Tag: Amy Madigan

‘Female Perversions’ Still Strikingly Relevant Nearly Two Decades Later

Like ‘Mean Girls’, ‘Female Perversions’ script (co-written by Streitfeld and Julie Hébert) is an adaptation of a book of the same name of nonfiction, feminist psychology, the concepts and ideas of which are plugged into a fictionalized narrative (and, in this film sometimes into bus stop placards and advertisements that appear in magazines).

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While looking at a highly subjective list of 100 great films by women (which is itself a reaction to the subjective list the BBC released of “top 100 American films“–that included only three directed by women) I had a mixed reaction. I was gratified to see some films I thought would be overlooked (XXY), appalled to see one of the worst films I’ve had to sit through this year (Eden), disappointed that critics often don’t look beyond the obvious films for women with interesting, varied careers (Chantal Akerman, Gillian Armstrong, Jane Campion and Sofia Coppola have all directed better but less well-known films than the ones on the list) and skeptical critics actually saw at least one of the films included (Shirley Clarke’s The Connection). But I also thought of the films that were milestones in my own viewing history that didn’t make the cut: one of the most vivid that remains surprisingly relevant today is Susan Streitfeld’s Female Perversions.

Like Mean Girls, Female Perversions’ script (co-written by Streitfeld and Julie Hébert) is an adaptation of a book of the same name of nonfiction, feminist psychology, the concepts and ideas of which are plugged into a fictionalized narrative (and, in this film sometimes into bus stop placards and advertisements that appear in magazines). The main character is Eve Stephens (Tilda Swinton, looking impossibly young and beautiful in her American film debut) a Los Angeles prosecutor who is widely thought to be the next person the governor will appoint as a judge to the appeals court. Her male boss assures her, “First of all, politically, he must appoint a woman,” and “he actually wants to appoint a woman,” reminding us of every paternalistic man who never stops reminding women how much he “supports” them.

We see Eve arguing a case as the men in the courtroom ogle her in her sharp, chic (for the mid-nineties) off-white suit and matching high heels as the camera lingers on a loose thread coming from a seam (the excellent cinematographer is, in a great rarity for a film directed and written by women, also a woman: Teresa Medina). Later she sees herself on television giving a statement to reporters after she has won the case and all she can notice is the dark lipstick staining her two front teeth.

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Not only is Eve expected to perform impeccably and advance in her profession, she’s expected to have perfect hair, clothes and makeup– and an enviable personal life too

 

As an opening quote onscreen from the book makes clear, the “perversions” in the film are actually the contradictory and unattainable standards conventionally feminine women are supposed to aspire to. Not only is Eve expected to perform impeccably and advance in her profession, she’s expected to have perfect hair, clothes and makeup– and an enviable personal life too (and this pressure on women has only increased in the nearly 20 years since the film’s release). She eats M & Ms, as she stays in her office working until 9:30 p.m. (leaving only when the Latina cleaning woman comes in), ordering flowers for herself to show up the next day with a double-entendre message “from” her equally high-powered, career-focused boyfriend. She then picks up a woman (a psychiatrist, played by Karen Sillas) on the elevator as she leaves the building. Before they get off, we see Eve’s receptive body language and hear the flirtatiousness in her voice as she asks the psychiatrist out for a drink. The next day a real card (and considerably more modest flowers) await her in the office from “the young doctor” alongside the big bouquet Eve ordered for herself.

Being pushed and pulled in so many directions makes Eve sometimes behave erratically, raging when she isn’t in the presence of others and imagining figures grabbing her and whispering sometimes obscene insults into her ear. When she hallucinates an upscale clothing clerk is judging her body as “wide across the hips” she tries on a piece of sheer lingerie and comes sashaying out of the dressing room wearing it for all to see.

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I’m not sure I’ve ever seen nudity used as well in a film as it is in ‘Perversions’

 

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen nudity used as well in a film as it is in Perversions, as Renaissance-style art in the somewhat scary fantasies in Eve’s head when she has sex (these scenes are reminiscent of the work Swinton did with out gay director Derek Jarman) and to make the sex scenes themselves deeper and more realistic. We don’t see the first encounter with Sillas’s character but we do see another, which starts with Sillas’s character mock-analyzing Eve and her answering, in jest, “Finally someone understands me.” What follows is much more like the hot sex people have in real life than what we’re used to seeing passed off as “hot sex” onscreen–especially between two women. Eve’s bare bottom is used to show, in the scene the next morning, how discombobulated she is, when she wakes up alone, in the blouse she wore with her suit and nothing else.

We also see how the forced politeness of acceptable, feminine behavior not only fuels Eve’s rage when she’s alone, but also renders her relationship with the psychiatrist shallow and unsatisfying. When Sillas’s character visits Eve, Eve claims she wasn’t bothered when she suddenly left, the way a good guest says she’s enjoying her stay no matter how she really feels. When the two talk they have a choreography of crossed and uncrossed legs and offered drinks that underlies the complex choreography of emotions that Eve is, by adhering to norms (as well as using her work as a kind of shield and excuse to keep their interaction short) cutting herself off from.

We also see Eve’s sister, Maddie (Amy Madigan) who lives in the desert and is about to defend her Ph.D. Maddie gets an erotic charge from shoplifting even as we see, in one scene, she immediately throws away an item she’s stolen. Madigan holds her own in scenes with Swinton, no small feat since Eve is one of Swinton’s best performances: she frequently injects an almost slapstick physicality into the character though we’re not watching a comedy (the film does have one great funny payoff involving Eve’s “lucky suit”).

The film isn’t perfect. The ending is a mess (the film just stops instead of offering any real resolution) and I could have done without the only Latinas we see literally standing in silent witness to Eve’s behavior. But I was sad to see Streitfeld has barely worked as a director since the film was released, one of the many women who made one great film and was never allowed to make another.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gN9Ca45l8cg” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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

Motherhood in Film & Television: The Authentic Portrayal of Mother-Daughter Relationships in ‘Future Weather’

Movie poster for Future Weather

I recently saw the film Future Weather at the Tribeca Film Festival and was blown away by the honest portrayal of motherhood onscreen. The film captures the ups and downs characteristic of mother-daughter relationships and does so without simplifying the women or relegating them to either/or binaries; there is no exclusively Good Mom or Bad Mom in this film. Not only is it nearly unheard of in films today to watch women interact with one another in ways that don’t involve men, but in typical feature films showcasing mother-daughter relationships, audiences are often subjected to a litany of unrealistic absolutes: Good Moms always love and nurture their daughters, sacrificing their entire adult existences and maintaining some virgin-esque purity while doing so; yet Bad Moms ruin their daughters’ lives through manipulation, neglect, or—conversely—smothering and over-protection, to the point that the audience labels these mothers nothing more than villains—usually mentally unstable villains—with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

But Future Weather avoids these clichés. The women in this film lead hard, complex lives. We know these women. We live with these women. Their interactions remind of us our own multifaceted mother-daughter relationships. And, fortunately—while they’re sometimes messy and often difficult to watch—the women in Future Weather aren’t treated as tropes to merely move a plot forward (no dead ladies/moms for dudes to avenge the deaths of!), and the filmmakers spare the audience from two hours of that cringe-worthy, all-too-familiar “lone woman among a group of complex, likeably awful men” thing.

Here is an excerpt from writer/director/producer Jenny Deller’s summary of the film on imdb:
Thirteen-year-old Laduree lives in a trailer tucked away on a beautiful piece of land in rural America. A loner who takes refuge in nature, she’s grown up looking after her mother [Tanya] as she wanders between men and jobs. A few weeks into the 8th grade, Laduree returns home to find a note in the breadbox with a fifty-dollar bill—her mother has taken off to pursue her life-long dream of becoming a make-up artist for the stars. … Laduree reluctantly begins life at her grandmother’s [in] a small house in town where her mother grew up. … As the two struggle to deal with Tanya’s disappearance, they tiptoe toward each other and apart, finding fragile moments of connection and release amid a glut of lies, omissions, and miscommunications. …

Perla Haney-Jardine plays Laduree (called “Ray” for short) brilliantly. Future Weather is a coming-of-age tale, and Ray’s relationship with her absent mother, Tanya (played by Marin Ireland), never feels false; I attribute that to Jardine’s stunning performance in the role. Ray always keeps her guard up, but underneath her feigned tough exterior lies a wounded child who, like many of us, had to take on adult responsibilities at a young age and never experienced the love she needed from her mother. And while Ray’s mother Tanya enjoys traditionally feminine things like experimenting with makeup—she abandons Ray to move to California to become a makeup artist, after all—Ray loves science, a traditionally male pursuit. She’s a tomboy who likes the earth, particularly plant-life, likes getting dirty, and likes swimming in lakes. These differing interests further separate mother and daughter, and neither knows quite how to relate to the other, though it isn’t for lack of trying.

Perla Haney-Jardine as Laduree and Amy Madigan as Greta in Future Weather

In several quiet scenes, often with no dialogue, the director Jenny Deller illustrates this disconnect perfectly, with Ray unsuccessfully trying to show Tanya her scientific discoveries and Tanya trying to bond with her daughter by giving her a makeover. I love this juxtaposition so much. For one, Ray’s love of science works as a metaphor throughout the film. Ray studies plants in her yard, and when she moves to her grandmother’s house, she must uproot her plants (which she’s named and everything) and physically move them to another home. She worries it will kill them, and that speaks to Ray’s own emotional turmoil in being forced to leave the only home she’s ever known. Ray essentially “mothers” (i.e. nurtures) her plants and loves them in a way she doesn’t feel loved by her own mother. 

Basically, since Ray can’t control her home life, which is utterly chaotic, or navigate her grown-up emotions surrounding Tanya’s abandonment, she focuses on the earth and science (a field driven by absolutes and logic), and immerses herself in finding ways to fix what she sees as the failure of humans to take care of—and nurture—their home.
Perla Haney-Jardine as Laduree in Future Weather

One of the criticisms I’ve read repeatedly about Future Weather is that the film includes too much eco-dialogue. Nope! Sure, Ray speaks passionately about the environment throughout, and in another film, one not directed by a woman who understands subtext, perhaps, (how is this Deller’s first film?!), the eco-dialogue critique might make sense. But in this film, particularly in the scene in which Ray flips out on an entire neighborhood of people about littering, excessive purchasing of water bottles, and not caring about the earth in general, the subtext is absolutely clear: people who possess the ability to care for living creatures also possess the responsibility to do so—to nurture and care for the planet because the planet takes care of us, the way mothers, daughters, and families should take care of one another.

Motherhood, specifically the act of mothering, is presented as a layered and complicated job in Future Weather.

Lili Taylor as Ms. Markovi in Future Weather

We see more evidence of this in Ray’s relationship with her science teacher Ms. Markovi (played by Lili Taylor). Ray connects with her for obvious reasons: she sees herself in Ms. Markovi, another female who loves science (gasp!), and she also sees Ms. Markovi as a stand-in mother, someone who understands her and nurtures her interests in ways both Tanya and her grandmother, Greta (played by Amy Madigan), struggle to do effectively. There are reasons for that struggle. Greta, one of my new, absolute favorite onscreen women ever, is fucking tough. She gave birth to Tanya at a young age and raised her alone, and Tanya replicated her mother’s life with Ray.

And guess what? Single motherhood is hard; the film shows us that.

It shows the hardships—and consequences—of trying to raise a child while struggling financially, getting no real support from the man who, you know, helped create the child, and hearing the constant message from society that mothers cease to exist as individuals once they have children. Forget it, moms. Any dreams or life goals you hoped to achieve once—put them on the backburner for a few decades. (Hint: society spares dads that message.)

I won’t give anything else away about the film, as it’s still screening at festivals and waiting for a distributor. (Someone pick up this film!)

But in the end, unlike so many movies about motherhood, Future Weather doesn’t condemn or vilify mothers, or even praise them. It illustrates the difficulties of motherhood, particularly for single moms. Deller, thankfully, doesn’t shy away from showing us the realities—and occasional horrors (ha)—inherent in mother-daughter relationships. We may question the decisions these mothers make, but they’re questioning themselves throughout, too.

The cast and director of Future Weather