Tag: Foreign Films

Guest Writer Wednesday: Where Do We Go Now?

Arabic movie poster for Where Do We Go Now?

This is a guest post by Kyna Morgan.
Nadine Labaki is a pretty big deal. Following up her directorial debut, the 2007 film Caramel (which she also wrote and starred in), she brought her sophomore directorial effort, Where Do We Go Now? back to the Toronto International Film Festival as co-writer, producer, director and star. I was lucky enough to snag tickets to a 9:45AM showing. While normally I wouldn’t be caught watching films at that ungodly hour of the morning, I couldn’t resist seeing this film. It turns out I hit the mother lode as a movie-lover. In fact, it was evident from the laughs and the sniffles from my fellow movie goers that Labaki’s film affected everyone. It’s a comedy, a drama, a musical, a social commentary! It’s quite simple yet extraordinarily complex at the same time. At the end of the festival it received the Cadillac People’s Choice Award, one of the few awards actually given out at Toronto (a non-competitive festival), and has since gone on to snag a U.S. distribution deal with Sony Pictures Classics and break box office records in Lebanon. Earlier in the year, it was an official selection at the Cannes Film Festival in the “Un Certain Regard” category. I didn’t know what to expect from the film, since I’m often misdirected by film synopses and I hadn’t even heard of it prior to September, but not knowing is one of the most exciting parts for me. Here’s what I found.

The story is set in a small town in Lebanon whose population is divided between Muslims and Christians. They have a mosque. They have a church. They eat together, live beside each other, celebrate together, mourn together, and they have spent many generations in peaceful existence with each other. Religious differences seem to be the least of their concerns when it comes to functioning as a community. The film begins with a group of women dressed in black walking together in a close group, moving in unison with the beat of the music over the opening credits, surrounded by the dry, mountainous land where they live. It appears as if they might almost break out in dance, but in a close shot, we see that they are sad, even grief-stricken, clutching rosaries, bouquets and photos. As the music dies down, they break into two groups. They are in a cemetery and each moves to one side of it, then scatters amongst the graves which they are there to tend. We see that one side of the cemetery is Christian, the other Muslim.

While Where Do We Go Now? has an incredibly strong ensemble cast – actresses as the leads with actors as supporting characters – director Nadine Labaki could be considered the main star. She plays “Amale,” the owner of a small café which serves as the heart of the town where people gather, both Muslim and Christian alike. Her secret love, the painter “Rabih” (played by Julian Farhat) who is there to renovate her café, also secretly loves her. Toward the beginning of the film, this is played out in a scene in which they dance closely and confess their love through song, all of which is Amale’s daydream as she washes dishes while Rabih looks good standing on his ladder stealing glimpses of her in the kitchen. I’ve heard the film called a musical, but this isn’t really the case. The characters don’t really break into song to replace dialogue, but rather it’s used to enhance the dialogue, and there are only about three short “musical” sequences in the film.

Everything seems to be going well for the townspeople. They have a television set up by a group of young men and the mayor, and once they’re able to get reception (they’re very far away from the nearest big town), the whole town gathers to watch a program. The mayor makes a speech, obviously very proud that this group of young men was able to make this special event happen. He comments on the happiness he feels at having so many years pass living harmoniously with his Muslim friends and neighbors (he is Christian), but then the television program turns to news and the violence that’s occurring elsewhere in Lebanon between rival groups of people. Desperate to preserve their peaceful way of life and ignorance about the outside world full of conflict, the women of the town begin to shout and complain at their husbands and their male neighbors, about whatever they can think of, in an attempt to drown out the noise of the awful news. This is where the story really begins. This film is about a group of women who go to hilarious lengths to prevent the problems of the outside world from entering their own town.

The comedy and the humorous grotesques which Labaki creates are tempered with drama. The turning point in the film comes when several Muslim men find that the door to the mosque has been left ajar and animals have come in, soiling the prayer rugs. No one takes the blame. In fact, it seems as if no one is to blame. It’s an accident, but a few of the men are determined to find who did it and start blaming their Christian neighbors and friends. Later, it is found that someone has retaliated by vandalizing the church, breaking a statue of the Virgin Mary. Something must be done, and the men seem too concerned about who did what that the women must take over. A series of schemes is put into action to distract the men from the problems in the town: a fake miracle experienced by Madame Yvonne (the mayor’s wife) when she hears the Virgin Mary call out various men of the town for their transgressions (including her own neighbor for things she doesn’t like him doing, as well as her husband), hiring a troupe of exotic Russian dancers to pretend to have a bus breakdown so they have to stay in the town for several days (including being relocated to the homes of many of the men and young boys, who couldn’t be happier), and drugging the men of the town by cooking hashish into breads, cookies and cakes which they are served in Amale’s café as they watch a belly dancing show put on by the Russian dancers. It is this final plan that allows the women to use intelligence gathered by one of the Russian dancers to find where the guns are buried which some of the men have been talking about using. Now, in the height of the enjoyment of the hashish-laced baked goods, drink and dancing women, the men’s desire to kill each other is the furthest thing from their minds. The women sneak out of the café to find the spot where the guns are buried, measuring by counting steps from a landmark, fussing over whose feet are bigger and can calculate properly. Eventually they find the stash and carry it to another place in the town to bury, swearing to each other that they will never speak of this to the men.
Labaki brilliantly captures how women speak to each other and treat each other and, what’s more, what they’re willing to do for one another. These are not women who compete with each other for men – most of them are married, anyway – nor compete for attention or status. They are not only neighbors, they are friends, and despite the difference in their religion, they seem to identify first and foremost as members – and even better yet, the leaders – of the community. They don’t let each other get away with anything, and make it clear what they want. They are self-actualized women who know who they are. They are the heart of the community. And they’re funny as hell. They’re a smart, scheming group of women who want to live in peace and are willing to do almost anything to secure it. Labaki shows women apart from men, outside of the definition of these women as wives or mothers, even potential brides (like Amale might be considered by Rabih). There is a strength in this as a storytelling device as well because it allows the women to be women without the constant presence of men to remind us as viewers that these women somehow belong to someone. Yes, they are trying to solve the problems being played out by the men, but it is simply because they know how to solve them and they know they have the power to do so. They are just more than half of humanity, and they act like it!

What drives the drugging of the male population of the town, though, is what happens a bit earlier. All of the hilarity of the schemes and misdirection that the women attempt is tempered with a dramatic scene so beautifully written, acted and shot, it becomes the film’s reality check. While the town is sleeping in the wee hours one morning, Takla’s (one of the main women, played by Claude Baz Moussawbaa) nephew returns on his motorbike with Takla’s son, Nassim. They had gone the day before to a nearby city and spent the night so they could sell the load of goods they had carried on the bike. But Takla finds her son is dead, having been shot by a stray bullet as he and his cousin tried to escape an area where there was a violent conflict. Labaki does not shy away or use some type of cinematographic cop out to avoid the pain this woman feels at realizing her son is dead. She puts the camera on her and lets the woman tell her own story, pulling her son off of the motorbike, cradling him in her arms, rocking him back and forth, wailing. It’s a stunning performance and a sobering moment in the film where the reality that exists outside of the town is dumped right onto Takla’s doorstep. She hides her son’s body in the well. She is determined to not let his death destroy the town and destroy the future she undoubtedly was determined for him to have: peace. Only days later do her closest friends demand to know what has happened (she is sad, reclusive, and they know something is wrong), so she tells them. They all swear not to say a word, and they begin to hatch a plan.

When both the priest and the imam of the town announce on the town’s speaker that all men are required to show up for a meeting at Amale’s café, it is then that the women put their hashish plan into action. Persevering to recover the way of life that existed before the men’s Muslim-Christian hatred came to a boil, one morning their husbands and children find them to have switched religions. The Christian women are now Muslim, the Muslim women now Christian. The mayor wakes to find that there are wall hangings in Arabic and his wife wearing a hijab and praying on her prayer rug, uttering “Allahu Akbar” (Allah is great) over and over until he demands to know what’s going on. Takla, whose older son Issam tried to find a gun in Takla’s house so he could find who killed his brother, Nassim, wakes to his convert mother as well (while he is tied up in bed after Takla grazed him with a shotgun to prevent him from trying to kill anyone, then restrained him from trying it again). All of the women of the town convert this morning as they plan for the funeral of Nassim. In the cemetery, with the Muslim and Christian sides separated by a narrow path, the women all dressed in black follow the pallbearers who walk to the end of the path and turn around to face them, still holding Nassim’s coffin. “What?” asks one of the women. One of the pallbearers, knowing each woman is now of the other religion, responds “Where do we go now?”

This is a gorgeous film with a grace and respect for humanity; Nadine Labaki is a tremendous talent. This film is Lebanon’s entry for the 2012 Academy Awards and it deserves to be. Not only does it paint a picture of the world in which we could live, but one in which she should. The leadership role of women is essential not just in this film but in any possible scenario for peace, conflict resolution and sustainable pluralism. It’s just in Where Do We Go Now? the work to solve the world’s problems seems a lot more fun!

—

Kyna Morgan is the founder and author of Her Film, a blog and global project to build audiences for films by, for and about women, and is a published researcher on the topic of African American women filmmakers of the silent and early sound eras of cinema. She has a background in film studies, entertainment administration and publicity, and spends her free time seeking out the world’s best vegan food while sharing her love of Canada.


Movie Preview: Tomboy

I don’t have much to say about this film: it looks amazing, and I can’t wait to see it. Here’s the movie synopsis from Rotten Tomatoes:
A French family with two daughters, 10-year-old Laure and 6-year-old Jeanne, moves to a new neighborhood during the summer holidays. With her Jean Seberg haircut and tomboy ways, Laure is immediately mistaken for a boy by the local kids and passes herself off as Michael. Filmmaker Céline Sciamma brings a light and charming touch to this drama of childhood gender confusion. Zoe Heran as Laure/Michael and Malonn Levanna as Jeanne are nothing less than brilliant. This is a relationship movie: relationships between children, and the even more complicated one between one’s heart and body. 

It’s gotten wonderful reviews so far, which isn’t surprising since it’s written and directed by Céline Sciamma, who also wrote and directed Water Lilies. The film doesn’t officially start playing (in limited release) until November 16th (I’m so there), but I’ll post the trailer to tide us over until then. 

Guest Writer Wednesday: Incendies

Incendies: Lebanon Is Scorched, Burned and Blistered

Guest post written by Vicky Moufawad-Paul.

To say that the Middle East has been scorched, burned and blistered by war is an understatement. In Incendies–a ground-breaking diaspora film, set in both present day Canada and in Lebanon in the recent past–we get to see in painful detail the intricacies of how the war burned many families into horrific mangled messes.

The idea of return is common among diaspora films of the last few decades. Usually the protagonist of the film returns to their family’s place of origin and discovers the rubble and ruins that have been vacated by their parent’s generation. Usually we do not see the atrocities that happened, but we are told that they are too terrible to talk about or to show. The protagonist walks around looking traumatized which, I have to admit, despite my devotion to these films, is part of the growing pains in the development of a genre.

Where Incendies distinguishes itself is in the crafting of a story that really is too terrible to tell and too terrible to witness. And then it makes us witness every terrible moment of it.

A cinematic moment. The image comes first and the explanation comes much much later.

The brilliance of Incendies is not simply in the visceral moments of violence–the shock of a child being ripped from her mother’s arms before the mother is burned alive–it is in the crafting of a story that makes visible the back and forth of retaliation: like an equation where each variable, each action has a predictable and increasingly despicable reaction. Details were planted early in the film and later revealed their terrible significance. At the same time, the film avoids didacticism, and instead reaches for and finds mythological resonance.

Violence and pain become sources of empathy and identification for the audience.

The film is based on a play written and directed by seasoned writer, actor and director extraordinaire, Wajdi Mouawad. He is of Lebanese origin and has received the highest accolades for his creative work in Canada. The Incendies stage play has traveled the world and has received rave reviews. Mouawad directed a film in 2004, Littoral, that was also an adaptation of a script he had written and directed for the stage. His initial transition to film was bumpy. Littoral was similarly a story of returning to Lebanon to burying a parent. Unfortunately, it was heavy in dialogue and the emotional tone of the film was forced. This time, Mouawad’s story has been better cinematically served by teaming up with director Denis Villeneuve. Villeneuve has spent the last decade working on the project of cinematic representations of violence. Even with an Oscar nomination in the Foreign Language category, Incendies is doing far better than its distributor had expected.

Seen through a feminist lens, the intersecting oppressions on the protagonist’s life do not simply come from the war planes overhead–which are never named, but are likely from Israel. The old world familial relationships that are what could loosely be referred to as pre-capitalist are further entrenched rather than displaced by war. The political, religious, and gender divides as well as ideas about honor and group loyalty are part of the web that entraps the protagonist. The story is written with non identical twins, a boy and girl, returning to Lebanon to search for their father and brother while uncovering their mother’s past. Each child is able to search in different spaces based on their respective genders, further revealing a splitting in the already fractured narrative.

The now classic diasporic subject returning to the ‘homeland’ and looking.

The incredible violence we witness in the film is shot and edited with emotional rawness and, importantly, respect for women’s bodies. The rape scene is a good example; we are first told through dialogue that it is going to happen. We see the woman sitting in a chair and then see the rapist enter the room. The camera cuts to a close-up of her face as she is waiting, then cuts to a close-up of the rapist’s face as he looks at her. It cuts back to her on the ground crying. The editing implies the act of rape, and reduces the voyeuristic impact on the audience. Instead, we share in the victim’s anticipatory fear and in her pain afterward.

The protagonist is played by Lubna Azabal, a Moroccan actress who is a contender to be the next generation Hiam Abbas.
Hiam Abbas is the Arab world’s Meryl Streep.

The press releases claim that the film is set in an unnamed Arab country. The film itself evades realist details that would pin it to an exact location: the cityscapes are not Beirut, because they were shot in Jordan. The prison which is referred to as “in the South” is undoubtedly modeled after the notorious Khiam prisons in Lebanon, but in the film it is given a new name. The Nationalist party and its leader are fictional, although they occupied a similar position in the ideological landscape of Lebanon. License plates on cars are from several countries. The protagonist is modeled after Souha Bechara, a famous Lebanese freedom fighter who was in prison for assassination and sang through her solitary confinement. Unlike the character Nehal, the historical figure of Souha did not have children. Obscuring, renaming, and deliberate obfuscation are perhaps the historical equivalent of mythological strokes in narrative structure. The lack of geopolitical specificity is perhaps what allows the film to breathe the symbolic into the Lebanese situation. Make no mistake – some things are obscure, but the important details situate the film with utter literalism in Lebanon over the last few decades.

The film is traumatic to watch and perhaps cathartic too, especially for anyone from the region. I sobbed at least six times. The film allows a flood of memories to return, and stimulates after-film conversations about things people have repressed for years. In one of these conversations someone asked why the mother would bring the memories of violence onto her children. “They live in Canada, they don’t even speak Arabic, why do they need to unearth a painful and terrible history? Why not live in ignorant bliss,” she asked. What are the assumptions operating here? Do those in diaspora ever really live in ignorant bliss, when they are raised by parent(s) who have been through trauma, and war trickles down through their actions onto the children somehow? In Incendies, the children were raised without a father and without an extended family on either their paternal or maternal sides. The film asks us to think about whether their lives were ever really free of violence, even though the violence may have been displaced and unnamed. Traces of violence and the reality of unknown origins haunted them. The film suggests both that there is violence implicit in the return of the exile and the inevitability of that return. In this story, the boundaries between ‘here’ and ‘over there,’ past and present, families and strangers are found to be more permeable than many would like to think.

Vicky Moufawad-Paul is a curator, artist, film programmer, and the Artistic Director at A Space Gallery in Toronto. She earned a Masters of Fine Arts from York University, where she conducted research on the visual culture of Palestine. She was previously the founding Executive Director of the Toronto Arab Film Festival, and has worked at the Toronto International Film Festival Group. She was a member of the Visual and Media Arts Committee at the Toronto Arts Council, a founding member of the Advisory Board of the Palestine Film Festival, and a member of the Board of Directors at Trinity Square Video. Her writing has been published by Fuse Magazine, E-Fagia, the Arab American National Museum, and the Journal of Peace Research. She was also a contributor to the anthology Decentre: concerning artist-run culture/a propos de centres d’artistes (YYZ Books, 2008). Moufawad-Paul’s video art has been exhibited nationally and internationally.

Movie Preview: Life, Above All

 

I saw a preview for Life, Above All when I went to see Woody Allen’s latest misogyny-fest, Midnight in Paris. For the record, I mostly hated Midnight in Paris–and should review it as the sexist piece of crap it is–but I’m trying to find examples of positivity in the film industry these days. The only truly great thing about attending Midnight in Paris was discovering the upcoming Life, Above All (now playing in New York and L.A.) and the upcoming Take Shelter–holy crap that’s a freaky trailer.

Michael Shannon scares me.
Anyway, the official Web site synopsizes Life, Above All as follows:
Just after the death of her newly-born sister, Chanda, 12 years old, learns of a rumor that spreads like wildfire through her small, dust-ridden village near Johannesburg. It destroys her family and forces her mother to flee. Sensing that the gossip stems from prejudice and superstition, Chanda leaves home and school in search of her mother and the truth. Life, Above All is an emotional and universal drama about a young girl (stunningly performed by first-time-actress Khomotso Manyaka) who fights the fear and shame that have poisoned her community … Directed by South African filmmaker Oliver Schmitz (Mapantsula), it is based on the international award winning novel Chanda’s Secrets by Allan Stratton.

The trailer itself gets me teary-eyed. I watched it and realized how rarely mother-daughter relationships grace the screen in a way that doesn’t portray the mother as smothering and ridiculous and usually insane, and at the very least, just … shitty. (See: Black Swan, Carrie, Mommie Dearest, Phoebe in Wonderland, Gone Baby Gone, Fish Tank, and the upcoming Ansiedad. Add screen portrayals of the Mother-in-Law to the list, and it’s a disturbing clusterfuck of epic proportions.) 

While a few reviewers argue that Life, Above All ignores the government’s responsibilities in the HIV/AIDS crisis in South Africa (like the film failing to mention former president Thabo Mbeki’s sympathies with AIDS denialists in the 00’s), I’m excerpting from several positive reviews that focus on the interpersonal relationships in the film:

By Liz Braun:

Life, Above All is an historical snapshot of the AIDS crisis in Africa and an indictment of sorts of the government bungling that allowed the epidemic to overwhelm South Africa. The culprits (ignorance, poverty, big pharma, religious and political leaders, etc.) are not so much the focus; the point of this quiet, heartbreaking drama is all those children left to cope, especially the orphans.

By Nora Lee Mandel:

Rather than focusing on the usual corrective lessons on the transmission and treatment of HIV/AIDS, the family’s struggles play out within systems of traditional care and limited modern medical facilities that are strained to the breaking point. Chanda rails against the stoic comforts of religion and receives only discouraging advice at an overcrowded clinic. Her illiterate and exhausted mother falls prey to the greed of a charlatan doctor, a demon exorcism, and horrific neglect by her revengeful sister, who has not forgiven Lillian for her flouting of tribal marriage traditions for the sake of love.

By Manohla Dargis:

Chanda’s silence is unnerving, as is the absence of tears, and while her calm conveys a preternatural strength of character it also suggests a lifetime of pain. No child, you think, should have to pick out her baby sister’s coffin. But she does, taking in the horror of the funeral home and its metal table without flinching and then pushing forward, still dry eyed, still determined, taking on life with an appealing (and enviable) toughness and grace that make this difficult story not just bearable but also absorbing. As the weight of the world bears down on her slender frame, she becomes the movie’s moral compass and its authentic wonder: the child who is forced to be an adult yet remains childlike enough to feel real.

By Mary Corliss:

Two years ago, a drama with a seemingly forbidding subject — an illiterate teenage girl, pregnant with her father’s child and hellishly abused by her drug-addicted mother — won over critics, audiences and the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The film was Precious. Now comes Life, Above All, which deals with the tragedy of AIDS in South Africa, as seen by a 12-year-old girl named Chanda. At the end of its world premiere at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, critics cheered like schoolkids, giving it a 10-minute standing ovation.

By Alison Willmore: 

… when its focus narrows onto Manyaka and her mother (Lerato Mvelase), their deep mutual affection and the terrifying sacrifices they’re ready to make because of it, the film sings, becoming a moving tribute to love holding fast against suffering. The ending, which offers a hint of relief, is unfiltered, frankly unbelievable melodrama, but something grimmer and more measured would be intolerable after everything that comes before.

Guest Writer Wednesday: Howl’s Moving Castle and Male Adaptations of Female Work

This piece by Emily Belanger is cross-posted from Not Another Wave.

The first time I saw Howl’s Moving Castle, five or six years ago, I was delighted. I’d seen Spirited Away, but other than that I’d never seen any Miyazaki films, and as far as Miyazaki films go, HMC is a tad more accessible to Western audiences. Plus, they dubbed the animation so well that a friend convinced me the film was not, in fact, a translation, but that it had originally been done in English.
Well, that wasn’t true. It’s definitely a dubbed film. But I was surprised, a month ago, when my older sister handed me a copy of the book Howl’s Moving Castle and recommended I read it. She said it was a little like The Princess Bride, in that the book was different from the movie but still delightful. And delightful it was – but I was surprised by the ways the story and characters changed when it was transferred from a Welsh novel written by a woman, to a Japanese film directed by a man. Miyazaki did a fantastic job with the film, and I still love it, but his adaptation places more focus on male characters and all but strips Sophie of her power. On the flip side, the film complicates age and evil witches in a really interesting way.

I want to make it clear up front that I don’t know enough about Japanese culture and Welsh culture to comment on how culture has impacted this transition. In fact, I haven’t even seen the movie undubbed. Accordingly, this review will compare a book that was published in English, to a version of the film that was released in English though Disney, and which was marketed to an American audience.

This romantic imagining of Howl says it all
(source: Dreamhuntress on flickr)
First of all, in the movie, Howl is the main event. He’s dashing and pretty, and he swoops into Sophie’s boring life to save her from the soldiers who are flirting with her. Yes, Sophie doesn’t really need saving from those men, and Howl in fact puts her into more danger when the Witch of the Waste sees him with her and decides to put a curse on her, but there’s still something heroic in the gesture. These heroics don’t show up so soon in the book – instead of scaring off unwanted suitors, Howl is the unwanted suitor. Sophie gets nervous when he tries to buy her a drink, so he chuckles, offers to escort her wherever she’s going, and backs off when she doesn’t want him to. And the Witch of the Waste doesn’t curse her because she’s seen with Howl – she curses her because of a misunderstanding and a mistaken identity. I can see why Miyazaki simplified the witch’s motivations here, mind you.
The Witch of the Waste is a complicated character in the book, in ways I won’t fully describe here, since I hope you’ll all read the book for yourselves. But I will say this: while the film complicates the idea of witches by turning the Witch of the Waste into a victim you can sympathize with, who is ultimately an ally, the book complicates the idea of witches in other ways by making Howl’s struggle into one where he’s trying to avoid becoming like the witch. She isn’t evil by virtue of being a powerful woman, (and every powerful woman in the movie is, in fact, evil – even the witch only turns good after losing her powers). She has turned evil over time because she made the same choice Howl made, and his only hope is to undo that choice before it hurts him like it hurt her.
And gaining power in the book doesn’t corrupt all female characters. While the movie carries a warning to all magical beings – all the other wizards and witches in the land are losing their humanity to war – the only witches we meet (Madam Suliman and The Witch of the Waste) use their power for evil, while the wizards we meet (Howl and his apprentice) use their magic to help people/ to hide. In the book, however, we meet several witches who are good, including Howl’s teacher, a woman who teaches magic to Sophie’s sister, and Sophie herself. Yeah, that’s right, Sophie herself has magical powers in the book. In fact, in the book Sophie is able to save Howl because of her magical powers, not because they’re in love – although they are.
And that last point transitions nicely into my last critique of the movie – the movie is more a love story, where the book is more a coming of age story. Accordingly, it follows traditional patterns of love stories in ways that downplay how powerful women are and play up how powerful men are, while also reinforcing the Beauty and the Beast myth that a virtuous woman can save a dark, brooding man from his animalistic nature. In the book, Sophie plays a huge role in defeating the evil force they fight toward the end. In the movie, it’s mostly Howl, and Sophie’s role pertains mostly to Howl’s heart, which, remember, she is moving through their emotional connection and not through her own power. To reiterate: in the movie, her power and influence are defined in relation to Howl, but in the book she has her own power.
Still, there’s a silver lining to all this: the movie and the book are both about a young woman who only finds herself after losing her youth. How feminawesome is that?? Also, the characters are interesting and fleshed out in both mediums, and the movie’s approach to war is interesting. And the animation and music – just incredible. So if you love the movie, I hope you keep on loving it. But take the time to read the book too so you can appreciate the powerful side to Sophie’s nature.
Emily Belanger currently lives in Utah, where she’s completing an MFA in creative writing. When she isn’t writing fiction or teaching, she co-edits Not Another Wave, a feminist blog with an inclusive angle, and writes for Go Girl Magazine, a travel magazine for and by women. She’s originally from rural New Hampshire and misses the humidity very much.

Guest Writer Wednesday: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

Enemy of the State: Heroine Lisbeth Salander Fights Back in The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest

This is a cross post from Opinioness of the World.

I am usually not a fan of trilogies; the third film often pales in comparison to the crescendo of emotion and suspense built in a series. And while the occasional exception exists (Return of the King), most (Godfather 3, Alien 3, Terminator 3) are substandard when you compare them to their phenomenal predecessors. Would The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the third installment in one of the best-selling trilogies, suffer the same fate? Perhaps. But how could I resist the lure of Lisbeth Salander, arguably one of the most interesting, unique and feminist heroines that has ever graced the page or screen?

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is the final film in the Millennium Trilogy, which also includes The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire. GWKTHN picks up right where the second film leaves off. Punk hacker and researcher Lisbeth Salander is in critical condition after surviving a gunshot wound to the head, shoulder and hip. In the same hospital two doors down, her mortal enemy, the sinister Zalachenko, also recovers from life-threatening wounds. While Salander fights for her life physically, she must also prepare for an emotional battle of wits as she must stand trial for crimes committed as well as prove her mental competency. Salander’s friend, journalist and magazine publisher Mikael Blomkvist, continues his unwavering support. He races to prove her innocence, uncovering a treacherous government conspiracy to silence Salander.
I’ve been engrossed by the movies and books written by the late Swedish author Stieg Larsson. So I couldn’t wait to see how the story ends.  My mother used to always say that a sequel was only good if you could watch it without seeing the other movie(s) in the series. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest would be difficult to watch without seeing the first two or reading the books. This is truly a film belonging to fans of the trilogy. With a different director, Daniel Alfredson, at the helm, it doesn’t stand alone as well as the first or even the second film. The movie suffers from a choppy pace. But the action scenes, such as the shootout in Samir’s restaurant and a police raid, are choreographed effectively. It’s the powerful performances by Noomi Rapace as the tattooed sullen survivor and Michael Nyqvist as the obstinate and passionate Mikael Blomkvist that elevate the material.

Michael Nyqvist stars as Mikael Blomkvist

Not surprisingly, there are differences between the book and its movie adaptation. Annika Gianinni, Salander’s lawyer, is made to seem less competent. In the book, she kicks ass during the trial in her flawless cross-examination of Salander’s childhood psychiatrist, slimy Peter Teleborian, who claims she needs to be institutionalized. But in the movie, she portrays far less resolve. Also, it’s never mentioned that Gianinni specializes in domestic violence and sexual assault cases, which spurred Blomkvist, her brother, to ask her to represent Salander. To my delight, the film retains the strong female police officers Monica Figueroa and Sonja Modig. Thankfully, the film cuts some extraneous storylines like Blomkvist and Figueroa as lovers. The subplot involving Erika Berger, Blomkvist’s best friend and editor of their magazine Millennium, concerns her taking a job at another publication and receiving sexually explicit emails from a possible stalker. In the film, Berger never leaves Millennium and doesn’t support Blomkvist’s stubborn investigation when it jeopardizes the safety of the other journalists. She still receives threatening emails but the film removes the whole premise of sexual harassment in the workplace, slightly diminishing Larsson’s theme of misogyny, preferring to focus on the government corruption.

In the U.S., the first book entitled The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, altered from its original Swedish title Men Who Hate Women. The Swedish name conveys the theme of misogyny Larsson carries throughout the entire trilogy. The first book contends with sexual assault, rape and domestic violence. The second book confronts sexual trafficking. The third book shows sexual harassment in the workplace. The trilogy depicts all of the different manifestations of men’s hatred towards women. To me, that was one of the things I enjoyed most about Larsson’s books: his ability to seamlessly fuse social justice with compelling characters and an interesting plot. Removing it somehow neuters the book’s message. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet‘s Nest’s original title is The Air Castle that Blew Up, with “air castle” referring to a “pipe dream.” It’s interesting to note Larsson’s original titles because only in the second one does he reference “girl” and in that particular book, he’s referencing Salander as a child. In the U.S., while they infantilize her in the titles, sadly reducing her to a “girl” rather than a “woman,” publishers shrewdly put Lisbeth Salander front and center, for she is the primary reason to read the books and watch the films.

Salander endured rape, assault and institutionalization; her rights throughout the trilogy have been violated. Yet she refuses to be a victim. Salander steels herself, always ready to fight back. For her trial, she dons a “costume” of garish goth make-up, mohawk hair and ripped clothes in court. She wasn’t going to pretend to be something she wasn’t; she had nothing to hide. This speaks to Salander’s strategy, a point not fully conveyed in the film. While Blomkvist, lawyer Gianinni, and her friends Plague, Holger Palmgren, and Dragan Armansky come to Salander’s aid and rally around her, she is an equal participant in her defense. Asphyxia is the program she designs to infiltrate people’s computers, which hacker Plague uses to uncover information on a trial witness. But if you hadn’t seen the other films or read the book, you’d never know that Salander’s brilliant mind invented the program. The last scene of the movie ends differently from the book too, detracting from Lisbeth’s emotional growth in learning to allow people into her life.

Annika Gianini (played by Annika Hallin) with Lisbeth Salandar (Noomi Rapace)

Actor Noomi Rapace brings the kick-ass heroine to life, imbuing her with strength and complexity. Despite a bedridden Salander for half the film, a complaint some reviewers have expressed, Rapace captivates. Beyond her dedication to the role (she trained for 7 months in preparation), she has a knack for conveying a range of emotions with a tilt of her chin or a narrowing of her eyes. Yet she’s underutilized here. I kept craving more Lisbeth, more Rapace…for me the two have become inextricably intertwined. I can’t imagine anyone else in the role, particularly as Hollywood gears up for Lisbeth Salander mania as actor Rooney Mara will attempt to fill Rapace’s shoes in the U.S. version.
My fave blogger Melissa Silverstein at Women and Hollywood had the opportunity to chat with the indomitable Rapace (so jealous!). When Silverstein asked Rapace why she thinks women relate to Lisbeth Salander, Rapace replied
She does not complain and she doesn’t accept being a victim. Almost everybody has treated her so badly and has done horrible things to her but she doesn’t accept it and won’t become the victim they have tried to force her to be. She wants to live and will never give up. I find that so liberating. Her battle is for a better life and to be free and I think everybody experiences that at some point in their life. They say OK, I’m not going to take this anymore. This is the point of no return. I’m going to stand up and say no.  I’m going to be true to myself and even if you don’t like me that’s fine. I don’t want to play the game of the charming nice sexy girl anymore, I’m me. I think everybody can relate to that.

It was interesting watching this film and juxtaposing it with For Colored Girls which I saw the same weekend. Both convey the pain men can inflict on women; both show women struggling to not just survive but thrive. What continues to fascinate me about Lisbeth Salander is her defiance to yield, living life on her own terms. She doesn’t wait for justice to come from the authorities; she’s a warrior wielding her own vindication. Salander continually challenges categorization, refusing to be defined by her looks, her sexuality or her gender. She defines herself; a powerful message that we as women and as a society don’t hear often enough. I’m going to miss Lisbeth Salander.



Megan Kearns is a blogger, freelance writer and activist. A feminist vegan, Megan blogs at The Opinioness of the World. She earned her B.A. in Anthropology and Sociology and a Graduate Certificate in Women and Politics and Public Policy. She lives in Boston. She has previously contributed reviews of The Kids Are All Right, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and The Girl Who Played with Fire to Bitch Flicks.

Guest Writer Wednesday: The Girl Who Played with Fire

Good Girl Gone Bad: Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander Burns Up the Screen in The Girl Who Played with Fire
This is a cross post from Opinioness of the World.
I’ve been utterly consumed by Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s gripping Millennium Trilogy (I’ll be reading the third book soon…so excited!).  I loved the first film, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, entranced by the burning intensity of the controversial heroine, Lisbeth Salander.  So I eagerly watched the second film in the series, The Girl Who Played with Fire.
Picking up one year after the first film ends, a young journalist and a doctoral student are researching the sex trafficking trade in Sweden.  Publisher and journalist Mikael Blomkvist’s magazine Millennium decides to publish the controversial work, essentially exposing the identities of the men who purchased young women for sex.  As they are about to go to print with the story, three violent murders are committed.  When the police suspect brilliant hacker Lisbeth Salander’s involvement, Blomkvist is determined to clear her name.  But Salander plots her own vengeful agenda against her enemies, plunging the audience even deeper into the mysterious heroine’s troubled and painful past.
I enjoyed the gritty, tense film.  With a different screenwriter and director at the helm, the movie surprisingly retains the same mood as the first film yet not the same depth.  Director Daniel Alfredson provides some visually stunning camera shots.  The ominous and eerie score perfectly sets the suspenseful tone.  Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t live up to the riveting novel.  So much of what I loved about the book is missing as an exorbitant amount of the plot and dialogue are cut from the movie.
The beauty of Larsson’s books lies in his fusion of societal analysis with compelling characters and gripping suspenseful plots.  In The Girl Who Played with Fire, he focuses his commentary on human trafficking, mental health care, espionage, LGBT discrimination and domestic violence.  Regarding the central theme of trafficking in the book, the young journalist Dag Svensson goes into great detail about the johns and researcher Mia Bergman provides the point of views of the women trafficked as she relays their harrowing tales.  According to Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn in their book Half the Sky, 3 million women and girls are forced into prostitution, as many traffickers coerce, beat and rape women into submission.  As with sexual assault in the first novel, Larsson gives you a sense of the horrors these women face.  But this and other vital themes are completely glossed over in the film.
Part of what makes the book so captivating is that it’s a whodunit; you feel as if you’ve stepped into an episode of Law and Order: SVU (I kept waiting for Mariska Hargitay and Chris Meloni to leap out and bust the perps).  The police investigation into the murders comprises a huge component of the story.  The plot twists and turns and you don’t know the identity of the killer or killers.  Salander’s involvement is ambiguous, as the book doesn’t follow her whereabouts for roughly 100 pages following the murders.  But the film basically tells you right up front, forgoing most of the mystery.
By its end, the movie (and book too) spirals into a violent frenzy, reminiscent of a slasher film with SPOILER ALERT!! characters wielding axes and chainsaws, along with numerous dead bodies buried outside a warehouse and someone buried alive.  Ending on a cliff hanger, it leaves us yearning to know the characters’ fate.
Anything lacking in the film, is made up for by the outstanding performances of the two powerful leads.  While he gave a solid performance in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I kept yearning for more emotion from actor Michael Nyqvist as the impassioned journalist Mikael Blomkvist.  In The Girl Who Played with Fire, he delivers, bringing Blomkvist’s obstinate and obsessive compulsion to solve the murders to life.  Devoted to Salander, his former research partner and lover, Blomkvist races to piece together the puzzle of the murders.  Nyqvist captures the essence of Blomkvist’s stubborn optimism and charisma.
But the spotlight still belongs to actor Noomi Rapace.  While she blew me (and numerous other critics) away with her performance in the first film, I am even more impressed with Rapace as the tattooed researcher Lisbeth Salander this time around.  She stepped into the role through physical training, 7 facial piercings and obtaining her motorcycle license.  Yet she also emotionally transformed herself.  In an interview, Rapace said that she would sit alone, away from the cast and crew, channeling Salander’s anger. Rapace effortlessly evokes Salander’s shrewd intellect, stubbornness and wrath.  We also get to see Salander’s tenderness in her scenes with her trusted former guardian Holmer Palmgren and her lover Miriam “Mimmi” Wu.  She doesn’t have a lot of dialogue, a challenge for an actor, yet Rapace lets us into the wounded character’s world through her subtle yet stellar portrayal.
Lisbeth Salander has generated an enormous amount of press.  It’s unusual to see a female character exude such ferocity.  Usually when we see violence from women in films, they are subordinate to a male counterpart or lover, re-articulating gendered stereotypes. But not Lisbeth.  An unlikely feminist, she despises misogyny, yearning for fair and equal treatment of women.  Salander refuses to be a victim after her own sexual assault.  Despite her pained and troubled childhood, she never wallows in self-pity.  Salander follows her own moral code, wreaking vengeance on those who have abused her with little regard to the law.  She takes responsibility and accepts the consequences of her actions.  Some may argue that she’s not feminine enough, acting like a male disguised in a female form.  But I think that ignores what makes Salander so refreshing.  Self-reliant and clever, she’s a resilient survivor, never backing down from a fight.  A fascinating and fearless character, she is defined neither by her gender nor her fluid sexuality.
While not living up to the book or the first film, it’s still worthwhile to watch for the phenomenal performances by Rapace and Nyqvist.  Each of them truly embodies their alter egos.  Rapace in particular mesmerizes with a smoldering strength.   I cannot wait to see (and read) what happens next in the third installment, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.

Megan Kearns is a blogger, freelance writer and activist. A feminist vegan, Megan blogs at The Opinioness of the World. She earned her B.A. in Anthropology and Sociology and a Graduate Certificate in Women and Politics and Public Policy. She lives in Boston. She has previously contributed reviews of The Kids Are All Right and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to Bitch Flicks.

Guest Writer Wednesday: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Rebel with a Cause: A Feminist Heroine Emerges in film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

This is a cross post from Opinioness of the World.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, you’ve undoubtedly heard about the international phenomenon that is Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. As I often lament the lack of strong female characters in books and film, I was intrigued to descend into the world where one of the most exciting and controversial heroines resides. I’ve been voraciously reading the books in the Millennium Trilogy (I’m currently reading the 2nd). Having thoroughly enjoyed the book, I was curious how the film adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, directed by Swedish filmmaker Niels Arden Oplev, would measure up.

The story revolves around the disappearance of Harriet Vanger, the niece of a wealthy business tycoon, who vanished without a trace 40 years earlier. Harriet’s uncle has been tortured by her absence all these years. Journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who’s been convicted of libel, and Lisbeth Salander, an introverted punk who’s a brilliant researcher and hacker, seek to solve the baffling mystery. The book is a riveting twisting thriller with numerous suspects.

Blomkvist is an interesting character. A charming and passionate journalist championing for the truth, he vacillates between cynicism and naïveté. Dejected after his conviction, he yearns to clear his name. He also frequently bed hops yet has enormous respect for women, often befriending them. While acclaimed Swedish actor Michael Nyqvist gives a valiant effort, he does not imbue the character with enough charisma.

But the sole reason to go see the movie (and read the book too) is for Lisbeth Salander. Noomi Rapace, who won a Guldbagge Award (the Swedish Oscars) for her portrayal, plays her perfectly. She stepped into the role by training for 7 months through Thai boxing and kickboxing (in the books Lisbeth boxes too) as well as piercing her eyebrow and nose, emulating Lisbeth’s punk look. A nuanced performance, Rapace plays the tattooed warrior with the right blend of sullen introvert, keen intellect and fierce survivor instincts. Salander is a ferocious feminist, crusading for women’s empowerment. Facing a tortured and troubled past, Salander is resourceful and resilient, avenging injustices following her own moral compass. An adept actor, Rapace conveys emotions through her eyes, never needing to utter a word. Yet she can also invoke Salander’s visceral rage when warranted.

 

While not quite living up to the book, the film is fantastic. It’s a very stripped down, gritty portrayal, particularly when compared to slick stylized American movies (which is I’m sure how it will be produced in the American re-make). Seeing all of the Swedish locales described in the book on-screen plunged me even further into the story. While the film stays fairly faithful to the book regarding the plot and the protagonists Blomkvist and Salander, there are notable differences between the book and film. As the movie condenses the book (even as it clocks in at 2 hours and 32 minutes), it lacks the same suspense. However Oplev does a superior job streamlining the story’s flow and evoking the tense mood.
But there are a few missteps. The score is distracting at times (the 80s called and they want their synthesizer back) and the end following the murder mystery portion, feels rushed and thrown together. The biggest complaint from viewers has been that the film lacks character development. Female characters, such as Erika Berger, Millennium’s editor and Blomkvist’s best friend/lover, and Cecilia Vanger, a suspect in Harriet’s disappearance, have their roles drastically reduced; interesting for a story that focuses so prominently on women. Yet Oplev diminishes other characters in order to put the two sleuths front and center.

Also, if you’re like me and reading each book before you see the film and you haven’t read the second book yet, be prepared for spoilers as there are scenes NOT in the first book that are taken from the second book and integrated into the film, such as Lisbeth’s flashbacks and the topic of her conversation with her mother.

 

In the book, Larsson makes social commentaries on fiscal corporate corruption, ethics in journalism, and the role of upbringing on criminal behavior. Larsson also provides an interesting commentary on gender roles with his two protagonists. Despite Blomkvist’s social nature and Salander’s private behavior, they both stubbornly follow their own moral code. Both also possess overt sexualities. Yet society views Blomkvist as socially acceptable and perceives Salander as an outcast. These themes are absent from the movie adaptation.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has received an exorbitant amount of attention for Larsson’s controversial central theme of violence against women. It’s true that both the book and film portray graphic violence. The movie does not shy away from the uncomfortable subject matter. In the book, women fall prey to being assaulted, murdered, and violently raped. A pivotal rape scene disturbs and haunts the viewer. But sexual assault is a reality women face, albeit an ugly truth that we as a society may not want to see. Yet Larsson in the book and Oplev in the film never made me feel as if women were victimized. On the contrary, women, particularly in the form of Salander, are powerful survivors. She fights back, not merely accepting her circumstances.

As Melissa Silverstein of Women & Hollywood wrote in Forbes,

As my friend playwright Theresa Rebeck says, “The world looks at women who fight back as crazy.” We constantly see movies, TV shows and plays where men commit violence against women. That’s our norm. Here we have a woman who is saying no more and exacts revenge. Larsson is very clearly saying what we all know and believe. Lisbeth is not crazy. She is a feminist hero of our time.

Violence against women is a pervasive issue. According to the anti-sexual assault organization RAINN, “every 2 minutes in the U.S., someone is sexually assaulted; nearly half of these victims are under the age of 18, and 80 percent are under 30.” And in Sweden, the problem is just as pervasive. Larsson states that “46 percent of the women in Sweden have been subjected to violence by a man.” We must not continue to brush these crimes aside. The original Swedish title of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (both the book and the film) is Män Som Hatar Kvinnor, which translates to “Men Who Hate Women.” I’m glad that Larsson devoted his books to shedding light on misogyny in society.

A provocative and haunting film, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is worthy of watching for Rapace’s subtle yet powerful performance. It’s rare for an audience to see a strong, self-sufficient woman on-screen. It’s even more unusual for a movie to address the stigma of sexual assault as well as the complexity of gender roles. Watch the movie and read the book. Get acquainted with Lisbeth Salander; she may be the most exhilarating, unconventional and surprising character you will ever encounter.





Megan Kearns is a blogger, freelance writer and activist. A feminist vegan, Megan blogs at The Opinioness of the World. She earned her B.A. in Anthropology and Sociology and a Graduate Certificate in Women and Politics and Public Policy. She lives in Boston. She previously contributed a review of The Kids Are All Right to Bitch Flicks.
 


Guest Writer Wednesday: Let This Feminist Vampire In

Cross-posted at Ms. Magazine
Warning: spoilers
Vampires have become so common in contemporary texts that they have lost some of their bite. With most of them falling into the emo, brooding, love-struck and angst-ridden variety (Edward of Twilight, Damon of The Vampire Diaries and Bill of True Blood), the female vampire featured in Let Me In (the U.S. remake of the Swedish film Let the Right One In) presents a refreshing change. Abby (Chloe Moretz), the 12-year-old lonely-yet-resilient vampire in a world populated by male violence, is a feminist vampire worth rooting for.
While the original film was also excellent, it lacked some of the more overt gendered analysis of the U.S. version. Though this may be due to discrepancies in translation (I saw the film both in Swedish with English subtitles and dubbed in English), the bullying theme running throughout the narrative was framed very differently in the Swedish version. In it, the young male protagonist, Oskar, was repeatedly told to “squeal like a pig” by his tormentors. In contrast, the male protagonist in the U.S. version, now named Owen (played by Kodi Smit-McPhee), is attacked by bullies with taunts such as  “Hey, little girl” and “Are you a little girl?”
Owen’s burgeoning friendship with the young vampire Abby (named Eli in the original) furthers this gendered meme when she advises him “You have to hit back … hit them back harder than you dare.” When she promises to help him, he says “But you’re a girl,” exhibiting the belief the bullies have instilled in him that girls are scared and weak. Even though an earlier scene showed Owen smiling as he views a girl punching the lead bully in the arm, this approval of female resistance has not erased the anti-girl taunts the bullies have polluted his brain with.
With an existence shrouded by his parents’ ugly divorce, the film suggests Owen has turned to voyeurism as an escape from his prison-like existence at both home and school. As Owen watches the world from his bedroom telescope and from behind his wide-eyed gaze, we see the daily injustices humans enact upon one another: bedroom fights, schoolyard torture, sibling abuse, interpersonal violence. Much of this violence is linked to codes of masculinity, including the muscling-up men do to create bodies capable of violence.
In comparison, vampire Abby’s thirst for blood becomes less violent and a lesser evil: Killing is something she resorts to in order to survive, in contrast to it being a sport (as with the bullies) or a means to secure and keep a mate (as with her “father” figure). The everyday violence in the film is more horrific and has more lasting effects than Abby’s monstrous thirst.
Unfortunately, the opportunity to further the suggestion that “average humans” are plenty monstrous is rendered less horrific in the American version by removing the references/suggestions of pedophilia in the original novel and film. Nevertheless, the remake provocatively suggests that our cultural proclivity to focus on exceptionally violent crimes of the “stranger danger” variety allows enduring, daily acts of violence to go comparatively unnoticed. Owen has adopted this view as well–he never mentions evil until he learns Abby is a vampire, failing to see that what the bullies do to him is actually more evil.
Though the film drips with gendered representations (although ones not as graphic, nor as queer as the original novel, as discussed here), reviews such as those in The New York Times and at MovieFone offer no gender analysis–an omission that seems particularly odd given the misogynistic bullying the film depicts as well as its focus on a girl vampire, a rarity in our male-dominated vampire tales of late.
To find such analysis, one most go back to reviews of the original film, including here at Feminist Review. Noting the tendency for a “queer sensibility about female vampires in film, whether explicit or subtextual,” Loren Krywanczyk argues the “gender non-normativity” of the two young protagonists presents us with a queering of gender as well as of childhood sexuality. Such queer readings are even more apt if Abby/Eli’s centuries-earlier castration (cut in the American film and only alluded to in the Swedish version) is taken into account.
While there has been much rallying against the necessity of remaking the film to appease Americans subtitle-avoidance (as here), I feel this new version offers yet another useful spin on a very complex tale–one a bit less queer but also one that  links the cultural disdain for femininity to the ubiquity of horrific daily acts of violence. If only our mainstream news media would similarly let that argument in.
Natalie Wilson, PhD is a literature and women’s studies scholar, blogger, and author. She teaches at Cal State San Marcos and specializes in the areas of gender studies, feminism, feminist theory, girl studies, militarism, body studies, boy culture and masculinity, contemporary literature, and popular culture. She is author of the blogs Professor, what if…? and Seduced by Twilight. She is a proud feminist mom of two feminist kids (one daughter, one son) and is an admitted pop-culture junkie. She previously contributed posts to Bitch Flicks about The United States of Tara, Nurse Jackie, and Lost.

Movie Preview: Bluebeard

Written and directed by Catherine Breillat, Bluebeard (Barbe Bleue) likely explores the same themes that Angela Carter highlighted in her retelling, “The Bloody Chamber.” Read the original fairy tale by Charles Perrault here and Angela Carter’s version here.

Variety‘s Leslie Felperin:

Having built a career on provocative, sexually explicit yet cerebral fare (“Romance,” “Sex Is Comedy”), Catherine Breillat shocked auds with her 2007 period piece, “The Last Mistress,” because it was not all that shocking. Now the Gallic helmer’s latest, “Bluebeard,” features considerable blood but no sex. This offbeat but compelling take on the tale, arguably the first serial-killer yarn, emphasizes sisterly bonds but still gets to the original story’s heart of mysterious darkness with impressive results. 

The New York Times‘ Manhola Dargis:

In “Bluebeard,” a sly rethink of the freakily morbid fairy tale, the filmmaker Catherine Breillat makes the case that once-upon-a-time stories never end. Divided into two parallel narratives — one focuses on Bluebeard and his dangerously curious wife, while the other involves two little girls in the modern era revisiting the tale — the movie is at once direct, complex and peculiar. It isn’t at all surprising that Ms. Breillat, a singular French filmmaker with strong, often unorthodox views on women and men and sex and power, would have been interested in a troubling tale about the perils of disobedient wives. Ms. Breillat never behaves.

You can watch the trailer here.

Movie Review: Persepolis


Persepolis. (2007) Written and directed by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud.

I rented Persepolis before the recent Iranian election, and have been thinking ever since about the film.

Persepolis is adapted from the autobiographical graphic novels written by Marjane Satrapi (which I haven’t read), and represents the first graphic-novel-as-film. Other graphic novels have been made into films, but none (to my knowledge) have remained as true to form as this. Visually, the film is lovely, stark, and at times deeply disturbing.

In Persepolis, we meet Marjane, a young girl living in Iran at the time of the Islamic revolution of 1979. The society changed drastically under Islamic law, as evidenced by Marjane’s teacher’s evolving lessons. After the revolution, in 1982, she tells the young girls, who are now required by law to cover their heads, “The veil stands for freedom. A decent woman shelters herself from men’s eyes. A woman who shows herself will burn in hell.” In typical fashion, the students escape her ideological droning through imported pop culture: the music of ABBA, The Bee Gees, Michael Jackson, and Iron Maiden.

While the film is a personal story, it does offer a concise history of modern Iran, including the U.S. involvement in the rise of Islamic law and in the Iran-Iraq war. This time in Iranian history is especially important right now, with the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the ensuing protests. One scene in particular depicts a group of people protesting when a young man is shot, bleeds to death, and is hoisted over his fellow protesters’ shoulders–eerily reminiscent of what happened with Neda Agha Soltan, whose public murder has rallied the Iranian protesters and people all over the world.

The history of Iran, while it determines the course of Marjane’s life, really is a backdrop—especially in the second half of the movie. In other words, the film is more about the experience of one woman than a documentary-style account of Iranian history. Once Marjane escapes the society she grew up in, her problems become much more ordinary for a Western audience, more commonplace. She vacillates between different crowds of people. She falls in love and has her heart broken. She feels angst and confusion over who she is and what she wants. She goes home to Iran for a time and, like so many others, ultimately finds she cannot return home.

As evident in the film, Satrapi grew up in a wealthy, educated, progressive Iranian family. They sent her to Vienna as a teenager so she didn’t have to spend her adolescence in such a repressive society, and because they feared what might happen to such an outspoken young woman there. While acknowledging her privilege, not many women in circumstances other than these would be able to accomplish what she has. Satrapi isn’t afraid to show missteps she makes in growing up, either. Young Marjane learns that her femininity, even when repressed by law, offers great power—and shows how she misuses that power. Missing her mother’s lesson at the grocery store about female solidarity, she blames other women for her troubles (“Ma’am, my mother is dead. My stepmother’s so cruel. If I’m late, she’ll kill me. She’ll burn me with an iron. She’ll make my dad put me in an orphanage.”), and falsely accuses a man of looking at her in public to avoid the law coming down on her.

Persepolis is, in every definition of the term, a feminist film. There are strong, interesting female characters who sometimes make mistakes. The women, like in real life, are engaged in politics and struggle with expectations set for them and that they set for themselves. They have relationships with various people, but their lives are not defined by one romantic relationship, even though sometimes it can feel that way.

As much as I like this movie, I can’t help but write this review through the lens of an interview Satrapi gave in 2004, in which she claimed to not be a feminist and displayed ignorance of the basic concept of feminism. I simply don’t believe gender inequality can be dissolved through basic humanism—especially in oppressive patriarchal societies like Iran. I wonder if feminism represents too radical a position to non-Westerners, and if her statements were more strategy than sincerity. Making feminism an enemy or perpetuating the post-feminist rhetoric isn’t going to help anyone. That said, this is a very good movie and I highly recommend it.

The official trailer:

A couple of good articles about women’s role in the recent Iranian protests:

The Nation: Icons of the New Iran by Barbara Crossette

Feminist Peace Network: Memo to ABC: Lipstick Revolution FAIL

Post your own links–and thoughts about Persepolis–in the comments.

Preview: The Stoning of Soraya M.

The Stoning of Soraya M. (2008). Directed by Cyrus Nowrasteh. Screenplay by Betsy Giffen Nowrasteh & Cyrus Nowrasteh (based on the book by Freidoune Sahebjam). Starring Mozhan Marno, Shohreh Aghdashloo, and James Caviezel.

Read The Huffington Post’s laudatory review and Jezebel’s excellent coverage of this timely film, which debuted in the U.S. this past weekend.

Watch the trailer: