Foreign Film Week – Bitch Flicks

Foreign Film Week Roundup

Gender, Family and Globalization in ‘Eat Drink Man Woman’ by Emily Contois

Foreign Film Week: Red, Blue, and Giallo: Dario Argento’s ‘Suspiria’ by Max Thornton

Sexism in Three of Bollywood’s Most Popular Films by Katherine Filaseta

BFI London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival

Realistic Depictions of Women and Female Friendship in ‘Muriel’s Wedding’ by Libby White

‘War Witch’: Finally, a Movie About Africa Without the Cute White Movie Star by Atima Omara-Alwala

A Thorn Like a Rose: ‘War Witch’ (Rebelle) by Emily Campbell

‘The World is Ours,’ a Feminist Film by Eugenia Andino Lucas — a review in English y en Espanol

Remembering, Forgetting and Breaking Through in the Female Narrative of ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’ by Leigh Kolb

Growing Up with ‘Les Demoiselles de Rochefort’ by Lou Flandrin

‘Lemon Tree’ Unites Two Women from Palestine and Israel by Megan Kearns

As a Collector Loves His Most Prized Item: ‘Gabrielle’ (2005) by Amanda Civitello

The Disturbing, Terrorizing Feminism of Dušan Makavejev’s ‘WR: Mysteries of the Organism’ and ‘Sweet Movie’ by Leigh Kolb

A Failed Attempt at Feminism Impedes ‘Rust and Bone’ by Candice Frederick

The Accidental Feminism of ‘4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days’ by Nadia Barbu

Growing Up Queer: ‘Water Lilies’ (2007) and ‘Tomboy’ (2011) by Max Thornton

Magical Girlhoods in the Films of Studio Ghibli by Rosalind Kemp

‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ and Male Adaptations of Fantasy by Emily Belanger

Female Empowerment, a Critique of Patriarchy…Is ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ the Most Feminist Action Film Ever? by Megan Kearns

Let the Right One In by Stephanie Rogers

Let This Feminist Vampire In by Natalie Wilson

‘Happy-Go-Lucky’ by Amber Leab

‘Los Ojos de Alicia’ by Amber Leab

‘Persepolis’ by Amber Leab

‘The King’s Speech’ by Roopa Singh

‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ by Megan Kearns

‘The Girl Who Played with Fire’ by Megan Kearns

‘The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest’ by Megan Kearns

‘Incendies’ by Vicky Moufawad-Paul

‘Atonement’ by Marcia Herring

‘Slumdog Millionaire’ by Tatiana Christian

‘The Descent’ by Robin Hitchcock

Top 10 Best Female-Centered Horror Films by Eli Lewy

‘Where Do We Go Now?’ by Kyna Morgan

‘Fire’: Part One of Deepa Mehta’s ‘Elements Trilogy’ by Amber Leab

‘The Artist’: “Peppy Miller, Wonder Woman” by Candice Frederick

Best Documentary Oscar Nominee: ‘Pina’ by Ren Jender

Preview: ‘The Iron Lady’ by Amber Leab

Best Actress Nominees: Meryl Streep and Michelle Williams by Gabriella Apicella

‘The Lady’ vs. ‘The Iron Lady’: Who Gets the Vote? by Candice Frederick

Preview: ‘Albert Nobbs’ by Amber Leab

‘Albert Nobbs’ Review: Exploring Constrictions of Gender and Class by Megan Kearns

Indie Spirit Best International Film Nominee: ‘Shame’ by Clint Waters

Indie Spirit Best International Film Nominee: ‘Melancholia’ by Olivia Bernal

‘Melancholia’: Take 2 by Hannah Reck

‘Room in Rome’ by Djelloul Marbrook

“Love” Is “Actually” All Around Us (and Other Not-So-Deep Sentiments) by Lady T

‘The Lady’ Makes the Personal Political by Jarrah Hodge

‘The Lady’ vs. ‘The Iron Lady’: Who Gets the Vote? by Candice Frederick

Motherhood in Film and TV: ‘Mother’ by Tatiana Christian

‘Splice’: Womb Horror and the Mother Scientist by Mychael Blinde

The Four Mothers of ‘Hanna’ by Rachel Redfern

‘Cloud Atlas’ Loses Audience by Erin Fenner

Please, ‘Turn Me On, Dammit!’ by Rachel Redfern

‘Skyfall’: It’s M’s World, Bond Just Lives In It by Margaret Howie

The Sun (Never) Sets on the British Empire: The Neocolonialism of ‘Skyfall’ by Max Thornton

10 Statements ‘Shakespeare in Love’ Makes about Women’s Rights by Myrna Waldron

The Depiction of Women in Films about Irish Politics by Alisande Fitzsimons

‘Anna Karenina’ and the Tragedy of Being a Woman in the Wrong Era by Erin Fenner

Gender and Food Week: ‘Life is Sweet’ by Alisande Fitzsimons

It’s “Impossible” Not to See the White-Centric Point of View by Lady T

Extreme Weight Loss for Roles is Not “Required” and Not Praiseworthy by Robin Hitchcock

‘Les Miserables’: The Feminism Behind the Barricades by Leigh Kolb

‘Les Miserables,’ Sex Trafficking and Fantine a Symbol of Women’s Oppression by Megan Kearns

‘Les Miserables’: Some Musicals are More Feminist Than Others by Natalie Wilson

Feminism & the Oscars: Do This Year’s Films Pass the Bechdel Test? by Megan Kearns

Feminism in ‘Aiyyaa,’ and Why It Ain’t Such A Bad Movie by Rhea Daniel

Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: ‘Ballet Shoes’ by Max Thornton

Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: ‘Farewell, My Concubine’ by René Kluge

A New Jane in Cary Fukunaga’s ‘Jane Eyre’ (2011) by Rhea Daniel

Comparing Two Versions of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ by Lady T

How BBC’s ‘Pride & Prejudice’ Illustrates Why The Regency Period Sucked For Women by Myrna Waldron

‘Women Without Men’: Gender Roles in Iran, Women’s Bodies and Subverting the Male Gaze by Kaly Halkawt

2013 Oscar Week: ‘A Royal Affair: More Royal Than Affair by Atima Omara-Alwala

2013 Oscar Week: ‘A Royal Affair’ by Rosalind Kemp

2013 Oscar Week: ‘Searching for Sugar Man’ Makes Race Invisible by Robin Hitchcock

2013 Oscar Week: Academy Documentaries: People’s Stories, Men’s Voices by Jo Custer

Penetrating History in ‘Hysteria’ by Rachel Redfern

Foreign Film Week: Female Empowerment, a Critique of Patriarchy…Is ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ the Most Feminist Action Film Ever?

Written by Megan Kearns. | Warning: Spoilers ahead

Can an action film portray exquisitely choreographed fighting scenes, badass fully dimensional ladies, tragic romantic love and make a searing social statement? Yes, yes, yes. One of my favorite films, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is an undoubtedly feminist action film with a potent gender commentary woven throughout.

In Ang Lee’s lyrical, Oscar-winning wuxia masterpiece, the lives of 3 women warriors are embroiled in the quest for a prized missing sword. Easily labeled a feminist film with its “slant on feminist empowerment,” Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon “advances a revolutionary agenda of female equality.”

Shu Lien (the amazing Michelle Yeoh), a famous warrior, exudes a quiet strength and dignity. She knows her abilities and what she wants. Yet she feels bound by duty, loyalty and patriarchal norms, unable to follow her heart. A governess by day, a thief and murderer by night, the bitter and vengeful Jade Fox (Cheng Pei-pei) frantically wants control. She’s filled with fury and vengeance over her denial to learn the ways of the revered Wudang skills due to her gender. Zhang Ziyi as Jen, a governor’s daughter and secret protégé of Jade Fox, steals the show. Fiery, impetuous, strong-willed, she’s a fierce warrior, desperate to break the chains of gendered aristocratic expectations placed on her by her family and society. Whether her lover, a friend or a warrior she admires, Jen stubbornly refuses to yield, obey or acquiesce to anyone. More than anything, she wants to make her own decisions, to live her own life.

While Li Mu Bei (Chow Yun Fat), a dude, is considered the most respected warrior, women are unquestioned in their capacity to be skilled warriors. A man who just had a baby girl says he hopes his daughter will be half as strong as Shu Lien. But while women are respected and admired, society simultaneously expects them to obey certain norms.

Jen strives to live the life of a warrior. She doesn’t want to be shackled by an arranged marriage. Jade Fox wants power and to rule, to not let her gender hold her back. Jen and Shu Lien both yearn for freedom, to freely love who they choose. But sexist patriarchy holds each woman back from attaining what each desires.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon continually questions stereotypical gender roles for women.

Jen laments her monotonous future as an aristocratic wife with both Shu Lien and Jade Fox. She must marry into a noble family in order to boost her father’s business. Jen says she hasn’t yet lived the life she wants. Jen reveals to Shu Lien how she envies her life, even though Shu Lien explains it’s not as romantic as it seems:

Jen: “It must be exciting to be a fighter: to be totally free.”
Shu Lien: “Fighters have rules too: friendship, trust, integrity. Without rules, we wouldn’t survive long.”

Jen craves a sisterhood between her and Shu Lien. The two discuss gender and marriage and how society views it as “the most important step in a woman’s life.” Jen questions if Shu Lien is married and then realizes that if she “probably couldn’t roam around freely” if she was a wife. Jen says to Shu Lien:

“I wish I were like the heroes in the books I read, like you and Li Mu Bai. I guess I’m happy to be marrying. But to be free to live my own life, to choose whom I love, that is true happiness.”

Jen thinks the key to her freedom is in remaining unwed and following the warrior’s path. But Shu Lien shares her own pain of thwarted love. Due to her warrior duties, she did not want to dishonor the memory of her murdered fiancé and pursue her love for Li Mu Bai:

“So the freedom you talk about, I too desire it. But I have never tasted it.”

Jade Fox’s gender, that she’s a female criminal, surprises people. Like Jen and Shu Lien, Jade Fox also bemoans the sexist constraints placed on her not being allowed to pursue her career. So she took matters into her own hands and stole the precious Wudang secrets. When Li Mu Bei confronts Jade Fox for her thievery and for murdering his master, she says:

“Your master underestimated us women. Sure, he’d sleep with me but he would never teach me. He deserved to die by a woman’s hand!”

In her eyes, she was good enough to fuck but not good enough to be an equal.

Women are expected to enter marriage, to strive to be wives and mothers. Societal norms dictate women should be nurturing and gentle, women should support the men in their life and they shouldn’t be too outspoken or too unruly. If they transgress these societal norms, they’re often punished. But here, we see the women speak out and push back against the hypocrisy and strains of sexism. We witness a delicate balance exists of respecting tradition while pursuing personal happiness and fulfillment, along with continued resistance to patriarchal norms.

Feminema’s Didion discusses the film’s “overwhelming” and “explicit” feminism:

“So that’s the first thing: the contrast of the yearning, reserved restraint of Yeoh/Chow, and the woo-hoo! of Zheng/Chang. The second thing is the feminism, which is so overwhelming and explicit I can’t believe no one made much of it at the time. And it’s not just that the fight sequences always feature women — who win — nor that the best sequence faces off Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi in the very best, funniest, most exciting matchup ever. The heart of the story relies on the fact that its three main female characters (Jen, Shu Lien, and Jen’s governess, Jade Fox) have each been foiled in their attempts to live as they desire because they are women. Each takes a different approach in response, and they inevitably find themselves in opposition with one another as well as with men.”

As Didion points out, the women all end up opposing one another. It’s interesting in the beginning of the film, Jen starts off as friends with both of the other women. Jade Fox mentors her and she yearns to forge a friendship with Shu Lien and emulate her life. Eventually all women are at odds with each other. Jen feels betrayed by Shu Lien that she wants her to return to her parents. Shu Lien is disappointed with Jen as she’s unappreciative of her support, Shu Lien and Jade Fox are at odds. Jade Fox feels jealousy and betrayal after she discovers Jen hid her talents in combat, particularly because she was the older mentor, the supposed wiser one bestowing knowledge, not the other way around.

Despite the fighting and rivalries, it never felt catty in the typical way the media depicts women as tearing each other down. Rather it feels like an indictment of sexist patriarchy that wants to pit women against each other. It’s up to us women to remember to nurture and support one another.

Based on a novel, Lee said it’s “one of the rare cases where we take the emotional tour with the women. We take their point of view, and they get to carry the story.” But while he calls martial arts a “very male-dominant” and “macho genre,” actor Michelle Yeoh offers a different perspective. When asked about Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon called a “feminist martial arts film” and “the role of women,” Yeoh said:

“If you read a lot of Chinese literature, there has always been very strong women figures — warriors, swordswomen — who defended honor and loyalty with the men. So it’s not new to our culture, it’s always been very much a part of it. It’s good that now the Western audience would have a different image of the Chinese women. Where for a while, it was very stereotypical — the demure, very quiet, strong in a very silent way.”

The film runs shows 3 strong, assertive, outspoken women – which counters Western media’s pervasive stereotypes of Asian women as docile and subservient.

In theory, women action heroes break that mold. But in reality, most female film characters don’t shatter gender stereotypes, ultimately succumbing to stereotypical gender roles. As researcher Katy Gilpatric discovered, women in action movies rarely lead as heroes, usually serving as props to the male protagonists, and serving as love interests. She also found women often meet their death, frequently by self-sacrifice, by the end of an action film.

But in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the women are the stars. And not just one woman. 3 women. Of different ages and different socio-economic statuses. Sure, there are men, romance and star-crossed lovers. But the female characters aren’t objectified for the male gaze or reduced to their sexuality. The women don’t sacrifice their identities in order to love or be in romantic relationships.

I don’t automatically find female action characters empowering. I find assertive, intelligent, self-reliant, female survivors empowering, whether they strap on a gun or wield a sword or not. But what makes these female characters and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon so feminist? We see their stories, their perspectives. We also get an indictment of patriarchy and a staunch argument in favor of gender equality.

Li Mu Bai calls Jen a dragon, and Jen refers to herself this way as well. On the symbolic color of green, director Ang Lee said that “anything green is hidden dragon, desires and repression…” The film is about repressing your desires — the pain it causes when you do (Shu Lien and Li Mu Bai) and the price you pay if you don’t (Jen). Jen runs away and steals the Green Destiny sword, calling herself the “Invincible Sword Goddess,” defeating a slew of dudes in the process. She taps into her hidden desires and literally wields and shapes her own destiny.

Li Mu Bai realizes the capacity of Jen’s skills and wants to train her in the Wudang way. When Shu Lien reminds him that they don’t accept women, he says they will have to make an exception. Li Mu Bai, who has also felt trapped by his duty and honor, impeding him from following his heart and confessing his love for Shu Lien, finally realizes the ridiculousness of stereotypical gender roles.

You can interpret the ambiguous ending — Jen leaping off the balcony over a cliff — as Jen committing suicide, unable to bear the thought of the damage her yearning for freedom has wreaked. Lo, Jen’s lover, tells her a story about a boy who made a wish and it came true after he leapt off the side of a cliff because his heart was true.

But I never saw the ending as her suicide. I saw it as Jen’s liberation. Jen’s choice conveyed her refusal to be tied down, her transcendental awakening rejecting society’s gender norms and patriarchy and embracing her individualism. She refused to live a life of obedience. She wanted to follow her heart and live life on her own terms. But Jen also realized that if she was the wife of a nobleman or perhaps even the wife of a rebel, she would still be immersed in patriarchy. Even if Jen and Lo reunite — his wish — she won’t be a docile, servile wife. She will be her own person.

But Jen also learned that she didn’t want to turn her back on female camaraderie, refusing Shu Lien’s help, the way her mentor Jade Fox turned on her through betrayal. Jen’s initial shunning of sisterhood ultimately led to Li Mu Bai’s death.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon focuses on the lives of different women on different paths with parallel obstacles. Ultimately, each woman forges her own path. When Shu Lien and Jen reconcile at the end, she doesn’t advise Jen to be loyal or obedient. She tells her that no matter what, Jen should remain true to herself. And that’s precisely what Jen does.

Ultimately, the film argues that sexist gender roles trap us all. Sexism remains a toxic barrier to happiness and enlightenment. And that’s what makes this film so empowering. Women must be true to themselves in order to achieve freedom and happiness.

Foreign Film Week: Magical Girlhoods in the Films of Studio Ghibli

Guest post written by Rosalind Kemp, previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on November 30, 2011.

“For the people who used to be ten years old, and the people who are going to be ten years old.”

— Director Hayao Miyazaki on Spirited Away

The films of Studio Ghibli provide their viewers with a rich variety of female characters from warrior princesses to love-struck adolescents, curious toddlers to powerful witches. These characters owe a great deal to the prototypes of European fairy tales and Japanese folklore and in many ways are traditional versions and depictions of femininities, but there’s an underlying sense of joy for feminist viewers in that these girls and women are active, subjective and thoroughly engaging. I’m focusing here on young girls in the lighter end of Ghibli’s production including sisters Mei and Satsuke in My Neighbour Totoro, Kiki in Kiki’s Delivery Service and Chihiro in Spirited Away.


Spirited Away

Ghibli films tend to blend fantasy and reality so that magic and flight are acceptable parts of the worlds the characters inhabit. Girls especially tend to possess magic powers or particular appreciation of them and this is shown in an unexceptional manner. While Kiki raises some eyebrows in her new town, it’s because the townsfolk don’t see many witches, not because they don’t believe in their existence. Similarly, although Kiki is an outsider, there is a distinct lack of threat to her for being so. In Ghibli worlds girls are fully entitled to fly on broomsticks, as long as they don’t congest traffic, and 13 year olds are allowed to pursue their cultural practices of living alone. In My Neighbour Totoro when Mei tells Satsuke and their father about her encounter with Totoro, after initial disbelief they embrace the truth that there are friendly nature spirits in the area, even leading to father taking the girls to pay their respects to the forest’s deities.

This acceptance of magic is refreshing and marks a clear difference to American cartoons where ironic references are embedded in children’s fantasy to appeal to parents. In this way parents are encouraged to indulge, but secretly laugh at their children’s engagement with fantasy. There’s no knowing irony in Ghibli films, instead they are focussed on telling children’s stories for children and the lack of distinct boundaries between the magic and the mundane are part of this child-centred view. That the protagonists are predominantly female makes for a collection of films focussed on girls’ adventures and triumphs where girls’ experiences are trusted and valued.

Children, like women, are often depicted as having a close connection to the supernatural; that they can see things the rest of us cannot. Indeed Mei and Satsuke seem privileged more than anything to be invited to join the Totoros’ night-time nature ritual. Dancing and flying with creatures the rest of the world (the Ghibli world at least) would revere but aren’t lucky enough to encounter. Chihiro doesn’t have a natural affinity for magic but she’s gifted in the solving of magical problems like how to clean a dirty river spirit.

Mei, Satsuke, Kiki and Chihiro all work within the magical world as part of their quest narratives. Mei and Satsuke are dealing with the illness and potential death of their mother and a move to a new home. Kiki has moved away from her parents according to witch culture and Chihiro seeks the return of her parents from the spiritual realm where she’s been trapped and they’ve been turned into pigs.

My Neighbor Totoro

In all three stories there’s also the seeking of identity for the girls, especially and most literally for Chihiro for she has her very name stolen by a witch. In their quests for self-hood and identity all four characters go through similar trials and experiences: the absence of parental influence, the access to magical powers, the physical manifestations of anxieties such as the dust bunnies that feature in both My Neighbour Totoro and Spirited Away.

The absence of parents is a common way to allow independence to young females from fairy tales to Jane Austen and unlike for orphaned boys in fiction it can also represent a removal of patriarchal influence in general. It’s not just that these girls don’t have parents guiding them or checking up on them; they are also free to create their own rules of engagement with the world.

One way that all four girls find meaning and self is through work. Satsuke in school and house work, Mei despite being very young does gardening, Kiki sets up her delivery service and Chihiro works in the bath house. All of them do a lot of cleaning. There’s an interesting mix of public and private here and certainly the suggestion that domestic labour can be especially rewarding (for example Kiki’s paid work can provide anxieties and problems). But is the culturally feminine nature of this work an issue? In Chihiro’s case cleaning is linked to subservience and being a captive to the domestic but for the others (and eventually for her) it’s a tool of empowerment and liberation. Does such labour inevitably have negative associations of female drudgery?

Another way that selfhood and identity is achieved by these girls is by flight. Most obviously for Kiki where her broomstick is literally the means of earning a living and saving a friend’s life but also in how Totoro and Cat Bus fly Mei and Satsuke away from their worries and later to their mother. Chihiro’s flight is more anxious, as her encounters with magic are generally, but still serves to move her closer to self discovery by being the time she gives Haku his name so leading her to the rediscovery of her own.

Kiki’s Delivery Service

Work as empowerment isn’t the only moral message in these films, with ecological messages also being played out. In My Neighbour Totoro there’s the idyllic agricultural setting as well as the Totoros and other spirits of the forest. In Spirited Away rivers like Haku’s have been filled in because of the greed of humans. The messages of conservation, respect of nature (and blaming of humans as nature’s destroyers) are not as forcefully applied as in, for example, Princess Mononoke but neither are they subtle. While this preaching could be tiresome in other films, because of their earnestness and how the protagonists are fully on message it’s actually pleasant. Although nurturing the planet back to health is presented as an ungendered activity the films together can be viewed as showing the next generation of empowered young women actively making progress and solutions to the problems inflicted on the world by older generations. This also applies economically where Kiki and Chihiro’s enterprising labours lead to success for both. Chihiro especially is placed at the beginning of the film in the context of a Japan after economic downturn and reckless financial behaviour by her elders (as reported by her father) damaging Japan as a whole and its youth implicitly.

Not everybody believes that Ghibli heroines represent empowered femininities. I’ve been rather selective in the choice of films to cover but even if I’d widened the selection I stand by my view. Ponyo for example wasn’t included as its heroine isn’t really a girl but although it’s a variation on the disempowering The Little Mermaid the core message is rather different. Ponyo accepts a loss of powers because they were never entirely hers and the sea’s power remains with the feminine; Ponyo’s sea-goddess mother.

There’s been significant note of the glimpses of knickers we get in Ghibli films like when Kiki is flying and generally when there’s any rough and tumble. There’s merit in the argument that this could be voyeuristic representations of young girls but it can also be seen as further expressing their freedom and activity. These girls don’t worry about skirts riding up because they totally lack vanity and are preoccupied with altogether more important missions. We’re not given alluring peeps at nubile bodies but girls in action which female bodies so rarely are; that gaze is usually reserved for male bodies. If female passivity is alluring then the kinetic energy of these girls places them beyond that.

What’s pleasurable about these films from a feminist perspective is their alliance with joyful, engaged and active girlhoods. These girls don’t wait for princes and don’t focus on their appearances but determinedly pursue their missions, however difficult.

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Rosalind Kemp is a film studies graduate living in Brighton, UK. She’s particularly interested in female coming of age stories, film noir and European films where people talk a lot but not much happens.

Foreign Film Week: Growing Up Queer: ‘Water Lilies’ (2007) and ‘Tomboy’ (2011)

Written by Max Thornton, this review previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on June 26, 2012.

Céline Sciamma’s films are ever so French. Light on dialogue, they tend to rely on lingering shots of longing glances and exquisite mise-en-scène to reveal character; loosely plotted, they leave the impression less of a story than of a series of vignettes, of tiny moments freighted with great import.

These techniques are uniquely suited to the onscreen portrayal of adolescence. It almost seems churlish to complain that Water Lilies and Tomboy lack full structural coherence, because that’s arguably intentional. Growing up, after all, is not a tightly-plotted three-act hero’s journey with clear turning points, tidy linear progression through the successive stages of personal development, and a satisfying ending. It’s a messy and confusing struggle to find a place in the world, littered with incidents that may or may not ultimately be significant (with no way to tell the difference), and most of the time the morals make no sense.

Sciamma instinctively understands this, and the little stories she tells of growing up queer are given vivid life through her two greatest strengths as a filmmaker: her ability to coax marvelously deep and naturalistic performances out of her young actors, and her eye for a strikingly memorable little scene that perfectly encapsulates a moment of overpowering adolescent emotion – the normally boisterous Anne clutching at a lamppost and weeping in Water Lilies, for example, or Tomboy‘s Laure curling up on the couch, thumb in mouth, suddenly overwhelmed by an earlier humiliation.

Both films are carried on the remarkably expressive faces of their lead actresses. There are no voice-over monologues or expository conversations, but both Water Lilies and Tomboy present the inner life of their protagonists with stunning depth and rawness.

Movie poster for Water Lilies

The protagonist of Water Lilies is Pauline Acquart’s Marie, a quiet fifteen-year-old with a crush on Floriane, star of the local synchronized swimming team. Marie’s best friend Anne, meanwhile, has her eye on Floriane’s boyfriend François. So far, so Gossip Girl, but there is nothing over-dramatic or sensationalistic about the way this love quadrilateral plays out. Although the film’s primary focus is on the blossoming friendship between Marie and Floriane, there is a clear thematic through-line of what it is to grow up female in the patriarchy. Marie, Anne, and Floriane all embody different ways of being young women, and especially young women coming into their sexuality.

Anne, though less conventionally feminine than the other girls, is confidently heterosexual and determined to sleep with the boy she finds attractive. Marie is so eager to spend time with Floriane that she agrees to help her sneak out to meet François, and her yearnings for the lithe bodies slipping through the water are beautifully conveyed through moments such as the shot of Marie shifting, flustered, as Floriane unselfconsciously changes into a swimsuit right in front of her. Floriane herself, despite the reputation she cultivates (perhaps recognizing that denial would be futile – once branded a “slut,” a teenage girl is hopelessly trapped in a no-win morass of contradictory social pressures), eventually confesses to Marie that she has never actually had sex, and in fact is afraid to do so.

“If you don’t want to do it, don’t.”

“I have to.”

“Where did you read that?”

“All over my face, apparently. If he finds out I’m not a real slut, it’s over.”

Floriane recounts several instances of sexual harassment from men; when Marie has no similar stories to share, Floriane tells her, “You’re lucky… very lucky.” And perhaps to some extent she is. Perhaps, as Anne and Marie float fully-clothed in the pool at the end of the movie, while Floriane dances alone for the boys she’s not certain she even wants to be with, they are considering their good fortune: they, at least, are strong enough to defy the patriarchal dictates around female sexual behavior, to name and claim their desires (or lack thereof), to make mistakes and learn from them without being defined by them. Growing up female in this world is hard, but they know they will make it.

Movie poster Tomboy

Tomboy tells a very different story of growing up queer. Zoé Héran turns in a truly remarkable performance as androgynous ten-year-old Laure, who, on moving to a new neighborhood, is asked by the friendly Lisa, “T’es nouveau?” – “Are you new?” – in a way that genders Laure male. In that moment, Laure becomes Mikael, a boy who spends a happy summer among his new friends and his puppy-love girlfriend Lisa. For the duration of the summer, Laure is confined to home and family (well-meaning dad, heavily pregnant mom, hyper-femme little sister Jeanne), and Mikael is the face presented to the world.

Any ten-year-old lives in the present, and Mikael meets each challenge as it arises – sneaking away deep into the woods when the other boys casually take a pee break; snipping a girl’s swimsuit into a boy’s, and constructing a Play-Doh packer to fill it; swearing Jeanne to secrecy when Lisa unwittingly tells her about Mikael – even as it becomes increasingly clear to the viewer that eventually Laure’s parents must find out about Mikael. As loving as they are, they still exert some gender-policing of their oldest child: Mom’s delight at hearing that Laure has made a female friend (“You’re always hanging out with the boys”) might have been tempered if she’d remembered that “copine” can also mean girlfriend!

The relationships between the various children are superbly observed, and constitute reason enough to see Tomboy in themselves. The energetic activities of childish horseplay that give Mikael such joy in himself and in his body – dancing enthusiastically with Lisa, playing soccer shirtless, wrestling in swimsuits on the dock – are balanced by the many lovely domestic scenes demonstrating the closeness of Laure’s relationship with Jeanne. This is honestly one of the most moving and genuine cinematic portrayals of a sibling relationship in years, and after her initial shock Jeanne takes to the idea of Mikael like a duck to water, boasting to another child about her awesome big brother, and telling her parents that her favorite of Laure’s new friends is Mikael.

The parents themselves, unfortunately, are much less accepting of Mikael. The film’s ending is ambiguous, allowing for multiple readings of the exact nature of Laure’s queerness; indeed, the film has been criticized as “an appropriation of trans narratives by a cis filmmaker toward her own purposes”; but to me the ending is terribly unhappy. With deep breaths and with profound conflict on Héran’s preternaturally expressive face, the character is forced to claim “Laure,” the name and gender assigned at birth and not the ones of choice. The cissupremacy has won this round.

Though Tomboy is the better film, the two movies make excellent companion pieces. Between them they depict a range of queerness and explore a variety of strategies for growing up queer (and/or female) in a hostile world. And yet they offer no easy solutions, no cheap moralizing, no promise that it gets better. These films, and the characters they portray, simply are. And, in the end, isn’t that the one universal truth of queer people? There is no ur-narrative of queerness. There is no right or wrong way to be queer. We simply are.

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Max Thornton is a Bitch Flicks writer, blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

Foreign Film Week: The Accidental Feminism of ‘4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days’

Guest post written by Nadia Barbu.

In the 1960’s and 70’s, the regime of Romanian communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was considered one of the more liberal in the European Soviet block, and maintained diplomatic relations with Western countries (US President Richard Nixon visited him twice; the Queen of England bestowed upon him a knighthood). Of course, such a glorious leader required a large population to honor him and enjoy his enlightened rule. In 1967, he released a Decree that outlawed abortion (and, unofficially, all other forms of birth control too).

What followed was an organized madness aimed at turning women into baby-making machines. People who remained unmarried or childless after the age of 25 had to pay a special “celibacy” tax. Thousands of women died in agony or were permanently damaged by back-alley abortion attempts. Miscarriages were investigated and the women who suffered them were treated like criminals. Working women were forced to undergo medical exams at their workplace, with any pregnancy suspicion to be reported and monitored. Many of those who couldn’t terminate abandoned their babies, and Romania became infamous for its gruesome orphanages where unwanted children were left to die of starvation or diseases caught through poor sterilization of medical equipment.

It is in the aftermath of the infamous Decree that writer-director Cristian Mungiu set his 2007 film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which would go on to win Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and near-universal praise from film critics all around the world. The film doesn’t really go much into explaining the details of its universe, though, so I assume that more than just one pair of untrained eyes didn’t know what to make of it. Perhaps it’s for the best, and maybe we shouldn’t burden Mungiu with the responsibility of making some grand political statement when he just wanted to tell the story of a few individuals navigating those times. Then again, I’ve read many comments who were oblivious to the political context, harshly judging the characters by measuring them up to the standards of modern life in a Western country, or misinterpreting this depiction of an illegal abortion as an argument against abortion in general, and this is such an inflammatory issue, that maybe in this case a more in-depth explanation of the film’s setting was absolutely required, especially since 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is not a film you can easily forget, for better or worse.

Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) and Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

The story is focused on university students and friends Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) and Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), who is pregnant (guess how far along?) and seeks an illegal abortion. While Gabita is the one with “the problem,” the burden of solving it falls mostly on Otilia, the obvious protagonist, who has to book a hotel room, scramble for money, bribe the abortionist, all while fitting in a dinner with her boyfriend’s unpleasant family. The affair takes an even nastier turn when (spoilers) Mr. Bebe, the man who is supposed to perform the procedure, is unhappy with the payment and requests sex with both women as a compensation. The girls are initially shocked, but see no other option but to give in and the abortion happens. The film doesn’t shy away from a shot of the dead fetus on the bathroom floor. Yes, it’s all exactly as bleak as it sounds, sometimes compellingly so, sometimes in ways that seem forced and calculated.

Although played brilliantly by Vlad Ivanov (who has since become typecast as the absolute bad guy of Romanian cinema), I feel that Mr. Bebe cheapens the story a bit by being such an unambiguous, black-and-white villain. It’s as if Mungiu feared that we wouldn’t understand or find meaning in the women’s plight if they were ‘only’ being violated by suffering pain, risking injury and death, or by being treated by the state as nothing more than incubators; some literal rape was necessary to hammer the point home. It’s not enough that Otilia and Gabita’s friendship has an obvious power imbalance, in which Otilia behaves like a workhorse getting everything done for her friend — she has to literally prostitute herself for Gabita.

European dramas have been described as award-baiting “misery porn” more than once, endlessly piling misfortunes on the characters, and while I don’t think 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is misery porn, the scene in which Mr. Bebe demands sex with the two girls made little sense to me, except that it made me cringe, but it’s not like the film didn’t have enough cringe-inducing material already. Would the film have been just as talked about without the rape? Or without the seemingly endless shot of the aborted fetus?

Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov) and Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

This doesn’t mean that 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days isn’t capable of subtlety. Maybe the most heartbreaking aspect of a system without reproductive rights is the loneliness of the women enduring it, while their partners continue to demand intercourse in the name of love, and often refuse to take any responsibility for its consequences in the name of freedom. Heterosexual romance is a celebrated force in pretty much every culture. Yet the much-praised mirage of wonderful romantic love suddenly seems nothing more than hypocrisy when one of the lovers is faced with the reality of having to “solve the problem” of an unwanted pregnancy on their own. Love is for two, but any subsequent suffering is just for one, something not to be talked about. At the family dinner party which Otilia attends for her boyfriend’s sake, she is more or less openly humiliated, yet her partner makes no effort to take her side, all the contrary: he expresses irritation at her inadequacy in filling the social role he had assigned for her. In a private conversation, Otilia asks him how they would deal with a pregnancy: he hasn’t even considered the issue. There is no ’we’, just appearances to be preserved and conventions to be perpetuated. At no other moment did the film seem as poignant to me, and so sensitive to gender issues.

Is 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days a feminist film in spirit? Well, it does pass the Bechdel test with flying colors, but writer-director Mungiu has spoken again and again about the film’s unwillingness to take sides in the question of reproductive rights, and this could in fact be constructed as making a case for each side depending on your point of view. The only other “abortion movie” in Romanian cinema was a Communist propaganda film in which the girl seeking abortion is “punished” by suffering a gruesome death as a consequence; Mungiu’s film stays clear of such obvious moral judgements, although it’s pretty clear that not only the monstrous abortionist, but the woman having the procedure herself are less than pleasant characters, and the filmmaker himself does personally seem to consider abortion unethical.

Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

Centering the story on two women and their friendship is just as unusual in Romanian cinema as everywhere else, sadly. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days could look like a showcase of female solidarity: the women have only each other to lean on, out of desperation if nothing else, Otilia plays the role of the supportive partner to Gabita, whose co-author in the pregnancy is nowhere to be seen or even mentioned, and she openly states that she would put her trust in Gabita to provide similar help. Yet this idea dissolves at a closer scrutinizing — Gabita is an underdeveloped character who is just as exploitive and entitled towards Otilia as the other people surrounding our protagonist, and other signs of women’s collaboration are nowhere to be seen.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is not a story of female resistance against an oppressive regime: stripped of any semblance of agency, Otilia is utterly alone, and even though the story has her running around all the time with apparently endless energy, her energy is entirely put to the service of others: her friend, her lover or who else may need her. The helpful woman, always hard-working, always self-sacrificing, her body and mind never belonging to herself or her own goals: this is Otilia, nothing but a pawn. Mungiu said he didn’t write the character with gender issues in mind, but it’s hard to imagine a man in a similar selfless, self-effacing role.

Perhaps 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days ends up making a statement about gender and patriarchy without aiming to do so; perhaps it was inevitable, due to the subject matter. Its deeper observations about the oppression of women are, however, doomed to be drowned in debate on pro-choice vs. pro-life, shock value and the calculated artsy-ness of its minimalistic style — which is a shame, since it’s a story so rarely told in such an open manner.

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Nadia Barbu lives in London, has a bachelor’s degree in journalism, a master’s degree in film and is very likely to someday start a PhD in Something Completely Different. So far she has written about politics, feminism, saving the planet, film, fashion, design, and many other things; at the moment she writes mostly about animation and can be found here http://www.animationmagazine.eu/author/nadia/.

Foreign Film Week: A Failed Attempt at Feminism Impedes ‘Rust and Bone’

Guest post written by Candice Frederick, originally published at Reel Talk. Cross-posted with permission.

At its core, there’s something very interesting about the small yet much buzzed about French film, De rouille et d’os, which is translated in English as Rust and Bone. Its off kilter premise, which follows the extraordinary love story of an amputated killer dolphin trainer and the lover she befriends during her recuperation, is fresh enough to attract audiences. The lead performances by Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts are both layered and beautiful to watch. But where it falters is the latter half of the story (written and directed by notable filmmaker Jacques Audiard of The Beat That My Heart Skipped fame), and the evolution (or lack thereof) of its protagonist and reluctantly drawn heroine.

It’s very easy to write a lead female character and call her a heroine, simply because she’s a woman and much of the plot revolves around her. But it’s another thing for her to actually be a heroine, a character someone can look up to or aspire to become. Stéphanie (Cotillard), a sexy wild animal trainer-turned-bewildered amputee, has all the potential to become that person. But instead her story inches its way toward progression only to become wilted and ultimately eclipsed by the neverending and somewhat unrequited compassion she has for her male counterpart, the weary absentee dad Alain (Schoenaerts).

Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard) in Rust and Bone

When we first meet Stéphanie, she’s a fierce dolphin trainer who knows her way around a club and literally has to beat the guys off with a stick. She gets into a scuffle outside a club one night, and Alain (who’s a bouncer) intervenes and saves the day. He ends up driving her home and icing his now bruised hand. While there, he encounters who the audience could only presume as her live-in lover who shoos him away with his look of death. Right out the gate, Stéphanie’s fate is dependent on the men she keeps around her.

After the tragic on-the-job accident, which severed her legs and left her wheelchair-bound, we’re left to assume that at this point, by the way things have already been going with her, that she’d just crumble and spend the rest of the movie in tears. A once seductive woman who could get any guy she wanted (or needed) was left alone, crippled and seemingly half the person she once was.

Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard) in Rust and Bone

That is, until she recalls her guy-on-retainer Alain, who’s moved on from his bouncer days to become a gym worker. That’s when Stéphanie’s story becomes essentially the betterment of his, which details a completely apathetic dad who’s inexplicably careless about his son and everything else in his life (including Stéphanie). He later haphazardly pursues a career as a street fighter. So of course she has to sign on to be his manager, securing herself in his life after several failed attempts to be his girlfriend. Meanwhile, throughout most the movie the audience is left in the dark about Alain’s feelings towards Stéphanie. His chemistry with her seems more mechanical and authoritative rather than her more needy desire.

Though Stéphanie’s new self-made job finally gives her purpose again, it comes off as another way to get closer to him and fit into his life. It just becomes an exhaustive attempt to create an empowered rehabilitated female character by counterbalancing her with the male character. It’s unfair for the character and counterproductive to the shrinking theme in the film — rebuilding a broken woman.

That aside, however significant, Cotillard’s portrayal is steadfast and deliberate. Her aggressively passive aggressive approach to the character wrangles over some of the more minor flaws about the way she was written, leaving the end result that much more impressive. And Schoenaerts, as annoying a character as he plays, delivers a unapologetic performance that is punctuated by the movie’s single glimmer of nuance. Together the two elevate the disappointing story, but the remains of what they had to work with still permeate the rest of the film.

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Candice Frederick is a former Essence magazine editor and an NABJ award-winning journalist. She is also the co-host of “Cinema in Noir” and the film blogger for Reel Talk. Follow her on Twitter.

Foreign Film Week: The Disturbing, Terrorizing Feminism of Dušan Makavejev’s ‘WR: Mysteries of the Organism’ and ‘Sweet Movie’

Written by Leigh Kolb

[Trigger warning: references to graphic content.]

Sometimes feminist films succeed by showing just how awful a world without feminism is. Dušan Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) and Sweet Movie (1974) provide that kind of jarring commentary.

Both of these films critique fascism, communism, capitalism and sexual repression. His films are part of the Yugoslav Black Wave film era, which featured films that employed “antitraditional form, polemical approaches, socio-critical concerns, oppositional ideology and, a fatalistic conclusion.”

WR and Sweet Movie are difficult for audiences to handle due to some graphic scenes and political commentaries. However, the fatalism of the films–the disturbing, unpleasant endings with an overall bleak outlook on modern society–is perhaps the most unsettling, and the most important aspect of the films. While we could talk at length about the politics of the films (indeed many have, better than I could), looking at the films through a feminist lens provides a deeper understanding of Makavejev’s messages about the tragedy of sexual repression (especially for women).

The Criterion Current‘s essay on Sweet Movie provides a backdrop for both films:

“Makavejev began his career by earning a psychology degree at a leading Serbian university, studying at Yugoslavia’s national film school, and making numerous shorts and documentaries… he set to work on the 1971 genre bender WR: Mysteries of the Organism, which anticipated Sweet Movie with its collagelike meditation on maverick psychologist Wilhelm Reich and his theories of sexual liberation.
“By this time, Makavejev was a leader of the so-called Black Cinema filmmakers, as they were dubbed by Yugoslav officials who didn’t like their negative view of official ideologies. The sexual politics of WR was more than those officials could take: the film was banned, and Makavejev fled the country, not working there again until 1988. He made Sweet Movie in Canada, the Netherlands, and France, with additional Swedish and West German funding. It is banned in various countries to this day.”

WR: Mysteries of the Organism is somewhat a documentary, somewhat a work of fiction. The documentary footage that provides the context for the film examines Wilhelm Reich, an anti-fascist Freud-trained psychoanalyst whose work–which focused on anti-fascism, sexual liberation and orgasmic energy–was censored and burned by the US government and he was imprisoned. Other documentary segments include interviews with sex-positive feminist Betty Dodson, a look into Screw magazine and how dildos are created and ideas of femininity and masculinity from the perspective of Jackie Curtis, who cross-dresses and challenges ideas of gender.

The fictional story cut into this documentary footage focuses on Milena, a young Yugoslav woman who is a radical feminist and revolutionary, focusing mainly on the importance of sexual liberation (and the fact that communism would fail because free love was repressed). She lectures the crowd of frustrated workers below her apartment balcony:

Milena lectures workers about the failure of communism.

“… Our road to the future must be life-positive. Comrades! Between socialism and physical love there can be no conflict. Socialism must not exclude human pleasure from its program. The October Revolution was ruined when it rejected free love. Frustrate the young sexually and they’ll recklessly take to other illicit thrills: Pilfering, burglary and assorted crimes, knifings, alcoholism, political riots with flags flying, battling the police like prewar communists! What we need is free youth in a crime-free world! If we are to achieve this, we must allow free love!…
“No excitement can ever equal the elemental force of the orgasm… Sweet oblivion is the masses’ demand! Deprive them of free love, and they’ll seize everything else! That led to revolution. It led to fascism and doomsday. How Man Became a Giant. Deutschland uber alles!… Deprive youth of their right to the sweet electricity of sex and you rob them of their mental health!… Restore to every individual the right to love!”

Milena’s fight for free love and the perfect orgasm leads her to a Soviet ice skater, Vladimir. He represents complete allegiance to Soviet rule and Stalin-esque communism. He speaks highly of his travels to the West, highlighting to the audience America’s class divide and sexual repression. Milena seduces him, encouraging him to accept his own freedom and sexuality. He succumbs, but his repressed lust and orgasm prove so overwhelming for him that he murders her (beheading her with his ice skate). Her decapitated head narrates the rest of the story as coroners discuss the huge amount of semen that was in her vagina.

Milena sees fascism as a masculine force that represses freedom and sexuality.

Milena’s fate exemplifies the passionate pro-love speech she gave to the workers. Sexual repression leads to violence. To further prove this point, Makavejev shows a man (performer Tuli Kupferberg, member of The Fugs) dressed in military regalia walking around Manhattan with a toy M-16 gun, stroking it as if masturbating, to The Fugs’ “Kill for Peace.” This idea that violence and sexual repression are connected leads to men glorifying guns and killing, and women being punished.

“Kill for Peace” excerpt from WR: Mysteries of the Organism.

Milena is not punished for her own sexuality, she’s punished because of the sexually repressive world she lives in. She would argue that the men suffer from this repression, clearly, and turn to violence when they don’t know what to do with the frustration.

In Sweet Movie, two women’s stories are featured. The only documentary footage Makavejev uses in this feature film are some shots of mass graves in the Katyn Forest massacre (where Stalin had authorized the killing of 4,000 Polish prisoners). For the censorship authorities in many countries, however, that’s not what made the film ban-worthy (the official “rejection” status explanation from the British Board of Film Classification doesn’t even mention it). Instead, the scenes at a commune that feature all manners of human excretory byproducts and one scene where Anna Planeta seduces young boys made the film censored and banned in many countries. The film was almost impossible to find until Criterion released the DVD in 2007.

In an excellent excerpt from the book Terror and Joy: The Films of Dušan Makavejev, Lorraine Mortimer analyzes Sweet Movie in depth and makes some of those most uncomfortable scenes much more understandable and meaningful. The vulgarity of the commune scenes remind us of how terrorized and sickened we are by bodily functions (and they are politically subversive, in that the people are not doing what they are supposed to), and the seduction scene reminds us–or should–how much “seduction” young people, especially boys, are subject to every day. This scene is also reminiscent of Reich’s ideas about sexual expression, even in youth. Anna Planeta’s scenes are important in their deadly intersections of politics, supposed sweetness and death after love. The giant Karl Marx head on her boat, and her lover (from a failed revolution) are symbolic of Makavejev’s recurrent themes of the tragic failing of Soviet communism and the anti-human, fascist results of such authoritarian systems.

In Roger Ebert’s 1975 review, he asserts:

“Makavejev doesn’t exploit this material — Sweet Movie is anything but a sex film — but uses it to confront us in a very unsettling way. The unasked questions behind his film seem to be: Well, we’re all human, aren’t we? This is what we are and what we do. What do you think of these people? You go to the movies to be entertained by scenes of people killing each other, you watch wars on TV — do the basic bodily processes of these people offend you?”

Most obvious–and still timely–to Western audiences, capitalism, commercialization and sexual repression are criticized in this film, especially through the story of Miss World 1984 (Miss Canada).

The film opens with a bright and cheery game show, and Martha, an older woman (the chairman of the Chastity Belt Foundation), accompanied by men dressed as priests, is standing by and helping judge while a gynecologist checks the virginity of various contenders for the grand prize–marrying her son, milk tycoon Mr. Kapital (a.k.a. Mr. Dollars), who is a wealthy bachelor.

The gynecologist examines the female contestants’ virginity.

Martha explains that at the Chastity Belt Foundation:

“Through the guidance of our sensational method, your own body kills the animal. We advocate simple triumph of the will. It is painless and ever so rewarding. No wild dreams. No – no peculiar behavior. Solid health and purposeful direction! … If not controlled and kept at bay, wild impulses will turn everyone into beastly animals, chaotic natural beings.”

We know from WR that this is the opposite of what Reich believed and what Makavejev reveals in his films.

The scene is wildly sexist, but clearly satirizes the value that society places on female virginity. When Miss Canada crawls into the examination chair and parts her legs, a light shines from her vagina, and she is declared the most virgin, the winner. And thus she is sold to the highest bidder.

She is an object, not a subject, and what she can offer to a man as a “prize” has nothing to do with her own sexuality. As they travel to their honeymoon location and fly over Niagara Falls, Mr. Kapital talks about how he is going to buy up Niagara Falls:

“I’m gonna buy it from the Canadian Government. I will renovate it, redecorate it. Get rid of the water, turn off the falls. … I’m gonna install an electric, synthetic, laser moving image in livin’ color. In livin’ color, honey! Yeah. And we’re gonna have a huge quadraphonic sound system. Yeah!”

(Mortimer notes that “…years later, it would be comforting if this wild caricature of acquisition and ignorance were further from our own reality.”)

Miss World and Mr. Kapital.

Miss World is an acquisition to Mr. Kapital, nothing more. He preaches on purity, money, sex and waste (marriage and business seem interchangeable, all driven by deeply capitalistic and puritanical ideologies). Martha and her brigade of priests stand outside a glass plate window as the marriage is about to be consummated. Mr. Kapital disinfects himself, and rubs Miss World down with alcohol–there is nothing sexual or sensual about the scene; it’s sterile and lifeless. When he takes out his penis, it’s covered in gold, and he procedes to urinate on Miss World as she screams.

When Miss World attempts to get out of the marriage, her mother-in-law attempts to drown her and they send her away. She speaks out and tries to have some independence, only to be punished harshly. She represents this world where girls are prized for their virginity and derided for the outcomes of this anti-woman socialization. (“This is my only property, it’s my diamond!” she exclaims of her virginity when the tycoon’s bodyguard attempts to sexually assault her.)

She is now shipped off, just one of Mr. Kapital’s failed business ventures.

She’s damaged and broken–she attempts sex with a Latin pop star only to be confronted by nuns and stuck in “penis captivus.” She’s sent to the aforementioned Otto Muehl commune to “heal.”

Religious imagery surrounds Miss World when she attempts to have sex–another symbol of sexual oppression.

By the end of the film, she’s shown writhing around in a pool full of melted chocolate for a commercial.

The camera man directs her:

“Darling, this is going to be the highlight of your career. From now on, when people eat chocolate – I mean, the brand we advertise – they will not feel the same. I want them to feel as if they’re eating you!”

Miss World, now just using her body to sell chocolate.

And here we are: the ultimate sexual objectification (she is naked, and attempting to seduce the camera) combined with commercialism–the indulgence of sweet chocolate (reminiscent of the toxic sugar on Anna Planeta’s boat) is confused with a kind of female sexuality that is supposed to be passive and proactive all at once, but certainly not for her. It’s supposed to be for the gold-encrusted penises, or the viewers, the consumers.

Miss World looks dead behind the eyes in this final scene. Her life was decided for her in a culture that prized her virginity and beauty above all else, and she couldn’t function when she attempts to be in another world.

She is punished, much like Milena is. However, Makavejev does not want us to think that they are at fault; instead, a society that represses and commodifies sexuality is the perpetrator of violence, masculine force and female suffering.

Makavejev’s films are representative of Black Wave sensibilities, especially in the critique of current society and the nihilism of the films’ endings. There are no clear answers here, just the reassertion that oppressive societies hurt everyone. In WR and Sweet Movie both, however, women are shown to suffer greatly at the hands of authoritarian, sexually repressive societies.

At the end of WR and Sweet Movie, all of our main characters suffer. Milena dies; her killer is still repressed, and now a murderer; Reich dies in prison; Planeta is arrested, her victims lined up by the river; Miss World is broken and no longer has her “diamond,” so she has no self-worth. The characters have been created and persecuted by their societies. And we still haven’t seemed to move past the cult of masculinity and gun violence or puritanical views about sexuality.

However, if we are to find any bleak hope here, it’s this: at the end of WR, Milena’s head is speaking to the audience, as if her life isn’t really over. At the end of Sweet Movie, Planeta’s victims are resurrected and brought back to life. Maybe–just maybe–Makavejev is showing that it’s not too late to find life in repressive societies and giving us the answer to Sweet Movie‘s lyrical refrain, “Is there life on the earth?

Is there life after birth?” Makavejev would say yes, but only if we can break free from authoritarian and repressive social ideals that have led to a cycle of repression, seduction and destruction.

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Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

Foreign Film Week: ‘Lemon Tree’ Unites Two Women from Palestine and Israel

Written by Megan Kearns. Originally published at The Opinioness of the World. Cross-posted with permission.

Arab culture has always captivated me. In college, I took classes on gender and Islam, Arab women’s movements and Middle Eastern History — classes which opened my eyes to diverse cultures and perspectives. People possess passionate opinions about the ongoing conflict between Palestine and Israel. With so much chaos and oppression, observers as well as those personally involved may not truly comprehend the other side’s plight.

The film Etz Limon (Lemon Tree) attempts to bridge the divide and present both sides of the story through two women’s lives.

Starring the always powerful Hiam Abass (The Visitor, Amreeka), she effortlessly exudes dignity and grace no matter the role. She captivates the audience, fully expressing her thoughts and feelings with her eyes, never having to utter a word. Abass won several awards, including Best Actress Award of the Israeli Film Academy, for her portrayal of Salma Zidane, a Palestinian widow who tends a lemon grove that’s been in her family for generations.

When the new Israeli Defense Minister moves in next door to her (on the Israeli side of the border) with his wife, Mira Navon (Rona Lipaz-Michael), the Secret Service advises him that the lemon trees are a security risk. Fearing a sniper could be obscured by the trees, the Defense Minister orders Salma to cut them down.

Salma (Hiam Abass) in Lemon Tree

A woman who’s lost her husband, who’s children have grown up and moved away, Salma is not about to lose her source of income nor her identity. With quiet yet fierce determination, she enlists the help of a young lawyer to fight the court order. Her decision to go against the State of Israel sends ripples throughout the lives of those involved.

Simultaneously, Mira faces her own struggle as she attempts to adapt to life in her new home and her new role as a politician’s wife. She’s often in solitude as her daughters are married, her son lives in the U.S. and her husband is preoccupied with his career. She ultimately becomes an unlikely ally in Salma’s crusade. As the court case gains more notoriety, Mira gives interviews speaking in favor of Salma, defying her husband, much to his chagrin.

Mira (Rona Lipaz-Michael) in Lemon Tree

Directed by Eran Riklas (The Syrian Bride), this beautiful and understated film, based on a true story, simultaneously conveys the daily oppression of the Palestinians as well as the fears of the Israelis. Discussing the film, Riklas said,

“The Middle East is constantly changing although when you really think about it, perhaps it isn’t…hope, optimism, pessimism, breakthroughs, new horizons, a new day, the future, the past – all words used on a regular basis to describe the situation in a region that has seen it all. Trees have always been around to witness what mankind has been doing…this is really a film about solitude as it is reflected in the lives of the two women – Salma on the Palestinian side and Mira, the Defense Minister’s wife, on the Israeli one…as well as all the other characters involved who somehow represent so many issues and subjects but all of them suffer from a kind of loneliness which is part of their lives on a personal and national level.”

I was pleasantly surprised at Lemon Tree‘s balanced treatment of both Palestinian and Israeli perspectives, considering the volatile and intertwined history of religion and bloodshed. No stereotypes exist here. No judgments passed on who’s right and who’s wrong.

While not originally intended as a feminist film, Lemon Tree ultimately is as we see the world through each woman’s eyes — we see their battles, their journeys. Too often, there’s a fallacious stereotype that exists in the U.S. that women in the Middle East are passive or subservient. Not true. In the film, both Salma and Mira find their voice and fight for what they believe.

Salma and Mira are both neighbors and mothers. Two separate scenes in the film show each woman climbing over the wire fence to the other side’s border, perhaps symbolizing their ensuing empathy for each other and their desire for liberation. Separated by language and the physical wall between Palestine and Israel, Salma and Mira remain united in their bond of compassion and respect for each other.

Each woman contends with loneliness as they find their inner strength, striving to navigate their lives in the constraints of their imposed physical and emotional boundaries. Each woman struggles to literally and metaphorically tear down confining walls with the hope of achieving freedom and peace.

Foreign Film Week: As a Collector Loves His Most Prized Item: ‘Gabrielle’ (2005)

Isabelle Huppert stars in Gabrielle

Guest post written by Amanda Civitello

Gabrielle is a beautifully complex film, the kind of movie that begs to be watched with attention. Starring the unparalleled Isabelle Huppert and Pascal Greggory, who each deliver spellbinding performances, and based on the short story “The Return” by Joseph Conrad, Gabrielle tells the story of a well-to-do woman, the wife of a successful businessman in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Paris, who one afternoon makes up her mind to leave her husband, writes him a note to that effect, leaves – and then, three hours later, returns. It’s a film with disconcertingly ambiguous characters who alternately elicit frustration, antipathy, disgust, and sympathy from the audience. There isn’t really a heroine to this film, but neither is there an anti-hero; the strength of Gabrielle is in its rendering of utterly perplexing, thoroughly human characters. Patrice Chéreau could not have chosen a better pair of actors to anchor his film. Huppert and Greggory shine in roles that rely primarily on non-verbal acting, embodying their characters with achingly subtle realism. The film suffers from some stylistic problems – it’s sometimes difficult, for example, to know what Chéreau intends when the film switches abruptly from black and white to color – but is, ultimately, a beautifully shot and well-acted film whose complex, disquieting story is all the more harrowing couched as it is in such lovely photography.

We are introduced to our eponymous protagonist in Gabrielle‘s opening scenes: we meet her through the eyes of the antagonist: her husband Jean. We learn why he chose his wife – her impassivity being her chief attribute – and we observe her. We watch her across the dinner table as he watches her each evening; we appraise her as he does; we do all this without hearing her say a single word. She is objectified and we are as guilty of her objectification as her husband. Though he takes pride in his reserved stoicism, he nevertheless insists on having fallen in love with his wife. Later, however, he qualifies this: “I love her as a collector loves his most prized item. Once acquired, it becomes his sole reason to live.” But Gabrielle isn’t his reason to live, of course: he’s not motivated by love or desire for his wife, but rather by the desire to possess her. Having won her, he wants to keep her; it’s meaningful that the room which he enters after pronouncing these words is essentially a sculpture gallery: busts of beautiful women, perhaps won at auction, which Jean would certainly love to keep. Jean’s love, further, is lacking in intimacy, which is not to say that it’s lacking in sex. He deems his desire “assuaged” and that they “know each other enough,” but that he insists on their sharing a bedroom. He says this with a degree of pride in the fact that it’s he who wants to share a bedroom with his wife, but of course, it’s not out of love for her – it’s just another manifestation of his almost obsessive possessiveness. He goes so far as to equate the sharing of their bedroom with the sharing of a grave; he wants to keep his Gabrielle.

Gabrielle, in these opening scenes, is very much an ice queen, for all that she’s a consummate hostess. We learn, however, that she does have interests outside of entertaining: Jean acquiesces to her desire to “give her individuality fair play,” and he finances her philanthropic efforts to fund a newspaper and goes along with her evening Salons. He’s pleased with his investment when the newspaper turns a profit, but, as before, his pride in her is possessiveness trussed up as love.

Jean Hervey (Pascal Greggory)

But Gabrielle is not precisely a sainted, long-suffering martyr, and it’s revealed that she was as coolly calculated in her decision to marry Jean as he was in his. In a brilliant use of cinematic parallelism, Chéreau turns the tables of the opening scenes on Gabrielle, so that she is the one watching, instead of being watched. She observes her servants as hawkishly, as silently as her husband studied her over dinner. “You’re devoted,” she declares to the young women attending her before her bath, “but you don’t enter my life.” Jean might have said the same words about Gabrielle herself in the film’s opening scenes, and the viewer has the sense that while Gabrielle is addressing her maids, the faraway look to her expression and the listless monotone of her voice mean that she might very well be speaking about her husband.

So Gabrielle is a beautiful, fragile-looking woman, who decides to leave her husband for her lover and then, perplexingly, chooses to return. Perhaps she never meant to permanently leave: perhaps the idea of leaving, the act of stepping through the door and venturing just a bit before turning homewards, was enough. What matters, of course, is that she chose to return to her husband. Jean wants an explanation, but Gabrielle isn’t one to justify herself. Nowhere is this more apparent than in a charged scene in which Jean confronts her angrily – then tells her, somewhat grudgingly, that she has his forgiveness. Gabrielle immediately bursts out laughing, and Jean is confused and enraged by her reaction. She laughs because she hasn’t apologized, perhaps because she doesn’t want his forgiveness and certainly because she doesn’t feel she needs it. He protests, his magnanimity patently insincere; her laughter grows more maniacal. Infuriated, he grabs a glass of water and tosses it in her face. Gabrielle blinks, silenced, and Huppert sinks ever so slightly back against the cushions, her expression regaining the impenetrable passivity from the film’s early scenes, this time laced with a practically tangible misery.

Perhaps some of her melancholy derives from those who try to convince her that her decision to leave and return was anything but her own. First Jean, who thinks she’s taken leave of her senses; then Yvonne, the maid, who argues that Gabrielle is not at fault because Jean had allowed a man into his home who didn’t “respect the rules.” Gabrielle is so sadly resigned to her fate in part because no one, not even her servants, accords her the recognition that she did something of her own will. We discover, over the course of her discussion with Yvonne, that she took up with her lover because he made her happy, at least for a time, and because she fell in love. The fact that she recognized the impetuosity of her choices and chose to return to her unhappy marriage doesn’t nullify her three hours of independence. But faced with such a dismissal of her feelings, it’s not surprising that the fight seems to leave her. In a further blow, she’s denied the recognition of her actions, the acknowledgement of her agency, by maid and husband alike.

At dinner, that evening, Jean expresses his determination to forget the incident entirely, but his generosity, his forgiveness, is passively aggressive, and when Gabrielle finally offers him some insight into her thinking, he’s angrily dismissive. Gabrielle explains that she suffered when he left her alone after their marriage, that she was disillusioned and disappointed by it. “And look at the new Gabrielle,” Jean says, dismissively. “It’s not much of an improvement.” Resolved, Gabrielle enlightens him as to the reason for her return: she knew that he would take her back. She anticipated his reaction – the anger, the insistence on forgetting the afternoon – and returned, safe in the knowledge that he would accept her back, that she would continue to live as the socially prominent wife of Jean Hervey because he would so fear the social ostracization that would ensue.

Gabrielle is a strong woman, of course; she does know her own mind and acts accordingly. She pursues the relationship with her lover (incidentally the editor of the Herveys’ newspaper) because of her own desires and passions. Can she be faulted for falling in love, and pursuing it? Pursuing it while married isn’t right, of course, and Gabrielle is clever enough to know that, but a female character, in a period piece, who does something simply because she wants to is refreshing. Gabrielle Hervey is an interesting character in a genre in which many female characters are simply quite bland. She’s a strong woman, then, but not an especially nice one.

At their Salon the following evening, Jean corners Gabrielle during a vocal recital, detailing how he will torment her with guilt until he feels that ‘his’ Gabrielle has returned, at which time he may or may not tell her that her suffering has ended. Unimpressed, Gabrielle retorts that she sees his appreciation of her suffering, and therefore, her mask of sadness will be the only face he sees, even when she is no longer miserable. The moment in which Jean tossed water in Gabrielle’s face seemed, at the time, to be entirely out of character is now revealed to be but the harbinger of further, more serious abuse to come.

Jean threatens Gabrielle

It all comes to a head after the Salon: as the party disbands, Gabrielle puts on her evening cape and makes as if to leave. Jean grabs her violently, demanding that she not go to him. But she wasn’t going to her lover, she declares: she was leaving alone. Finally, in the moments that follow, each of them sat on the floor opposite the other – with Jean having practically wrestled her there in the first place – we learn why Gabrielle decided to leave and return. It’s not as simple as banking on her husband’s good nature: “when you don’t matter,” she says, “you can come and go.” She was a woman trapped in a marriage in which she felt unseen; she was a nonentity. She left, we realize, not just out of passion, but out of desperation; she returns not out of love for her husband or remorse for her infidelity, but because her life with Jean is easier. She knows her role; she knows what he expects from her, and she knows what she expects from him, and chooses that. Her decisions have the air of deliberation and calculation about them; we have the sense that she, up until this point, believed as we did in Jean’s placidity.

Throughout the film, Huppert’s Gabrielle maintains her even tone of voice and her expression of sad resignation, conveying Gabrielle’s changing emotions with only the subtlest of changes in expression. But Jean is enraged by this, and the sight of Gabrielle’s lover at their Salon, and the knowledge of their lovemaking pushes him over the edge. [Trigger warning.] In a terrible moment, Jean rips away the bodice of Gabrielle’s dress and forces up her skirt, and rapes her against the stone staircase. With a final shout, Gabrielle runs away, her steps echoing loudly on the stone floors. Huppert and Greggory handle the moment very carefully: this is an utterly terrifying scene in an otherwise slow-paced film, and it has much to do with the sudden onslaught of emotion from the two leads.

He returns to the bedroom the next morning, seemingly broken, yet offering excuses and wondering, impossibly, if she still loves him. It’s to Greggory’s credit that Jean is believable in this moment. Practically in response, with an utterly tired expression, Gabrielle moves to the bed, reclines, and pulls her clothes away from her body. “Come,” she says. “Lie down. Perhaps if you did, I could…now.” Despite her words, there’s nothing at all desperate about her in these moments: she’s a woman in control, who meets Jean’s gaze challengingly, who bares herself because she chooses to, she who, we come to learn, had been reticent to make love with her husband; who takes control of her sexuality and leverages it. Finally, it’s Gabrielle who sets the tone, in an utter reversal of the movie’s early scenes. He sits beside her and his hand trembles on her breasts; he lies on top of her; she doesn’t respond in the slightest to his touch. He wrenches himself away, his face twisted with emotion, in stark contrast to Gabrielle’s mask of placidity. “You could, like this, without love?” he asks, stunned. “Yes,” Gabrielle replies, simply. It’s a scene that’s incredibly difficult to watch, thanks to Huppert’s commanding performance. While before we gazed at her across the dinner table, admiring her, studying her, objectifying her, now it’s Gabrielle who dares us to look by offering herself to Jean – and to the audience’s gaze. And this time, we look away.

In the end, in the film as in the story, it’s Jean who leaves, slamming the door of the great house behind him, never to return; does that mean that it’s Gabrielle who won? The melancholic resignation that pervades the film’s final scenes seems to suggest that there are no winners in a story like Gabrielle: there are no winners just as there are no heroes in a marriage that falls apart because of the failings of both husband and wife.

Gabrielle

Amanda Civitello is a Chicago-based freelance writer and Northwestern grad with an interest in arts and literary criticism. She has recently written on Jacques Derrida and feminist philosopher Sarah Kofman for The Ellipses Project and has contributed reviews of Rebecca, Sleepy Hollow, and Downton Abbey to Bitch Flicks. You can find her online at amandacivitello.com.

Foreign Film Week: Growing Up with ‘Les Demoiselles de Rochefort’

Les demoiselles de Rochefort (1967)

Guest post written by Lou Flandrin.

This masterpiece by Jacques Demy is definitely the most important movie of my childhood. Part of it is probably due to the hours I spent listening to the cheerful singing while going away on vacation with my family. Singing in the car is the best remedy to car sickness and boredom, and so the whole family would happily sing along these tunes about dreams, true love, and living life to the fullest.

While I love this movie because of the catchy lyrics, colourful clothes and the giddy state in which it turns me, I also appreciate its depiction of women’s lives and family bonds. I am grateful to have had these depictions to look up to when I was growing up, of sisters and friends who didn’t fight against each other, but worked together towards their dreams to have an artistic career and to find happiness.

The plot of the movie is quite simple: the main characters, Delphine and Solange, are twins who are tired of their provincial lives and decide to go to Paris to start their artistic career. As they plan their departure, the summer fair is settling in the beautiful city of Rochefort – which was painted in pastel colours for the movie – and fair workers, sailors and musicians will cross their path, webs of stories will get intertwined, resulting in a wonderful puzzle of emotions, songs, and choreographed happiness.

A Celebration of Love in All its States

While this movie is about soul mates finding each other, it is above all a celebration of love in general, love of life and of all the little things that makes the world so amazing. A perfect illustration of this is the song that the twins perform for the fair’s big show, “La Chanson d’un Jour d’été” which is all about loving life, and as they sing it: “loving the world in order to be happy.” This positive philosophy is a recurring leitmotif in the movie. Two fair workers – played by George Chakiris and Grover Dale – contribute to the theme by singing about the joys of travelling and living life to the fullest in every city they visit, “running from one happiness to the next.” With such a positive outlook, it’s no wonder this movie makes me want to smile and dance around like a maniac!

Being in love is obviously still a major theme, but it is presented as a complement to this love of life and freedom. Most of the characters are on a quest to find their true love in their own different ways. Yvonne, the twins’ mother, is longing for her lost love, whom she rejected years before because of his ridiculous last name. Andy, an American composer, is feeling incomplete after spending his whole life focusing on his musical career. Simon Dame, the dissed lover with a ridiculous name, is now back in Rochefort when he once was in love with Yvonne. Maxence, a young artist doing his military service in Rochefort, dreams about his feminine ideal, painting her portrait that looks eerily like Delphine.

Delphine (Catherine Deneuve) discovers Maxence’s painting

There is no distinction between a feminine or masculine depiction of love, as lovers’ voices share the same intensity, and their songs echo each other. Love “is the sole authority” and erases the discriminations of gender, social class or even moral virtue.

The twins have their own expectations about love. While it is no secret that they have had their share of lovers – as sung in their famous “Chanson des Jumelles,” they are now both looking for someone to share their lives with, and will take action towards this goal. At the beginning of the movie, Delphine dumps her phony and creepy boyfriend Lancien in an amazing break-up song, in which she reproaches him of treating her like “just another doll” and not understanding anything about her dreams. Lancien gets a few lines in the song as well, but he misses the point entirely. He mistakes his desire to own Delphine with love, and will try repeatedly to get her back, including with a poor attempt to convince her that she would need someone like him to look after her in Paris. But Delphine knows better than that, and replies that she never wants to see him again. Good riddance!

A Celebration of Friendship and Family Ties

What I like about this movie is that it’s not all about true love, as friends and family are shown as equally important parts of life. The two sisters live together in harmony, they confide in each other, share their joys and fears, and sing to each other about everything. Another interesting duo is that of the two girls who were supposed to sing and dance at the fair. After discussing it with each other, they decide to leave Etienne and Bill, the two fair workers, because they are tired of being exploited and want to live their own lives. Sure, they have their own superficial reasons (Bill doesn’t have blue eyes, sailors are better lovers…) but still, the message is out there, they want to free themselves and they do it together.

Guys are not excluded from this friendship pattern. Etienne and Bill have known each other for years, they travel together and share the same adventures and heartbreaks. They sing about their undying friendship, describing themselves as penniless knights with hearts of gold running from cities to cities. When the girls leave them for blue-eyed sailors, they echo their previous song about freedom, and leave the scene smiling at each other. Later on, when they very awkwardly ask the twins if they want to sleep with them and get rejected, they sing together about their bad luck with women.

True bros wear tight jeans and white boots, it is known. (George Chakiris and Grover Dale)

As for family ties, they are not limited to the sibling relationship between Delphine and Solange. Their mother Yvonne has raised three children on her own, sacrificing her life in order to help her family become well-read. She owns a café, and spends her days behind the counter. While she is at work all the time, in what she calls her “aquarium,” the café becomes the family home. The twins come and go to chat, Yvonne’s father spends his time in a corner constructing models, and Booboo, the youngest son, is always brought from the café to school and vice-versa.

A Celebration of Art

Art is what allows the characters to escape the mundanity of their daily lives, as when Maxence evades from the army barracks every night to paint in his studio. Art and love are pictured as complementary. While Andy is a successful composer, he feels a void, and realises that Solange might be the one who can fill it. They fall in love at first sight, and their idyll is written in F-sharp minor, just like Solange’s concerto that she accidentally drops on the ground when they meet, and that will further charm Andy.

Andy (Gene Kelly) singing about his love for Solange and her concerto

Art can be used negatively, for example in the case of Lancien, Delphine’s ex, who owns a gallery, and “creates” abstract paintings by shooting at balloons full of paint over white canvasses. Unlike the other characters, his art is depicted as destructive, and is echoed in his negative discourses on how he wants to own Delphine and control her life.

A Celebration of Freedom

What makes all the characters of this charming tale so unique is that they are all striving for freedom, and taking action to achieve their independence. Delphine doesn’t want to become Lancien’s doll and decides to leave to Paris to become famous on her own. While her reasons were questionable, Yvonne’s refusal to marry Simon can also be interpreted as a way to stay independent: she didn’t want to become Madame Dame, and chose to struggle on her own rather than becoming his wife.

Throughout the movie, the twins keep saying what comes to their mind, and doing what they want. When the fair workers come to the twins’ door to ask them to take part in their show, they imply that they need their help to go to Paris, which scandalises the sisters. They don’t want to be patronised and don’t want to be mere substitutes either, which is why they will participate to the show in their own way. Delphine buys revealing dresses that she thinks are beautiful, and Solange wonders: “Aren’t you afraid we might look slutty?” Delphine dismisses the comment, and they end up wearing those dresses on stage, showing everybody that they do not care about what people might think. Similarly, Solange couldn’t care less that her dress’ lining is showing, despite everybody insisting on reminding her. The twins’ indifference to other people’s judgement is also seen in their anthem, in which they proudly sing that they were born from an unknown father, and that they had lovers at a very young age.

Who doesn’t love characters who sing in the face of slut-shaming? (Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac)

Freedom is celebrated through the characters’ ability to travel the world to their fancy, like the fair workers who are happiest when they travel, or the sisters who decide to try their luck in Paris. Lack of freedom, for instance in Yvonne’s case, stuck in her “aquarium”, is depicted as the culmination of misery. She evades by dreaming of Pacific beaches, and will only be happy when she manages to get out of her café and find her former lover in front of Booboo’s school.

The musical has some darker notes, with the side story of a sadistic killer who killed a woman and cut her in little pieces because she refused his love for 40 years. Lancien’s obsession with Delphine echoes that of the killer, and we can only hope that he will not follow her to Paris to copycat the tragic event.

Paint Life in Pastel Tones

Haters will diss the cheesy dialogue, the ridiculous plots devices used to make characters miss or meet each other, and the overly cheerful singing. People might also argue that this movie is offering a false depiction of life, in which true love can always be found if one sings about with enough passion, and roams prettily the streets of France while dancing in colourful clothing.

But this very naivety is what makes Les Demoiselles de Rochefort so brilliant. Everything in the movie makes it clear that it is only a wonderful tale, far from reality. If you look at it that way, and decide to immerse yourself in Demy’s pastel singing city, you will end up happier and confident that while real life doesn’t have the same splendour, the ideals it promotes are very real.

Lou Flandrin is a French graduate in languages and international politics. Currently living in Chengdu (China), she is a volunteer translator and author at Global Voices Online, and sometimes tweets about Sichuanese food, robots, and other stuff.

Foreign Film Week: Remembering, Forgetting and Breaking Through in the Female Narrative of ‘Hiroshima mon amour’

Written by Leigh Kolb

Hiroshima mon amour debuted in 1959, 14 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed. Alain Resnais’ first feature film explores memory, forgetting and tragedy on an individual and worldwide scale, largely through the lens of Elle (“Her”), played by Emmanuelle Riva.

While Resnais had signed on to do a documentary about the atomic bomb, he concluded that it should be fictional and “that the impact of Hiroshima would be refracted through the viewpoint of a foreign woman,” according to critic Kent Jones. Resnais wanted Marguerite Duras, a French writer and later film director, to write the screenplay.

Duras’ command of literature, dialogue and feminist sensibilities resonate in the film (Duras was nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay). Hiroshima mon amour, which grounds itself in the brief affair of a French woman and a Japanese man (Lui, “Him,” played by Eiji Okada) in Hiroshima, is as much about the growth and healing of an individual in a partnership as it is about nations healing after the second World War.

Marguerite Duras wrote the screenplay, a stream-of-consciousness conversation with a focus on the feminine.

This juxtaposition of the feminine (love, emotion, peace) and the masculine (war, possession, destruction) shows that neither exists in a vacuum.

The first section of the film shows Elle and Lui’s naked bodies intertwined, and their dialogue–dominated by her thoughts–is accompanied by increasingly awful footage of the aftermath of the bomb. She talks about how she visited the museum in Hiroshima: “… the reconstructions, for lack of anything else… the explanations, for lack of anything else.” She looked at the photographs and the scorched metal. She says, “What else can a tourist do but weep? I’ve always wept over Hiroshima’s fate.” As she “remembers,” Lui interjects that she remembers nothing, that she knows nothing and that there was nothing for her to weep over.

Elle was a young woman in occupied France (Nevers) when she learned the bomb dropped. Lui was fighting in the war, and his family was in Hiroshima. As the narrative unfolds and Elle comes to terms with her past, her youth and madness that she had in Nevers was due to her intense love with a German soldier–the enemy–who was killed right before they were set to leave together.

Lui’s story doesn’t seem as important as hers. We know he’s married (they both are), and that he’s a successful architect and involved in politics. His role in the film is that of a lover, of course, a pursuer and a listener.

Elle, fighting Lui’s claims that she doesn’t know anything about Hiroshima, stresses that she does know. She says she knew that women risked giving birth to “monsters,” men risked becoming sterile, huge amounts of food had to be thrown away and that the “principle of inequality” kept advancing–between races and classes. He tells her she knows nothing, but we hear her concern with the traditionally feminine, even feminist, cultural and human ramifications of this new warfare.

Her memory and knowledge, from a French perspective, also symbolizes the difficulties that others have in attempting to remember and to understand tragedies on foreign soil.

When this introductory collage of words and images ends, the couple’s faces are shown, laughing in bed. They are individuals now, not just ideas.

He asks, “What did Hiroshima mean to you in France?”

She answers, “The end of war. I mean, completely.” She couldn’t believe they did it and that they succeeded.

“The whole world rejoiced, and you rejoiced with it,” he says.

Elle and Lui share passion and memory.

Their conversations, although heavy, are rooted in a desire and growing love for one another. The beginning conversation sounds uncomfortable since Lui is denying Elle’s memory and understanding, but they weave themselves together and her memories become lucid as the story unfolds. And Lui listens and falls deeper in love with her.

This prevailing theme of memory and understanding, and the limitations of both, are a product of a unique film production–Japanese and French companies and crews produced it, and the producers demanded that one star be French and the other Japanese. Even the production of the film highlights this partnership and what can be possible when cultures partner. Resnais and Duras, the creative team, show the great power of giving creative license to both the masculine and feminine.

Elle is in Hiroshima acting in a film about “peace,” and when Lui finds her on set, they are filming actors protesting with signs about nuclear testing and photos from after Hiroshima. Much like the setting of Hiroshima itself, these scenes provide a backdrop to the individual love affair of a couple while reminding the audience of worldwide pain and tragedy.

Elle describes her memory of her past in Nevers (after Lui asks her about it). When she first asks why he asked about Nevers, Lui says he understands that she “was young, and didn’t belong to anyone in particular. I somehow understand that you began to be who you are today.”

She fell in love with a German soldier, and he was killed. She stayed by his cold body while the cathedral bells celebrated the liberation of Nevers (again, showing the complex perspectives of victory for some and tragedy for others). Her family is shunned since she was a “disgrace,” and her head is shaved. When she screams, she’s locked in the cellar until she becomes “reasonable,” and her mother sends her to Paris.

When she arrives in Paris, Hiroshima is “in all the papers.” She says, “Fourteen years have passed–I still remember the pain a little bit, but one day I will no longer remember it. At all. Nothing.”

Lui asks if her husband knows this story, and she says no. “So I’m the only one?” he asks, and she replied that he is. He is elated, and embraces her. His possession of her memories signifies a deepening of their relationship and a new found trust. That, or he’s simply happy to have something of hers that only he possesses.

In an internal dialogue after leaving Lui (who begs her to stay), Elle speaks to her German lover, and says that she’s found another impossible love, and that she’s told her story. She is terrified of forgetting him.

Elle splashes water on her face and she is reborn after telling the story of her “youth” and “madness” in love.

When she and Lui walk the streets together and her thoughts dominate the narrative, scenery from France and Japan flash back and forth, confusing time and place. Elle says, “I meet you. I remember you. This city was tailor-made for love. You fit my body like a glove. Who are you? You’re destroying me. I was hungry. Hungry for infidelity, for adultery, for lies and for death. I always have been. I had no doubt you’d cross my path one day…”

She is attracted to and comforted by Lui, but her journey is much more introspective. He continuously chases after her, but she knows that “staying is more impossible than leaving.”

Her climactic thought is “Silly little girl who died of love in Nevers–I relinquish you into oblivion.”

She doesn’t really, though, nor should she.

They visit a cafe late at night (Casablanca, a clear nod to another film of “impossible love”), and the sun begins to rise overhead. Lui follows Elle back to her hotel room. She cries, “I’ll forget you! I’m forgetting you already!” This is a threat and a mournful realization all at once. She says, slowly, “Hiroshima,” and he covers her mouth. “Hiroshima,” she repeats. “That’s your name.

“Yes, that’s my name,” he says. “And your name is Nevers. Nevers in France.”

The sweeping narrative begins with discussion of place, of warfare and mass casualties narrows in on a couple, and a woman’s struggle with remembering, forgetting and mourning her past. At the end, they are again representative of their places in the world, and a complex, difficult history.

Hiroshima mon amour, as a cornerstone film in the French New Wave movement of the late 1950s and 1960s, offers us no answers or prescriptions for life. Instead, we are left aching–both for the “impossible” romance and the pain and emptiness of modern war.

The beginning of the film inundates us with images from after the bomb. As we drift farther into the narrative and farther away from those horrifying images, we forget what we saw. We forget the horrors. Hiroshima mon amour forces us to reflect on the power of memory, and more so, the power of forgetting.

Throughout the film, the relationship between the masculine and the feminine, remembering and forgetting and dealing with war from different perspectives tugs and pulls at Elle and Lui and at the audience. At the end, the impossible is made penetrable by accepting and absorbing these complex relationships all at once.

—–

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

Foreign Film Week: ‘The World is Ours,’ A Feminist Film

Guest post written by Eugenia Andino Lucas.

[Original post en Español follows English version.]

Last summer, a Spanish film had a modest success at the cinema: El Mundo es Nuestro (The World Is Ours), directed by Alfonso Sánchez, starring himself and Alberto López. The origin of this film is in a series of shorts released on Youtube, produced in the simplest way and showing the solid education in independent theater of the performers; one fixed camera and two guys, sitting in iconic places of Seville, chatting about this and that and nothing in particular. The one thing setting them apart from regular stand up comedy was that in each of the first three shorts, the two friends were characterized as a local stereotype: in “This isn’t what it used to be,” canis (somewhere between working-class and petty criminals),

The first of the original shorts (unsubtitled Spanish).

That’s the way it is stars upper-class, conservative men with a very distinct set of local idiosyncrasies, and It was different, back then has hippies, for lack of a better word (in a different country or year they would have been hipsters: guys of middle-class origin with a snobbish mix of liberal values). As I write, the original video has more than 1,268,000 Youtube views and the second one, more than 2,625,000. The canis and the posh guys appeared in different sequels, and after some intensive and creative crowdfunding, Alfonso Sánchez directed his film, with the original petty criminals, Culebra and Cabeza, as protagonists.

The World Is Ours

The plot is not the most original in the world: Seville’s favorite crooks plan a bank robbery that goes wrong when a mysterious third man takes the entire bank office hostage, including them, and demands to appear on TV to give a very important message. As a fan of the original shorts, I went to see the film. And at the box office, I took a look at what other options the multiplex was giving:

A woman wants to kill another one because she’s younger and prettier.
Two men save the world from the evil plans of another man.
A prison mutiny. It’s a man’s prison and there is one woman as hostage. Naturally.
A war flick with big macho guys.
A handful of brats give a party.
If he stalks you, it means he loves you.
Girl is infatuated with guy who still remembers his ex. Said ex is baaaaaad and meeeeeeean.

And The World is Ours, a film that I was looking forward to, but which didn’t seem very promising from a feminist perspective. In fact, I assumed the film worked on the premise that I don’t exist, because in the Youtube videos, women are entirely absent, as characters and even as mentions. Luckily, I was wrong. If feminism is the radical idea that women are human beings, The World is Ours is a wonderfully feminist film.

When was the last time that you saw a film that didn’t just pass the Bechdel test, but also had female characters that were not victims of sexual violence? How many films do you remember in which some of those female characters were simultaneously kind and clever? How many films with supporting female characters that aren’t the hero’s girlfriend?

A woman enjoying lunch. It is not a major plot point.

In The World is Ours, you can find almost anything you could wish in a comedy portrait of women in Southern Spain. First of all, quantity: male and female roles with dialogue are in a 13:8 proportion. Not bad!

Characterizations show a bit of everything: people are kind or disgusting, clever, naive, or stupid. People, men and women, do their jobs with varying levels of honesty and efficiency. The problems shown are human, and often universal. Consider these; some of them feel particularly local to me, but anyone could relate:

An exploited intern.
Unemployed, on the dole, with bits of illegal work on the side (think British social comedy).
Working for two because your partner is unemployed. Being partly proud and partly resentful of your head-of-the-family position.
Queer and gradually out of the closet.
A wormy, servile coward; bully to the weak.
A good, rational professional adjusting badly after a transfer at work. It’s not really their fault. A bit like in Northern Exposure.
Friendship from the cradle, passionate and unconditional.
Someone whose grey, boring job is embittering every aspect of their lives.

Five hostages.

Can you guess the sex of any of the characters from my descriptions? You can’t? That’s the best test of this film’s feminism: if we took all of them and switched, it would work just as well.

It’s not perfect, but it’s so enjoyable that I don’t care. In the words of my husband, who saw the film with me and doesn’t have any gender studies on his CV, “it’s a film with real women, who are human.” Thanks, Alfonso Sánchez, and the rest of the team.

Culebra and Cabeza.

El Mundo es Nuestro, esa película feminista.

Estaba yo en la puerta del cine para entrar a ver El Mundo es Nuestro y me fijé en lo que había en la cartelera. Os doy un resumen rapidito:

Una mujer quiere matar a otra porque es más guapa.
Dos hombres salvan el mundo del plan de otro hombre.
Un motín en una cárcel. De hombres. Con una mujer de rehén, claro.
Una de guerra con soldados machotes.
Unos niñatos dan una fiesta.
Si te acosa es que te quiere.
Chica pierde el culo por un muchacho que todavía se acuerda de su ex. La ex es mala y tontita.

Y El Mundo es Nuestro, una película que no prometía mucho como reflejo de que yo existo. Porque en los vídeos on Youtube de mundoficción las mujeres están ausentes, como personajes o como menciones. Afortunadamente, me equivocaba. Si el feminismo es creer que las mujeres somos seres humanos, El Mundo es Nuestro es una película maravillosamente feminista.

¿Cuándo fue la última vez que viste una película con más de dos personajes femeninos, ninguna de las cuales era víctima de violación, ni de maltrato doméstico? ¿Cuántas en la que algunas de esas mismas mujeres son listas y buenas personas a la vez? ¿Cuántas en las que los personajes femeninos son algo más que la novia del protagonista?

Pues El Mundo es Nuestro tiene casi todo lo que se podría desear en un retrato cómico de las mujeres en España. Para empezar, la cantidad: los personajes masculinos y femeninos con diálogo están en la bonita proporción de 13 a 8. No está mal.

Sobre sus caracterizaciones, entre ellos y ellas hay de todo: gente indeseable y encantadora, gente lista y tonta, gente que hace su trabajo con dosis variables de ética y de eficacia. Los problemas son humanos, y universales: ser un becario explotado. Estar en paro. Trabajar por dos porque quien está en paro es tu pareja. Salir del armario. Ser un pelotillero cobarde y miserable. Sentirte fuera de lugar en una cultura ajena, después de un traslado por motivos de trabajo. ¿A que no adivinas cuáles de estas situaciones corresponden a un hombre o a una mujer en la película? Ese es el mejor test: con todos los sexos cambiados, la película funcionaría igual de bien.

No es perfecta, pero se disfruta tanto que da igual. En palabras de quien me acompañó al cine, “una película con mujeres de verdad, que son personas”. Gracias, Alfonso Sánchez, y a todos los demás enteristas.

Eugenia Andino Lucas is a teacher of English as a Foreign Language in Spain. She’s also working on a PhD on Gender Violence in the novels of Charles Dickens. You can follow her on twitter: @laguiri and on her blog: eugeniaandino.bachpress.org.