Ida – Bitch Flicks

Academy Awards 2015 Theme Week Roundup

Check out all of the posts for our Academy Awards 2015 Theme Week here.

Nightcrawler: Centering the White Fear Narrative by Lisa Bolekaja

Bloom is a lonely man who scrapes by on the underbelly of society. His white male privilege allows him to steal, beat up people, and sabotage competitors without fear of repercussions from the police. As the renowned comedian Paul Mooney would say, Bloom has “the complexion for the protection.”

Female Purity Is Some Bullshit: My Problem With Ida by Ren Jender

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

Finding Vivian Maier: The Greatest Art Mystery of the 20th Century by Rachel Redfern

However, Vivian Maier–besides being an obvious genius–remains a mystery. Finding Vivian Maier follows the narrative mystery as we pursue the reclusive and eccentric Vivian (or her personas of Ms. Meier, Mayer, Meyer, Meyers, Maier) across the US and through the streets of the 1950s and 1960s, attempting to discover more of a woman who is still unknowable.

Sexism in Disney’s Into The Woods by Jackson Adler

It seems Disney is saying that The Baker’s Wife is a “fallen woman,” and that it is making a firm decision on how it wants the audience to interpret the affair that occurred. This is made more problematic by how the affair was shot and choreographed. In the film, Cinderella’s Prince pins The Baker’s Wife against a tree and kisses her. There is nowhere for her to escape, even if she wanted to.

A Wild Woman Alone by Ren Jender

The filmmakers (director Jean-Marc Vallée and screenwriter Nick Hornby) profess to be fans of Strayed’s work, but they were apparently so busy patting themselves on the back for not making this story of a woman alone into some kind of boy-meets-girl rom-com that they forgot to include everything else that makes the book distinctive.

Does Hating Foxcatcher Mean I Hate Men? by Robin Hitchcock

Foxcatcher is very serious meditation on men and masculinities, male relationships, and the white male experience of the class system in America. And I am so fucking bored with those subjects, even when they aren’t presented with a deliberately slow pace, sterile tone, and distracting amounts of face putty.

Gone Girl: How to Create the Perfect Female Villain by Alize Emme

Kudos to the 20th Century Fox exec who decided to market Gone Girl (2014) as a great date movie. This is not a date movie. This is a horror story about the sensationalized pitfalls of a doomed marriage.

American Sniper: We Can Kill It for You Wholesale by Lisa Bolekaja

This cowboy motif is no accident, as it connects this film to the old John Ford Westerns and the nostalgia some folks feel about John Wayne flicks and the mythology of good white cowboys fighting off savage Indians who were keeping good white settlers from utilizing this “wilderness” that would become the U.S.A. Dehumanizing non-whites is the foundation for creating this nation. It’s the glue that holds apple pies and hot dogs together.

The Alchemy of Still Alice by Lisa Rosman

What works beyond a shadow of a doubt is Moore herself. For a long time now, she has demonstrated an uncanny range and power without ever subjecting us to a shred of vanity. Here, she outdoes herself, channeling Alice’s physical, mental, and emotional devolution with an alchemy that is as thrilling as it is harrowing. Her luminous features slacken, her cadences falter, her life force fades. Scenes with Stewart are especially heartbreaking.

Gone Girl: Scathing Gender Commentary While Reinforcing Rape and Domestic Violence Myths by Megan Kearns

I wish I could say that Gone Girl is a subversive feminist film exposing myriad gender biases and generating a much-needed dialogue on rape and domestic violence. Yet it reinforces dangerous myths rather than shattering them.

Big Hero 6: Woman Up by Andé Morgan

The female team members are often shown as being more capable then the males, both as combatants and as scientists. Gogo Tomago, and Honey Lemon, are two bright, young scientists who exhibit strength of mind, body, and will. During a training montage, Gogo uses the phrase “woman up” to encourage one of her teammates to do better. This was a great, subversive line because it flowed naturally from the character and the context, rather than seeming like a forced injection of faux-feminism.

Child-Eating Parents in Into the Woods and Every Children’s Story Ever by Katherine Murray

Your dad is an ogre or giant, your mom is a witch, and both of them want to kill you. Welcome to your fairy tale life.

Birdman Is Black Swan for Boys by Robin Hitchcock

Birdman bears striking similarities to Black Swan, both in the broad strokes—each follow their protagonist’s slipping grip on sanity in the days before a high pressure stage debut—and in a strange number of superficial details—hallucinations of menacing black winged creatures, “surprise” lesbian scenes, and ambiguous suicides at least partially showcased on stage.

Am I The Only Person Incredibly Bored With This Awards Season? by Robin Hitchcock

Only one of the Best Actress nominations is from one of the Best Picture nominees, whereas four of the five Best Actor nominations are for Best Picture-nominated films. As I wrote in 2013, this trend suggests that movies with significant roles for women aren’t considered as great or important by the Academy. This year, it is even worse: four of the five Best Actresses were in movies not nominated outside of the acting categories.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Suck by Katherine Murray

So, you just saw a terrible movie and you want to tell the world about it – not so fast. How we frame our discussions about sucky movies depends on who’s listening, and whether we’ve got common ground.

Selma Backlash: Is It a Gender Issue? by Lauren Byrd

So what can women do about these smear campaigns directed at films by women? Go see films directed by women, support these filmmakers any way you can, whether it’s by filling theaters or participating in social media campaigns. We may not be able to change Academy voters’ minds, but we can continue drawing attention to gender disparities and focus on the positive changes.

Doing The Extraordinary in Two Days, One Night by Ren Jender

Women in films are even less likely to engage in this kind of dispirited struggle. Instead an actress usually plays the wife, mother, or girlfriend whose job it is to be “strong” and rub the hero’s back while he battles against his own obstacles. She talks reassuringly to him whenever he doubts himself, the exact same way Sandra’s husband does with her here.

What’s Missing from the Gone Girl Debate? Privilege! by Natalie Wilson

Gone Girl has been called misogynist, an amalgamation of negative stereotypes of women, a text that perpetuates rape culture, and a narrative that fuels Men’s Rights Acivtists’ ugly depiction of the gender equality feminists are trying to achieve. Yet, what is missing from the discussion is a focus on privilege.

Two Days, One Night: Marion Cotillard’s Insight From the New York Film Festival by Paula Schwartz

Cotillard did triple duty at the New York Film Festival Sunday to promote Two Days, One Night, which had its U.S. premiere. (The film is Belgium’s submission for best foreign film.) At 1, in jeans and a casual but chic top, Cotillard participated in a Q&A for a standing-room crowd. At 3 she changed into Dior and walked across the street to Alice Tully Hall and joined the Dardenne Brothers as they introduced ‘Two Days, One Night’ to a sold out audience, and afterward participated in a Q&A.

Where Is the Female Version of Whiplash? by Katherine Murray

I’d really like to see more introspective films about the human experience where the humans experiencing things look like me.

Boyhood (Feat. Girlhood) by Robin Hitchcock

Let’s face it, Boyhood is a gimmick movie. Richard Linklater sporadically filmed it over a twelve-year period so we could see the child actors in it actually grow-up. If you loved Michael Apted’s Up series but wanted more fiction and less wait, Boyhood is for you. But if you just love coming-of-age dramas, I’m not sure I can recommend this one.

Selma Is Now by Nijla Mu’min

In so many ways, this film reflects the current moment, while also highlighting how things have and have not changed since the King family and their allies risked their lives to secure rights for all. Scenes in the film will jolt you into the present: watching Jimmie Lee Jackson’s mother grieve in 1965 for the son she will never see again made me immediately think of the family of Tamir Rice, the young black boy who was murdered by police officers this year for toting a toy gun in Ohio. ‘Selma’ is now.

The Theory of Everything: A “Great Man” From The First Wife’s Point of View by Ren Jender

Do great women exist? The film industry still hasn’t decided. We had Frida a dozen years ago and that bio-pic about Margaret Thatcher (like Frida, directed by a woman) from a few years back–which won Meryl Streep an Oscar, but tepid reviews along with a completely irredeemable main character kept me from seeing it. Usually the women in the “great man” films are great only by osmosis, because they married or otherwise provide emotional–and other–support to great men. The actresses who play these roles win Oscars too: they make the “supporting” category a literal one. The Theory of Everything, the new bio-pic about astrophysicist (and best-selling author) Stephen Hawking seemed like it might be different since it’s based on the book written by the great man’s first wife, Jane.

Selma Shows Why We Need More Black Women Filmmakers by Janell Hobson

DuVernay has said in interviews that when she inherited Paul Webb’s screenplay, she altered it to decenter its focus on President Lyndon B. Johnson (even though the controversy surrounding the film managed to once again re-center the story on white male power and its portrayal). Rather than criticize the director for shifting her gaze away from whiteness (or for getting certain historical details wrong), it may be more useful to consider the difference a woman behind the camera—and a Black woman in particular—brings to a motion picture.

The Imitation Game and Citizenfour: Secrets Then and Now by Ren Jender

Sometimes I wish the mainstream film industry would stop making movies about queers. The rare times that a queer person is allowed to be the main character in one of its movies, as in this one, he (almost always a “he”), like the rare main character of color is usually unrealistically isolated from the community he comes from, a trope fostered from before Stonewall to the ’90s to now: we are oh-so-tragic and oh-so-alone.

Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke Praise Patricia Arquette’s Performance in Boyhood by Paula Schwartz

Arquette, who is terrific as Olivia, turns in a nuanced and complex performance that is vanity free. We watch her age perceptively and slowly as her character gains wisdom but still falters. In other words, she’s the kind of three-dimensional woman we rarely see in American films.

Captain Uhura Snub: The Politics of Ava DuVernay’s Oscar by Brigit McCone

It is appropriate, when celebrating the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., to recall Dr. King’s words to Nichelle Nichols, as she considered quitting Star Trek in frustration at the limitations of her role: “You can’t leave!… For the first time on television, we are being seen as we should be seen every day. As intelligent, quality, beautiful people … who can go into space.” Dr. King’s words show that he clearly understood the value of a token image, as a symbol, a precedent and a possibility model for future progress.

The Boxtrolls: Better Than Its “Man in a Dress” Jokes by Ren Jender

In a nice contrast to many children’s films and books, the character at the start who goes against the mob is a girl, Lord Portley-Rind’s daughter, Winnie (voiced by Elle Fanning in a mid-Atlantic accent passing as British). Although Winnie, in her pink ruffled dress and blonde ringlets might look like other storybook heroines, her fits over never being believed or taken seriously by adults and her morbid fascination with the boxtrolls make her more like Daria than Alice in Wonderland. When she asks another character if boxtrolls ate his parents, she adds, “Did they let you, I mean, make you, watch?”

Colleen Attwood’s Costumes in Disney’s Into The Woods by Jackson Adler

Attwood’s designs are stunning, but they also highlight the discussions of gender roles and racial relationships in America.

The Academy’s White Noise: Silencing the Lions by Leigh Kolb

I said that I had hoped this year would be different. However, when the Academy announced its nominations, I was not surprised.

The Grand Budapest Hotel and Wes Anderson Fatigue by Robin Hitchcock

And the worst of it is that awards recognition will probably just send Wes Anderson further up his own ass, if such a thing is even possible. I don’t think I’ll be rushing to see his subsequent films until I hear that he’s finally tried something different.

The Internal Monologue of Wild: Lone Woman Walking, Lone Woman Writing by Elizabeth Kiy

In a film, as in real life, with no language to defend herself, the lone woman is a suspect. She gets stared at and scowled at and catcalled and often told that she’s making herself vulnerable, or taking unnecessary risks. In short, our culture says she’s asking for what she gets. A woman alone is unloved, uncared for and written off. In Wild, the film based on Strayed’s memoir of her months solo hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, she has several uncomfortable and frankly terrifying encounters.

Feminist Highlights and Fails at the 2015 Oscars by Megan Kearns

This year’s Oscars lacked racial diversity with all 20 acting nominees being white. The overwhelming whiteness of the Oscars, which hasn’t been this egregious in nominating people of color since 1998, spurred a Twitter boycott and the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite created by April Reign. In addition to racial diversity, once again the Oscars lacked gender diversity. No women were nominated for director, screenplay (adapted or original), original score or cinematography. The snub of Ava DuVernay especially stung.

Moments of Sincerity in Otherwise Endless Oscars by Josh Ralske

What stood out were what seemed like genuine heartfelt moments. John Legend and Common delivered a spirited performance of “Glory” from snubbed director Ava DuVernay’s Selma, and an equally impassioned acceptance speech when they won, notable for its intersectionality. They brought up Hong Kong’s fight for democracy, Charlie Hebdo, and America’s shameful prison-industrial complex. “Selma is now” is a message many need to hear, including their liberal Hollywood audience.

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

This repost by Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on the Academy Awards.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Notes from the Telluride Film Festival: Reviews of ‘The Past’ and ‘Ida’

We learn in The Past that not is all as it seems, and maybe all that is left in the past isn’t really. Academy Award-winning director Asghar Farhadi (2011’s The Seperation) returns with his first movie outside of Iran. Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) returns from Iran to finalize his divorce with Marie-Anne (Berenice Bejo, 2011’s The Artist) and finds himself awkwardly sleeping at the house of her new boyfriend, which also contains her children.

This is a guest post by Atima Omara-Alwala.

It’s in the Past, or Is It Really? A Review of The Past

We learn in The Past that not is all as it seems, and maybe all that is left in the past isn’t really. Academy Award-winning director Asghar Farhadi (2011’s The Seperation) returns with his first movie outside of Iran. Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) returns from Iran to finalize his divorce with Marie-Anne (Berenice Bejo, 2011’s The Artist) and finds himself awkwardly sleeping at the house of her new boyfriend, which also contains her children.

Director Asghar Farhadi is Iranian, and in speaking about the film, addressed how he hopes–as someone from the East–that people from the East and the West can better understand one another through film. Certainly, The Past is, among many things, one of those movies that aims to dispel notions about his Iranian characters. First, the movie has a major female protagonist in Marie-Anne as the ex wife of Ahmad, in addition to her daughter Lucie, who is in a supporting role. Marie-Anne is a woman with a solid career as a pharmacist. Ahmad is an Iranian man, who adores children and is better with them than his soon-to-be ex-wife, and he enjoys cooking for his ex-wife and the children. The Western portrayal of Iranian men (or men from the Middle East) tends to show men as very patriarchal who treat women with disdain (eg, Not Without My Daughter). As if to ensure the viewer that Ahmad is not a one hit wonder, Marie-Anne also is in a serious relationship with a new Iranian man, Samir (Tamir Rahim) who is a single, devoted father to his son Fouad after his wife ends up in the hospital in a coma from a suicide attempt.

A web of secrets from the past threatens to destroy the lives of all the characters; how they grapple with it and deal with them (or if they do) is what makes this film riveting to watch for all viewers (as it has universal themes).

A must see by a talented director.

The Odd Couple: A Review of the Film Ida

Ida is a wonderfully-directed film by Polish director Paweł Pawlikowsk about two women learning about themselves and their family together. Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) is a novice, an orphan brought up by nuns in a convent. Before she takes her vows, she is told of her only living relative, Wanda (Agata Kulesza), whom she seeks out to find the answers about her family.

Anna finds out she’s really not Catholic, but Jewish, according to her Aunt Wanda.

Wanda, a somber woman, wondering about what happened to her sister’s family (Anna’s parents) agrees to take a journey with her to find out what happened. It is a journey both women take that forces them to learn about each other, and it challenges each other’s beliefs.

You learn Wanda has fallen a bit in her career. Formerly a powerful attorney and judge in Communist Poland, you quickly see Wanda’s brilliance, intensity, and hardness. You see slices of what Wanda must have been when she demands answers on what happened to her sister from the family that now lives in her sister’s home. “You know I can destroy your life,” says Wanda. Anna is quiet and demure, a perfect product of her Catholic upbringing and at times clearly does not know what to make of her Aunt.

Putting a devout young sheltered Catholic woman with a wordly Polish Jewish woman is bound to create tension. When Anna quietly, but clearly, disapproves of her Aunt Wanda’s dancing, drinking, and flirting with men on one of their road trip stops, Wanda senses this and points out how Anna’s Jesus hung out with women like her (alluding to Mary Magdalene).

The saddest moment in the journey awaits them as they find out what really happened to their family. How they both deal with that tragedy and are impacted by their interactions with each other carries the last third of the film poignantly.

Shot in black and white, it resonates of a darker time in Poland. This is a must see because the story is touching and Paweł Pawlikowsk portrays the depths that are these women characters. Despite Anna being a novice on her way to being a nun and Wanda being a powerful career woman, they are not caricatures but real characters with feelings and desires who are figuring out their lives.

Atima Omara-Alwala is a political strategist and activist of 10 years who has served as staff on 8 federal and local political campaigns and other progressive causes. Atima’s work has had a particular focus on women’s political empowerment & leadership, reproductive justice, health care, communities of color and how gender and race is reflected in pop culture. Her writings on the topics have also been featured at Ms. Magazine, Women’s Enews, and RH Reality Check.