films about queer women

‘Concussion’: When Queer Marriage in the Suburbs Isn’t Enough

The queer women we see in sexual situations in ‘Concussion’ are not cut from the same Playboy-ready cloth as the two women in ‘Blue’: one client is fat, another is an obvious real-life survivor of breast cancer and some of her clients, like Eleanor herself, are nowhere near their 20s anymore.

This repost by staff writer Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

How many distinctive, acclaimed films about queer women can be released in American theaters at the same time? If we extrapolate from the actions of film distributors in 2013, the answer is apparently: only one. Concussion was named one of the top 20 films of that year by Slate’s Dana Stevens and was also named one of the top films of 2013 in Salon. Shortly after its premiere, at Sundance, The Weinstein Company acquired it for distribution. For most films that acquisition (and the later support from reviews in traditional media) would mean a national release, but the film had a very limited run in theaters that fall and never played a theater in my art-house-friendly city. The film was on Video On Demand, iTunes, and Google Play, but deserves much more attention than most films that never have a national theatrical run.

This film about a queer woman is, unlike the same year’s Blue Is The Warmest Color, directed and written by a queer woman (Stacie Passon who was nominated for “Best First Feature” in the Independent Spirit Awards and directed an episode of this past season of Transparent) and in many aspects is the answer to those who dismissed Blue as a product of the male gaze. Instead of a teenage protagonist, the main character in Concussion, Abby (played by Robin Weigert: Andrew O’Hehir in Salon summed up her performance as “OMFG”), is a 40-something, stay-at-home Mom, married to another woman and living in the suburbs.

When her son accidentally hits her in the face with a baseball, we see the confusion and blood in the family car ride to the hospital, as she moans to no one in particular, “I don’t want this. I don’t want this. I don’t want this.”

In the ER Abby says she is going back to work in the city (and that she really means it this time). Abby doesn’t need to work for money: her spouse, Kate, is a divorce attorney, kept busy by the dissatisfied wives in their social circle. We see the wives’ well-maintained bodies in slow motion, at the beginning of the film, in spin and yoga classes as David Bowie sings on the soundtrack, “Oh you pretty things…”

Passon knows this world well She lives in the town (Montclair) Abby does. She is married to a woman and has children, one of whom accidentally hit her in the face with a baseball. The parallels between her life and Abby’s may be why the character and setting seem so fully realized.

Abby for the most part blends in with her straight women friends but we see she’s different from them–and not just in her orientation. She reads books while she vacuums. When a friend is circulating a “new motherhood” survey for an article in a parenting magazine, Abby writes of dreams in which she sticks her then newborn son in the microwave–and other dreams in which she and her son are married. She writes, “My poor baby, I didn’t know whether to kill him, fuck him, or eat him.”

At times Abby’s queerness does separate her from the other women. When Abby mentions to her friend that one of the group of women they work out with is “cute,” the friend (played by Janel Maloney) reproaches Abby, “She’s not a lesbian!”

Abby starts work with a contractor to refurbish a city loft. As they transform the apartment, she transforms too, first hiring women to have sex with her and then working out of the loft as a high-priced escort, “Eleanor,” whose clients are all women.

A woman character turning to sex work for reasons other than money is usually a male artist’s conceit, as in Luis Buñuel’s great Belle de Jour, which features stunning, beautifully dressed, doctor’s wife, Catherine Deneuve, working in a brothel while her handsome, attentive (but clueless) husband sees his patients. In women’s memoirs of sex work (like Michelle Tea’s Rent Girl) the money is the point of the work (as it is with most work).

A sex worker character whose clients are all women (when the vast majority of sex work clients are men) is also usually the creation of a straight male artist–and is usually a male character so the work avoids any explicit same-sex scenes.

Perhaps because Concussion turns that last trope on its head (or perhaps because New York is a big city that can cater to many kinds of tastes) we accept the conceit of a woman over 40 seeing women clients (for $800 a session) every day. The queer women we see in sexual situations in Concussion are not cut from the same Playboy-ready cloth as the two women in Blue: one client is fat, another is an obvious real-life survivor of breast cancer and some of her clients, like Eleanor herself, are nowhere near their 20s anymore.

Robin Weigert doesn’t have a Barbie Doll face or a porn model’s body, but does have a passing resemblance to the young Ellen Barkin. Weigert exudes the same confidence and sexiness–reminding us those two qualities are often one and the same.

Concussion has a scene similar to one in Blue in which a straight man interrogates a queer woman about her sexuality. But because Abby is in her 40s, the mocking tone she takes with him is completely different from what we hear from the 20-something main character in Blue, Adele.

In Concussion are we seeing the female gaze? Well, we’re definitely seeing one woman’s gaze, that of Passon. The sex scenes in Concussion, unlike Blue, don’t seem like outtakes from an amateur porn video, but flow from the other nonsexual encounters in the film. (Concussion’s expert cinematographer is David Kruta.) We also don’t see full frontal nudity from any of the actresses, and although we see the bare breasts of some of Eleanor’s clients, we never see hers. Eleanor/ Abby is both a psychological and corporeal enigma to us.

Some clues for her motives are in the scenes between Abby and her spouse. They are affectionate and loving with each other, even when they’re alone, but the sex has gone out of their marriage. After a disastrous first encounter with an escort, we feel Abby’s ache of longing when a second “better” escort begins to touch her. Later we see Eleanor’s first client, a 23-year-old virgin, react to Eleanor’s touch in much the same way.

In the city we see Abby in punk rock t-shirts (vintage Blondie and the now-defunct C.B.G.B) and boyshort underwear and in the suburbs we see her fitting in with her friends in yoga pants and an expensive down-filled jacket. At a suburban dinner party the guests talk about their days hanging out in pre-gentrified downtown New York clubs, Squeezebox and The Limelight, and we realize yes, many of the club kids of the ’90s have become comfortable, suburban Moms and Dads.

The loft is decorated with posters for Louise Bourgeois and The Guerrilla Girls and has Diet For a New America on the bookshelf, distinct touches some of us in the audience recognize from our own living spaces. In the dialogue we hear echoes of conversations we too have had (or overheard) at parties: “I finally took the Myers-Briggs.” Writers of satire often seem to want their audience to hate the people, especially the women, they create (the Annette Bening character in American Beauty is just one example). Passon’s satire is much trickier–and kinder. She wants us to recognize these people. She wants us to recognize ourselves in them.

The film Passon says inspired Concussion is from the 1970s: Jeanne Dielman.., (and was also written and directed by a queer woman, the late Chantal Akerman). In Concussion, as in Dielman, we see the first signs of the housewife/sex-worker protagonist starting to unravel when she fails to stick to her usual daily routine: Abby misses picking up the kids after school for the first time in six years. Unlike Dielman, Passon’s film captures the monotony of domestic tasks, but doesn’t ask the audience to endure that boredom themselves.

Although Concussion was made before queer marriage became legal in New Jersey, the film brings up some interesting questions about the queer community’s quest for “equality.” What if we become just as disenchanted with being soccer Moms as straight women sometimes do? What then? At the end Abby throws herself into a home renovation project, the way so many of our married friends, straight and queer do, and we marvel at the mystery of other people’s marriages, not just in the film, but all around us.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8Wg–Mh8YY” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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

A Compromised ‘Carol’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Girls and Women in the Middle of Nowhere: ‘The Wonders’ and ‘Bare’

In some ways Wolfgang could be a stand-in for all the directors and other outsiders who naively idealize and misinterpret contemporary rural settings and the business of farming.

In a scene early in Italian writer-director Alice Rohrwacher’s The Wonders the main character, an adolescent girl named Gelsomina (a radiant Maria Alexandra Lungu), her short-tempered beekeeping, farmer father (Sam Louwyck), her slightly younger sister Marinella (a charming Agnese Graziani) and her two youngest sisters, twins who delight in not doing what they’re told and making messes, are taking a break from the hard work of the farm to splash and scream in an impossibly crystalline body of water. Then a man, fully dressed in black pants and shirt makes his way through a shallow lagoon and tells them they must be quiet. “We’re shooting,” he says. When they follow him back to an idyllic small waterfall set against a backdrop of a rock cliff, we see “the shooting” isn’t the hunters we heard at the beginning of the film but a camera crew and a beautiful, white-wigged, costumed, famous TV host (Monica Bellucci) shooting a promo for a new reality TV series that will take place in the region and feature local, farming families competing against each other on camera for a large cash prize.

“Countryside Wonders will be here,” the host announces to the camera and even after the shoot is finished, Gelsomina who, as the oldest, is her father’s main helper in transporting the bees, collecting honey and even removing stingers from his neck, can’t stop staring at the host who gives her one of the jeweled clips from her wig. Gelso wants the family to be part of the competition, but her father, Wolfgang, whose Italian is clearly not his first language and seems to have some vaguely apocalyptic beliefs that have driven him into farming with his family in the countryside, says, “We don’t need that crap.”

In some ways Wolfgang could be a stand-in for all the directors and other outsiders who naively idealize and misinterpret contemporary rural settings and the business of farming. Rohrwacher shows us not just the hard work and financial precariousness of the farm, that just one forgotten chore can potentially put into ruin, but also little slights, like when a customer at the farmers’ market asks if the price of the farm’s honey has gone up, in a tone that implies it’s not worth what the family is charging.

Wolfgang’s neighbor, who grew up in the area, is more philosophical about the reality show, “Maybe we will get some jobs or some tourists.” When he’s on the show, wearing the ridiculous costume the producers force all of the contestants into, he knows just what role he should play, complimenting the host, telling her he’s always wanted to be on her show, lamenting his status as a bachelor and getting the women in his family to sing a “traditional” song for the audience. Gelsomina’s stunt, in which she lets bees crawl out of her mouth while the troubled, 14-year-old boy who lives with the family whistles, is met with much less enthusiasm from both the host and the live audience.

The Wonders could also refer to the film’s gorgeous cinematography shot by Hélène Louvart, whether the scene includes that unnaturally glass-like lake, the crumbling farmhouse, the Tuscan countryside or the open, tender faces of the women and girls (including the girls’ mother, Angelica, played by the director’s sister, Alba Rohrwacher). The beekeeping scenes are surprisingly absorbing, as Gelsomina in her protective suit removes the swarming insects from the thick branch they coat into an open container or finds a pile of dead bees and in the bottom of another and declares them, “poisoned.” I have only a slight fear of bees, but I shuddered at some at these scenes, so anyone with a more serious phobia might want to look away. And anyone who has ever questioned the sanitary standards of small farms will want to look away from a number of scenes showing the gathering of honey in this family operation.

As beautiful and well-acted as the film is, I couldn’t help thinking once the credits rolled, “Is that it?” Although the film has opportunities for great emotional sweep it consistently avoids them by deliberately cutting away or downplaying action that would engage us more fully with these characters and their story. In some shots Lungu looks like she could have been painted by Modigliani and the film itself is more of a static portrait than an emotionally moving story. We spend a lot of time looking into Lungu’s face, but besides her desire to be on TV and get closer to the farmhand, we never really find out what she’s thinking.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEOS5iy0Y4M” iv_load_policy=”3″]

Stateside, another new film from a women-writer director that takes place far from the city is Natalia Leite’s Bare. Glee’s Dianna Agron and Paz de la Huerta (believably androgynous and a little grubby) are respectively, Sarah, a meek, young woman in small-town Nevada, working (and getting fired from) a series of menial jobs and Pepper a sexy, shoplifting drifter in a truck.

Inside this film’s sometimes over-the-top melodrama it has some acutely observed moments, like when Sarah’s best friend disparages a woman they both know, then over a period of time, the two of them become best friends and Sarah is the one they whisper about. We see the aimless wandering of the group of slightly past-high-school kids who don’t have anything like college plans, drinking, driving and shouting in the wide Nevada deserts and canyons. Other films show scenes like these only as preludes to disaster: this one just lets its bored, restless characters blow off steam.

Agron and de la Huerta have great chemistry and unlike many similar films about young women together, Bare doesn’t shy from showing these two characters having sex and, at least on Sarah’s part, falling in love. The film also has a more realistic take on working in a strip club than we are used to seeing in films, though the way the film equates dancing naked for money as degradation, the same way it makes Sarah’s sexual awakening with Pepper coincide with her being able to really let loose onstage, is a little retro. Agron is a lot better than I expected her to be (Glee isn’t exactly renowned for its great dramatic performances) and the film is beautifully shot (by Tobias Datum) but, as is too often the case with both indie and Hollywood films, the script is nowhere near the level of the performances or cinematography–and a good script is what makes a good movie. Maybe someday both Hollywood and the indie world will learn this lesson.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8p5RhFZTm0″ iv_load_policy=”3″]

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

‘Grandma’–and Lily Tomlin–in a Minor Key

Paul Weitz, who is about my age and is probably still best known as the director of ‘American Pie,’ grew up with Tomlin too, which may be why he centered his latest film, ‘Grandma’ (for which he also wrote the script) around her. 76-year-old women are not often the leads in mainstream American movies, especially not current ones, so I suppose I should be grateful, but I kept wishing this vehicle (and I don’t mean the antique car Tomlin’s character drives in the film) were a better one.

Lily Tomlin was the first woman on television who ever made me laugh. She appeared on Laugh-In as Ernestine, the telephone operator with the ’40s hairstyle and quick temper who snorted at her own jokes, back when the US had telephone operators–and only one phone company. Tomlin was also Edith Ann, a little girl about my age in an oversized rocking chair who ended every monologue by lisping, “And that’s the truth,” and blowing a raspberry.

I didn’t see Nashville when it first came out though my parents did, and afterward my father played its soundtrack incessantly. When I saw the film as an adult I didn’t really care for most of it–except the scenes with Tomlin’s not-at-all-comic (but Oscar-nominated) role, the married, gospel singer, a mother of two, young, deaf children, who has an affair with the young up-and-coming singer/songwriter (Keith Carradine). He has sex with many women but only has eyes for her. When he invites her to a club to watch him perform, she shows up but has obviously never been to a nightclub before. She is struck motionless when Carradine’s character sings a love song he’s penned (many of the actors in the film wrote their own songs, including Carradine, who won a “Best Original Song” Oscar for this one) looking straight at her. The camera doesn’t look away from her either.

Paul Weitz, who is about my age and is probably still best known as the director of American Pie, grew up with Tomlin too, which may be why he centered his latest film, Grandma (for which he also wrote the script) around her. 76-year-old women are not often the leads in mainstream American movies, especially not current ones, so I suppose I should be grateful, but I kept wishing this vehicle (and I don’t mean the antique car Tomlin’s character drives in the film) were a better one.

One of Weitz’s best ideas is to make Tomlin’s character queer, since none of us knew as children in the ’70s that the woman who wrote much of Tomlin’s most famous work, Jane Wagner, was also her romantic partner. The two legally married a couple of years ago, the final unambiguous, public “coming out” of many in that generation (and those who are a little older). Although Tomlin has maintained in interviews that she was always open about her sexuality and the media simply didn’t report it, the history some of us remember is a little more complicated. In the ’90s writer Armistead Maupin (Tales of the City) objected to Tomlin narrating The Celluloid Closet (which he wrote) a ’90s history of queers in film because he felt having a semi-closeted narrator was antithetical to the film’s message.

In the film Elle Reid (Tomlin) is a lesbian poet whose heyday was in the ’70s: she’s now an underemployed academic whose talent and reputation is enough to attract a much younger girlfriend, Olivia (Judy Greer). Greer has a warm presence and hilariously wears the anti-fashion sometimes donned by queer women of a certain age (batik pants!), but we see no chemistry between these two characters who are supposed to be hot and heavy lovers, so their breakup in the first scene is a blessing. When Elle’s only granddaughter Sage (Julia Garner) comes to her and confesses, “I’m pregnant,” Elle is too broke to give Sage the money she needs for an abortion. So the two set off in Elle’s old car (which actually belonged to her late partner, Vi) to try to track down the money for the procedure. Another nice touch is that this film doesn’t make a big deal about abortion; Sage is a high school student who seems to have self-esteem issues and her boyfriend (Nat Wolff) isn’t exactly great father material (Elle asks him, “Why didn’t you use a condom, or for humanity’s sake get a vasectomy”), so this choice makes the most sense for Sage, the way it does for many women and girls in real life. I’ve loved Garner in other films, but here she doesn’t demonstrate much of a flair for comedy, especially in reaction shots–or maybe she doesn’t seem skilled in comparison to a master like Tomlin.

The problem is the script isn’t very funny and when it’s serious, it’s not very acutely observed. Everything this film knows about women’s studies and lesbian poets could have been cribbed from a Wikipedia page (though Weitz knows some queer women writers, and is familiar enough with the work of Eileen Myles to quote it at the very beginning of the film). Some straight men can make very good films about queer women–Show Me Love and Blue Is the Warmest Color (with some reservations) are two of my favorites. But Grandma doesn’t really go much under the surface; Elle misses Vi (who was Black–directors, when we ask for more characters of color onscreen, we don’t mean dead ones whom we see only in still photos and drawings), and had good sex with Olivia and that’s… about it. When we see Elle trying to raise money by selling her first editions of famous feminist books, one by a notorious homophobe, Betty Friedan, and another by transphobe Germaine Greer–even though we find out Elle’s friendly enough with one trans woman (Laverne Cox, majestic as always) to have lent her money–Elle doesn’t let on that she might have any objections to these authors or that she knows anyone who does (and with plenty of transphobes among some self-described feminists, especially older ones, today, this detail would be a relevant one).

Although we see artifacts of ’70s Southern California (a dream catcher and wind chimes in Elle’s home), we don’t get a sense of Elle as a person who lived in that time and subculture the way a film that was actually shot in the ’70s, the underrated, under-seen detective story The Late Show, gives us; Tomlin’s character in that film wrote affirmations on her mirror. An interesting film could be made about a character like Elle’s transition from ’60s free spirit to 2010s misanthrope (which Sage confuses with “philanthropy”), perhaps with a script by Wagner (if she’s not retired) since she did such a good job writing the transformation of feminist women and not-so-feminist men from the ’70s to the ’80s in Tomlin’s ’80s hit, one-woman, stage show The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.

As in Tangerine the straight writer-director tips his hand by making a straight white-guy supporting role the most complex and best thought-out character in the film–Sam Elliott’s, Karl, an old flame of Elle’s (who explains this relationship to Sage as, “I knew I liked women. I just didn’t like myself”)–completely avoids cliché, the only character to do so. Elle’s daughter and Sage’s mom is a cold workaholic, the type of woman we’ve see in movies before, over and over. Elle is the dirty-talking, no-filter, “surprisingly” antagonistic stereotype many older women are called on to play these days, which stretches back to Dorothy on The Golden Girls and beyond: nearly 50 years ago, when Tomlin’s Laugh-in co-star Ruth Buzzi played her most famous character, an older woman who hits men with her handbag, it was already a tired trope. When people talk about how in this supposed “golden age” of TV that premium television is “just like” film, Grandma is the type of predictable, middle-of-the-road, haphazardly written movie that they mean. My advice is to watch other films and see if they change your mind.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XspFo3jiVR8″ iv_load_policy=”3″]

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

‘Saving Face’: About Chinese American Women, Not Based on a Book By Amy Tan

Like ‘Chutney Popcorn,’ ‘Saving Face’ is one of the few films focused on queer people of color and their families. Having those two elements together might seem like a modest achievement, but ‘Pariah’ is one of the only recent films that also includes both. Mainstream movie makers apparently think queer people of color don’t have families, but instead are deposited as eggs in a sandy, warm spot by a pond until they hatch and make their way, independently, into the world.

Written by Ren Jender as part of our theme week on Asian Womanhood in Pop Culture.

During writer-director Alice Wu’s 2004 romantic comedy Saving Face one of the main women characters goes into a video store and looks at the “Chinese” shelf of DVDs: it’s The Joy Luck Club plus a whole lot of porn. In spite of East Asians making up an increasing part of the international film market (and American films increasing reliance on the rest of the world to make money at the box office), we still have hardly any mainstream films starring actresses of East Asian ancestry (or of any other Asian ancestry). Rinko Kinkuchi is a Japanese actress who has had success in Babel, Pacific Rim and most recently Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter and Lucy Liu has an established career, but we see relatively few Asian women stars in American films–and never more than one at a time.

Saving Face, which focuses on three Chinese American women (all of whom are also played by Chinese American actresses), came during what was, especially compared to more recent releases, a wave of films centered on people of color and their immigrant families (Bend It Like Beckham, The Namesake) along with some rom-com fluff which featured queer protagonists (Imagine Me and You and a litany of forgettable movies on the LGBT film festival circuit). Like Chutney Popcorn, Saving Face is one of the few films focused on queer people of color and their families. Having those two elements together might seem like a modest achievement, but Pariah is one of the only recent films that also includes both. Mainstream movie makers apparently think queer people of color don’t have families, but instead are deposited as eggs in a sandy, warm spot by a pond until they hatch and make their way, independently, into the world.

The characters of Saving Face don’t so much subvert stereotypes as present another side to them. Wil (short for Wilhelmina, played by Michelle Krusiec) is a high-achieving second-generation New York City surgical resident–who is also queer. Wil’s mother, Hwei-Lan Gao–mostly referred to as “Ma” (played by Joan Chen)–is the scolding, guilt-inducing first-generation immigrant, but also stunningly beautiful, and, at 48, pregnant and single. Wil’s girlfriend Vivian (Lynn Chen) has a career as a ballerina which, because it’s part of the classical arts, her doctor father approves of–but what she really loves is modern dance.

Even though Wil is the main character, she’s the least interesting of the three, though, refreshingly, she is one of the few women protagonists in film who wears pants and men’s cut shirts and jerseys throughout, with no “makeover” scene. We all know women, of every sexual orientation, who wear those clothes every day, but actresses in movies and TV seem to sport skirts and cleavage for every occasion. Wil also wears her long hair in a ponytail, not an unusual look for a busy medical resident, but one not usually seen on women main characters in movies even those doing jobs or activities (like fighting bad guys) that make loose, long hair impractical.

When Wil’s grandparents find out her long-widowed mother is pregnant they throw her out of their house in Flushing, Queens. The Chinese American community there also ostracize her, so, in a sitcom-like scenario she comes to live with Wil. As in most American films (Obvious Child is one of the few exceptions), even though the pregnancy is unplanned and disrupts her living situation and social standing, no one ever offers abortion as a solution, though it’s a procedure one out of three American women will have during her reproductive lifetime.

“Ma” is sad and shaken, but not enough to keep her from redecorating the apartment with a lot of red as well as blaring Chinese devotional music while she meditates. Women characters who are almost 50 hardly ever get this much complexity and screen time but giving it to a working-class (her job is at a hair salon), first-generation immigrant who is also sexy and vulnerable is unheard of. Joan Chen is so good in the role, even the queer supremacist in me wishes the film were more about her than her comparatively dull daughter.

Gorgeous, flirty Vivian is an Asian American woman we don’t often see in films, a queer, confident femme. She tells Wil she’d like to meet her mother, something that Wil at first says, will never happen. But Vivian convinces her, “Just tell her I’m a friend. A nice Chinese girl….I’ll fake it.”

We see Wu teasing Chinese American stereotypes throughout the film. When her mother is about to go an a date, trying to find a husband before the baby is born, Wil tells her to change out of the matronly black dress she’s wearing. Wil holds up another of her mother’s dresses, but her mother dismisses it, saying “Chinese people cannot wear yellow.” When Wil gives her mother a questioning look she says (in English), “On sale.” We also see anti-Black sentiment isn’t confined to white people with some of the remarks Wil’s mother makes about Wil’s Black neighbor Jay (Ato Essandoh)–and with this character we also see that an Asian-American screenwriter can use Black characters as tokens the same way white screenwriters do.

In a lot of ways the film feels like it takes place earlier than just a little over a decade ago and not just because of its landline telephones. Eleven years of queer rights legislation and legal marriage in parts of the US (now a reality in a majority of states) make queer people a lot less likely to be closeted to their own immediate families (even conservative, immigrant ones), so Wil’s behavior around her mother seems as alien to us as the time before (most) everyone had a smartphone. Later we find out that Wil isn’t closeted, that her mother knows, but is in denial. In contrast, Vivian’s mother, from the same first-generation immigrant community (but also somewhat ostracized because she’s divorced) knows that her daughter is dating Wil and doesn’t have a problem with it. She casually leaves a message on the answering machine–which the couple hear while they have sex, “Did Wil show up? Thought you may wanna talk after she leaves. Oh, maybe she’s still there? OK. Bye.”

Of course in the template for this kind of film even the most entrenched homophobia never lasts long. Nothing serious ever does: when a minor character dies, the mourning is so short-lived I expected someone to tell us the death had been a misunderstanding. The ending of Saving Face reminded me of Big Eden from 2000 where the denizens of a small town in the Montana all gather around an interracial male couple slow-dancing at the end and no one looks at them with anything less than benevolence–when at least some of these folks would probably be Ted Cruz supporters. But instant queer acceptance in small, sheltered communities might not be any more unlikely than a world where American movie executives continue to ignore the people who make up more and more of their audience.

After The Brat Pack: Ally Sheedy in ‘High Art’

Although a few who had fallen under the brat pack sobriquet (like Demi Moore) continued in mainstream star-vehicles well into the 90s (and Rob Lowe, dismissed as another pretty face in the ’80s, was able to sustain a TV career into the present), most had faded from the public view by then, including Ally Sheedy (after starring in 1987’s ‘Maid to Order,’ her own ‘Weekend At Bernie’s’) –though earlier in her career she, of the whole “Pack,” received some of the best reviews for her work. Sheedy went on to reinvent herself–and make good on her earlier promise–in a series of meaty roles in independent films in the late 90s: the most well known one (for which she won several awards) was Lucy Berliner in writer-director Lisa Cholodenko’s 1998 feature debut ‘High Art.’

This post by Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on The Brat Pack.

I was already an adult when the term “Brat Pack” was coined to refer to 1980s young actresses and actors who, in spite of being slightly older than I was, usually came to prominence playing high school kids. As the ’80s petered out. most of these actors starred in progressively crappier movies (Weekend at Bernie’s is one notorious example) and audiences became clued in to how bad these films were–and stopped showing up for them.

Although a few who had fallen under the Brat Pack sobriquet (like Demi Moore) continued in mainstream star-vehicles well into the 90s (and Rob Lowe, dismissed as another pretty face in the ’80s, was able to sustain a TV career into the present) most had faded from the public view by then, including Ally Sheedy (after starring in 1987’s Maid to Order, her own Weekend At Bernie’s) –though earlier in her career she, of the whole “Pack”, received some of the best reviews for her work. Sheedy went on to reinvent herself–and make good on her earlier promise–in a series of meaty roles in independent films in the late 90s: the most well known one (for which she won several awards) was Lucy Berliner in writer-director Lisa Cholodenko’s 1998 feature debut High Art.

Radha Mitchell’s Syd is the main character, a young, ambitious hard-worker at an arty NYC photography magazine. She tells the receptionist of her promotion (one of the many ways to tell this film was made in the 90s: she got her job after working at the magazine as an intern), “I’m not really assisting anyone. I’m an assistant editor,” but we see the male editor uses her as a glorified go-fer. Reading for work in the bath at home she feels water dripping on her from above and interrupts the constant (if subdued) 24-hour drug party going on in the apartment of her upstairs neighbor, Lucy (Sheedy) to find the source of the leak. Lucy lives with her strung-out German girlfriend Greta (Patricia Clarkson, hilariously out of it for much of the film, evoking the equally heroin-addled, famous blonde, Nico, even as she name-drops gay addict-director Rainer Werner Fassbinder). While Syd wraps duct tape around the leak she notices and compliments the framed photos all around the apartment, which are Lucy’s.

Although the style of these photos (and the ones Lucy takes later) look, to contemporary eyes, like the faux-realism of American Apparel and some Calvin Klein ads, in 1998 they seemed to reference the photographer Nan Goldin who also used elements of her own life (including drug addiction, the queer community and domestic violence) as documentary fodder for her work.

Lucy turns out to have been someone who was making a name for herself before she left town a decade before. The clueless male editor Syd reports to has no idea who she is, but his boss Dominique (Anh Duong) does, as does the hot, young male photographer of the moment working on the magazine’s upcoming cover. Through Syd Dominique enlists Lucy to do their next cover instead, even though Lucy had insisted to Syd, “I don’t really do that anymore.” Lucy makes Syd her editor.

Syd had, at first, tried to get close to Lucy for professional reasons, but she finds herself snorting heroin with Lucy, in the company of Greta and her drug friends, and, while her live-in boyfriend (Gabriel Mann) cools his heels at a party in Lucy’s living room, Syd makes out with Lucy in the bedroom. Greta rouses herself long enough to notice the attention Lucy is paying to Syd, dismissing her as a “psycho-phant.”

Sheedy herself famously had her own struggles with drugs and because of them had stopped working for a time. The monologue she has in which Lucy explains to Syd how she “fucked up” seems very real. Sheedy’s face is seemingly naked of not just of makeup but of flesh, the point of her chin and cheekbones stretching her pale skin, leaving circles under her eyes. She’s startlingly thin (not merely very slender, as she was in the mid to late 80s, which in turn was a slimming down from her more full-faced look in the early 80s) in the fashion of a lot of downtown types (and junkies): her shoulder blades under thin t-shirts and tank tops are so prominent they seem ready to sprout wings.

One of Lucy's photos of Syd — One of Lucy’s photos of Syd

Sheedy also has great chemistry not just with Mitchell (who was fresh from playing another queer woman in her native Australia in the light-to-the-point-of-complete-forgettability Love and Other Catastrophes) but also with Clarkson (in the film role where critics first took notice of her). In spite of Greta often being on the verge of nodding off, she is still luscious and playful in her black lingerie and long, blonde hair partially piled on her head, like a vintage Brigitte Bardot gone awry. The film’s treatment of women’s sexuality is a nice contrast to the lesbian-bed-death clichés (and anti-chemistry) of Julianne Moore and Annette Bening in Cholodenko’s more recent The Kids Are All Right.

Cholodenko made a couple of spot-on, very funny shorts about queer women before High Art, so I was disappointed with the “tragic lesbian” turn the film takes at the end–both when I first saw the film in 1998 and rewatching it now. In a way tragedy seems like an easy out–and rings less true than the gradual relationship burnout experienced by the main gay couple also impacted by drug addiction) in Ira Sach’s excellent, autobiographical Keep The Lights On. Substance abuse in the queer community is perhaps a more pressing issue than we think it is: I wonder about the “coincidence” of two of the most closely observed, relatively recent films about drug addiction and art both made by openly queer writer-directors. But artist careers ebb and flow for reasons that are more complicated than a drug overdose: shortly after her run as the newly crowned queen of indie films, Sheedy played the lead, then walked out of an off-Broadway production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and though she’s still around (you can follow her on Twitter @allysheedy1) she hasn’t starred in many films since.

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

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

‘Violette’: You Won’t See A Better Portrait Of Queer Women Artists This Year–Or Maybe Ever

So ‘Violette,’ a film which covers all of the 1950s (it begins in the 40s, before the end of the Nazi occupation of France during World War II and ends in 1964) is a nice change in that it focuses on not one, but two women writers who work hard over a period of years to become successful artists (both critically and financially) in their own right. The two characters come from real life: Violette Leduc (played by Emannuelle Devos, whom some will recognize as the star of Arnaud Desplechin’s films like ‘Kings and Queen’) the author of ‘La Bâtarde’ (‘The Bastard’) and Simone de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain) who wrote (among many other books) the groundbreaking feminist work ‘The Second Sex.’ In a Parisian parallel to Johnson, de Beauvoir was also the companion to Existentialist philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre.

In the memoir Minor Characters, editor and writer Joyce Johnson describes the early Beat scene in 1950s New York, when she dated Jack Kerouac. Although she and the other women on the scene are frustrated with being the “minor characters” of the title, Johnson mentions one woman, a painter, married to one of the men in the Beat social circle as being the only woman artist she knew (including Johnson herself) who took her work as seriously as a man would. Although we see plenty of evidence today of women, including women artists like Kara Walker, having the type of acclaimed careers that were not open to them in the 1950s, we rarely see that reality reflected in films. A film that focuses on an artist and that artist’s work is usually about a man, whether it’s Ed Harris in Pollock or Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote, and he usually has a supportive, encouraging woman by his side who is the main guy’s champion and cheerleader, the filmmakers not seeming to give a shit that she was an accomplished artist as well: painter Lee Krasner (played by Marcia Gay Harden) in Pollock and author Harper Lee (played by Catherine Keener) in Capote.

So Violette, a film which covers all of the 1950s (it begins in the 40s, before the end of the Nazi occupation of France during World War II and ends in 1964) is a nice change in that it focuses on not one, but two women writers who work hard over a period of years to become successful artists (both critically and financially) in their own right. The two characters come from real life: Violette Leduc (played by Emannuelle Devos, whom some will recognize as the star of Arnaud Desplechin’s films like Kings and Queen) the author of La Bâtarde (The Bastard) and Simone de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain) who wrote (among many other books) the groundbreaking feminist work The Second Sex. In a Parisian parallel to Johnson, de Beauvoir was also the companion to Existentialist philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre.

Reviews of the film led me to believe it was a portrait of a woman who is a pathetic pain in the ass who also just happens to become an acclaimed writer, but the film is more complex than the tired trope of the woman whose career is more successful than her personal life. For one thing, Leduc’s career, for much of the movie, goes nowhere. After approaching de Beauvoir as a fan and handing her the manuscript she’s been working on, Leduc’s first book comes out in a limited edition, which means no one can find it in the bookstores, so it makes hardly any money. Her next few books barely sell more. A later novel is censored; after de Beauvoir lobbies the publisher, he agrees, as a compromise, to keep the part of Leduc’s novel that describes an abortion (based on an abortion Leduc herself had when she was briefly married) but excises the passages about a sexual relationship between two schoolgirls (also based on Leduc’s early life, which was later published as Thérèse and Isabelle).

De Beauvoir’s advice to Leduc, whether she takes a brief time away from entertaining guests at her apartment or joins Leduc for dinner at a bar is always the same: “Tell it all…You’ll be doing women a favor,” even as Violette acts out every “oversensitive” artist’s worst impulses, always assuming everyone is slighting her (while ignoring all protestations and gestures to the contrary), moaning that no one really cares about her and writing about herself that “Ugliness in a woman is a mortal sin.”

Male critics have, in the context of the film, commented on Devos’ “striking, broad features,” but I wish everyone, especially men, would agree to some sort of moratorium on discussing an actress’s attractiveness. Because no one asks, “Brendan Gleeson: hot or not?” With her hourglass figure (few women look better in a plain white slip), and Betty Grable hair, Devos, as Leduc, is as attractive, and, with her 40s-style high heels, royal blue coat, and matching scarf, as glamorous, as she was as the love-object who should’ve been charged with manslaughter in Kings and Queen. Photos of the younger real-life Leduc show she was not “ugly” either: labeling herself that way was just another instance of her periodic self-loathing. We’re so used to seeing in films beautiful actresses with messy hair or toned-down makeup pretending they don’t still look great, the movie was half over before I realized that the filmmakers (director Martin Provost wrote the script with Marc Abdelnour and René de Ceccatty) didn’t buy into Leduc’s description of herself either.

As happens with a lot of temperamental people, whether they are artists or not, Leduc’s emotional outbursts, though they are rooted in her own despair, end up working to her advantage. After Violette has a fit about being cast as the mother in his amateur film, a rich “collector” friend offers her a generous advance for her next manuscript. After she rants about not being able to support herself with her writing, de Beauvoir arranges for her to receive a stipend while she works.

Leduc falls in the same sort of obsessive, unrequited, desperate love with de Beauvoir that we see her demonstrate for her gay male companion at the beginning of the film (she’s attracted to his queerness, but he remains unmoved by hers). We get a reference to the novel de Beauvoir wrote about a ménage à trois of two women with a man, but while the film name-checks her male lovers, Sartre and American novelist Nelson Algren, nothing else in the film informs us that the bisexual de Beauvoir also had sex with women–though she never has an affair with Leduc, and keeps her at a chilly arms-length for much of the film. But saying the two women don’t have a relationship is wrong.

From their very first, brisk, business-like meeting about the manuscript Leduc has handed to de Beauvoir, de Beauvoir never ceases to encourage Leduc in her writing, suggesting improvements (like cutting out the character based on the gay guy Leduc was obsessed with) and encouraging her to explore themes taken from her own life in her next work. De Beauvoir, while not maternal with Leduc (like Leduc, de Beauvoir is not eager to play “the mother”) is the ideal mentor, perhaps because as one of the only women in her social circle of post-war writers and intellectuals, she was tired of being “one of the boys.” De Beauvoir is Leduc’s champion with publishers and is not above using her own fame to prop up Leduc’s. And she is, in her way, always on Leduc’s side. During a very bad period in Leduc’s life, de Beauvoir appears at her bedside, holding up a newspaper with a laudatory review of Leduc’s latest novel for her to see. De Beauvoir even, at one point, suggests to Leduc that she travel, which, in a roundabout way, leads to the peace Leduc finds at the end of the film. Throughout the decades de Beauvoir tells a disbelieving, depressed Leduc, “Screaming and sobbing will get you nowhere. Writing will.” By the end of the film not only do we see de Beauvoir was right, but more importantly, we see that Violette knows it too.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzhp2PCOWfI”]

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