2014 Oscar Nominee – Bitch Flicks

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’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.

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?

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.

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.

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.)

The_Wolf_Of_Wall_Street_review_article_story_main — 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.

american-hustle-amy-adams-1 — 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.

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.

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

The Women Both Admired and Ignored in ’20 Feet From Stardom’

The background vocalists are mostly women of color often singing behind white, male leads and the film poses the question of why these white guys (whose voices are not as strong as the women featured) became stars and their backup singers did not. The answer turns out to be more complicated than we might have thought.

When I was in high school, The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” wasn’t new, but it didn’t have the baggage of being associated with Martin Scorcese films, Dexter, or The Simpsons. I remember wondering about the woman whose powerful vocals make up half the song. In those days duets between men and women were a staple on the radio with both artists’ names above the title. But no one ever mentioned this woman. Years later with the advent of the internet and Wikipedia I looked up her name, Merry Clayton, and was surprised I didn’t recognize it. When I had heard the song I was sure I was hearing someone who had gone on to record other hits.

In a way, I had been right. Among many other songs, Merry Clayton sang on Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” Joe Cocker’s “Feelin’ Alright,” and Ringo Starr’s “Oh My My,” but because she was a backup singer, her name was buried in the credits and never mentioned on the radio when stations played these songs over and over. So even though many of us have heard her voice throughout our lives and maybe have even bought the songs and albums she sang on, most of us do not know her name.

The Oscar-nominated documentary 20 Feet From Stardom (directed by Morgan Neville) attempts to right this injustice by focusing on Clayton and a number of other backup singers whose voices we know, but whose names we often do not: Judith Hill (though some may recognize her from The Voice), Claudia Lennear, Lisa Fischer, Táta Vega, The Waters, as well as former back-up singers whose names became well-known like Darlene Love, the 60s girl-group singer who is in The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and Luther Vandross, who went from singing background on and cowriting and arranging hit David Bowie songs to his own successful solo career.

Anyone who has worked in the arts has seen enough examples to know talent is no guarantee of success– which some of the popular artists who have worked with the backup singers featured admit in the film. We see and hear solo performances from Clayton and Fischer and although they’re good (Fischer’s single won a Grammy), the songs they perform are not close to the caliber of “Gimme Shelter.” What makes a song (and its singer) a hit is tricky: sometimes the vocalists’ collaborators are the key (Mick Jagger with Keith Richards–or Bowie with Vandross), sometimes grooming from a powerful recording executive and producer does the trick (like Clive Davis for Whitney Houston) and sometimes artists become successful on the strength of their songwriting skills instead of their vocal prowess (Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, and Bob Dylan among many, many others).

As Darlene Love mentions she and the other girl-group singers modified their sound according to the wishes of producers so, for example, in the background vocals for “The Monster Mash” they changed their style to “sound white.” A singer’s popularity often depends on a distinctive style. Even Aretha Franklin didn’t become the Aretha Franklin we know today until she was allowed to sing and play piano as she had when she had sung gospel. In previous, secular recordings she was backed by an orchestra including plenty of strings, in a effort to try to replicate the success of Sarah Vaughn. The backup singers’ flexibility and skill in creating generic vocals might have also been their downfall in achieving success on their own.

Some backup singers have crossed over to great, popular success under their own names. but Sheryl Crowe and Emmylou Harris are white women, Luther Vandross was a Black man and Leon Russell was a white guy. The door doesn’t seem open to women of color. The film touches on some of what the women have had to deal with, acknowledging the racism in “Sweet Home Alabama,” which Clayton says her now-deceased husband convinced her to take part in, so her voice could be a retort to the song’s lyrics. The opening credits unroll to the sound of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” with its infamous chorus of, “And all the colored girls sing…” When the song was released “colored” wasn’t as strong a slur as it is today, but it also was not a word that most Black people were still using to refer to themselves. Progressive white people didn’t use it then either. The song “Brown Sugar” was rumored to be written about Lennear (who dated Mick Jagger around the time it was written) and its lyrics are also cringe-worthy.

JaggerFischer20Ft — Mick Jagger and Lisa Fischer in the 90s

The women are often in the position of being not just ear candy, but eye candy as well. We see a younger, slender Lisa Fischer in spandex eventually replacing Merry Clayton when the Rolling Stones tour and play “Gimme Shelter”–though Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have become visibly older and more fossil-like in the intervening years. Fischer is now 55, and toured with the Stones in 2013 (as she has in each of their tours for the last 24 years), but the precariousness of these gigs for women as they age makes Lennear’s long-ago decision to quit the business and teach Spanish to kids instead seem like a sensible one.

Now that the music industry is collapsing onto itself, the women who are still singing backup complain “my phone has not rung,” and struggle to make a living. So I’m puzzled why so much of the audience and critics see this film as a “feel-good” experience. At the end I couldn’t help thinking what the future would hold for these women: if this film is the last vestige of an era, the way a stuffed passenger pigeon in a museum is all that remains of the flocks that used to cover the sky.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kgRq_pGN2g” 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.

‘The Great Beauty’ of Little Temptations

‘The Great Beauty’ (‘La Grande Belleza’ in its native Italy)–winner of Best Foreign Language Film at The Golden Globes (and nominated in the same category for an Academy Award)–could easily have been an example of what the great film critic Pauline Kael called “The Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties”: European films in which very wealthy, attractive people are depressed in spite of their beautiful homes, expensive clothes, and jet-set lifestyles. These films, especially to contemporary audiences, can seem like at any moment they will cross the line into parody, with one of the characters spoofing an old Weill/Brecht tune, “Oh no, not another opulent location! Oh no, not another expensive, tailored suit! Oh no, not more sex with gorgeous, unhappy people!”

The Great Beauty (La Grande Belleza in its native Italy)–winner of Best Foreign Language Film at The Golden Globes (and nominated in the same category for an Academy Award)–could easily have been an example of what the great film critic Pauline Kael called “The Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties“: European films in which very wealthy, attractive people are depressed in spite of their beautiful homes, expensive clothes, and jet-set lifestyles. These films, especially to contemporary audiences, can seem like at any moment they will cross the line into parody, with one of the characters spoofing an old Weill/Brecht tune, “Oh no, not another opulent location! Oh no, not another expensive, tailored suit! Oh no, not more sex with gorgeous, unhappy people!”

Superficially, The Great Beauty resembles these films with a dissatisfied main character at its center: Jep (played by the director, Paolo Sorrentino‘s longtime star, Toni Servillo) a celebrity journalist who wrote one acclaimed novel forty years before and has been dining out on his reputation ever since. Servillo, after making a delayed appearance in the film (in a great entrance, he steps out of a line dance at his own chaotic, noisy birthday party to light the first of countless cigarettes) is in nearly every scene that follows, framed in the middle of the breathtaking scenery and lush interiors of Rome. The film makes us want to visit, but as one great visual outdoes another we realize outside of the cinematographer, Luca Bigazzi’s, lens the city could never live up to this ideal.

Beautiful Scenery and Beautiful Suits — Beautiful scenery and beautiful suits

The man who has every social and material advantage but remains unhappy is a staple in every art form: Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Richard Cory” (also a Simon and Garfunkel song), The Kinks’ “A Well Respected Man,” the Jack Nicholson character in Five Easy Pieces and Shakespeare’s Hamlet are just a few examples. The character is always a man: women exist in these works to either support him, betray him, or both. The popularity of “the people who have everything but really have nothing” can also be seen, in TV shows like Downton Abbey and, back in the 80s, Dallas and Dynasty, as an attempt at social control. The message in these works for those without money or power is: “Even if you had what you want, you still wouldn’t be happy.”

Sorrentino avoids these pitfalls, in part because the energy and fantasy-level luxury that make up the characters’ lives are allowed to dazzle us: even Jep’s mid-rise apartment and well-tended garden overlook the ruins of The Colosseum. We understand why Jep would spend forty years in this world, but after a few parties we come to understand why he is sick of them. We see Jep is a thoughtful and decent man, but weak, like Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth who said, “We resist the great temptations, but it is the little ones that eventually pull us down.”

Servillo’s charming, insinuating performance also saves the film from becoming a chorus of “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me”: in spite of his discontent the character never raises his voice: his life is easy and enviable so he never has to. The movie is also a portrait of Italy at a critical juncture. Not just the main character, who often thinks back to his first love, but others in the film, like the country itself, are trapped in the past: a “princess” rents herself and her husband out to parties where her bloodline will add some social cachet, even though they live in a cramped, ugly apartment–underneath the glittering museum her childhood home has become.

Instead of positing that the characters will find some missing and essential part of themselves by revisiting their memories (as so many films have posited before it) The Great Beauty sidesteps that possibility: Jep sees an opportunity to find out why his first love left him when her husband mentions she kept a diary, then in the next breath he tells Jep he threw it away. The princess’s empty, pristine old bedroom in the museum will never be her room again, just a backdrop for taped audio about the history of her family the museum-goers listen to.

The film avoids disaster in other ways. I was afraid the little person we first see as part of the raucous, debauched party at the beginning, who then regains consciousness the morning after at the now empty site, might be the art-film trope Peter Dinklage’s character in Living in Oblivion described as “Make it weird. Put a dwarf in it!” But blue-haired Dadina (Giovanna Vignola) turns out to be Jep’s editor–his boss–at the magazine where he works. She regularly eats with him at the dining table inside her office and is one of his closest–and in one scene, most tender–friends.

Some scenes had the potential to devolve into the misogyny that often accompanies this type of storyline, as when Jep interviews a Marina Abramović-like performance artist and gets her to admit she doesn’t know what her quasi-mystical pronouncements mean, or the scene when, after a fellow-partygoer provokes him, he dismantles her illusions point by point. But Jep is quiet and matter-of-fact in these scenes: he has none of Jack Nicholson’s relish in denigrating women. He asks the partygoer several times to stop asking him to analyze her before he lets her have it. When he does, we see, like Truman Capote before him, Jep’s sojourn in the world of celebrity hasn’t dimmed the novelist’s gift for observation.

At one point Jep makes a stripper (who is the daughter of an old acquaintance, the strip club’s manager) his companion, but she’s in her 40s, 20-something years younger than Jep, but not the 25-year-old we’ve come to expect in these roles. As other partygoers gossip over her spangled catsuit, he treats her as an intelligent apprentice in the art of negotiating the highest social circles. They don’t have a sexual relationship. Earlier Jep falls into bed with a woman–again much more age-appropriate than she would be in an American film–and we can see these encounters don’t have the same appeal for him as they might have when he was younger. But the film is devoid of the hostility toward women we’ve come to take for granted in similar films. He’s playful with the woman, asking, “What did you say your job was?”

She answers, “Me? I’m rich.”

“That’s a good job!”

Sorrentino criticizes the vanity of Jep’s circle, showing a botox party (which makes looking at some of subsequent close-ups of middle-aged actresses in the film difficult–something Sorrentino might have done intentionally) but later Sorrentino exposes Jep’s vanity as well, when we see his torso usually covered by a smart suit jacket (often in a primary color) wrapped in the velcro equivalent of Spanx.

In this film Sorrentino also focuses on nuns and clergy who wander in and out of the frame like birds–or aliens: the young nun at the botox party wants the shot so her hands will stop sweating, and a Mother-Teresa-like figure collapses on the bare floor of Jep’s elegant apartment to sleep. Sorrentino’s interest in religious figures reminded me of Luis Buñuel’s obsession, though Sorrentino seems to see them as clueless and out-of-step (during a party one cleric can speak only about recipes) and not, as Buñuel did, an active harm to the culture. That difference may be a statement about the Catholic Church’s disappearing relevance as much as about the two directors’ style and tone.

As much as I loved the film: at two hours and 20 minutes it’s about a half an hour too long. We could use fewer of the parties. We get it: they’re not as fun as they might seem. The film also falters in a brief scene in which a delegation from Africa (who come to see the Mother Teresa figure) are dressed as if they were extras in a Tarzan movie. I’m a little disappointed that the film won The Golden Globe over Blue Is The Warmest Color (which isn’t nominated for an Oscar, because of a technicality). The Great Beauty is a worthy film, but it’s also one that I recommended to my mother, which I most definitely would not with Blue. I’d love if the “Best Foreign Language Film” reflected how exciting and innovative the greatest films from non-English speaking countries are these days.

Still, film is a tricky medium: a movie about a character without redeeming qualities (like The Wolf of Wall Street) can seem like a paean to outrageously bad and sometimes criminal behavior (especially when its real-life protagonist continues to make money from his misdeeds) no matter how much the filmmakers disavow those intentions. Movies about obtuse misanthropes like Nebraska and Inside Llewyn Davis can seem obtuse and misanthropic themselves. The Great Beauty is about a bored, jaded man but doesn’t leave its audience bored–or jaded which is itself an achievement.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxWdwx5Hkiw”]