French Films – Bitch Flicks

Touching Friendship in ‘Marie’s Story’

‘Marie’s Story’ dramatizes the real-life biography of Marie Heurtin, a deafblind girl who was taken in by a convent in the late nineteenth century. It’s an intimate portrayal of an unusual relationship between two young women.

Written by Max Thornton.

The relationship between Christianity and disability is complex and many-sided, encompassing stigma and pity, aid and condescension, systematic exclusion and the creation of refuge spaces – and it’s not just an academic concern for scholars of religion. Societies that took shape under the influence of western Christianity still reflect and perpetuate Christian philosophical and ethical ideas, both in cultural attitudes and in policy and law. Disability is no exception. Levitical purity codes, New Testament healing narratives, and Augustinian theology of original sin all contribute to the mishmash of ableism that pervades twenty-first century US culture.

Disability scholars and cultural critics are doing some terrific work to examine and dismantle ableism. Some of my favorites include Andrew Pulrang at Disability Thinking (and his podcast, Disability.TV), the Disability Visibility Project, and the BBC’s Ouch podcast. You don’t have to spend long reading disability criticism to learn that one of the most hated forms of disability representation in popular culture is inspiration porn. The late, wonderful, deeply mourned Stella Young put it like this:

marie's-story-inspiration-porn — Ugggghhhhh

“[In inspiration porn] we’re objectifying disabled people for the benefit of nondisabled people. The purpose of these images is to inspire you, to motivate you, so that we can look at them and think, ‘Well, however bad my life is, it could be worse. I could be that person.’ But what if you are that person?”

Hollywood in particular loves inspiration porn, to that point that watching a movie about a disabled person is a source of dread for anyone who cares about disability studies. Will the disabled person be a precious angel, too good for this sinful earth? Will they exist primarily to teach the non-disabled protagonist a lesson? Will they be a bitter cripple who gradually triumphs over this dreadful tragedy? Will I throw up in my mouth?

I approached Marie’s Story with less trepidation than usual, though, both because it’s a small French film rather than slushy Oscar-bait, and because the titular Marie is played by a Deaf actress, the talented young Ariana Rivoire. For the most part, thankfully, my confidence was well-placed.

Marie’s Story dramatizes the real-life biography of Marie Heurtin, a deafblind girl who was taken in by a convent in the late nineteenth century. The convent educated deaf children, but felt ill-equipped to teach a deafblind child who had no communication skills – until one very determined nun, Sister Marguerite, insisted on giving Marie a chance.

So far, so Miracle Worker, and in the early stages the film certainly hits a lot of beats familiar from popular narratives of Helen Keller’s life: the terrible fights with the strong-willed mentor, the transformation from wildling to neatly-coiffed well-mannered young woman, the come-to-Jesus moment of language comprehension. What’s distinctive about Marie’s Story is its convent setting and the normalization of the deaf environment (how many movies have you seen that pass the Bechdel Test in sign language as well as spoken words?).

Wisely, given popular Christianity’s reprehensible enthusiasm for the doubly nauseating Inspiration Porn With Added Jesus, Marie’s Story treads lightly around the religion aspect. No miracle healings or trite theodicies here – the most explicitly theological sequence in the film is a conversation around mortality, when Marie asks in frustration: “Who is God? Where is he? I can’t touch him.” The film as a whole functions as a panentheistic affirmation that she absolutely can touch God: despite Christianity’s emphasis on sight and sound as the primary senses for divine encounter, Marie’s alternative embodiment is the locus for divine encounter through touch and scent. From the opening sequence, in which Sister Marguerite climbs a tree and, looking for all the world like The Creation of Adam, extends a hand to a frightened Marie, this film stresses the power of bodily touch.

The film doesn’t entirely escape certain inspiration porn pitfalls, primarily in voiceovers of Sister Marguerite’s diary entries where she gushes about how much she’s learned from Marie and describes Marie’s transformation in weird racialized and colonial terms of “savagery” and “imprisonment.” However, Marguerite’s own chronic illness keeps the relationship from being too one-sided. It’s in the final third that the film really shines, as Marie develops agency and character of her own, even tending to Marguerite just as the nun had previously cared for her. In perhaps the most moving sequence, Marie teaches her parents how to greet her in sign language, with Marguerite translating and facilitating but never speaking for or over Marie.

Ultimately, this is not a film about Saint Sister Marguerite and her noble civilizing mission to help a poor deafblind girl. Instead, it’s an intimate portrayal of an unusual relationship between two young women (watch for a scene where they lie in a meadow together like Bella and Edward), a quietly beautiful story of faith and female friendship.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and tweets at @RainicornMax. He studies theology, disability, and gender, and gets really excited when they all come together.

‘Summer’: Portrait of a Recognizable Human

When the family sits down to eat, a platter full of pork chops is placed in the center of the table just as Delphine announces she is a vegetarian. As the others interrogate her (a tedious line of questions familiar to many vegetarians) and one of the men even offers her a plate full of rose petals to feast on, she tries to walk the tightrope many women do–in all sorts of conversations–of not wanting to be seen as a “bother,” but still trying to stick up for her own beliefs.

Written by Ren Jender as part of our theme week on Unlikable Women.

“Difficult” women in movies, as in life, are often more a matter of nomenclature than behavior. A male lead in a film can show up drunk at his wife’s workplace, humiliate her and punch her boss, and the director/writer will posit that he had his reasons. But a woman character who doesn’t want to fuck the male lead, or even indulge his crush on her, we are supposed to read as “difficult.” Women in film are so often ornamental plot devices that when one acts in a way that distinguishes her, as Rebecca West said in her famous quote about feminism, from a doormat, we’re a little shocked. Looking to differentiate her from the ever-patient, doe-eyed, “wise” horde of “supportive” girlfriends, wives and mothers we’re used to seeing onscreen we use “difficult” or “unlikable” when what we mean is “recognizably human.”

Just because I can discern this pattern doesn’t mean I’m immune to it. When I signed up to post about “unlikable women” I thought of Eric Rohmer’s 1986 film Summer (also known as The Green Ray) and its main character Delphine (played by Marie Rivière, who with Rohmer, co-wrote the great script), a single 30-ish woman who can’t seem to find any peace of mind in the month-long summer vacation that is part of French life. But as I rewatched the film (a favorite that I last saw four and a half years ago) I realized, during my previous viewings, I was wrong to think of Delphine as a hopeless pain in the ass who gets in her own way. Although she complains about things that don’t bother others (at one point she says about a sunny outdoor meeting spot that the light there “hurts my eyes”) and she shuts down her friend Manuella’s (María Luisa García) suggestion to stay with Manuella’s grandmother in Spain, we can see the two have a playful relationship. As they talk about meeting men, Manuella pats the calves of the nude statue next to them and says, “This one should be right up your alley. He’s very handsome.”

When Delphine lets her guard down, as with her own family (at least some of whom are, in real life, related to Rivière–part of the dialogue in this and other group scenes seems to be mixing nonfiction into the narrative), especially the older members and children, we see she is solicitous and, as she later defensively describes herself “sweet.” But in another scene when her “friend” (Rohmer regular Béatrice Romand) badgers her about being single and lonely–and blames her reluctance to go on vacation alone, adding “I tell you, that’s how you meet people”–Delphine dissolves into tears. She laments to the one friend who comes to comfort her that she doesn’t want to go on vacation by herself or go camping in cold, rainy Ireland with her family. She, reasonably, wants a warm, seaside vacation and a real bed to sleep in. This friend then invites Delphine to her own family’s place in Cherbourg.

Although it’s by the sea, Cherbourg (the setting of the classic Jacques Demy musical starring a very young Catherine Deneuve) isn’t a traditional vacation spot. It’s a military port (the two women meet a man who is a sailor, in town for just one night) with weather that the characters’ sweaters tell us is chilly, even in July. The worst part is that Delphine’s blonde friend is happily ensconced in a couple, as are all the other adults in the household, so Delphine goes from being the third wheel to being the fifth or the seventh. She does find some refuge when she spends time with the children there, but even then one older girl asks her if she has a boyfriend and, as she did earlier, Delphine pretends she and her ex are still together.

When her friend and boyfriend are leaving to return to Paris, Delphine, whom we have seen crying alone on outdoor, solitary walks, begs to go back with them. She then tries a mountain getaway (where at least the guy who gives her the cabin keys seems happy to see her) but doesn’t even last a whole day there. Back in Paris, by chance she runs into a friend at a café who, when she announces she got married, Delphine asks, “Again?”

The friend says, “This time it’s serious,” and tells Delphine she now has a 17-month-old son, but also that hers is no happily-ever-after scenario (the implied conclusion whenever anyone talks about Delphine meeting someone). She offers Delphine her brother-in-law’s apartment in Biarritz, a popular resort, which she grabs.

Finally Delphine is in the vacation spot she wants, but the apartment is cramped and outside space is tight, both on the beach and in the water. Although Delphine, with her lanky body, looks like she could have come from a vacation catalog as she trots through the water in a tiny, iridescent bikini (briefly taking off the more modest, dark, one-piece she usually wears over it) she’s still lonely, seeing couples everywhere as she explores alone, at one point eavesdropping on the conversation a group of old friends on an outdoor bench have about the book The Green Ray.

One day on the beach she meets blonde, chatty topless Lena (Carita) from Sweden, the polar opposite of Delphine. Lena loves to go on vacation on her own and tells Delphine she is better off without a fiancé since hers is always jealous when she looks at other men. Lena spends a lot of time pointing out good-looking guys to Delphine and arranges for a double date. Delphine flees the scene even though the man she’s fixed up with seems reasonably attractive and nice as he confesses his own loneliness (though like more than one of the French “straight” guys in this film, his manner and outfit, to US eyes, seem like those of a gay man).

At the train station Delphine meets a man (Vincent Gauthier), a cabinet-maker, also on vacation, and she impulsively changes her route for him. As with the sister with all the suitors in The Makioka Sisters we immediately see why Delphine goes with this guy and has rejected all the others. As they sit in a café she explains to him what, we realize as she speaks, we’ve seen throughout the film, that she can’t play the games with men that Lena plays (she told the double-date guys she was from Spain) or the games she tells us she played back in Paris, having sex with men then the next day going back to being strangers. She and her date watch the sunset, and once again she cries, hoping against hope that she will finally see the sign that she’s found the person, in her own time, in her own way, who is right for her–not the ones others think that she should pursue. The final shot reassures us that after the hoops we make ourselves and others and even the universe jump through as we try to find what we need, we might, in spite of ourselves, attain it.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1aar4IDUvU” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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

Catherine Breillat’s Transfigurative Female Gaze

The grotesque is enmeshed with sexual pleasure and violent death–all images and storylines that patriarchal cultures have been weaving together for centuries. A woman’s sexual desire and her actions stemming from those desires are often presented as horrifying and punishable: “unwatchable.” Much of what Breillat shows supports the reality that female sexual desire is real, and the societies in which we must function are at best, uncomfortable with that desire, and at worst, violently hostile.

Written by Leigh Kolb as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.

“… a person who can find the transfiguration of sex in her life is no longer a person who can be directed.”

– Catherine Breillat

French filmmaker Catherine Breillat has spent her career exploring female sexuality. She hasn’t done so in a comfortable, easy way. When The Woman says to The Man, “Watch me where I’m unwatchable” in Anatomy of Hell, this could very well be Breillat’s message to her audiences as she presents female desire in harsh, jarring narratives that completely subvert the male gaze.

Normally, if we talk about subverting the male gaze and focusing on the female gaze in film, it’s cause for celebration. Finally! We scream. We’re coming!

Breillat’s female gaze is different, though. It pushes us to places of complete discomfort and sometimes disgust, and forces and challenges us to think about the deeply twisted cultural expectations surrounding women and sex.

Sometimes a shock is what it takes to bring us to places of transfiguration. We can’t smoothly transition to the female gaze after centuries of being surrounded and objectified by the male gaze. Breillat delivers shock after shock that serve to transfigure how we see ourselves and our culture. This isn’t comfortable, but it’s powerful.

Breillat’s first film, based off her novel, Le Soupirail, was A Real Young Girl (Une vraie jeune fille). Produced in 1976, it was quickly banned and wasn’t released in France until 1999. The film centers around 14-year-old Alice, who is discovering and attempting to navigate her sexual awakening. A Real Young Girl is avant-garde puberty.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4FXxS9VevE”]

There are moments in the film that are confusing and grotesque (most notably one of her fantasies that involves barbed wire and a ripped-up earthworm). While I found some of these scenes disturbing, I like being disturbed. The worm scene horrified me at first, but then I realized that when I was in high school, the hit teen comedy involved a dude literally fucking a pie. Teenage sexuality is weird and when we are faced with a teen girl’s sexuality–something we are not used to seeing (unless she is a sexual object)–in all of its confusion and vacillation between intense desire and disgust, we are uncomfortable. Breillat wants us to be uncomfortable; she wants to push us to the edge to that visceral experience that will challenge how we see both female sexuality and film depictions of female sexuality.

Fat_Girl_poster — *Fat Girl* (*À ma sœur!*)

Fat Girl (À ma sœur!), released in 2001, follows two sisters–Elena, 15, and Anaïs, 12–as they vacation with their parents. Elena is conventionally beautiful, and while she likes boys and has experimented sexually, she wants to remain a virgin until she’s with someone who “loves” her. She quickly develops a relationship with a young man who is frustrated with her desire to not have sex. He pressures her into anal sex (which hurts her), tries to force her to have oral sex, and finally convinces her he loves her and she has sex with him. In all of these instances, Anaïs is in the room–feigning sleep, asking them to stop, or, when they finally have sex, crying.

Anaïs’s views on sex are very different than Elena’s. She is starting to feel sexual–she’s not a teenager yet, but she’s not a child. Her desires range from banana splits to having sex just to get it over with. She has sexual desires, and her responses to Elena’s sexual experiences show both naiveté and jealousy. Their ages, their exterior looks, their sexual experiences (or lack thereof) all inform Breillat’s treatment of the sisters’ relationship with one another, with their own burgeoning sexuality, and with a culture that insists on sexualizing Elena and ignoring Anaïs. Their desires–Elena as internalized (and then disappointed) object, Anaïs as frustrated subject–are common categories for adolescent girls to fall into.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHRJRbM2EAg”]

Fat Girl (read Breillat’s commentary on the title here) is disturbing in its depictions of some of Elena and Anaïs’s experiences. However, the end of the film is shocking and violent. After Elena and her mother are brutally killed at a rest stop, the murderer rapes Anaïs in the woods. The next morning, she tells the police she wasn’t raped, and she looks at the camera, in an ending that clearly reflects The 400 Blows. Like the Truffaut classic, we are saddened and disturbed at the life trajectory of our young protagonists, and have no idea where their lives will go from here. We just have a frozen young face staring at us, implicating us in their fate.

Anaïs, at the end, seems to embrace her rape (as her meaningless loss of virginity that she wanted) and deny its violence. This is made even more traumatic since her rapist murdered her mother and sister (her sister who had just become sexually active, and her mother who wanted to punish her for it).

The message here is that girls cannot win. A patriarchal culture–full of boys who think they’re entitled to sex and men who violently rape and kill women–cares little for female desire and agency. This world is a dangerous place for girls. This world treats pretty girls like objects, and unpretty girls like nothing. Their desires are complicated and real, but are eclipsed by toxic masculinity.

Released in 2004, Anatomy of Hell (Anatomie De L’Enfer) is a film that pulls together pornography, misogyny, and female sexuality in a way that shocks and disgusts (male reviewers in particular wrote scathing, condescending reviews of the film). The Woman visits a gay bar and attempts suicide in the bathroom–she is tired of being a woman and being hated by men, and surmises that gay men hate women the most. The Man, however, saves her and she offers to pay him to stay in her home for four days to “watch her where she is unwatchable.” What follows is, for some viewers, unwatchable.

The Woman is naked for most of the film (a body double is used for vaginal shots), and The Man is played by an Italian porn star. His homosexuality serves to completely upend the typical male gaze. He’s disgusted by much of what he’s seeing and experiencing, and the understanding that this primal, visceral, shocking female desire is at the focus of the film (and has absolutely nothing to do with male desire) reflects a culture that typically focuses only on the male gaze and male pleasure. In this culture, female sexuality isn’t a consideration.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbFSZiT2-a4″]

When The Man drinks a glass of water with a used-tampon teabag, certainly the audience is meant to feel disgust. Perhaps some audience members actually gagged at the sight. How many scenes, however, in porn (explicitly) or mainstream film (suggested), feature women swallowing male excretions? Do we blink? Or is it just part of what we expect it means to be a heterosexual woman?

Jamie Russell astutely observes at the BBC, “For all the shocks, though, this is a stoically serious movie: it’s anti-porn, a transgressive sex movie that’s not against pornography but against the (male-dominated) objectification of women’s bodies.”

Breillat’s complete oeuvre (which certainly demands our attention beyond these three films) delivers continually shocking treatment of female sexuality presented though the female gaze. She wants us to be uncomfortable and to be constantly questioning both representations of female desire and our responses to those representations, and how all of it is shaped by a religious, patriarchal culture.

In an interview with The Guardian, Breillat articulated that her female gaze should directly threaten the male gaze, and that men should examine their own sexuality in the face of female desire:

“It’s a joke – if men can’t desire liberated women, then tough. Does it mean they can only desire a slave? Men need to question the roots of their own desire. Why is it that historically men have this need to deny women to be able to desire them?”

The reporter points out that Breillat had said “that censorship was a male pre-occupation, and that the X certificate was linked to the X chromosome,” and Breillat goes on to discuss the religious and patriarchal reasons to censor female desire, which is directly connected to keeping power away from women.

Breillat’s 1999 Romance was originally given an X rating (or banned in some countries). At Senses of Cinema, Brian Price notes that “Breillat’s statement was echoed in the French poster for the film, which features a naked woman with her hand between her legs. A large red X is printed across the image, thus revealing the source of the trouble: a woman in touch with her own sense of sexual pleasure.”

And that’s always the problem, isn’t it? Breillat’s work pushes boundaries and forces us to live in the intense intimacy and discomfort of a female gaze that we are unused to due to social oppression of women and women’s sexuality (at the hands of patriarchal religious and government systems). The literal and figurative red X over Breillat’s work–and female sexuality–needs to be stripped away to reveal what’s underneath–which isn’t always pretty.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpH-V6kkOwI”]

___________________________

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

“Love,” Death, and Penises in ‘Stranger By The Lake’

“Mind if I get naked,” the main character of ‘Stranger By The Lake’ asks a fat, older shirtless man in the middle of a conversation. The two characters are at a nude men’s beach, so the question isn’t unexpected, but in a film which isn’t porn (and this film is not porn), male actors are rarely asked to be nude, and when they are, we most often see their backsides only. In non-porn films actresses are usually the ones with their clothes off, a situation that echoes the famous poster from the Guerrilla Girls which asks if women have to be naked to get into the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Women are still a tiny minority of film directors but naked women in films are plentiful, the stills forever appearing on websites where commenters can criticize every aspect, no matter how trivial, of the actresses’ bodies and debate whether the women are “hot or not.”

“Mind if I get naked,” the main character of Stranger By The Lake asks a fat, older shirtless man in the middle of a conversation. The two characters are at a nude men’s beach, so the question isn’t unexpected, but in a film which isn’t porn (and this film is not porn), male actors are rarely asked to be nude, and when they are, we most often see their backsides only. In non-porn films actresses are usually the ones with their clothes off, a situation that echoes the famous poster from the Guerrilla Girls which asks if women have to be naked to get into the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Women are still a tiny minority of film directors but naked women in films are plentiful, the stills forever appearing on websites where commenters can criticize every aspect, no matter how trivial, of the actresses’ bodies and debate whether the women are “hot or not.”

Stranger By The Lake (directed by Alain Guiraudie) won accolades (Best Director and The Queer Palm Award) alongside Blue Is The Warmest Color at Cannes, but is only now being released in the US, in what is generally considered to be the worst month of the year for a film to open. Movie distributors seem not to realize that an explicit film about male cruising (and this film has more penises in it than most porn films do), especially one as well-reviewed as Stranger, has the potential to attract an audience beyond just gay men: many women, straight and queer, are curious about the type of anonymous, repercussion-free sex shown in the film–because it’s not available to us (in spite of one man in the film who insists women sometimes come to the cruising site). We wonder about the option of sex being just another stop on the way home, after getting milk and bread at the supermarket and picking up the dry cleaning.

This phenomenon of women being interested in sexual encounters between men is also nothing new: yaoi comics in Japan depict often explicit relationships between men and its audience, as well as its writers, have always been mainly women. In other countries, explicit slash fan fiction is almost exclusively written by women, including queer women, and most of the sex is between men. Although some claim this focus on male sexuality is a form of misogyny, the rationale might be more complex.

Women in porn and other sexually explicit video and film are regularly degraded both on camera and off (see the controversy around Blue Is The Warmest Color). In a culture that seems to place so little value on a woman’s sexual pleasure and autonomy (if we take the films of our culture to be its mirror) we shouldn’t be surprised that women of all sexual orientations would look to gay men’s porn and sexually explicit material about men to see onscreen sexual interplay that doesn’t degrade women. The two films I can think of in which women are allowed to have explicit sex (which coincidentally seems to not be simulated) with men and are not somehow punished or denigrated for it were directed by gay men: the late Patrice Chereau’s Intimacy (in which award-winning actress Kerry Fox takes a penis into her mouth on camera) and John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus, in which Sook-Yin Lee’s character sexually experiments: one scene has her straddling the penis of a reluctant husband.

Straight men are the only audience who might be squeamish about seeing a film which centers around anonymous sex between men, features copious amounts of full-frontal male nudity and even has a couple of scenes in which the sex is obviously unsimulated (these scenes are cut into the action and so do not involve the actors we see). But marketers are pretending all the rest of us would react to this film like a thirteen-year-old boy who wishes to convince the world he’s straight: “Eww, penises.”

The script (written by director Guiraudie) is pared down to its essentials. The action takes place completely on a men’s nude beach by a lake and the cruising spot in the woods right next to it. We don’t find out the name of the main character, Franck (Pierre de Ladonchamps) until he introduces himself to the man who fascinates him, Christophe Paou’s Michel (as opposed to the fat man we never see naked but whom Franck enjoys talking to: Henri). Franck and Michel exchange names after the first time they have sex, just one day after Franck has witnessed Michel intentionally drown a fellow beachgoer.

I was fortunate to see a screening with the director present. In the question and answer period after the screening, I asked why the sex scenes, even though they contained some of the same material as porn, didn’t remind me of porn. The director speculated that we are not used to seeing scenes with “waggling organs” (he spoke in French but had someone translating by his side) that move the story along–as the sex scenes in this film do. He also mentioned that because the explicit scenes were cut into the other action, the scenes didn’t need to drag and play out over real time the way they do in porn clips.

The director said that Franck “falls in love” with Michel before the murder. We can construe the whole film as a metaphor for romantic love itself, much like in Michael Winterbottom’s first film Butterfly Kiss in which timid, sensitive Miriam (nickname: Me) runs away with murderous Eunice (nickname: Eu) and Me does her best to convince Eu that the trail of bodies (like so much we learn about our romantic partners) Eu leaves in her wake doesn’t bother her.

“Falling in love” isn’t something we expect to happen in a cruising spot, but the director used the phrase repeatedly, reminding me of author Edmund White‘s description of 70s cruising and anonymous sex as something that involved the heart, not just the genitals. The men at the beach do have a camaraderie together. Franck hugs and kisses a regular beachgoer with grey hair (played by the director) and sometimes makes plans to meet with him at the club–though he doesn’t go into the woods with him. Franck and Henri have dinner together (offscreen) more than once. The bond among the men extends even to the ever-present masturbating voyeur, to whom one man shouts, “We’re talking now. We’ll be fucking later. Come back then.” But the murder victim’s car is conspicuous in the tiny parking area. His towel remains laid out, empty, on the small beach like a grave, and no one remarks about it. The camaraderie goes only so far.

Franck eschews condoms in his encounters with men (not just Michel) in the woods, absurdly saying to one with whom he has barely exchanged five words, “I trust you.” The chance Franck takes in pursuing Michel is similar. Soon after the drowning, the two men swim together, alone at night, an almost identical scenario to the one in which Michel (who with his mustache and dimples resembles a young Tom Selleck) drowned the other man. Franck is hesitant, but gets into the water with Michel anyway.

The conflation of sex and death is also clear in a scene in which we see a man crying out and moving under another man in the tall grass near the woods. We are unsure: are they having sex? Or is one man killing the other? The movie points out the twisted logic of most film content and ratings: we are much more likely to see in a (non-porn) film a fatal wound gushing blood than we are to see a penis ejaculating.

After the drowned man’s body is found, a police detective questions the men at the cruising spot, a strategy that doesn’t seem like it would yield much success: even before the murder the beach and woods are places for them to keep secrets. Most of the men don’t know each other’s names. Henri had, until recently, a longtime girlfriend who doesn’t seem to have known that he also had sex with men. We find out the voyeur has a jealous husband who one day accompanies him to the beach. Besides lying about the murder, Franck tells the detective, “I don’t come here often,” when we see that he’s there every day.

Because queer characters in film were vilfied for so long, movies with murderous, violent or manipulative queers in them can give off the stink of homophobia: The Talented Mr. Ripley and Notes on a Scandal are two examples of films which angered me. Guiraudie, like other queer directors handling similar material, (see Todd Hayne’s Poison) seems to avoid this problem perhaps simply because the murderer is just one of many queer characters in the film.

Queerness, like nudity in Stranger is the norm: those who are straight and keep their clothes on are the outliers. The effect of seeing so many penises, presented so matter-of-factly in a film is like being at a nude beach ourselves: the naked flesh isn’t remarkable, so we don’t gawk. This ubiquity and also perhaps the knowledge early on that Michel is a murderer (and we don’t find out much more about him beyond his attractive, smiling surface) kept me from finding the film erotic, in spite of its explicit content. But it is a compelling portrait of characters reaching out for connection, trying to overcome their loneliness, afraid of the void. When, at the end, Franck cries out into the dark, he could be any of us.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgcEGKn7waI” autohide=”0″]

___________________________________________________

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

A Study of a Singular Woman: A Review of ‘White Material’

‘White Material’ is about Maria Vial, a white Frenchwoman striving, in the face of mounting hostilities, to secure the coffee plantation she manages. French troops are assigned to evacuate their nationals but she refuses to leave the land she considers home. Superbly played by Isabelle Huppert, Maria is a profoundly complex character. Whether hanging on to the back of a bus heaving with humanity, or applying red lipstick as the world around her goes up in flames, her tenacity is shown to be incontestable and remarkable.

White Material, 2009 — *White Material*, 2009

Written by Rachael Johnson

Claire Denis has made remarkable films about both French colonial Africa and the immigrant experience in post-colonial France. In White Material (2009), Denis returns to the continent, to an unnamed, post-colonial, Francophone country in the throes of civil war. Interestingly, the script was co-written with French author Marie NDiaye. Although of different race, background and generation, both the writer and director have a close connection with French-speaking Africa and an intimate understanding of otherness: Parisian-born Denis grew up in colonial Senegal and Cameroon while Franco-Senegalese NDiaye was born and raised in France.

White Material is about Maria Vial, a white Frenchwoman striving, in the face of mounting hostilities, to secure the coffee plantation she manages. French troops are assigned to evacuate their nationals but she refuses to leave the land she considers home. Superbly played by Isabelle Huppert, Maria is a profoundly complex character. Whether hanging on to the back of a bus heaving with humanity, or applying red lipstick as the world around her goes up in flames, her tenacity is shown to be incontestable and remarkable. Maria is, however, a deluded single-minded woman. Her flaws are rooted in both her privileged white European background and singular personality. She may feel an attachment to African soil- indeed, she feels she belongs to the country- but we know that her struggle to save “her” coffee plantation shows supreme self-interest. She shows concern for a worker’s sick child but disregards the fears of those fleeing her plantation. Equally revealing is her willingness to let her employees stay in unpardonable living quarters.

Maria’s dismissal of the concerns of others, particularly those of her ex-husband, André (Christopher Lambert), and refusal to acknowledge the dangers encircling her adolescent son, Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle), may strike the viewer as unrealistic. This capacity for denial is improbable but may also mask a racist assumption: namely, the belief that her white skin will protect her. The viewer is encouraged to read Maria’s commitment as a white fantasy of belonging and possession. This post-colonial white woman may have had a romantic relationship with the local mayor, and may be contemptuous of other whites, but her mindset is considerably colonial. Note that Denis does not judge her central character in an obvious way. Her approach is to observe rather than condemn. It is up to the individual viewer to interpret Maria.

The film is primarily about the position of white people in Africa. The expression “white material” refers both to white people and their possessions. It is wittily employed by the local radio DJ who provides sharp political comment on the conflict: “As for the white material, the party’s over. No more cocktails on shaded verandahs while we sweat water and blood. They’re deserting. They’re right to run scared.” Although Maria’s extraordinary energy and audacity are constantly highlighted, Denis appears to underline that her very presence on African soil is incongruous. This is accentuated by the striking image of her pale-skinned, red-haired character standing, all by herself, on a dirt road in a pale pink dress. Maria is presented as an idiosyncratic anachronism. As it did for the European colonial male in the past, Africa, for Maria, represents opportunity and romantic self-realization. She asks the Boxer, a wounded rebel leader holding up on the land (Isaach de Bankolé), “How could I show courage in France? It would be absurd…I’d slack off, get too comfortable.” Interestingly, it is the Frenchmen of White Material who embody white European decline. Her ex-husband is in debt to the mayor, Cherif, her father-in-law (Michel Subor) aged and ailing, and her son slothful and unstable. Degraded by child soldiers, the latter self-destructs in disturbing ways.

It is to both the child soldiers of the land–“the fearless young rascals”–and Marie that Denis dedicates her film. The former are portrayed as children. We see them play with toys in Maria’s home and we also see their throats slashed by government forces as they bathe and sleep. Although Maria’s commitment to the soil is emphasized, the director’s sympathies rest with the orphaned child soldiers. Their tragic fate is portrayed in an unsettling, heart-breaking manner.

The representation of African political unrest in White Material is troubling, however. The country in question is never named and nor is the viewer given a background to the war. This universalizes the African conflict experience and, unhelpfully, portrays the continent’s wars as incomprehensible, colossal nightmares. The filmmaker’s impressionistic, elliptical approach is problematic too. Africa still needs to be demystified in the Western popular imagination. The continent’s diversity is extraordinary–as the writer and filmmaker undoubtedly know–and, as any thoughtful student of modern African history knows, its wars are invariably politically engineered and highly calculated and organized.

The narrative approach of White Material also serves to generalize the contemporary European expatriate white experience in post-colonial Africa. It may seem obvious but the global audience needs to be reminded that there are many different kinds of expatriates across the continent–of all races and socio-economic backgrounds–as well as white expatriates–and citizens–who are not colonial in their mentality. White Material is specifically about privileged white people who still farm African land in a post-colonial French-speaking country. Further, one may question whether a family so singular can represent the French post-colonial mindset. Manuel’s fate is, to be honest, quite bizarre. The apocalyptic resolution befits a classical tragedy but it is frankly absurd. If it is meant as a searing condemnation of the colonial mentality–and I hope and trust it is- the message is lost in all the strangeness.

Razor-sharp remarks about European exploitation of black Africans ring true in White Material. The DJ mocks those “who rip us off and use our land to grow mediocre coffee that we’d never drink.” However, both the script and story lack clarity. What to make of Cherif’s remarks about Maria’s son, Manuel? He observes: “Extreme blondness brings bad luck. It cries out to be pillaged. Blue eyes are troublesome. This is his country. He was born here. But it doesn’t like him.” The remarks are striking but somewhat cryptic. They have political intent and resonance in the sense that they force Maria to confront her whiteness. She is reminded that her ancestors were not African. These somewhat obscure words also appear to indicate a belief that whiteness is somewhat demonized in the popular black African imagination. This is worrying as they arguably serve to reinforce Western associations of Africa with superstition. The character of the rebel leader, the Boxer, is, equally, opaque. Before finding refuge, The Boxer roams the scarred land on an abandoned horse like a kind of phantom. Suffering a stomach wound, he also appears to symbolize African stoicism. The portrait is, therefore, a somewhat mythic one.

White Material thankfully lacks the exoticism of Hollywood films about Africa. This is unsurprising, of course, considering the filmmaker’s background. Nor does it adopt a didactic approach. Although not without interesting ideas and striking images, it ultimately, though, does not provide great insight into African politics or conflict. Due perhaps to its obliqueness and opaqueness, White Material is neither sufficiently stirring nor powerful. It is an interesting rather than impressive work by the veteran director. What is unusual about White Material, however, is that it has a single-minded, risk-taking, ideologically dubious, deeply flawed complex female character at its center. What’s more, it elicits important discussions about white European femininity and entitlement.