films directed by women

Rewritten History: Affecting in ‘Brooklyn’, Not So Much in ‘Suffragette’

I was surprised at how enjoyable and skillfully made ‘Brooklyn’ is: I cried when everyone else did and gasped when the rest of the audience did too, but in spite of its excellent art direction and affecting performances the film is mostly hokum. New York in the 1950s is a place where no one the main character hangs out with smokes (when all of the men and the majority of women were smokers). Most of the characters barely drink (just one glass at Christmas) and, except for a child’s brief outburst at a family dinner table, (“I should say that we don’t like Irish people”) none of its white, working-class, ethnic characters have any problem with any other ethnic group.

I’m never enamored of the cleaned-up, ambiguity-free nostalgia that movies, especially mainstream ones, serve to their audiences in the guise of “history” so I avoided John Crowley’s Brooklyn (written by Nick Hornby from the novel by Colm Tóibín) about an Irish immigrant, Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) in the US. The Irish have been romanticized in films as early as The Quiet Man (a new release when the film takes place) and romanticized among Irish Americans for as long as the Irish have been coming to the US. But when Brooklyn began raking in awards (especially for Ronan) I decided to see it.

I was surprised at how enjoyable and skillfully made Brooklyn is: I cried when everyone else did and gasped when the rest of the audience did too, but in spite of its excellent art direction and affecting performances the film is mostly hokum. New York in the 1950s is a place where no one the main character hangs out with smokes (when all of the men and the majority of women were smokers). Most of the characters barely drink (just one glass at Christmas) and, except for a child’s brief outburst at a family dinner table, (“I should say that we don’t like Irish people”) none of its white, working-class, ethnic characters have any problem with any other ethnic group. In the actual 1950s, my mother, just a few years younger than Eilis is in the film, lived in an Irish American neighborhood in Boston, much like the one the film shows in New York and wasn’t allowed to date Italian boys because, her father explained, “They beat their women.” We never find out what the main characters in Brooklyn think of Jewish people (since the church still taught then that the Jews killed Christ, that opinion probably wasn’t favorable) because none of them encounter any, even though plenty of Jewish people lived in Brooklyn in the 1950s. And Black people in this film are at the farthest periphery: two women in a crowd crossing a street and a Black couple is shown on the beach at Coney Island.

Eilis’s family in small-town Ireland is prosperous enough that her sister works as a bookkeeper and they live with their mother in a decent house, but Eilis immigrates anyway to a sales clerk job, arranged by a kindly priest (Jim Broadbent), at a department store in New York. In other words, she’s the kind of immigrant even the Republican party of today would like: white and “respectable.” She’s not the kind who comes to the country without papers, or has to learn English, scrub floors or work as a nanny and she doesn’t have an impoverished family in her home country to worry about. When being well-cared-for in her new home becomes too much for Eilis, her suddenly sympathetic boss (Jessica Paré) has the priest swoop into the store break room and tell Eilis he’s signed her up for bookkeeping classes at Brooklyn College. He tells her, “Homesickness is like most sicknesses. It will pass.”

Priests in the US at the time took collection money from their parishioners and gave them very little in return so to have one dole out college tuition after arranging a sales clerk job seems far-fetched, and for the recipient of both favors to be a young “marriageable” woman the priest barely knows seems like something from a parallel universe. For women in the 1950s, especially those in the working class (even ambitious ones like Eilis) the endgame was marriage, not a career. “Real” men (especially working-class ones) didn’t let their wives work outside the home (unless the family was poor), but Eilis’s middle-class, Italian-American, plumber boyfriend (Emory Cohen, a standout in a very good cast) walks her home from her night classes and loves hearing about her studies. His parents and his brothers seem equally charmed instead of exchanging nervous glances and asking, “You’re not a career girl, are you?” The only way a daughter-in-law in that type of family in the 1950s could work would be in her husband’s business — and even then she probably wouldn’t be given a salary for the first decade or so.

What priests did then (and for decades afterward) was browbeat women for working when they had children at home: if they encouraged women to go to college, the goal was for the women to find husbands there and never work outside the home again. If their husbands then beat or neglected them, the priests told the women they must be at fault (this mindset was a secular one at the time too) and they must never, ever get divorced. At the boarding house where Eilis lives she talks about marriage with a woman whose husband has left her for “someone else.” We never have a clue, in all of Eilis’s longing for her old hometown that a woman in that same situation wouldn’t be able to get divorced in Ireland until the very last part of the 20th century, a detail that a woman screenwriter or director probably wouldn’t leave out.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15syDwC000k” iv_load_policy=”3″]

Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette (with a screenplay by Abi Morgan) is another film I put off watching, because even with its creaky plot device of seeing historical events through the eyes of a fictional “composite” character the film apparently still managed to leave women of color out of the fight for British women’s suffrage as well as omitting another integral element, the queerness of some of the most famous suffragettes.

The film isn’t as bad as I feared it might be (or perhaps it just looked good compared to the film I saw just before it: The Danish Girl) but its problems are not just because it’s about white, straight women. Carey Mulligan does what she can with the lead role, Maud, who works at the laundry and is radicalized by a coworker–and by witnessing police beating up “Votes for Women” protesters. The film could do a much better job of integrating present-day concerns with what happened to “radicals” then, with its scenes of not just police brutality and political groups using bombs and violence as a means to bring about change, but the treatment of political prisoners and the force-feeding of hunger-strikers.

We see Helena Bonham Carter in another old-fashioned role: the audience/main character’s guide to the movement but we don’t see what we do in Brooklyn’s portrait of the women in the boarding house: the sense of the group of women as a clique, a cornerstone of the women’s suffrage movement which needs to exist in any radical political movement. If a woman’s family and old friends think her ideals are anathema, she needs to find peers who share those ideals and who will be her new friends — and new family. Except for a few, not very compelling scenes, we don’t get the sense of Maud as part of a group that supports her, just that she’s an outcast from her old life. The film contains very little we haven’t seen before and what’s new in it is allowed onscreen only very briefly: like the idea that Maud, who has worked most of her life including her childhood, would find motherhood her first opportunity to engage in play.

The film instead becomes a guessing game of what horrible thing can happen to Maud next. Suffragette has the chance to contain more dramatic tension when a police captain asks her to be an informant in exchange for dropping charges (another situation with present day parallels). He tells his men, “We’ve identified weaknesses in their ranks. We’re hoping one of them will break.”

But instead of considering the offer or pretending to inform while acting as a double-agent, Maud just writes an impassioned letter to him about the righteousness of her cause. In the end, Maud is just as dull and unimaginative as the film is, which is a shame, because the real-life figures in this fight were never boring.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=056FI2Pq9RY” 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

A Tinge of Melancholy Saves ‘Sleeping with Other People’

For the rest of the film, which covers a period of years, we follow the relationship of these two characters who are “not a couple but…act like one.” They don’t kiss or have sex but don’t deny they want to either.

Sleeping with Other People, the new film from writer-director Leslye Headland (Bachelorette) has elements that make me hate most other rom-coms. Though set in New York City, every character with more than a few lines is a white, straight person and the script had enough gender-stereotyping to make me want to bite someone. But near the start we see Jake (Jason Sudeikis), the lovable Lothario star of way too many other movies, try to explain away his latest infidelity to his girlfriend as they argue in the middle of a busy New York street. As he seems to bullshit his way back into her heart–and bed–she suddenly pushes him, hard, into the path of an oncoming cab. He escapes with only minor injuries, but he does get hit, and we in the audience feel the impact: this film is trying to be different from the rest.

The most interesting conceit of the film is that both main characters realize they’re too damaged to be together. Alison Brie as Lainey cannot stop hooking up with her gynecologist fuck-buddy (Adam Scott) who went to college with both Sudeikis’s and Brie’s characters (it’s supposed to be 13 years later and, uh, some of the actors seem a little mature to be in their early 30s) whether or not the two are in “monogamous” relationships with other people or not. After Jake and Lainey have dinner together and confess their failings, Lainey says, “We gotta just be friends.” and they discuss a “safe word” they can use to dispel sexual tension between them. They decide on “dick in a mousetrap” (“mousetrap” for short).

For the rest of the film, which covers a couple of years, we follow the relationship of these two characters who are “not a couple but…act like one.” They don’t kiss or have sex but don’t deny they want to either. When they’re in a store talking as they browse one of the clerks tells them what “cool” married people they are and Jake and Lainey play along. When, in a crisis, Lainey rushes to Jake’s place they lie in the same bed, fully clothed and she asks, “Are we in love?” He doesn’t say no.

Sudeikis’s character is one of those annoying guys in movies who doesn’t have to worry about money (he and his business partner have developed software together that is bought out by another company for millions). He brings a nice self-awareness (including a touch of self-loathing) as a man who compulsively picks up women and can never stay faithful to any of them (the concept of polyamory seems not to have occurred to anyone in the film).

Brie has the better written part in Lainey. Instead of, like Jake, having sex with strangers she takes some time off from dating, and in a great rarity for any onscreen character, especially a woman, begins a process of permanent change. She gets into medical school. She stops answering the gynecologist’s calls. When someone asks her why, she says, “Because I’m not an asshole,” leaving unsaid the words “any more.” When Jake asks her why she continued the relationship with the gynecologist for so long, she tells him, “I thought he’d choose me,” and the melancholy and weariness in her voice comes closer to real-life romantic disappointment than most rom-coms ever tread. Her last scenes with the gynecologist seem to imply he feels a sadness too, demonstrating what most adults learn: getting to choose what you want (or don’t) and not getting to can be equally dissatisfying.

Sudeikis and Brie have great chemistry together and the film is quite funny especially when Jake’s business partner (Jason Mantzoukas) and his wife (Andrea Savage) are in a scene. The wife, Naomi, tells Jake and Lainey, “Don’t have kids,” then says to the adorable preschool daughter she’s carrying on her hip, “No offense.” The other supporting roles (except for Natasha Lyonne’s throwaway appearance as Lainey’s queer friend) are also written and cast with exceptional care, especially Amanda Peet (who really shines here) as Jake’s knockout boss, whom he’s always asking out even after she tells him she doesn’t date her employees.

The film is not without parts I would complain about in a film by a man and am dumbfounded to see in one directed and written by a woman. Lainey spends time in lingerie for seemingly no good reason except to show off Brie’s lovely body (the film purports to be a sex comedy but never shows any real nudity). In another scene Jake uses an empty glass bottle to shows Lainey how to touch her own clit. For maximum offensiveness he imitates Public Enemy while he does so.

But even these scenes can’t ruin the emotional resonance of Jake and Lainey’s relationship which we see makes each a better, more whole person able to move on and have a romantic relationship with someone else. As a bonus we see the two characters attend a child’s birthday party high on ecstasy (molly) and the script has them act like real-life people who’ve taken the drug. When the entertainment for the party is a no-show, Lainey tells a worried parent, “Re-laaaaax,” and leads the kids in a dance to David Bowie’s “Modern Love.” Even if this method isn’t how adults usually get through these occasions, the film suggests maybe it should be.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYlEqlTsSJY” 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

‘Female Perversions’ Still Strikingly Relevant Nearly Two Decades Later

Like ‘Mean Girls’, ‘Female Perversions’ script (co-written by Streitfeld and Julie Hébert) is an adaptation of a book of the same name of nonfiction, feminist psychology, the concepts and ideas of which are plugged into a fictionalized narrative (and, in this film sometimes into bus stop placards and advertisements that appear in magazines).

While looking at a highly subjective list of 100 great films by women (which is itself a reaction to the subjective list the BBC released of “top 100 American films“–that included only three directed by women) I had a mixed reaction. I was gratified to see some films I thought would be overlooked (XXY), appalled to see one of the worst films I’ve had to sit through this year (Eden), disappointed that critics often don’t look beyond the obvious films for women with interesting, varied careers (Chantal Akerman, Gillian Armstrong, Jane Campion and Sofia Coppola have all directed better but less well-known films than the ones on the list) and skeptical critics actually saw at least one of the films included (Shirley Clarke’s The Connection). But I also thought of the films that were milestones in my own viewing history that didn’t make the cut: one of the most vivid that remains surprisingly relevant today is Susan Streitfeld’s Female Perversions.

Like Mean Girls, Female Perversions’ script (co-written by Streitfeld and Julie Hébert) is an adaptation of a book of the same name of nonfiction, feminist psychology, the concepts and ideas of which are plugged into a fictionalized narrative (and, in this film sometimes into bus stop placards and advertisements that appear in magazines). The main character is Eve Stephens (Tilda Swinton, looking impossibly young and beautiful in her American film debut) a Los Angeles prosecutor who is widely thought to be the next person the governor will appoint as a judge to the appeals court. Her male boss assures her, “First of all, politically, he must appoint a woman,” and “he actually wants to appoint a woman,” reminding us of every paternalistic man who never stops reminding women how much he “supports” them.

We see Eve arguing a case as the men in the courtroom ogle her in her sharp, chic (for the mid-nineties) off-white suit and matching high heels as the camera lingers on a loose thread coming from a seam (the excellent cinematographer is, in a great rarity for a film directed and written by women, also a woman: Teresa Medina). Later she sees herself on television giving a statement to reporters after she has won the case and all she can notice is the dark lipstick staining her two front teeth.

SwintonPorizkova — Not only is Eve expected to perform impeccably and advance in her profession, she’s expected to have perfect hair, clothes and makeup– and an enviable personal life too

As an opening quote onscreen from the book makes clear, the “perversions” in the film are actually the contradictory and unattainable standards conventionally feminine women are supposed to aspire to. Not only is Eve expected to perform impeccably and advance in her profession, she’s expected to have perfect hair, clothes and makeup– and an enviable personal life too (and this pressure on women has only increased in the nearly 20 years since the film’s release). She eats M & Ms, as she stays in her office working until 9:30 p.m. (leaving only when the Latina cleaning woman comes in), ordering flowers for herself to show up the next day with a double-entendre message “from” her equally high-powered, career-focused boyfriend. She then picks up a woman (a psychiatrist, played by Karen Sillas) on the elevator as she leaves the building. Before they get off, we see Eve’s receptive body language and hear the flirtatiousness in her voice as she asks the psychiatrist out for a drink. The next day a real card (and considerably more modest flowers) await her in the office from “the young doctor” alongside the big bouquet Eve ordered for herself.

Being pushed and pulled in so many directions makes Eve sometimes behave erratically, raging when she isn’t in the presence of others and imagining figures grabbing her and whispering sometimes obscene insults into her ear. When she hallucinates an upscale clothing clerk is judging her body as “wide across the hips” she tries on a piece of sheer lingerie and comes sashaying out of the dressing room wearing it for all to see.

SwintonPerversions — I’m not sure I’ve ever seen nudity used as well in a film as it is in ‘Perversions’

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen nudity used as well in a film as it is in Perversions, as Renaissance-style art in the somewhat scary fantasies in Eve’s head when she has sex (these scenes are reminiscent of the work Swinton did with out gay director Derek Jarman) and to make the sex scenes themselves deeper and more realistic. We don’t see the first encounter with Sillas’s character but we do see another, which starts with Sillas’s character mock-analyzing Eve and her answering, in jest, “Finally someone understands me.” What follows is much more like the hot sex people have in real life than what we’re used to seeing passed off as “hot sex” onscreen–especially between two women. Eve’s bare bottom is used to show, in the scene the next morning, how discombobulated she is, when she wakes up alone, in the blouse she wore with her suit and nothing else.

We also see how the forced politeness of acceptable, feminine behavior not only fuels Eve’s rage when she’s alone, but also renders her relationship with the psychiatrist shallow and unsatisfying. When Sillas’s character visits Eve, Eve claims she wasn’t bothered when she suddenly left, the way a good guest says she’s enjoying her stay no matter how she really feels. When the two talk they have a choreography of crossed and uncrossed legs and offered drinks that underlies the complex choreography of emotions that Eve is, by adhering to norms (as well as using her work as a kind of shield and excuse to keep their interaction short) cutting herself off from.

We also see Eve’s sister, Maddie (Amy Madigan) who lives in the desert and is about to defend her Ph.D. Maddie gets an erotic charge from shoplifting even as we see, in one scene, she immediately throws away an item she’s stolen. Madigan holds her own in scenes with Swinton, no small feat since Eve is one of Swinton’s best performances: she frequently injects an almost slapstick physicality into the character though we’re not watching a comedy (the film does have one great funny payoff involving Eve’s “lucky suit”).

The film isn’t perfect. The ending is a mess (the film just stops instead of offering any real resolution) and I could have done without the only Latinas we see literally standing in silent witness to Eve’s behavior. But I was sad to see Streitfeld has barely worked as a director since the film was released, one of the many women who made one great film and was never allowed to make another.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gN9Ca45l8cg” 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

Barbara Loden’s ‘Wanda’: A Persuasive Portrait of Female Aimlessness and Alienation

It does not rejoice in the freedom of the open road. There are no cool, seductive lovers or beautiful cars. Wanda is not a charismatic counter-culture heroine or anti-heroine. She’s not a heroic working-class figure either. Loden’s portrait, however, aims to shed light on the psychological condition of young, working-class women disconnected from societal demands and expectations.

Written by Rachael Johnson.

Set in coal-mining Pennsylvania, Wanda (1970) is the story of a directionless working-class woman who leaves her husband and young children for a life on the road. Barbara Loden (1932-1980) not only plays the title role of Wanda, she also wrote and directed the film. Although it would, sadly, be the only feature she would make, it remains one of the most culturally significant portraits of American womanhood of its era, as well as one of the greatest independent films of all time.

We see Wanda at the beginning of the film sleeping on her married sister’s couch, but she soon embarks on a journey to nowhere. Unable to secure and maintain a job, her situation becomes increasingly precarious. She is ditched by a man at a rest stop outside of town following a one-night stand, and robbed of her money when she falls asleep alone in a movie theater. She meets a small-time, hopeless crook, Mr. Dennis (Michael Higgins) and develops a relationship of sorts with him. He’s an aggressive, charmless man but he offers a kind of security. Initially hesitant, she becomes Mr. Dennis’s accomplice in a bank robbery. It all ends disastrously, and at the close of the film we see her surrounded by strangers in a bar, as isolated and aimless as she was at the start of her journey.

Some may find Wanda’s inertness and passivity baffling, even exasperating. We are not given much insight into her former life. We only have her husband’s testimony in court that she was a poor homemaker and neglectful mother. Was she bullied and belittled by her husband? Why does she not fight for custody of her kids? In the courtroom, she instructs the judge to give her husband the divorce he wants and states that the children “will be better off with him.” Although it is what society dictated for women, perhaps Wanda never even wanted a family.

Loden’s description of Wanda in a 1972 interview on the Mike Douglas Show is quite instructive:

“She’s really running away from everything…She doesn’t know what she wants but she knows what she doesn’t want, and she’s trying to get out of this very ugly type of existence but she doesn’t have the equipment that a person that has been exposed to more different kind of people that would help her… She can’t cope with life..”

It is, indeed, evident that no one was there for Wanda growing up–no loving, supportive parent/s, inspirational teacher or mentor. Loden, interestingly, got the inspiration for the film from a newspaper article telling the curious tale of a female accomplice to a bankrobber who thanked the judge for sentencing her to twenty years in jail but it is also semi-autobiographical. A native of North Carolina, Loden did not come from a privileged home. Brought up by strictly religious grandparents following her parents’ divorce, she endured a hard childhood. Loden equally understands Wanda’s psyche. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times (1971) she explained, “I used to be a lot like that… I had no identity of my own. I just became what I thought people wanted me to become.”

Crucially, the director seems to recognize that countless working-class American women of her background and generation were never taught to develop their very identity and assert themselves. Although Hollywood tries to propagate the myth, not everyone survives shitty childhoods through self-education and force of will. There are, also, indications that Wanda was abused and/or neglected as a child. To say she has poor sense of self-worth is an understatement. Unlike mainstream American movies, Wanda, moreover, recognizes that human beings of all backgrounds repeat the same mistakes over and over again. Loden does not judge her protagonist and nor should we. Judging Wanda does not help us understand her. In fact, it reflects a position of privilege.

Barbara Loden’s own journey was remarkable and successful though ultimately tragic. Unlike her heroine, she was graced with opportunity and talent, as well as encouraged to realize her creative ambitions. Loden was a dancer and model before becoming a screen and theatre actress. She was married to director Elia Kazan and starred in his films Wild River (1960) and Splendor in The Grass (1961). As said, Wanda was her first and last film. Other projects remained unrealized up until her death. No doubt misogyny played an ugly, starring part in keeping her out of the film business. She tragically died of breast cancer in 1980 at the age of 48.

Wanda was critically acclaimed when it was first released- it won the International Critics Award at the Venice Film Festival in 1970- but in the years that followed, it fell into relative obscurity in the United States (Loden and Wanda have always been more appreciated in France).

Shot on a small budget, Wanda is a stark film devoid of sentiment. Nicolas Proferes was the cinematographer and editor, and in terms of its look and form, it’s a grainy, unpolished film that reeks of the real. It is, in fact, a road movie but without the usual romantic qualities of the genre. It does not rejoice in the freedom of the open road. There are no cool, seductive lovers or beautiful cars. Wanda is not a charismatic counter-culture heroine or anti-heroine. She’s not a heroic working-class figure either. Loden’s portrait, however, aims to shed light on the psychological condition of young, working-class women disconnected from societal demands and expectations. Some may find her portrait of female identity lack and alienation a tough viewing experience but it is a rewarding one. Loden’s low key performance, it should be noted, is, also, entirely persuasive.

Although the film is beginning to be rediscovered and revisited, Wanda needs to be even more appreciated. Loden’s story too should also be more widely known. As we are only now beginning to fully realize, the history of women in film has, criminally, been one of forgetting. We need to remember and honor Barbara Loden as a director of one of the most grittiest and unconventional American films of the 20^th century.

A Gutsy Tribute to the Heroes and Heroines of American Labor: Barbara Kopple’s ‘Harlan County, USA’

Politically active, working-class American women are a clear threat to Yarborough’s natural order and must, therefore, be branded unfeminine and un-American. Women also play a celebrated cultural role in the community. They are a vital part of the musical and political history of the place.

Written by Rachael Johnson.

“Truth is on the side of the oppressed.” –Malcolm X

Directed with great spirit and empathy by Barbara Kopple, the documentary, Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976) is the story of an eventful strike in eastern Kentucky. The 13-month-long Brookside Strike (1973-4), as it was called, involved 180 miners from the Duke Power-owned Eastover Mining Company’s Brookside Mine in Harlan County. The film chronicles the miners’ fight to join the United Mine Workers of America, a move prohibited by the mining company when they refuse to sign the contract. Their hard struggle for representation, better wages and working conditions is lived and portrayed as a collective one. The men are joined on the picket lines by their wives who play a central role in the story. Their dramatic journey is understood and depicted as a deeply personal and political one.

In the first few minutes of Harlan County, U.S.A, the viewer is transported into the mines. We watch the men labor, and even have a bite to eat, in the grimy, confined spaces before emerging into the light once more. This is proper political film-making. Kopple takes us into the working men’s world. She sides with the miners and we are encouraged to do so too. She gives us a strong sense of how dangerous the job is. The men’s working conditions are appalling. The miners have had black lung for generations and suffer injuries for which they receive no compensation. The living conditions the workers endure are shameful too. Their houses don’t have indoor plumbing and running water. We see one miner’s wife wash her child in a tin bucket. Kopple’s documentation of these inexcusable living conditions may shock both American and non-American audiences watching today- as they, no doubt, must have done in 1976. U.S. popular culture- particularly Hollywood- does such a good job concealing American poverty that when audiences see it, it always comes as a jolt. This is, perhaps, even the case for people who have few illusions about the American Dream. There are, of course, reminders now and again. The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, for example, revealed to the world disturbing truths about US economic inequality.

Numbers cited in Harlan County, U.S.A. tell an outrageous tale: coal company profits in 1975 rose 170 percent while workers’ wages rose only 4 percent. As U.M.W. organizer Houston Elmore explains, the miners are victims of a “feudal system.” The story of Harlan County, U.S.A. is one of struggle and resistance to power. The strike rejuvenates and organizes them. It is gruelling, perilous fight too. When they are not being arrested and jailed, they are being intimidated, assaulted and shot at by mining company thugs. Kopple is always with them recording their struggle. At one frightening night-time picket, her camera is attacked. The workers begin to arm themselves too. Tragedy finally strikes when a young miner is murdered. The company soon concedes and the strike ends. While the story of the strike may be a stirring one, and the workers secure their right to unionize, there is neither a neat nor fairytale ending. Some workers are happy with their pay but others express disappointment about their contract. Union compromises like the no-strike clause indicate that the struggle for miners’ rights will continue.

The women of the community play an essential, dynamic role during the strike. As with the men, the struggle strengthens and politicizes them. They join the picket lines too, and block the roads with their bodies to prevent the scabs from getting through to the mines. The women are fully aware of what they are up against. One addresses a judge at court: “You say the laws were made for us. The laws are not made for the working people in this country…The law was made for people like Carl Horn.” Carl Horn was the president of Duke Power at the time. Although the women are not entirely immune from letting personal crap get in the way, they are focused and determined. They are, in fact, incredibly strong. An older lady encourages them to not back down as backing down would mean a return to the dark, hungry days of the 30s. “If I get shot, they can’t shoot the union out of me,” she says. The women are also intimated, assaulted and shot at. The film rightly focuses on the collective but the community does have its characters. The most charismatic woman among them is perhaps organizer Lois Scott. Both an inspiration and a badass, Lois seems frightened of very little in life.

What Norman Yarborough, President of the Eastover Mining Company, says about the miners’ wives at a press conference is extremely revealing. When asked about their role, Yarborough smiles in a patronizing, good-old-boy fashion before conceding that they have played “a big role.” He goes on to say that their activities disturb him: “I would hate to think that my wife had played this kind of role….there’s been some conduct that I don’t think that our American women have to revert to.” Politically active, working-class American women are a clear threat to Yarborough’s natural order and must, therefore, be branded unfeminine and un-American. Women also play a celebrated cultural role in the community. They are a vital part of the musical and political history of the place.

The numerous songs featured in the documentary illustrate the central role music plays in their lives of the mining community. They chronicle the history of Harlan as they rouse and unify its people. The most memorable is “Which Side Are You On?.” Widely recognised as one of the great protest songs of the 20^th century, this anthem to worker’s rights was penned by activist, folk song writer, and poet, Florence Reece. A daughter and wife of miners, Reese penned “Which Side Are You On?” during the Harlan strike of 1931. The great woman herself is featured in Harlan County, U.S.A. singing her iconic song at a strike rally.

The documentary focuses on the 1973 strike in Bloody Harlan but it also manifests an understanding of labor history. The miners, like any other exploited group, remember what was done to them decades before. Kopple connects the past to the present through powerful interviews with older residents, film footage and stills. Remembering is essential work, especially in a country where the silencing of historic abuses has always been routine. As writer Milan Kundera once said, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Harlan County, U.S.A. is an extremely detailed, multi-layered film. The documentation of other labor-related events and struggles deepen our understanding of the time. Kopple documents leadership challenges and reforms in the union in the early seventies, the extraordinary story of the Mafia-style hit of United Mine Workers President Joseph Yablonski and his wife and daughter by President W.A. Boyle in 1969, as well as the 1968 Farmington, West Virginia mine explosion, a tragedy which killed 78 men.

Harlan County USA — Harlan County U.S.A.

Kopple gives an in-depth portrait of the men and women of the mining community of Harlan County as well as a gripping account of the strike that transforms them. She never patronizes the people of Harlan and she can never be accused of exploitative class voyeurism. From the very start, she plunges the viewer into the life of the community, and we are with them every step of the way.

Harlan County, U.S.A. is a stirring tribute to working-class kinship and activism. Although it is a story specifically rooted in the history of Harlan, as well as a very American story, the struggle for economic justice it documents is one that transcends regional and national borders. Koppel’s gutsy film-making was rewarded. Harlan County, U.S.A. won Best Documentary Feature at the Academy Awards that year. It is, without a doubt, one of the greatest documentaries ever made, and it should be shown in every school in the United States.

‘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.

‘Laggies’ and the Perils of Success

Lynn Shelton’s best known films, the great ‘Humpday’ and the equally delightful ‘Your Sister’s Sister’ stood out in a similar way. Shelton devised and wrote scripts that became the basis for the actors’ improvisation (with the ‘”‘final draft’ put together in the editing room”)–and made films that seemed fresh and distinct from the usual Hollywood product. Each film had a surprisingly tight structure and was funny in ways that never occured to mainstream filmmakers. As I sat through Shelton’s latest movie, ‘Laggies,’ (which opens this Friday, Oct. 24) I couldn’t help feeling deflated. Shelton’s transformation into a mainstream director is a little like if Bergman had had second thoughts and ended up going on a diet and let Hollywood makeup artists make her unrecognizable.

Years ago, when Ingrid Bergman first went to work in Hollywood (after a successful career in Sweden), she was wary of how American movie studios had changed the appearance of other European actresses once they were under contract. The Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo who appeared in films stateside looked very different from the actresses of the same name who were in European films a few years before. Bergman opted to keep her own eyebrows and resisted pressure to lose weight. She also wore more natural makeup than was the rule for other actresses working in Hollywood at the time. Her toned-down but still radiant look, along with her talent, may be why Bergman’s presence in films connected with audiences: she stood out among the crowd of Max-Factored, Hollywood actresses with deep hollows under sharp cheekbones.

Lynn Shelton’s best known films, the great Humpday and the equally delightful Your Sister’s Sister stood out in a similar way. Shelton devised and wrote scripts that became the basis for the actors’ improvisation (with the ‘“‘final draft’ put together in the editing room”)–and made films that seemed fresh and distinct from the usual Hollywood product. Each film had a surprisingly tight structure and was funny in ways that never occurred to mainstream filmmakers. As I sat through Shelton’s latest movie, Laggies, I couldn’t help feeling deflated. Shelton’s transformation into a mainstream director is a little like if Bergman had had second thoughts and ended up going on a diet and letting Hollywood makeup artists make her unrecognizable.

Laggies has a traditional script (in every respect) by Andrea Seigel and names familiar from the multiplex in the lead roles: Keira Knightley as Megan, an underachieving 20-something, Chloë Grace Moretz as Annika, the high school student she befriends and Sam Rockwell as Annika’s single Dad, Craig, who works as a divorce lawyer.

At the very beginning of the film we see Megan after her own prom hanging out with her best high school girlfriends in terribly framed and shot “home video.” We can barely see their faces: a clever and effective solution to the movie quandary of showing characters over a decade younger than they appear in the rest of the film. Unlike most people, who move on from their high school friends during college or in other parts of young adulthood, Megan is still hanging out with the same clique and we see from the beginning that they have grown apart. During the small, private, bachelorette party for her friend Allison (Ellie Kemper, playing a snide variation of the same character she played in Bridesmaids) we see her friends snip at her for everything from her working for her father, holding a sign pointing to his business, to touching the chest of a huge, tacky, gold-painted statue at the Chinese restaurant where the party takes place. Perpetually irritated Allison asks, “Why would you tweak the nipples? That’s Buddha.” (actually it’s Budai the so-called “laughing Buddha,” but I don’t expect the characters to know the difference).

Megan has a nice-guy, live-in boyfriend Anthony (Mark Webber), also a relic from high school, who proposes to her at Allison’s wedding reception. Megan’s reaction when she sees him start to get down on one knee is to gasp and say, “No, no, whoa! Get up!”

Megan first meets Annika outside a liquor store when the teen approaches her with a flimsy story about her and her obviously underage friends that culminates in the question: could Megan buy liquor for them? Megan says, “Someone did this for me when I was your age. It’s like a rite of passage.”

Annika says, “I had a good feeling about you.”

Megan cracks, “That makes one of us.”

That night, Megan hangs out with and gets very drunk with the teens and through a series of contrivances ends up staying at Annika’s home for a week–accompanying her to teen parties, the mall and taking part in a sleepover with Annika’s best friend Misty (Caitlyn Dever from last year’s Short Term 12). Shelton still has a great touch with actors and Knightley here reminds us that the movie in which she first received acclaim, Bend It Like Beckham, was a comedy. In Laggies, she’s at her best the times she gets to use her long skinny body for comic effect, as when she dons headphones to undulate along a busy road while she holds the sign pointing to her father’s business or folds herself against the ground into a turtle-like posture to feed Annika’s pet tortoise.

The film also has a refreshing lack of hysteria about the activities of contemporary, suburban teens. Moretz’s character is a teenager who seems more like the peers I had in high school than the stereotypes that populate most movies. Husky-voiced Annika is an unapologetic “partier” who regularly lies to her father about where she’s going and what she’s doing–and unlike similar girl characters in mainstream films we’re not cued to see her as a sociopath or an alcoholic.

The film also shows empathy for Sam Rockwell’s put-upon Dad. Rockwell has good chemistry with Knightley and a great touch with lines like the one he gets when he first sees Megan in Annika’s room, “Wow, high school students are looking rougher and rougher these days.” His Craig is a mixture of equal parts of love and exasperation he feels toward his daughter with some “embarrassing” Dad behavior thrown in. The film also refrains from completely vilifying Annika’s absentee mother, played briefly and poignantly by Gretchen Mol.

But the film’s central premise of Megan regressing to her high school days falls flat. Knightley’s Megan seems too sensible and grounded to be the kind of screwed-up (but sometimes fun) adult who hangs out with teenagers. And although Rockwell’s character briefly questions Megan’s intentions, no one else does, or comes to the conclusion that many of us would if we saw an adult spending lots of time with a high school student (including sleeping over): that the two are having sex or headed in that direction.

In this film queer people seem not to exist, a disappointment because Shelton is an out bisexual woman who created a complex and memorable title queer woman character (beautifully played by Rosemarie DeWitt) in Your Sister’s Sister and played a small, but memorable role as a queer woman herself in Humpday. Laggies, like the other mainstream American movies that assume everyone is heterosexual, is in danger of seeming outdated, especially compared to recent television shows like Please Like Me and How To Get Away With Murder, which nonchalantly depict every aspect of their queer characters’ lives–and feature them as leads.

The movie intermittently focuses on Megan’s lack of direction (she has dropped out of graduate school, where she was studying to be a therapist), but the ending, like that of a screwball comedy from the 1930s, seems to suggest her whole life is resolved by choosing the right man. This mainstream rom-com directed by Lynn Shelton is better and more nuanced than any other choice at the multiplex, but I still miss the wilder, funnier, earlier Shelton films shown at art houses–and the more complicated lives of the women–and men–at their centers.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xep7s36qZL0″]

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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

On Not Giving Women Filmmakers A “Free Pass”: ‘Kelly & Cal’

Many actresses, especially those in their 30s and older, find themselves relegated to playing “the mother” for much of their careers. Most of these films (like the recent indie hit Boyhood) seem to go out of their way to tell stories from anyone but the mother’s point of view. For a short time Jen McGowan’s Kelly & Cal (also written by a woman: Amy Lowe Starbin) seems like it will be a welcome contrast to this norm. At the beginning we see a closeup of the tired, stressed face of new mother, Kelly (Juliette Lewis), as we hear the pleasant, disembodied voice of Kelly’s OB/GYN, who indulges in the (relatively recent) abhorrent practice of referring to women who are pregnant or have recently given birth as “Mom” (instead of calling them by their names) while she rushes Kelly through her six-week checkup. The doctor isn’t the only offender: “How was your day, Mommy?” Cybill Shepherd’s squeaky clean mother-in-law later asks when she visits for dinner.

We again see closeups of Kelly’s unhappy face as she (and we) hear her baby constantly crying, interrupting her even when she tries to masturbate–after her husband proves more interested in TV than in sex. We learn Kelly’s name only when she introduces herself to Cal. They meet over her fence as Kelly sneaks a cigarette and Cal asks if he can have one too. Cal is supposed to be 17 or l8, but the handsome and not untalented Jonny Weston, who plays him, is–and looks–26. Throughout the film, whenever he talks about attending high school I felt like correcting him, “Don’t you mean graduate school?” The actor visibly being well past his teens makes Cal’s banter seem particularly inappropriate and creepy.

He tells Kelly (whom he’s just met) “You have great breasts,” then admonishes her that if she didn’t want him to comment on them she shouldn’t nurse her son with the curtains open (sort of like how some men feel free to advise celebrities never to pose for private nude photos if they don’t want the world to see them).

Kelly immediately tells him, “Get away from my house,” then sees he uses a wheelchair as he rolls back toward his own place. That evening she tells her husband she feels bad that she yelled at someone who is “handicapped,” the word used to describe Cal throughout the film, even though “people with disabilites” has been common parlance–including in the Americans With Disabilities Act–for over 25 years. I guess we should be grateful the film doesn’t have any queer characters, so we don’t have to hear them called “homosexuals.”

She used to be "wild" — She used to be “wild”

The movie really goes off the rails after Kelly appears at Cal’s garage apartment (his parents’ house hasn’t been equipped with ramps) as an apology, but quickly leaves (Juliette Lewis is quite funny in this scene; she’s better than the film deserves) when Cal continues to talk explicitly about sex (this time about his own prowess even after the accident that caused his spinal cord injury). Her actions are perfectly in keeping with everything else we’ve seen so far from Kelly. So the audience is left to wonder why, the next day, she goes back to visit Cal as if nothing has happened. If Kelly were meant to be a damaged character, a woman who felt that being in the company of someone who humiliates her by talking explicitly about her body (which he spied on while she was behind closed doors in her own house, feeding her son)–and then told her all the sexual things he could do to her–is all she deserves, I could accept this plot point. But as the part is written (up until that point in the film) and as Lewis plays her, Kelly is a level-headed sort, even if she feels lonely and out-of-place in her new role as a suburban stay-at-home mother. Kelly and Cal’s “friendship” in this context makes no sense and seems to bolster the philosophy of street harassers and “pickup artists” that talking explicitly to women they barely know (and who don’t seem open to their sexual attention) is the way to attract them.

For extended periods that follow, the film (which seems long but is actually only 110 minutes), in the tradition of soap operas, seems to forget Kelly has a baby. We see her freely drinking beer and other alcohol when before she had demurred explaining that she was still breast-feeding (if the TV series Please Like Me can be trusted, apparently breastfeeding mothers can pump their milk before the occasional drunken night out, but the movie doesn’t care enough to offer this explanation). She and Cal spend lots of time alone together, after which she often goes home to an empty house–when new parenthood means (as the start of movie makes clear, and shows is a major part of Kelly’s frustration), except for brief respites when others take over, the baby is always there.

No, really she was "wild" — No, really, she was “wild”

We get a tiny subplot that goes nowhere about Kelly once being “young and wild” and “in a band” which seems cribbed from a Wikipedia entry about “Riot Grrrl,” especially when the characters repeatedly mispronounce “Sleater-Kinney” as “Sleeter-Kinney.” The film also uses a Cyndi Lauper song, the polar opposite of “wild,” as one of of Kelly’s favorites. Kelly ends up kissing Cal because his harassment somehow ends up charming her. She also does a little breaking and entering and graffiti with him as foreplay.

Cal, on the other hand, inhabits the trope of the disabled character who feels like life is no longer worth living. A person with disabilities who becomes suicidal is such a cliché that When Billy Broke His Head, a too-infrequently seen documentary about disability–directed by a disabled man–had a sequence that was a montage of disabled characters in film after film announcing their intentions to kill themselves. Audiences would object if every woman in films wanted to off herself–or if every person of color did. And we’re glad that modern queer characters in dramas like Weekend, Keep The Lights On, and Pariah survive to the credits because in the past the rule seemed to be that one (or more) of a film’s queer characters must die by the end. But the disabled character (and there’s usually only one), if he or she isn’t busy being an inspiration to others, is, in too many films and TV shows otherwise on the brink of suicide. We could use more characters like Winston (Clifton Collins Jr.) in Sunshine Cleaning, who was missing an arm, but was neither depressed nor awe-inspiring, just a person trying to get through life.

A film with real distribution (it opens on Sept. 5) directed by a woman as well as written by one is a rare enough occurrence that I wish I didn’t have to point out all that’s wrong with Kelly & Cal. But if a film has the same old sexist (not to mention ableist) tropes, we have remember why we wanted more films by women in the first place–and see that maybe this particular example isn’t solving the problem.

As Susan Sarandon (in The Celluloid Closet) said of their love scenes in The Hunger, no one needs to get drunk to kiss Catherine Deneuve. In the same way, nobody needs to lower their standards to love the films of women like Stacie Passon, Miranda July, Dee Rees, Sarah Polley, and Andrea Arnold. But film distributors still treat an acclaimed queer woman’s film about a queer woman, Concussion, as subpar: last year the rapturous reviews it received from a number of influential critics came too late for it to have a real run in many cities that might have embraced it, (including mine which is full of art houses and is in the first state to legalize queer marriage). One Cut, One Life the documentary co-directed by and featuring Lucia Small was the best film I saw at the Independent Film Festival of Boston (where I saw Dear White People, Belle, and Obvious Child) and probably the best documentary I’ve seen this year (a year that included Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me and Anita) but even though it plays at The New York Film Festival Sept. 29 it still doesn’t, as far as I know, have a distribution deal. The only way to fight against this tide is to keep praising good films by women–and not dilute that praise by heaping it onto other films that happen to have women’s names on them.

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

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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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‘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.

Girls, Consent, and Sex in ‘Palo Alto’ and ‘I Believe In Unicorns’

Films set in high school are often about boys; films which feature high school girl characters complex enough to surprise an audience (one measure of good screenwriting) are relatively rare–‘Say Anything’, ‘Mean Girls,’ ‘Clueless’ and from earlier this year ‘It Felt Like Love.’ ‘Palo Alto,’ the first film directed by Gia Coppola (niece of Sofia and granddaughter of Francis), who also wrote the script (based on the stories of James Franco) focuses on several main characters in high school, including April (‘American Horror Story’s’ Emma Roberts, whose auburn hair and dark eyebrows recall her Aunt Julia’s). We see her as she plays soccer, babysits, goes to boozy parties and is alone in her room.

Films set in high school are often about boys; films which feature high school girl characters complex enough to surprise an audience (one measure of good screenwriting) are relatively rare–Say Anything, Mean Girls, Clueless and from earlier this year, It Felt Like Love. Palo Alto, the first film directed by Gia Coppola (niece of Sofia and granddaughter of Francis), who also wrote the script (based on the stories of James Franco) focuses on several main characters in high school, including April (American Horror Story’s Emma Roberts, whose auburn hair and dark eyebrows recall her Aunt Julia’s). We see her as she plays soccer, babysits, goes to boozy parties, and is alone in her room.

April’s mother and stepfather, like some of the other parents we see later in the film are perfectly pleasant to April but seem to have never grown up themselves. April’s mother interrupts her constant kitchen cell phone conversation with “Jamal” to coo at her daugher and make her the occasional meal. April’s stepfather (a nearly unrecognizable Val Kilmer) holes away in a separate part of the house, drinks from a mug that has his own photo on it and rewrites April’s term paper even though she asked him to merely look it over. Neither one ever asks April where she’s been or when she’s coming home; “cool” parenting becomes a study in benign neglect.

Disaffected, wealthy young people aren’t new subjects for a film, but perhaps because Coppola is not far from the age (and background) of her characters some of the details resonate: the way “friends” pour alcohol down the throat of one of the main characters who is late to a party so he can be as drunk (or drunker) than they are, the game of “I Have Never” at the party which becomes an opportunity to reveal others’ secrets told in confidence, the banter between girl athletes who think their coach is cute (“What do you think his o-face looks like?”), the bedroom of Emily (Zoe Levin)–whom the others call “blow job queen,” a label she does her best to live up to–full of little-girl knick knacks and stuffed animals.

Palo Alto is based on the book of short stories of the same name by James Franco (who plays April’s coach, Mr. B.; she babysits his young son). Franco also helped get financing for the film. No one should confuse Palo Alto with one of Franco’s many projects that would elicit zero curiosity from the public if his name weren’t attached, and I haven’t read the book, which may be to blame, but in spite of how much time we spend with April, and in spite of Roberts, who radiates intelligence and wariness in the role, I didn’t have much emotional investment in the character.

The storyline about April and her coach is initially a promising one. He’s relatively young and good-looking and pays special attention to her, very like some of the real life scenarios in which teachers have sex with high school students. But April doesn’t seem ditzy or desperate enough to think sex with her teacher is a good idea, and he doesn’t seem smooth or clever enough to work through the natural resistance of a student with a stable (if lax) home life and a thoughtful nature. In the late 70s and early 80s when I went to high school, all of us suspected one of the girls in my class was having an inappropriate relationship with the biology teacher–the sexual tension between them was apparent from 50 feet away, even when they were just talking to one another in the hall. Teachers and students today would have to be more discreet, and the lack of depth in Franco and Roberts’ connection fits with later developments in their story, but we never get the feeling much is at stake when they fuck (which we don’t see) let alone when they find themselves attracted to one another–even though he’s endangering his job, abusing his position and breaking the law, and she is putting herself in the position to be hurt, exploited or both (and could also easily turn him in to the authorities).

Coppola does a better job of verisimilitude with Emily who seems surprised that her many hookups with boys don’t turn into relationships or even into friendship. At one point she has sex with a boy, Fred (Nat Wolff) she’s hooked up with before, and he invites other boys to also have sex with her; whether the sex Emily has with them is consensual is unclear. Coppola has Fred tell the story in voiceover without showing any of the action (or even the lead-up to it), an intriguing choice that keeps a possibly nonconsensual encounter from titillating the audience–and keeps the audience from deciding for ourselves whether the sex seems consensual or not.

Perhaps because of the sex scenes, Emily is played by an adult, as is April, who nevertheless makes a convincing teen in her yellow sweatshirt and skeleton hoodie. But when we see the travails of Teddy (Jack Kilmer, Val’s son with Joanne Walley) in the film, the two actresses’ relative maturity stands in stark contrast to Kilmer’s tender face touched with vestiges of baby fat–he is 18, not just playing a teenager, and the difference between him and the other actors takes us out of the movie. Seeing the other actors share scenes with Kilmer reminds me of an English stage actress who wondered, when she was a very young woman, why she couldn’t get larger roles playing against the older women in the company. “I didn’t realize (a thirty-something actress) could play a teenager on stage and it would work–unless you put a real teenager right next to her.”

Kilmer has been described as “androgynous” but “amorphous” is a better descriptor, and, much like a similarly soft and young-looking Gina Piersanti in It Felt Like Love, his being the age of the character is an essential element of what makes him so good in the part. Teddy is a teenager we’ve known and maybe even been, but one we don’t often see onscreen. He is sensitive and artistic, but afraid of being ridiculed by his best friend, Fred. So Teddy is unable to say “no” to Fred even when he knows he will end up getting in trouble (and maybe even end up in court) because of him. We see that he genuinely cares for April, but that he lets a jealous Fred drag him away from her more than once. Palo Alto is a film in which we often dread what teens will do next, so at the end, when Teddy finally does the right thing, and, in her own way, so does Emily, we breathe a sigh of relief.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7Q3oeHsIj0″]

Writer-director Leah Meyerhoff’s I Believe In Unicorns is a much more minor film than Palo Alto but has some similarities–a high school girl has her first sexual relationship with an older man. The main character, Davina (Natalia Dyer), lives with and cares for her mother who uses a wheelchair and also doesn’t have full use of her hands (Meyerhoff’s own mother, Toni Meyerhoff, plays the part. She has multiple sclerosis and Meyerhoff cared for her when she was growing up).

Davina spends a lot of her time awash in fantasies that seem like those of a much younger girl (her room is also like a younger girl’s); one sequence involves fireworks (it evokes a similar scene in Beasts of the Southern Wild) and others involve a stop-motion animated unicorn and dragon in a forest. Meyerhoff’s talent as the director of experimental shorts is apparent in these scenes, but her script does not come close to equaling it. The mother is nearly silent (which may be because of her disability), and we don’t get a sense of what happens to her when her daughter runs away to be with a man/boy who has already graduated, Sterling (Peter Vack)– even though the mother seems to have no one else to help care for her.

We see brief glimpses of what the film could have been: the kiss Davina exchanges with her friend Clara (Amy Seimetz) when asked how Sterling kisses, Davina squatting down and spitting up after performing oral sex on Sterling for the first time and Davina and Sterling’s encounters which alternate between the two of them feasting on each other’s mouths teenager-style to rough sex that is sometimes just under and sometimes over Davina’s line of consent. Sterling alternately abuses Davina and cries in fear that he will abandon her and Dyer’s presence is lovely and vulnerable throughout the film. “Do you really like me or is this just temporary,” she asks him in a heartbreaking moment. Although Vack is a competent performer, he looks distractingly like a male model (he could have come from the cover of a romance novel), which makes the “real” sequences seem just a dystopian continuation of the fantasy ones, a problem not helped by the two of them never seeming to completely run out of money and having clean, shiny, flawless hair after living out of a car for an unspecified period of time. We also don’t know for sure until toward the end of the film that Sterling is an adult (although an emotionally stunted one). Vack is obviously an adult: his height and muscled body threaten to overwhelm the petite Dyer (who was 17 when the film was shot) in their scenes together, but because so many films put adults in high school roles we don’t realize how creepy Sterling is from the beginning. He not only has sex with a girl who is not yet an adult, but also chooses one who looks even younger than she is–and she’s still enough of a kid to place animal miniatures on the dashboard of his car.

In the question and answer period after the film, Meyerhoff explained how difficult casting Davina was and how the filmmaking team went through hundreds of actresses before they found Dyer. It’s a familiar story (similar to Hittman’s casting of Piersanti in It Felt Like Love). I wish this writer-director had put that same effort into writing a coherent script for her talented actors.

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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.

‘Belle’: A Costume Drama Like and Unlike the Others

People of color are often omitted from historical dramas (except to play slaves or servants), with the rationale that it’s not “realistic” to have them in the cast. We can see through this excuse in historical dramas in which casting people of color would match the story being told, but white people still have the biggest roles in–and sometimes even make up the entire cast of–the film, as in the recently released ‘Noah.’ Historical “realism” is not always what we think it is: literature and visual art through the ages confirm that people of color who weren’t slaves, like Alexandre Dumas the author of ‘The Three Musketeers,’ have been in Europe for as long as people have lived there. We need to see more of their stories onscreen.

People of color are often omitted from historical dramas (except to play slaves or servants) with the rationale that it’s not “realistic” to have them in the cast. We can see through this excuse in the historical dramas in which casting people of color would match the story being told, but white people still have the biggest roles in–and sometimes even make up the entire cast of–the film, as in the recently released Noah. Historical “realism” is also not always what we think it is: literature and visual art through the ages confirm that people of color who weren’t slaves, like Alexandre Dumas the author of The Three Musketeers, have been in Europe for as long as people have lived there. We need to see more of their stories onscreen.

Director Amma Asante, in her second feature, Belle tells the based-on-fact story (the script is by Misan Sagay) of a young biracial girl, whose Royal Navy Admiral father (Matthew Goode) takes her to the family estate just outside of London, so his great-uncle’s family and servants can raise her in late-18th-century, upper-class luxury her father says is “due to her.”

The girl, Dido, grows into a beautiful young woman (Gugu Mbatha-Raw in a star-making turn), wearing the finest dresses, often the same cut (with the outrageously low necklines and the upward thrust of breasts typical of the period–like a Maxim cover gone out of control) but in a different shade from those of her blonde, white cousin and companion Elizabeth (Sarah Gadon). Dido carries her father’s last name, and, when he dies, inherits a £2,000 annuity which, as Elizabeth points out, makes her an heiress. But Dido is not allowed to eat dinner with the family–or the servants, because, as her great-uncle, Lord Mansfield (Tom Wilkinson) tells her, neither situation would be “correct” for a woman of her color and social standing.

Dido’s isolation increases when her aunts take the initiative in finding a rich husband for her cousin who, because her father has remarried, has no dowry. Lord Mansfield hands the house keys to Dido and explains that since no gentleman will marry her (because of the color of her skin) and because of her social standing she cannot marry a man who isn’t a gentleman, she can soon replace her “spinster” Aunt Mary (Penelope Wilton) as the caretaker of the house.

During the family’s stay in London, Dido does attract suitors, for her beauty, charm and for her money. Fans of Jane Austen may see some parallels with her work, especially in Dido’s initial fraught interactions with John (Sam Reid), the vicar’s abolitionist son. Belle fails to give the same sense, as the best adaptations of Austen do (like 1995’s Persuasion) of the death grip manners and custom combined with the mores and opinions of their families and social circle had on women, especially young women, at that time (and the film takes place some decades before the works of Austen do). The film pays little attention to the necessity of a young man and a young woman of courting age to always have a chaperone present, a tradition that survives today in some strict religious communities in which the prospective bride and groom spend hardly any time alone together before they are married.

We see the reason for chaperones when Dido is alone with the loathsome older brother of the penniless gentleman who wishes to marry her. The brother manhandles her as he tells her how disgusting he finds her, and then, out of the camera’s range, seems to sexually assault her. This scene is the only part of the film that, at that time of strict sex segregation among unmarried, unrelated gentry, shows how privileged, white men felt free to sexually prey on women of color. Although the film makes clear that Dido’s father loved her mother, the implications of his meeting her on a Spanish slave ship are disturbing: the mother is never called a slave, so we can infer Dido’s father never owned her (unlike Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings, the mother of his children who were born into slavery) but the relationship (while not rape, as it would be between a slave and owner no matter how much one “loved” the other) would still be an abuse of power if Dido’s mother worked for her father as a paid servant, as Mabel (Bethan Mary-James), the Black maid at the family’s London house, does.

The customs and mores of the present day always corrupt the “realism” of costume dramas: the well-scrubbed faces and bodies of the actors belying the fact that daily bathing is a relatively recent innovation, their clothes, in the days before dry-cleaning are spotless (in very early silent films we see stained clothes–over a hundred years after the events of Belle take place–were the norm), their accents in 18th century England are an anachronism. We suspend our disbelief to ooh and ahh over the pretty dresses, grand mansions and drawing room antics.

The problem with Belle is: we have to suspend our disbelief about the rampant racism, and to some degree the sexism (Dido, at one point, is the only woman in a court full of men and not one of them tries to throw her out) of the time as well. We see plenty of racist sentiment directed toward Dido (especially from Miranda Richardson, who plays the gossipy, sharp-tongued mother of Dido’s gentleman suitor), but the “good” people like Dido’s great-uncle and John end up espousing beliefs about racial equality very much like those the “good” white people of today might. Even though one character wrote a court decision that (spoiler alert) laid the framework for the eventual abolition of slavery in England, and the other (spoiler alert) married a Black woman, giving these 18th century characters (especially those based on real people who lived at the time) the mindset of the 21st century has the effect, as in Downton Abbey and to a lesser degree in Mad Men, of downplaying the racism of the past, the legacy of which we still see in the present.

Dido_ElizabethPortrait — The real Dido and Elizabeth

Americans don’t have to go back nearly 250 years and over an ocean to find overt racism about the “mixing” of the races from “good” white people. Abraham Lincoln, who signed the U.S. Emancipation Proclamation about 80 years after the events of the film take place, espoused racist beliefs in historical documents. Film and television producers avoided showing white and Black people together in any relationship other than as master and servant (even on talk shows) well into the 1960s. In the 1970s, when my family lived next door to an interracial couple, the children in the neighborhood called their son and daughter “zebras.”

The second of Dido’s suitors, John, is radically forward-thinking for the time. Much religious rhetoric in those days supported slavery, the way a lot of religious rhetoric today supports homophobia, so John would have had to be something of an apostate too: an unusual position for the son of a clergyman. He also would have been considered a crank and an outcast (like many forward-thinking people throughout history) in most social circles of the time. Instead, he suffers from Perfect Man Syndrome, a disease that also afflicts the romantic leads in Short Term 12 and the upcoming releases Obvious Child and Dear White People: men who are so ceaselessly caring, who never say the wrong thing no matter how aggrieved they are, that they might as well sprout wings and fly into the clouds as angels. Sam Reid’s relative lack of skill as an actor doesn’t help: I had to suppress a giggle when he shouts, “I love her,” in a scene that isn’t supposed to be humorous. The flawless Mbatha-Raw, in particular, shows him up, as does the presence of Wilkinson, Richardson, Wilton and Emily Watson (who plays Wilkinson’s wife) in the film who all give the type of serviceable performances that will neither diminish nor enhance their reputations as great actors. The film score by Rachel Portman (one of the few women who regularly composes music for movies) is also uninspired: cuing the audience to feel emotions the film doesn’t quite earn.

That said, Belle has a great lead performance from a Black actress in a Black woman director’s film of a Black woman’s script about a Black woman in European history (who wasn’t a slave): an opportunity that doesn’t come very often for audiences, so you shouldn’t miss it. If the long line for the women’s restroom after the film is any indication (women are the main audience for costume dramas in film and on TV) Belle will probably be a big art house success. Still, we see glimmers of a better, deeper movie in too few moments of Belle: in Dido’s own initial snobbishness, the trappings of which have left her in a lonely, untenable position. Later, we see her two identities, as an upper class woman and a Black woman, at odds with each other, captured most poignantly when Dido is asked to sit for a family portrait. At first we don’t understand why she’s upset at the request, until she points out that in the paintings on the walls of the mansion, Black people are always positioned at the feet of white people (as pet dogs, cats and birds were often painted with children at the time: in the otherwise excellent A Royal Affair–which takes place during the same general period–a Black child is also portrayed as a “pet” for the white upper class). At the end of the movie the director unveils the real portrait that inspired the film and in the original Dido’s face we see an expression hinting at the more complex and nuanced conduit to the past Belle might have been.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFi8YCxq2VU”]

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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.