Tag: Alisande Fitzsimons

Wedding Week: ‘Bride Wars’: When Weddings Drive a Bitch Crazy

This is a guest post by Alisande Fitzsimons.

In Gary Winick’s 2009 film Bride Wars, two best friends pit themselves against each other in order to both have their dream wedding day. If this thoroughly unfeminist – not to mention unlikely – premise doesn’t put you off then pull on your spanx, pin up your hair, and settle in to enjoy some fun so light and frothy it may as well be a specially designed valium-laced cupcake.

It pains me to state that a rare successful Hollywood film featuring a rare two female leads (Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway) orientates itself around the wedding industry, an industry that feeds on female insecurity, causing otherwise sane and sensible women to spend a fortune on a single day in a quest for a level of perfection that probably only exists on cinema screens.

Best friends turned worst enemies

It also pains me to admit that the film is a firm favourite of mine because the lunacy that is fused to its girliness means it fits very well into that hallowed space known as “comfort movie.” Feel free to judge. I know you have one too.

Written by the female comedy duo Casey Wilson and June Diane Raphael, Bride Wars can be read as a much lighter companion piece to Kristen Wiig’s infinitely dirtier Bridesmaids, were Wiig’s depiction of how women behave when their closest friendship is self-immolating not far more realistic (yes, I do include the part where she hallucinates on the plane) and – let’s be real – funnier.

Bride Wars depicts both its brides – friends since childhood – as beautiful, successful in their careers and in stable relationships. It also depicts their descent into venomous harpies when it emerges that their wedding planner (a dignified and ice-cool Candace Bushnell) has booked both of their weddings to take place at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel on the same day.

The Plaza, we understand, has been both of the women’s dream venue since childhood visits with their mothers, who were also BFFs. This may be a side issue but, realistically, how many women’s best childhood friend remains their closest friend into adulthood, particularly when they became friends because of their mothers’ friendship?

Also, how realistic is it that both of these women would remain fixated on the goddamn Plaza from the age of six through twenty-six? Yes, the Palm Court is divine but I maintain that at some point at least one of them – probably Hathaway whose character Emma is a teacher – would have looked round and said, “You know? I don’t think it really is worth the money.”

Liv in Vera Wang

Bride Wars, then, is a film about madness. Emma and Liv (Hudson) are arguably experiencing a folie a deux bought on by that well-known contagious disease, wedding fever. Since before the Great Depression there have been studies showing that even in times of dire need, people in the West will still spend the equivalent of a down payment on a home on their weddings. Tell me that’s not crazy.

Bride Wars is a film that aims to capture its audience, which I think we can take for granted is made up entirely of women, by highlighting the worst side of what Hollywood likes to depict as the nature of women. Rather than solving their planner’s error in a dignified, or even organized way, the brides turn on each other, exploiting each other’s vulnerabilities and weaknesses in ways that only a former ally ever can.

And though it’s amusing to watch the pair go at each other in increasingly underhanded ways – a dye job gone brutally wrong, a fake tan turned neon, deliveries of cakes and sweets causing one bride to gain so much weight that she can no longer fit into her bridal gown, a Bachelorette crashed and dance-off performed – there is also the fact that these acts have consequences so far-reaching that it’s hard to imagine the pair hugging out at the end of the film (which, of course, they do).

Liv’s dress, for example, was by Vera Wang, meaning it probably cost in the region of $25,000. That’s a lot of money to make a former friend waste. The bad dye job turned her locks blue, causing a disastrous day at work that very nearly costs her the job that’s paying for that fancy frock and, one suspects, her wedding as her fiancé is shown to earn less money than her.

But worse than all of this is the fact that, while the women go at each other like thirteen-year-olds with enough money to act out their most schadenfreude-filled fantasies, the men in it are doing nothing. Not strictly nothing. Both the grooms have jobs and seem like OK dudes, but neither of them is running around the city in a vengeful huff because his soon-to-be-wife’s former-bestie is trying to best their wedding day and destroy his woman’s life.

The madness at work

No, in Bride Wars that brand of madness is entirely female. This says nothing good or particularly realistic about the state of mind of the modern adult female. I mean, yes, we get hurt and pissed off when our friends do something that seems designed to cause pain to us, but how many of us who are not mentally ill follow them around, actively trying to ruin one of the most significant and expensive days of their lives?

For one thing, who would have time, especially if they were trying to plan the happiest day of their own lives at the same time?

So, once again, even though I doubt the writers were trying to make a serious point about how the pressure and expectations of the wedding industry can direly affect women’s mental states, I think the film is about mental illness. You decide.

Alisande Fitzsimons is a writer and stylist from Dublin. She can be found tweeting about weddings and clothes @AlisandeF.

2013 Oscar Week: Depicting Sex Surrogacy in ‘The Sessions’

poster for The Sessions
Guest post written by Alisande Fitzsimons.
One of the more moving films of 2012 was Ben Lewin’s drama The Sessions. Based on the life and articles of profoundly disabled poet and journalist Mark O’Brien (played by John Hawkes), The Sessions depicts the period in O’Brien’s life when he engaged with Cheryl Cohen-Greene, a sex surrogate played by Helen Hunt. 
Bitch Flicks Co-Founder Stephanie Rogers has already written about Sex, Disability and Helen Hunt in ‘The Sessions’ for this site, pointing out that, “Helen Hunt is awesome.” She’s right – the power of Hunt’s performance as Cheryl cannot be understated, and even though she’s already collected one Oscar (for As Good As It Gets in 1997), a lot of us are rooting for her to collect another in 2013. 
Helen Hunt as Cheryl Cohen-Greene with John Hawkes as Mark O’Brien
What Exactly Is A Sexual Surrogate? 
When she first meets Mark O’Brien, Hunt’s character takes care to explain that she is a sex surrogate, rather than a sex worker but is not shown explaining the exact differences to him on-screen. For the record, the difference is this: sex workers provide sexual services in exchange for money. These services can vary wildly and some sex workers do indeed work with disabled or sexually dysfunctional clients. 
A sexual surrogate on the other hand is a certified sex therapist who educates and sometimes engages in intimate acts with their patients in order to reach a therapeutic goal. 
In The Sessions Hunt’s character treats O’Brien over four two hour sessions. O’Brien has never had an intimate relationship when he first begins working with Cohen-Greene but makes rapid progress, becoming comfortable with his own body, then with Cohen-Greene’s body, before finally achieving full intercourse with her and bringing her to orgasm. 
Growing up in the UK, I wasn’t aware that this kind of therapy existed, and I found the film’s insight into it fascinating. The film was released there at a particularly useful moment in British culture. As I type, a former Brothel keeper called Becky Adams is getting a lot of press attention for a new charity she has founded called Para-Doxies. 
The aim of Para-Doxies is to introduce disabled people of all genders and sexuality to sex workers so that their sexual needs can be met. As far as I’m aware therapy such as the sort offered by Cohen-Greene is not available in the UK. Realising how much good the sex therapy O’Brien received did him makes me hope that Adams’ project succeeds and that disabled sexuality becomes more widely accepted. 
There’s Sex But It’s Not Conventionally Sexy. 
I don’t mean that section heading in a bad way. In fact, the depiction of sex in The Sessions is wholly refreshing. As well as giving audiences an insight into disabled sexuality (because for some people the fact that disabled people do indeed enjoy sex apparently came as a bit of a shock), the film also does a marvelous job of presenting a leading lady who has sex both with her husband and patients in a way that’s not meant to titillate. I know I don’t have to remind anyone that this is unusual. 
There are no bras or slips left on during sex in this film but even though we see Hunt naked and having sex, there’s no part of this film that makes a female viewer uncomfortable. Not because Hunt is made to look unattractive in the film – she’s simply not – but because the nudity is so much in keeping with the realist tone of The Sessions that the sex is in no way “pornified” and so does not cater to the male gaze. 
Even when O’Brien, whom Hunt’s character has come to love — but, crucially, has not fallen in love with – orgasms during sex with him, it’s not the sort of noisy When Harry Met Sally moment we’ve come to expect from Hollywood films. Rather, it’s a quiet but heartfelt moment of wholly convincing intimacy between the couple. 
Arguably this should make the moment on-screen even sexier because it reflects real-life lovemaking more than most sex scenes ever will. The catch though is that the scene is so beautifully written and performed that it felt hard to watch. I mean that too in a good way. I mean, who over the age of 13 can’t look at a sex scene? 
The emotional investment the audience makes in the characters of Cohen-Greene and O’Brien means that watching it is not unlike one of those moments when you walk in on a friend having sex – awkward. 
Helen Hunt as Cheryl Cohen-Greene
The Private Life of a Sexual Surrogate 
Apart from the sessions in which she treats O’Brien, Cohen-Greene’s professional life is depicted on-screen when Hunt is shown making notes about how the treatment is going. This part of the film is crucial, not only because it gives the audience insight into O’Brien’s state of mind from a healthcare professional but also because it is what will distinguish Cohen-Greene’s work as a sexual surrogate from that of a particularly sympathetic sex worker in the minds of less liberal viewers. 
Another interesting insight the film is careful to make is into Cohen-Greene’s private life. While most of the film does indeed concentrate on O’Brien – it’s his story, and based on poetry and articles he wrote so the world could really understand disabled sexuality – the small amount of time the camera spends with Cohen-Greene at home is interesting. 
What, for example, motivates someone to become a sexual surrogate over any other kind of therapist? It’s a role that hugely benefits patients but one that may cause problems for the surrogates themselves. 
Cohen-Greene, for example, is married with a teenage son in the film. Her husband, whom she describes as “a philosopher” is in fact unemployed, leaving the family to rely on his wife’s income. It’s apparent that he has no problem with the nature of her work – and all credit to the filmmakers for not reducing an unemployed character to a loutish stereotype – but rather accepts her job as a valid form of employment and therapy. 
In fact, until Cohen-Greene begins treating O’Brien it seems that the couple had no problems with jealousy at all. O’Brien though sparks something in his therapist that her husband recognizes as threatening. It’s not as if a man who was forced to spend at least 20 hours a day in an iron lung due to catching polio during his childhood should, in Hollywood terms at least, be much of a threat to any healthy marriage. 
Yet O’Brien’s flirty and lively personality, not to mention his superior mind that can conjure up incredibly beautiful poetry, do start to come between the couple, even though it’s clear that Hunt’s character does not actually fall for her patient so much as come to respect him and care for him deeply, the way most of us do for our closest friends. She never, in spite of the non-physical intimacy the therapy could foster between them, tells him much about her personal life at all. A sure sign of love and respect for the man she is married to. 
— 
That Cohen-Greene is not depicted as a kind of saint who can see the lovable in a disabled man is another strength of The Sessions. The character is undoubtedly a good person but also a real one, and perhaps most importantly given the delicate nature of this kind of sex therapy, a wholly professional one. 
When the patient-therapist relationship she has with O’Brien threatens her marriage, she reacts first with anger then with consideration and does what she needs to to make that relationship work. 
At the film’s end she is shown attending O’Brien’s funeral with her husband, to whom she is still married. When O’Brien’s girlfriend, whom he met after his sessions with Cohen-Greene have finished, reads out a love poem that is clearly about Cohen-Greene, Hunt just smiles. 
When the love you have for someone is that great, be it platonic or romantic, sometimes the fact that both of you know is enough. It’s a credit to Hunt that her characterization of a character who could easily have been made out to be brassy or manipulative never is, and I really hope she’s duly rewarded by the Academy for it. 

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Alisande Fitzsimons is a sex positive writer. She can be found tweeting @AlisandeF.

Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: The Depiction of Women in Three Films Based on the Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen

This is a guest review by Alisande Fitzsimons.
Danish author Hans Christian Andersen is one of those writers whose stories—like those by the Brothers Grimm and Scheherazade (the Persian Queen who spun the stories that make up A Thousand and One Arabian Nights)—are so much a part of our culture that you undoubtedly heard them, and watched film adaptations of them, as a child.
Andersen had an unfortunate habit of falling in love with unobtainable women and later unobtainable men. The theme of lost love, and of the thing we love the most coming to destroy us is repeated throughout his fiction, much of which features a woman or female character in a lead role.
This essay will look at some adaptations of his most famous stories, and examine the role of the female protagonist in them.

Moira Shearer as Vicky in The Red Shoes

The Red Shoes (1948)

The film of the The Red Shoes differs slightly from HCA’s original tale. Rather than using it as a template for the whole film, the story is used as the basis for a fifteen-minute ballet that is performed in the movie. The composing and performing of the ballet is a crucial plot point within the movie.
The film revolves around Vicky (Moira Shearer), a prima ballerina, whose love for dance destroys her, the same way that the girl in HCA’s original story is destroyed by her beloved red shoes which eventually force her to dance herself to death.
The female protagonist Vicky is presented on-screen as flame-haired and beautiful. Less sympathetic though is the character’s passion for dance, and for The Red Shoes ballet in particular. Her obsession with it is such that she leaves her husband so that she can dance it once more, only to realise she’s made a mistake. She follows him to the train station and ends up being injured by an on-coming train, while wearing the red shoes she used to perform in.
Though the girl in HCA’s story is vain and wished for shoes that would let her dance forever, you’re aware that she’s also desperate to get out of the situation. In the film, it is Vicky who is possessed. She’s so obsessed with her career, and in particular the ballet that made her famous, that she cannot pass up a chance to dance it. Even when running after her husband, she does not remove her performance shoes.
It’s basically another film where a woman who’s career-focused is depicted as mentally ill because of it, and duly punished. No wonder it’s one of Courtney Love’s favourite films.

Bridget Fonda’s Snow Queen makes her romantic rivalry with Gerda clear

The Snow Queen (2002)

There have been many adaptations of The Snow Queen over the years (she’s a consistently scary bitch) but I’m talking about the 2002 made-for-TV adaptation starring Bridget Fonda as the eponymous villain of the piece. (It falls on me here, for no reason other than the fact that I’m immature and enjoy this kind of thing that “Bridget” rhymes with “frigid,” and to be frigid is to be icy and so on. Anyway…)
The most striking difference between HCA’s story and the film is that when it was made for TV the producers opted to make the story’s heroine, Gerda, into a love rival for the queen. In the fairy tale, Gerda and Kai—the boy the queen wants to own/seduce depending on the version—are best friends rather than girlfriend and boyfriend.
In the film, they are romantically involved, and so a story about friendship and sacrifice becomes one about a love triangle in which two women fight over a man. So far, so typical a Hollywood adaptation. But bearing in mind that HCA’s original story was about two children, and the sacrifices one was willing to make to save the other’s soul, isn’t that a bit sad?
It’s not just that two women can’t see each other as anything other than rivals for a man (even when one of them is a supernatural being with the power to control winter). By making the story “more accessible to modern audiences,” which producers love to do by reducing women to the sum of our ancestors’ parts (because once-upon-a-time we would have had to fight each other in order to make the best marriage we possibly could) they’ve actually made it a lot more boring. Sigh.

Disney’s Little Mermaid Ariel gets her fairytale ending

Splash (1984) and The Little Mermaid (1989) based on The Little Mermaid

The fact of the matter is that, if you’re looking for an accurate rendering of The Little Mermaid on-screen, you probably won’t find one. The animated Disney version of the story, complete with singing lobsters and a best friend called “Flounder the fish,” sticks closely to the majority of the story but leaves out the fairy tale’s violence, pain and death in favour of a good inter-species marriage at the end.
It’s hard to overstate how violent HCA’s original story is. The mermaid’s tongue is cut out, she dances for the human prince despite being in excruciating pain, having never quite gotten her landlegs, and—after she realizes he will never love her—she has to decide whether or not to shed his blood using a massive knife. It’s no wonder that the man who received this story in the form of a love letter from HCA turned down his affections.
Directed by Ron Howard, Splash is one of the more enjoyable romantic comedies of the eighties, possibly because of the fairy tale elements it contains. Like the little mermaid of the fairy tale, Daryl Hannah’s gorgeous mermaid Madison first catches sight of her prince as a child.
Years later, when she washes up on the shores of Manhattan, the two are re-united and romantic and comedic chaos ensues until he decides he loves her so much that he will follow her to the sea, from where he can never return (although he will live for 300 years which might be some compensation).
Although Splash is very loosely based on HCA’s story The Little Mermaid, the decision of the male protagonist to follow his love into the sea is a direct contradiction of it. For one thing, in HCA’s story the mermaid does not get her man. He marries a more suitable human instead, and the mermaid perishes before becoming a spirit (it’s a bit complicated but very spiritual).

Daryl Hannah as Madison in Splash

I rather like this ending to a film because despite not sticking to the original story, it offers viewers a chance to see something that is still relatively unusual on-screen: a successful male character giving up his life for the woman (mermaid) he loves. He sacrifices everything for her, with no real guarantee that he’ll be happy, and absolutely no way back. In that way, the male lead (Tom Hanks) is more like the little mermaid of HCA’s original story, who gave up her life below the sea for the human she loved, than Daryl Hannah’s character.
Both Splash and Disney’s The Little Mermaid stick to HCA’s premise that once a mermaid is on shore, she will be rendered mute. Feminists have had a field day with this part of the story but bearing in mind HCA’s sexuality, it’s also possible to read their silence as a manifestation of his desperation to be loved.
Rather than forcing his female characters into silence as a nod to the social roles enforced by the patriarchy of the era, might this be HCA’s way of telling his love that he will silence himself for them?

Conclusion

The adaptation of works from previous centuries is, if sometimes undesirable, inevitable. The fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, though still accessible to readers today, often shock with the violence and victimization that occurs to his lead characters, many of whom are, yes, female.
What strikes the modern reader, especially in light of what we know about HCA’s sexuality and relationships, is that many of these characters, though written as female are likely to be the writer consciously or unconsciously expressing parts of himself.
It’s curious then to see a character such as the Little Mermaid, who in literature sacrificed everything for the man she loved, pursued by a man who willingly sacrifices everything for her in one film version of the story, and happily married in another.
The film versions of The Red Shoes and The Snow Queen offer up more interesting re-interpretations of HCA and his characters’ psyches. In The Red Shoes, a character is destroyed by her mental illness and vanity—qualities the homophobic are very quick to attribute to gay men.
In the film version of The Snow Queen, the love of a good woman (Gerda) turns the character of Kai from a jealous, spiteful, mean young man (again qualities that homophobes love to attribute to young gay men) into the caring, loving, definitively heterosexual boy the filmmakers want him to be.
While it’s nothing new to argue that books and fairy tales reinforce the heteronormative, it’s interesting to think that HCA might once have been trying to do something quite different, and to imagine what a queer filmmaker might be able to come up with.

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Alisande Fitzsimons likes to eat. She blogs regularly at xoJane.co.uk and tweets about it @AlisandeF.

Gender & Food Week: ‘Life is Sweet’

Guest post written by Alisande Fitzsimons.

Trigger warning: A large part of this post discusses a character who is suffering
from Bulimia.
In many ways Mike Leigh’s 1991 film Life is Sweet should not be extraordinary. An almost entirely improvised piece, it takes place in a working class family home in the unremarkable London suburb of Enfield.
The preparation and consumption of food is a running theme throughout the film. Family man Andy (Jim Broadbent) is a chef in a large, anonymous corporation who, at the start of the film, buys a fast food van* in order to fulfill his ambition to work for himself. Soon after that, his buoyantly optimistic wife Wendy (played charmingly by Alison Steadman) takes a waitressing job at the Regret Rien, a Parisienne-themed eatery that a friend of the couple has recently opened.
The couple’s twin daughters also demonstrate an interest in food, albeit in very different ways. Nicola (Jane Horrocks), a tiny chain-smoking bulimic, binges and purges sweets and chocolate every night, seemingly punishing herself for a crime that’s never revealed. Her sister Natalie has a stereotypically normal relationship with food — managing to sit and eat with her parents, when her sister never can — but works as a plumber, something which was still seen as a bit icky, and not a suitable job for a woman in Britain in the early 90’s. And yes, that was because she may have had to come into contact with human waste.
In spite of its seemingly mundane subject matter, Leigh’s film is superb. Naturalistic to the point where it could be a fly-on-the-wall documentary, it’s also brilliant in its depictions of parts of the female experience that many films approach in ways that make them seem gimmicky.
A young woman with an eating disorder lashing out at everyone around her but never hurting them more than she does herself? Check. A mother desperately trying to stay strong and support her mentally ill child, in spite of the frustration that child’s self-destructive tendencies cause? Check. A closeted lesbian dreaming of escape but ultimately remaining stable and strong for everyone around her? Check.
And that says nothing of Andy, the hard-working but mildly baffled father figure. And yet, despite the tropes and the presentation of these character’s lives as “tragi-comic” none of it is tacky, or even remotely depressing. It is in fact an unusually uplifting watch.
[*Fast food vans may be a British phenomenon. They are mobile kitchens, which park on the side of busy roads and serve snacks such as burgers, bacon sandwiches, baked potatoes and hot dogs to passers-by. Considered low-class, their offerings are typically delicious.]
Family Dynamics
L-R: Nicola (Jane Horrocks) and Wendy (Alison Steadman) in Life is Sweet
To my mind, this film’s main characters are Wendy and Nicola. Although she is undoubtedly a loving mother to both her girls, most of Wendy’s time and energy is taken up by Nicola, and Nicola’s seemingly needless rage at the world around her.
Natalie, though often present — and an interesting depiction of a lesbian who remains closeted — is side-lined while the film-maker and characters concentrate on her sister’s struggle with an eating disorder. Her apparent contentment with her life and realistic ambitions (she wants to take a holiday in America) mean that she does not demand a lot of attention from anyone, including the viewer. Readers who’ve lived with such an illness, or someone suffering from one, may recognise the reality of this on-screen scenario.
Andy, despite being the one family member who gets to fulfill an ambition in the film, also plays second fiddle to his wife and mentally ill daughter. It’s possibly because he spends much of his time either daydreaming or at work, and is thus unaware of the extent of Nicola’s misery, and his wife’s increasing concerns about it.
Wendy and Andy, it’s revealed, struggled to raise their children. There was never enough money, forcing Andy to remain in a job he “hated” for years to support them, while his wife could not pursue her goal of completing a university education. That one of their children reacts to her life – which is, after all, largely funded by her parents’ catering jobs – by developing bulimia nervosa is an obvious manifestation of self-loathing.
Nicola becomes increasingly reclusive and agitated throughout the film, abusing her father for being a “capitalist” when he invests in the fast food van, and refusing to sit with her family at meal times or even mix with anyone outside the family home.
Throughout the film she conceals her bulimia from both of her parents, only agreeing to tell her parents about it in the film’s final scene. Her twin has known about it – and about the locked suitcase full of sweets and chocolate she keeps under the bed – because she hears her bingeing then purging each night, a painful secret she keeps not simply because she loves her sister, but because she also has no idea what to do.
In one scene, Nicola has a blazing argument with Wendy that indicates that she may finally be ready to recover. Shame-faced, Nicola screams that she knows how much the whole family hates her, and that is why they’re trying to force her to eat with them/ mix with other people/ live her life.
Exasperated, her mother snaps, “We don’t hate you! We bloody love you, you stupid girl!” reducing Nicola to tears.
It’s an exchange that cuts to the core of their relationship, and to the thinking of an eating-disorder sufferer. If they loved her, Nicola thinks, they’d let her fulfill the death wish the disease implants in sufferers. Her family, though not entirely aware of what’s going on, love her too much to let her fulfil that particular ambition.
Nicola’s Behaviour
Nicola (Jane Horrocks) in Life is Sweet

Like many bulimics, Nicola hides much of her illness from her family. Its most obvious manifestation is probably her refusal to eat with them at mealtimes, which could easily be taken for rudeness rather than any kind of secretiveness.
One of the more interesting — or just salacious — quirks of her disorder is that food is essential to her sexuality. She cannot become aroused unless her lover (David Thewlis) ties her up and licks chocolate spread from her chest. It’s as if even when in the middle of sex with a man who genuinely cares about her, when she should finally be able to indulge herself without punishment, she is still determined to deny herself. Granted, the metaphors in this film aren’t particularly hard to decipher.
I’ve already mentioned that she keeps a locked suitcase full of sweets and chocolate under her bed, which she uses to abuse her body with each night, stuffing herself full of them before plunging her fingers down her throat in order to bring all that food back up. It’s not until one has had an illness that causes repeated vomiting (this is my last reference to puke, I promise) that one realises how much bulimia nervosa is an act of self-abuse.
To deliberately and repeatedly purge day-in-day-out for months or even years at a time is to truly hate oneself because it is such a horrible experience. Jane Horrocks’ depiction of this level of self-hatred and the harm a person can do to their own body is truly insightful.
I don’t want to recommend this film to anyone who’s suffering or is in recovery from an eating disorder in case it is triggering, but I have heard sufferers say that Horrocks’ performance helped their loved ones to understand the realities of their disorder. I thought that was worth mentioning.
The Regret Rien
L-R: Aubrey (Timothy Spall) and Wendy (Alison Steadman) in Life is Sweet

A little way into the film, Wendy takes a job at the Regret Rien, a restaurant that’s just been opened by a family friend. Parisienne-themed and — there’s no way around this — as clichéd as fuck, the Regret Rien is also in possession of one of the most revolting menus in modern cinema (and I’m including films in which

characters cannibalise each other in that).
A quick sample of what’s on the menu: Saveloy on a Bed of Lychees, Liver in Lager, Pork Cyst, Prune Quiche, King Prawn in Jam Sauce, Tongues in a Rhubarb Hollandaise, Tripe Soufflé, Chilled Brains, Prune Quiche, Grilled Trotter with Eggs Over Easy.
Pork cyst, for God’s sake. And Tripe Souffle.
Apparently meant as a parody of the nouvelle cuisine trend that swept British restaurants in the early 1990’s, it’s not much of a surprise the venture looks set to fail. Its pretentious menu and clichéd décor are directly contrasted with the plain and much more popular food served up by Andy’s fast food van.
By the end of the film the viewer comes, in no uncertain terms, to like the family depicted in it (even Nicola), and a lot of their likeability comes from the fact that they are “salt of the earth” people who aren’t pulled in by gimmicks such as the push bike that sits in the bay window of the Regret Rien.
That’s not to put down working class people with a love of French cuisine, and a dislike of fast food. It’s just to point out that when it comes to cooking, the simplest recipes — like the simplest people — are often the best.
Conclusion
There’s a lot of food in Life Is Sweet, most of it — from the chocolate that Nicola purges to the burgers Andy cooks up, to the vile cuisine Wendy is meant to be serving — bad. But there’s also masses of love.
As I’ve admitted, the metaphors Mike Leigh employs aren’t particularly hard to decipher. But this is a lovely film, a film that takes a mostly realistic look at the difficulties life throws at us and points out that as long as we ignore the pretentious, over-complicated rubbish in favour of the people who love us enough to support us through them, we will be okay.
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Alisande Fitzsimons likes to eat. She blogs regularly at xoJane.co.uk and tweets about it @AlisandeF.

Women in Politics Week: The Depiction of Women in Films About Irish Politics

For as long as there have been film-makers, they’ve seemingly been attempting to depict the Irish struggle for independence. Apart from the fact that a country in the midst of political strife always makes interesting viewing (see also: Israel, Palestine, the rest of the Middle East and the plethora of films produced each year about life in communist East Berlin), this may be down to timing. 
The Easter Rising, when Ireland declared its intention of ending British rule over the country, took place in April 1916. The first commercial films, including DW Griffith’s seminal and hugely racist The Birth of a Nation (1914), were made in the same decade, meaning that the medium of film as a way to depict and interpret historical events through fictitious re-renderings of them, was created just in time to record the political strife that characterised Ireland in the twentieth century. 
Since it’s women in politics week here on Bitch Flicks, I thought I’d offer up a quick overview of how women are depicted in some of the more well-known films about Ireland’s political history. 
Wives and Girlfriends 
One of the most important films about the division of Northern Ireland from the Republic (the country more usually referred to as Ireland), is Michael Collins, directed by Neil Jordan, released 1996. 
In real life, Collins (played by Liam Neeson), was an Irish revolutionary leader who was crucial to the formation of the Irish Free State, which later became the Republic. He was assassinated in August 1922, while engaged to a woman called Kitty Kiernan, played on-screen by a particularly bland Julia Roberts. 
Julia Roberts as Kitty Kiernana
It’s almost a shame that Michael Collins is such an important film in terms of the depiction of “the Irish problem” on-screen because, by God, is Kitty a dull, poorly developed part. Not that I’d argue that the reduction of a potentially fascinating female role to that of an ornamental girlfriend is unusual. 
Another notable, but much more interesting IRA girlfriend is Marcella in the 1984 drama Cal. In a moment that we might attribute to extreme post-traumatic stress, the IRA man who killed her Protestant police officer husband pursues the young widow and begins an affair with her. On-screen, and probably because Helen Mirren who plays Marcella can render anything believable, the relationship appears more moving than fucked up. 
Much messier is Danny’s (Daniel Day-Lewis) torrid relationship with his former flame Maggie (Emily Watson who, like, Mirren, could make throwing away a cereal box seem moving if she put her mind to it). IRA code prevents Maggie, who married another IRA man while Danny was serving a prison sentence, from pursuing their relationship much as she’d like to. She’s likely to get attacked or worse if she does. 
While quite different, these films do give some insight into what it has meant to become involved with an IRA man at different points in the movement, and also how filmmakers have changed their approach to depicting the women that did. Kitty Kiernan deserved better, that’s all I’m saying. 
Lovers 
Warning: spoilers ahead. 
Neil Jordan’s 1992 film The Crying Game was a worldwide hit on release, and gives viewers one of the most interesting portraits of an IRA man and his lover. Forced to flee Northern Ireland after the botching the killing of a British soldier, Fergus (Stephen Rea) moves to London and gets involved with club singer Dil (Jaye Davidson), who’s keeping a secret. In her pants. 
Jaye Davidson as Dil
In 1992 Dil, who is revealed as being transgendered a short while into her love affair with Fergus, was one of the few unprejudiced depictions of a transgendered woman on-screen. Her sexuality, and indeed her penis, though revealed, are never made to be a punch line. In terms of mainstream film-making this was even more rare in the 90s than it is today. 
As well as marking a positive depiction of transgender on-screen, Dil’s status as a trans-person is important because it marks Fergus’ movement away from the militant Irish Catholicism that has coloured his life so far, including his relationship with his ex-girlfriend, Jude (Miranda Richardson). 
By literally and figuratively embracing Dil, Fergus is shown to be developing as a person in a way that it’s suggested the republican movement may need to. 
It’s interesting that both The Crying Game and Michael Collins were written and directed by the same dude. His fictional ladies, though also both involved with IRA men, are way more interesting to watch. 
Allies 
Ken Loach’s 2006 historical film The Wind That Shakes The Barley gives viewers the chance to see a part of the Irish republican movement that’s rarely depicted in cinema, the Cumann na mBan. 
CnamB was founded in 1914 as an all-female auxiliary to the recently formed Irish Volunteers, which aimed to secure liberty for Ireland with the mandate that they were willing to use force if need be. Though they rarely get a nod in the media, the group are still in existence and listed by the UK Terrorism Act still as a “Domestic Terrorist Group”. 
Set during the Irish War of Independence, the film gives us Sinead (Orla Fitzgerald), a member of the CnamB who refuses to be a victim. She remains politically and militantly active as Ireland suffers under the British occupation that is increasingly marked by vicious attacks by the notorious Black and Tans, and refuses to allow the men she’s allied with to fight the country’s battles without her. 
Orla Fitzgerald as Sinead
It’s this engagement that eventually mean the character of Sinead will come to symbolise the country’s determination and hard-won independence in the eyes of the viewer. 
Now, if Ken Loach would just turn his attention to immortalising a couple of real-life female revolutionaries, Maud Gonne and Countess Markiewicz, on-screen, all would be almost right in the world. The world of depictions of Irish women on-screen, anyway. 
Victims 
The 1970 drama Ryan’s Daughter is set in the fictitious Kerry village of Kirrary in 1916. Though the film is in fact a loose adaptation of Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary, the depiction of events in a village and era so rife with anti-British sentiment are accurate enough to use here. 
Sarah Miles as Rosy Ryan
When she begins an affair with a British Army officer, spoiled beauty Rosy Ryan (played by Sarah Miles), becomes not only a victim of public shaming by local villagers who drag her into the street, strip and beat her, before cutting all her hair off, she also becomes a victim of her own father’s greed. 
Because although Rosy is engaging in adultery with a man who symbolises the British occupation of Ireland, she has not been informing him about the activities of local IRA men (watch the film and it’s clear she’s far too self-obsessed to take any notice of what anyone else is up to). It’s her father, Tom, who hears everything by virtue of being the local publican and sells the information to British soldiers at the local army base. 
A betrayal of his country, Tom’s collaboration is neatly juxtaposed on-screen with the villagers’ acts of violence against Rosy, whose sexual attraction to a British soldier is seen as every bit as treacherous as her supposedly having informed on them. 
She’s a victim then of the republican villagers who attack her, the men who purport to love her but refuse to protect her in the face of this violence, and – always dangerous for a woman on-screen – her libido. 
It’s one of the more depressing movies in the genre. 
Mothers 
Most mothers in political films about the state of Ireland, and particularly Northern Ireland, have tended to be either ardent supporters of a militant political organization who want their sons to get out there and do their bit, or more stereotypical mothers who worry. Inarguably, women raising children in the middle of a civil war zone have a lot more to worry about. 
Helen Mirren as Kathleen Quigly and Fionnula Flanagan as Annie Higgins
Some Mother’s Son (1996) is based on the true story of the 1981 Hunger Strikes in which republican prisoners starved (sometimes to death) in protest against the British presence in Northern Ireland, and gives viewers two mothers to consider. 
Kathleen Quigley (Helen Mirren) is mother to a man who has kept his IRA involvement secret from her. When he is arrested, she’s torn between her love and loyalty towards her son, and her disgust for the organization. When the Hunger Strikes begin, she is determined to do whatever is necessary to save her son. 
Annie Higgins (Fionnula Flanagan), meanwhile, is a hardline republican, who is able to completely support her own son’s actions, but is eventually forced to watch him die at the hands of the British Army. 
Neither woman is depicted as a saint, stereotype or, unusually, as a symbol for the struggles of Northern Ireland as a whole, which makes the film not only more realistic but also far more moving. 
Cruella de Ville 
I’ve already mentioned that I think Neil Jordan can write a pretty rocking fictional woman’s part. It’s possible that I’m misinterpreting Miranda Richardson’s role as country girl turned villainess Jude in The Crying Game. That’s her there, rocking Uma Thurman’s iconic hairstyle a full two years before Pulp Fiction hit the big screen. 
Miranda Richardson as Jude in The Crying Game
Like Orla in The Wind that Shook the Barley, Jude is an ally to the IRA men in the film. Her initial job, while still blonde and clad in double denim, is to lure Forest Whittaker’s British soldier Jody back to her place so the republicans can take him hostage. (This flirty technique was considered so immoral that the IRA swiftly banned members from using it.) 
It’s only later, after her safehouse is bombed by the British army, killing some of her cohorts and forcing her boyfriend Fergus to flee Ireland, that she’s given a make-over that most fairy tale villains might deem “a bit over the top.” 
From her jet black, bluntly cut bob to the razor sharp suits she adopts, there is no part of Jude’s later characterization – which will include threatening her ex, then shrieking the usually comforting Roman Catholic motto, “Keep the Faith!” as she leaves the room – that implies she’s anything less than evil. 
Among academics this depiction of a female IRA member as having no redeeming qualities at all is considered one of the most misogynistic to have appeared. 
Conclusion 
There are few genres that are depicting women in as complex and interesting a manner as we deserve to be. The political nature of the films I’ve described here does mean that that the parts being written usually depict a certain amount of emotional and social complexity that other genres can lack. 
There’s none I wouldn’t recommend to you, if you’re interested in the development of Irish politics and the people involved in it but what I would say is that in spite of feminism in Ireland developing more slowly than in other parts of the first world, women have never been sidelined from the revolution. 
We had women in the Cumann na mBan fighting alongside men when the country overthrew British rule in the 1920’s. Countess Markiewicz and Maud Gonne are arguably as important revolutionary figures as the men they campaigned alongside, but who are more usually referred to and depicted on film. 
And – though there are a plethora of films depicting the mothers, wives, girlfriends or lovers who have loved the men who’ve fought for Ireland – we’re still waiting for the films about the lives of these women to be made. 
Alisande Fitzsimons blogs regularly at xoJane UK. She can also be found tweeting about Ireland and movies at @AlisandeF