films about women – Page 2

‘Obvious Child’: Allowing Women To Be Funny

Women in comedy are often held to a double standard that’s rarely talked about, even in the tiresome and wrongheaded “Are Women Funny?” debates. A better question might be “Are women allowed to be funny?” Because while male comedians famously defend their right to make jokes about any topic they want to women who draw on their own outrage, experience and even their own bodies receive an extra layer of censorship.

Women in comedy are often held to a double standard that’s rarely talked about, even in the tiresome and wrongheaded “Are Women Funny?” debates. A better question might be, “Are women allowed to be funny?” Because while male comedians famously defend their right to make jokes about any topic they want to, women who draw on their own outrage, experience and even their own bodies receive an extra layer of censorship. Elayne Boosler, a comedian popular in the 80s, talked about asking the powers that be why she hadn’t yet gotten her own cable comedy special. The executives told her that featuring her in a special of her own was out of the question, because she touched her breasts during her act. When she watched the specials of other comedians popular at the time, like those of Robin Williams she said, “I realized I had my hands on the wrong thing.”

Later when Sarah Silverman was with Saturday Night Live, she wrote in response to legislation that required abortion waiting periods: “I think it’s a good law. The other day I wanted to go get an abortion. I really wanted an abortion, but then I thought about it and it turned out I was just thirsty.” Even though SNL, then as always, was in dire need of lines that actually make people laugh, she wasn’t allowed to include it. She made it part of her stand-up act instead.

The protagonist of writer-director Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child, an aspiring stand-up comedian in Brooklyn named Donna (Saturday Night Live’s Jenny Slate) starts out the film doing a routine that breaks the taboo about women speaking about their own body parts and functions (which leads to a great payoff scene later in the film) as well as making fun of her relationship with her current boyfriend. After she comes offstage, triumphant, her boyfriend informs her he’s dumping her: he and her best friend have been having an affair and want to get together. Instantly Donna is reduced to a pile of tears and insecurity, soothed at home by her level-headed, caring roommate, Nellie (Gaby Hoffmann).

SlateObviousChild — Jenny Slate as Donna

One night, still vulnerable, Donna gets drunk with her gay comedian friend Joey (Gabe Liedman) after she bombs onstage and meets Max (Jake Lacy), a blue-eyed computer nerd, who is dazzled by her. Although the trailer often shows Slate in unflattering hats and poses, we can see why Max is drawn to her: even though she’s still an emotional mess, she looks great (while not at all resembling most kewpie-doll model-actresses) with her long, dark, hair loose, wearing a tight sleeveless t-shirt, and, after she embarrasses herself onstage, has a fun, nothing-left-to-lose affect. He gets drunk with her and they end up having a one-night stand (after raucously stumble-dancing in his apartment to Paul Simon’s title song).

Weeks pass and a casual remark from her roommate causes Donna to think that she might be pregnant. She tells Nellie of her drunken encounter with Max, “I remember seeing a condom. I just don’t know…what exactly it did.” After a pregnancy test confirms her suspicions, she schedules an abortion at a clinic.

Here Obvious Child also veers away from other films, which sometimes mention abortion as an option for unplanned pregnancy, but make sure it’s never something nice girls, like Juno, the Michelle Williams character in Blue Valentine, or the character Katherine Heigl played in Knocked Up ever go through with–even though, in real life, 30 percent of women in the U.S. opt to have an abortion during their reproductive lifetimes. In keeping with that reality, Nellie has had an abortion (when she was much younger) and tells Donna what to expect.

In the middle of this crisis, Max reappears and he and Donna still have a spark between them, but she’s reluctant to go out with him because she doesn’t want to tell him about the abortion–and risk his disapproval. During a wine-fueled dinner Nellie, Joey, and Donna debate what she should do. Nellie offers a spirited defense that the abortion is none of Max’s business, after which Joey tells her he agrees with her but adds, “You’re scaring the dick off me right now.”

As interviews and other reviews have mentioned, no one in Obvious Child is anti-choice, again a nice respite from other movies, but this film, which hews so closely to the romantic comedy formula in most ways (except in its attitude to abortion), could use some tension. Everyone, even Donna’s business professor mother (Thirtysomething’s Polly Draper), who disapproves of Donna’s unremunerated comedy career, supports Donna wholeheartedly in her decision to abort, so the stretching of this film from its origins as a short begins to show. Max, in particular, could use some fleshing out, but instead with his big, clear eyes and irreproachable behavior at every turn he’s more like a fantasy of the perfect man than a character.

Where Obvious Child succeeds is in letting women be funny, not in the faux-humor of humiliation that too many comedic actresses in movies are subjected to these days, but in actual laugh-out-loud funny lines and situations (most of which are woven deeply into the context of the movie, so they don’t make it into the trailer) that reminded me, in spirit if not in content, of Roseanne Barr during her 80s heyday (before her current incarnation as an unfunny, anti-trans crank). Slate is wonderful as Donna (the role she also played in the short) and pulls off a late laugh line about the abortion (yes, there is one) with aplomb. Former child star Hoffmann who radiates no-nonsense kindness and compassion makes us wish more movies featured her. And Lacy, although he isn’t given much to do, is a believable Max and has a nice chemistry with Slate.

HoffmannSlateObviousChild — Nellie and Donna

My main quibble with this film is one that many of us bring up repeatedly with similar works, but it still doesn’t seem to ever be addressed. In a film that takes place in Brooklyn, the only person of color who has a name is Donna’s Asian American gynecologist. The only Black people we see are, first, a woman with no lines who crosses a street (really) and, second, a comedian onstage who talks about his father being a crack addict. In a film that rights so many wrongs about gender-stereotyping a lot of us would like (and, at this point, expect) a cast that better reflects racial as well as gender (and sexual orientation) diversity especially when that film takes place in Brooklyn. Hoffmann is actually part Latina (her father’s last name was Herrera), but we never get any hint that her character is less than 100 percent white.

Geena Davis recently wrote that screenwriters could automatically achieve gender parity in scripts simply by making half of the characters women, and the writers of Obvious Child (along with Robespierre, Karen Maine, Elisabeth Holm and Anna Bean) could have done something similar with this script to make it less white: Nellie could easily have been made a Latina (instead of just played by a part Latina actress), Joey could have been played by a Black actor (a Black comedian from Brooklyn is not terribly unusual). Hoffmann even could have played the lead with a Latino actor cast as Donna’s father instead of Richard Kind: although in many ways, Slate is the incarnation of Donna, Hoffman and Draper would make a more believable daughter and mother, both physically and temperamentally.

Yes, women should support Obvious Child when it opens in theaters this coming weekend, but as more filmmakers attempt to expand the limits imposed on white women in film and on television, we (critics and audiences) need to continue to put pressure on them to provide roles for others who have traditionally been ignored or stereotyped. White people shouldn’t be the only people we see as fully formed characters onscreen, any more than white men should be.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cabI_CzXGD4&feature=kp”]

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

‘Wish You Were Here’: Sex and Obscenities by the English Seaside

In the words for women that have no male equivalent–like “bitchy,” “slut,” and “hag”–we can easily discern sexism, but we can also see it in words and phrases that mean something different when applied to men than when applied to women–or when applied to boys rather than girls. A boy who is “acting out” is often a euphemism for a boy who is physically threatening or harming others or (less likely) himself. A girl, especially an adolescent girl, who is said to be “acting out” is sometimes harming herself (and even more rarely harming others), but is more likely behaving in ways that, in a bygone era, would have been called “unladylike” (when no one ever used the word “ungentlemanlike”). She’s loud; she’s crude; she’s inconsiderate–all things girls and even adult women are rarely allowed to be. When she is seeking out her own pleasure she is “acting out sexually,” another phrase with no male equivalent.

This post by Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.

In the words for women that have no male equivalent–like “bitchy,” “slut” and “hag”–we can easily discern sexism, but we can also see it in words and phrases that mean something different when applied to men than when applied to women–or when applied to boys rather than girls. A boy who is “acting out” is often a euphemism for a boy who is physically threatening or harming others or (less likely) himself. A girl, especially an adolescent girl, who is said to be “acting out” is sometimes harming herself (and even more rarely harming others), but is more likely behaving in ways that, in a bygone era, would have been called “unladylike” (when no one ever used the word “ungentlemanlike”). She’s loud; she’s crude; she’s inconsiderate–all things girls and even adult women are rarely allowed to be. When she is seeking out her own pleasure she is “acting out sexually,” another phrase with no male equivalent.

Emily Lloyd’s Lynda, the main character of 1987’s Wish You Were Here is a textbook example of a girl (Lloyd, like her character, was 16) “acting out” in every way in a sleepy, English seaside resort town. The film is set in the early 1950s, and though the town has a postwar patina contemporary audiences have enough distance from to find picturesque, the sun barely breaks through the clouds over grey sea walls and piers, and the salty wind from the ocean has faded all the building signs. Wide shots show the dinky dance hall and rollerskating rink even at their busiest, are never really full. Against this backdrop Lynda rides her bike, has a penchant for colorful language (or the 50s British version of it: her favorite phrase is “up yer bum”) and likes to show off her underwear to boys her age–and to men.

She can barely wait to lose her virginity, making out with a boy in full view of an older man who threatens to tell Lynda’s stern father, a World War II veteran, hairdresser and “Freemason.” We can see Lynda become disenchanted with the boy when he runs scared. She wants someone who has as little use for propriety as she does.

She seems to find a good match in the young bus conductor, Dave (Jesse Birdsall), who takes her dancing and then to his grandmother’s house–empty while she is away. Lynda waits for him in bed, and he comes out of the bathroom in bright yellow pajamas and smoking a cigarette with a holder. He asks,”Do you fancy me?”

She laughs, “Not half as much as you fancy yourself.” Because it’s the early 50s Lynda has no knowledge of birth control and doesn’t even know what condoms are (or how they work) until her boyfriend informs her that he’s wearing one. We see both Lynda’s and Dave’s faces as they have sex, a study in why the sexual revolution and feminism couldn’t happen soon enough: Lynda, at first wide-eyed and then unimpressed at how quickly it’s over, and Dave pumping, straining and sweating but not really paying much attention to how much pleasure Lynda is getting out of it. But Lynda, taking another condom out of the package, tells him that they have all night to practice.

In the morning Dave’s uncle comes by for an unexpected visit, grilling Dave (“I heard you brought a girl here”) while Lynda hides under the bed, stifling laughter as she watches the man’s dog snatch a used condom from the floor. When the uncle leaves they watch from the window as he discovers what the dog has in its mouth–and he sees the two of them looking down at him. In the small town where everyone knows each other and each other’s business, the uncle informs her father–who then warns off the boyfriend for good.

Lynda’s father takes her to a psychiatrist, for whom Lynda proves a challenge. When he asks her to recite every obscenity she knows going through each letter in the alphabet, she pretends she’s stumped at “f” as he becomes increasingly impatient. Her father, wary of the expense, doesn’t schedule her for any more visits. Lynda’s encounter with psychiatry and the powers that be could have been a lot worse: “promiscuity” was a condition that could get young women committed to mental hospitals in those days, or, just across the water in Ireland, to lifetimes of unpaid labor.

From the earliest parts of the film we notice the bookie friend of Lynda’s father Eric (Tom Bell) looking at Lynda. Lynda refers to him as “Long John Silver” because of his lopsided (perhaps war-injured) gait: he is a tall, hatchet-faced, rail-thin, middle-aged man in a suit. One day he asks to come into the house even though her father is out, and while they are alone in the parlor, he mocks her, tells her she’s all talk and gets ever closer until he works his hand into her underpants–and we see her eyes grow wide again. She doesn’t say yes and she doesn’t say no, but she also doesn’t try to get away from his touch. When they are interrupted (but not caught) he whispers to her to meet him in the backyard later that night.

At first she’s determined not to go, but she’s starved for attention and affection; her boyfriend is with someone new, her mother is dead and her father, absent for much of the war, barely knows her. In spite of Lynda’s modern attitudes to sex and swearing, she’s a creature of her time (and of the movies she goes to see) when she asks Eric if he loves her. He tells her no, and also confirms that her father wants to be rid of her. She stays anyway.

Lynda is given to telling off (or showing up) the stodgy, older, often hypocritical people around her, and in some of those scenes we can see how, a decade early, other people in small-town England are primed for the rebellion of the sixties: the tea room waitresses in their black-and-white-uniforms (along with a 60 -or 70-something woman pianist) applaud her outburst, and, after Lynda causes a commotion at the bus company where her father has arranged for her to work, the other workers boo when the boss tells her she’s fired–and cheer when he tells them that they’re fired too.

Lynda’s tirades (like the song “Take This Job And Shove It”) are the sort most people fantasize about but never actually follow through with. But unlike in fantasies we see the aftermath, where Lynda is staring out her bedroom window in the dark or crying over tea, distraught. She’s in the wrong time as well as the wrong town, so her victories over the hypocrites around her are Pyrrhic ones, and we see her actions have consequences.

Her father catches her coming back from sex with Eric in the backyard shed and tells her that she can’t continue to behave this way because he’s “respectable.” His concern has nothing to do with her own well-being but with her reflection on him. He does not think to confront his friend about the affair. When his daughter asks about his own sexual relationship with a woman he brings to the house, he says, as if he need give no further explanation, “I’m a man.”

Lynda leaves home and tries to move in with Eric in his room above the movie house, but Eric is no comfort to her, taking off her clothes on the unmade bed that takes up most of the space as she sobs about her confrontation with her father. Later she informs Eric she’s pregnant, and following the lead of shitty men throughout history, he asks, “How do you know it’s mine?” Lynda, instead of being hurt, the way we expect women in movies to be, parries right back, “If it walks with a limp and thinks with its prick, I’ll know it’s yours!” Lloyd is fantastic in this scene as she is in the rest of the film. The script by director David Leland was the perfect vehicle for his young star who is alternately hilariously rude and vulnerable, an unusual mixture for a woman or girl character in films, TV or literature even today.

Lynda, at the end, has a kind of triumph over the town’s insularity (and the woman on whom the story was originally based went on to become a famous madam) but after a few high profile projects (and even more high-profile firings) Lloyd’s career shrank to very occasional, very small roles. The film industry continues to not have much tolerance for women and girls who “act out” in real life no matter how talented they are.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJY1Koru_Fs”]

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

‘Under The Skin’ of the Femme Fatale

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

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

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

JohanssonCompactSkin — Johansson’s alien on the prowl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carmen Maura: Pedro Almodóvar’s Essential Star

Writer-director Pedro Almodóvar was able to ride the wave of art house popularity starting in the 80s when theaters were more likely to program subtitled films. He came to prominence in no small part because of his star, Carmen Maura who first gained the attention of U.S. audiences in ‘Law of Desire,’ Almodóvar’s 1987 film, as Tina, the transsexual actress who is the sister of the main character, the gay director Pablo (Eusebio Poncela).

This post by Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on The Great Actresses.

I skipped this year’s Oscars for many reasons, not the least of which were the nominees in the “Best Actress” category. Amy Adams and Sandra Bullock are perfectly acceptable screen presences, but no acting either has done could compare to the intensity and range of the performances non-nominees Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux gave in Blue Is The Warmest Color. The Academy Awards take place in the U.S. and usually honor U.S. films, but Marion Cotillard won for the French film La Vie en Rose, in 2008—which insiders credit to skillful studio lobbying, Cotillard’s charm with Academy voters and the fact that even the most mediocre film biographies can win Oscars for its stars. In 1962 Sophia Loren won for the Italian film Two Women, but in that era the film-going public were more used to having to read subtitles to take in a decent movie. Art houses today are more likely to fill their bills with U.S. “independent” fluff like The Grand Budapest Hotel which, in spite of featuring Tilda Swinton and playing once an hour on the hour at two separate movie theaters in my city right now, I have no desire to see.

Writer-director Pedro Almodóvar was able to ride the wave of art house popularity starting in the 80s when theaters were more likely to program subtitled films. He came to prominence in no small part because of his star, Carmen Maura who first gained the attention of U.S. audiences in Law of Desire, Almodóvar’s 1987 film, as Tina, the transsexual actress who is the sister of the main character, the gay director, Pablo (Eusebio Poncela).

Tina and her brother in Law of Desire — Tina and her brother in *Law of Desire*

Maura is electrifying in all of her scenes (including toward the end with a very young Antonio Banderas). With her tight, bright, short dresses, red permed hair and long earrings, her hands held up for balance as she minces in her high heels, Tina could easily devolve into caricature, especially with the convoluted history Almodovar gives her. Tina had an affair with her own father pre-transition leading to her parents’ divorce–and later she had gender reassignment surgery at her father/lover’s urging. Maura’s Tina can be outrageous: in one famous scene she convinces a municipal worker with a street cleaning hose to soak her whole body and writhes in ecstasy under the forceful blast of water. But Tina is allowed to have poignant moments as well. While she is playing the lead in Jean Cocteau’s play The Human Voice (her brother is the director), her lover, a woman (played by trans actress Bibí Andersen, later known as Bibiana Fernández) looks on from the wings, preparing to leave Tina for a man. When the lover is ready to turn away, Tina says “Wait,” and both in character and as herself recites part of the play’s monologue directly to her lover, trying to convince her not to go. “That would be cruel,” she says, “And you have never been cruel.” The lover leaves anyway.

Tina’s bond with her brother is also believable and touching: the many twists of the plot (an Almodóvar specialty) wouldn’t work if the audience weren’t convinced the two genuinely care for one another. When her brother is in the hospital with temporary amnesia after a car accident she tells him the story of their family: their mother is dead, their father left Tina years before.”You’re everything to me,” she says to Pablo, and even though her brother still has no memory he asks for a hug (since he’s too injured to do so himself). Toward the end of the film when Pablo has regained his memory he puts himself in danger to save his sister, and we can’t help thinking that if one of them has to die, we’d miss Pablo a lot less than we’d miss Tina.

Maura also carried Almodóvar’s next film: the breakthrough American hit, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in which she played the protagonist, Pepa, a woman who lives in a penthouse that looks like it came from the Marilyn Monroe, Betty Grable, Lauren Bacall vehicle How To Marry a Millionaire. Like the main character in The Human Voice, Pepa is trying to talk to her lover on the phone, but the (circa 1988) technology keeps getting in her way, as she leaves message after message for her lover and waits in vain for him to call back (and repeatedly abuses her phone in retaliation for his silence). Unlike the main character in the solo Human Voice, Pepa’s life is constantly traversed by others: her lover’s grown son (Banderas again), a naive friend who was the unwitting host of a gang of Shiite terrorists, the lover’s vengeful ex-wife (also his son’s mother) and even a gazpacho-loving, hard-to-please young woman (played by another of Almodóvar’s film regulars, Rossy de Palma) who wants to rent Pepa’s apartment.

I saw Verge when it first came out and remember being disappointed, perhaps because the film had zero queer content (unlike Law of Desire, which had hardly any straight characters) or because the film seemed much more conventional than Law. Part of the pleasure of Almodóvar’s films is his trademark absurdity, usually midway between the sensibilities of the other out gay directors popular when he started his career, Rainer Werner Fassbinder in Germany and a pre-Broadway-musical John Waters in the U.S.: Almodóvar at times matched the tragedy of the former’s work and the camp of the latter’s. In 1988 Verge struck me as having too little of either, but seeing it now, I have a new appreciation for the film–and for Maura’s performance in the lead. Pepa might wear high heels, 80s-style high “fashion” and carry an assortment of colorful shopping bags, like Tina, but she would never ask to be hosed down, she just wants to be listened to. And when she realizes her lover has no intention of doing so, in spite of her increasingly desperate messages, she knows she’s better off alone. In a scene near the end, perfectly played by Maura, Pepa tells him that she would have taken him back a day before or even earlier that day, but not at the moment–and never again in their lives. Her resolve will be familiar to any of us who have cried and humiliated ourselves over lovers and then made the decision to finally stop.

After Verge, Maura and Almodóvar had a falling out and didn’t work together for nearly twenty years. In many of the films Almodóvar made during that time, especially those that were part of his 90s resurgence, he still seemed to be writing roles for Maura: the author in The Flower of My Secret, the cop’s wife in Live Flesh, the actress in All About My Mother. In 2006’s Volver (which translates as “Returning”), Maura played the “ghost” mother, Irene, who “returns” to her two grown daughters (including Penelope Cruz’s Raimunda) four years after her “death.” The mother wears house dresses and knee highs but, as the earlier characters Maura played might have, makes one of her first requests that her hairdresser daughter cut, style and color her long, straggly, grey hair.

Carmen Maura in Volver — Carmen Maura in *Volver*

As usual in an Almodóvar film, in Volver men do great wrongs to the women in their lives, (Almodóvar does not usually talk about his romantic relationships with men, but one can infer from his films that many of them have not gone well), so women have to rely on each other for emotional sustenance. As in Law Maura plays the scenes with her family with heart-breaking conviction. When her granddaughter asks her why she has returned she answers, “Because I was lonely.” When Maura and Cruz’s characters cry, on separate occasions, in discovery of the other, four years older than at their previous meeting and later reconcile, the scenes have the emotional resonance of the reunion of two long-lost lovers–or of a great writer-director and the equally great actress for whom his films seem custom-made.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L2AJmNoUgo”]

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

Cute Old Ladies Who Talk Dirty in ‘Nebraska’ and ‘Philomena’

But Payne doesn’t seem to give much thought to Kate’s situation. In all but one scene Kate is called on to be testy and not much else. Even though we laugh as she chirps the cause of death of a late, but not lamented relative and we feel satisfied when she cusses out greedy members of Woody’s family, the character is more of an exclamation point than a person.

The women in the films of writer/director Alexander Payne are a mixed bag. I enjoyed his early film, Citizen Ruth but the contempt he seemed to have for most of the women characters seeped into–and made me hesitate to laugh at–the movie’s comedy. I hated Election in spite of a pre-stardom Reese Witherspoon in the lead and the cool, teenaged lesbian character in a prominent supporting role: what some other critics have called misanthropy in Payne’s body of work seemed to me more like misogyny.

I skipped About Schmidt because Jack Nicholson and Alexander Payne didn’t seem like a woman-friendly combination, a hunch confirmed when even male critics used the m-word to describe the film. I thought I’d also avoid Sideways with its manchild protagonist, but when I saw the movie, late in its run, I loved it: the same care had gone into developing the Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh characters as Payne had put into creating the roles played by Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church. Payne’s next film, The Descendants had a comatose, unfaithful “bad” mother at its crux but also showed her willful, smart-mouthed daughters (Shailene Woodley played the older of the two) at their most vulnerable. So I went into Nebraska, nominated for a slew of Oscars including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Best Director, hopeful but cautious. But in this film Payne seems to be going not sideways, but backwards.

Will Forte and Bruce Dern in 'Nebraska' — Will Forte and Bruce Dern in *Nebraska*

The film’s focus is on the relationship between two men: addled, alcoholic Woody (Bruce Dern, nominated for Best Actor) and his son David (Will Forte, who many know from his days on Saturday Night Live). David ends up taking his father on a quixotic road trip to collect the money Woody mistakenly and stubbornly believes he’s won through a letter from a company that is very much like Publishers’ Clearing House. We see many scenes that demonstrate the challenge Woody’s drinking and encroaching dementia are for his son (who seems to be around 40 and able-bodied), but David never considers that the trip might be a chance for his own mother to have a break from being Woody’s sole caretaker. Instead, David repeatedly says he agreed to drive his father over two states because the trip might be the last chance for the two of them to spend some time together.

June Squibb plays Woody’s wife and David’s mother, Kate, and is the film’s nominee for Best Supporting Actress (she also played Jack Nicholson’s wife in About Schmidt). She has the kind of face that moviegoers are used to seeing everywhere but onscreen: an 80-something woman who doesn’t appear to have undergone any plastic surgery and doesn’t look like she’s just come from a session with a team of makeup artists and hair colorists.

Anyone who has known an older woman left alone to take care of a husband in declining health will recognize the exasperated tone and facial expression Kate uses whenever she speaks to Woody. David, in contrast, is unfailingly patient and calm, like a cross between a therapist and Mr. Rogers, when he talks to his taciturn and pigheaded father, perhaps because he knows when the trip is over, his father’s care will go back to being Kate’s responsibility and will remain so until he dies–or she does.

We can see that Kate, direct and bereft of tact, is supposed to be a refreshing change from the smiling, always forgiving grandmothers of yore, but seeing her yell and swear reminds me of every role Betty White has played in recent years, the same role that goes to many other actresses once they hit 65. Dern’s character is also often angry and uses crude language, but as limited as his character is we do see other aspects of him, both in Dern’s performance and in exposition from the other characters. So much of our time and focus goes to this character, we think that his opaque and maddening surface will crack so that he can can finally show some affection and gratitude toward his son or to his old girlfriend whom his son encounters in the town where he was raised, but Woody remains selfish, irascible and without redeeming qualities to the end.

A better and more interesting movie would have included more about Kate. In spite of the women all around us who take care of men when they get old and sick (even though these women are often not young themselves) we very rarely see movies about a woman who is a caretaker: off the top of my head the only film I can think of is Marvin’s Room. But Payne doesn’t seem to give much thought to Kate’s situation. In all but one scene, Kate is called on to be testy and not much else. Even though we laugh as she chirps the cause of death of a late, but not lamented, relative and we feel satisfied when she cusses out greedy members of Woody’s family, the character is more of an exclamation point than a person.

That we, in the audience, aren’t as sick of the Grandma Who Talks Dirty trope as we are of the Magical Negro or the Sassy Gay Best Friend shows that the culture either isn’t paying attention or doesn’t care how older women are portrayed. Philomena is another Oscar-nominated film (for Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Score) which features an older woman, and it left me frustrated for slightly different reasons.

Although Philomena is based on a true story about the title character (Best Actress nominee Judi Dench), it’s equally about the journalist, Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan), who helps in her search for the son who was taken from her (sold to American “adoptive” parents) when she was a young, single mother. Philomena Lee was sent to a Magdalen laundry (run by the Catholic Church but also supported by the Irish state) to have her baby and afterward forced, along with many other girl and women “sinners”, to work washing clothes for years afterward with no pay–a part of Irish history which receives a more detailed treatment in 2002’s The Magdalene Sisters.

I understand why the film makes Sixsmith an equal player in the story (the film is, after all, based on his book and was brought to the screen by Coogan), and the culture clash between romance-reading Philomena and Oxford-educated Martin is mildly entertaining, but this film reminded me a little too much of films from the 1980s like Mississippi Burning and Cry Freedom, in which stories about Black people were told through a white-guy main character and savior. I had the feeling if Sixsmith’s character had taken his rightful place as a background figure no producer would have put up the money for this film.

In Philomena, we again have an older woman with a surprising vocabulary: I guess I should be grateful that a mainstream movie features a lead actress (especially one of Judi Dench’s stature) saying the word “clitoris,” but I wish the scene weren’t played for a cheap laugh. Philomena Lee embodies contradictions that many of us have seen in our own families: women who remain devoted to the Catholic Church after years of being mistreated by it (with the people now around them pointing out that mistreatment), whose ideals are also more liberal than the church’s dogma.

I wanted to see more of the women I knew in Dench’s performance, but she’s miscast. She doesn’t sound any more Irish than…Judi Dench (and though some Irish people of Lee’s generation who moved to England made sure to lose their brogues–Lee wasn’t one of them–they didn’t then adopt Dench’s Received Pronunciation). Dench doesn’t speak in the same rhythm as someone from Ireland, or even as someone whose parents are from Ireland (though Dench’s mother was Irish). So Dench’s portrayal of Lee’s faith and forgiveness also fall flat. I have not seen any other review that notices how wrong Dench (as great as she has been in other roles) is for this part, the same way straight critics never seem to notice when two women playing lovers in a film have zero chemistry together. We’re supposed to be sated by seeing these women characters in a film at all. We aren’t supposed to want older women in films to do what they do in our lives outside movie theaters: to charm us, to move us, to sustain us.

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