to drones, corporate greed, and media callousness, where was the satire of rampant consumerism, of police fascism? The violence (and there is a lot of gunplay) is video-gamey and bloodless. In the original, Murphy is horrifically gunned down with shotguns; in the remake, he’s very neatly blown up by a car bomb. The city of Detroit is an afterthought; the movie might as well have been set in Richmond. Keaton was just weird as the CEO of OCP; he seemed to be constantly doing an impression of William Shatner doing an impression of Steve Jobs. It was off-putting. Oldman was fine, though the impact of his performance was somewhat limited by hammy dialogue.

Anne Cornish as Clara Murphy.
Anne Cornish as Clara Murphy.

RoboCop (1987) was not a feminist movie. For example, neither it nor the 2014 version passed the Bechdel test. But Anne Lewis’ character in the original was, arguably, a well-received, distinctive feminist character. So why did the studio decide to go with a male cop for the remake (Michael K. Williams as Jack Lewis)? The only female cops we see are behind desks; all of the detectives are men. Marianne Jean-Baptise does stand out, briefly, as the Black Boss Lady Chief of Police Dean. While Kinniman is passable as Murphy, Cornish spends the entire movie going from room to room to either hold her son or cry a single tear.

RoboCop (2014) is certainly not the worst action movie to be released recently, and it is probably better than the 49 percent rating it currently has on Rotten Tomatoes. That being said, the best thing I can say about the movie is that it might prompt folks to watch the original.


Andé Morgan lives in Tucson, Arizona, where they write about culture, race, politics, and LGBTQ issues. Follow them @andemorgan.

Muted Female Power in ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ and ‘American Hustle’

The men get the most attention for their greed and corruption. However, if we look a bit closer, the films’ women are the ones who can be traced to plant bigger, fatter seeds of avarice. This wouldn’t bother me, as I’m always in favor of more complex female characters (even if they’re unsympathetic), but what strikes me is that we barely notice these scenes. The women become victims and damsels, when oftentimes the ideas were their own.

Is this some kind of 21st century version of the femme fatale? A woman who is coercive–not only sexually, but also financially–but who isn’t taken seriously as a power player? Is it just embedded in us to not notice women’s power or ignore their parts in the narrative?

american-hustle-wolf-of-wall-street

Written by Leigh Kolb.

Two of this year’s Oscars contenders–The Wolf of Wall Street and American Hustle–are based on true stories. These stories center around greed and corruption. The characters cheat and lie their way into and out of the American Dream.

The men get the most attention for their greed and corruption. However, if we look a bit closer, the films’ women are the ones who can be traced to plant bigger, fatter seeds of avarice. This wouldn’t bother me, as I’m always in favor of more complex female characters (even if they’re unsympathetic), but what strikes me is that we barely notice these scenes. The women become victims and damsels, when oftentimes the ideas were their own.

Is this some kind of 21st century version of the femme fatale? A woman who is coercive–not only sexually, but also financially–but who isn’t taken seriously as a power player? Is it just embedded in us to not notice women’s power or ignore their parts in the narrative?

In both The Wolf of Wall Street and American Hustle, women plant the ideas that become the stories themselves. We shouldn’t point at them and scream, “Jezebel!” or blame them entirely for the greed and corruption. Instead, I think it’s important that we recognize them as part of the story, and not as characters who need saving.

The Wolf of Wall Street‘s quiet, victimized femme fatales are harder to identify. In fact, when we watch The Wolf of Wall Street, the power and corruption of bloated, desperate masculinity screams at us from every frame–women are objectified, and men hold the power.

However, some key moments in Jordan’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) professional life are influenced by women. When he loses his first job on Wall Street after Black Monday, his wife Teresa (Cristin Milioti) shows him an ad for a job at the Investors Center, where he goes to sell penny stocks quite successfully. When he starts taking people’s money in earnest, Teresa says, “Wouldn’t you feel better selling to rich people who could afford to lose money?” The rest is history.

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Teresa

Then come the strippers and the marching band, and the scathing “Wolf of Wall Street” article in Forbes. There’s “no such thing as bad publicity,” Teresa says.

Pretty soon, Jordan is hooked on quaaludes. He points out that the history of quaaludes–how they were first prescribed to housewives, and then became recreational drugs (this Paris Review article notes that they were prescribed to “nervous housewives” and went on to be discovered by “curious teenagers” who raided their mothers’ medicine cabinets). Here we have a shift: all of a sudden, what was once a woman’s game was now co-opted, blown out of proportion, and reckless.

Soon, Jordan is with Naomi (Margot Robbie). He goes into her apartment and is beeped by Teresa (“Go home to your wife,” he says to himself). Naomi steps out naked, and they have sex instead.

She didn’t come, though. It’s pointed out that she doesn’t come, which is important–she’s seductive, but not satisfied. She’s sexy, but not sexual. (Or maybe Scorsese was trying to avoid an NC-17 rating, since doing blow out of a prostitute’s ass crack is R material, but female orgasms are just too scandalous.)

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Naomi’s “power”

 

Teresa and Naomi both are suddenly victims, discarded and consumed by Jordan’s lifestyle. We feel sorry for them, and they seem to be powerless (except for Naomi’s use of withholding sex). Their motivations and their power are erased by misogyny (figuratively in the story, or literally through violence and rape). I suppose this is actually in keeping with history–a history that favors men, and typically erases women’s involvement.

However, in American Hustle, Sydney (Amy Adams) shares center stage. She is a formidable scammer. She fabricates a persona, adopts an accent, and partners with Irving (Christian Bale) as a scam artist. Her power is fairly clear, and her nomination for the Best Actress Academy Award reflects her spotlighted role.

When Sydney and Irving meet, they are both already con artists in their own right. Sydney points out to Irving “how easy it could be to take money from desperate people.” With her involvement, his business takes off. Irving was a small player before Sydney; she takes their business to the next level.

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Sydney has control

Before long, though, Sydney is a damsel in distress–needing to be rescued by either Richie (Bradley Cooper) or Irving, and pitted against Irving’s wife, Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence). Her jealousy and cattiness take over, and she and Rosalyn seem at times to be liabilities because of their unbridled passion. All of a sudden, Sydney’s role as a powerful female force is whittled away. I want to be able to look at a female character and fully realize her power and potential, and recognize her role as an agent of change–even if that change is corrupt. It’s unfortunate to watch her weaken because of romantic relationships, and for her adversary to be the wife who almost tears everything down with her jealousy.

There’s a relatively happy ending for Irving and Sydney–they have legal jobs, and share custody of Irving’s adopted son, while Rosalyn has also found a new partnership. I don’t deny that Sydney is a strong character in her own right; however, a viewer could easily see her role as softened, muted somehow because of her jealousy.

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Jealousy takes over

It’s simply too easy for viewers to file women away in the “victim” category, or to not take them seriously as power players. Don’t get me wrong–I don’t think the answer to this problem is to always force female characters into leading roles, especially if the story on screen revolves around a male character. But there must be a way to avoid victimizing women and dismissing their motivations and actions, overshadowing them by female tropes. The male supporting characters are able to be seen as complex–American Hustle‘s Richie, Carmine (Jeremy Renner), and Stoddard (Louis C.K.), and The Wolf of Wall Street‘s Donnie (Jonah Hill), Patrick (Kyle Chandler), and Max (Rob Reiner) are likable and despicable, sympathetic and sinister. It’s possible.

I also wouldn’t want viewers to blame the women fully for the men’s actions, seeing them as simply vamps or temptresses who lead men astray. There’s some kind of middle ground that needs to be explored–and that ground is seeing women as complex human beings.

The women in The Wolf of Wall Street and American Hustle have power in pivotal moments, but it seems too easy for the audience to disregard due to cultural expectations and ideas about women and story lines that have them fade–just enough–into stereotypes. When women have formidable power behind the scenes, it would be nice to see that fully realized on the screen. We need a culture shift to move away from the dangerous dichotomies that wedge women into Madonna or whore, damsel or temptress. It’s up to writers and audiences to make that a reality.

 

See also at Bitch Flicks:  Women’s Bodies in the Oscar-Nominated FilmsThe Academy: Kind to White Men, Just Like History

 


Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri. 

The Life and Art of Mercedes Sosa

I’m not quick to apply the word “intimate” followed by “portrait” to anything outside of the Lifetime series by the same name, but this description accurately characterizes Rodrigo H. Vila’s documentary ‘Mercedes Sosa: The Voice of Latin America.’ The film is a retrospective of the Argentinian alto whose career spanned 60 years and encompassed the tumult of 20th century political and cultural shifts in Latin America.

I’m not quick to apply the word “intimate” followed by “portrait” to anything outside of the Lifetime series by the same name, but this description accurately characterizes Rodrigo H. Vila’s documentary Mercedes Sosa: The Voice of Latin America. The film is a retrospective of the Argentinian alto whose career spanned 60 years and encompassed the tumult of 20th century political and cultural shifts in Latin America.

mercedes younger

Sosa was born in the northwestern Argentine province of Tucumán, where she and siblings went to bed hungry more often than not. At the age of 15 she won a singing competition organized by a local radio station and was given a contract to perform for two months, much to the chagrin of her parents, who at the time did not think highly of folk music. She started her career in Tucumán and performed under the name Gladys Osorio. In 1957, she married Manuel Óscar Matus and together with Armando Tejada Gomez and Jose Segovia, they created the manifesto of the “Nuevo Cancionero”: a people’s movement anchored in traditional Argentinian folk music and poetry. Sosa began performing and recording music under her given name, and soon drew much attention for her powerful voice and fervent commitment to championing the rights of the poor and oppressed in Latin America. As she says in one of the many interviews incorporated in the film, “The life of people in America is a suffering people. They are a very poor people. They don’t deserve this poverty. We’ve been robbed of so much, really.” In the early 1970s, she recorded concept albums that celebrated the art and music of Latin American poets and composers, like the Chilean poet and folk musician Violeta Parra. Parra’s “Gracias a la Vida” would become one of Sosa’s signature songs. Even translated into English and flat on the page, the lyrics are beautiful, and in Sosa’s voice truly transcendent:

Thanks to life, which has given me so much.
It gave me two stars, which when I open them,
Perfectly distinguish black from white
And in the tall sky its starry backdrop,
And within the multitudes the one that I love.

mercedes middle age

By 1975 Sosa herself would be robbed of the freedom to perform in her home province, and many other sites in Argentina, due to increasing presence of a military dictatorship, which would install Jorge Rafael Videla in 1976. Targeted as a communist, she started receiving death threats and was forced to leave Argentina after being arrested on stage in 1979. In an interview reflecting on this Sosa says, “Kicking me out was a big mistake because they let loose on the world a famous artist. And in Europe the press was already against them.” In 1982 she returned from exile in Europe to sing in Argentina, and gave a series of performances at the Opera Theatre in Buenos Aires, where she invited many fellow musicians to join her. The recordings from these performances have since become well known, especially Sosa’s version of “Solo le Pido a Dios,” written by León Gieco (who also joins her in performing the song in the film). This song in particular has an anthemic quality, and it didn’t surprise me to learn it’s been covered by artists as wide ranging as Bruce Springsteen and Shakira. Until her death in 2009 at age 74, Sosa would go on to tour extensively and even collaborate with artists like Renee Perez.

mercedes old

While the expansive collection of still photographs and concert and interview footage comprising the main source material of the film make Mercedes Sosa: The Voice of Latin America a rich and inspiring viewing experience, there’s a subtler element that adds a sweet, if melancholic depth: that Sosa’s adult son Fabián Matus is our principal guide through his mother’s life. In his conversations with friends and family who have known his mother longer than he’s been alive, Matus quietly seeks the truth of his mother’s motivations and emotional life. We feel as though we’re seated at the dining room table as he hears from one his mother’s closest friends that his father mistreated and abandoned his mother. Though we don’t know what Matus knew before this scene (or what he went on to find out later, if anything), there is gravitas in these pauses, in the way the subjects take time to think of exactly what they want to tell Matus about the woman they knew as Mercedes Sosa, their friend and sister. Beyond being just a fascinating and well-constructed portrait of a great artist, Vila’s film is a love letter conceived of by her son and generously shared with audiences who, like myself, have the great delight of coming to her art in the afterlife that is her musical legacy.

 

 

Cute Old Ladies Who Talk Dirty in ‘Nebraska’ and ‘Philomena’

But Payne doesn’t seem to give much thought to Kate’s situation. In all but one scene Kate is called on to be testy and not much else. Even though we laugh as she chirps the cause of death of a late, but not lamented relative and we feel satisfied when she cusses out greedy members of Woody’s family, the character is more of an exclamation point than a person.

June Squibb as Kate in Nebraska

The women in the films of writer/director Alexander Payne are a mixed bag. I enjoyed his early film, Citizen Ruth but the contempt he seemed to have for most of the women characters seeped into–and made me hesitate to laugh at–the movie’s comedy. I hated Election in spite of a pre-stardom Reese Witherspoon in the lead and the cool, teenaged lesbian character in a prominent supporting role: what some other critics have called misanthropy in Payne’s body of work seemed to me more like misogyny.

I skipped About Schmidt  because Jack Nicholson and Alexander Payne didn’t seem like a woman-friendly combination, a hunch confirmed when even male critics used the m-word to describe the film. I thought I’d also avoid Sideways with its manchild protagonist, but when I saw the movie, late in its run, I loved it: the same care had gone into developing the Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh characters as Payne had put into creating the roles played by Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church. Payne’s next film, The Descendants had a comatose, unfaithful “bad” mother at its crux but also showed her willful, smart-mouthed daughters (Shailene Woodley played the older of the two) at their most vulnerable. So I went into Nebraska, nominated for a slew of Oscars including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Best Director, hopeful but cautious. But in this film Payne seems to be going not sideways, but backwards.

Will Forte and Bruce Dern in 'Nebraska'
Will Forte and Bruce Dern in Nebraska

The film’s focus is on the relationship between two men: addled, alcoholic Woody (Bruce Dern, nominated for Best Actor) and his son David (Will Forte, who many know from his days on Saturday Night Live). David ends up taking his father on a quixotic road trip to collect the money Woody mistakenly and stubbornly believes he’s won through a letter from a company that is very much like Publishers’ Clearing House. We see many scenes that demonstrate the challenge Woody’s drinking and encroaching dementia are for his son (who seems to be around 40 and able-bodied), but David never considers that the trip might be a chance for his own mother to have a break from being Woody’s sole caretaker. Instead, David repeatedly says he agreed to drive his father over two states because the trip might be the last chance for the two of them to spend some time together.

June Squibb plays Woody’s wife and David’s mother, Kate, and is the film’s nominee for Best Supporting Actress (she also played Jack Nicholson’s wife in About Schmidt). She has the kind of face that moviegoers are used to seeing everywhere but onscreen: an 80-something woman who doesn’t appear to have undergone any plastic surgery and doesn’t look like she’s just come from a session with a team of makeup artists and hair colorists.

Bruce Dern and June Squibb
Bruce Dern and June Squibb

Anyone who has known an older woman left alone to take care of a husband in declining health will recognize the exasperated tone and facial expression Kate uses whenever she speaks to Woody. David, in contrast, is unfailingly patient and calm, like a cross between a therapist and Mr. Rogers, when he talks to his taciturn and pigheaded father, perhaps because he knows when the trip is over, his father’s care will go back to being Kate’s responsibility and will remain so until he dies–or she does.

We can see that Kate, direct and bereft of tact, is supposed to be a refreshing change from the smiling, always forgiving grandmothers of yore, but seeing her yell and swear reminds me of every role Betty White has played in recent years, the same role that goes to many other actresses once they hit 65. Dern’s character is also often angry and uses crude language, but as limited as his character is we do see other aspects of him, both in Dern’s performance and in exposition from the other characters. So much of our time and focus goes to this character, we think that his opaque and maddening surface will crack so that he can can finally show some affection and gratitude toward his son or to his old girlfriend whom his son encounters in the town where he was raised, but Woody remains selfish, irascible and without redeeming qualities to the end.

Parents and son

A better and more interesting movie would have included more about Kate. In spite of the women all around us who take care of men when they get old and sick (even though these women are often not young themselves) we very rarely see movies about a woman who is a caretaker: off the top of my head the only film I can think of is Marvin’s Room.  But Payne doesn’t seem to give much thought to Kate’s situation. In all but one scene, Kate is called on to be testy and not much else. Even though we laugh as she chirps the cause of death of a late, but not lamented, relative and we feel satisfied when she cusses out greedy members of Woody’s family, the character is more of an exclamation point than a person.

That we, in the audience, aren’t as sick of the Grandma Who Talks Dirty trope as we are of the Magical Negro or the Sassy Gay Best Friend shows that the culture either isn’t paying attention or doesn’t care how older women are portrayed. Philomena is another Oscar-nominated film (for Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Score) which features an older woman, and it left me frustrated for slightly different reasons.

DenchCoogan

Although Philomena is based on a true story about the title character (Best Actress nominee Judi Dench), it’s equally about the journalist, Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan), who helps in her search for the son who was taken from her (sold to American “adoptive” parents) when she was a young, single mother. Philomena Lee was sent to a Magdalen laundry (run by the Catholic Church but also supported by the Irish state) to have her baby and afterward forced, along with many other girl and women “sinners”, to work washing clothes for years afterward with no pay–a part of Irish history which receives a more detailed treatment in 2002’s The Magdalene Sisters.

I understand why the film makes Sixsmith an equal player in the story (the film is, after all, based on his book and was brought to the screen by Coogan), and the culture clash between romance-reading Philomena and Oxford-educated Martin is mildly entertaining, but this film reminded me a little too much of films from the 1980s like Mississippi Burning and Cry Freedom, in which stories about Black people were told through a white-guy main character and savior. I had the feeling if Sixsmith’s character had taken his rightful place as a background figure no producer would have put up the money for this film.

The real-life Sixsmith and Lee
The real-life Sixsmith and Lee

In Philomena, we again have an older woman with a surprising vocabulary: I guess I should be grateful that a mainstream movie features a lead actress (especially one of Judi Dench’s stature) saying the word “clitoris,” but I wish the scene weren’t played for a cheap laugh. Philomena Lee embodies contradictions that many of us have seen in our own families: women who remain devoted to the Catholic Church after years of being mistreated by it (with the people now around them pointing out that mistreatment), whose ideals are also more liberal than the church’s dogma.

I wanted to see more of the women I knew in Dench’s performance, but she’s miscast. She doesn’t sound any more Irish than…Judi Dench (and though some Irish people of Lee’s generation who moved to England made sure to lose their brogues–Lee wasn’t one of them–they didn’t then adopt Dench’s Received Pronunciation). Dench doesn’t speak in the same rhythm as someone from Ireland, or even as someone whose parents are from Ireland (though Dench’s mother was Irish). So Dench’s portrayal of Lee’s faith and forgiveness also fall flat. I have not seen any other review that notices how wrong Dench (as great as she has been in other roles) is for this part, the same way straight critics never seem to notice when two women playing lovers in a film have zero chemistry together. We’re supposed to be sated by seeing these women characters in a film at all. We aren’t supposed to want older women in films to do what they do in our lives outside movie theaters: to charm us, to move us, to sustain us.

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

Women’s Bodies in the Oscar-Nominated Films

What is telling is the presence of so many films that either elide or sexualize female bodies in the category that presumably represents the best of the best. The Academy clearly has a critical preference for movies about men, with women present primarily as wives and sex objects.

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The Wolf of Wall Street

This guest post by Holly Derr previously appeared at Ms. Magazine and is cross-posted with permission.

Jake Flanagin at Pacific Standard and Victoria Dawson Hoff at Elle recently floated an interesting idea: The Oscars should be entirely segregated by gender. Their proposal would create categories such as Best Female Director and Best Female Writer in addition to the already segregated acting awards.

Though this would lead to recognition of more women working in the field, it wouldn’t solve one of the Oscars’ main gender problems: the Academy Award for Best Picture. Most films are produced by teams of both men and women, making segregation in that category impossible. And yet, the Best Picture category is where we can see the clearest evidence of the Academy’s preference for male-driven films. Only three of the nine films nominated this year even have women in leading roles: American Hustle, Gravity and Philomena.

Perhaps as significant as the lack of women characters is the treatment in these films of women’s bodies. The main female character in Her is not even human, allowing the film and its central relationship to avoid dealing with the messy reality of  women with bodies. In Dallas Buyers Club, one of the two female-gender-identified characters is played by a cisgender man, effectively replacing a body that would raise interesting questions about the difference between sex and gender with one that is much easier to understand. One cannot help but wonder, if a trans actor had played the role, in which category would she be eligible for a nomination?

Where women’s bodies are present in these films, they are almost always objectified through an emphasis on their sexuality. In The Wolf of Wall Street, one woman has sex on top of a pile of  money (the actor says her back was covered with paper cuts after filming) and another woman literally wears money. One could argue that these moments are designed to reveal the callousness of the male characters, but in imagining and glamorizing a world without any female characters who aren’t objectified, the film ultimately endorses its characters’ worldview. The main female character in 12 Years a Slave is literally a possession, and she is repeatedly raped. Unlike with The Wolf of Wall Street, which encourages the audience to identify with criminals, 12 Years a Slave invites us to sympathize with the victim rather than the perpetrator. In this way, the film does at least provide a critique of turning women into objects, rather than an endorsement.

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12 Years a Slave

American Hustle provides the clearest example of Hollywood’s inability to deal with women’s bodies without sexualizing them.Though most of the fashions in which the male characters adorn themselves–from the polyester to the conspicuous chest hair to the hairstyles–are quite unsexy, the women are dressed in ways that reveal their every curve. Though plunging necklines were popular for evening wear in the era portrayed in the movie, women also wore formal dresses that, by today’s standards, look like your grandmother’s nightgowns. During the day, women wore button-up shirts with large collars; the most popular woman’s outfit of the decade was the pantsuit, and hair was more commonly worn natural than elaborately styled.

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American Hustle

It makes sense for Amy Adams’ character to wear a dress cut down to her belly button, but when her character impersonates a British aristocrat, it would have been more logical to have her button up. She would still have been sexy and her talent would have shone just as brightly without an outfit that invites the viewer to spend most of the scene staring at her boobs. Similarly, the notion that a troubled housewife would wear her hair in an updo all the time is incongruent both with Jennifer Lawrence’s character and with the style of the time.

The contrast between the body of Christian Bale’s character and those of his lovers is especially striking. Whereas Bale’s character has an outside that matches his inside–his corrupt, conniving character is manifest in his weight, physical health and  unnatural hairpiece–Adams’ and Lawrence’s characters are gorgeous despite their twisted insides. I would love to see a version of this film in which the women’s bodies, the clothes they wear and the hairstyles they sport are as reflective of their unsavory inner selves as the men’s are.

Only two of the nine films nominated for Best Picture are genuinely about women, and the difference in how women’s bodies are treated in those films versus the other seven is telling. Sandra Bullock spends much of Gravity in shorts and a tank top, yet at no point is she sexualized. One might note that she looks strong and healthy, but one’s eyes are not deliberately focused on her breasts either by her costume or the camera. The unnecessary addition of [SPOILER ALERT!] a lost child to Gravity betrays Hollywood’s inability to portray women without reference to their biology, but even the final shot in which the camera slowly pans from Bullock’s feet to her head is much more about showing her strength than it is about showing her girl parts.

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Gravity

Philomena is a film centered around a woman’s reproductive past, yet it trounces the competition in its fully human representation of a woman character. Unlike  Jennifer Lawrence in American Hustle, Judi Dench is old enough to conceivably be the woman she portrays. Close-ups of her face make no attempt to hide signs of age, revealing a beautiful woman whose wrinkles only make her intense emotional experience all the more gripping. Though the film is about the woman’s search for her lost child, the woman herself is far more than a mother on a mission. She loves her children, but she also loves sex. She’s a woman of faith, she’s openly accepting of gay people, she loves to read and she makes friends everywhere she goes. This is not to say that every female lead in every movie needs to be a saint;  most real women are not. But is there any other female character in this year’s nominees for Best Picture about whom the audience learns so much and in whom they become so deeply invested because of whom she is instead of what?

You might question whether the absence/objectification of women’s bodies in this year’s Best Picture nominees reflects on Hollywood or the culture as a whole. None of these films would necessarily be problematic on its own—12 Years a Slave in particular performs the important function of detailing the violence under which female slaves really lived and showing slave owners to be as oppressive as they really were. What is telling is the presence of so many films that either elide or sexualize female bodies in the category that presumably represents the best of the best.  The Academy clearly has a critical preference for movies about men, with women present primarily as wives and sex objects.

Though segregating awards by gender would up the profile of women working in Hollywood, it would also perpetuate the notion that there is something fundamentally different about work created by women and work created by men. And it would not solve the fundamental problem at the heart of Hollywood: Movies about men are more highly valued than those about women.

 

Related Reading: 7 Ways Stars Can Change Hollywood This Award Season

For more Bitch Flicks commentary on the 2014 Academy Award nominees: 2014 Academy Award NominationsThe Academy: Kind to White Men, Just Like History

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Holly L. Derr is a feminist media critic who writes about theater, film, television, video games and comics. Follow her @hld6oddblend and on her tumblr, Feminist Fandom

‘August: Osage County’ and What It Means to Be a “Strong” Woman in America

The strength of ‘Osage’ is that it never once sentimentalizes women’s relationships with one another. It does not allow for trite Hollywood portrayals of women as somehow less violent, less complex, or less serious than men. ‘August: Osage County’ is an odd sort of respite for those of us who don’t relate to stories of quirky, privileged, white girls from Brooklyn. The women of ‘Osage’ would destroy ‘Girls’ Hannah Horvath with a word and look. For me, it’s a kind of comfort to see these steely women on screen.

August: Osage County. Carloads of fun!
August: Osage County. Carloads of fun!
This article by Lisa Knisely was originally published on Bitch. Read more feminist film reviews at Bitch.

August: Osage County has garnered mostly lukewarm reviews. This is somewhat of a surprise: the movie is based on the Pulitzer-winning play by Tracy Letts and the film’s cast is packed with talented actors. Although both Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts were nominated for Golden Globes for their powerful performances, both of them walked away from the award ceremony last Sunday night empty-handed.

But then, this is a movie that is, unambiguously, about women. August: Osage County is about morally flawed, sometimes cruel, and often unlikable women.

And that’s what makes August: Osage County good.

At its essence, the film is about Julia Roberts’ character, Barbara Weston, and her struggle to both claim and reject her identity as a “strong woman.” She inherits her strength from her mother, Violet (Meryl Streep), and it’s a mixture of involuntary responsibility for others and a hardness necessary for survival. At one point midway through the film, Barbara and her two sisters (Julianne Nicholson and Juliette Lewis) sit together discussing their mother. Ivy, the reserved middle sister played by Nicholson, distances herself from affiliation with the rest of the Weston clan by claiming that family is simply a genetic accident of cells. Despite this bit of wishful thinking on Ivy’s part, we see clearly throughout the film that this is far from true. August: Osage County hammers home the idea that our upbringing shapes us no matter how much we may want to escape our complex relationships with our less-than-perfect mothers. The film is deeply evocative of how the familial, social, and physical landscapes of our childhoods leave indelible marks on our adult identities.

Film poster for August: Osage County
Film poster for August: Osage County

 

In his review for the L.A. Times, Kenneth Turan writes that the film “does nothing but disappoint,” comparing it to “that branch of reality TV where dysfunctional characters… make a public display of their wretched lives.” The problem with the film, according to Turan, is that its high melodrama doesn’t make the audience care about the characters, but instead makes the audience feel trapped.

But, this, I think, is the point. The experience of watching the film is stifling and emotionally difficult, much like the experience of growing up in a dysfunctional, addiction-fueled family like the one we see on the screen. If Turan feels like a voyeur looking in on the “wretched lives” of the Weston family, other viewers of the film will recognize, perhaps with too much familiarity, the uncanny mixture of very dark humor and gut-wrenching trauma at the heart of Weston family life. In the tradition of Faulkner and McCullers, this is a story that holds no punches.

Like Turan, New York Times’ critic A.O. Scott reviewed the film poorly, though he was slightly less negative in his review, writing that it lacked “fresh insight into family relations, human psychology or life on the Plains.” Randy Shulman also gave it an unfavorable review claiming, “The film has one electrifying scene, in which a husband (Chris Cooper) takes his bitchy, critical wife (Margo Martindale) to task. It’s a bracing moment that, for an instant, jolts us out of our lethargy. Had the entire film been on this level of engagement, August: Osage County might have been one of the year’s best films.”

Reading Shulman’s opinion struck me. That same moment in the film was my least favorite scene. I was, indeed, jolted by the scene that Shulman lauds, thinking it seemed too easy in its moral righteousness. It was at that moment of Osage that most of the men in the film (played by Chris Cooper, Sam Shepard, Ewan McGregor, and Benedict Cumberbatch) suddenly seemed to be the innocent and heroic victims of a pack of soul-devouring, child-eating, Gorgon harpies from the hilly plains of Oklahoma. This struck me as strangely out of tune with the rest of the film, which walked the line between making viewers simultaneously despise and sympathize with the women characters who forcefully drive its plot.

The strength of Osage is that it never once sentimentalizes women’s relationships with one another. It does not allow for trite Hollywood portrayals of women as somehow less violent, less complex, or less serious than men. August: Osage County is an odd sort of respite for those of us who don’t relate to stories of quirky, privileged, white girls from Brooklyn. The women of Osage would destroy Girls’ Hannah Horvath with a word and look. For me, it’s a kind of comfort to see these steely women on screen.

The women of August: Osage County looking mightly unlikable.
The women of August: Osage County looking mightly unlikable.

 

Despite its relative strengths, though, the film has one glaring failing: its treatment of race. Actress Misty Upham plays Johnna Monevata, a Native American woman hired at the start of the film to take care of the cancer-stricken, pill-addicted, racist Violet. That Violet is raw and unflinching in her racism against Native Americans isn’t the problem, as this seems realistically in accord with her character. What is an issue though is that the film’s attempt to deal with Native-White race relations in Oklahoma comes off hollow and under-developed. While she was a central figure in the original play, in the film, we never get to know Johnna beyond the fact that she can bake good pies.

While most of the narrative is so adept at portraying the mixture of intimacy and violence in the Weston household, the relationship between Johnna and the rest of the characters is flat. Toward the very end of the film, a disoriented and distraught Violet seeks solace and comfort from Johnna. This scene could have been a striking commentary on the way that people of color are often compelled within racist social structures to provide emotional labor and physical care for white people when their own kin will not. If this was the intended subtext of Johnna’s presence in the story, her character ultimately registers more like a problematic aside to the “real” action of the white characters in the film. This is really a missed opportunity for a film that is otherwise so successful at highlighting the complexities of being a strong woman from the Plains.

 


Dr. Lisa C. Knisely is a freelance writer and an Assistant Professor of the Liberal Arts in Portland, Ore.  

 

‘Blue Jasmine’ and Other Art By Abusers

It’s the feminist fan’s eternal conundrum: can I support art made by abusers of women? (For any value of support: consuming it to begin with, paying to consume it, or—gulp—enjoying it). But I watched ‘Blue Jasmine’ this week, even with Woody Allen’s sexual abuse of children in his family freshly in mind after the controversy surrounding his Golden Globes lifetime achievement award. And maybe it was my feminist guilt seeping in, but I was disappointed with it.

Movie poster for Blue Jasmine
Movie poster for Blue Jasmine

It’s the feminist fan’s eternal conundrum: can I support art made by abusers of women? (For any value of support: consuming it to begin with, paying to consume it, or—gulp—enjoying it.)

The incredibly sad truth of the matter is that switching off art by abusers can feel like switching off art entirely. It’s not just a matter of changing the station when “Yeah 3X” comes on, it means not listening to The Beatles and James Brown. It’s not just a matter of not watching Chinatown or Annie Hall; you have to decide if it is OK to watch 12 Years a Slave because it features Michael Fassbender, whose ex-girlfriend took out a restraining order on him after he broke her nose. Maybe that’s OK because he’s not the “author” of the film. But, well, supporting it supports his career (he got his first Oscar nom out of it), so, well… was my ticket for the best movie of the year, that’s also a landmark achievement for black filmmakers and actors, and moreover a powerful condemnation of systems of oppression intersecting with rape culture, now a betrayal of feminism and human dignity?

Everyone has to make these personal negotiations themselves. Maybe you can choose to tolerate work featuring actors who beat women, but not work “by” them. So watching Sean Penn in Milk is OK, but you must not watch The Crossing Guard and his other directorial efforts. Maybe you will only shun the work of sexual abusers, or maybe only sexual abusers of children, like Roman Polanski and Woody Allen.

Woody Allen
Woody Allen

A relatively easy approach is to lean heavily on the word “allegedly.” Other key vocab words: “rumor” and “gossip.” Ignore the myriad failures of the legal system in bringing abusers to justice, ignore that celebrity often compounds those failures, and remind everyone that these artists have “never been formally charged with/convicted of” their crimes. This is very nearly a free pass! [Speaking of free pass: let’s apply a blanket “alleged” to everything in this piece! Don’t sue me!]

I truly respect people who refuse to consume art by abusers, and I hope I can be forgiven for being too much of a pop culture completist to take that hard-line stance. Again, I think this is a choice everyone has to make for themselves, and I think the only wrong answer is the one that Hollywood appears to cling to: sweep the sins of its darling “geniuses” under a rug, so we can enjoy their work without internal conflict. (That is, if those sins were not against Hollywood itself, for that is UNFORGIVABLE!)

So: I watch Woody Allen’s movies, and I like a lot of them (although I feel compelled to clarify, when I wrote that I wanted “the next Woody Allen” to be a woman, I certainly did not mean a woman who is a sexual predator). I watched Blue Jasmine this week, even with Woody Allen’s sexual abuse of children in his family freshly in mind after the controversy surrounding his Golden Globes lifetime achievement award.

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Blanchett accepting Best Actress at the SAG awards

In Cate Blanchett’s Best Actress acceptance speech at the SAG Awards last week, she thanked Woody Allen for creating “role after role after role” for women. This praise of Woody Allen as a great giver to women left a bad taste in a lot of feminist mouths. But he has written many great female characters, even the elusive meaty roles for women over 40, like Blanchett.  I watched Blue Jasmine because I didn’t want to miss out on a new iconic female character and one of the most-praised female performances of the year.

And maybe it was my feminist guilt seeping in, but I was disappointed with Blue Jasmine. It’s a solid film, and sort of the polar opposite of To Rome With Love on the “effort expended by Woody Allen as filmmaker” scale.  But the cracks still show: the class commentary central to the film can be cartoonish, the Ruth Madoff character analogy feels a bit dated (at least coming from guy who makes a movie every seven months or so), and the pivotal moment in the third act is a chance encounter on the street, which is somewhere on page one of “Hacky Screenwriting for Lazies.”

Jasmine, not only from Allen’s writing but also from Blanchett’s performance, is a captivating character. But she never transcends “character” for me. I took particular issue with the jumbled mental illness cliches cobbled together: Nervous breakdown! Talks to herself! Medication “cocktails”! Excessive intake of actual cocktails! Electroconvulsive therapy! Delusions of grandeur! Relying on the kindness of strangers!

Cate Blanchett as Jasmine
Cate Blanchett as Jasmine

I am a mentally ill person myself, and I saw nothing recognizable in Jasmine. Silver Linings Playbook caught some flack last year (including from me!) for being a little too lighthearted and breezy on the subject of mental illness, but I found the characters in that film PROFOUNDLY relatable. One of the things Silver Linings Playbook did right was craft mentally ill characters not solely defined by their illness. Jasmine’s only other characteristics are being selfish and mean and generally unpleasant, all too easy to conflate with her illness itself.

This hodgepodge characterization makes Blanchett’s acting seem more awards-bait-y than it actually is.  She is fantastic in the film, especially because she manages to win some small amount of sympathy from the audience despite her character’s thorough terribleness. Sally Hawkins is also great as Ginger, Jasmine’s semi-estranged adopted sister, and I appreciated that she had her own storyline instead of existing merely as Jasmine’s grounded foil.

Blue Jasmine is the kind of movie I would normally say “is worth seeing” even though I didn’t personally like it very much. Multiply that lukewarm semi-endorsement by the sum of your personal “comfort with consuming art by abusers” coefficient and your awards-season completist factor to determine if you should give it two hours of your time.


Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town, South Africa.