Tag: Emily Campbell

Wedding Week: Do or Do Not

This is a guest post by Emily Campbell.
Here’s some sobering news: if you’re not a U.S. citizen, same-sex marriage isn’t going to score you a green card. And, unless you can make sense of immigration legalese and have overwhelming amounts of luck on your side, seeking asylum as an LGBT individual probably isn’t either.
Sure, you can marry your spouse in some states and everything is perfectly legal, but good luck getting them a green card or permanent residency because surprise! The federal government says no. State-federal alignment, what state-federal alignment? And you can totally apply for asylum, but first you have to prove you’re queer enough, that you’re in danger of being persecuted for being queer in your country of origin, and you have to do this within a year of arriving in the U.S. or it’s straight to deportation.
I’d been reading about cheerful things like the obstacles faced by LGBT asylum seekers and all the creative ways U.S. immigration law manages to avoid actually granting asylum when I first heard of I Do. An indie film bearing the vaguely ominous tagline “Two words can change everything” and promises of a plot centered on a playing-it-straight green card marriage, it sounded right up my alley. According to director Glenn Gaylord:
The film touches upon some very profound issues of our time, the Defense of Marriage Act, and how even though gay people can get married in certain states in this country, immigration is a federal right. So even if a gay person legally marries someone, it doesn’t grant citizenship, because of DOMA. All told, despite its hot-button topicality, this is the very human story about a man who has to decide whose life he’s living. 

Movie poster for I Do
Intense, right? Essentially, my first thought was “I need to see this yesterday.”
I Do kicks off with some narration from our humble protagonist, Jack (David W. Ross): “I do believe in fate. I do believe in family. I believe in telling the truth and that your actions have consequences.”
Please note the strategic repetition of “I do.”
Jack’s life is kind of tragic. He’s a transplant from England who’s been living in the U.S. since he was 17 and (spoiler) his brother bites it within the first five minutes of the movie. This happens right after said bro announces over dinner that his wife Mya (Alicia Witt) is pregnant, and isn’t that a wonder since he only married her for a green card. There’s always that one family member making really tasteless jokes at the table. Jack politely congratulates him anyway, then politely bears it when his bro talks about sometimes wishing he were gay because–get this–those intrepid bohemian homosexuals have no responsibilities or ordained path, and he feels like he’s conforming to societal norms by being married and having a kid. Right, then.
We fast-forward a few years, and Jack’s doing all right for himself. He works as a photographer’s assistant and fills his off hours by being the greatest gay uncle ever for Mya’s preposterously sweet daughter and the greatest BFF ever to his coworker Ali (Jamie-Lynn Sigler), who also happens to be a lesbian. Then things get sticky when Jack’s work visa is denied. The explanation? Everything’s harder since September 11, which means he can’t just renew his visa. Instead, he has to go back to England and begin the whole process again, and even then he might not be eligible for another since he has a denial on his record. Leaving his life in New York to wait things out in England is just plain out of the question, as is remaining in the U.S. illegally and risking deportation.
Jack (David W. Ross) and Aly (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) bonding and providing some equal-opportunity objectification

But, his lawyer conspiratorially tells him, he can still get his hands on a green card if he marries. A woman. And he has just two months to figure out what to do.
Fortunately for Jack, Ali’s girlfriend recently dumped her and made her move out, leaving her newly single and with nowhere to live.
Enter fake marriage. Don’t ask why Ali goes along with it so readily; I’m not sure either. But it means we get to see her being quietly conflicted about helping a friend and potentially going to federal prison for it, which entails lots of lingering shots of her doe-eyed, adorably accessorized visage. So there’s that.
Jamie-Lynn Sigler as Ali in I Do
And this is where the real problem comes in. We’re clearly supposed to feel bad for Jack’s plight and the DOMA-fueled injustice being heaped on him. But as things escalate and Jack suddenly falls for Spanish architect Mano (Maurice Compte), the casual viewer is more likely to feel bad for Ali, who has to deal with him gallivanting all over the place and not even trying to make their relationship seem remotely realistic. Her future is on the line right along with Jack’s, but Jack never seems to have an inkling of just how big of a risk they’re taking for his sake.
There’s also the fact that the chemistry between Jack and the newfound love of his life is anemic at best, but we’re supposed to believe it exists for the sake of a plot point. And while this could just be my own personal bias about what constitutes romance and what constitutes creepy, Mano showing up (unannounced and unsolicited) with coffee and changes of clothes for Jack and Mya while they’re staying the night in a hospital reads as more of the latter than the former. Especially considering Jack and Mano have met all of twice at this point.
Mano is also sketching their future dream home by the third date and promising to go to England with Jack if he gets deported. And he happens to conveniently be an American citizen. However, as Jack’s lawyer points out, Manu can marry Jack legally in New York and it still won’t make a difference since immigration is a federal issue. In case those of us following along at home missed anything, she spells it out for them and says point blank that they don’t have the same rights as a straight couple.
Ali, meanwhile, is petrified of going to prison for being Jack’s fake wife. Then immigration officers show up while Jack is out with Mano generally being the worst fake husband ever even though their relationship is weirdly unbelievable.
Okay, that’s not entirely true. There’s one scene where Mano tells Jack the scar on his chest is from when his father caught him in bed with a neighbor’s son, which has the potential to be very poignant. Or it would be if the theme of family being important hadn’t already been hammered home time and time again. And since the linchpin of Jack wanting to stay in the U.S. is his own adopted family of Mya and her daughter, this makes his eventual resolution incredibly jarring.
It all wraps up with another earnest monologue from Jack. “I believe in family. I believe in fate. I believe we should all have the freedom to love. I believe in love. I do.”
That said, there are bright spots amidst all the doom and despair. Alicia Witt is excellent as Mya, trying to make ends meet and move on with life, simultaneously loving Jack and hating him for being alive instead of her husband. And Mickey Cottrell is great as Jack’s mentor, Sam, who at one point confides in Jack that the only reason he ended up with his partner of 32 years was because he knew he was the one and went for it. But at the end of the day, I Do takes a hot-button issue and waters it down immensely. If you want an engrossing story about gay marriage beating the legal system, read about the awesome lesbian couple from Pakistan who took a vacation to the U.K., got married, and immediately filed for–and won–asylum there. Someone really needs to make a movie about that.
Emily Campbell is approximately three fifths finished with this cup of chai and five fifths finished with grad school. She has previously reviewed Cracks and War Witch for Bitch Flicks.

2013 Oscar Week: A Thorn Like a Rose: War Witch (Rebelle)

Guest post written by Emily Campbell.

If you reel off its vital stats, War Witch sounds like a shoo-in for an Oscar.

It tackles the delicate topic of African child soldiers and was filmed entirely in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Its main character is a girl who bravely forges forward even though her life has more obstacles than The Hunger Games.
It stars a leading actress who grew up on the streets of Kinshasa and was cast at the age of 15.
It’s in French.
So why has it slipped under the radar?
After hosting an impromptu watch party, I posed the question to a few friends. “It’s because it’s Canadian. That and there are no white people,” one said.
“There are if you count the albino guy,” another countered, unwittingly opening a whole new can of worms.
Eventually the discussion culminated in a long, detailed dissection of the official Oscar nominees and it was concluded that, since there were already Best Picture nominations for a French language film (Amour) and two films about a young people of color overcoming adversity (Beasts of the Southern Wild and Life of Pi), there just weren’t any bases left for War Witch to cover. Despite being comprised of components that typically make the Academy salivate left and right, War Witch is nominated in only one category: Best Foreign Film, otherwise known as that part of the Oscars dedicated to movies only a handful of people have actually seen and several handfuls of people will inevitably decide to see but still probably never get around to it.
War Witch (2012) poster
Canada’s seventh nominee in this category, War Witch begins with a seemingly innocent narrative hook: the voiceover of a woman speaking to her unborn child. The camera pans through a Congolese village, where the residents live in houses constructed of everything from towels to tarpaulins and wear sandals made of plastic water bottles. Inside one of these ramshackle houses, a girl sits patiently while her mother braids her hair.
Within two minutes, everything takes a turn for the decidedly less innocent and never looks back.
It turns out the girl and the narrator are one and the same: Komona, age 12, is abducted from her village by rebel soldiers along with a handful of other children. In order to ensure the loyalty of their new recruits, the rebels eliminate any other contenders and waste no time in doing so, putting an AK-47 in Komona’s hands and instructing her to kill her parents.
“This is your mother,” her kidnappers say, passing around sticks for the children to practice gun-handling. “This is your father. Respect your guns. They’re your new mother and father.”
As a member of the Great Tiger’s rebel army, Komona is trained to do battle against the government alongside other kidnapped children. What sets her apart from them is her ability to see visions after drinking the “magic milk” from a certain tree—a gift that leads to her foreseeing and surviving a government attack. Ultimately, Komona’s visions catch the attention of the Great Tiger himself and, at age 13, she is anointed his personal war witch.
Throughout the course of the film, Komona’s voiceover continues narrating her story to her child. “Listen good when I talk to you because it’s very important that you know what I did before you come out of my belly,” she tells it. “Because when you come out, I don’t know if God will give me the strength to love you.”
War Witch delivers its share of chilling lines, such as Komona calmly explaining that she sees fallen soldiers not as dead bodies but as walking ghosts, or how a local butcher always keeps a pail at hand since every slice of his machete reminds him of what happened to his family and makes him want to vomit. But interspersed with the grimness are moments of levity. At one point, the child soldiers are watching a movie on a bus, yelling and clapping like kids on a school trip. At another, after Komona’s friend Magicien informs her it’s only a matter of time before her visions are faulty and the Great Tiger has her executed like the three witches before her, they flee the army together and Komona accepts his proposal of marriage. However, this is only after she requests that Magicien first bring her a white rooster (which her father once told her is the hardest thing to find in the country), a challenge he takes very seriously.
The brainchild of Montreal director Kim Nguyen, War Witch (billed as Rebelle in French) was filmed entirely in Kinshasa, after Nguyen had spent the past decade researching the plight of child soldiers in central Africa. “I learned that there are actually more women child soldiers than men,” he said, “which was surprising. What’s tragic, of course, is that they’re used as sexual slaves.”
Rachel Mwanza, who stars as Komona, has already racked up Best Actress awards from the Berlin Film Festival, the Tribeca Film Festival, and the Vancouver Film Critics Circle. She and Serge Kanyinda, who plays Magicien, have earned respective nominations for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor at the 2013 Canadian Screen Awards. “This character is ten-dimensional,” Nguyen has said of Mwanza’s portrayal of Komona. “She’s a child but she’s an adult, she’s a killer and a victim, she’s a mother but she’s a child. You cannot imagine a more paradoxical figure.” But, as he relayed during a TIFF interview, War Witch’s accolades are far more an exception than a rule: “I had brutal answers that would tell me a Black main actor doesn’t sell.”
In only ninety minutes, War Witch packs a thousand punches. Komona is abducted at 12, a renowned war witch by 13, and pregnant by 14. Her loved ones are snatched away with ruthless precision and her time as a soldier leaves its marks in the form of Stockholm syndrome, post-traumatic stress, and an unborn child. Her superiors beat her, and even Magicien and his protective talismans can only prevent so much harm. The ghosts of her parents give her nightmares, urging her to return to her village and bury them. Inevitably, she becomes a product of her environment, learning to kill or be killed. This comes to a head during one especially harrowing scene wherein she becomes a “poisoned rose” in an effort to kill her commanding officer.
But War Witch is more than just atrocity layered on top of atrocity. There are allies: for a time, Magicien and Komona take shelter with Macigien’s uncle, who abhors the war and provides a safe haven. There’s ingenuity: in one of the film’s lighter moments, Macigien throws himself against the side of a passing van and kicks up a fuss about being injured until the bewildered driver quickly leaves him some money and speeds away. And there’s hope: Komona’s resilience leads to her turning on her commanders multiple times, with eventual success, and stubbornly seeking closure that seems forever just out of reach. 
And yet, it’s a Canadian film. No Canadian film has ever won Best Picture and only one (2003’s The Barbarian Invasions) has won Best Foreign Film. Only three Canadian actresses and one African actress have nabbed the Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role. The Academy has also been known to neglect giving credit where it’s due, a fact that has even more unfortunate ramifications regarding actors of color. Black actresses have been nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role a mere ten times, with Halle Berry’s 2001 turn in Monster’s Ball resulting in the solitary win. As noted in a study titled “Not Quite a Breakthrough: The Oscars and Actors of Color, 2002-2012,” no winner in any Oscar category has ever been Latino, Asian American, or Native American. More recently, Life of Pi’s Suraj Sharma, who carried the entire film by acting opposite a bluescreen and lost 20% of his body weight for the role and is only 17 years old, was passed over for a nomination although the film itself garnered eleven of them.
Actor Rachel Mwanza
As noted by Jorge Rivas in his 2012 article, an overwhelming majority of the Academy consists of white men. Rachel Mwanza, pictured above with the Silver Bear she won at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival, was the first African woman to do so. Mwanza is currently slated to star in the upcoming Marc-Henri Wajnberg-directed drama Kinshasa Kids.
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Emily Campbell has taught English on three continents, been involved with dubious theatrical productions on four, and recently acquired an M. Ed. on one. She has previously written a review of Cracks for Bitch Flicks and still not-so-secretly wants to be an Animorph when she grows up.

LGBTQI Week: Cracks

This is a guest review by Emily Campbell.

This is a story about lesbian schoolgirls.

Those of you who have already seen Lost and Delirious, The Moth Diaries, D.E.B.S., Therese and Isabelle, Fucking Åmål, But I’m A Cheerleader, Heavenly Creatures, Bilitis, and every other lesbian schoolgirl film out there, just hear me out and try not to roll your eyes yet.

Cracks, the directorial debut of Jordan Scott (daughter of Ridley Scott), is an independent film based on Sheila Kohler’s novel of the same name. Although it was released in Ireland and the UK in 2009, Cracks didn’t come out the US at all until 2011, showing on only six screens. While it takes several liberties with the book, setting it at an isolated British boarding school in the 30’s rather than a South African boarding school in the 60’s, the story faithfully focuses on a group of girls who make up their school’s diving team, their mysterious mentor, Miss G (Green), and the new student who overturns the status quo just by existing.

This is also, mind you, a lesbian boarding school movie in which neither the character with the crush nor the object of the crush tragically commits suicide. Now, I’m not going to swear to you that this is an entirely death-free film, or even that it’s a particularly easy film to watch. I will, however, swear that the characters are fascinating, the score and cinematography are stunning, and Eva Green’s costumes (thank you, Alison Byrne) will take your breath away.

And, for those of you with more refined interests, there’s a scene where she strips off and urges a group of students to join her for some late-night skinny-dipping. This is actually (a) relevant to the plot and (b) shot so beautifully it doesn’t feel gratuitous, both factors that could easily have proven to be pitfalls for several scenes. The entire movie manages to evoke sensuality without crossing the line into lewdness, no mean feat considering how effortlessly it could have portrayed the girls as archetypal nubile young things seething with sexual frustration. Instead, the emphasis is on the characters’ development, not the audience’s titillation.

“To dive is to fly,” says Miss G to her girls. “Set yourself free of the shackles of conformity. Let nothing hold you back except the air itself. You are between heaven and earth. The rules no longer apply.”

And let’s be real, if Eva Green was your diving instructor, you’d probably cede to her every whim too.

When we first meet Miss G, she happens to be wearing the ensemble pictured above while lounging in a rowboat with Di, one of her students, and discussing a scandalous book she had no qualms about lending her.

Di Radfield (Juno Temple) is the star of the diving team and something of a bigwig on campus, the Regina George in the 1934 edition of Mean Girls.

She’s also head over heels for Miss G.

Based on this knowledge alone (and possibly the same three plotlines that tend to occur in most boarding school movies), I personally would already be gritting my teeth in preparation for ninety minutes all about Di’s introspective self-loathing and her efforts to avoid the censure of her peers, the castigation of her teachers, and the denunciation of her desires. In most cases, I wouldn’t be far off the mark: usually, the character with the same-sex crush encounters some kind of scorn from others simply for daring to find another woman attractive, which then becomes the main source of conflict.

But that isn’t the case at all for the girls of the fictitious St. Mathilda’s. Di, instead, is admired for being daring. Already a natural leader, she has even more prestige by being the favorite and having the ear of the teacher all the girls idolize.

Nor does Di herself have any apparent issue with her feelings. “I’ve had rather a lot of lustful thoughts,” she admits during confession, one of only a handful of scenes to feature a male character. “Do I have to be sorry for all of them?”

Her teammates and sometimes lackeys, a garden of British blossoms with names like Poppy (Imogen Poots), Lily (Ellie Nunn), Laurel (Adele McCann), Rosie (Zoe Carroll), and awkward Fuzzy (short for Persephone, played by Clemmie Dugdale), are all in awe of her. One of the first scenes features Poppy eagerly asking if Di, emerging from the chapel, admitted to reading the book Miss G let her borrow. Di only scoffs that they can’t stay pure forever and she sees nothing wrong with wanting to know about the real world. And of course, she would never do anything that might get Miss G into trouble.

Miss G, who is cultured and serene and has a killer wardrobe, teaches diving (though always fully clothed and from the safety of a dock or rowboat) and apparently at least one additional class that involves textbooks. The only evidence we see of the latter is when she has the girls put their books away and then proceeds to regale them with tales of her adventures in far-off lands—which her students, of course, lap up without question.

Enter new girl Fiamma (María Valverde), the Spanish noble who happens to actually be as well-traveled as Miss G claims to be.

Fiamma, the living embodiment of the outside world, quietly challenges the authority of both Di and Miss G almost immediately. She joins the team and usurps Di as their top diver, exposes Miss G’s fantastical stories as word-for-word recitations of Mary Kingsley, and demands to know why the divers never compete against other schools. She is every bit the catalyst her name implies, causing the students to consider several of the questions we as viewers have been accumulating all along.

Until now, the girls have been accustomed to the remoteness of their lives, with only Miss G’s stories as a window to anything else. The school itself, located on a fictional island off the coast of England, is accessible only by ferry. Letters home are meant to show students’ “fine penmanship and turn of phrase” and are read by their teacher before being approved and sent. The divers share the same dorm and classes, bound into an elite little coterie by their positions on the team, led all the while by a teacher who never dives, never risks or plunges herself, but swears that the most important thing in life is desire and makes them all believe it.

While the rest of the team is amazed by her, Miss G in particular becomes fascinated with Fiamma, both wanting her and wanting to be her. Di, however, resents Fiamma for replacing her as Miss G’s favorite.

We learn, through Miss G’s snooping, that Fiamma was sent away for becoming involved with a boy of a far lower social status than her own. While Fiamma believes she will only be held at the school until the air clears for her back home, its almost ethereal isolation assumes a more menacing role when Miss G calmly reels off the names of other girls who also thought they would only be there for a short time. “Only Di,” she tells Fiamma, “realized this is forever.”

But Fiamma’s only response is, “It is not forever. They will leave you.”

Gradually it comes to light that, although Miss G constantly tells outrageous anecdotes about her life, she herself is actually a product of the same school. When asked by a ferryman, she coolly admits she does not care for open water. The one time she leaves school grounds, we see her mumbling to herself and visibly steeling up to stroll through the tiny town on the mainland in order to buy treats for Fiamma. As the girls’ coach, she easily plays the sultry storyteller who captivates them all, but once out of her element she literally isn’t able to walk the walk.

Her obsession with Fiamma manifests in progressively disturbing ways, from showering her with affection to stealing her belongings to a truly disturbing scene where she forces Fiamma to dive whilst on the verge of an asthma attack. While the other girls adore Miss G unquestioningly, Fiamma fails time and time again to be ensnared by her spell. And when Miss G learns that she can never regain control or save face while Fiamma is around, her resolution isn’t pretty.

This is a story about three passionate women that just so happens to take place in a boarding school: Miss G, who struggles to uphold the persona she’s created for herself within the institution she can’t leave; Fiamma, everything Miss G could never be; and Di, enthralled by her hero’s tales of far-off places but so reluctant to accept a person actually from one of them.

Cracks is guilty of falling into the characterization trope of the sophisticated mentor who isn’t at all what she seems, as well as the more troubling trope of the predatory deviant who clearly isn’t right in the head. As Miss G’s obsession with Fiamma escalates, so does her exposure as a pathological liar who glamorizes herself for the teams’ affections. The film also borrows liberally from the old boarding school standby of catty girls turning on each other at every opportunity (interestingly, several actors were boarding school students themselves when the movie was filmed) and their motivations blow hot and cold too quickly to seem logical at times—one minute they’re turning on Fiamma at Di’s behest, and the next they’re striking a truce and planning to have a midnight feast.

While the novel Cracks was titled after a slang term for a crush, throughout the movie we see actual cracks as they appear in Miss G, in the sway she holds over her girls, and in the complacence of the girls themselves when their world and their idol are shaken apart. The story ends with all three of the main characters taking leave of the school in different ways, a conclusion just open-ended enough to leave you wondering if the reality created for these girls actually is forever, or if independence is still possible in spite of it all.

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Emily Campbell is an M. Ed. candidate who has taught English on three continents and still secretly wants to be an Animorph when she grows up.