Drama – Page 3 – Bitch Flicks

Céline Sciamma’s Films (‘Girlhood,’ ‘Tomboy,’ and ‘Water Lilies’) Capture the Complexities of Adolescence

French director and screenwriter Céline Sciamma of ‘Water Lilies,’ ‘Tomboy,’ and ‘Girlhood’ has gained critical acclaim for her portrayals of adolescence and coming-of-age, particularly on themes of gender and sexuality. … This undefined, yet crucial space is an uncomfortable one and Sciamma’s films excel because they embrace the chaotic ambiguity of youthful liminality.

This guest post written by Charline Jao appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

French director and screenwriter Céline Sciamma of Water Lilies, Tomboy, and Girlhood has gained critical acclaim for her portrayals of adolescence and coming-of-age, particularly on themes of gender and sexuality. Sciamma’s movies are intimate character studies, punctuated with dancing, tiny details embedded in body language, and a serious respect for younger viewers. For all the cringe-worthy or mediocre child acting that permeates film, Sciamma has a remarkable ability to draw out nuanced and organic performances in her works, oftentimes from non-actors.

I’ve never met a single person who ascribed to the idea that high school is supposed to be the best time of your life, yet the romanticization of youth persists in so much of our media. While childhood is often seen through nostalgia goggles, the reality is that adolescence is a confusing and horrifying time, defined in many western cultures as liminal. Liminality refers to the ambiguous space in between social structures — something Britney Spears famously pinpoints in her 2001 hit “I’m Not a Girl, Net Yet a Woman.” The adolescent or teenager sits on the threshold of adulthood by sitting between child and adult, figuring out their rites of passage and space within society. This undefined, yet crucial space is an uncomfortable one and Sciamma’s films excel because they embrace the chaotic ambiguity of youthful liminality.

In Tomboy, we see a 10-year-old move into a neighborhood and introduce themselves as Mickaël (Zoé Héran) in front of their new friends. This quickly develops into a double life, as we learn their family sees them as their elder daughter Laure — a tomboy with short hair. Through interactions with the neighborhood boys and their girlfriend Lisa (Jeanne Disson), we see how children as young as six already recognize and enforce notions of gender. Girls don’t get to play soccer. Boys are strong defenders. Mickaël at 10 already understands that being a tomboy (garçon manqué in French, which means failed boy) is acceptable, but being a boy without a penis is something shameful and unspeakable. Similarly, the local boys know that when that transgression occurs, they’re within bounds to reject and attack their supposed friend.

Sciamma never shies away from the very real threats young people face. Maybe it’s a kind of discomfort with childhood curiosity of “mature” ideas (with LGBTQ+ themes being unfairly treated as more mature), but Sciamma’s films make one realize how rare this is in much of our mainstream media. Sexuality, violence, and depression are all things we want to separate from children who are pure, uncorrupted, and need to be protected. When film and television do venture into the dark side of growing up, it’s often in the form of a soapy after-school special. This not only feels dishonest, it feels like a disservice.

Children under the age of 18 years old experiment, they deal with depression, and suicide is the third-leading cause of death for that age demographic. My Life as a Zucchini, which Sciamma worked on as screenwriter, is a strong example of a film dealing with difficult issues as the film follows a group of foster children, each of whom has a differently tragic background: abuse, drug use, alcoholism, violence, etc. In Tomboy, when Mickaël’s mother (Sophie Cattani) angrily forces them into a blue dress, we’re meant to understand — in addition to misgendering them — how humiliating that is and acknowledge that childhood problems some might perceive as “bumps in the road” actually have very, very high stakes.

At the same time, the physical and non-physical violence directed towards these characters are not their defining factors. When portraying characters outside the straight, cis, or white archetype, there’s a very real danger of turning people into spectacles or tropes. Poor, marginalized, or under-portrayed individuals turn into tragedy porn meant for rich consumption, or become patronizing PSAs that unintentionally other these characters. There’s a troubling emphasis on the reactions of those around the marginalized, instead of the actual figure. When faced with trials and tribulations, Sciamma’s characters express themselves in all kinds of ways without turning gratuitous or voyeuristic. While Hollywood loves the emotional outburst that builds over several acts, we know everyone deals with grief and frustration differently. Maybe it’s the simple act of regressing and sucking one’s thumb as in Tomboy, the persistent clinking of a plate in Zucchini, or just falling silent. The attention to detail in body language, lingering stares, and looks resist the idea that there is a singular female, LGBTQ, or young rite of passage.

Girlhood is another story that could have easily gone terribly awry in the hands of a different director. Along with its critical acclaim, the film has been simultaneously praised for centering Black girls as well as criticized as “a story of black femininity being presented via a white feminist gaze.” The film follows Marieme (Karidja Touré), a Black teenager from a difficult background, as she finds a community among three other girls and discovers a new world of fights, boys, and music. Like Tomboy, we vividly see structural and physical violence: adults tell Marieme she’s a lost cause and she has an abusive family life. However, there’s always an equal amount of joy and camaraderie in in Sciamma’s films, which she often illustrates through dance. One of Girlhood‘s most memorable scenes features the group of girls in a hotel room dancing along to Rihanna’s “Diamonds.” In Tomboy, Lisa dances with Mickaël in her room. In My Life as a Zucchini, the many foster children have a dance party during a vacation in the mountains. There’s plenty more — inside jokes, sports, and snow fights — but these dramatic, musical moments assert that childhood is not all darkness. After all, a movie about children that fixates only on the tragic isn’t only unrealistic, it leaves little room for hope. There’s an element of uncertainty in Girlhood‘s ending, to which Sciamma told Indiewire, “I think I’m making movies that ask questions and that make you care for the character. I think that’s more powerful than actually knowing they’ll be alright.”

Tomboy similarly omits any definitive language regarding Mickaël — they don’t plan to live this double life in advance, it just happens. Their exact gender identity is left somewhat ambiguous because it’s possible Mickaël is still figuring things out, and they might not yet have the vocabulary for words like transgender, genderqueer, non-binary, or misgendering. While narratively it allows for a small twist, it’s notable that the first time we hear our protagonist’s name is when they introduce themselves to Lisa — and the viewer — as Mickaël. At the film’s conclusion, when they call themselves Laure, it’s unclear whether this is an act of defeated conformity or a reconciliation of the double life. Very much in line with Sciamma’s statement on Girlhood, we “can’t leave the film in the room.” Instead, “you have to take it back home with you.”

There’s valid criticism of Tomboy’s refusal to name Mickaël as a trans boy, but there’s also a strength in how the film doesn’t push them to explain or justify themselves. We don’t know where Mickaël — or Laure — will end up and it’s likely they’ll grapple with much more in the future. Tomboy explores gender-policing through child characters and refuses to tie things up neatly at the end because this greater structural violence still exists. That’s not saying that children are ever too young to express their own gender identity, only to acknowledge different types of journeys. There’s a definite anxiety that stems from how much we’ve grown to care about Mickaël, but also a certain kind of reassurance for the viewer in that open-ended finale that says it’s acceptable to be a work in progress.

Diving into the mind of a child isn’t as simple as simplifying the world. It’s no surprise that Sciamma called Pixar’s Inside Out, a complex and thoughtful mapping of a young girl’s brain, one of her favorite films of 2015. When I spoke to Sciamma about her role as screenwriter on the Oscar-nominated animated film My Life as a Zucchini, she explained that thinking like a child is not, “trying to be lighthearted about everything” but to take children seriously as characters.

“We all go through this, and then when we are adults and we are addressing children we do this, like, ‘They were innocent, shiny people,’ whereas we all know how overwhelming, troubling entering the world is and how we went through dark feelings and very strong emotions.”

The popular portrayals of adolescents as happy-go-lucky, helpless, or wise beyond their years is a puzzling pattern considering the fact that we’ve all been children before. Sure, not everyone has the same kind of childhood, but I’d like to think most people recognize that childhood is oftentimes not a squeaky-clean or logical space. Sciamma’s films open up introspection to our own childhoods, illuminating moments that we might have glossed over or sanitized in our memory.

Water Lilies, a queer love story, grapples with young female sexuality, slut-shaming, and tangled affections. Our fifteen-year-old protagonist Marie (Pauline Acquart) develops feelings for the popular Floriane (Adèle Haenel), who goes between desiring an anonymous older man to her boyfriend François to wanting Marie. Marie’s friend Anne (Louise Blachère) longs for François, who’s also inconsistent in his affections. All of their experiences, while gendered, are different and reveal there’s no singular way to explore sexuality. We see this as well in Marieme’s sexual agency in Girlhood, when she makes the decision to sleep with her boyfriend. As the characters change their minds, make mistakes, and enjoy themselves, the narrative never paints anything they do as invalid or abnormal. Unlike stories that demonize, fetishize, or mystify female sexuality, Sciamma allows her characters to just be.

Childhood is also often nonsensical or inappropriate, full of jokes that don’t make sense or are vaguely offensive in their misinformation. The dialogue in a Sciamma film acknowledges this and there’s a very natural character-driven humor that comes out of unfiltered speech. Anne in Water Lilies off-handedly mentions that she thinks arranged child-marriages are cool and characters in My Life as a Zucchini talk about sex and their absent parents in ways that aren’t “right” or proper. Allowing characters to be unfiltered opens an unmediated image of youth that feels more authentic and less like a morality tale. Furthermore, it means acknowledging young carelessness without nervously apologizing for it.

Perhaps one of the most compelling elements of Sciamma’s films is that they’re not children’s stories made for adult’s eyes. Rather, they are made to speak to both children and adults. The director never speaks down to her audience. Her most recent screenplay for My Life as a Zucchini exemplifies this through stop-motion, a medium we typically associate with children’s films. In the movie, we’re introduced to all kinds of families — ones torn apart, abandoned, or rejected.

Sciamma told me she made sure “everybody has to relate to the same thing,” meaning it wouldn’t have jokes meant for adults peppered in or bits just for children. If you’re a parent watching My Life as a Zucchini with your kid, the two of you watch the same film and hopefully have a frank and thoughtful conversation afterwards. While Sciamma isn’t the only director creating powerful representation, her movies stand as a powerful testament to what children’s films can do, especially for the underrepresented children confronting gender identity, sexuality, and other issues.

In an 1971 review for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the late critic Roger Ebert identified a lack of serious children’s movies by writing:

“Kids are not stupid. They are among the sharpest, cleverest, most eagle-eyed creatures on God’s Earth, and very little escapes their notice. […] They don’t miss a thing, and they have an instinctive contempt for shoddy and shabby work. I make this observation because nine out of ten children’s movies are stupid, witless, and display contempt for their audiences, and that’s why kids hate them. Is that all parents want from kids’ movies? That they not have anything bad in them? Shouldn’t they have something good in them — some life, imagination, fantasy, inventiveness, something to tickle the imagination? If a movie isn’t going to do your kids any good, why let them watch it? Just to kill a Saturday afternoon? That shows a subtle kind of contempt for a child’s mind, I think.”

Sciamma not only respects the fictional children in her films, she trusts younger viewers to grapple with the heavy topics she’s presenting. Children’s movies shouldn’t be “just” children’s movies — flippant, shallow, or watered down. Not to fall into cliches, but if children are our future, shouldn’t our media respect their intelligence and capacity to learn?

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Movie Makers from the Margin: Céline Sciamma

Girlhood: Observed But Not Seen

Growing Up Queer: Water Lilies and Tomboy

Charline Jao is writer based in New York City who specializes in film and geeky pop culture. You can find her work over at The Mary Sue and on Twitter @charlinejao.

Andrea Arnold’s ‘American Honey’: A Young Woman Reclaims Her Life’s Trajectory

Andrea Arnold’s films largely focus on the female experience, predominantly that of young women transitioning into adulthood. … It is here then, that Arnold’s depiction of female desire and agency warrants praise. Star acts on her own wants and needs, and seeing Jake, acknowledges her longing. She consciously rejects the current trajectory of her life, and intentionally and purposefully seeks a new one.

This guest post written by Siobhan Denton appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

Andrea Arnold’s films largely focus on the female experience, predominantly that of young women transitioning into adulthood. These women often find this experience problematic, particularly when informed or defined through their relationship with the men around them. Fish Tank’s Mia establishes a formative, abusive relationship with the much older Conor, while Cathy Earnshaw, finding herself perpetually torn between both men and social status, is driven to physical illness in Wuthering Heights. While Mia is able to leave behind her experience with Conor, and her unsupportive family, she still finds her freedom through establishing a relationship with a man. While this male character is on equal terms with Mia, and their relationship thus appears to be far healthier, she still needs him in order to remove herself from her current environment.

American Honey’s Star (Sasha Lane) is, initially, similarly propelled into action through interaction with a male character. Jake (Shia LaBeouf), part of the magazine crew selling subscriptions managed by Krystal (Riley Keough), imparts a vision of a life filled with no responsibility. For Star, whose life currently consists of digging through dumpsters to find food with two young charges, Jake’s offer is difficult to turn down. Initially, she resists, feeling some level of responsibility towards her current life, despite its futility. Quickly though, she recognizes that these children, and indeed the domesticity that she is attempting to uphold despite the harassment she receives from the children’s father, is not her concern.

It is here then, that Arnold’s depiction of female desire and agency warrants praise. Star acts on her own wants and needs, and seeing Jake, acknowledges her longing. She consciously rejects the current trajectory of her life, and intentionally and purposefully seeks a new one.

Her meeting with Jake signals the life that Star seeks. First, she witnesses him travelling on the bus filled with the various adolescent members of the magazine crew. The pair lock eyes. Jake is surrounded by his fellow crew members, while Star holds the spoils of her latest dumpster search, young children beside her. Seeing the bus turn into a supermarket, Star implores the children to join her in visiting the store. Once inside, she watches Jake dance to Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” clambering up on the checkout counter to ensure that he’s caught Star’s attention. It is this version of Jake that Star finds entrancing; she seems to revel in his vicariousness and enjoys his physicality.

Take the scene in the parking lot, in which the pair almost face off as if battling one another. The camera constantly moves, weaving and bobbing around between the two as they edge towards and away from one another, not quite ready to trust each other’s intentions yet intrigued by what one another appear to represent. For Star, Jake represents a life lived without constraints, a life in which she has power and control over her own life. For Jake, Star seemingly represents an opportunity to indulge in his own desires.

Later, after spending more time with Jake, Star discovers that in fact, despite the image that he presents, he subscribes to the American Dream in the same way that everyone else does. He becomes disappointingly conventional, and in turn, loses his hold over her. Star has witnessed and lived the drudgery of domesticity and seeks an escape from it.

Jake tries to mold Star to his desires. He wants to have her, and to be with Krystal simultaneously without consequences. In training Star, he attempts to impart his money-making ways upon her, encouraging her to lie. She watches as he profusely insists to a potential customer of his desire to attend college and the subsequent need to sell subscriptions in order to do so. Jake expects Star to act in the same way, using any anecdote regardless of its validity in order to secure a sale. Notably, in training Star, he expects, and Krystal insists (when it is noted that Star is not yet making enough money) to secure sales through lies and blurred facts. This is the way in which Jake has found success, and to him, it is the only way. In teaching Star, Jake assumes the role of experienced, intellectual educator. He instructs Star in the ways in which he has previously found success, never offering Star the opportunity to prove her own worth in her own manner.

When Star, in an attempt to prove her worth, engages with a group of older men and agrees to travel back to their home, Jake immediately questions her actions. To Jake, Star’s actions demonstrate a need to be rescued. He arrives uninvited to the wealthy abode, aggressively insisting that Star join him in leaving. Star, left to her devices, has managed to secure an impressive sale and shows that away from Jake, she is more than capable of interacting with men and maintaining her own power dynamic. Jake struggles to accept this and chastises Star for her methods. It is after this pseudo-rescue that Jake and Star first consummate their burgeoning relationship. It is as if Jake feels the need to reassert his control and power over Star, unable to recognize that she is able to enact her own wants and needs and that she’s able to survive on her own terms.

Jake constantly insists on rescuing Star, particularly from situations that are of her own intentional making. Star agrees to offer her services to an oil worker for a substantial amount of money. There is no real sense that Star feels manipulated or coerced into agreeing to this transaction, but Jake, upon discovering the situation, once again acts aggressively. First, he asserts his masculine power by attacking the oil worker, then by questioning Star’s behavior and displaying his displeasure at her actions. We later discover that Jake regularly sleeps with the girls that he helps to recruit to the magazine crew, but he appears to insist on Star’s fidelity while not displaying any such intention himself.

It is in this moment that Star recognizes that Jake’s conventional nature is prohibiting the life that she has sought for herself. The imbalance of power that has existed cannot be corrected, while Jake still insists on performative gender stereotypes. At the narrative’s close, Jake gifts Star with a turtle. Star, retreating from the group, sets the turtle free, symbolically coinciding with her decision to allow herself to follow her own desires, rather than monitor them to cater to Jake’s needs.

Siobhan Denton is a teacher and writer living in Wales, UK. She holds a BA in English and an MA in Film and Television Studies. She is especially interested in depictions of female desire and transitions from youth to adulthood. She tweets at @siobhan_denton and writes at The Blue and the Dim.

‘The Transfiguration’ Offers Insights into Vampirism and How Our Experiences Shape Us

The point of the story is that, like so many vampires, he’s been transformed against his will into a creature he can’t quite make peace with. It’s an insight into vampires – backed by what seems to be an encyclopedic knowledge of how they have been portrayed in film – but just as interestingly, and perhaps more importantly, it’s an insight into how our experiences shape us; how early the die can be cast on the type of people we grow up to be.

Written by Katherine Murray.

I have a confession to make: I am so taken with the idea of being a literal vampire that it completely escaped my notice that Michael O’Shea’s film, The Transfiguration, may not be about literal vampires.

The film, which premiered at Cannes last year and opens in limited release this month, follows Milo (Eric Ruffin), a teenager who’s even more obsessed with vampires than I am. Milo, who we learn early on has been seeing a counselor about his violent impulses, gets beat up by local gang members during the day and stalks the streets at night, cutting his victims with a knife and drinking their blood. He keeps detailed journals explaining the “rules” of vampirism as he’s learned to understand them and he never socializes with anyone except his older brother and, as the film progresses, a neighbor girl named Sophie (Chloe Levine). Sophie has a much more casual, romantic interest in vampires, preferring popular works like Twilight and True Blood over Milo’s darker, more refined tastes – Let the Right One In, a Swedish film that shares more than a couple of plot points with The Transfiguration, is his favorite.

As Milo starts to care for Sophie, he also starts to see himself through her eyes and to question some of the choices he’s made, as well as some of the rules he’s learned about vampires. He also starts to reflect on how he became a vampire in the first place, an origin story that has less to do with being bitten by a stranger and more to do with witnessing his mother’s suicide. Eventually, like the sun setting over the course of a month, a heavy existential question settles over the film: if this is what Milo’s experiences have already made him, what comes next?

The Transfiguration is a slow-moving but confident film that uses the idea of vampires in a way I haven’t seen before – which is saying something, considering how omnipresent vampires were just a few years ago. As many other critics have pointed out (to me), it’s never entirely clear whether Milo has literally become a vampire, or if he’s just a messed-up kid who kills people and drinks their blood – and it doesn’t need to be clear. The point of the story is that, like so many vampires, he’s been transformed against his will into a creature he can’t quite make peace with. It’s an insight into vampires – backed by what seems to be an encyclopedic knowledge of how they have been portrayed in film – but just as interestingly, and perhaps more importantly, it’s an insight into how our experiences shape us; how early the die can be cast on the type of people we grow up to be.

Shot “guerrilla-style” by a first-time filmmaker, it’s impressive that The Transfiguration even exists, and that O’Shea and his director of photography, Sung Rae Cho, were able to create an unconventional horror film that can stand side by side with indie and art house offerings at festivals around the world. The understated performance from the two young leads, Eric Ruffin and Chloe Levine, also helps to maintain the difficult balancing act between the real and the supernatural. That said, The Transfiguration is better at asking existential questions than it is at answering them and the film’s final act is a bit of a downer.

In that respect, it reminds me of another weird movie with a problematic ending: Sony’s 2012 sci-fi film, Looper. Although I liked Looper a lot, the movie’s resolution, and its message [spoiler] that its main character should kill himself so that he doesn’t ruin someone else’s life, rubbed me the wrong way. Like The Transfiguration, Looper is a complicated story about destiny, the role of formative experiences, and the question of whether someone who has internalized a very deep trauma and lashes out in violent ways has any possible path toward redemption. That question is not academic to some people; it’s something they struggle with in real life, and I hope they will not conclude that the answer is “Once a monster, always a monster.”

The Transfiguration is less glib about this question than Looper is, but it definitely seems to take the position that, after life has placed you on a particular path, you walk it until you die.

For me, the most interesting character in The Transfiguration is actually Milo’s taciturn brother, Lewis (Aaron Moten). What we know of him, we only know from a single scene late in the film, but he was, apparently, a part of the neighborhood gang before withdrawing for unspecified reasons. He served in the military for some period of time and saw people get blown to pieces overseas. And, in the single scene where he talks for more than five seconds, he soberly and surely tells Milo that, no matter how bad he feels for whatever he’s been doing, there are people all over the world doing something a million times worse. This is a moral philosophy that’s both true and incomplete, but it’s fascinating because it’s about how you go on living – and that’s something we only do when we haven’t given up on ourselves as being a lost cause.

By contrast, the least interesting characters are the undifferentiated clump of gang members who apparently have nothing better to do than to terrorize middle school kids. Nothing about them feels particularly real to me, and it seems like they exist only to fulfill a plot purpose and to serve as a vague reminder that young men with histories like Milo’s can grow up to be killers even without getting weird and vampiric about it.

The Transfiguration is an uneven film with an uncomfortably pessimistic ending, but it’s rescued by its insight into Vampire as monster and the way it leverages that insight to examine the human condition.

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

The Love That’s Really Real: ‘American Psycho’ as Romantic Comedy

Although primarily a horror film, ‘American Psycho’ has a satiric backbone that appropriates codes from the romantic comedy genre to expose the absurdities of our gender ideals. Director and co-writer Mary Harron’s lens skewers the qualities we find appealing in romantic comedies as terrifying.

This guest post written by Caroline Madden is an edited version of an article that originally appeared at Screenqueens. It is cross-posted with permission.

A 2006 YouTube video created a parody trailer envisioning American Psycho (2000) as romantic comedy. While the stark juxtapositions between the classic boy-meets-girl formula and a horrifying portrait of a serial murder are amusing, the sentiments between them are not so far-fetched. Although primarily a horror film, American Psycho has a satiric backbone that appropriates codes from the romantic comedy genre to expose the absurdities of our gender ideals. Director and co-writer Mary Harron’s lens skewers the qualities we find appealing in romantic comedies as terrifying.

Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) is a concoction of the romantic comedy and drama archetype of “the bad boy.” He’s Julian Kaye (Richard Gere) in American Gigolo (1980) meets Fifty Shades of Grey’s (2014) Christian (Jamie Dornan). Near identical scenes portray their fetishistic consumption of high-class material goods. They inhabit modern-architecture utopias enveloped in glass windows and filled with famous artworks. They have closets full of immaculate designer suits that they softly glide their hands over as if they were ancient relics. These characters engage in sacred manscaping rituals and rigorous exercises to construct Herculean physiques. No strand of hair out of place, no wrinkles in sight. The hetero and bi female audience (and gay and bi male audience) ogles these perfect creatures who are made all the more enticing by their inscrutable personalities. Women are consistently told to fawn over this image of the handsome, cynical bachelor who can’t be tied down.

Christian Bale particularly modeled his performance off of the (former) rom-com icon Tom Cruise. Watching American Psycho, it becomes clear how well Bale infuses Cruise’s frenetic energy and high-watt smiles. The “Show me the money!”-esque freakout in the dry cleaners scene best exemplifies his influences. But beneath that charismatic veneer, Mary Harron said Bale observed an “intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes,” which he extrapolated to account for Patrick Bateman’s alien disengagement from humanity. Furthermore, the iconic romantic Cruise character Jerry Maguire draws similar threads to Patrick. He is the “bad boy,” trading the stoicism of Christian (50 Shades of Grey) and Julian (American Gigolo) for a jackrabbit vivacity; he is the detached bachelor drowning in shallow ideals, easy flings, and over-commitment to his work.

The creator of the YouTube video, filmmaker Dan Riesser, stages Patrick as the aforementioned cynical bachelor figure in the American Psycho rom-com. We view a rapid-cut montage of all the women in his life: lovers, flings, and hook-ups. The video positions Chloë Sevigny’s character, the dowdy but doting secretary Jean, as the potential true love to change his Lothario ways. A close analysis of Patrick’s scenes with various women throughout the film reveals that these romantic comedy elements are no trick of the YouTube editor but rather clearly infused in director Harron’s construction.

Jean is the sweet, shy girl due for a makeover, a trope seen in countless romantic comedies, such as She’s All That (1999). Jean’s mousy image opposes Patrick’s cool, aloof, bad boy; he is the one that could encourage her to break out of her shell — in other words, the plot of Fifty Shades of Grey. Patrick encourages her to dress prettier, to wear skirts and heels instead of boxy pantsuits; Jean is shown dutifully following his request in the next scene. She shows clear interest in Patrick as she pitifully asks if he has something romantic planned for his dinner reservations.

Patrick eventually asks Jean out on a date and they meet at first at his apartment. We know the real undertones to Patrick’s intentions as he slyly fetches duct tape and a knife. There’s a head in the freezer next to the ice cream he offers. Patrick tries to make a joke about Ted Bundy but Jean doesn’t know who he is. Bale’s hilarious disappointed reaction is a reversion of Tom’s (Joseph Gordon Levitt) elation to find a girl who loves The Smiths in 500 Days of Summer (2009). If only Jean could love Ted Bundy as much as he did, maybe she could be the one. Patrick parrots the sweet-talk of romance films as he makes Jean feel special by asking questions about herself and telling her, “I just want to have a meaningful relationship with someone special.” Jean clearly is infatuated by this, unbeknownst that Patrick is holding a nail gun behind her head. He spares her after a message from his fiancée Evelyn (Reese Witherspoon) plays on the machine. He tells Jean that she should leave for he doesn’t know if he could control himself. Patrick is referring to his homicidal tendencies but Jean takes this as a sexual suggestion. She laments her penchant for unavailable men, she would not want to sleep with an engaged man. This exchange is a morbid doppelgänger of the double-entendres and miscommunications often found in the romantic comedy.

Romantic comedies often paint the “other woman,” who the male lead foolishly wastes his time and devotion on, as shrewd and vapid. The playboy bachelor may share some of those vapid qualities, but the female romantic lead can see the heart of gold waiting to be unearthed — rather, what Jean hopes to find in her quest to charm her indecipherable boss. Evelyn perfectly embodies the cliché of heartless fiancée in her ice-blue suits and obnoxious disregard for Patrick’s zen Walkman moments. She just doesn’t let him be himself! Patrick also wastes his time with a ridiculous fling, Courtney (Samantha Mathis), who drowns herself in pills.

Harron undercuts this satirical imagery of women with Patrick’s very real violence towards them. There is no Cinderella or Pygmalion story awaiting the sex workers at his home, no magic shopping trip to transform them into high society princesses. The serial killer is certainly not Richard Gere from Pretty Woman (1990). After a zealous threesome, Harron shows Patrick wielding a wire hanger and purveying various instruments of torture. Patrick Bateman may fit the playboy image, but he is not the handsome prince of our dreams.

Harron and co-writer Guinevere Turner employ a satiric focus on Patrick’s shallow, jaded, and interchangeable yuppie friends to critique self-aggrandizing collective masculinity. He and his three friends swap fetishistic knowledge of luxury brands and designer labels over cocktails like a gender-swapped version of Sex and the City (1999). Their subsequent discussion of a woman’s looks versus personalities is purported from classic rom-com ethos. They laugh and high-five each other after exclaiming in unison, “There are no girls with good personalities!” Craig McDermott (Josh Lucas) follows, “Listen, the only girls with good personalities who are smart or maybe funny or halfway intelligent or even talented — though God knows what the fuck that means — are ugly chicks because they have to make up for how fucking unattractive they are.” Although Harron mocks the male characters through this sardonic exchange, we cannot ignore that this comes from very real ideals avowed in the typical romantic comedy. It is eerily similar to an exchange from When Harry Met Sally (1989):

Jess: Yeah but you also said she has a good personality.
Harry: She has a good personality.
Harry: What?
Jess: When someone is not that attractive, they’re always described as having a good personality.
Harry: Look, if you would ask me, “What does she look like?” and I said, “She has a good personality.” That means she’s not attractive. But just because I happened to mention that she has a good personality, she could be either. She could be attractive with a good personality, or not attractive with a good personality.
Jess: So which one is she?
Harry: Attractive.
Jess: But not beautiful, right?

The group continues their disparaging remarks, David Van Patten (Bill Sage) says, “A good personality consists of a chick with a little, hard body who will satisfy all sexual demands without being too slutty about things and who will essentially keep her dumb fucking mouth shut.” We turn to the rom-com The Ugly Truth:

“You want a relationship; here’s how you get one: it’s called a Stairmaster. Get on it and get skinny and get some trashy lingerie while you’re at it because at the end of the day, all we’re interested in is looks. And no one falls in love with your personality at first sight. We fall in love with your tits and your ass. And we stick around because of what you’re willing to do with them. So you want to win a man over? You don’t need ten steps. You need one. And it’s called a blowjob.”

While the cynical bachelor of The Ugly Truth gets reformed, the toxic messages remain. This disturbing vision of gender relations categorizes women’s merit based purely on appearances and both shames and suppresses their independent sexual desire. Romantic comedies play on these ideals for laughs but they are inherently rooted in our societal subconscious. The men of American Psycho may be parodies, but we experience their dialogue and message on a tangible level throughout various films.

Ultimately, Mary Harron approaches the romantic comedy elements of American Psycho as Patrick Bateman approaches music. He waxes poetic about the underlying message of Huey Lewis’ “Hip to be Square” and Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All.” Seemingly saccharine self-love anthems or bopping pop grooves become a “universal message [that] crosses all boundaries and instills one with the hope that it’s not too late to better ourselves, to act kinder” and “not just about the pleasures of conformity and the importance of trends, it’s also a personal statement about the band itself.” On its surface, the romantic comedy is a confectionary salve for the mind. We crave the simple pleasures of these unrealistic fairy tales coupled with hearty laughs. Underneath, the genre often blankets the divisive and often sexist ideals of the “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” adage. Often the “bad boy” cliché of real life is an abusive and violent person, perhaps not on the level of Patrick Bateman but certainly sharing similar fearful and misogynist qualities. And a makeover should not be the defining quality that entices a man to fall for a woman. I wonder what Patrick Bateman would have to say about “Walking on Sunshine,” which he bops to in the hall. Perhaps the narrator is similar to the female figures in romantic comedies, waiting for her cynical bachelor by the mailbox and to be with her for more than a weekend. Romantic comedies teach us to look for “the love that’s really real” in all the wrong places.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Mary Harron’s American Psycho: Rogue Feminism

Caroline Madden has an MA Cinema Studies from Savannah College of Art and Design. Other writing can be found on Screenqueens, Pop Matters, and her blog Cinematic Visions. Film and Bruce Springsteen are two of her most favorite things.

Flaws Make the Woman: In Praise of ‘Love’s Mickey Dobbs

Too often, representations of women fall into clichéd binary opposites in the style of Levi-Strauss. Thus, TV shows feature the “good” woman in direct conflict with the “bad” woman, with this clash driving the narrative forward. Mickey encompasses both; she is simultaneously good and bad, selfish and giving, childish and mature. It is this complexity that ensures Mickey’s believability and development as a character. She is real and human, and thus, relatable.

This guest post is written by Siobhan Denton.

Now in its second season, Love, starring Gillian Jacobs and Paul Rust, is far more complex and developed than its detractors would have you believe. For those that have failed to truly engage with the show, the central relationship between Mickey (Jacobs) and Gus (Rust) is simply another restrictive addition to a long line of improbable relationships between a manic pixie dream girl and a less conventionally attractive “geeky” lead. While this is understandable to a casual viewer, it must be noted that to define Love as such is hugely limiting and fails to recognize the complexity that is at the heart of the series. Love’s characters, given room to breathe, are problematic and through this, are fully developed and engaging.

Quickly, it is apparent that Mickey and Gus reject the stereotypes that they initially appear to fulfill. Gus, despite presenting as a “nice guy,” is often passive aggressive and dependent. He is desperate to receive praise, and seeks it through attempting to be as amenable as possible, even when it is detrimental to his plans or aims. Gus strongly believes that he is a nice guy, and as such, should be treated accordingly. Similarly Mickey, who initially presents as a quirky, kooky, attractive woman, quickly rejects this image. She is a complicated, imperfect woman who, despite the various demands on her mental health, manages to maintain a successful career. Indeed, her ways of maintaining this career are, at times, questionable, including sleeping with her boss to ensure that she is not at risk of being fired. It’s as if Mickey cannot believe that she is successful within her role, despite the viewer witnessing her ability to multitask and appease colleagues at work, so she feels the need to ensure her success in methods that are more suited to her personal experience.

Mickey Dobbs is not an immediately likable character. Certainly she is engaging, and entertaining to watch, but her selfishness, borne out of her various addictions, often leads to narcissistic behavior. Initially seemingly motivated by self-interest, her interactions with those around her, including her work colleagues, highlights her ability to use and manipulate others. Given the room to develop without clichéd conflict or drama, the viewer soon recognizes that Mickey’s behavior is learned, and she acknowledges and recognizes it as damaging to both herself and the others around her.

In recent years, this concept of a flawed female protagonist on-screen has gained traction in television series such as How to Get Away with Murder, You’re the Worst, House of Cards, Insecure, Game of Thrones, Empire, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Nurse Jackie, Fleabag, Damages, Jessica Jones, and Orange Is the New Black. One salient example is Girls, which features a cast of difficult and often problematic characters. Each of creator Lena Dunham’s characters is uniquely flawed, but their issues are often borne out of social status, class privilege, and white privilege. Certainly these flaws are worthy of focus, and their issues range from the complex to the superficial, yet the characters often generate their own problems leading to them isolating themselves from the audience. Unlike Girls’ Hannah Horvath, Mickey knows that she needs to work on her flaws. She also recognizes, and tries to rectify, the impact that her mistakes have had on others.

Take her interactions with Bertie (Claudia O’Doherty), her roommate, whose value as a friend Mickey does not initially recognize. Hoping to see Gus after a moment of conflict, she manipulates Bertie into attending a studio tour at the studios where Gus works as an on-set tutor. She knows that Bertie will resent the manipulation, especially when she has relied on Bertie for moral support previously, yet undertakes the ruse anyway. Once confronted by Bertie, she willing admits to her machinations and has subsequently recognized the importance of Bertie’s friendship (attempting to dissect Bertie’s relationship with Randy in hopes of protecting Bertie).

Mickey, in recognizing her issues, has endeavored to ensure that she is honest with those that she cares about. Thus she is honest about her addictions, particularly with Gus, and there is a clear sense that Mickey is consistently and resolutely herself with Gus. After their confrontation in season one, both Gus and Mickey recognize that honesty is crucial in ensuring the success of their relationship. Addictions and flaws aside, both Gus and Mickey offer no pretenses in their interactions with one another, and, in being afforded time to develop (as seen in the date episode in season two) are able to demonstrate their genuine chemistry with one another. Such a representation of a relationship, in which the characters simply enjoy each other’s company, is rare. Indeed, despite the external complications, their relationship thus far (midway through season two) is fairly uncomplicated – they simply like one another.

Ultimately, Mickey Dobbs’ characterization should be praised. She is a character who is allowed to make mistakes, act selfishly, and still be likable. Her representation is grounded in reality and thus makes her relatable and eminently watchable.

Siobhan Denton is a teacher and writer living in Wales, UK. She holds a BA in English and an MA in Film and Television Studies. She is especially interested in depictions of female desire and transitions from youth to adulthood. She tweets at @siobhan_denton and writes at The Blue and the Dim.

Alienated Women: The Terror in Mica Levi’s Scores for ‘Under the Skin’ and ‘Jackie’

Jackie’s deeply emotional outbursts may stand in stark contrast to the alien’s lack of empathy, but both women share a troubling alienation from the people around them. Mica Levi’s scores make this alienation audible, the grim discomfort of her music allowing the audience to feel, even for 90 minutes, the terror of such a solitude.

This guest post written by Zoë Goodall originally appeared at Cause a Cine. It is cross-posted with permission.

When I saw the trailer for Pablo Larraín’s Jackie (2016), my first thought was, “Why do I feel so afraid?” I was unsurprised then, to discover that the woman behind the music was Mica Levi, who composed the score to Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013). After seeing Jackie, it occurred to me the two films that Levi has composed music for have more in common than it initially appears. Under the Skin is a sci-fi angle on the femme fatale, where Scarlett Johansson plays an alien who seduces and kills men in Scotland. Jackie is the Oscar-ready biopic of Jackie Kennedy, centered on a masterfully emotive performance by Natalie Portman. Yet both films feature women who are lost, distanced from others and profoundly alone. Those around them cannot understand them, and so they are alienated. It is the haunted feeling of such alienation that Levi’s scores illuminate.

Johansson’s alien in Under the Skin is of course the more literal embodiment of alienation. She blankly visits human settings such as shopping centers and nightclubs, never sure of how to arrange her face to fit in with those around her. She lacks human empathy, illustrated starkly in a scene where she leaves a baby on a beach with a tide coming in. When she experiences sex with a human man, she is so overwhelmed that she flees. Levi’s score is fittingly otherworldly, pulsing with unidentifiable noises, the viola screeching like a wounded animal. It’s utterly unlike other film scores, giving the audience no easy emotional cues. The nails-on-chalkboard discomfort it conjures makes audible the colossal distance between the alien and humanity. One cannot relax when listening to the score, instead feeling a constant sense of dread at what this unknowable creature might do next.

This constant dread, this grim unease, are present also in Levi’s Oscar-nominated score for Jackie. Jackie, in contrast to the alien, is utterly, familiarly human. Her grief and trauma over her husband’s death is the bedrock of the narrative. The audience knows how she feels, due to Portman’s highly expressive face. Jackie is also privileged, famous, and powerful. But as the narrative demonstrates how quickly Jackie loses her power, Levi’s score highlights the instability of Jackie’s world in the aftermath of her husband’s death. The score is more lush and regal than the score for Under the Skin, in part because there’s an orchestra and in part to reflect the high-class American world that Jackie inhabits. But the discomfort that Levi brought to Under the Skin is present in Jackie, too. Many times when the score begins, it sounds light, almost cheerful, before being undercut by low, ominous strings that lurk obtrusively in the background. The result is a feeling of disturbance, that something familiar and romantic has been polluted by a grim terror.

Just as Under the Skin showed how Scotland was a completely foreign world to the alien, Jackie displays how the First Lady losing her title and home throws her into a world that’s entirely unfamiliar. Visually, this is represented through particular, subtle moments: the look of shock on Jackie’s face when Lyndon B. Johnson is greeted as “Mr President” hours after JFK’s death; the camera lingering on Lady Bird Johnson picking out new White House curtains while Jackie watches, unseen. Jackie is constantly filmed on her own, without even the presence of bodyguards or servants to lessen the impression of her alienation. Her friendship with her assistant, Nancy, is shown to be of great value to her, but the film’s repeated shots of a solitary Jackie make clear that she feels cut off from everyone around her. In the film’s final minutes, a happy sequence of her playing on the beach with her children is concluded with a close-up of her grief-stricken face, and her children out of the frame. Then, she sits alone on the couch while the Life interviewer talks on the phone. Then, at the burial of JFK, she stands starkly apart from everyone else. The final shot is of her dancing at a party in JFK’s arms, placing her feelings of joy and belonging firmly in the past.

Angelica Jade Bastién writes that Jackie uses horror movie techniques to illustrate Jackie’s grief. Levi’s score is an integral part of this, the relentless, ominous strings suggesting that life has changed for Jackie in a most terrifying way. When she finally returns to the White House from Dallas, the score is fundamentally eerie, sadness undercut with grim foreboding. It’s a score suited to a dangerous expedition into unknown territory, rather than a return home. Levi’s score communicates what doesn’t need to be said through dialogue; the White House isn’t home anymore, and Jackie’s power has disappeared with her First Lady title. The terror of being cut off from a familiar world, and the subsequent alienation, are made salient in Levi’s grim, uncomfortable music.

The alien in Under the Skin has no possessions apart from her classic predator’s white van, and the outfit she chooses to resemble the common woman. Although dressed in the finest of outfits, Jackie finds herself similarly dispossessed, telling the Life reporter that the White House and her current house never belonged to her. “Nothing’s mine, not for keeps anyway,” she tells him. Separated from the home planet or the White House, both women are anchorless, adrift. Even when surrounded by revellers in metropolitan Glasgow, or watched by thousands at her husband’s funeral, the alien and Jackie remain fundamentally alone. Haunted by their inability to connect with others, to slot in to this world, they stand lost and detached. Jackie’s deeply emotional outbursts may stand in stark contrast to the alien’s lack of empathy, but both women share a troubling alienation from the people around them. Levi’s scores make this alienation audible, the grim discomfort of her music allowing the audience to feel, even for 90 minutes, the terror of such a solitude.

Zoë Goodall is currently an Honours student and Media Coordinator for an Australian not-for-profit organization. She likes feminist film analysis, dogs, and reading Batwoman comics. She lives in Melbourne, Australia.

‘The Revenant’ Should Be Left in the River to Drown

Don’t believe the hype. You have been conned. ‘The Revenant’ is a terrible film. … The second galling part of the film is its abhorrent treatment of Native peoples. It is at best mediocre, at worst condescending, and at all times unremarkable lazy recycled fodder. Almost every time Hugh has an interaction with a Native American person, they meet with disaster. … Can we see this whole movie from the Arikara tribe’s perspective? From Powaqa’s perspective? That would be an actual game changer.

This guest post written by Celey Schumer appears as part of our theme week on Unpopular Opinions.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape and sexual assault]

Don’t believe the hype. You have been conned. The Revenant is a terrible film. And what’s more insulting is that it’s not even a new version of terrible; it’s been-there-done-that tale-as-old-as-time terrible. It’s Dances with Wolves meets Kill Bill in the White Walker woods without the badass female protagonist. You know why EVERYONE who worked on The Revenant (directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu) kept saying how HARD it was to make? How the harsh conditions were frigid, demanding, and grueling? This was to distract you from the fact that there was nothing else to talk about.

This white-man-against-all-odds tale of revenge has been told so many times, even Michael Bay is probably like, “Eh, can’t we find something more original?” The whole team wanted you to think the film was groundbreaking. They wanted you entering the theatre knowing all of these outlandish background stories of wading in freezing rivers and Leonardo DiCaprio the vegetarian eating a real bison liver because those stories swirling in your mind would prevent you from thinking, “Wait, why the fuck do I even care about this guy?” And on an elitist actor note, putting yourself in danger, and disgusting your body to the brink of repulsion is not, exactly, acting. Yes, bending your circumstances and “real world” experiences and research are essential to the craft. But the craft is, at its core, living truthfully under imagined circumstances. You don’t really have sex and you don’t really murder people, but actors pretend those characters and situations all the time. I’m not sitting here and awarding you gold stars for eating real liver and then jaw-clench screaming for 2 hours.

You know why people like The Revenant? Because the cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki is gorgeous. Really. When the film focuses on the glorious and unforgiving landscape, it is a beautiful sight. Its highest calling is probably being a screensaver for a graphic designer named Theil in Portland. And I know, claiming the critic darling that finally won Leo his Oscar is terrible (who robbed an un-nominated Idris Elba, but I digress) and is certainly a thrown gauntlet. But I stand behind that gauntlet, and this is the most boring zombie movie of all time.

Why is it a zombie movie? Because Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio), aka the Land Lover, SHOULD BE DEAD. Yes, I know it’s based on real events, and to that I say, PSHAW. “Based on real events” covers a thousand half-truths. For a movie ostensibly obsessed with authenticity, the simple fact that Hugh Glass survives past minute 28 is utterly ridiculous. Here is a (not exhaustive) list of things Glass’ character has absolutely no business surviving: a full on bear attack; woodland “surgery”; being buried alive (Really? No dirt infection?); swimming in a BEAR SKIN (that MUST weigh upwards of 50lbs when wet) in a FREEZING turbulent river with a gaping neck wound; cauterizing said neck wound with gunpowder; swimming in the freezing river again (Really? No hypothermia? A tiny 3-log fire warms him and dries his bearskin? His body fights off all the infections? No blood poisoning? No missing toes?); falling with a horse into a pine-tree and then to the bottom of the pine-tree ravine; spending a sub-zero night inside the horse Tauntaun style… I could go on.

“But it’s a MOVIE!” you cry. “It’s supposed to be sensational.” Shove it. Fast and the Furious is supposed to be sensational. This sold me a bill of goods claiming realism and grit and the power of nature and honesty, and gave me instead a revenge-driven snow-zombie.

The second galling part of the film is its abhorrent treatment of Native peoples. It is at best mediocre, at worst condescending, and at all times unremarkable lazy recycled fodder. Almost every time Hugh has an interaction with a Native American person, they meet with disaster. Honestly, Chief Elk Dog (Duane Howard) and his men are the only ones operating with their own agency and justice in their quest to rescue his kidnapped daughter, Powaqa (Melaw Nakehk’o). But we hardly see them and are left to infer all of this information, until of course Hugh the White Man comes to Powaqa’s rescue. The only two even partially developed Native characters are Hugh’s son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), and the wandering gent Hikuc (Arthur Redcloud) — whose name you never learn, I had to IMDb it — with whom Hugh shares the bloody snack carcass and a rollicking night of tongue-snowflake catching.

Hawk is killed early in the film (after Hugh is not killed by the bear) because he sees the half-scalped John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) trying to smother his father. Glass sees Fitzgerald murder his son but he’s so injured that he can’t do anything (maybe he’s tied to the stretcher, hard to tell) even though he has the strength to literally drag himself from a grave a few hours later. So, revenge for his son’s death inspires Hugh’s entire life from that point forward; it’s problematic to see Native characters fridged to propel the narrative of a white man. Hikuc offers Hugh shelter, food, and a dollop of friendship before he is later found hanging from a tree. Really? The film had to kill Hikuc? Why? To prove this land is brutal? Hugh was buried alive, his son was killed by a man who escaped his own scalping, and he’s performing self-surgery with gunpowder. We get that it’s brutal.

Even lazier than the film’s treatment of Native peoples — and even less surprising, as this is supposedly a “guy’s movie” made by guys being cool guys — is its treatment of women. There are 3 women on-screen in the entire 156-minute film. Not 3 female characters. 3 women. Ever. I scanned the entire IMDb page and included the extras. Powaqa is probably the most significant female character, as Hugh rescues her after being raped by French trappers. Unfortunately, this is historically accurate as many Native women were raped by white men, yet the film still perpetuates the same old white savior shit. Powaqa does get to exact her own revenge, and then we see her later reunited with her people. Can we see this whole movie from the Arikara tribe’s perspective? From Powaqa’s perspective? That would be an actual game changer.

The second woman on-screen is Hugh’s wife (Grace Dove), credited only as “Wife of Hugh Glass” who is brutally murdered along with most of the rest of her village and people (minus Leo and Hawk), and is seen only in dream flashbacks. He never speaks of her, neither does her son, and her entire narrative purpose is pretty much to make you think Hugh is a good guy and also, in case you weren’t sure yet, the West was really fucking brutal. The last woman is simply “Crying Arikara Woman.” I’ve seen the film twice and don’t even remember her.

In the smallest of silver linings, at least the actors playing Hawk, Hikuc, Powaqa, Chief Elk Dog, Hugh’s wife, and the rest of the Arikara are actual Indigenous actors and not whitewashed roles. Really though, the only true achievement of The Revenant (besides its gorgeous cinematography) has been the awareness and activism it helped bolster. DiCaprio’s Oscar acceptance speech, and subsequent environmental activism (which he has advocated for years now but has gained more pop-culture traction because of the buzz surrounding the film) have been hugely beneficial for many causes important to Native peoples as well as our teetering climate. Stars like DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, and Shailene Woodley have protested alongside Native people and raised awareness for the Standing Rock water crisis. For my money, you can have an Oscar for that. It’s a far greater accomplishment than most things we put on-screen.

Yet, wonderful as this activism may be, it does not make a good film. Nor does it justify the problematic depiction of Native peoples on-screen. In fact, the noble aspirations of the filmmakers — which they screamed about constantly, every chance they got — make the lazy and decidedly NOT groundbreaking treatment of Native peoples even more disappointing. Why NOT develop those characters? Why not allow them their own independent storylines? Hell, why not make a movie honestly and genuinely from a Native person’s perspective? “Because this was Leo’s passion project, a vehicle to finally win his Oscar,” you’ll say. And I will respond, “Of course it was. It also sucked.”

Celey Schumer is an actress, comedian, and writer. She is embarrassingly good at Harry Potter and Friends trivia. Her degrees in physics (Middlebury College) and structural engineering (University of Washington) look very impressive while they collect dust. She was definitely not eating chocolate as she wrote this. You can follow her on Twitter @CeleySchumer.

‘Moonlight’ and the Radical Depiction of Love

It’s like Plato’s overused allegory of the cave – everything we knew about this world before was shadow and puppetry; now we’ve seen a glimpse of the real thing. ‘Moonlight’ deals with highly politicized content – race, class, sexuality, gender expression, drug use – in a disarmingly nuanced way. It parachutes into territories dominated by stories about hate and dares instead to tell us stories about love.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Moonlight is a serious, introspective, understated film from director Barry Jenkins that’s been an overwhelming hit with critics, winning numerous awards for acting, directing, writing, and Best Picture, including at the Academy Awards, Golden Globes, Independent Spirit Awards, and Screen Actors Guild Awards. It’s about a gay, Black drug dealer who lives in Miami — and it doesn’t think that any of those things are either funny or shameful.

The main selling point for Moonlight is that it’s different from other movies. Unfortunately, that also makes it hard to explain – the difference of Moonlight is something you feel while you’re watching it. It’s like Plato’s overused allegory of the cave – everything we knew about this world before was shadow and puppetry; now we’ve seen a glimpse of the real thing.

Moonlight deals with highly politicized content – race, class, sexuality, gender expression, drug use – in a disarmingly nuanced way. It parachutes into territories dominated by stories about hate and dares instead to tell us stories about love. The film checks in with its protagonist, Chiron (played by Alex R. Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes), at three different points in his life – as a child, growing up in a rough neighborhood; as a teen, struggling with his sexuality; and as an adult, seeking a sense of authenticity. Each chapter ends at a startling point and begins by defying any stereotypes we’ve come to expect.

Hilton Als’ gorgeous essay in The New Yorker unpacks the story in more detail, and offers more insight into what it means to see Black gay men depicted this way on film, but, like Als, I was struck by my own reaction to the film’s first chapter. In that story, the young Chiron makes friends with a neighborhood drug dealer (Mahershala Ali) who becomes a surrogate father to him. I spent the first two thirds of that chapter with my shoulders and stomach clenched, waiting for something awful to happen. I was waiting for the drug dealer to be a bad person. I was waiting for Chiron to be disappointed, or rejected, or hurt somehow by this relationship. I was surprised and moved when I realized I was actually seeing kindness. I was seeing a picture of men with do-rags and pistols who love.

A lot of stories about poor Black communities are stories about either pity or invulnerable hyper-masculinity. Love is a lot more humanizing than pity and a lot more vulnerable than a rap video. Love makes us real to each other – it lets us see each other as kin. There is a shocking tenderness to Moonlight that cuts across boundaries – there is a confident assertion that these are people whose stories matter; that their experiences are worth sharing; that we will feel connected to them and sit with them in their pain, and triumph, and struggle, and caring. It’s an assertion that Black lives are human lives, as rich, complex, meaningful, and worthy as any other lives we see on film. The characters aren’t offered to us as archetypes or clowns – they’re offered to us as our own.

Moonlight isn’t the first film to act like Black people are human, or like poor people are human, or like gay people are human – but it is a beautifully-made movie, with a rich emotional palette and an introspective style. One of its strengths is that, for a movie about love – that is, in many ways, essentially a romance, at its core – it doesn’t fall into the trap of being sentimental. While racism, homophobia, and poverty aren’t the topic of the film, they inform the setting and the characters’ worldview. There’s a powerful scene where Chiron’s mother (Naomie Harris), addicted to crack cocaine, screams at him, yelling words we can’t hear – words he later dreams or remembers as “Don’t look at me.” That sense of shame and self-hatred, manifested in the psychological violence she does to herself and her son, haunts every chapter of this story, but it’s allowed to exist alongside caring and hope, without either cancelling the other out.

The final two chapters of the film, in one way or another, concern Chiron’s relationship with his bisexual friend and primary love interest, Kevin (played by Jaden Piner, Jharrel Jerome, and André Holland), and the way that various pressures in his life converge to mold the way he presents himself to others. In some ways, Chiron comes full circle by growing up to be like the drug dealer who raised him – outwardly tough, physically strong, and kind.

Moonlight is about Black masculinity, and does an exquisite job of dramatizing gender performance, but it’s reductive to say it’s only about gender, sexuality, or identity. Moonlight is a movie that captures the zeitgeist of the early twenty-first century – of a generation that grew up in the 1980s and 90s; of a culture with a lot of bullshit things in it, that still has the courage to risk a vulnerability like love. It’s the kind of film that you want future generations to see, so they can understand what the world was like in the past – the kind of film you want future generations to be confused by, because so much has changed, and the kind of film you want them to connect to, because our humanity cuts across time.

Like many other festival films, Moonlight is a slow burn that requires some patience to watch. I promise you, though, that your patience will be rewarded. This movie stayed with me for weeks after I saw it, persistently tugging at my attention, making me want to watch it again. It’s different in a way you truly have to see to understand.

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

‘Logan’: On Death and Dying. And Mutants.

‘Logan’ is a real film. In fact, it’s more real than any comic book superhero movie has business being. … It is a beautifully crafted film. If you still think that comic books and their offspring are incapable of being high art, I urge you to give it a chance.

Written by Andrea Morgan.

Have you ever cared for someone close to you as they were dying, slowly, from some dread disease? I have. It’s terrifying, and terrible. The anticipated grief, the pure sadness that comes with seeing someone you love torn down piece by piece, is often superseded by guilt. Caretaking is dirty, annoying work. By the hundredth time you’ve wiped someone else’s ass, you hate it, they hate it, and you know that they know that you hate it. You resent their illness, as if it was a punishment unjustly inflicted upon you as a result of their moral failings. But you know this isn’t true, so you feel guilty.

This is some real bleak shit.

Logan is a real film. In fact, it’s more real than any comic book superhero movie has business being. It opens with a semi-dystopian Southwestern scene filled with some rather graphic (and, admittedly, satisfying) violence, but then slides effortlessly into mutated human drama as the titular character (played by Hugh Jackman) heads south of the border to an appropriately-dusty abandoned power station. There, Logan, and another mutant, Caliban (Stephen Merchant), are caring for Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), aka Professor X, who is suffering from the effects of Alzheimer’s. Logan, ill himself and looking much more his 100-plus years than in the previous X-Men films, houses Xavier inside of a toppled water tower. It’s a gorgeous and suggestive set piece, both expansive and confining, rusted and full of tiny holes backlit by the desert sun.

Hugh Jackman is excellent, but here, and throughout the film, Patrick Stewart is transcendent. His depiction of illness is absolutely authentic, as is the filial love between Logan and Xavier established through subtle tones, looks, and physical displays of vulnerability and sacrifice. That love shines brightly though the bitterness and pain. I came to the film already knowing that Stewart is one of the greats, but his performance still wrecked me like I was unprepared. More than once, I wept. During a Marvel movie.

We learn that Logan is a participant in the gig economy, working as a limo driver ferrying a stream of evermore repugnant white people to earn money to acquire pharmaceuticals. These drugs are needed to counter some of the more extreme manifestations of Xavier’s illness. During this setup, Logan encounters the film’s primary baddie, Pierce (Boyd Holbrook), who channels his best Val-Kilmer-as-Doc-Holliday — and does a damn fine job of it. Logan also meets Gabriela (Elizabeth Rodriguez), who begs Logan to take her adolescent daughter, Laura (Dafne Keen), to a safe haven in North Dakota.

Of course, Laura is not just some random girl. Xavier clocks her immediately as a mutant, which is strange, because there aren’t any mutants anymore. They’ve been hunted down and killed as part of a government-sanctioned pogrom; no new mutants have been born in years. Logan reluctantly agrees to escort Laura, but Pierce and his crew of delicious hipster cyborg mercenaries (seriously, these guys use their blood money to buy craft IPAs and beard wax) have other ideas.

There is a fight, and Laura is outed as a Little Miss Badass. This trope, where a young girl, often a waif, displays combat skills incongruent with her small size and our culture’s gendered expectations, is not new. But Keen’s take on it is truly something to behold. Unlike similar characters, say Firefly’s River Tam (Summer Glau), who round out their episodic violence with adorableness and mercy, Laura is all hard, sharp, pointy bits. The ferocity that Keen brings to the role, coupled with John Mathieson’s unflinching camera work, James Mangold’s direction, and the story’s frequent violence, give the viewer plenty of opportunities to contemplate their discomfort at seeing an adolescent girl kill.

At times, Laura seems like a spiritual pair, or maybe predecessor, to Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh. The parallels don’t stop there. Cormac McCarthy’s pitiless fatalism, and the Coen Brother’s reverence for the American West shown in No Country for Old Men (2007), clearly influenced Logan’s story and feel.

While there are several women with speaking parts, Laura is the only female character to be given much of an arc. Two older women, both mothers, are murdered by the bad guys to help establish their evil bona fides, and to perpetuate the film’s nihilistic aesthetic.

While Logan is set in 2029, the film is very much planted in the present. Things that concern us today, like rapid technological advancement (think genetic engineering, militarized drones, and driverless vehicles), and issues that consume us today, like authoritarianism, bigotry, and immigration policy, are checked. In fact, both the southern and northern borders figure largely in the story. Logan traverses a checkpoint, ominously crowded with armed Border Patrol agents, in his daily travels into Texas. Gabriela and Laura make the long journey from Mexico City to El Paso, with Gabriela receiving a painful wound while crossing the Wall. Later, Logan, Laura, and Xavier, an unconventional family to say the least, set off on a quest for a place literally called “Eden,” from where Laura and a group of young mutants of color will try to cross into Canada to escape persecution by the U.S. Government.

You are right to expect that Laura and company don’t have an uneventful road trip. People, good and bad, die, and often. As we watch the story unfold its familiar form against the backdrop of rural America, we are forced to face our own fears of regret, death, and of a future filled with cold tech and colder government.

Logan is a beautifully crafted film. If you still think that comic books and their offspring are incapable of being high art, I urge you to give it a chance.

Andrea Morgan is a Baltimorean currently living in Denver. A Bitch Flicks staff writer, they write about film and television. Andrea is a queer person of color, and their perspective stems from a life spent on the boundaries of race, class, and gender. Andrea’s writing has also appeared on The Bilerico Project and The Rainbow Hub.

Catherine Tramell in ‘Basic Instinct’ Is a Subversive Anti-Hero

The notion of Catherine as a subversive anti-hero develops when you view the film not as a story about the supposed protagonist Detective Nick Curran but as Catherine’s journey from mind games to almost domestic bliss but always returning to her basic instincts which threatens the Hollywood happy ending of established heteronormativity.

This guest post written by Alexandra West appears as part of our theme week on Unpopular Opinions.

What happens when we love something problematic? What happens when in the middle of something problematic there’s something unique, interesting, and incredibly refreshing? How do we as audience members look for the potentially progressive nuggets that drive a filmic narrative forward in new and interesting ways while also understanding that nugget can come wrapped in a basket of deplorable politics? One such case worthy of examination is Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) as a progressive anti-hero in Paul Verhoeven’s blockbuster erotic thriller Basic Instinct (1992). The notion of Catherine as a subversive anti-hero develops when you view the film not as a story about the supposed protagonist Detective Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) but as Catherine’s journey from mind games to almost domestic bliss but always returning to her basic instincts which threatens the Hollywood happy ending of established heteronormativity.

Set in San Francisco, notably one of the most queer-positive cities in North America, Basic Instinct centers on the murders of men possibly committed by Catherine, a beautiful, wealthy, murder mystery author with a degree in psychology. The murders all mirror crime scenes directly from her books and homicide detective Nick Curran becomes entangled in the crimes and obsessed with Catherine. Nick can’t decide if Catherine is behind the murders or if he’s in love with her or both.

Throughout the film, Catherine’s bisexuality is at the forefront of her character which marks her as transgressive to the hetro-male oriented police force while the other female characters in the film are also implied or explicitly coded as bisexual or lesbian. Any subtly or nuance in regards to the queer experience in a mainstream blockbuster is wiped away in favor of brash eroticism and the ultimate objectives of Nick who imposes his heteronormativity on his relationships, particularly with Catherine. Nick’s hope is that he’ll be enough for Catherine to settle down for. Catherine is framed in contradistinction to Nick’s almost girlfriend Beth (Jeanne Tripplehorn) a police therapist who plays the typical “good girl” with a maybe sinister past. Nick (and the film) can’t help but conflate both Catherine and Beth in his mind through the lens of the virgin or the whore. Ultimately, Nick’s desire to render Catherine as his own private virgin drives the film towards a mainstream conclusion.

But what of Catherine, the object and prize of the film? Through all the gross biphobia, homophobia, and misogyny of Basic Instinct, Catherine remains an enigma. Her role in the film as foil to Nick’s heteronormative dream is what’s most subversive about her as a character. Her alluring presence confounds those around her; her placement in the film is a clear nod to the femme fatale role, but Catherine occupies the role of narrative driver. The ultimate satisfaction of Basic Instinct in subsequent viewings stems from watching her manipulate the narrative and those around her, watching protagonist Nick succumb to her charms and power. Catherine continually and enjoyably plays with Nick prodding him towards his reckless ways of drinking, drugging, and indiscriminate sex. However, instead of attempting to create husband material out of Nick, Catherine utilizes him for her own purposes of her new book. Her means to an end finishes with her book, her creation, her narrative – not wedded bliss. Catherine’s role as an author is posited by the film as a potential red herring when in fact it actually marks her as the maker of meaning, conducting research through her own means.

It is her manipulation which allows Nick to reflect, grow and change throughout the film for better and for worse allowing him to be the hero he thinks he is. Nick completes the narrative she constructs for him. If he did not play along with her suggestions and supposed whims the film could have had a very different outcome but as Basic Instinct stands, Catherine developed Nick’s narrative of one of toxic masculinity viewing everything other as a threat which in its dark ending suggests that Nick’s white-picket fence goals are as unfounded as the film’s dangerous portrayals of homosexuality. As Nick views Catherine as a prize, she views him as a character in one of her books and just as disposable. Ultimately, Nick needs Catherine more than she needs him.

While Catherine does inhabit the role of the Dangerous Woman (a seemingly modern version of the film noir femme fatale character) cliché and the Murderous Bisexual Women trope, it’s important to acknowledge what is unique and perhaps even progressive about her. She is both the architect of the narrative and her own destruction as she struggles against giving up her agency in favor of a “normal” life. In order to act as a good mother or wife, she’d have to give up the things that made her interesting and alluring in the first place, illuminating the flaws of the patriarchal “happy ending” and ultimately mocking the very thing the film attempts to confirm as an “acceptable” way of life. The role she never gives up on is that of author and creator; her sexuality, identity, and motives are all fluid based on the situation but her God-like power in the film is unmistakable. The film even flirts with a near happy ending for Nick and Catherine which is where the film would have ended if Nick was the true protagonist but instead, the film ends with the vantage point of Catherine’s true intention.

Stone would go on to reprise the role of Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct 2 (2006) as the only holdover from the previous film. Stone has had a problematic relationship with the original film herself, decrying that the infamous leg-crossing shot was achieved and exhibited without her consent which in essence is the film doubling-down on its problematic nature. Watching the film in this day and age, its troubling and problematic elements ring through clearer than church bells, but the film is also a hugely important cultural touchstone for 1992 as it was the 4th highest grossing film of 1992. The film is marked by Verhoeven and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas’ penchant for creating watchable chaos and mayhem (see also Showgirls) with the film perpetually creating a new audience for itself based on the film’s taboo-inclined nature. Looking back at Basic Instinct as a piece of media that was so widely and readily consumed, its façade is still marred by biphobia, homophobia, and misogyny, yet it’s satisfying to know that Catherine still remains at large, a threat to everything Hollywood deemed acceptable.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

The Trope of the Murderous Bisexual Woman

Biphobia in Basic Instinct

Alexandra West is a freelance horror journalist and playwright who lives, works, and survives in Toronto. Her work has appeared in the Toronto Star, Rue Morgue, Post City Magazine and Offscreen Film Journal. She is a regular contributor to Famous Monsters of Filmland and a columnist forDiabolique with “The Devil Made Us Watch It.” In December 2012, West co-founded the Faculty of Horror podcast with fellow writer Andrea Subissati, which explores the analytical side of horror films and the darkest recesses of academia.

In ‘Arrival,’ Amy Adams is the Superhero We Need Right Now

‘Arrival’ is yet another in a long line of alien invasion movies, but it’s also so much more than that. It’s the story of a single extraordinary woman who steps up to save the human race, armed with nothing more than her ability to communicate. It’s a story of hope — and it’s one that audiences need to hear right now.

This guest post written by Lee Jutton originally appeared at her blog. It is cross-posted with permission.

How do you make an epic about saving the entire world feel as intimate as a independent film? How do you tell a story with such high stakes while still managing to make the audience feel emotionally connected to the individual people involved? With Arrival, director Denis Villeneuve and his collaborators make this incredible task look easy — and utterly gorgeous to boot. Adapted by screenwriter Eric Heisserer from Ted Chiang’s short story “Story of Your Life,” Arrival is yet another in a long line of alien invasion movies, but it’s also so much more than that. It’s the story of a single extraordinary woman who steps up to save the human race, armed with nothing more than her ability to communicate. It’s a story of hope — and it’s one that audiences need to hear right now.

That said woman is played by Amy Adams, who makes her all the more compelling. Adams is not only one of the most consistent actresses working today — turning out brilliant performances in such diverse films as Junebug, Enchanted, The Master, and Big Eyes, just to name a few — she’s also one of the most subtle. Her performances never rely on flashy gimmicks or method madness; she can easily disappear inside a character without the aid of wigs and weight gain. Her presence as Lois Lane in the Man of Steel movies instantly classes up proceedings — at least, as much as is possible when Zack Snyder is involved. In Arrival, Adams portrays a very different kind of superhero than the ones she hobnobs with in the dour DC universe, and her quietly intense performance as linguistics professor Dr. Louise Banks is one that stands out even among her impressive body of work.

Louise is living a lonely life in a big house, teaching at an anonymous university during the day and gulping glasses of red wine at night, when she’s enlisted by Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) to do what seems to be the impossible. Twelve black obelisks have appeared out of nowhere and are floating above a diverse array of locations across the globe. Teaming up with brash astrophysicist Ian (Jeremy Renner), Louise is sent to the obelisk in Montana to find a way to communicate with the extraterrestrials inside. She uses written words on flashcards to get the aliens — dubbed “heptopods” for their seven squid-like legs — to share their own written method of communication, a series of intricate rings reminiscent of the stains produced by coffee mugs. Louise’s painstaking work seems slow to the military men around her, whose trigger fingers are growing itchy from watching too many giddily paranoid news broadcasts (an example of the power of communication used for ill if there ever was one), but gradually she produces results.

One doesn’t think of writing words on flashcards as the epitome of action-packed, but in Arrival these moments are surprisingly engaging. A scene in which Louise explains to an impatient Colonel Weber the numerous steps that need to be taken before asking the aliens what brought them to Earth — pointing out that one has to teach the aliens what a question even is before one can ask them one, then breaking down the various grammatical elements of the question on a whiteboard — is a phenomenal glimpse inside the weird world of linguistics, a world that I admit was almost entirely foreign to me going into the movie. So impressive is Louise’s mastery of language that it feels like a superpower — an unlikely one, to be sure, but one that proves highly effective.

I don’t want to reveal more of the plot of the film for fear of ruining it for others; suffice to say that in Arrival, humans are just as much of a threat to the future of Earth as their alien visitors, if not more so. Throughout it all, Louise remains the quietly heroic heart of the movie, determined to do whatever it takes to maintain the heptopods’ tenuous new relationship with humanity. One doesn’t necessarily root for the human race in Arrival; one roots for our heroine, and it just so happens that the fate of the human race is tied to her success. The story edges its way along a tightrope of tension and never grows boring despite the startling lack of such science-fiction standbys as spaceship shoot-outs and special effects-induced explosions (okay, there’s one explosion). It handles sophisticated topics in a way that feels accessible to the average moviegoer, though one shouldn’t be shocked that a film focused on communication expresses itself so elegantly; despite the potential for pretentiousness, one never feels talked down to by Arrival.

The success of Arrival is not entirely due to Amy Adams’ performance as Louise, though it is a substantial part of it. Jóhann Jóhannsson’s appropriately otherworldly score sets the mood throughout the film, and is an ideal match for Bradford Young’s ethereal cinematography. Young (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, Selma) is a master of using only available, natural light to create beautiful images, and Arrival is no exception. This combination of sound and image results in perfectly crafted moments that are as epic as anything in Kubrick’s classic 2001: A Space Odyssey — the highest praise I can give any film in this genre. The first reveal of the heptopods will make your heart leap into your throat, and stands out in my mind as one of the most memorable cinematic moments of the year.

Arrival has entered theaters as the people of the United States are reeling from the result of our most recent presidential election, and it’s likely we’ll all continue to reel for quite some time. And while cinematic escapism is only a temporary solution to the anxiety that plagues so many of us, Arrival is that rare film that provides a much-needed escape from our real world while also containing a timely message for it. In a world increasingly on edge, with conflict always hovering on the horizon, it would do us all some good to be reminded of the power of communication to maintain peace. And for little girls around the world who long to see people who look like them saving the world, Arrival is a wonderful (and unfortunately necessary) reminder that yes, women can be heroes too.

Lee Jutton has directed short films starring a killer toaster, a killer Christmas tree, and a not-killer leopard. She previously reviewed new DVD and theatrical releases as a staff writer for Just Press Play and currently reviews television shows as a staff writer for TV Fanatic. You can follow her on Medium for more film reviews and on Twitter for an excessive amount of opinions on German soccer.

‘Certain Women’: Four Women United by Emotional and Under-Recognized Work

‘Certain Women’ belongs to the four women at its core: Laura Dern’s fragile, exhausted stoicism, Michelle William’s neutrality laced with sharp edges, Lily Gladstone’s quietly powerful grasp of the feeling of new love, and Kristen Stewart’s almost-sweet awkwardness, are what make Certain Women worth the trip.

This guest post is written by Deborah Krieger. | Spoilers ahead.

Perhaps 6:30 in the morning is not the best time to take in a film that begins with such a long, gentle shot of a train in the misty Montana morning, but that early hour is when the Vienna Film Festival chose to show it, on the final day of its screening schedule. In a way, Certain Women is an extension of said shot — picturesque, poetic, more than a little “blue,” so to speak — but once the action, as subtle and understated as it is, begins, it’s hard to not get invested in what might be accurately called Emotional Labor: The Movie.

Certain Women, directed by Kelly Reichardt and adapted from Maile Meloy’s short story collection Both Ways Is the Way I Want It, tells the stories of four women (Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Lily Gladstone, and Kristen Stewart) in three loosely connected vignettes. While the women come largely from different backgrounds and have different jobs and relationships to their patch of Montana, their stories are united by the emotional and under-recognized work they perform for the others in their communities; hence my (joking) alternate title for this film.

What makes this film memorable is the juxtaposition of tension and understatement, of rising action undercut by mundanity. I kept waiting for something to “happen” — that is, for something to go the way of many feature films and turn bombastic and dramatic for its own sake, regardless of how well such a tendency fits within the style of this particular movie.

In the first segment of the film, Laura Dern’s character (also named Laura), is a lawyer whose client Fuller (Jared Harris), injured in a work-related accident and disgruntled with the useless settlement he received, breaks into his former workplace and takes a security guard hostage with a shotgun. Laura gets the call in the middle of the night, and is sent into the building by the police, with a bulletproof vest hidden under a stylish, simple coat, to coax Fuller into surrendering himself without any violence. As this particular scene unfolded, it must have been all of the conventional dramas and action movies I watched signaling to me that someone was going to die — or at the very least, get shot — but Certain Women, wisely, is not that kind of film. The emphasis in Laura’s story begins and ends with the work, both in the legal and quasi-therapeutic sense, that she must repeatedly do to help Fuller, even though he has no hope of suing the company whose neglect ruined his life.

Likewise, in the segment centering on Michelle Williams’ character, Williams plays Gina, who with her husband Ryan (James Le Gros) and daughter Guthrie (Sara Rodier) is looking to build a new home in the Montana countryside. Yet Gina finds that she must be the one to do the dirty work in this business of moving her family into this new life and getting this house constructed: her husband is all too happy to let Gina be “the bad guy,” as she puts it, where Guthrie is concerned; similarly, Ryan is also happy to let Gina do the work of acquiring building materials for their house from an older gentleman (René Auberjonois) in the area, even though said older man insists on talking to Ryan instead of dealing with her directly. In both scenarios, it is clear that Ryan (whom we meet by dint of his having an affair with Laura in the previous segment) is satisfied letting Gina take charge and do the necessary dirty work while he skims the surface — but is it because Gina wants to take charge, or because she feels she must in order to get things done? Like the segment about Laura, I kept waiting for some kind of climax, of some kind of apotheosis where Gina would finally let loose and dare to show a little emotion in the face of her husband’s passivity and her daughter’s petulance, but once again, Certain Women sticks to what is ultimately more realistic — with buried passive-aggression replacing a more fictional-seeming outburst, which is to its credit.

The final segment, which stars Lily Gladstone as Jamie, a ranch hand and a queer Native American woman, and Kristen Stewart, a freshly-minted lawyer named Beth, deals with this idea of labor in more subdued and ultimately more heart-wrenching ways. We meet Jamie moving through the slog of her routine handling horses on a snow-strewn farm; when she accidentally walks into a community college class on education law taught by Beth, Jamie instantly develops what is perhaps the most accurate depiction of a one-sided crush I have ever seen on film. As Jamie invites Beth to dinner after class several times and is content to just smile at her and talk with her sparingly, basking in the warmth of these new feelings, Beth — and the audience — grow increasingly more uncomfortable on both of their behalf. After an almost adorable sequence in which Jamie takes Beth to an after-class dinner on one of the ranch’s horses, Beth stops coming to teach the class — but is it because the class required an eight-hour round-trip and wasn’t even Beth’s real job? Or because Jamie’s obvious but unspoken affection made Beth uneasy? Or both?

Following Jamie’s discovery of Beth’s absence, she drives the four hours to Beth’s town to try and find her — a move that comes off as both sadly creepy and totally understandable. When you develop feelings for someone, you tend to magnify the smaller gestures and minimize the larger ones: a simple dinner at a diner becomes incredibly significant in the narrative of your “love story,” while the inadvisable move of tracking down someone you don’t really know, uninvited, in a town four hours away, seems like less of a bigger deal than it actually is. The scene in which Jamie finally finds Beth, who is unable to return Jamie’s affections, was so recognizable in its use of awkward, potent pauses and shades of things left unsaid that I wanted to sink through the floor with secondhand embarrassment. Yet the theme of labor still holds, as both Jamie and Beth curtail their actions and thoughts — Jamie hoping to not scare Beth, and Beth wanting to let Jamie down as carefully and painlessly as possible. It’s also notable, and refreshing, that this film doesn’t make a big deal out of Jamie’s same-sex crush on Beth — it’s treated with the same gentleness and empathy that a heterosexual romance with all the same trappings would have been given.

The cinematography, by Christopher Blauvelt, is pure loveliness, making rural Montana both desolate and alluring, and the four central performances are all fantastic. In a story about women, the male characters do fall short, especially, sadly, with Fuller’s narrative. Jared Harris is unfortunately miscast in this salt-of-the-earth American blue-collar role, as his accent (Harris hails from London) is all over the place, and is just not as convincing as Laura Dern, especially in the scenes where they play opposite one another. Similarly, James Le Gros does not manage to convey what would make two vastly different women find Ryan so appealing — but perhaps that is intentional.

Certain Women belongs to the four women at its core: Laura Dern’s fragile, exhausted stoicism, Michelle William’s neutrality laced with sharp edges, Lily Gladstone’s quietly powerful grasp of the feeling of new love, and Kristen Stewart’s almost-sweet awkwardness, are what make Certain Women worth the trip.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

The Women of the New York Film Festival 2016

Deborah Krieger is a senior at Swarthmore College, studying art history, film and media studies, and German. She has written for Hyperallergic, Hooligan Magazine, the Northwestern Art Review, The Stake, and Title Magazine. She also runs her own art blog, I On the Arts, and curates her life in pictures @Debonthearts on Instagram.