films that pass the Bechdel test

‘The Assassin’ We Want To See

Because ‘The Assassin’ packs nearly every kind of arty, intersectional-feminist fan’s fantasy into one movie. It centers around a woman of color (it takes place in China in the middle ages and its director is Taiwanese, so most of the actors are Taiwanese too) whose main scenes are with other women of color (this film has relatively little dialogue but passes the Bechdel test with no problem).

I was out of town for a long weekend and then catching up on what I had missed when I found out Hsiao-Hsien Hou’s The Assassin was having its last showing (a late matinee, not even an evening show) in my art-house-friendly town. I wasn’t even aware the film had begun its run. I dropped everything to see it, and if this movie is playing nearby, so should you.

Because The Assassin packs nearly every kind of arty, intersectional-feminist fan’s fantasy into one movie. It centers around a woman of color (it takes place in China in the middle ages and its director is Taiwanese, so most of the actors are Taiwanese too) whose main scenes are with other women of color (this film has relatively little dialogue but passes the Bechdel test with no problem). The main character, Nie Yinniang (Qi Shu) is the assassin of the title, an action heroine (or maybe an anti-heroine: for much of the film we don’t know) with beautifully choreographed martial arts scenes: this film unlike some other films of the Wuxia genre doesn’t feature the ridiculous airborne hijinks that defy suspension of disbelief.

The Assassin, as a historical costume drama also shows off its high-born characters in sumptuous period robes, their homes decorated with curtains and tapestries as fine, if not finer than their clothes: we even see some of the palace intrigue through these gauzy, wafting borders, as if we, like the main character are spying through them. And this film is stunningly shot (by cinematographer Ping Bin Lee): one of the only subtitled films in which I missed at least a little of the dialogue because I was too busy looking at what was onscreen. The Assassin even has a little, old-fashioned black magic in its plot, which made me love it even more.

What the film doesn’t do is pander to a Western audience: the story is apparently well known in China in many different incarnations, but not in the US. Still, I much prefer a film that makes me sometimes wonder what’s going on to one like The Walk with its over-explanation and bad performances obfuscating its emotionally-fraught (my palms and even the soles of my feet were sweaty) 3D action scenes. The Assassin isn’t in 3D, but the moves are so fast, smooth and quiet they’re like dance captured on film (although these scenes probably use some form of camera trickery I couldn’t spot it). The camera astonishes elsewhere too. At one point we are looking, in a long take, at a curtained alcove of the Governor’s palace and we suddenly see Yinniang standing there, listening in the shadows, and we’re not sure if she just appeared or if we didn’t notice her before.

We watch much of this film as a dance performance. Yinniang is often silent: more than one critic has compared her to the sometimes ambiguous main characters in Westerns. We know that she is trained as a killer and see her kill at the start of the film, but we also see that she won’t murder a target in front of his young son. Her teacher, a nun says, “The way of the sword is without compassion,” but we don’t know, for the majority of The Assassin, if that way will turn out to be Yinniang’s and are often looking at her face–and her actions–for clues.

In other words, we’re looking at a taciturn, complex main character not uncommon in movies about men (especially Westerns) but pretty much unheard of in films about women (not just her teacher but also one of Yinniang’s fighting opponents is a woman). At the behest of her teacher, Yinniang returns to her hometown to kill her cousin, Tian Ji’an (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s Chen Chang), the independent Governor of her home province, but her mother, not knowing the reason for her return puts her into the fancy, movement-constricting robes other women wear. We see Yinniang trying on the outfit and then wearing her signature black coat and wrapped boots for the rest of the film. And unlike other long-haired women action-adventure heroines she actually has her hair tied in such a way that it won’t get in the way of her fighting.

We find out later that Yinniang was at one time betrothed to her cousin and the two were given matching pieces of carved jade to formalize this arrangement. When she makes her first attempt on the Tian Ji’an’s life she leaves behind her piece. “She wanted me to recognize her before taking my life. She wanted me to know why,” he says.

But the film doesn’t waste much time portraying Yinniang as heartbroken, though her quiet, watchful demeanor is in keeping with the trauma she has endured, in both the separation from her family at a young age and her conscription into killing. At the same time, she also has a romantic interest (Satoshi Tsumabuki) who, from the expression we see on his face, seems to realize no woman is as hot as the one who pushes a bad guy in front of you at the right moment to stop an arrow that was headed for your chest.

Hsiao-Hsien Hou won “Best Director” at Cannes for this film, so I don’t understand the lack of fanfare for The Assassin now. In contrast to several acclaimed films I’ve seen lately, I was never bored during The Assassin and wished the film lasted longer. At the matinee I spotted three, youngish Asian women (three more than I would expect at that showtime, in that neighborhood) in the audience as the lights came up, one of whom was beaming at what she had just seen. If only film distributors and male critics would realize a lot of women like (and unlike!) her would love to see this terrific-looking, well-acted, martial-arts film about a complicated, Asian woman who is nobody’s victim or martyr.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSoXoOAY1zU” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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

‘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

We’re All Stars: A Feminist Retrieval of ‘High School Musical’

I am not here to argue that the ‘High School Musical’ franchise is a feminist triumph. But I continue to believe that popular cultural products beloved of young women and girls receive an inordinate amount of vitriol because of misogyny, and that they merit close and generous examination for the retrieval of positive messages.

Written by Max Thornton.

First things first: I am not here to argue that the High School Musical franchise is a feminist triumph. But I continue to believe that popular cultural products beloved of young women and girls receive an inordinate amount of vitriol because of misogyny, and that they merit close and generous examination for the retrieval of positive messages.

(At least, that’s what I tell myself to justify my love of One Direction.)

The first time I saw High School Musical, I classified it as “basically Grease with worse songs but a better message,” and that holds true. As the RiffTrax snarks: “At last, a high school movie that tackles the issue of cliques.” But let’s be real, there are an awful lot of teen movies out there with pretty terrible messages (like, um, Grease), and HSM isn’t actually one of them.

There's so much pep in this poster, I'm exhausted just looking at it. — There’s so much pep in this poster, I’m exhausted just looking at it.

Sure, it’s cheesier than a four cheese pizza with extra cheese, setting up potential conflicts only to resolve them through ~the power of friendship~ ten minutes later. And sure, it has plot holes you could drive a bus through. My personal favorites are (1) the notion of theater nerds being obsessed with punctuality and (2) the fact that antagonists Ryan and Sharpay are in every way demonstrably better performers than the heroes Troy and Gabriella. (In fact, they are such breakout characters that Sharpay even has her own spinoff movie, Sharpay’s Fabulous Adventure, which, the montage of two dogs falling in love to a Justin Bieber song notwithstanding, undoubtedly has the most narrative cohesion of any film in the High School Musical franchise.)

However, let’s take our cue from Johnny Mercer and ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive. Latina Gabriella’s friendship with African-American nerd Taylor ensures that the film easily passes both the Bechdel test and the race equivalent. Then there’s the fact that, as a Tumblr post that eludes my search skills put it, the master narrative is that of a rom com about a popular boy “giving up his swag” to be with a nerdy girl. Of course, this is Disney at its Disneyest, so even the nerdy kids are bright-eyed and pimple-free, but it’s still essentially a gender inversion of a common trope.

Plus, the film kind of takes the hoary message about being true to yourself to a logical endpoint by being so ridiculously optimistic about the consequences. Standout number “Stick to the Status Quo” is all about kids reinforcing a system that disadvantages them because it’s all they know. The homework enthusiast who loves hiphop, the basketballer player who bakes, the stoner (/skateboarder, because this is Disney) who plays the cello – all are shouted down by their fellow students who want them to remain within their boxes. And yet surely nobody is fully defined by a single interest. Even the nameless masses of kids who insist that their bolder peers “stick to the stuff you know” must have other hobbies, pastimes, passions, facets to their personalities; but they are so invested in the clique system that they insist upon it, even when they logically should not. I’m not going to suggest that this is a trenchant critique of repectability politics and systems of normativity, but it is an illustration of how these things work. The system’s greatest trick is its internalization by those who suffer under it.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYZpZr3Cv7I”]

This being Disney, as the RiffTrax says, “high-schoolers’ secrets are ‘I like rap,’ not ‘Dissecting the fetal pigs gave me a boner.’” Everyone is afraid that doing something different will make their friends dislike them; their friends are jerks (“worse than jerks… mean jerks,” as Taylor The Academic Decathlete so incisively expresses it) for all of ten minutes before feeling bad, apologizing, and joining forces to enable the lead characters to excel at a truly implausible number of extracurriculars. In a corny, contrived way, the film presents a world in which being yourself really is the best option. Admit to your secret love of singing, and not only will your jock buddies accept you, they will actively scheme to enhance your time-management skills. Within the schema of the “be yourself” story, it’s at least consistent to the notion that being yourself always makes life better – even if it does this in a hopelessly rose-tinted manner. If the message of your fictional story is “things will be best if you are always true to yourself,” it makes logical and moral sense for your protagonists to get to have their cake and eat it once they have learned this lesson.

It’s also pretty easy to read this film as a coming-out story in disguise. The jock is concerned that his love of musical theater will alienate his teammates and his jock dad? Yeah. OK, it’s a stereotype, but what in this movie isn’t? Plus the movie goes out of its way to code Troy and Gabriella’s relationship as nonsexual: they bond over the idea of being in kindergarten, they never actually kiss until the sequel, their rival counterparts are a literal brother and sister (the brother of whom is as gay as you could get in a Disney Channel original film)… On one level, of course, this is simply a rather extreme version of boy-band attractiveness rendered as non-threatening, desexualized cuteness – being a 90s kid, I still think of Hanson as the zenith of such things – but the queer reading can certainly coexist. (Note also that gay-coded musical theater enthusiast Ryan and scoffing dudebro jock Chad inexplicably show up wearing each other’s clothes in a scene in High School Musical 2.)

You think I made that up? I did not make that up.

A major philosophical concern of recent decades has been the coexistence of unity and diversity. How do we balance our commonalities as human beings and our differences as individuals? As complex and difficult as this topic often gets, I ultimately can’t express it more succinctly than the lyrics to “We’re All In This Together”:

“We’re not the same, we’re different in a good way.”

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Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax. He wrote this piece for his partner, because it’s their anniversary and they watched High School Musical on their first date. Romance!

Female Purity Is Some Bullshit: My Problem With ‘Ida’

Religious devotion is a tricky quality to depict in any medium: so many of us have seen piety as hypocrisy both in film and in life that we’re prepared to laugh at or to dismiss deeply held religious beliefs onscreen. In work made for mostly secular audiences, filmmakers who want to show deeply religious characters have to answer the question: if piety isn’t a joke, what exactly is it?

Sincere, spiritual belief in the Korean Zen film Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring (which, for long stretches is, in all but name, a silent film) is shown in very specific ways, most compellingly when the young monk pours the ashes of his teacher into the water and we see the fish start to consume them. A very different viewpoint comes from Luis Buñuel, the anticlerical director of Simon of the Desert when he shows the audience that the “goodness” and faith of religious ascetic, Simon, interferes with his ability to understand and connect with other people–which is why his efforts to improve their lives never quite hit the mark.

The title character of Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida (Agata Trzebuchowska) starts out as Anna, a young novitiate in Poland in 1962, ready to take her vows when her mother superior tells her she must first visit her only living relative, an aunt whom she has never met, nor even heard about before. When the aunt, Wanda (Agata Kulesza), first sees Anna at her door she doesn’t even bother greeting her, just stares at her face for an uncomfortably long time. When Anna introduces herself, Wanda tells her that she knows who she is.

Anna comes in and they talk, Wanda says “They never told you? You’re a Jew.” Anna’s parents (her mother was Wanda’s sister) were slaughtered during World War II and Anna/Ida was brought up as an orphan in the convent. Wanda shows Anna/Ida photos of her family (including Anna’s mother, who looks just like her) and asks because Anna’s hair is covered with a wimple “You’re a redhead too, aren’t you?”

Anna/Ida wishes to find out how her parents were killed and where their remains are buried, so she sets out for the small town in the countryside where they lived and died. Wanda accompanies her, chauffeuring her in the shiny car that, like her spacious apartment, fur-collared coat and tailored dresses, are a perk of being a powerful Communist Party member (she works as a judge) and provide a stark contrast to how most of the others we see in the film live.

Wanda and Ida act as good cop/bad cop with Wanda’s past as a prosecutor put to use when she interrogates those who might know where and how her sister and brother-in-law were killed, while Anna’s wimple and cross serve as entrée through doors that even Wanda’s position as a powerful Party member can’t open. One of the many things the film gets right about the period is the deference laypeople show Anna. In the 60s and early 70s, years before the sexual abuse scandals came to light, a lot of Catholics, especially older people, still looked at nuns and priests with reverence. Even as a farmer’s wife rebuffs Wanda’s efforts to find out about the death of Ida’s parents, she asks Ida to bless her baby.

The excellent Enemies, A Love Story, from the late Paul Mazursky, is one of the few other films that shows surviving European Jews living with the aftereffects of World War II’s mass genocide without, as in The Pawnbroker and Sophie’s Choice, giving us flashback scenes to the camps themselves. But Ida is different in that it takes place in the country where the genocide happened–and where we see precious little soul-searching about it. We find out Ida’s mother and father never made it to the camps, or even into the presence of a Nazi soldier or bureaucrat, but were killed, like livestock, by a neighbor. He knew no one would punish him for their deaths.

He murdered the family to gain possession of the small, run-down farmhouse we see at the start of Ida and Wanda’s search, its dinginess a testament to just how little it takes for someone to lose all morality. When Ida asks the man why he didn’t also kill her, he tells her, “You were tiny. No one would know you were a Jew,” and the arbitrariness that spared her is as bracing to us as a slap.

The film presents but never quite answers a question that still persists in places like Rwanda today: how does one continue to live with the people who wanted to kill you and all the people like you, or at least didn’t try to stop those who wanted to see you and your kind dead? Anna/Ida, without revealing her relation to them asks the town priest if he knew her parents. His answer shows a continuing indifference to them and to their fate: Jews mostly kept to themselves, he says. That indifference is something Anna/Ida might have shared before she knew who her parents were and how they died.

The black and white cinematography of the film, by Ryszard Lenczewski and Lukasz Zal, is striking: at one point we see the spindly, dark trunks of trees pushing up between the gravestones in an abandoned cemetery like an Edward Gorey illustration come to life. And Ida passes the Bechdel test with flying colors (as they look for clues about her murder, the two women talk about Ida’s mother, but hardly at all about her father, whom Wanda holds responsible for her sister’s death). But a pass or fail of the Bechdel test alone doesn’t determine the worth of any film: in spite of the talent of both actresses, and the deep issues the film brings up, these two characters, in the end, inhabit unconvincing gendered stereotypes.

In the same way that some popular memes have placed men in poses adopted by women in magazine layouts to show the inherent sexism of these photo shoots, we can see how these characters are lacking by imagining the roles rewritten as men. “Adam” is scheduled to soon take his vows as a monk when he is told by one of the Brothers at the monastery that he should first visit his Uncle Waclaw, his only living relative. Waclaw tells Adam he’s Jewish: his real name is “Ira.” The uncle is a former prosecutor who degrades himself by sleeping with a lot of women and frequently getting drunk. But unless we’re seeing a film from director Steve McQueen, no male character succeeds in degrading himself by having sex with a lot of women. And hard drinking often telegraphs the man is the hero.

“Ira” never loses his temper or even cries when he encounters the evidence of his parents’ murder and the confession from the man who killed them. The closest he comes to a stand (outside of his determination to find out what happened to his parents) is a placid-faced, silent and motionless refusal to shake the hand of the farmer when he agrees to show Ira the grave in exchange for Ira dropping any claim to the farm.

The hitchhiker the uncle and Ira pick up would be the woman singer in the jazz band instead of, in Ida, the male saxophonist (the singer would feel safe alone with two men in the car because one was wearing monk’s robes) and later when the monk comes to listen to the musicians jam after their gig, the singer could tell him, looking over his smooth, wide-eyed face (as the saxophonist tells Ida) “You have no idea the effect you have on (wo)men, do you?”

As Wanda’s character could be summed up as a screwed-up “slut” (a word she calls herself and for which there is no male equivalent), Ida/Anna seems to serve as a bastion of purity. The problem with purity as ascribed to everyone from the Virgin Mary through Snow White to every dull, “good” woman rescued by “the hero” is: “pure” is a better descriptor of soap than it is of a human being. In films as in life, purity is rarely an attribute assigned to men, only to women and girls just like “strong” in the emotional sense of the word, is.

I wouldn’t categorize the two main women characters in Pawlikowski’s earlier film, the compelling My Summer of Love (its star Emily Blunt, in the role that brought her to the attention of Hollywood) as ultra-realistic either, but their actions and words seemed to have concrete (if sometimes complex) motivations: those two weren’t the opaque characters Wanda, to some extent, and Anna/Ida, especially, turn out to be. When Anna/Ida makes a life-changing decision toward the end, her expression is as serenely impassive as it was at the beginning, as if nothing had happened to her during the course of the film. Ida seems poised to forget everything she’s learned in the 80 minutes we’ve been in her company–including her own name.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXhCaVqB0x0&feature=kp”]

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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 appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.