disability in film – Bitch Flicks

“Crazy” Women Run in the Family in ‘Rocks in My Pockets’

We have had few if any first-person accounts from “crazy” women filmmakers about how they see their own lives and minds. Animator and artist Signe Baumane’s first feature, ‘Rocks in My Pockets,’ seeks to change that situation. Baumane focuses on five women’s stories of mental illness in two different generations of her Latvian family: her grandmother, Anna; and three of her cousins–Miranda, the artist; beautiful, studious Linda; music teacher Irbe; and finally, Baumane herself.

The “crazy” woman character has been a staple of literature going as far back as Jane Eyre and a staple of films going as far back as Olivia de Havilland in The Snake Pit. Not coincidentally, “crazy” is the adjective most often used to dismiss a woman who disagrees with the opinions or the recounting of events of a man or group of men either online or elsewhere (the second most popular term of dismissal is “angry”). In recent years women writers like Kay Redfield Jamison have documented their own struggles with diagnosed mental illness, and an Australian TV series (on Pivot in the US), Please Like Me, has used the experience of the star and creator, Josh Thomas’s, own mother as a model for the sympathetic and nuanced portrait of the “Josh” character’s mother on the show: she has attempted suicide more than once and spent much of the last season as an inpatient at a mental hospital.

We have had few if any first-person accounts from “crazy” women filmmakers about how they see their own lives and minds. Animator and artist Signe Baumane’s first feature, Rocks in My Pockets, seeks to change that situation. Baumane (who also wrote the screenplay) focuses on five women’s stories of mental illness in two different generations of her Latvian family: her grandmother, Anna; and three of her cousins–Miranda, the artist; beautiful, studious Linda; music teacher Irbe; and finally, Baumane herself.

Early in the film, Baumane alludes to a longer history of mental illness in the family than the one she details. Her grandmother marries an older man who divorces his first wife so he can have another larger family (he wants 10 more children but ends up with eight) so more little Latvians can inherit what he thinks are his superior qualities. The grandfather’s ego was far greater than his accomplishments; his children in some scenes momentarily transform into DNA double helixes to remind us of how he sees them. But Baumane tells us he didn’t take into account his new wife’s family history, never asking about the members of her family who “died early” and “didn’t live up to their potential.”

AnnaKidsCowsRocks — Anna and her children

Anna’s depression doesn’t manifest until after she starts having children, one after another, in an isolated town with a jealous husband who makes sure his young, pretty wife is far from any male neighbors. The family live on top of a sandy hill, so they cannot dig a well for water. Instead Anna has to travel back and forth up the hill to bring water in buckets from the river below, not just for the family, but also for the two cows and a horse. The animals alone needed 40 buckets every day.

The family goes through much hardship as the country is first annexed by the Soviets and then by the Nazis and then the Soviets again. During her many trips to the river Anna sees in the water a creature that looks like a cross between an oversized teddy bear and a sea monster beckoning her to come in. One day she does, but a poacher spots and rescues her. She had forgotten to put rocks in her pockets to sink.

Anna later sends her children to boarding school, since she can barely provide for them (her husband continues to live at home but we see him literally turn his back on the rest of the family). Sometime after he dies, she overdoses on Valium, the go-to drug of the country’s Soviet era, prescribed for everything from heart problems to the “mental deficiency” the regime considered mental illness to be.

MirandaHusbandRocks — Miranda and her husband

Baumane’s slightly older cousin Miranda has no desire to get married, but a nice man pursues her and she relents. As she gathers wild orchids with a 16-year-old Baumane she tells her that this will be her last summer. Baumane thinks that Miranda means her last summer as a single woman and urges her to cancel the wedding. Miranda tells her she feels obligated to do the things that make the people who love her happy, and marries and has a child within the year. After her son is born, she tries to strangle herself, but her husband comes home early and saves her. “She never forgave him,” Baumane tells us. After spending much time in Soviet-era mental hospitals under heavy medication Miranda succeeds in killing herself when her children are older.

“You can’t learn from anyone else’s mistakes,” Baumane narrates. “You have to make your own.” Because Baumane becomes pregnant, her parents pressure her, when she is still young, to marry a man who seems to be descending into alcoholism. After her son is born she visits a psychiatrist and then she too is sent to a mental hospital, but is somewhat reassured when, just before she goes, she looks in a mirror and sees Miranda, who tells her to just drink a lot of water to dilute the medication she is forced to take. After Baumane is discharged from the hospital and divorces her husband, Baumane’s mother decides she is unfit to take care of her own son and raises him herself instead.

Baumane combines traditional hand-drawn animation (she at one time worked with Bill Plympton and some of the film evokes his distinctive style) with sets and some other elements made of paper maché. The exaggerated expressions of the human characters (who are sometimes hard to tell apart), along with Baumane’s narration–which at times, sounds a bit too much like an adult reading a story to a child–can be jarring. Waltz With Bashir and Sita Sings The Blues are two films that had better success in combining conventional animation with complex stories meant for grown-ups (which, like Baumane’s, have elements of autobiography), probably because both had tighter scripts than Baumane does. Baumane’s family history starts with her grandmother’s early suicide attempt in the river, backtracks to Baumane’s own suicidal ideation (she’d make sure to rub with soap the rope she’d hang herself with, so it wouldn’t catch on any edges and would wear adult diapers, so whoever found her wouldn’t have to clean up any urine and feces expelled from her dying body), then goes to the very beginning of the grandmother’s story, a runaround that both exhausts and confuses the audience.

But a lot of the imagery Baumane uses, in both the paper maché (the misshapen human characters and the houses with eyes are standouts) and the animation that has the look of illustrations for children’s books (work that Baumane has also done) like the teddy bear/sea monster, huge bottles of pills invaded by equally huge, long tongues and the psychiatrist’s giant legs bursting from under her desk under her immobile, sedated face, are unforgettable.

The creature who embodies mental illness in all of the women’s lives doesn’t look threatening. In fact, the creature is kind of a solace to several of the women–it dances with a delusional Linda while she wears a wedding dress for a groom who doesn’t exist. The creature’s appearance fits how the women see it themselves; Irbe describes the voices she hears as comforting, because they once warned her off a road before a vehicle came crashing through it.

Baumane, like some mental health activists who have been diagnosed themselves, doesn’t see medication as the answer (at least two of the women in her family were taking prescribed medication when they committed suicide). Her solution: to not withdraw into herself and her own pain when it threatens to overtake her and instead spend time in the company of others, waiting out her worst suicidal impulses seems like an anticlimax. But the method has apparently worked for her–keeping her alive and well long enough to make this vivid and beautiful film she labels a “quest for sanity.”

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

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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

‘The Theory of Everything’: A “Great Man” From The First Wife’s Point of View

Do great women exist? The film industry still hasn’t decided. We had ‘Frida’ a dozen years ago and that bio-pic about Margaret Thatcher (like ‘Frida,’ directed by a woman) from a few years back–which won Meryl Streep an Oscar, but tepid reviews along with a completely irredeemable main character kept me from seeing it. Usually the women in the “great man” films are great only by osmosis, because they married or otherwise provide emotional–and other–support to great men. The actresses who play these roles win Oscars too: they make the “supporting” category a literal one. ‘The Theory of Everything,’ the new bio-pic about astrophysicist (and best-selling author) Stephen Hawking seemed like it might be different since it’s based on the book written by the great man’s first wife, Jane.

Like a lot of women, I’m impatient with the “great man” films that invade theaters every year just in time for Oscar consideration. The main character is always a man whose name we all know, played by an actor who really wants an Academy Award. We see his earliest struggles then later, his triumphs. The addition of some failures never succeeds in making the film more interesting, just longer.

Do great women exist? The film industry still hasn’t decided. We had Frida a dozen years ago and that bio-pic about Margaret Thatcher (like Frida, directed by a woman) from a few years back–which won Meryl Streep an Oscar, but tepid reviews along with a completely irredeemable main character kept me from seeing it. Usually the women in the “great man” films are great only by osmosis, because they married or otherwise provide emotional–and other–support to great men. The actresses who play these roles win Oscars too; they make the “supporting” category a literal one. The Theory of Everything, the new bio-pic about astrophysicist (and best-selling author) Stephen Hawking, seemed like it might be different since it’s based on the book written by the great man’s first wife, Jane.

But the movie begins by focusing on him (Eddie Redmayne) not her, as he rides a bike, attends classes as a Ph.D. student in the early 1960s at Cambridge and acts as a coxswain (complete with megaphone) for the crew rowing on the river. Hawking meets Jane (Felicity Jones) at a student mixer and they become a couple. Hawking’s physical awkwardness could pass for that of any geeky man who considers his body merely a container for his brain, but we know what’s coming before the characters do when we see scenes in which Hawking trips and falls in a train station or his hand folds in on itself as he writes equations on a blackboard. When he has a fall in the yard he receives his diagnosis, ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease), along with the news “Life expectancy is two years.”

At first he avoids Jane and holes up in his room, but after she finds out from his friends about his illness, in a scene we’ve all watched in countless other films, she marches into his room and declares, “I want us to be together for as long as we’ve got.” Stephen resumes his studies and for his thesis topic chooses “time.” He and Jane get married and start to have children soon after.

What follows is a portrait of a marriage that combines all the elements of pre-second-wave feminism at once: Jane has to set aside her studies not just to care for her very young children, to make all the meals and clean the house, but also to care for her husband, whose mobility is rapidly deteriorating, even though he’s still a relatively young adult. At the point where he can walk only with the assistance of two canes and can maneuver the stairs in his house only by lying flat on his back and grasping with his few remaining functional fingers the railing to pull himself up or down, we see Stephen hand in a typed dissertation with a barely legible shaky signature; I couldn’t help wondering if the person who typed it was Jane, since he seems unlikely to have been able to do so himself–and so many wives in that era were also their husbands’ de facto secretaries. We’re also seeing an era in which care for disabled family members was often left to a wife or mother (as opposed to paid staff, unless the family was very wealthy), and no one, not Hawking’s family nor Jane’s, ever thinks of taking over his care for even a few hours at a time to give Jane some respite. On the drive back from a dinner at his family’s hillside cottage in the country, a teary Jane tells Hawking she needs help, but he cuts off any further discussion.

TheoryBed — Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking and Felicity Jones as Jane Hawking

Later Jane’s mother can see how stressed she is and (instead of offering to help) suggests she join a church choir (Jane is a regular churchgoer, a contrast to her outspoken, atheist husband). She then meets the handsome choirmaster, Jonathan (Charlie Cox) who becomes a family friend and also helps with Stephen’s care. Stephen seems to see the spark between his wife and Jonathan from the beginning and lets her know in an indirect way that she is free to pursue the relationship. Here the film is at its most interesting: too many “great man” films seem to sum up the wife or girlfriend character struggle of living with the great man as “she was a saint” without considering that she might have needs of her own. Jane’s situation also parallels many others of the 50s and 60s when women got married in their early 20s and found in their 30s and 40s their marriages did not fulfill their own expectations and ambitions. Jane remains devoted to Stephen but is at her happiest when she spends time with Jonathan. The closeness of their relationship invites the scrutiny of others at the christening of her third child, when her mother-in-law follows her into the kitchen and declares the family has a “right to know” whether the child is Jonathan’s. Jane replies that the child’s father could not be anyone but Stephen.

When Stephen has the health crisis that robs him of the ability to talk without assistance, Jonathan steps back and nurses come into the home to help Stephen, along with a man who designs a device through which Stephen can talk again, by slowly “typing” (actually clicking a monitor to choose letters and phrases) and having an electronic voice read the words. Stephen becomes very close to one nurse in particular, Elaine (Maxine Peake), who even helps him to look through the copies of Penthouse that come to his office. He eventually leaves Jane for her. An end title tells us that Jane eventually got her Ph.D., married Jonathan, and that she and Stephen are still friends.

EverythingSpeaks — Jane watches Stephen “speak” through a device while the woman who will be his second wife looks on.

What the film leaves out are the most interesting parts of the story–not just Hawking’s scientific work (we get explanations that are so oversimplified they don’t make much sense), but also that the nurse Stephen lived with (and eventually married and divorced) was the wife of the man who created his speaking device–and that she was also investigated after other caregivers alleged she physically abused Stephen (during their relationship he had unexplained bruises, broken bones and burns). When Jane did publicity for a previous movie based on her and Stephen’s relationship, she said she couldn’t comment on Elaine (who was still married to Stephen then) for legal reasons. She did admit during interviews that she was friends with Stephen mainly for the sake of the children. And she and Stephen weren’t a couple when he was diagnosed, their romance blossomed afterward, which Jane described as being in keeping with the great optimism of the early 1960s that ran parallel with the belief that nuclear war between the super powers could, at any moment, wipe out the world.

Redmayne does a credible job as Hawking (whose character in the film is much more sympathetic than Jane and news sources have portrayed him; this Hawking never runs over anyone’s toes “accidentally” with his electric wheelchair), especially in the later scenes where we see a certain impishness in his face (very like the real-life Hawking’s), while most of his features remain immobile. Jones as Jane does a serviceable job too, but I wish she had been allowed to look and dress less like Jean Shrimpton (the British supermodel popular in the era when the film begins). At least Redmayne (who is also more conventionally pretty than the person he plays) gets to mess up his hair and wear unflattering glasses; Jones, for much of the film, until she starts wearing a crappy short wig and half-assed “aging” makeup, looks like she could have stepped out of a stodgy, British clothing catalogue, even when Jane has three kids and a disabled husband to take care of, and, as Jane points out in her book, and is briefly referenced in the film, very little money. The filmmakers (screenwriter Anthony McCarten and director James Marsh) didn’t seem to think any of these details were worth including. The Theory of Everything is a good, if very conventional, film, but the real story it’s based on could have been made into a great one.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8QYUgO-tZo”]

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On Not Giving Women Filmmakers A “Free Pass”: ‘Kelly & Cal’

Many actresses, especially those in their 30s and older, find themselves relegated to playing “the mother” for much of their careers. Most of these films (like the recent indie hit Boyhood) seem to go out of their way to tell stories from anyone but the mother’s point of view. For a short time Jen McGowan’s Kelly & Cal (also written by a woman: Amy Lowe Starbin) seems like it will be a welcome contrast to this norm. At the beginning we see a closeup of the tired, stressed face of new mother, Kelly (Juliette Lewis), as we hear the pleasant, disembodied voice of Kelly’s OB/GYN, who indulges in the (relatively recent) abhorrent practice of referring to women who are pregnant or have recently given birth as “Mom” (instead of calling them by their names) while she rushes Kelly through her six-week checkup. The doctor isn’t the only offender: “How was your day, Mommy?” Cybill Shepherd’s squeaky clean mother-in-law later asks when she visits for dinner.

We again see closeups of Kelly’s unhappy face as she (and we) hear her baby constantly crying, interrupting her even when she tries to masturbate–after her husband proves more interested in TV than in sex. We learn Kelly’s name only when she introduces herself to Cal. They meet over her fence as Kelly sneaks a cigarette and Cal asks if he can have one too. Cal is supposed to be 17 or l8, but the handsome and not untalented Jonny Weston, who plays him, is–and looks–26. Throughout the film, whenever he talks about attending high school I felt like correcting him, “Don’t you mean graduate school?” The actor visibly being well past his teens makes Cal’s banter seem particularly inappropriate and creepy.

He tells Kelly (whom he’s just met) “You have great breasts,” then admonishes her that if she didn’t want him to comment on them she shouldn’t nurse her son with the curtains open (sort of like how some men feel free to advise celebrities never to pose for private nude photos if they don’t want the world to see them).

Kelly immediately tells him, “Get away from my house,” then sees he uses a wheelchair as he rolls back toward his own place. That evening she tells her husband she feels bad that she yelled at someone who is “handicapped,” the word used to describe Cal throughout the film, even though “people with disabilites” has been common parlance–including in the Americans With Disabilities Act–for over 25 years. I guess we should be grateful the film doesn’t have any queer characters, so we don’t have to hear them called “homosexuals.”

She used to be "wild" — She used to be “wild”

The movie really goes off the rails after Kelly appears at Cal’s garage apartment (his parents’ house hasn’t been equipped with ramps) as an apology, but quickly leaves (Juliette Lewis is quite funny in this scene; she’s better than the film deserves) when Cal continues to talk explicitly about sex (this time about his own prowess even after the accident that caused his spinal cord injury). Her actions are perfectly in keeping with everything else we’ve seen so far from Kelly. So the audience is left to wonder why, the next day, she goes back to visit Cal as if nothing has happened. If Kelly were meant to be a damaged character, a woman who felt that being in the company of someone who humiliates her by talking explicitly about her body (which he spied on while she was behind closed doors in her own house, feeding her son)–and then told her all the sexual things he could do to her–is all she deserves, I could accept this plot point. But as the part is written (up until that point in the film) and as Lewis plays her, Kelly is a level-headed sort, even if she feels lonely and out-of-place in her new role as a suburban stay-at-home mother. Kelly and Cal’s “friendship” in this context makes no sense and seems to bolster the philosophy of street harassers and “pickup artists” that talking explicitly to women they barely know (and who don’t seem open to their sexual attention) is the way to attract them.

For extended periods that follow, the film (which seems long but is actually only 110 minutes), in the tradition of soap operas, seems to forget Kelly has a baby. We see her freely drinking beer and other alcohol when before she had demurred explaining that she was still breast-feeding (if the TV series Please Like Me can be trusted, apparently breastfeeding mothers can pump their milk before the occasional drunken night out, but the movie doesn’t care enough to offer this explanation). She and Cal spend lots of time alone together, after which she often goes home to an empty house–when new parenthood means (as the start of movie makes clear, and shows is a major part of Kelly’s frustration), except for brief respites when others take over, the baby is always there.

No, really she was "wild" — No, really, she was “wild”

We get a tiny subplot that goes nowhere about Kelly once being “young and wild” and “in a band” which seems cribbed from a Wikipedia entry about “Riot Grrrl,” especially when the characters repeatedly mispronounce “Sleater-Kinney” as “Sleeter-Kinney.” The film also uses a Cyndi Lauper song, the polar opposite of “wild,” as one of of Kelly’s favorites. Kelly ends up kissing Cal because his harassment somehow ends up charming her. She also does a little breaking and entering and graffiti with him as foreplay.

Cal, on the other hand, inhabits the trope of the disabled character who feels like life is no longer worth living. A person with disabilities who becomes suicidal is such a cliché that When Billy Broke His Head, a too-infrequently seen documentary about disability–directed by a disabled man–had a sequence that was a montage of disabled characters in film after film announcing their intentions to kill themselves. Audiences would object if every woman in films wanted to off herself–or if every person of color did. And we’re glad that modern queer characters in dramas like Weekend, Keep The Lights On, and Pariah survive to the credits because in the past the rule seemed to be that one (or more) of a film’s queer characters must die by the end. But the disabled character (and there’s usually only one), if he or she isn’t busy being an inspiration to others, is, in too many films and TV shows otherwise on the brink of suicide. We could use more characters like Winston (Clifton Collins Jr.) in Sunshine Cleaning, who was missing an arm, but was neither depressed nor awe-inspiring, just a person trying to get through life.

A film with real distribution (it opens on Sept. 5) directed by a woman as well as written by one is a rare enough occurrence that I wish I didn’t have to point out all that’s wrong with Kelly & Cal. But if a film has the same old sexist (not to mention ableist) tropes, we have remember why we wanted more films by women in the first place–and see that maybe this particular example isn’t solving the problem.

As Susan Sarandon (in The Celluloid Closet) said of their love scenes in The Hunger, no one needs to get drunk to kiss Catherine Deneuve. In the same way, nobody needs to lower their standards to love the films of women like Stacie Passon, Miranda July, Dee Rees, Sarah Polley, and Andrea Arnold. But film distributors still treat an acclaimed queer woman’s film about a queer woman, Concussion, as subpar: last year the rapturous reviews it received from a number of influential critics came too late for it to have a real run in many cities that might have embraced it, (including mine which is full of art houses and is in the first state to legalize queer marriage). One Cut, One Life the documentary co-directed by and featuring Lucia Small was the best film I saw at the Independent Film Festival of Boston (where I saw Dear White People, Belle, and Obvious Child) and probably the best documentary I’ve seen this year (a year that included Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me and Anita) but even though it plays at The New York Film Festival Sept. 29 it still doesn’t, as far as I know, have a distribution deal. The only way to fight against this tide is to keep praising good films by women–and not dilute that praise by heaping it onto other films that happen to have women’s names on them.

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

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Girls, Consent, and Sex in ‘Palo Alto’ and ‘I Believe In Unicorns’

Films set in high school are often about boys; films which feature high school girl characters complex enough to surprise an audience (one measure of good screenwriting) are relatively rare–‘Say Anything’, ‘Mean Girls,’ ‘Clueless’ and from earlier this year ‘It Felt Like Love.’ ‘Palo Alto,’ the first film directed by Gia Coppola (niece of Sofia and granddaughter of Francis), who also wrote the script (based on the stories of James Franco) focuses on several main characters in high school, including April (‘American Horror Story’s’ Emma Roberts, whose auburn hair and dark eyebrows recall her Aunt Julia’s). We see her as she plays soccer, babysits, goes to boozy parties and is alone in her room.

Films set in high school are often about boys; films which feature high school girl characters complex enough to surprise an audience (one measure of good screenwriting) are relatively rare–Say Anything, Mean Girls, Clueless and from earlier this year, It Felt Like Love. Palo Alto, the first film directed by Gia Coppola (niece of Sofia and granddaughter of Francis), who also wrote the script (based on the stories of James Franco) focuses on several main characters in high school, including April (American Horror Story’s Emma Roberts, whose auburn hair and dark eyebrows recall her Aunt Julia’s). We see her as she plays soccer, babysits, goes to boozy parties, and is alone in her room.

April’s mother and stepfather, like some of the other parents we see later in the film are perfectly pleasant to April but seem to have never grown up themselves. April’s mother interrupts her constant kitchen cell phone conversation with “Jamal” to coo at her daugher and make her the occasional meal. April’s stepfather (a nearly unrecognizable Val Kilmer) holes away in a separate part of the house, drinks from a mug that has his own photo on it and rewrites April’s term paper even though she asked him to merely look it over. Neither one ever asks April where she’s been or when she’s coming home; “cool” parenting becomes a study in benign neglect.

Disaffected, wealthy young people aren’t new subjects for a film, but perhaps because Coppola is not far from the age (and background) of her characters some of the details resonate: the way “friends” pour alcohol down the throat of one of the main characters who is late to a party so he can be as drunk (or drunker) than they are, the game of “I Have Never” at the party which becomes an opportunity to reveal others’ secrets told in confidence, the banter between girl athletes who think their coach is cute (“What do you think his o-face looks like?”), the bedroom of Emily (Zoe Levin)–whom the others call “blow job queen,” a label she does her best to live up to–full of little-girl knick knacks and stuffed animals.

Palo Alto is based on the book of short stories of the same name by James Franco (who plays April’s coach, Mr. B.; she babysits his young son). Franco also helped get financing for the film. No one should confuse Palo Alto with one of Franco’s many projects that would elicit zero curiosity from the public if his name weren’t attached, and I haven’t read the book, which may be to blame, but in spite of how much time we spend with April, and in spite of Roberts, who radiates intelligence and wariness in the role, I didn’t have much emotional investment in the character.

The storyline about April and her coach is initially a promising one. He’s relatively young and good-looking and pays special attention to her, very like some of the real life scenarios in which teachers have sex with high school students. But April doesn’t seem ditzy or desperate enough to think sex with her teacher is a good idea, and he doesn’t seem smooth or clever enough to work through the natural resistance of a student with a stable (if lax) home life and a thoughtful nature. In the late 70s and early 80s when I went to high school, all of us suspected one of the girls in my class was having an inappropriate relationship with the biology teacher–the sexual tension between them was apparent from 50 feet away, even when they were just talking to one another in the hall. Teachers and students today would have to be more discreet, and the lack of depth in Franco and Roberts’ connection fits with later developments in their story, but we never get the feeling much is at stake when they fuck (which we don’t see) let alone when they find themselves attracted to one another–even though he’s endangering his job, abusing his position and breaking the law, and she is putting herself in the position to be hurt, exploited or both (and could also easily turn him in to the authorities).

Coppola does a better job of verisimilitude with Emily who seems surprised that her many hookups with boys don’t turn into relationships or even into friendship. At one point she has sex with a boy, Fred (Nat Wolff) she’s hooked up with before, and he invites other boys to also have sex with her; whether the sex Emily has with them is consensual is unclear. Coppola has Fred tell the story in voiceover without showing any of the action (or even the lead-up to it), an intriguing choice that keeps a possibly nonconsensual encounter from titillating the audience–and keeps the audience from deciding for ourselves whether the sex seems consensual or not.

Perhaps because of the sex scenes, Emily is played by an adult, as is April, who nevertheless makes a convincing teen in her yellow sweatshirt and skeleton hoodie. But when we see the travails of Teddy (Jack Kilmer, Val’s son with Joanne Walley) in the film, the two actresses’ relative maturity stands in stark contrast to Kilmer’s tender face touched with vestiges of baby fat–he is 18, not just playing a teenager, and the difference between him and the other actors takes us out of the movie. Seeing the other actors share scenes with Kilmer reminds me of an English stage actress who wondered, when she was a very young woman, why she couldn’t get larger roles playing against the older women in the company. “I didn’t realize (a thirty-something actress) could play a teenager on stage and it would work–unless you put a real teenager right next to her.”

Kilmer has been described as “androgynous” but “amorphous” is a better descriptor, and, much like a similarly soft and young-looking Gina Piersanti in It Felt Like Love, his being the age of the character is an essential element of what makes him so good in the part. Teddy is a teenager we’ve known and maybe even been, but one we don’t often see onscreen. He is sensitive and artistic, but afraid of being ridiculed by his best friend, Fred. So Teddy is unable to say “no” to Fred even when he knows he will end up getting in trouble (and maybe even end up in court) because of him. We see that he genuinely cares for April, but that he lets a jealous Fred drag him away from her more than once. Palo Alto is a film in which we often dread what teens will do next, so at the end, when Teddy finally does the right thing, and, in her own way, so does Emily, we breathe a sigh of relief.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7Q3oeHsIj0″]

Writer-director Leah Meyerhoff’s I Believe In Unicorns is a much more minor film than Palo Alto but has some similarities–a high school girl has her first sexual relationship with an older man. The main character, Davina (Natalia Dyer), lives with and cares for her mother who uses a wheelchair and also doesn’t have full use of her hands (Meyerhoff’s own mother, Toni Meyerhoff, plays the part. She has multiple sclerosis and Meyerhoff cared for her when she was growing up).

Davina spends a lot of her time awash in fantasies that seem like those of a much younger girl (her room is also like a younger girl’s); one sequence involves fireworks (it evokes a similar scene in Beasts of the Southern Wild) and others involve a stop-motion animated unicorn and dragon in a forest. Meyerhoff’s talent as the director of experimental shorts is apparent in these scenes, but her script does not come close to equaling it. The mother is nearly silent (which may be because of her disability), and we don’t get a sense of what happens to her when her daughter runs away to be with a man/boy who has already graduated, Sterling (Peter Vack)– even though the mother seems to have no one else to help care for her.

We see brief glimpses of what the film could have been: the kiss Davina exchanges with her friend Clara (Amy Seimetz) when asked how Sterling kisses, Davina squatting down and spitting up after performing oral sex on Sterling for the first time and Davina and Sterling’s encounters which alternate between the two of them feasting on each other’s mouths teenager-style to rough sex that is sometimes just under and sometimes over Davina’s line of consent. Sterling alternately abuses Davina and cries in fear that he will abandon her and Dyer’s presence is lovely and vulnerable throughout the film. “Do you really like me or is this just temporary,” she asks him in a heartbreaking moment. Although Vack is a competent performer, he looks distractingly like a male model (he could have come from the cover of a romance novel), which makes the “real” sequences seem just a dystopian continuation of the fantasy ones, a problem not helped by the two of them never seeming to completely run out of money and having clean, shiny, flawless hair after living out of a car for an unspecified period of time. We also don’t know for sure until toward the end of the film that Sterling is an adult (although an emotionally stunted one). Vack is obviously an adult: his height and muscled body threaten to overwhelm the petite Dyer (who was 17 when the film was shot) in their scenes together, but because so many films put adults in high school roles we don’t realize how creepy Sterling is from the beginning. He not only has sex with a girl who is not yet an adult, but also chooses one who looks even younger than she is–and she’s still enough of a kid to place animal miniatures on the dashboard of his car.

In the question and answer period after the film, Meyerhoff explained how difficult casting Davina was and how the filmmaking team went through hundreds of actresses before they found Dyer. It’s a familiar story (similar to Hittman’s casting of Piersanti in It Felt Like Love). I wish this writer-director had put that same effort into writing a coherent script for her talented actors.

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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.

‘Under The Skin’ of the Femme Fatale

Most of these films demonstrate a lack of curiosity about how these women came to be the characters we see: no one in real life becomes as deceptive, manipulative, and callous toward others as these characters are without a backstory, which usually never makes it into these films. So we’re probably overdue for a femme fatale who literally drops, fully formed from the sky: Scarlett Johansson’s main, unnamed character in Jonathan Glazer’s ‘Under The Skin,’ an alien in the guise of a beautiful woman. Johansson, wearing a short black wig, drives around Scotland in a nondescript, white van asking men walking alone along the road for directions and then, if she ascertains, through a few questions, that they won’t be missed, she offers them a ride.

The woman who lures men to their doom is a trope that goes back to the earliest days of film. Theda Bara, one of the first silent screen actresses to have an image of wanton carnality instead of the virginal purity of other stars of the era like Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish, was referred to as a “vamp“–short for vampire– for her sexy roles in which she proved the downfall of the men attracted to her. “Vampy” and femme fatale characters have provided career peaks for many actresses since, from classic Hollywood film noir–Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity and Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice through the late 20th century with Kathleen Turner in Body Heat in the 80s and Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction in the 90s. In this century, the vampire of Let The Right One In (and its inferior American remake), who appears to the world an ordinary 12-year-old girl, manages to enlist both a man and a boy as her servants (while preying on others for fresh blood).

Most of these films demonstrate a lack of curiosity about how these women came to be the characters we see: no one in real life becomes as deceptive, manipulative, and callous toward others as these characters are without a backstory, which usually never makes it into these films. So we’re probably overdue for a femme fatale who literally drops, fully formed from the sky: Scarlett Johansson’s main, unnamed character in Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin, an alien in the guise of a beautiful woman. Johansson, wearing a short black wig, drives around Scotland in a nondescript white van asking men walking alone along the road for directions and then, if she ascertains, through a few questions, that they won’t be missed, she offers them a ride.

JohanssonCompactSkin — Johansson’s alien on the prowl

We’re cued to how the main character sees human beings in one of the earliest scenes in which a naked Johansson strips the clothes from a freshly killed young woman (it’s unclear whether Johansson or her silent male assistant–also an alien in human guise–did the deed), so she can wear them as her own. As a tear falls down the dead woman’s face, Johansson’s character picks up an ant crawling on the woman’s now naked body and focuses on it as if it were a puppy. The ant helps explain Johansson’s attitude to humans: she’s not cruel. She just sees them as expendable and as removed from her own existence as most of us see insects.

The media and the filmmakers have made a point of revealing that some (but not all) of the encounters Johansson has in the van were unscripted, the men in them random passersby (who didn’t recognize the star of The Avengers), the camera hidden. This information seems pointless given how ordinary those conversations are–as far as we can tell. The accents of most of these men are so heavy they should have been subtitled for American audiences and perhaps UK ones as well.

But Glazer has a great touch with professional actors: he made the justly acclaimed Sexy Beast with Ben Kingsley as an unforgettable, ultraviolent, pint-size gangster: the anti-Gandhi. In Glazer’s less acclaimed (but still creepy and atmospheric) Birth he gave us a stricken, affecting Nicole Kidman (also in a short wig) as a woman accosted by an 10-year-old boy who convinces her he is the reincarnation of her dead husband. Johansson hasn’t always impressed me in her movie roles, (I didn’t believe a minute of Her: Johansson’s performance as Samantha was not the whole reason why, but certainly didn’t help) and in interviews she seems to confirm our worst suspicions of how ill-informed and insensitive to people outside their sphere movie stars can be. But she pulls the audience in here, as if we too are her victims, a relief, since for much of the film Johansson is the sole, silent person onscreen. In other scenes, when she talks to the men in a passable English accent (which sounds more natural than the Jersey accent she used in Don Jon) her eyes glitter with emotion. At first we mistake this passion for empathy (and the men mistake it for lust), but her excitement turns out to be the thrill of the hunt.

Each unlucky man follows her into a room (while the disturbing score by Mica Levi plays in the background) in which she strips her clothing as she walks, encouraging the man to do the same (this film isn’t one that discriminates in its nudity: the actors who go to her place are shown in full-frontal shots, two of them with erections) Without realizing he is doing so, his eyes focused on Johansson each man sinks completely into the black hole/digestive tank under his feet, while she pads across the smooth surface like a cat.

In the outside world, we see her knock out a swimmer who saves a man from drowning (the man then tragically goes back into the water to try to save his wife) and ignore the screaming toddler the couple has left behind on the beach. She starts to feel for the humans around her only when, outside of the insular world of her van, walking on city streets, she trips and falls face first on the sidewalk–and men like the ones she has been preying on help her up and ask if she’s okay. She’s as disconcerted by their doing so as if a small band of dragonflies did the same for one of us.

Later she picks up a loner (Adam Pearson) who appears to have the same disease as The Elephant Man (the actor has Neurofibromatosis), his facial features radically distorted. Because she’s an alien, Johansson’s character neither looks away from his face nor stares at it. She stops the van, asks him if he’s ever touched a woman and places his hand on her neck. She does take him back to her place, but the sight of a trapped fly trying to escape a room sparks something in her conscience. She flees the city (and her male assistant) to the Scottish Highlands where she experiences both the best and worst of human nature in men (she rarely interacts with women).

In this latter part of Skin the filmmakers seem to want to show Johansson’s character finding out what being human means. The problem is: Johansson’s character knows, from the start of the film how to be, by all appearances, a human woman— and the filmmakers never seem curious how she learned to do so. This film isn’t big on explanation–for anything, but this omission nagged at me in a way the other missing pieces didn’t.

The guise Johansson’s character chooses for herself is one which seems like it would require some research. Like the vampire in Let The Right One In she knows inhabiting a female form will make humans less wary of her, but she also somehow knows to take on all the arbitrary and sometimes contradictory attributes that make a woman attractive in the Western contemporary movie-star/model sense: full breasts (but a small waist), full lips (but a small jaw) and large eyes (but slender eyebrows). Equally puzzling, Johansson’s character knows, from the start, how to act like a conventionally attractive woman. She puts on a bra as if she had spent her adult life doing so; she walks in heels (she even knows to run down stairs in them–sideways, so she won’t trip) without wavering or falling (except for the one time); she applies makeup so it accentuates rather than makes grotesque her eyes and lips. Teenage, femme girls spend years wobbling and stumbling in heels and using too heavy a hand with blush and eyeliner before getting the hang of any of these things, but the filmmakers seem to think these skills come naturally with a female body, the way prizes used to come in cereal boxes. Johansson’s character never says a wrong word or has an awkward moment when she flirts with the men: she doesn’t talk to them with a young teenage girl’s uncertainty, but with the easy confidence of someone who has garnered male attention for most of her years.

If we had seen Johansson’s character struggle and falter with being a convincing, normal-seeming woman earlier in the film, we could better understand–and more easily suspend our belief for–her struggle later with the trials of being in a woman’s body. She has no idea how to maneuver amid men’s various intentions toward her, like the consensual encounter she cuts short when she finds, to her shock (in one of the film’s few comic moments) just what comprises heterosexual intercourse.

Toward the end, Johansson’s character removes the mask she has been wearing throughout the film, and as she looks down on it, it blinks back at her. It’s a visually stunning moment that might have been more emotionally resonant if the filmmakers had bothered to better explore what the world–and movies–expect women to be.

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

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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.