Tag: Drama

A Compromised ‘Carol’

If only ‘Carol’ the much lauded movie from director Todd Haynes (adapted by Phyllis Nagy from Patricia Highsmith’s novel ‘The Price of Salt’) were as good as its trailer, a one minute ten second masterpiece of close-ups, pitch-perfect period detail and barely contained emotion.

CarolMaraCamera

If only Carol, the much lauded movie from director Todd Haynes (adapted by Phyllis Nagy from Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt) were as good as its trailer, a one minute ten second masterpiece of close-ups, pitch-perfect period detail and barely contained emotion. On paper Carol is a film I should worship, a love story about queer women, based on a novel by a queer woman and adapted into a screenplay by one. And its director is one of the few people who came out of the new queer cinema of the early ’90s who still works regularly in film.

Haynes’ previous theatrical release I’m Not There was a miraculous rendering of everything I otherwise hate — bio-pics about musicians, Bob Dylan fandom, films set in the Old West and disjointed narratives — into a transcendent viewing experience. Not everything in I’m Not There made sense (no one but Haynes himself seemed to know what was going on in the scenes with the young Black child traveling with a guitar) but when the weird-ass chances Haynes took worked, like casting Cate Blanchett as the Dylan of the mid-1960s, or having a band (made up of current indie musicians) in the Old West section of the film sing “Going To Acapulco” to a corpse propped up on a stage with them, the results were as thrilling as they were original.

I should have known Carol wasn’t for me when, before I had a chance to see the film (which took a month to make its way to my art-house friendly city — and is still in relatively few theaters compared to macho Oscar-bait The Revenant) some well-known, straight women critics who waxed rhapsodic about Carol compared the relationship between young department store clerk Therese (Rooney Mara) and older, married, wealthy housewife Carol (Cate Blanchett) with that of a mother and daughter — or a mentor and her protégé. Even if these critics meant well, their mindset de-sexes queer women (something straight people have a history of doing). What love affairs between women most resemble are… other love affairs. And what any couple needs, if the audience is going to root for them in a film, is chemistry, not vague bonding around sisterhood and lipstick.

As iconic-looking Blanchett is in early ’50s hair and costumes (by Sandy Powell) her performance is so over-the-top she takes us completely out of the movie. Evident even in stills, the way she looks at Mara is how an alien from outer space ready to tear off its human disguise to swallow her whole might, a gaze not dissimilar from the one Blanchett, playing the stepmother, directed toward Cinderella.

CarolFurBlur

In much of Carol Blanchett’s performance she seems to be telegraphing the audience, “I’m acting! In real life, I’m not queer at all,” continuing an ignoble tradition that includes two other talented, blonde movie stars: William Hurt in Kiss of the Spider Woman (which won him an Oscar) and Philip Seymour Hoffman in Flawless. By 2006, when Hoffman won his Oscar for playing Truman Capote without histrionics, I thought the old method of playing queer characters had gone out of style for good. In brief moments of Carol we see Blanchett reach under the broad surface of the character. Toward the end, in her speech to a room full of lawyers about custody of her daughter she touches us, and early on, when Therese is talking to Carol on a hallway phone and tries to confirm if she’s reading Carol’s interest in her correctly we see Carol’s vulnerability. Therese says, “I wanna ask you things, but I’m… I’m not sure that you want that…,” and Carol pleads in desperation, “Ask me, things… Please…” But through most of this film Blanchett doesn’t mine the depth of feeling the film’s story demands.

Mara’s performance is much more natural, but because she’s playing against Blanchett’s hamminess, her wide-open stare registers more like that of a schoolgirl who hasn’t done her homework gaping at her teacher than the obsessive protagonist of Highsmith’s novel who, on impulse, sends beautiful, rich, Carol a Christmas card after briefly helping her in the store. In the film, Therese instead sends Carol back the gloves she left on the store counter, making the main character (and no matter how the producers campaigned for the film’s acting award nominations, Therese is the main character of both the novel and the movie) more timid and dull. The film’s Therese is also stripped of ambition: the character in the novel, an aspiring set designer, is often networking with people who might be in the position to employ her or ones who can introduce her to someone who can — and never misses a chance to take on a set-designing job, not even to be with Carol. The Therese in the film takes photos and has to be pushed and prodded (by a man, even though in the 1950s, most men were not exactly eager to encourage women in their careers as artists) to have any faith in her own talent. We also aren’t privy to her thoughts as we are in the novel, so we don’t know that even as she remains quiet she’s taking everything in and making shrewd (and sometimes cruel) observations.

Sarah Paulson as Carol’s ex, Abby, is a relief in no small part because Paulson, an out performer who has never seemed fully at ease in previous big screen roles, knows she doesn’t have to overplay to convey the bond between the women. When Abby and Carol talk, Paulson’s smartypants smile and skeptical eyes show the two have the ease of people who have long since forgiven each other’s transgressions. Paulson also reminded me that my favorite part of Far From Heaven, Haynes’ other ’50s set, Douglas-Sirk-inspired drama, was Patricia Clarkson as another wisecracking best friend.

Haynes has in Carol (with art direction by Jesse Rosenthal and cinematography by Edward Lachman) perfected the look of a Sirk melodrama while modernizing it, with the more “realistic” hyper-pigmented reds and mint-greens of 1950s-era color photos along with the fuzzy resolution of snapshots taken at that time. But Haynes seems not to have learned the first lesson from Sirk’s films (or from two other gay male directors influenced by Sirk: Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Pedro Almodóvar): tastefulness is the opposite of passion. When Blanchett and Mara have one of countless drinks together, without any part of their bodies “accidentally” touching the other’s, when the film avoids any on-camera exchange of confidences (which do happen in the novel and the screenplay: a blossoming romance between women doesn’t need both touch and talk, but it does need one or the other) the audience doesn’t experience tension, just boredom.

CarolBlanchettDinner

When the sex scene finally happens, it plays like something from adolescent fanfiction, after a makeover, when the two women stare steadily and silently at each other in a mirror. We then get tasteful toplessness and (finally) some touching (strictly above the waist) from the two leads. In the novel, which includes neither the makeover nor the mirror, the two women have sex for the first time after they each say, “I love you.” And in roundabout, metaphorical, 1950s parlance Highsmith makes clear the sex is a revelation for Therese. The one redeeming part of the scene in the film is Carol looking at Therese’s naked body and almost smiling as she says, ” I never looked like that…”

What puzzles me most about Carol is: with so many queer people at its helm why does the film come off as enervated and somewhat clueless about queer issues (like Carol seeming to be sincere when she says she likes her therapist, when psychotherapy of the 1950s was invariably conversion therapy)? Carol pales in comparison to two other films centered around queer love stories which didn’t have openly queer people heading their productions: Brokeback Mountain and Blue Is The Warmest Color. Brokeback, which famously shows heated love scenes between its main characters, takes place at least partly post-Stonewall, but is a wrenching portrait of the closet’s effect on the couple. In Carol, even as its bittersweet “happy” ending is kept intact, the film doesn’t acknowledge that if the two women stay together, even in New York, even in “progressive” circles they’ll have to lie to nearly everyone (except other queer people) about their relationship for at least the next two decades (even Highsmith waited many years before she let the novel be republished under her own name, not the original pseudonym). And that secrecy took its toll on queer people, even those in happy relationships, as Edie Windsor (whose relationship with her eventual spouse started in New York over ten years after the one in the film) has stated in interviews. As bad as the naked sex scenes in Blue Is the Warmest Color were, that film did get right the thrill of queer first love (and lust), the sacrifices the main character made for it, and how few straight people she bothered to come out to, even in France, even in 2013.

The makers of Carol know a lot more about queer life than the director and co-writer of Blue does, but I think those behind Carol set out to make a film about queer characters that straight people can congratulate themselves for enjoying. The sex scenes will neither skeeve them out nor turn them on. The homophobia of the time (like that of more recent times — and of now) is softened, present only in characters we don’t feel invested in, so straight viewers are free to ooh and aah over the costumes, cinematography and art direction, guilt-free.

Of course plenty of queer people seem to enjoy this film too: the critics’ group I’m part of gave every award it could to Carol (after the Oscars snub of the film in “Best Picture” and “Best Director” categories). As someone who came of age in the ’80s and ’90s when many of us dutifully went to see every highly imperfect queer film released, I understand the tendency to want to support queer representation in movies. But I much prefer Haynes when he lets his freak flag fly, as in I’m Not There and when he speaks directly and knowingly to a queer audience as in Velvet Goldmine (which should be essential viewing for everyone mourning David Bowie right now). Maybe the lesson here is that Haynes’ features should always be period films about musicians. A glance at IMDb shows that his next film is an as-yet-untitled project about the life of Peggy Lee.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjHU34cpD1U” iv_load_policy=”3″]

___________________________________________________

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together and a staff writer at Bitch Flicks. Last week at The Toast, she interviewed Deniz Gamze Ergüven, the writer-director of the Oscar nominee ‘Mustang’ which everyone should see.

‘Suffragette’: The More Things Change the More They Stay the Same

In fact, it made me even more upset at the fact that one hundred years later, we may have the vote but women are still facing inequality, sexual harassment, unequal pay, and poor conditions in the workplace. … I wasn’t expecting to be as taken aback by just how little has changed since the period ‘Suffragette’ is set. …It made me realize we need [feminism] more than ever.

Suffragette movie

This guest post is written by Scarlett Harris. | Spoilers ahead.

I went to see Suffragette at the culmination of a day spent feeling utterly depressed at the state of women in the workplace and the world at large. As you can imagine, Suffragette did nothing to assuage my feelings. In fact, it made me even more upset at the fact that one hundred years later, we may have the vote but women are still facing inequality, sexual harassment, unequal pay, and poor conditions in the workplace.

The day in question saw my Twitter timeline full of defenses of cricketer Chris Gayle, who hit on a female reporter as she was trying to interview him after a game; Jamie Briggs, the minister for cities and built environments, who sexually harassed a young female staffer on an international trip; Peter Dutton, the minister for immigration and border protection, who called reporter Samantha Maiden, who stood up for the staffer in question, a “mad fucking witch” in a text message clearly not meant for her but somehow sent to her anyway (and this is the guy in charge of Australia’s borders!); and the two men who murdered their families as “good guys” suffering from mental health problems (an important issue in its own right but not at the expense of the safety of women and children).

So, heading into Suffragette I shrunk into myself as a form of protection from all the microaggressions I’d faced that day but I raged internally at the depictions of workplace inequality, sexual harassment and assault and the general placement of women as second-class citizens and, behold, this piece was born.

Suffragette movie

Workplace Rights.
In the laundry that protagonist Maud (Carey Mulligan), her husband Sonny (Ben Whishaw) and friend and fellow suffragette Violet (Anne-Marie Duff) work, women toil away over steam and hot fumes. Maud herself was born at the laundry to a mother who was killed when a vat tipped on her only four years later. When Maud gets home, she washes her family’s own laundry and fixes her husband and son dinner. She endures sexual harassment and, it is implied, survived rape by the manager of the laundry, Mr. Taylor (Geoff Bell). All of this is viewed as inconvenient at best, a workplace hazard at worst.

After a day spent reading about the above-mentioned modern day examples of workplace harassment I couldn’t help but see the similarities. While the Gayle and Dutton incidents came to light because they happened in full view of the media, Briggs’ sexual harassment accusations are the exception to the rule: how many other countless examples of sexual harassment and assault have occurred but are swept under the carpet in an effort not to jeopardize positions or be looked on unfavorably by colleagues?

You Don’t Get a Cookie.
When Maud reveals these labor conditions (her standing up to her rapist happens later) in a votes for women hearing, the men on the board seem genuinely shocked. Prominent British politician and statesman David Lloyd George (Adrian Schiller) seems sympathetic to Maud’s plight however her testimony doesn’t convince him of her right to vote.

Maud’s husband, too, seems initially merely inconvenienced by her newfound interest in suffrage but, as the movie progresses, Maud’s feminism gets stronger and she spends more time in prison for demonstrating, he kicks her out of the house and adopts their son out to a rich family. He says he can’t be expected to work, run a household and look after their son — what Maud’s been doing this whole time — in a stark example of male privilege.

These are some of Suffragette’s more sympathetic male characters compared to anti-suffrage policeman Inspector Steed (Brendan Gleeson) and Mr. Taylor but, like men today who express astonishment when women reveal they’ve been harassed and assaulted and the belief that women do, in fact, deserve basic human rights, they don’t get a cookie for it.

Reproductive Rights.
As attacks on reproductive rights threaten to return to pre-Roe V. Wade levels, which is to say non-existent, in the U.S. and pap tests and STI blood tests will come at a price in Australia, they are mirrored in Suffragette. Abused spouse Violet steps down from the suffrage movement when she discovers she’s pregnant again, citing exhaustion at not being able to “take care of the [kids] I’ve got.” Maud is force fed in prison in a harrowingly triggering scene echoing rape, mandatory trans-vaginal ultrasounds for women seeking to terminate their pregnancies, forced sterilization and any manner of other violations against women’s bodies. She asks Steed, when he expresses disdain over her disobedience of the law, “Why should I obey a law I had no hand in making?”

Black Lives Matter.
Much has been made about Suffragette’s whitewashing and rightfully so. There were literally no women of color in the film, despite the real-life involvement of Indian suffragettes, for example. And, in perhaps the most offensive portion of the film that was parlayed into a tone-deaf marketing campaign, suffrage leader Emmeline Pankhurst (Meryl Streep in a two-minute cameo) says in her famous speech:

“We do not want to be law breakers; we want to be law makers. Be militant, each of you in your own way. Those of you who can break windows, break them. Those of you who can further attack the sacred idol of property, do so. We have been left with no alternative but to defy this government. If we must go to prison to obtain the vote let it be the windows of government not the bodies of women which shall be broken.”

First of all, slavery is not a choice. Secondly, the above-mentioned use of this 1913 speech for a Time Out cover featuring the all-white cast illustrates just how far white feminism has to go in the inclusion of women of color.

Three queer Black women formed the #BlackLivesMatter movement after the death of Trayvon Martin at the hands of police as “a response to the anti-Black racism that permeates our society.” Meanwhile, white ranchers are allowed to demonstrate “peacefully” — albeit armed — on seized government land (which let’s not forget was originally stolen from Indigenous peoples hundreds of years ago). Much like the attempts to bar people of color from demonstrating peacefully without militarized police forces (see above tweet) threatening them or mowing them down, Suffragette excludes women of color from its depiction of the suffrage movement by denying them a voice. But on the other hand, consider Pankhurst’s words above and some of the film’s early scenes in which demonstrators are attacked by policemen in the streets: Suffragette could also be viewed as an allegory for racist police brutality.

I’m Not a Feminist, But…
Upon Maud’s first arrest, she insists she’s “not a suffragette.” Where have we heard that before? Modern women’s baffling insistence that they, too, are not feminists seems to be in the news every other day. The online campaigns about why women don’t need feminism and celebrities being asked whether they are feminists have dominated the discussion in recent years reminded me of Maud’s colleagues at the laundry turning their backs on her when she’s outed for demonstrating and when she finally takes her revenge on her abuser. Internalized misogyny is as hard at work today as it was 100 years ago.

White women who do call themselves feminists, such as Emma Watson and Lena Dunham, are seldom met with much push-back, whereas Black women’s (those who do identify with a movement that has often ignored the contributions of feminists who are women of color and not with another movement such as “womanist”) feminism comes with a whole host of caveats. Despite Beyoncé’s spectacular embrace of feminism at the MTV Video Music Awards flanked by an emblazoned erection of the word, she’s still asked to qualify it. Black feminists such as Janet Mock, Roxane Gay and Amandla Stenberg are increasingly having their voices heard by the mainstream media while Kate Winslet refuses to talk about “vulgar” pay inequities in Hollywood and Patricia Arquette urges other marginalized groups to support women — and, let’s be clear here, she was talking about white women in the über privileged world of Hollywood. That’s not to say that Jennifer Lawrence, a fellow champion of closing the pay gap, doesn’t deserve to get paid as much as Bradley Cooper, but it partially ignores the struggles of women like Viola Davis and men like John Boyega to get paid as much as their white counterparts. And to intersect the two, all we have to do is look at this week’s Oscar nominations which resulted in no actors of color being recognized in the four main acting categories. Oscar noms = $$.

I wasn’t expecting to be as taken aback by just how little has changed since the period Suffragette is set. Sure, sexism and misogyny may not be as violent and blatant and we’re more likely to get up in arms when it is, but just because a few high profile women enjoy privileges far removed from what Maud and Violet in Suffragette and countless other women around the world face, doesn’t mean that we don’t need feminism. In fact, it made me realize we need it more than ever.

Screen Shot 2015-12-03 at 10.22.25 AM

Scarlett Harris is an Australian writer and blogger at The Scarlett Woman, where she muses about femin- and other -isms. You can follow her on Twitter here.

Let’s All Calm Down for a Minute About ‘The Hateful Eight’: Analyzing the Leading Lady of a Modern Western

In an action movie, violence is due to befall all characters. Is violence against any female character inherently woman-hating, inherently misogynist? … It’s possible that subconscious sexism makes people quick to see her as a victim, and then criticism of the trope of women as victims may be getting in the way of seeing the agency and complexity of a character like Daisy Domergue.

The Hateful Eight

This guest post is written by Sophie Besl.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape, sexual assault and graphic violence] | Spoilers ahead.

When the only female character in Quentin Tarantino’s new film, The Hateful Eight, appeared on promotional materials, and eventually onscreen, with a black eye and chained to a male character, the hair on everyone’s backs was already up. A Tarantino fan and writer I admire went so far as to post on Facebook, “…What I saw tonight in 70 millimeter was a woman-hating piece of trash.”

In this analysis, I ask viewers and readers to take a new perspective. In an action movie, violence is due to befall all characters. Is violence against any female character inherently woman-hating, inherently misogynist?

The Hateful Eight Is a Western.
This male-centric genre, like many others, is guilty of shackling a limited number of women into stereotypical roles such as: a) emotional, submissive frontier wives completely at the mercy of men’s decisions, b) hyper-sexualized sex workers, or c) exoticized depictions of Native and Indigenous women. Of course, there are still standout roles for women (Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles, Katharine Ross in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the role of Mattie in True Grit), but these roles are difficult to etch out. I would like to submit that Daisy Domergue, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, is one of these strong roles. Tarantino gets as close as he can to putting a woman in a leading role (which he has shown is his preference in Jackie Brown, Kill Bill, Death Proof, and Inglourious Basterds).

The primary message of The Hateful Eight is about the Civil War and what it meant for America and the men, white and Black, who fought it. Thus, the main characters fought in the war. While a small number of women disguised themselves as men and fought, the overwhelming majority of veterans were men. So since the main characters had to be veterans, these were male, but Tarantino made the “next available” lead character female. Domergue is essentially the third lead, the highest level available that is historically accurate for a woman, given Tarantino’s primary goal exploring race relations (her Golden Globe nomination is for supporting actor, but it’s okay, those decisions are not a science!).

The Hateful Eight

Play the Movie in Your Mind with a Male Actor in the Role.
In my opinion, one test of whether a character is feminist or not is if you ask, “Does this character’s gender play any part in the character’s actions, fate, or treatment?” If the answer is “no” or “not really, not essentially,” then that is a very feminist character. Insert a male actor in place of Jennifer Jason Leigh. Think about it — the plot would play out exactly the same. Not only that, but almost no lines of dialogue would need to be changed. “This woman” would be replaced with “this man,” “sister” with “brother,” etc. The only outlier is the dreaded “b” word, but Tarantino has plenty of colorful insults for all manner of characters.

Domergue Is Never Viewed in a Sexual or Objectifying Way.
This is rooted one of my favorite things about Tarantino as a filmmaker. In a world riddled with rape, the last thing we need is gratuitous, titillating visuals, filmed from a male point of view, of sexual violence against women.¹ The closest Tarantino ever comes to this is with the Bride² — but the sexual violence is implied not shown³ — and Death Proof, where the revenge equally or far outweighs the initial gender-based homicide. On the flip side, Tarantino has no problem showing rape and sexual assault against men onscreen, such as in Pulp Fiction and The Hateful Eight.

Shosanna in Inglourious Basterds is one of the best examples of Tarantino writing for women as if they do not live in danger of sexual violence from men. This suspension of disbelief onscreen is refreshing and empowering for viewers, such as me as a woman who does somewhat live in daily fear of sexual violence. Shosanna repeatedly, assertively turns down advances from Zoller quite at her own peril throughout the entire film. Her fearlessness is astounding, and respected. Here are the ways that Domergue is written in similarly feminist ways:

[Spoilers follow.]
• She is walked into a log cabin in the middle-of-nowhere Wyoming to spend the night with 9 or 10 men, one of whom she is chained to, and it never seems to the viewer that she might be in danger, of sexual violence or even significant other harm.
• There is no implication that her captor has raped or sexually assaulted her.
• Her looks are never commented upon, neither that she is pretty nor looking haggard. The comment-ability of her appearance intensifies over time based on the chaos that occurs inside the cabin, yet no one comments. This is impossibly refreshing and almost unheard of for women in film. Even the looks of the strongest women characters in other Westerns are usually remarked upon or up for discussion among the men.
• Domergue is not a love interest of any of the characters.*
• Men are willing to risk their lives to save Domergue due to familial or gang ties, not out of love, affection, or sexually driven motives.*
• The camera never rests on her in an objectifying or gazing way that is different than the other characters or unique to her as a woman.

*Note: Major Marquis Warren does imply this in one line of dialogue, but it is quickly dismissed. Compared to most films where men only act out of love for women and sex is a major motivator, this is still a major step in terms of feminist film.

The Hateful Eight

Okay Yes, We’ll Talk about the Violence.
I’m no fool — I’m not going to pretend that it’s all butterflies and rainbows for Domergue in The Hateful Eight. As Leigh told The Daily Beast, she took a photo of herself and sent it to her mom when her only makeup was a black eye and a few scratches and bruises and said, “This is as good as it’s going to get. This is the beauty shot from the movie. … Then it just got more and more insane as it goes on.”

My initial question was: Is any violence against a woman inherently misogynist? Leigh said in an interview:

“I think it’s actually more of a sexist response [to say that]… I think it’s easy to have a sexist response. ‘Hitting a woman? Sexist.’ It’s a natural go-to place for people. But [Tarantino]’s actually taking the sexism out of it.”

Another argument about the violence is that Domergue has almost full agency over it. She has been arrested by an officer of the court, and he has made it clear what the consequences are for what actions. She purposely violates his rules, knowing what the consequences will be, and chooses the risks of receiving an elbow to the face for getting in some fantastic jabs at Kurt Russell’s character John Ruth, such as that his intelligence may have suffered from taking a high dive into a low well.

Also, while many would argue that Domergue gets the worst of the violence, mostly marked by her lack of wiping blood off of her face, it should be noted that part of the lead protagonist Major Warren’s genitals are separated from his body by a gunshot wound, an injury he viscerally suffers from until the end of the movie, so it’s not like Tarantino spares his lead male actors.

The Hateful Eight

She Kills Her Captor.
While: a) being chained to Ruth, b) Ruth is poisoned and thus vomiting on her, and c) Ruth is still managing to beat her up, Domergue manages to grab his gun and blow him away. Any one of the “hateful eight” could have easily killed Ruth plot-wise, but Tarantino gives this murder to Domergue, who deserves it and has truly earned it. (Note: She also deftly and matter-of-factly saws his arm — which she’s still handcuffed to — off of his corpse to facilitate her mobility later that night.)

The Fates of Four Men Rest on Her in the End.
Speaking of her being a total badass, after Jody’s murder, she goes from being the #2 to the #1 leader of one of the most dangerous gangs in the land. In the final act of the film, she just about single-handedly negotiates the lives (and deaths) of the two protagonists and her two remaining gang members. She is unarmed, and yet commands full power over the four men’s actions and decisions until the very last moment. Her brilliance —“She’s very, very smart,” Leigh tells The Daily Beast — causes her to outshine all of the other characters and almost “win.” “…She’s a leader. And she’s tough. And she’s hateful and a survivor and scrappy,” says Leigh in an interview with Variety, all traits that give Domergue power in the frenetic, desperate situation in which all the characters find themselves.

The Death Scene.
This is arguably the most problematic scene of all. Let’s present what I’m up against before I present my counterpoint. Matt Zoller Seitz at RogerEbert.com writes:

“The film’s relentless and often comical violence against Daisy never feels truly earned. Saying, ‘Well, they’re all outlaws, including her, and that’s just how women were treated back then’ feels like an awfully thin defense when you hear audiences whooping it up each time Russell punches Leigh in the face, and it dissipates during the final scene, which lingers on Daisy’s death with near-pornographic fascination. In a movie filled with selfish, deceptive and murderous characters, hers is the only demise that is not just observed, but celebrated.”

Well this is where I’m going to go way out on a limb and repeat what Leigh herself (the woman who had to sit around in 30 degrees in the fake blood and brains, and pretend to be hung) said, “I think it’s actually more of a sexist response [to say that].” Why is watching a villain get what’s coming to her “near-pornographic fascination?” There’s nothing sexual about the act of killing her, or its filming/gaze. Also, after her death, her body is sometimes held in the same shot with the two protagonists, as if her character still lives on in a way.

• Did this reviewer feel the same way when Tarantino’s three protagonists were kicking the living bejesus out of Russell’s character in Death Proof?
• What about when Elle is sitting over Bud’s snake-poison-filled body in Kill Bill Vol. 2 and calmly reading to him? If anything, that is more tortuous and sick, plus the camera is looking up at Elle (murderer) and down at Bud (victim). These camera angles are reversed in Domergue’s murder, with an upward shot on her and downward at the murderers.
• If I recall correctly, the audience also “whooped it up” each time significant discomfort befell almost any of the characters: O.B. getting really cold, Ruth and O.B. throwing up from poison, Mannix getting shot and passing out, etc.
• If I recall correctly, the audience pretty clearly celebrated or enjoyed the shorter-in-duration but also gristly murders of Bob and Jody. This violence was also slated as comical.
• Maybe I was the only sick person in the theater, but I also found it pretty enjoyable and hilarious that Tim Roth’s character didn’t die right away, and he was crawling around in the background while a bunch of other stuff was going on, with no one paying him any mind.
• May I take a moment to reiterate the violence to Major Warren’s genitals? This was extremely comical to the audience — why is his violence earned but hers is not?
• There are only a few murders in the film that are decidedly not celebrated and those are of three women (and two men, one of whom is an older man in his 70s).

The Hateful Eight

I see the temptation to look at what happens to Daisy Domergue on-screen and denounce, “You sexist, you’re destroying a woman, how misogynist!” I even did it for moments myself. However, I encourage everyone to move past this knee-jerk reaction. It’s possible that subconscious sexism makes people quick to see her as a victim, and then criticism of the trope of women as victims may be getting in the way of seeing the agency and complexity of a character like Domergue. I’d rather we not take this as an opportunity to put down Tarantino, but as an opportunity to celebrate Leigh’s nuanced and powerful performance – she even took time to learn to play guitar to perform a song in the film — as film critics are doing this awards season.

I’ll close with a quote from Tarantino:

“Violence is hanging over every one of those characters like a cloak of night. So I’m not going to go, ‘OK, that’s the case for seven of the characters, but because one is a woman, I have to treat her differently.’ I’m not going to do that.”

Notes:

[1] See my view on the only acceptable treatment of sexual violence in film in “I’ll Make You Feel Like You’ve Never Felt Before”: Jennifer’s Power in I Spit on Your Grave

[2] See a thoughtful exploration of the Bride’s rape revenge in Revenge Is a Dish Best Served… Not at All?. I agree with Rodriguez’s interpretation that Buck is “at the bottom of the barrel” as the first to die, but I disagree that Tarantino sees this is a means of empowerment that enables her to find liberation. I see it as another brutalization by Bill (indirectly) that further justifies her revenge. The Bride’s revenge against Bill feels very “tit for tat” in the way historically all-male cast movies are written, yet by working in the rape and the losing of her baby, he makes them more true to the realities of what a female character would face (again without showing sexual violence). Writing a female character with completely equal respect as a male character, yet with these realistic modifications based on gender, is the most feminist thing I can imagine.

[3] This argument of “implied not shown” was used to justify a reason why Mad Max: Fury Road is a feminist film.

See also: Revenge of the Pussycats: An Ode to Tarantino and His Women, True Romance or How Alabama Whitman Started the Fall of Damsels in Distress, Unlikable Women Week: The Roundup.

Sophie Besl is an exploitation film fanatic with a day job in nonprofit marketing. She has a Bachelor’s from Harvard and lives in Boston with three small dogs. She tweets at @rockyc5.

Moonfaze Feminist Film Festival: Her Story Illuminated

Writer/Director/Actress and Moonfaze Film Festival Founder Premstar Santana has taken on the challenge of not waiting for Hollywood to feature feminist cinema. She is creating the platform that elevates feminist viewpoints from marginalized voices that rarely get the opportunity to shine.

 

Moonfaze Banner

The future is female

On December 5, 2015 Writer/Director/Actress and all-around badass Premstar Santana created a phenomenal short film festival centering powerful feminist narratives. Presented inside of LA Mother, (a non-profit organization and multi-purpose creative space that is dedicated to nurturing women in business and the arts), Premstar carved out a safe space for diverse voices from around the globe to flourish. By creating this platform in conjunction with LA Mother, Premstar has taken on the challenge of not waiting for Hollywood to feature feminist cinema. She is creating the platform that elevates  feminist viewpoints from marginalized voices that rarely get the opportunity to shine.

Premstar Santana at the Festival Opening

The one day evening event started off with a mixer where patrons could nibble on fresh popped popcorn, enjoy some libations and partake of tasty bites provided by a Korean BBQ food truck. Premstar introduced herself the moment I walked in and thanked me for supporting her event. I was immediately struck by her warmth and her sincere appreciation for every person who turned out. And there were a lot of people there. When it was time for the short film showcase to begin, every seat was filled, with an overflow audience sitting on the staircase and standing in the back. A packed house.

Premstar and Sarah

The opening film, Luna — written, directed by, and starring Premstar herself — immediately set the tone for the rest of the festival. Premstar’s film let me know that she was not bullshitting about her clarion call to elevate the game. Luna, is an experimental film that introduces us to a woman performing a sacred ceremony inside a circle of burning candles in a dark room. There is a blood offering, an incantation that opens another dimension, and the woman finds herself surrounded by nature and facing a mirror image of herself who simply says “Hello, I’ve been waiting for you…are you ready?” Our protagonist then responds by asking “For What?” Her question is answered by her second self, “To dance.” The film ends with a gorgeous shot of Premstar standing on a sunlit beach watching ocean waves, the full moon high above her head. The piece resonated with me emotionally, and I had the rare moment of instantly recognizing a fellow sister/creator. After watching her other work in the festival (the sci-fi tinged Dos Lunas) I understood Premstar to be a thoughtful and gifted artist. Her work is deeply personal, poetic, and at times haunting. She creates compelling cinema, so I felt confident that I would enjoy the films presented. I felt like I was at a cinema tapas bar, nibbling on all the various films she was spreading before us at LA Mother.

Luna

The films themselves ranged from comedy, horror, experimental, dramatic thrillers, documentaries and even a Bollywood drenched piece that had a shocking ending that delighted the receptive audience. One of the crowd favorites was a 6-minute French comedy film called Papa Dans Maman (Dad in Mum) written and directed by Fabrice Bracq. In the film two young sisters hear their mother and father having sex. They try to decide if they should go inside the bedroom to investigate when they hear an unexpected arrival downstairs. The humor worked because of the expressive faces of the young actresses, and the tension that was created by the one sister peeking through the bedroom keyhole and telling the other what she sees.

Papa Dans Maman

Another standout piece was the aforementioned 12-minute U.S. Bollywood-Punk Musical, The Pink Sorrys, written by Ben Stoddard and directed by Anam Syed. A deadly girl gang seeks retribution after one of their own is sexually assaulted. The graphic ending was pretty bloody and followed the rape/revenge trope popular in ’70s exploitation cinema. I enjoyed the unique mash-up to tell an unpleasant story about violence against women’s bodies. And come on — Bollywood. Punk. Musical. You got me.

The Pink Sorrys

Afghan rapper Sonita Alizadeh directed and stars in a music video called Brides for Sale where she spits her own rap lyrics advocating for the end of forced marriages globally. In Diyu (written and directed by Christine Yuan), a teenaged girl is caught between heaven and hell in a strangely hypnotic experimental film that won the Best Director Award at the end of the evening.

brides

diyu

The festival found the right balance of showing some serious life-altering narratives alongside lighter fare that was equally compelling in different ways. One of my other comedy favorites was a film starring Moonfaze’s Festival Manager Sarah Hawkins. Roller Coaster (written and directed by Sarah’s father Bradley Hawkins) is a sweet tale about Emily, an aspiring actress who sets out for an audition, only to encounter obstacles that may cause her to miss her big break. The film playfully highlights the plastic-looking homogeneity of casting calls where women feel the need to look a certain way (mainly white, thin, surgically enhanced or bleached in some way). What struck me about Sarah Hawkins as an actor is that her face had that classic oldschool natural beauty that I miss. In fact, that is what struck me about most of the films in the festival. All these wonderful new faces that don’t have the bland manufactured Hollywood “look.”

Rollercoaster

At the close of the festival, awards were given in various categories for Best Screenwriting, Cinematography, Acting, Best Experimental Film, Best Documentary, and Best Director. I left the festival elated and impressed with the quality and variety of the films I watched.

A few days later, still excited about the festival, I contacted Premstar and invited her and Festival manager Sarah Hawkins to talk about Moonfaze on the Screenwriter’s Rant Room Podcast I co-host. It was important to give these feminist filmmakers another platform to talk about their work. You can listen to the podcast here.

Premstar said she conceived the idea for the festival in the summer of 2015, and less than six months later it came to fruition. Feminist filmmakers are hungry and ready to share their stories and 2016 will see another Moonfaze Film Festival. As I told Premstar and Sarah on the podcast, the work that Moonfaze has done is reminiscent of song lyrics done by the acapella singing group, Sweet Honey in the Rock. The lyrics are, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Simply put, we don’t have to wait for someone else to do this work. Fam, we got this. We really do.

Premstar Santana and all the filmmakers involved in the very first Moonfaze Film Festival are bold, unapologetic, and creating new life-giving narratives. I look forward to the 2nd Annual Festival. You should too.

For more information about the Moonfaze Film Festival and Premstar Santana, check out these websites:

premstarsantana.com

moonfaze.lamother.com

Staff Writer Lisa Bolekaja is a speculative fiction writer, screenwriter, podcaster, Sci-Fi slush reader for Apex Magazine, and a devoted cinefile. A former Film Independent Fellow and a member of the Horror Writers Association, her fiction can be found on Amazon.com.

‘The Violators’ and ‘Wildlike’: Two Films Deal with the Trauma of Child Abuse in Different Ways

[Trigger Warning: for discussion of child abuse, incest, rape, and sexual assault] To what extent are filmmakers obliged to depict scenes of rape and the sexual assault of women and girls — a pandemic-sized problem in real life — in accurate and illuminating ways?

The Violators

This is a guest post written by Holly Thicknes.

Trigger warning for discussion of child abuse, incest, rape, and sexual assault.

Wildlike and The Violators: two independent films released on festival circuits to rip-roaring acclaim. Both are debut features from Frank Hall Green and Helen Walsh respectively, and both deal with the uncomfortable subject of the sexual abuse of teenage girls. Yet the two films left me with very different impressions.

To what extent are filmmakers obliged to depict scenes of rape and the sexual assault of women and girls — a pandemic-sized problem in real life — in accurate and illuminating ways? If ever we are to believe that films can influence society for the better, surely we must look for critical self-awareness along with satisfying storytelling (where abuse is more than just a tool of the narrative that progresses the story). The guise of the art house genre has a history of being perceived as absolving films of the representational issues of rape as spectacle, as if the festival-to-independent-cinema distribution package amounts to an automatic stamp of approval (perhaps anyone seeing Gaspar Noé’s Love will take a moment to cast their minds back to the bitter experience that was his Irreversible, shown at Cannes in 2002). But explicitness — or as some might view it, uncut realism — in representing the sexual exploitation of women in itself is problematic if it serves no purpose other than the pleasure of spectacle. And so it is a delicate balance which filmmakers must strive to strike: an honest representation, made — crucially — for the right reasons.

Wildlike

Green’s Wildlike premiered at the Hamptons Film Festival in October 2014 and was the winner of over 40 Best Film awards at various other festivals. The film promises a scenic hike across Alaska, an unlikely friendship of substitution between a teenage girl and an older man and a tense chase by an abusive, ominously unnamed uncle. It delivers all three with invigorating authenticity: the photography and performances meld together to perfectly tow the line between documentary-inspired art house flick and melodramatic Alaskan road movie. The script and Green’s direction soar in moments of transition, where all the action is embedded in the faces of the characters (articulated with faultless performances all around, namely by Bruce Greenwood as male lead Rene) or else the gruff, ever-changing landscapes, and the contemplative essence of the story feels overwhelmingly all-encompassing. There is an endearing sweetness in the father-daughter friendship being cultivated with very little words but plenty of weighted glances. All the substance is there, evidently so, affording it its success and status as a breakthrough debut.

But for all of Wildlike‘s strengths, what I simultaneously can’t forgive it for nor realistically expect of it is the fact that the guesses feel clumsy around the depiction of the central female character’s abuse. They feel second hand, peripheral, flat.

The Violators

In blatant contrast, The Violators is uncompromisingly captured from 15-year-old female protagonist Shelly’s perspective, and centered around the effects of the sexual exploitation she suffers. It is a film lovingly cultivated by acclaimed novelist and writer/director Walsh, who turned her hand to filmmaking for the first time with the kind of surety that relevant experience for the subject at hand affords you. She reached back into her childhood, where she grew up on the periphery of Cheshire, England, on the same streets and dockland walks we see depicted in the film, and drew out a story about a community of people suffering from the cyclical nature of abuse that forever seems to renew until someone or something finds the strength to break the cycle.

Through the eyes of Shelly, played by acting revelation Lauren McQueen, we see the people of this community play a daily game of chance with the hand they have been dealt. Exploring, as the story does, violation, no one person is made to claim all the blame and no one is absolved entirely, epitomized in Shelly’s complex character role of both sensible mother figure and misled, reckless child. Walsh hints at the details of an abusive father, in jail but possibly being paroled soon, to her and her self-sufficient siblings, and the prospect of it hangs like a spectre over everything so that current moments of violence feel grounded in her damaged past. True as the film is to real life, abuse does not change the centre of gravity of anyone else’s world, but instead informs the path that particular victim takes for the worse.

This perspective is where Wildlike falls down on the representational front, making it into a paternal film about a father-and-daughter-type friendship ever blooming in the beautiful Alaskan wilderness that sidelines the protagonist’s abusive experiences. To be fair, there is nothing insensitive about Green’s portrayal of MacKenzie (Ella Purnell), whose angsty teenager status is drawn onto her face with the filmic trope that is black eyeliner, but beyond this rightfully possesses no superficial traits that simply pigeonhole her character. The scenes of abuse are deliberately not treated as spectacle, but with impressive restraint and disgust-inducing visceral sound effects that imply rather than show (a storytelling technique that Green applies with great success throughout). But the effects of the incidents are observed from the outside, in manner of a concerned father who might look on at his daughter going through her troubled teenage years with genuine concern but bafflement. We are never invited into MacKenzie’s personal space to understand her motivations, and are instead left to second guess how messed up she must be from her experiences. Consequently, when she does break her sullen silence in a burst of emotion, the dialogue feels clumsily roped together in a bid to sound spontaneous but which comes off as whiny.

Wildlike

Unsurprisingly it is much easier to sympathise and identify with Rene, the recently widowed middle-aged male hiker that MacKenzie latches onto, firstly at the whiff of a meal ticket but then being tentatively drawn towards a kind and understanding father figure. Bruce Greenwood is a dream in the role, who we are introduced to in a moment when his defenses are down, in the rue of privacy whilst lying in bed, reminiscing about his late wife, without knowing that MacKenzie is actually hiding under his bed having snuck into his hotel room to nap for the night during her journey to Seattle. His male vulnerability in the wake of the manipulative uncle figure from whom MacKenzie is running is an instant catch: he is afforded an intimate look that we never get to see of her. A few silhouetted crying scenes do not cut it by any stretch.

Green has never claimed, as far as I know, to have made a film directly commenting on the lasting effects of sexual abuse on an underage girl in the hope of enlightening his audience. The meeting point of the two films is their examination of the resilience of vulnerable people in the face of attack. Wildlike does this beautifully — arguably more successfully than The Violators. But having seen both films at film festivals this year with directorial introductions, the contrast between representational intention is blatantly stark. Should films ever sideline child molestation? Should the primary victim’s account ever feel viewed from a distance? And should the issue even ever be used in a film by a male writer/director, one with undeniable storytelling skill, which gets the film into a bunch of festivals with its indie look, but uses the sensitive issue to invoke drama? It’s for everyone to individually make up their minds, but for my part I’m left with the uncomfortable feeling of having watched a film about teenage molestation and incest told superficially from the perspective of the female victim but in reality from the perspective of a man.

Holly Thicknes is a freelance film critic and editor of female-focused film blog Girls On Film. She lives and works in London, studies printmaking, and helps organise themed short film events for Shorts On Tap. She is particularly interested in the ways in which films help people carve out spaces for themselves in an increasingly lonely society. You can follow Girls On Film on Twitter at @girlsonfilmLDN.

‘Sicario’: The Movie That Dares to Ask if the CIA Really Cares About Mexican Families

An unholy mash-up of ‘No Country for Old Men’ and ‘Silence of the Lambs,’ ‘Sicario’ defames the city of Juarez, the FBI, and the CIA without telling us anything we don’t already know.

Written by Katherine Murray.

An unholy mash-up of No Country for Old Men and Silence of the Lambs, Sicario defames the city of Juarez, the FBI, and the CIA without telling us anything we don’t already know.

S_D040_10409.NEF

When I asked for Emily Blunt to be a detective, this is not what I had in mind. In Sicario, she plays FBI agent Kate Macer, a kidnapping specialist who gets pulled into a joint task force to investigate the operations of a Mexican drug cartel in America. From the moment she accepts the assignment, Kate is kept in the dark about most of her team’s objectives and shocked by the behaviour of the CIA agents she’s working with. Motivated by the hope that she can make a real difference and help to improve life for people both north and south of the border, she stays on, even as the situation looks more and more grim. Also on the task force is the mysterious Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro), who always has Kate’s back in a crisis, but refuses to answer questions about who he works for or what his role is. There are twists and turns as the story goes on, but the upshot is that Kate is disillusioned when All is Revealed.

Sicario is technically well-made, and I would never try to argue that it isn’t. It’s shot with both frankness and care, the score is deliciously creepy, and it manages to make a shoot-out in stopped traffic just as tense and exciting as a car chase. Emily Blunt and Benicio Del Toro are every bit as awesome as you’d want them to be, and Josh Brolin turns in a good performance as the task force leader, Matt Graver. That said, the story’s kind of annoying and, in order to explain why it’s annoying, I have to tell you how it ends. Which means I spoil all the twists and turns for you from this point on.

Here’s the deal: the CIA’s ultimate goal is to help the Columbians take over the drug trade in Mexico, with the understanding that they will stop the violence from spilling over to the US. Kate doesn’t find that out until the movie’s final act, when it’s too late for her to stop them. She also finds out that the CIA needs an FBI agent with them as a technicality, so that they have the legal authority to operate within US borders – meaning, the entire reason she was invited to join the task force was because she was motivated to get revenge on the drug cartel after they killed two of her guys, but ignorant about who the major players were and what standard operating procedure was in Narcotics. They purposely kept her in the dark because they want her to sign a piece of paper saying that she observed their operation and it was by the book.

Alejandro was once a prosecutor in Mexico, until a drug lord killed his whole family. Now he’s working for the Columbians and the CIA because they’ve given him the chance to assassinate the guy who murdered his wife and daughter. In the film’s final act, the CIA smuggles Alejandro back into Mexico and gives him intel to help him track, kidnap and murder various members of the cartel, including one man we’ve been set up to like – a Mexican police officer who’s moving drugs for the cartel, probably so that they don’t kill him. When Alejandro finally makes his way to the drug lord’s home, he murders the guy’s whole family in front of him, completing his revenge.

In the movie’s final scenes, Alejandro returns to the USA and confronts Kate, who’s refused to sign the paperwork after learning his true mission. He threatens to kill her and make it look like a suicide if she doesn’t sign, and, when she can see that he’s serious, she agrees. As Alejandro walks away, Kate points her gun at him but can’t make herself pull the trigger. The last thing we see is Mexican families watching their children play soccer while gunshots are fired in the distance.

SICARIO Day 16

I will say something good about the plot of Sicario, and it’s this: the movie manages to have a lot of characters tell lies while still presenting the audience with a story that makes sense from everyone’s perspective. That’s not easy to do. It also takes advantage of our expectations to trick us in a fairly clever way – we’re so used to seeing characters get drafted into super special teams that they’re not qualified to be on that we don’t even question why Kate was chosen for the task force, even though we’re told several times that she doesn’t have the knowledge or experience to be there. There are definitely a lot of well-executed elements at play here – but there were still some things that bugged me as I was watching.

To start with, Kate Mercer is a worse version of Clarice Starling. The comparison with Silence of the Lambs is pretty hard to miss – Clarice was also a naive FBI agent, brought onto a special project because her lack of guile and lack of knowledge made her the perfect candidate. And she also developed a strange friendship with a murderer whom she later couldn’t bring herself to kill. The difference is that Clarice was the hero of Silence of the Lambs – the entire story is about how she overcomes her inexperience and finds the courage and determination to track down a serial killer, proving to herself that she’s become powerful enough to protect others. Kate just gets tricked by some people. Her main purpose in the story is to witness how great Alejandro is.

Even though most of Sicario is shown to us through Kate’s perspective, and she’s the character the audience is most invited to identify with, this is really Alejandro’s story – and it’s not so different from any other contemporary action movie. He’s a brooding, dark hero with a troubled past who’s become a hardened killer, and he looks really cool doing it. One of the most telling things is that the movie suddenly ditches Kate once it gets more exciting to watch Alejandro kill people. We follow him for quite a long time before returning to Kate, and even then, he “wins” that exchange in the same way he’s won every other exchange he’s involved in. He never messes anything up, he never wavers from his mission – he’s totally sure that he’s right about everything, and he always gets the upper hand, just like every other action hero ever.

The other knock against Kate as a character – besides that she’s only there to watch Alejandro be a dark, capable assassin – is that she’s ineffective in everything she does. She tries to take a moral stand against the CIA but Alejandro forces her to back out of it. She tries to get the task force to follow procedure, but Graver makes her feel stupid for doing it and she, again, backs off. The worst part is a sequence where she tries to hook up with a friend of a friend only to discover that that guy’s working for the Mexican cartel and only there to find out what she knows. The way she finds out is the stupidest part of the movie – I’ll spare you the details – but, once she finds out who he is, he overpowers her and she’s ultimately saved by Alejandro, who reveals that he was following her the whole time because they used her as bait to flush this guy out. Then, she thanks him for saving her life.

S_D18_05049.NEF

The movie is also kinder to Alejandro when he does something evil than it is to members of the drug cartel. The film opens with a scene where Kate’s team accidentally discovers a house full of the cartel’s victims, and we get lingering shots of their corpses, all with plastic bags over their heads. When the task force goes to Juarez, we also get lingering shots of mutilated bodies hung up on an overpass, and dumped on the street by the cartel. But, when Alejandro kills Fausto Alarcón’s family, we don’t see the bullets enter their bodies. When he tortures an informant secretly transported across the border, all we see is a grate on the floor.

The movie acts like it’s a big surprise that the CIA doesn’t care about anyone outside America, but, no matter what your feelings are about that in real life, it’s obvious to anyone who’s seen a film before that that has to be where this is going. The more interesting question is how Alejandro feels about Mexico, after everything that’s happened to him, but the film doesn’t interrogate that very much.

It’s also interesting that the two focal characters in this movie are a woman and a Latino man, but the movie doesn’t make very much of that, either. There’s a weird dynamic where Kate keeps getting shut down every time she tries to assert herself, and where Graver tries to bully her into keeping quiet – and there are moments of that that feel realistic in an uncomfortably gendered way, though it isn’t explored very deeply. Just like it would have been nice to hear more about what Alejandro thinks of Mexico, it would have been nice to look at the awkward gender dynamic a little more closely, too.

The only character that really doesn’t land is Kate’s partner from the FBI, Reggie. Because race is so important to this story, it bears mentioning that Reggie’s black, and that, if Kate is bad at accomplishing things, he’s even worse than she is. Again, it’s interesting that the dynamic is one where a white man keeps information from Kate and behaves dismissively toward her, and then Kate keeps information from Reggie and behaves dismissively toward him, but I’m not sure it’s happening on purpose, or that it’s there to offer any kind of commentary. The actual result, though, is that Reggie exists to give Kate someone to explain things to or withhold things from. He doesn’t contribute anything else except advice that she doesn’t listen to. There’s even a scene where they go have beers and he spends the whole time talking about her, and trying to give her advice about her love life. Who is Reggie other than being Kate’s tag-along? We’ll never know.

Taken all together, Sicario is a pretty standard action movie wrapped in a thin layer of social commentary on the drug war and US-Mexico relations. Once you brush away a few contemplative shots and a few scenes where characters wring their hands over moral ambiguity, this is straight-forwardly a story about a hitman who is awesome at killing people – a beast that you admire from afar. The story is told from the perspective of a woman who knew him and, because she was ignorant about what was going on at the time, that makes his story more suspenseful.

Sicario is part of that awkward genre of action movie that wants us to enjoy watching someone indiscriminately kill people, but feels obligated to point out that it’s wrong to indiscriminately kill people – or, if it’s not wrong, it’s complicated – it’s a grey area – it’s a sad, hard truth of the world we live in – look at him shoot that guy through another guy!

I’m still waiting for a better Emily Blunt-led detective movie than this.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV (both real and made up) on her blog.

‘Equals’ Is an Interesting If Not Especially New Portrait of Mental Illness

Drake Doremus’ dystopian science fiction movie, ‘Equals,’ presents a pretty good metaphor for mental illness – just not a very challenging one.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Drake Doremus’ dystopian science fiction movie, Equals, presents a pretty good metaphor for mental illness – just not a very challenging one.

Kristen Stewart _ PLANET_250815_equals4

Equals, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival this year before coming to TIFF, is set in a future society where people have been genetically engineered not to have emotions. It’s strongly implied that this is the basis for the false utopia the characters live in, where they all wear the same clothes, and live in modular apartments, solving puzzles in the evenings, like so many rational Vulcans. It’s an interesting idea – I, for one, would have liked to hear the characters explain what the purpose of human life was, and why they bothered showing up for jobs, if they didn’t feel any way about anything – but the movie isn’t interested in how this civilization works. Instead, it’s just set up as vaguely bad and communist, in a way that borrows from Nineteen Eighty-Four and other works that came before it, without exhibiting the same interest in social critique.

Instead, the focus of Equals is on personal, idiosyncratic experiences of not fitting in, or being labelled deviant, ill, and outcast because you don’t feel the right way.

The action kicks off when the main character, Silas (played by Nicholas Hoult), develops a rare condition known as SOS. His genetic programming fails and his emotions switch back on, leading him to have a panic attack in his apartment. Trusting the system, he turns himself over to the medical authorities and learns that the prognosis isn’t good. There is no cure for SOS and, while medication can slow the condition’s progression, sufferers eventually become so unstable that they have to be quarantined inside an ominous facility known as the DEN. Living conditions in the DEN are so deplorable that most patients kill themselves within days of arriving and, in fact, they’re encouraged to do so, because the horror of living with emotions is more terrible than death.

Silas, bummed out by this diagnosis but trying not to be, lest he get sent to the DEN, begins to suspect that one of his coworkers, Nia (Kristen Stewart, in one of her best performances yet) is also suffering from SOS, but trying to hide it. The two strike up a friendship that turns into a romance as they bask in the relief of having someone else to talk to about what they’re feeling.

Unfortunately, physical contact of any kind is strictly prohibited in this randomly (and somewhat senselessly) dystopian society – for reasons that, again, I would have been interested to hear about – and, as soon as their fingertips brush, Silas and Nia are on the path to being discovered, with predictably tragic results.

 equals

Equals has amazing sound design and a handful of beautiful shots, but it’s not winning any points for originality. The setting is sketched out in pretty vague terms, and the plot doesn’t offer many surprises. If you’re feeling churlish, you can spend all 101 minutes asking why questions that don’t have any answers. Equals isn’t really interested in its own setting except in so far as it establishes the concept “People living here are suspicious of feelings.” And the reason it wants to establish that concept is because the story is really a metaphor for mental illness, designed to tell us that we are too quick to medicate and suppress people whose feelings aren’t normal.

The story in Equals is structured to cover as many contemporary attitudes toward mental illness as possible, and to explore the way that different characters relate to SOS. Nia, distrustful of the system and scared of ending up in the DEN, never tells anyone what’s she’s experiencing and deals with it herself. It takes all her energy, every day, just to act normal; to not let anyone see that she’s different. On the other hand, Silas trust the system and ends up a with a medical record that follows him wherever he goes, counting down the time until he winds up in an institution. Arguably, things are easier for him because he can take medication to suppress his feelings, but he goes back and forth about whether it’s worth it to do that.

Part way through the movie, he joins a support group for other people who have SOS, where each person has a different opinion about how to see the condition and how to live with it. Over the course of the film he goes on a journey where he starts out waiting for a cure and later comes to believe that SOS is a natural part of who he is, and that the real problem is the way everyone else is reacting.

The questions that Silas struggles with are really important and really integral to the lives of people with long-term mental health conditions – especially ones that affect personality development and aren’t going to go away. Is this me or a disease? What does it mean that I’m different from everyone else – am I worse, am I better, am I equally good this way? If someone could cure me tomorrow, would I want to take the cure? Who would I be, if I did?

The metaphor works really, really well. What’s more disappointing is that the movie doesn’t seem to have an interesting perspective on the answers to those questions. Instead of challenging us, it takes the easy way out by setting up a situation where Silas and Nia are clearly correct in their beliefs while everyone else is just… well, crazy. It’s much more like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest than Benny & Joon – Doremus and scriptwriter Nathan Parker make it easy for us to sympathize with Silas and Nia to the point that a lot of the complexities are lost. Of course it’s better to live in a world where people feel something rather than nothing. Of course people should be able to talk about their feelings with each other. Of course it’s good to fall in love with someone. There are never any negative sides to SOS except that The Man is against you.

This Right Side, Wrong Side, Fight-The-Power-For-Your-Right-to-Be-In-Love stuff not only makes the story less challenging – it also makes it less interesting. The story never swerves away from predictable plot developments and, like a train conductor calling out the stops before you arrive, Equals mechanically foreshadows each and every one, suggests the most obvious possible outcome, and then delivers that outcome on schedule. I’d make a joke about Chekov’s cure for SOS and the convenient six-hour lag time before it goes active, but then I’d be telling you how the movie ends just as blatantly as the director does.

Look – there are things to like about Equals. Kristen Stewart’s good in it, the editing is very well thought-out and emotionally evocative, the sound is really good, and, hey – the metaphor is really good, too. But I wish that the metaphor were in service of a message I haven’t heard before.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

On Breathing, Not Breathing, and Forms of Abuse That We Don’t Have the Words to Express

‘Breathe,’ the second feature-length film from French actor and director Mélanie Laurent, offers an unusually nuanced portrait of abusive relationships – specifically through the lens of a toxic friendship between two teenage girls.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Breathe, the second feature-length film from French actor and director Mélanie Laurent, offers an unusually nuanced portrait of abusive relationships – specifically through the lens of a toxic friendship between two teenage girls.

breathe

Based on a YA novel of the same name, Breathe (also known by its French title, Respire) follows an average, decently popular girl named Charlie as she is befriended and then betrayed by the exciting new girl at her school, Sarah. Sarah at first seems to be the perfect companion – her attention makes Charlie feel special, and they become close friends very quickly. As time goes on, though, and Sarah gets bored, her easy-going always-affable mask starts to slip, revealing an angry, demanding, hypercritical face underneath. Charlie, shocked by these changes, scared and uncomfortable, tries to figure out what she did wrong, why Sarah is acting this way, and what she can do to repair their relationship. When her efforts fail, Sarah gets more and more hostile, until their relationship reaches a jarring conclusion.

What makes Breathe so fascinating to watch is that it gets the nuances of abusive relationships right. Sarah honestly believes herself to be the victim in this friendship, and her confidence and sense of entitlement are enough to make Charlie question her own judgement. It isn’t that Sarah’s cold and calculating – she’s not the smooth-talking criminal mastermind that sociopaths are often portrayed to be – she’s just so self-absorbed that whether or not she hurts someone else isn’t a blip on her radar. She gets closer to Charlie whenever she wants something, and callously disregards her feelings again once she has it.

In the film’s most notable sub-plot, Charlie’s mother is facing a similar situation with her estranged husband. Outside observers keep telling her he’s just an asshole, but she argues that he’s never hit her, so she can forgive him for all the emotional abuse. Charlie finds herself acting out the same scenario with Sarah – forgiving her, even once Sarah’s made it clear that she isn’t a friend, trying to explain why Sarah is this way – feeling pity and compassion for her, because of her terrible home life – trying to be the bigger person and move on. In both cases, it’s clear to the audience that these relationships should end, but the question Breathe holds out to us is “Why don’t they?” Why are Charlie and her mother so unwilling to cut these ties; why don’t they just walk away? Why don’t we have the right words to talk about abuse when it doesn’t involve physical violence?

breathe3_thumb

The performances from Joséphine Japy and Lou De Laâge as Charlie and Sarah are what make the movie. Breathe is, for the most part, about subtle forms of emotional abuse – about how the way you say something carries a message; the way Sarah teaches Charlie not to have boundaries by turning a few degrees cooler every time she encounters one; the way she uses a condescending tone to say things that aren’t true. I wouldn’t go so far as to call the movie understated, but it’s patient and careful in the work it’s trying to do, and so are its actors. Even though the story moves forward quite slowly, we’re drawn in by the characters – we want to understand what’s going on between them almost just as much as Charlie does.

Laurent’s similarly patient direction creates an effectively dark mood, like storm clouds gathering on the horizon – something that’s also captured in the international trailer. It’s not accurate to say that this is a world you want to live inside, as you’re watching, but it’s a world that’s interesting enough that you’ll want to sit with it and watch events play out.

One of the issues the film grapples with well is what constitutes bad behaviour – at what point you can accuse someone of having wronged you – and its subtlety and ambiguity plays into that. Often, our standard for whether someone has done something wrong lies in whether they’ve done something they didn’t have the legal right to do, but so much of human interaction is subjective that it isn’t (and can’t be) a crime to be mean to someone. It would be very hard for Charlie to objectively demonstrate that Sarah’s behaviour is harmful – that all the little things Sarah does have damaged her in some way – but we can see very plainly, watching this friendship play out, that Sarah is slowly destroying Charlie’s entire life. We can see very plainly that she’s doing something wrong, though it may be hard to say what it is.

There’s also a sense in which, watching this film as an adult, you want to say, “OK, she’s not your friend. Move on,” but that would be missing the point. Breathe is about exploring relational dynamics that we don’t have a framework for talking about – it’s about following the characters into a murky area full of confused and conflicted emotions, and watching how that confusion works against Charlie to stop her from just dumping Sarah and walking away. If I’m honest, there was certainly a time in my life when I also believed – as Charlie seems to believe – that someone had to do something objectively wrong in order for me to decide we weren’t friends. It couldn’t just be because I felt bad when we were together.

Breathe, like many YA stories, is a bit like watching someone wrestle with life problems I’ve already solved, but it’s also an important attempt to articulate those problems in an understandable way – to bring them out into the open and give us a new lens to see them through, and a new touchstone that we can use to discuss them.

If you want to feel uncomfortable in a good way and sink inside this insightful, carefully-constructed film, Breathe opens in New York on Friday, Sept. 11, and in Los Angeles on Sept. 18.

 

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV (both real and made up) on her blog.

 

 

Murder Spouses and Field Kabuki: The Female Gaze in NBC’s ‘Hannibal’

The show treats the bodies of living women with the same respect that it treats those of dead ones.

1

This guest post by Lisa Anderson appears as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.

In discussing the female gaze in media, there’s one television show worth considering that may come as a surprise: NBC’s Hannibal. This plucky little drama has toiled away in bad time slots for three seasons now, winning critical accolades and devoted followers that never translated into ratings. In a landscape littered with crime procedurals that exploit women, Hannibal stands out, and not just for its searing visuals or plot twists. There are three ways that the “gaze” in Hannibal is feminine: the way the show depicts women, the way it depicts men, and the way it depicts sex.

You only need start with the pilot to see that Hannibal is a different sort of show. Not only does it cast two characters who were men in the original novels by Thomas Harris as women – Freddy (Freddie) Lounds and Alan (Alana) Bloom, to be specific – but it gives beefed-up rolls to three characters who weren’t central to the novels’ plots. Those are Jack Crawford’s wife Phyllis, forensic investigator Beverly Katz, and Abigail Hobbes, the daughter of serial killer Garrett Jacob Hobbs. Yet another female character, Hannibal Lecter’s psychiatrist Bedelia DuMaurier, is created from whole cloth. Showrunner Bryan Fuller has been quoted as saying he balanced the cast this way in part because writing a show with only men would have been boring.

2

As remarkable as the living women in the cast, however, is the way that the show treats dead women, right from the start. Much ink has been spilled about how many law enforcement procedurals fetishize the torture and suffering of women, or depict female murder victims in a titillating way. By contrast, in the opening moments of Hannibal, the protagonist, Will Graham, invites his students (and the viewers) to empathize with a dying murder victim, not with her killer–in spite of his own unfortunate gift for doing the opposite. As he is drawn into the FBI’s investigations of Hobbs’s murders, the first victim is found tucked respectfully into bed, fully clothed. The second crime scene he visits turns out to be one of Hannibal Lecter’s infamous murder tableaus, and while the dead woman there is naked –impaled on antlers – her body is angled in such a way her gender isn’t obvious and the image is fit for network TV.

Hannibal continues its gender-neutral approach to serial murder throughout its run. As many men are murdered as women (if not more), and whenever corpses are found without clothes on, they are shot such a way that they register as human rather than male or female. (The victims of the Muralist in Season 2 are perhaps the best example of this.) Even when a bare breast is shown straight on (such as with one critical character death in Season 2), it goes by quickly and is soft-focused and the nipple is not shown. Most importantly, the murders on Hannibal aren’t driven by misogyny or some twisted sexual motivation. This is not reflective of real of serial killers at all, but the show is more interesting for it. The one exception is Frances Dolarhyde, who comes on the scene in the back half of Season 3, and whose sexual pathology is impossible to get around. Even there, though, his female victims aren’t depicted in a titillating way.

1

Surely just having lots of good female characters and not depicting crime in a creepy way doesn’t qualify a show has having the female gaze, though, right?   No, and in the case of Hannibal, there’s more to it than that. The show makes the most of the attractive male actors in its cast (and their avid fans), and also centers female pleasure in its sex scenes without exploiting the actresses.

The first (and very unsettling) instance of the female gaze that I noticed in Hannibal centers around the above-mentioned Mr. Graham, played by the amazing Hugh Dancy. Early in Season 1, Graham uses his talent for empathy to imagine himself in the place of a mental hospital inmate played by Eddie Izzard. As he mentally reconstructs a murder committed in the hospital by Izzard’s character, we see him with his shirt unbuttoned, smirking at the victim with a mix of smolder and menace before attacking her. In that moment, Dancy seems to be channeling Eddie Izzrard’s own sex appeal. Nor was that the only time the show has made the most of Dancy’s looks: it’s not common for him to be seen shirtless, but it’s not unusual either, and fans on tumblr have gleefully traded stills of the show that feature his rear end. In terms of Will the character, there is, of course, a perennial appeal to a cute man in glasses and cold-weather clothes scritching a dog… but maybe that’s just me. (I doubt it.)

2

In terms of the female gaze in Hannibal, however, no character is more important than the titular serial killer, played by Mads Mikkelsen. Sex appeal is part of the “Person Suit” that Lecter puts on, whether it’s the dapper, cultured professional that he puts forward in seasons 1 and 2, or the leather-clad, globe-trotting bad boy that begins Season 3. It’s not to lure his victims, though; it’s to conceal his crimes from society. Nor do clothes always make the man–in Season 2, the audience is treated to a slow pan up Mikkelson’s body as he is clad in only swim trunks. (In another example of the show’s twisted vision, Lecter is actually in dire straights at that moment.) In Season 3, there is a brief-but-langorous sequence of Lecter showing off blood. He emerges from the bathroom to have a tense confrontation with another character, rendered decent only by prop placement that would make Austin Powers proud.

The staff of Hannibal make the most of both their talented and attractive lead and the fans’ appreciation for him. The show’s official tumblr literally teased fans for weeks with the prospect of their favorite cannibal in a swimsuit. Even the show’s hilarious and inimitable food stylist, Janice Poon, has described Mikkelson as the “man o’ dreams,” as she jokingly (?) lamented missing the opportunity to brush glaze onto him.

1

The show’s eye candy doesn’t end with Mikkelson and Dancy, either. Richard Armitage, of Hobbit and North and South fame, joined the cast in Season 3 as Francis Dolarhyde, the Great Red Dragon. Right from his first, dialogue-free scene, he meets the high bar for acting set by Dancy and Mikkelson. But he also got into fighting shape to play the body-building villain of Harris’ novel, and for the most part, if Dolarhyde is in private, he is either wearing only small shorts or implied to be naked.

The way Dolaryhyde is filmed for Hannibal points to the difference between how depicts men and women. His nudity is not necessarily supposed to be titillating – it’s mainly to show off his formidable form and the vivid tattoo on his back, although it certainly won’t be unappealing to those who go in for muscular men. What it is, though, is gendered. By contrast, in the pilot, we see Freddie Lounds sitting at her computer, with her back turned and no shirt on. The mood is casual (especially in comparison to Dolarhyde’s workouts), and there is no posing for a camera that shouldn’t be there, no implication that she might turn. She’s treated as a naked human, not a naked woman. The same comparison can be made between Lecter’s Season 3 shower and the baths taken Dr. DuMaurier, played by Gillian Anderson. The show treats the bodies of living women with the same respect that it treats those of dead ones.

Hannibal - Season 1

So, what happens when the men and women of Hannibal get together? Speaking strictly in terms of what’s been confirmed onscreen, we’ve had a couple of opportunities to find out. Women are seduced by (and seduce) serial killers, a lesbian character sleeps with a man to get pregnant but later finds a female partner, and there’s even a hallucinatory “five-way” that involves people hooking up with people while thinking of other people (and also… a wendigo. It’s hard to explain). If it all sounds sensational and potentially problematic, only the first part of that is true.

The sex scenes in Hannibal have a few things in common. First, neither female nor male bodies are really exploited. This could be written off as owing to network TV, the networks manage the male gaze just fine in their sex scenes most of the time. Instead, there’s a dream-like, almost art-house quality to the editing and camerawork. Second, they’re always between central, full-drawn characters, who are both acting out of their agency even if there is information that they don’t have. Third, they all have strategic or plot importance – the feelings of the characters and the dynamics between them are as important as what happens physically.

hannibal-sniff1

Most importantly, though, the sex scenes in Hannibal always imply that the woman (or women) involved are satisfied. This is usually done with a tasteful shot of an arched back or ecstatic facial expression. Remarkably, in a show where interpersonal relationships of all kinds prove to be fraught and painful, there’s never been a sex scene where it wasn’t clear that a woman was having a good time. This focus on female pleasure, as much as anything else, qualifies Hannibal as a show with a female gaze.

While Hannibal’s female gaze obviously includes the straight female gaze, it’s not strictly heteronormative. Dr. Alana Bloom, played by Caroline Dhavernas, is attracted to both Will and Hannibal, but ultimately ends up in a long-term relationship with a woman. Will and Hannibal both get involved with women, but in a Episode 10 of Season 3, Bedelia DuMaurier – perhaps the person most in Hannibal’s confidence – heavily and repeatedly implies that they’ve been sexual with each other as well. Many viewers were surprised only by the confirmation, based on the homoerotic subtext between the two from the start. While Hannibal still has never had a gay man as one of the central characters, it acknowledges both male and female bisexuality, which is unfortunately a rarity on TV today. Needless to say, this wins the show points in today’s fandom environment, with it’s overlapping interest in social justice and same-sex pairings.

hannibal-tv-series-image-hannibal-tv-series-36794557-3000-1997

I’m not saying that Hannibal is a perfect show. Feminists have taken issue with it before. I’ve agreed with some of those criticisms and either disagreed with or eventually softened my position on others. With two more episodes left in Season 3 as of this writing, I can imagine ways in which it could still disappoint me. At the end of the day, though, it explodes many of the misogynist tropes of the TV crime procedural and even the texts where it finds its roots, and makes something truly unique and darkly beautiful with the shards.

Sadly, Hannibal has been canceled by NBC, and has not yet found another financial backer. I hope that it finds one, because I’d love for Bryan Fuller to be able to complete his vision. Until then, I’ll probably revisit it on DVD, and encourage those who I think would enjoy it to check it out. I’ll also look forward to his next project: a mini-series of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. I’m sure he’ll bring his singular style to it, and hopefully continued nods to the female gaze as well.

Lisa Anderson is a social services professional and part-time writer living in Nashville Tennessee.  Her favorite things include reading, good chocolate, and feminist pop culture deconstruction.

 

 

Meryl Streep Has a Blast in ‘Ricki and the Flash’ and You Will Too

Meryl Streep is having the time of her life in ‘Ricki and the Flash’ — playing rock star, acting alongside her daughter Mamie Gummer, macking on Rick Springfield, and wearing leather pants. Her joy is infectious, and lends an overall lighthearted tone to what could be a very sad movie about estranged families.

Meryl Streep in 'Ricki and the Flash'

Written by Robin Hitchcock.

Meryl Streep is having the time of her life in Ricki and the Flash — playing rock star, acting alongside her daughter Mamie Gummer, macking on Rick Springfield, and wearing leather pants. Her joy is infectious, and lends an overall lighthearted tone to what could be a very sad movie about estranged families.

More of Meryl Streep having the time of her life

Streep plays Ricki Randazzo, formerly known as Linda Brummer back in her square suburban mother days. She left her marriage and her three children to escape intractable dissatisfaction; basically, imagine if Streep’s character in Kramer vs. Kramer went on to become frontwoman for a dive bar’s house band.

Ricki’s life is far from perfect: she struggles to get by with her cashier job at a Whole Foods stand-in, she won’t commit to her boyfriend/lead guitarist Greg, but she doesn’t seem to regret her life or her choices.

Mamie Gummer as a very depressed Julie

Then: a phone call. Her daughter Julie’s husband has abruptly left for her for another woman. She’s falling apart and “needs her mother,” a role Ricki hasn’t played in decades.

Mamie Gummer is fantastic in her role as Julie. She genuinely portrays the devastating depression of grief while milking plenty of humor from her character having absolutely zero fucks left to give. Streep and her daughter perfectly utilize their natural chemistry as Julie’s inability to play at normalcy jibes with Ricki’s counterculture vibe, both sticking out awkwardly behind the Brummer’s white picket fence.

Streep and daughter Gummer have natural chemistry

There’s a fantastically tense dinner where Ricki’s also reunited with her sons Josh (Sebastian Stan) and Adam (Nick Westrate), who are revealed by Julie to be respectively engaged and gay, though they haven’t felt moved to tell their biological mother either of those things. As strained as Julie and Ricki’s relationship is, there’s a wider chasm between Ricki and her sons.

Ricki, Julie, and Pete revisit old memories.

Even though Ricki does bond with Julie and with her ex-husband Pete (Kevin Kline), Diablo Cody’s smart script avoids excessive sentimentality; it is clear that Ricki can never make up for lost time, and that her children will always have a family she’s not entirely a part of, including their seemingly perfect stepmother Maureen (Audra McDonald). Maureen is stunningly polite and kind when she basically kicks Ricki out of her house, and subsequently reaches out to Ricki with an invite to Josh’s wedding. I really liked seeing these two women not hate each other despite their obvious conflict, and Audra McDonald is really good in her few scenes.

Audra McDonald and Kevin Kline in 'Ricki and the Flash'

At the big wedding in the end, everyone gets along despite some awkward moments, and when Ricki and the Flash crash the wedding stage (sorry, other band!) they get all the uptight rich people in their boogie shoes. (The third act felt a bit like a condensed version of director Jonathan Demme’s previous wedding movie, Rachel Getting Married.) We know it can’t really be happily ever after for this family, but there is hope for much-less-unhappily ever after.

Ricki and her children reunited on stage

A significant portion of the film’s run time is Ricki’s band rocking out, so if that’s not your jam, you might get bored (my husband sure did). But director Jonathan Demme has made some incredible concert movies (Stop Making Sense and Neil Young: Heart of Gold), and he puts those talents to use here. And giving the band significant screen time allows us to see the joy in Ricki’s life, so she’s not just some pathetic deadbeat mother who ruined her life. And also lets us see Meryl Streep sing “Bad Romance,” which is worth the price of admission.

Ricki and the Flash is not a movie of great consequence, but it is nearly perfect for what it is. Unless you’re a weirdo like my husband who hates rock ‘n’ roll, you should see it.

Robin Hitchcock is a writer based in Pittsburgh who was born in the same hospital as Meryl Streep.

‘Miss Julie’ Is My Very Worst Date, Nineteenth Century Style

It’s hard to avoid the sense that this is a story about how the rich are in decline – how complacency has made them helpless and weak enough for the poor to pull them down. It’s hard to know if we’re supposed to think that John has the right idea by using Julie as a stepping stone to move toward his goals – if we’re supposed to think she deserves what she gets because she was stupid and drunk and coming onto him. The play seems to think so – Chastain and Ullmann seem to disagree – the movie itself seems to be a confused mixture of the two viewpoints.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Now on DVD, Liv Ullmann’s adaptation of Miss Julie is a complicated, if not always very uplifting, exploration of the intersection between class and gender. Despite the best efforts of everyone involved, there’s still a thin angry thread of hatred for women and poor people vibrating under the surface. Spoilers for a story that’s over a hundred years old.

Colin Farrell and Jessica Chastain act out the boot-kissing scene in Miss Julie
I promise you, this is even more sexual in context

 

Miss Julie is a pretty straight-forward story about class differences at the turn of the nineteenth century. Based on the 1888 play of the same name, the movie follows Julie, the daughter of a wealthy Baron, as she tries to seduce her father’s Valet, John. It isn’t a romance story – Julie and John don’t love each other. In fact, they kind of hate each other, but they’re two people who happen to be in close proximity, and they’re bored. Because it’s based on a one-room play, most of the action consists of watching two people argue with each other long past the point when most of us would walk away, and the drama consists mostly of trying to figure out which of them is The Worst.

The film moves through roughly four stages, marked by unexpected changes in John’s behaviour.

In the first, and best, and most palpably uncomfortable stage. Julie sexually harasses John in a style I’d like to call 50 Shades of Awkward and Unpleasant. In Jessica Chastain’s portrayal, Julie pretends to be more confident than she is. She wants John to like her – she wants him to be infatuated with her – and, because he isn’t, she abuses her power over him by ordering him to behave as though he is. There’s a creepy and overtly sexual moment when she makes him start kissing her boots, but there are also much sadder and mundane requests. She makes him dance with her, bring her flowers, and offer her a glass of wine. And each time he grudgingly, angrily does any of these things, she smiles and thanks him as though it were his idea, trying hard to pretend that it was.

Even at this stage in the story, there’s a pitiable element to Julie’s power. It’s true that she can coerce John into doing whatever she wants him to do, but it’s also clear that she doesn’t know what she wants from him at all. John’s much more worldly, and, behind his clenched, contemptuous expression, we can tell that he sees her much more clearly than she sees herself. He’s annoyed mostly because she’s playing stupid, childish games with him – not because he feels threatened by her presence. There’s an uncomfortable vulnerability to Julie in these scenes, even on the first viewing, because we can see that she’s exposing all her weaknesses to John without knowing.

Jessica Chastain and Colin Farrell star in Miss Julie
The strangest part of the movie is the one, glittering moment when they seem to get along

 

The second stage of the story comes when John – quite suddenly, almost like he’s gotten fed-up and reached a breaking point – confesses that he’s actually in love with Julie. He has, in fact been madly, passionately in love with her for years, and that’s why it torments him so much when she teases him this way. Julie is surprised by this, but pleased, and there’s a bit of the normal Heathcliff what-will-your-family-think we-can-never-be-together stuff before they both cross a line and have sex.

In the third stage, John starts to look like a douchebag. He lies to and manipulates the kitchen maid he’s dating, and turns on Julie as soon as he has enough power to do so. Because she’s a woman, and this is 1888, she can’t ever tell anyone she had sex with a servant. Julie’s also afraid she might get pregnant, and she’s shocked that John would lie to her and pretend to be the perfect (which, in her eyes, means subservient) boyfriend just to get her into bed. John’s happy he wrecked her life and crows over the fact that she’s now just as gross as him. With the class barrier gone, he now has more power because of his gender, and he slut-shames her for, like, an hour in the middle of the movie. As Julie starts to get more panicked about what she’s done and what’s going to happen to her when everyone finds out, John tries to convince her that the only way to salvage the situation is to steal her father’s money and run away with him, so that he can start the business he’s always dreamed of. After a lot of coaxing, Julie goes along with this plan, but John changes his mind again.

In the final and shortest stage of the movie, the sun starts to rise and John sobers up and realizes that he’s been too ambitious for his own good. He doesn’t want to take the risk of running away with Julie anymore – he wants to stay in the comfortable little life he’s made for himself as the Baron’s servant. This is, after all, The Way of the World. Julie’s still in a state of total crisis, though, and he needs to stop anyone from finding out about what happened with her, so that he doesn’t lose his job. So, he convinces her to kill herself, and that’s the end.

Jessica Chastain sits at Colin Farrell's feet in Miss Julie
“The alternation of ascent and descent constitutes one of life’s main charms,” say Strindberg.

 

Miss Julie is really obviously interested in the intersection of class and gender – like, obvious to the point that Julie and John do a little bit of dream interpretation, discussing how they’re always climbing or falling in their sleep – but, because the author’s take on the situation is kind of horrible, it’s hard to tell where the movie comes down. If you don’t want to read Strindberg’s entire introduction to the play (which I am told is even more misogynist in its original version), suffice to say that John’s a special kind of Poor because he wants to be refined, but he’s still dirty and ignorant on the inside, and Julie is a man-hating half-woman who’s destroying the fabric of society because she doesn’t know her place.

It’s also not surprising that Chastain had a tough time with the idea that Julie kills herself because John tells her to. I have a tough time with that, too, and I’m not sure I buy her explanation that it’s ultimately empowering because Julie was suicidal all along and wanted John to help her self-destruct.

Director Liv Ullmann seems to want us to understand Julie not as a horrible deviant, but as a victim of her circumstance, reacting in an understandable way. The film opens with a sequence in which we watch a young Julie wander bored and alone through her father’s mansion, and implies that her interest in John is born from the same lack of playmates, coloured by a strange naiveté that comes from leading a sheltered life. (Chastain is also much older than Julie, making her awkwardness and innocence seem like a psychological outcome rather than the product of youth).

At the same time, it’s hard to avoid the sense that this is a story about how the rich are in decline – how complacency has made them helpless and weak enough for the poor to pull them down. It’s hard to know if we’re supposed to think that John has the right idea by using Julie as a stepping stone to move toward his goals – if we’re supposed to think she deserves what she gets because she was stupid and drunk and coming onto him. The play seems to think so – Chastain and Ullmann seem to disagree – the movie itself seems to be a confused mixture of the two viewpoints. This version of Miss Julie isn’t so much a reaction against or dialogue with the original as it is a faithful performance that tries to sneak in a more empathetic worldview around the sides. It’s very interesting, but I’m not sure it completely succeeds.

Aside from the movie’s weird politics, Chastain and Colin Farrell are both very interesting to watch, but it’s a long haul. I wasn’t kidding when I said it’s mostly two hours of people fighting in the kitchen. That’s something that doesn’t work as well without the visceral immediacy of a stage.

All in all, I’m not sorry I watched this, but I enjoyed the first leg of the story, which seemed to be uncomfortable on purpose, more than I enjoyed the last legs of the story, which seemed like the playwright’s ghost was giving us the finger.

 

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV (both real and made up) on her blog.

 

 

The Burden of Carrying On: The Currency of Women in Dystopian Films

I can’t keep count of the number of times the fact that women menstruate has been used as a reason to render us incapable of doing something. However, the fact women can have children (while cis-men cannot) is arguably our greatest power in a time of crisis.

It_Follows_review_-_CANNES_article_story_large

This guest post by BJ Colangelo appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.

When I was 8 years old, I was given written permission from my parents to watch Titanic on VHS at my friend’s 10th birthday party. Loaded up on birthday cake, potato chips, and as much cherry Coke as I could stomach, I sat in awe as I watched the seemingly unsinkable ship crack in half and kill approximately 1,500 people. As the string quartet played their final notes, the main antagonist of the film (Billy Zane’s Cal Hockley) grabbed a stray child claiming her to be his daughter in order to secure himself a space on a lifeboat reserved for women and children. My friend’s mother was a feminist, liberal arts school college professor and upon watching this scene uttered:

“Leave it to a man to manipulate the only system put in place where a woman’s life is actually given any sort of value.”

997TNC_Billy_Zane_019

Every day, women are made to feel worthless. Whether it’s the media bombarding us with contradictory ideas on how to be, or the fact politicians still think our rights need to be settled by a vote, women are still struggling for equal treatment in just about every aspect of existence. During the March 10 edition of Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly hosted Marc Rudov, author of Under the Clitoral Hood: How to Crank Her Engine Without Cash, Booze, or Jumper Cables, to discuss “What is the downside of having a woman become the president of the United States?” Rudov’s initial response to the question was, “You mean besides the PMS and the mood swings, right?” I can’t keep count of the number of times the fact that women menstruate has been used as a reason to render us incapable of doing something. However, the fact women can have children (while cis-men cannot) is arguably our greatest power in a time of crisis.

As seen in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later… Christopher Eccelston plays the leader of what appears to be the last of surviving civilians in Britain after the epidemic of the Rage Virus. Eccelston’s Major Henry West is a military man through and through, as are the overwhelming majority of the men surviving at his outpost. Major West sent out a radio broadcast searching for survivors to join him and his men, but once characters Hannah, Selena, and Jim arrive at the sanctuary, the true motivations for the radio broadcast become horrifyingly clear:

“Eight days ago, I found Jones with his gun in his mouth. He said he was going to kill himself because there was no future. What could I say to him? We fight off the infected or we wait until they starve to death… and then what? What do nine men do except wait to die themselves? I moved us from the blockade, and I set the radio broadcasting, and I promised them women. Because women mean a future.”

28DaysLater-Still1

While Major West’s speech (and the events that shortly follow) opens up an entirely new can of worms regarding the sexual politics of the apocalypse, it’s still a reminder that women are arguably the most important symbols of hope in dystopian landscapes.

We often think of dystopian films set in fantastical and futuristic worlds after some post-apocalyptic cause. What we see in It Follows is the wastelands of Detroit and the aftermath of economic devastation. It’s this backdrop set in a contemporary setting that blurs our vision of the forest for the trees. The value of women in this dystopian world is quantified by the supernatural curse that starts to follow these characters. This outside force makes it so that a sexual encounter is needed in order to survive. It’s blatantly said through the film that it’s easy for Jay (Maika Monroe) to pass it on, “because she’s a girl.” She even has two suitors fight over the opportunity to take on this curse, allowing her to be in the power position to have a choice in which suitor essentially lives or dies. It’s from the male perspective that women are seen as currency, as something holding the most value, and they will do anything to obtain them.

Mad Max: Fury Road enforces this practice through the lens of women fully aware of their value. The plot of the film is centrally focused on gender politics, but it never once feels heavy handed. Surprisingly, the escaped “wives” in the center are also never sexualized, even from their former captor.  The girls do discuss the villain Immortan Joe having a “favorite,” but the women are fully aware of their value. Amidst gunfire, these women use themselves as shields, understanding the War Boys’ fear of harming them. However, this fear isn’t rooted in a sexual desire, but in the desire to survive. Sexuality isn’t used as a weapon, but the women use themselves as a weapon to address the fact they are in control of any hope for the future. Immortan Joe’s desire to save the women comes not from a loss of beautiful sex slaves, but from a loss of the possibility of continuing his familial line. Men cannot continue on their own without women, and the world of Fury Road knows it. In this universe, we must work together to make a future.

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD

The unfortunate reality of the value of women in dystopian societies is that the relegation of women as currency brings out the absolute worst in humanity. They say that money is the root of all evil, and if women are now being valued as a currency, the evil is bound to leak through. In 28 Days Later… the soldiers are willing to rape the first women they see, and in It Follows, a man has chloroform at his disposal, presumably for use in case Jay were to have denied him sex. While there is power in women gaining the ultimate value in dystopian landscapes, there is also a great risk that comes along to being reverted to nothing more than currency.

 

BJ Colangelo is the woman behind the keyboard for Day of the Woman: A blog for the feminine side of fear and a contributing writer for Icons of Fright. She’s been published in books, magazines, numerous online publications, all while frantically applying for day jobs. She’s a recovering former child beauty queen and a die-hard horror fanatic. You can follow her on Twitter at @BJColangelo.