Tag: Judi Dench

Breaking: Dame Judi Dench Is Not Entirely Perfect

Judi Dench’s charming, Oscar-nominated performance as the eponymous character carries with it a rather shaky Irish accent.

I’m trembling, deigning to disparage one of the greatest actresses in cinema, particularly in this fine performance. So let me clarify that this isn’t one of those embarrassingly overwrought or perplexingly unrecognizable attempts at an accent. The problem is she does not commit. There are moments when—to my admittedly untrained American ears—her accent is convincing. But those moments last about half a line of dialogue every twenty minutes of film. The rest of the time it is just Judi Dench’s (glorious, enviable) regular voice.

This is shaking my world-view. There is something Dame Judi Dench cannot do perfectly.

Judi Dench in 'Philomena'
Judi Dench in Philomena

I finally saw Philomena, the sole outstanding 2013 Best Picture nominee on my list. Better yet, I saw it on my way to Ireland, a key setting in the film, where I’m currently enjoying an impromptu vacation.

These circumstances drew my attention to something rather shocking: Judi Dench’s charming, Oscar-nominated performance as the eponymous character carries with it a rather shaky Irish accent.

I’m trembling, deigning to disparage one of the greatest actresses in cinema, particularly in this fine performance. So let me clarify that this isn’t one of those embarrassingly overwrought or perplexingly unrecognizable attempts at an accent. The problem is she does not commit. There are moments when—to my admittedly untrained American ears—her accent is convincing. But those moments last about half a line of dialogue every 20 minutes of film. The rest of the time it is just Judi Dench’s (glorious, enviable) regular voice.

How is it possible that this woman is not perfectly perfect in every way?
How is it possible that this woman is not perfectly perfect in every way?

This is shaking my world-view. There is something Dame Judi Dench cannot do perfectly.

I am trying to spin this positively. If Judi Dench can craft a great performance, but one with a significant flaw, perhaps any of us can do great things (maybe not Dench great, but you know, our personal best) even if there is some part of it we struggle with. See, I write for the esteemed site Bitch Flicks, but I just ended a sentence with a preposition.

Here’s some things other than an Irish accent that I’m willing to venture Dame Judi Dench cannot do very well:

Surya Bonaly can do something Judi Dench cannot.
Surya Bonaly can do something Judi Dench cannot.
  1. A back flip on ice skates. Well, certainly not a back flip landing on a single blade, like Surya Bonaly.
  2. Juggle a dozen quail eggs.
  3. Speak fluent Xhosa.
  4. Fold a fitted sheet with one hand tied behind her back.
  5. Run a marathon in high heels and a straightjacket.
  6. Recite pi to 300 digits.
  7. Breed pandas.
  8. Explain the plot of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
  9. Communicate with ducks.
  10. Recreate every braided hairstyle she sees on Pinterest.
  11. Traverse the Darien Gap.
  12. Fold a piece of paper in half more than 11 times.
  13. Climb Everest without oxygen tanks.
  14. Score over 1,000 in Flappy Bird.
  15. Recall every meal she’s had for the last 20 years.
  16. Write her name on a single sesame seed.
  17. Catch a cloud and pin it down.
  18. Solve the P versus NP problem.
  19. Travel through time.
  20. Paint her nails without getting any on her cuticles.

So that’s that. Dame Judi Dench isn’t perfect. Her Irish accent in Philomena was inconsistent and weak. She PROBABLY can’t do the things listed above (at least not yet). But that’s OK. We’re all OK.

 

Robin Hitchcock is an American writer presently in Galway, Ireland. Her Irish accent is substantially worse than Judi Dench’s.

The Sin of Sexuality: Desire in ‘Philomena’

Sex is everywhere and nowhere in ‘Philomena.’ Sex is the reason that the titular heroine is sent to Roscrea as a young woman, to have her illegitimate baby behind closed doors. Sex is also the reason that Philomena’s son, Anthony, is adopted out to an American family even though his mother is still living.

'Philomena' movie poster
Philomena movie poster

 

This guest post by Caitlin Keefe Moran appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.

Philomena, directed by Stephen Frears, tells a recognizable story: a mother searches for the child she gave up for adoption in her youth. What complicates this recognizable story is that this isn’t the story at all: Philomena’s child was given up against her will by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart at Roscrea Abbey in Ireland, who held her in bondage as a laundry girl until she repaid the debt caused by her sin of sexual indiscretion. Sex is everywhere and nowhere in Philomena. Sex is the reason that the titular heroine is sent to Roscrea as a young woman, to have her illegitimate baby behind closed doors. Sex is also the reason that Philomena’s son, Anthony, is adopted out to an American family even though his mother is still living; the very fact that she gave birth to him at all, unmarried as she was, means she is unfit to be his mother. But we never see any sex—we get the faintest whisper of a flirtation at a county fair, a couple of innocent giggles, a dropped caramel apple, before the camera pans away. The next time we see Philomena, she is pregnant, standing before a firing squad of nuns, answering questions about her virtue.

Judi Dench as Philomena Lee, looking through the gates at Roscrea Abbey
Judi Dench as Philomena Lee, looking through the gates at Roscrea Abbey

 

The bulk of the film follows Philomena (Dame Judi Dench) as she tries to find her son after over four decades of separation with the help of journalist Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan, who was nominated for an Oscar for co-writing the screenplay). After being stonewalled by the nuns currently living at Roscrea, Philomena and Martin end up in Washington DC, following a tip from an Irish bartender that most of the Roscrea children were sent to America. I won’t spoil the surprise of what she ends up finding but I will say that we get to hear Judi Dench say the word “clitoris,” which in my opinion justifies just about every endeavor.

Catholic ideology hangs over the film like an incense-scented altar cloth. All discussions of sex, or sin, or pleasure, are tied to each other and connected in a messy tangle. When the nuns interrogate a pregnant Philomena, they don’t focus on what she did; they interrogate her agency and her gratification. “Did you enjoy your sin?” they ask. “Did you take your knickers down?” Sexual pleasure, in other words, makes an already execrable sin that much worse. Philomena herself buys into this logic; after she and Martin travel to Roscrea together for the first time, she speaks frankly about her first sexual experience. “And after I had the sex,” she tells Martin, “I thought anything that feels so lovely must be wrong.” To which Martin, a lapsed Catholic and former altar boy, replies, “Fucking Catholics.”

Philomena and Martin on the way to America—and answers.
Philomena and Martin on the way to America—and answers.

 

Religion and sexuality were, and remain, uncomfortably coupled, not only in Ireland but in Catholic countries everywhere. In the climax of the movie, when Martin and Philomena confront Sister Hildegarde, the nun who purposely withheld information about Philomena from her son when he was dying from AIDS and searching from her, Sister Hildegarde lays it out for them: “I have kept my vow of chastity my entire life. Self-denial and mortification of the flesh. That’s what brings us closer to God. Those girls had no one to blame but themselves and their carnal incontinence.” (To which Martin, lapsed Catholic and former altar boy, replies, “I think if Jesus were here right now he’d tip you out of that fucking wheelchair.” Go Martin!) In Sister Hildegarde’s world, sexual purity is the only thing women possess that makes them valuable, worthy of both earthly and divine love. Once that purity has been lost—and especially if the losing of it was enjoyable—then women also lose the right to be treated like human beings. When Philomena was in labor, Sister Hildegarde was the attending nurse who refused to call a doctor or administer pain medication when it became clear that the baby was breach. “Her pain is her penance,” she says to another nun as she stood over a screaming Philomena. An exercise in sexuality may start out pleasurably, but it can only end in pain. Martin, too, learns this when he discovers old graves in the back of the abbey, all anonymous, for the women who hadn’t survived labor at Roscrea. Mother and child, in childbirth.

Philomena Lee was one of thousands of girls between the mid-18th century and the late 20th century who worked in the Magdalene laundries (named for Mary Magdalene, who in early Christian tradition was suspected of being a prostitute). Sometimes they came, like Philomena, pregnant and unwed. Others came from state-run hospitals and psychiatric wards, or were simply plucked from the street and delivered up to the nuns. Once in the control of the nuns, the women and girls worked for no pay doing backbreaking labor until they expunged their sins. But for women like Philomena, this was impossible. Her sexuality was her sin. Many of the Roscrea girls came from backgrounds rife with sexual abuse and violence. In 2013, the Sydney Morning Herald published interviews with women who had survived the laundries; one of them, named Mary Currington, described her three-decade marriage after incarceration in the laundries thusly: “I’m afraid I was a failure in the bedroom department. It was all tied up with the abuse as a child. I tried to be a good wife, but every time it felt like rape… It was a humiliating, degrading, shaming life and it doesn’t leave you.”

Young Philomena with Anthony, before he was taken away
Young Philomena with Anthony, before he was taken away

 

The last of the Magdalene laundries closed down in 1996 (let that sink in for a moment). In 2011, after sustained efforts from survivors’ groups and the United Nations Committee against Torture, the Irish government officially recognized its role in the operation of the laundries and apologized. The religious orders that had run the laundries, however, refused to pay restitution to the surviving victims (justifying the note I scrawled in the margins of my notebook while watching the movie: “Damn, nuns are cold”). These were absolutely not the sins of the father being visited upon the son; the Church was still benefitting from the laundries only 15 years before the government’s formal apology, so they should have been held accountable. But the rhetoric of sexual indiscretion allowed them to escape culpability for their abuses. These were damaged women, irredeemable women. The fallen. If they had committed any other crime, any other sacrilege, then perhaps they would be worthy of an apology. But not these women. Not Philomena. After all, she took her knickers down.

In the end, Philomena finds it within herself to forgive the nuns of Roscrea for what did to her; Martin, ever the cranky atheist, can’t. As a viewer, I tended to side with Martin on questions of faith and forgiveness. If I were Philomena, the world could have pried my bitterness out of my cold, dead hands as I was lowered into the ground. But even more important than Philomena’s forgiveness of a wretched old nun is that throughout the movie she maintains an open heart and a loving soul in the face of incredible loss. She lives not as a woman afraid but as a woman mourning what was lost, who nevertheless keeps going. She maintains a love of the world, of things and of people, of cheesy romance novels that she continuously narrates to Martin and free booze on airplanes. She marries and has more children, who are good to her. In spite of a world that would have gladly consigned her to the anonymous headstones in the abbey’s graveyard, she lives.

Caitlin Keefe Moran is an editor in New York City. Her work has appeared on The Toast, in The Iowa Review, and other outlets. She lives in Queens and feels passionately about donuts and splitting infinitives as a form of protest.

Cute Old Ladies Who Talk Dirty in ‘Nebraska’ and ‘Philomena’

But Payne doesn’t seem to give much thought to Kate’s situation. In all but one scene Kate is called on to be testy and not much else. Even though we laugh as she chirps the cause of death of a late, but not lamented relative and we feel satisfied when she cusses out greedy members of Woody’s family, the character is more of an exclamation point than a person.

June Squibb as Kate in Nebraska

The women in the films of writer/director Alexander Payne are a mixed bag. I enjoyed his early film, Citizen Ruth but the contempt he seemed to have for most of the women characters seeped into–and made me hesitate to laugh at–the movie’s comedy. I hated Election in spite of a pre-stardom Reese Witherspoon in the lead and the cool, teenaged lesbian character in a prominent supporting role: what some other critics have called misanthropy in Payne’s body of work seemed to me more like misogyny.

I skipped About Schmidt  because Jack Nicholson and Alexander Payne didn’t seem like a woman-friendly combination, a hunch confirmed when even male critics used the m-word to describe the film. I thought I’d also avoid Sideways with its manchild protagonist, but when I saw the movie, late in its run, I loved it: the same care had gone into developing the Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh characters as Payne had put into creating the roles played by Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church. Payne’s next film, The Descendants had a comatose, unfaithful “bad” mother at its crux but also showed her willful, smart-mouthed daughters (Shailene Woodley played the older of the two) at their most vulnerable. So I went into Nebraska, nominated for a slew of Oscars including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Best Director, hopeful but cautious. But in this film Payne seems to be going not sideways, but backwards.

Will Forte and Bruce Dern in 'Nebraska'
Will Forte and Bruce Dern in Nebraska

The film’s focus is on the relationship between two men: addled, alcoholic Woody (Bruce Dern, nominated for Best Actor) and his son David (Will Forte, who many know from his days on Saturday Night Live). David ends up taking his father on a quixotic road trip to collect the money Woody mistakenly and stubbornly believes he’s won through a letter from a company that is very much like Publishers’ Clearing House. We see many scenes that demonstrate the challenge Woody’s drinking and encroaching dementia are for his son (who seems to be around 40 and able-bodied), but David never considers that the trip might be a chance for his own mother to have a break from being Woody’s sole caretaker. Instead, David repeatedly says he agreed to drive his father over two states because the trip might be the last chance for the two of them to spend some time together.

June Squibb plays Woody’s wife and David’s mother, Kate, and is the film’s nominee for Best Supporting Actress (she also played Jack Nicholson’s wife in About Schmidt). She has the kind of face that moviegoers are used to seeing everywhere but onscreen: an 80-something woman who doesn’t appear to have undergone any plastic surgery and doesn’t look like she’s just come from a session with a team of makeup artists and hair colorists.

Bruce Dern and June Squibb
Bruce Dern and June Squibb

Anyone who has known an older woman left alone to take care of a husband in declining health will recognize the exasperated tone and facial expression Kate uses whenever she speaks to Woody. David, in contrast, is unfailingly patient and calm, like a cross between a therapist and Mr. Rogers, when he talks to his taciturn and pigheaded father, perhaps because he knows when the trip is over, his father’s care will go back to being Kate’s responsibility and will remain so until he dies–or she does.

We can see that Kate, direct and bereft of tact, is supposed to be a refreshing change from the smiling, always forgiving grandmothers of yore, but seeing her yell and swear reminds me of every role Betty White has played in recent years, the same role that goes to many other actresses once they hit 65. Dern’s character is also often angry and uses crude language, but as limited as his character is we do see other aspects of him, both in Dern’s performance and in exposition from the other characters. So much of our time and focus goes to this character, we think that his opaque and maddening surface will crack so that he can can finally show some affection and gratitude toward his son or to his old girlfriend whom his son encounters in the town where he was raised, but Woody remains selfish, irascible and without redeeming qualities to the end.

Parents and son

A better and more interesting movie would have included more about Kate. In spite of the women all around us who take care of men when they get old and sick (even though these women are often not young themselves) we very rarely see movies about a woman who is a caretaker: off the top of my head the only film I can think of is Marvin’s Room.  But Payne doesn’t seem to give much thought to Kate’s situation. In all but one scene, Kate is called on to be testy and not much else. Even though we laugh as she chirps the cause of death of a late, but not lamented, relative and we feel satisfied when she cusses out greedy members of Woody’s family, the character is more of an exclamation point than a person.

That we, in the audience, aren’t as sick of the Grandma Who Talks Dirty trope as we are of the Magical Negro or the Sassy Gay Best Friend shows that the culture either isn’t paying attention or doesn’t care how older women are portrayed. Philomena is another Oscar-nominated film (for Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Score) which features an older woman, and it left me frustrated for slightly different reasons.

DenchCoogan

Although Philomena is based on a true story about the title character (Best Actress nominee Judi Dench), it’s equally about the journalist, Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan), who helps in her search for the son who was taken from her (sold to American “adoptive” parents) when she was a young, single mother. Philomena Lee was sent to a Magdalen laundry (run by the Catholic Church but also supported by the Irish state) to have her baby and afterward forced, along with many other girl and women “sinners”, to work washing clothes for years afterward with no pay–a part of Irish history which receives a more detailed treatment in 2002’s The Magdalene Sisters.

I understand why the film makes Sixsmith an equal player in the story (the film is, after all, based on his book and was brought to the screen by Coogan), and the culture clash between romance-reading Philomena and Oxford-educated Martin is mildly entertaining, but this film reminded me a little too much of films from the 1980s like Mississippi Burning and Cry Freedom, in which stories about Black people were told through a white-guy main character and savior. I had the feeling if Sixsmith’s character had taken his rightful place as a background figure no producer would have put up the money for this film.

The real-life Sixsmith and Lee
The real-life Sixsmith and Lee

In Philomena, we again have an older woman with a surprising vocabulary: I guess I should be grateful that a mainstream movie features a lead actress (especially one of Judi Dench’s stature) saying the word “clitoris,” but I wish the scene weren’t played for a cheap laugh. Philomena Lee embodies contradictions that many of us have seen in our own families: women who remain devoted to the Catholic Church after years of being mistreated by it (with the people now around them pointing out that mistreatment), whose ideals are also more liberal than the church’s dogma.

I wanted to see more of the women I knew in Dench’s performance, but she’s miscast. She doesn’t sound any more Irish than…Judi Dench (and though some Irish people of Lee’s generation who moved to England made sure to lose their brogues–Lee wasn’t one of them–they didn’t then adopt Dench’s Received Pronunciation). Dench doesn’t speak in the same rhythm as someone from Ireland, or even as someone whose parents are from Ireland (though Dench’s mother was Irish). So Dench’s portrayal of Lee’s faith and forgiveness also fall flat. I have not seen any other review that notices how wrong Dench (as great as she has been in other roles) is for this part, the same way straight critics never seem to notice when two women playing lovers in a film have zero chemistry together. We’re supposed to be sated by seeing these women characters in a film at all. We aren’t supposed to want older women in films to do what they do in our lives outside movie theaters: to charm us, to move us, to sustain us.

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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.

‘Philomena’: A Feminist Gender and Religion Critique

Philomena is based on the true story of Philomena Lee, an Irish woman who got pregnant as a teenager and was relegated to a convent where she was forced to perform grueling manual labor before her young son was sold to an adoptive US family. Fifty years later, Philomena works with a washed-up ex-journalist to find her son while he uncovers the dark truth behind her son’s adoption and the church’s betrayal. Overall, I’d say this is a feminist film that tries to expose oppressive gender roles that linger on today and allows its heroine, played by the exquisite Dame Judi Dench, to be her own person: a woman who makes her own decisions and mistakes while remaining irrepressibly full of humor and love.

Philomena Poster Alt

I wouldn’t exactly characterize Stephen Frears much-praised film Philomena as a comedy. I’d describe it as more of a dramatized exposé of the corruption of the Irish Catholic church with moments of levity that give a desolate story warmth and humanity. Philomena is based on the true story of Philomena Lee, an Irish woman who got pregnant as a teenager and was relegated to a convent where she was forced to perform grueling manual labor before her young son was sold to an adoptive US family. Fifty years later, Philomena works with a washed-up ex-journalist to find her son while he uncovers the dark truth behind her son’s adoption and the church’s betrayal. Overall, I’d say this is a feminist film that tries to expose oppressive gender roles that linger on today and allows its heroine, played by the exquisite Dame Judi Dench, to be her own person: a woman who makes her own decisions and mistakes while remaining irrepressibly full of humor and love.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DBPqcp6Hc4″]

Philomena is in the business of critiquing institutions; specifically: religion, gender, class, and media. The interactions between ex-journalist Martin and Philomena highlight class disparity. Sometimes the exposure is subtle. Martin flies to the convent while Philomena drives with her daughter. Philomena is giddy at the prospect of free champagne on the flight to America as well as the complimentary grand breakfast buffet and the posh hotel room. She doesn’t “get” Martin’s sense of humor or cultural references, and she reads romance formula fiction, never guessing at the “formula” obvious in all her books. These moments are designed to make the audience chuckle at the sweetness of Philomena’s naivete while underscoring her lack of privilege, education, and wealth.

Philomena feels "like the Pope" for being allowed to ride on the airport transport service.
Philomena feels like royalty for riding on the airport transport service.

Other times, the class disparity is stark and painful. Philomena realizes she could never have given her son the opportunities and lifestyle he enjoyed as a result of his adoption. Martin is, on occasion, cruel to her because the things that excite her are old hat for him; he’s jaded and has come to expect a life of comfort and privilege. He also mocks Philomena for her faith, insinuating that her class status is why she believes in a higher power (because he is too learned and intellectual to believe in anything). The movie shows that though Martin is more worldly, wealthier, and better educated than Philomena, he doesn’t enjoy life the way that she does. She refuses to be bitter or angry like he is. He begins to understand and accept the fact that Philomena needs him, with his connections and his status as an upper-crusty white man, to find out the truth about her son.

Martin rebuffs Philomena for her excitement about the hotel's omelet station
Martin rebuffs Philomena & her excitement about an omelet station

Philomena‘s religion and gender critique go hand-in-hand. Religion judges and punishes young women (some as young as 14) for giving in to “carnal” desires that they haven’t been educated about to even understand the potential consequences. The film also highlights forced labor along with constant recriminations to show how religious forces incite fear, shame, and blame that Philomena and countless others carry for over 50 years. Philomena experiences a particular guilt because she enjoyed the sexual encounter that led to her pregnancy. The church teaches that female bodies and female pleasure are sinful, and many of the nuns are revealed to be bitter and vengeful, a perfect example of patriarchy-complicit female figures of authority. There is no discussion of the culpability of the male cohorts whose sperm was a necessary part of the baby-making equation. Sound familiar? The religious right continues this mentality with its abstinence-only education while heaping stigma galore onto young women who become trapped in pregnancy, insisting that the female body is a breeding ground for impurity and that all the fault lies within the woman, who is, in many cases, forced to suffer all the consequences.

Young, inexperienced Philomena at the fair.
Young, inexperienced Philomena at the fair.

The kicker is that “female sin” is big business for the church in Philomena. The convent forces young women to “pay off” their debt/sin by working ungodly hours (pun intended) in the convent, and then they illegally sell the babies to the US for a great deal of money. The church destroys evidence and refuses to help families reunite even after 50 years of separation. The film claims that this was in part due to a continued resentment and desire to punish the sins of the young mothers, but it’s perhaps more true that the church is covering its tracks. Here, the church, a religious institution, takes advantage of the weak, the helpless, the poor, and the disenfranchised. Here, the church, targets women in particular using the notion of female sin to solidify their dogma and to reinforce their power (financial in this case). The exploitation of women by religious institutions is not new and continues today, as female reproductive rights are leveraged to cause divisiveness and to reinforce the power of political groups, religious groups, and the patriarchy.

The real-life Anthony with a nun before he was sold.
The real-life Anthony with a nun before he was sold.

Despite it all, Philomena remains a good-hearted person. She stands up to Martin when necessary, insisting that this is her story. She asserts that she’ll be the one who makes the decisions and that her reaction is her own, not his or a media that seeks only to capitalize on her tale of woe and exploit her for its own gain. She continues to love and accept her son regardless of the many things she learns about him that an old-fashioned religious person like herself could have found alienating. In the end, she forgives the convent, proving that she is the bigger person and more Christian than the nuns and religious institution that tormented her. While the circumstances of the film are tragic and devastating, Philomena’s doggedness, her bravery, and her journey have exposed wide-spread corruption and opened the door for other mothers to reunite with their long-lost children. Though she’s an ordinary woman without means, a fancy education, or influence, she stood up to a powerful institution steeped in centuries of history, and she said, “No more.” Philomena’s quest shows us that the personal is political and that one woman can make a difference in the the world.

Judi Dench sits with the real Philomena Lee.
Judi Dench sits with the real Philomena Lee.

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Amanda Rodriguez is an environmental activist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She writes all about food and drinking games on her blog Booze and Baking. Fun fact: while living in Kyoto, Japan, her house was attacked by monkeys.

Older Women Week: Judi Dench Carries ‘Notes On A Scandal,’ and Other Badass Accomplishments

There’s an imperative reason why Dench was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in a film for Notes On a Scandal. The Academy can be a load of BS with their ageism and racism, but sometimes, they get it right. It’s also quite wonderful to point out that Dench scored her first nomination at 64, her first and only win at 65, and four nods after— the last being Notes on a Scandal. For people to say that she is too old for anything is simply wrong on all counts. She truly is at her artistic best.

Notes on a Scandal film poster.
Dame Judi Dench is a favorite of mine and definitely worthy of this appropriately named tumblr.
Dench played the wonderful Armande Voizon in Chocolat, a witty, brooding mother who gluttonously indulged despite having diabetes. She doesn’t have the “traditional” Bond Girl look and physique, but she kicks major ass as M (who is supposed to be a man) in the James Bond films. Sadly, it is her appearance in the Bond films that gets her the most recognition. She also voiced the darling Mrs. Lilly on the British animated series, Angelina Ballerina, and I have no shame in admitting that my hard drive houses several episodes. We can’t forget her unforgettable turns in Importance of Being Earnest,  Iris, Shakespeare in Love, Mrs. Henderson Presents and so on.
When I see Dench on screen, I don’t see an aging actress fading and desiring work outside of matronly figure. I see a talented woman full of zesty relish and passion for her craft. Notes on a Scandal showcased a terrifying brilliance unlike anything I had ever seen from her, ultimately proving that Dench can wear many hats.
Barbara (Judi Dench) in her turtleneck and sweater cardigan wouldn’t hurt a fly.
Dench’s earlier portrayed characters contain humor and charm. In Notes on a Scandal,  a film based on Zoe Heller’s novel, Barbara Covett certainly has that nestled inside her sea of condescending criticisms of the world around her. She drifts sans lifeboat and purpose; her greatest love is writing scribbles and taking care of her cat. Young, sensually stirring, carefree Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett) floats listlessly into Barbara’s mundane life. A dark and sinister side disguised underneath a mask of a nonthreatening single old woman emerges with savage claws and teeth bared, waiting with perceptive eyes to strike into Sheba’s vulnerability.
There’s an imperative reason why Dench was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in a film for Notes On a Scandal. The Academy can be a load of BS with their ageism and racism, but sometimes, they get it right. It’s also quite wonderful to point out that Dench scored her first nomination at 64, her first and only win at 65, and four nods after– the last being Notes on a Scandal. For people to say that she is too old for anything is imply unstated and wrong on all counts. She truly is at her artistic best.
In the Guardian’s article called, “I Never Want to Stop Working,” Dench briefly touches on why she felt compelled to play such a wicked character.
“I remember reading the novel Notes on a Scandal and thinking: I would love to play that woman, to try to find a humanity in that dreadful person. I was thrilled to be asked to do that.”
Barbara’s (Judi Dench) cat just died and she’s going postal on Sheba (Cate Blanchett) for trying to “abandon” her during the mourning process.
Notes on a Scandal is almost a Single White Femalesituation and some parts are unsettling in this disturbing thriller. Except that Barbara doesn’t want to mimic Sheba. She wants her. The undeniable tension between Barbara and her ravenous fixation on Sheba manifests into an overwhelming viscerally charged moment of raw intensity. Barbara is seeking sensual validation and believes that Sheba holds the key to fulfilling the fragmented jigsaw. She is deluded into actually concluding that Sheba is the missing puzzle piece that fits into an isolated world longing for female companionship. Sheba, so naive and unaware of Barbara’s lesbian attraction and dishonorable intentions, is just as lost and confused as the young boy she seduced. 
Dench plays the hell out of this demented woman on the brink of lunacy with a sweet voice coated in cold calculating manipulation and demure blue eyes spurning icy darts of pure evil. I was so used to  her sweet and congenial characters that Barbara Covett just literally frightened the depths of my soul. She is an unrootable and unstable character, yet smart and sly. It opened up this strange can of worms–I love Dench, but for the life of me, I despised Barbara and her sick, compulsive selfishness. Why couldn’t she have asked Sheba, “Let’s be friends?” Why deceive?
With close cropped silver hair and a diligent work ethic, Judi Dench continues to defy Hollywood’s obsession with long hair and youth.

Notes on a Scandal is a twisted piece of filmmaking that does touch on age and the desire to stay trapped inside youthfulness–that place where all the cool people reside. I have yet to read Zeller’s book, but feel compelled that I must do so.
As for Judi Dench, let’s applaud her never-ending quest to continue shining through and not letting a little thing like age get in the way of a versatile career. I see another Oscar nod or two in her future.

Older Women Week: Funniest After 50: Four Comediennes to Love Forever

Betty White, Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, and Helen Mirren… At first, when writing this article, I thought about pointing out the ways in which Hollywood has shorted these prolific and amazing actresses, and while I’m sure that’s happened to them at some point in their careers, in reading about their lives, I realized that would almost be a disservice to all that they’ve accomplished. Rather, this piece is meant as a tribute to these enduring female comediennes, who have not only flourished but also paved the way for so many other actresses and actors.

Written By Rachel Redfern
The always hilarious Betty White
When thinking about female comediennes, we often consider the hilarity of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, Sarah Silverman, Ellen Degeneres and Mindy Kaling (plus many more); however, rarely do we think about those funny women who helped to pioneer women in comedy, and who manage to stay current today. Even more than that, do we ever think about actresses over the age of 80 who are still out there, busting sides and helping to expand the boundaries of cinema? Four people who are doing just that? Betty White, Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, and Helen Mirren. These women have managed to retain a certain appeal and charisma, keeping them current and having a substantial effect on popular culture. 

But what roles are they playing? Are they merely fulfilling our stereotypes of older women? It is common knowledge that most female actresses are given a narrow width of roles once they top the age of 45, the focus at that point aiming more towards how well they aged and can they convincingly play Scarlett Johansson’s mother?

At first, when writing this article, I thought about pointing out the ways in which Hollywood has shorted these prolific and amazing actresses, and while I’m sure that’s happened to them at some point in their careers, in reading about their lives, I realized that would almost be a disservice to all that they’ve accomplished. Rather, this piece is meant as a tribute to these enduring female comediennes, who have not only flourished but also paved the way for so many other actresses and actors.

Betty White (1922)

While Betty White has had a career in show business for most of her life, White was most known for her role on Golden Girls over twenty years ago, a role in which she was spunky and hilarious. But the steam generated by that show built her up until suddenly, ten years ago when she started guest starring on dozens of shows, won seven Emmys, become the oldest person to ever host Saturday Night Live, and even had a spot on a major super bowl ad.

But why? What’s so enduring and endearing about her? Is the fact that White, born in 1922 (she is now 91 years old) retains a youth and vitality that is staggering? Is it the comedic roles she easily slips into as a lovable and sassy grandmother? At first, when considering the usual roles that she plays I wondered, is White fulfilling a wishful stereotype for audiences (that of a hilarious, raunchy, older woman) without playing more dramatic roles or portraying realistic situations for the elderly?

But in my consideration of her career, I changed my perspective; Betty White is a comedienne and has been for most of her career. The fact that she’s still entertaining and embracing offbeat comedic roles, and even hosting her own prank show called Betty White’s Off Their Rockers, is actually one of the best tribute to funny women everywhere.

Maggie Smith (1934)

You’ve watched Harry Potter, and probably Downton Abbey, so you know who she is, but Smith has been a prominent actress since 1952, although she started her career in the theater. However, I didn’t necessarily consider Smith a comedic actress until actually taking a closer look into her expansive and productive bibliography. Since 1956, Smith has been recognized as both a powerful dramatic actor (becoming a member of the Royal National Theater in the 1960’s, nominated for an Oscar only a few years later for her role as Desdemona in Othello) and as a woman of great comedic timing and talent.

Consider her acerbic wit and hilarious disdain as the Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey, the prim nun in Sister Act, and a lovely, elderly Wendy in Hook. The unfortunate moment in all of this research is the realization that most people of my generation have tasted only the barest sample of Maggie Smith’s range, especially in regard to her comedic abilities.

Judi Dench (1934)

 

We don’t always consider Judi Dench as a comedic actress, because well, let’s face it, she’s a drama powerhouse. Elegant, confident, she displays all the characteristics of a self-assured woman of grace and intelligence, both off- and on-screen. However, similar to Smith, Dench was also a fixture of the England theater scene for many years, being a member of the Royal Shakespeare company, and it was there, that she gained prominence for both her drama and comedy work, once being cited as the greatest comedic actress in all of England.

In 1981 she starred in the critically acclaimed British romantic sitcom, A Fine Romance, with her husband, Michael Williams, but it’s her more current work as M in the James Bond series that I find interesting. Her performance has been acclaimed for its combination of British sarcasm and competent, cold leadership.

Besides that, she’s hilarious in private life, once stating that since Harvey Wienstein helped to further her career that she had his name “tattooed on my bum ever since.”

Helen Mirren (1945)

Helen Mirren has retained a sexiness and a dynamic appeal, which she happily carries with her as she enters her seventies. I love that. While it’s true that too much emphasis is placed on the physical beauty of the women in Hollywood, Mirren’s draw comes from more than just her good looks. She’s always been known for her sensuality and for the heat and intensity she could bring to a film or theater production.

Like Judi Dench, Mirren was also a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company in her youth who then moved onto fame for ability to portray British royalty, having played three queens so far: Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Elizabeth II, and Queen Charlotte. Yet, while most of her substantial theater experience was in drama and displaying “sensuality” and “sexual allure,” in film and television, she’s become a recognizable comedic personality.

Her roles in Calendar Girls, the dark-comedy and action thrillers Red and Red II, countless television interviews and even, a night spent hosting Saturday Night Live in 2011 have solidified Mirren as a sultry and mischievous comedienne. (Click here to see Helen Mirren and Billy Crystal consider a remake of When Harry Met Sally and here to see a fabulous video of Mirren talking about women in Hollywood and the “worship of the young male and his penis.”)

I find that combination fabulous, and in many ways groundbreaking; Mirren has managed to successfully embrace her famous sexuality and incorporate it into her own unique style of slapstick, confident comedy.

The brilliance in examining the comedic range of these four women is that all have developed a unique style and are at ease with their age. They don’t take themselves too seriously, and because of their resilience, diligence, hard work, and talent, (in a notoriously competitive and unfriendly-to-women-environment) they embody the best of women in Hollywood—stalwart performers whose years of experience is outstanding and mind-boggling.

What are some other actresses that have successfully retained their comedic abilities as they’ve entered their golden years?

Rachel Redfern has an MA in English literature, where she conducted research on modern American literature and film and its intersection, however she spends most of her time watching HBO shows, traveling, and blogging and reading about feminism.

Older Women Week: ‘Notes on a Scandal’: The Older Woman As Predator and Prey

This is a guest post by Elizabeth Kiy.

“I don’t know. It’s just the distance between life as you dream it and life as it is.” –Sheba Hart

Notes on a Scandal film poster

In Notes on a Scandal, a 2006 British psychological thriller, a web of lies and manipulations form around the relationship of two schoolteachers who live very different lives.

Told through her point of view, the film takes viewers into the mind of Barbara Covett (Judi Dench), an elderly woman whose sweet voice and grandmotherly appearance hide a cunning mind and sinister intentions. She lives alone with her cat and confides only in her journal, whose entries form the film’s narration.

Her loneliness is compounded by this narrative technique, as Barbara is often given no one to play off of and instead watches interactions from a distance, remaining an entirely closed off person with a rich internal life she only reveals in her private writing. For an older woman, whose age, unmarried status and perceived lack of attractiveness leave her virtually invisible and of no value to society, this narration allows her to express her resentment. But underneath her malice is the profound loneliness of a woman who seems to have never learned how to connect to people and to remain in their lives without manipulations.

Barbara only confides her real opinions in her journal

To a degree, her isolation is self imposed as Barbara sees the people around her, students and teachers alike, as uncultured, unwashed and unilaterally badly behaved. That she sees herself as above them is highlighted in an early sequence when she watches the children come into the school from an upper floor window. This is the scene where Barbara first sees Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett).

Sheba’s first appearance presents a sharp contrast. She floats, very blonde and pale in a sea of dark haired students in black uniforms and the viewer’s eye, aligned with Barbara’s, is easily drawn to her. While Barbara, a through disciplinarian in dowdy clothes, fits naturally into the school environment, Sheba is alien within it. It is suggested that she has no authority over the students because she still sees herself as a young person and wants to be their friend. The film also addresses the idea of class difference which further sets Sheba, with her upperclass background, apart from the working class pupils.

The details of Sheba’s life seem comfortable enough; she lives in a large, ornate house with her much older husband (Bill Nighy–who interestingly portrayed a love interest to Dench in Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) and her two children, a teenage daughter (Juno Temple) and a boy with Down syndrome, but none of it makes her happy. In a telling detail, a photograph of Sheba in her youth, dressed in a punk style, is shown in her studio.

Teenage Sheba was a Siouxsie & The Banshees fan

Like her pottery and the art in her shed, this photograph suggests a life unfulfilled, that she imagined a bigger, more bohemian life for herself. This was the time in her life when she felt most free and most herself, before she was married or had children, and it is this sense of fulfillment she tries to reclaim by ultimately entering into a relationship with one of her students.

Her relationship with 15-year-old Steven Connolly is particularly disturbing because actor Andrew Simpson certainly looks this age. At first, he satisfies her idealism, and helping him develop his potential as an artist makes her feel useful in a way she hasn’t felt in a long time. She tells Barbara it was he who began to pursue her, constantly following her and playing on her sympathy with sad stories about his family life. The first time she leaves her family to meet him, lying about where she is going, the camera briefly lingers on her son and husband, showing her last minute hesitation.

In viewing the situation as one where he pursued her and she was helpless in her desire (whether or not Sheba’s story to Barbara is reliable), she allows herself to feel young, desirable and like a teenager again, experiencing clandestine affairs. In this sense, her much older husband is recast as her father, which Connolly thinks he is when he sees him. Sheba’s relationship with her daughter, who is the same age as Connolly, is also changed as they both enter a similar world of teenage dating.

Teenage Steven Connolly pursues Sheba

In the end, it becomes clear Connolly can’t take the burden of this complicated relationship and the knowledge that she has a family and feels he has been used by her. In her efforts to reclaim her own carefree youth, she has been stealing his and forcing him to grow up. In one telling scene, Connolly looks through her records and is unfamiliar with the artists, highlighting their age gap. The wrongness of Sheba’s actions is brought home to her when Connolly, naked post-sex tries on her son’s hat. At the sight of him, she is repulsed and forces him to take it off.

Though both women struggle with loneliness and are unhappy with their lives, the different ways they deal with similar emotions cast them in degrees as predator and prey.

Alone and undervalued, Barbara rapidly develops an obsession with her younger colleague, which makes her feel more vital and connected to the world. She is fascinated with the exotic character that Sheba seems to be, someone so different from her. She is also jealous of Sheba, as in her narration she says that people like her only think they know what real loneliness is. With this in mind, when she discovers Sheba’s affair with Connolly, she uses it to blackmail her into being her friend.

Though society easily defines a woman like Sheba as a predator, and she is punished with a jail sentence at the film’s end, Barbara’s predatory nature is much subtler and hidden. She looks at Sheba’s life noting how around her family, she acts in a serving position, making dinner and tidying the dining room while the others sit and talk, that she alone has had to take care of the children. This allows Barbara to resent Sheba’s family as a burden placed on her that she’d be glad to be rid of.

Several characters mention Barbara’s old friend, Jennifer, who she doesn’t want to talk about, suggesting she has had these obsessives friendships before. They also suggest Barbara’s attraction to Sheba is actually repressed lesbian desire, unfortunately casting this desire as predatory by connecting it with Barbara’s manipulations. In one scene, the camera, showing her point of view, focuses on an extreme close-up of one of Sheba’s golden hairs falling. Like a lover, Barbara holds it delicately, as if it is precious to her and saves it in her diary.

The camera shows Barbara’s point of view as she gazes at Sheba with lust

In addition, during a moment of casual dancing during her first visit to the Harts, Barbara’s eyes scan up Sheba’s body, and her dancing is shown in slight slow motion, accentuating Barbara’s lustful gaze. This gaze challenges the societal view of an older woman as a sexless grandmother and presents her as someone with active sexual desires.

Sheba is also guilty of manipulating Barbara and dismissing her because of her age. Early on, when she first begins to confide in Barbara, she sees her as a good person to talk to because she assumes she does not have her own life or secrets. She assumes a woman like Barbara would be glad just to have a friend, and dismisses any idea that she could have sinister intentions running contrary to the older woman’s assumed place in society as the grandmother. With this assumption, she begins to prey on Barbara’s loneliness, continuing to see Connolly and buying Barbara gifts to silence her. The viewer begins to feel sympathy for Barbara here as her narration reveals that she lives in a fantasy world, believing she has a wonderful relationship with this loving friend who will take care for her in her old age.

Barbara dresses as a doting grandmother to visit the Harts

Similarly, Barbara shows her first genuine smile when she is first invited to Sheba’s family dinner. Because the film follows her through the minute details of getting ready; buying clothes and having her hair done, the invitation is inflated in importance. As the details momentarily consume the film, the preparations seem to become her whole life, revealing how small, unimportant and lonely it is. The insert shot of her in the mirror, nervously touching her hair stresses her concern about looking a certain way and fitting into the role expected of her.

She emerges wearing pearls and carrying flowers, the very picture of a sweet grandmother.

The film takes great care to show Barbara in an unflattering light, making the signs of her age, her thinning hair, neck fat and heavily wrinkled skin, appear (for lack of a better word) pathetic. It also suggests Barbara’s appearance mirrors her cold-hearted nature. This seems a bit hypocritical, as much of the film can be interpreted to suggest that the older woman should not be dismissed as having none of her own desires and secrets. By aligning the film with Barbara’s point of view and then including scenes, like the overhead shot of Barbara smoking in the bath with her sweaty older body on display, it is suggested not only that she is monstrous, but that she sees herself as monstrous.

Barbara’s “monstrous” older body on display in a purposefully unflattering shot
The older unmarried woman is often portrayed in media in a very cliched fashion, as treating her pet like a child, and this point in Barbara’s character is a bit heavy-handed. Her most vulnerable, “pathetic” moments occur around her cat, Portia, and its failing health. The one time she is explicit about her sexual attraction to Sheba, when the camera, showing her point of view, pans down to Sheba’s breasts, is after she finds out Portia is terminal. Angered Sheba doesn’t reciprocate, she reveals that she fully understands Sheba’s state of mind when she delivers the ultimate insult, telling her, “You’re not young.” When Portia is put down, Barbara is bewildered and irrational and tries to force Sheba into being with her. She goes to Sheba’s house and screams at her, attempting to pull her away from her family exactly when she is trying to reconnect with them.

To Barbara, this final betrayal marks the end of their friendship, as she buries not only her cat, but the silver frame Sheba had given her. Having become completely unhinged, Barbara now wants to possess Sheba and become the only thing in her life, as Sheba is in Barbara’s. With this goal, she reveals Sheba’s relationship with Connolly.
The overwhelming solitariness of Barbara’s life is contrasted with Sheba’s warm family evening, through crosscutting between them, counting down the last moments of Sheba’s happiness. When the affair is revealed, Sheba’s house is swarmed by the media, and her family rejects her. With no one else left, she has to call Barbara and rely on her friendship when she has nothing else.

Sheba, in her punk make-up, discovers the journal

Alone in Barbara’s apartment, Sheba tries to convince herself that she is still young and attractive, by applying punk make-up, finally visually becoming the teenage girl she had felt like.
As she sits, considering herself in the mirror, she discovers ripped pages from Barbara’s diary and, furious and scared, she begins to search for it. The film cuts between Barbara innocently shopping for their new life and Sheba discovering her obsessions and manipulations.
In the end, Sheba returns home to talk with her husband and rebuild her family, while Barbara sits with her new notebook, speculating on the life she could have lived with Sheba. Time passes and Barbara meets a new woman and begins her predatory advances all over again.

Barbara makes a new friend and the story begins again

Notes on a Scandal is an interesting film to look at through a lens of age, as it portrays elderly and middle-aged women being driven to manipulate each other and those around them by their fear of growing old and being (or feeling) alone. It is complicated in its depiction of lesbianism, its suggestion that a teenage boy is responsible for seducing his teacher, and its often cliched presentation of an elderly woman as a spinster worthy of pity.

Elizabeth Kiy has a degree in journalism with a minor in film from Carleton University. She lives in Toronto, Ontario and is currently working on a novel.

10 Statements ‘Shakespeare In Love’ Makes About Women’s Rights

Shakespeare In Love Poster
Shakespeare In Love is one of those films that gets a lot of hate from critics and movie buffs. Its crime? Beating Saving Private Ryan for the Best Picture Academy Award. Funny, I didn’t know that when the Academy makes a decision you disagree with, it somehow instantly makes the winning film terrible. The Academy makes terrible decisions all the time – but that’s a problem with the voters, not the films they choose. At any rate, I think another reason why this film gets an enormous amount of hate is because it’s a romantic comedy. A CHICK FLICK, OH MY GOD! And yet, this supposed ‘Chick Flick’ was directed by a man, written by men (including Tom Stoppard, a playwright most famous for Rozencrantz & Gildenstern Are Dead) and with a cast (for historical reasons) mostly populated by men. 

And yet, oddly enough, this film is pretty feminist. The rights and roles of women have come a very, very long way since the 1590s, and yet this film shows us the major societal problems that occur when women are denied agency. The lack of rights given to the film’s heroine, Viola DeLesseps, seem needlessly cruel and puritanical to modern standards. However, Queen Elizabeth I’s reign should be seen as an important time in feminist history. Not only did she prove to England, and the world, that a woman could rule and be a highly capable leader on her own without a husband, she brought England into a Golden Age. Elizabeth I is thus used in this film as a symbol of the kinds of heights women can achieve if they are only given the opportunity.

What this shows me is that if feminists keep fighting for women’s (and LGBTQ, and POC) rights, future generations will also look back on our era and see our as of yet denied rights the same way we view the rights denied women in the Renaissance era. The things we have been fighting for will be considered a given. Progress is only a future away.

By showing the major societal flaws that occur when women are denied agency, here are 10 statements that Shakespeare In Love makes on Women’s Rights:
Shakespeare kisses Viola as Thomas Kent
1. Women were not allowed to be actors: The first major conflict of the film is Viola’s longing to be an actor. She adores Shakespeare’s plays and reveres poetry above all. But it was the law that only men can appear on stage as actors in plays; it was seen as lewd and obscene for women to act. This is one of those aspects of Elizabethan society that seem positively absurd by modern standards. Could you imagine our movie industry today if every female character was played by crossdressing men and prepubescent boys? And yet, some vestiges of this type of law still remain – women are still seen as the gatekeepers of morality. It is still a fact that some things are seen as okay for men to do, but obscene and disgusting for women to emulate. Slut vs. stud, anyone? At any rate, there is a blatant women’s rights violation here in that Viola’s true ambition – just to act – is seen as illegal and immoral.

2. Fathers control their daughters’ destinies. As the beautiful daughter of a social climbing merchant, Viola DeLesseps is seen by her father as a mere asset, not his child. He does not even ask her if she desires to be married, nor does he tell her that he has decided her future for her behind her back. He is even contemptuous of her when speaking to her future husband, and blatantly bribes the Earl of Wessex to marry her: “Is she obedient?” “As any mule in Christendom. But if you are the man to ride her, there are rubies in the saddlebag.” Marriage at this time, at least for nobility/aristocracy was seen more as a business or political transaction, and love is never considered.
3. Husbands control their wives even before they’re married. Lord Wessex is not a nice guy. At the DeLesseps’ party, Wessex refers to Viola as “my property” before their engagement is even official. He threatens Shakespeare’s life for admiring Viola – he is extremely possessive of her, and Viola does not even know yet that she is to marry him. He later starts ordering Viola around, throwing screaming fits if she dares to be late. Viola’s unguarded contempt of Wessex, and her later escape from their wedding carriage to see the play, show that she is strong-willed, and not at all likely to be the submissive bride he was hoping for. Viola is thus pushing the limits of freedom that are available to her in defiance of the arranged marriage.
4. Women are not allowed to make their own choices of marriage. The pain that Viola’s arranged marriage causes serves as the other major conflict of the film. Viola can never marry Shakespeare. Even if he were not married with children, he is poor, and playwrights/actors are seen as the amongst the lowest class people in London. As the daughter of a rich merchant, she would never be allowed to marry so far beneath her station. Her father has bought the Earl of Wessex so his grandchildren will be nobility – she is not even given the choice as to whether she may have children or not. It is Viola’s duty to follow her father’s wishes – she does not get any choice at all. She also knows that were she to defy Wessex, Queen Elizabeth would know the cause, and execute Shakespeare for it, as Elizabeth has given her official consent to the marriage. 
5. Women are expected to be submissive and humble. The Earl of Wessex must get the Queen’s consent to marry, so Viola is to appear at court before her. Wessex thus demands that she be “submissive, modest, grateful and brief” when she is presented to the Queen. He is in effect asking Viola to defy everything that she feels inside just so Lord Wessex can increase his personal fortune. Because she is an actor, she initially behaves as he requests, but when she impulsively defends the ability of plays/poetry to represent the truth and nature of love, she actually impresses Elizabeth enough for her to officiate a wager between Lord Wessex (who denies that plays have this power) and a disguised Shakespeare. The ironic subtext of Wessex’s demands is that he is expecting Viola to behave as would please a man of that time, forgetting that Elizabeth is first and foremost a woman.
Viola and Shakespeare as Romeo & Juliet
6. Women are seen as possessions. As mentioned earlier, Lord Wessex refers to Viola as “my property” before their engagement has even become official. Her father compares her to a mule, and vulgarly makes a double entendre about “riding” her to Lord Wessex. Lord Wessex also goes into a murderous rage and is intensely jealous that William Shakespeare has won Viola’s love. The only thing that he shows pleasure in is when he believes that Shakespeare (who he thinks is Christopher Marlowe) has died. His power is such that he can threaten Shakespeare’s life, in public, in front of multiple witnesses who are friends of his, without fear of repercussion – Shakespeare covets that which belongs to Wessex. But the women in this story know better. On Viola’s wedding day, both her Nurse and her mother are weeping – not for joy, but for knowing that the men of the age control Viola’s destiny.
7. Consent is seen as optional. There is a very strong contrast between Lord Wessex and William Shakespeare in how they approach Viola as a lover. When Wessex informs Viola that they are to be married, he tells her, “You are allowed to show your pleasure.” He then informs her that he chose her because he was attracted to her lips, and then forces a kiss on her. When she slaps him, he reminds her that she cannot defy her father nor her Queen. In contrast, when Shakespeare and Viola prepare to make love for the first time, he interrupts her to make sure that she truly does consent to sex with him: “Wait! You’re still a maid, and perhaps as mistook in me as I was mistook in Thomas Kent.” “Are you the author of the plays of William Shakespeare?” “I am.” “Then kiss me again, for I am not mistook.” The true and ideal nature of love is for both parties to enthusiastically consent to physical pleasure – it is quite telling that the poor playwright respects the agency of women far more than the rich Earl does.
8. Virginity is seen as a prize to be won. When Viola is presented to Queen Elizabeth, she detects that something is different about her, and correctly surmises that she has fallen in love and lost her virginity since the last time she saw her. She tells Lord Wessex: “Have her, then. But you are a lordly fool. She’s been plucked since I saw her last, and not by you. It takes a woman to know it.” Notably, she is not implying that Wessex is a fool for marrying a non-virgin, but for marrying a woman that will never love him. This above all makes Wessex murderously jealous. And yet, Viola too sees her lost virginity as something that was precious: “I loved the writer and gave up the prize for a sonnet.” She has no regrets about her love affair with Shakespeare, but also knows that Lord Wessex is not likely to forgive her for emotionally and physically loving anyone but him.
9. Elizabeth I is sympathetic to Viola’s situation. Viola was recruited to play Juliet when the teenage boy actor’s voice had suddenly broken, and the Master of the Revels was intending to arrest all of the actors for knowingly allowing a woman to act onstage. Elizabeth I was watching the play in disguise. She comes to Viola’s rescue, and decides to pass her off as her pseudonym, Thomas Kent: “The Queen of England does not attend exhibitions of public lewdness. So something is out of joint. Come here, Master Kent. Let me look at you. … Yes, the illusion is remarkable. And your error, Mr. Tilney, is easily forgiven. But I know something of a woman in a man’s profession. Yes, by God, I do know about that.” Her last statement is incredibly powerful when related to how this film interprets women’s rights. She, more than anyone else in that era, knows what it is like to be someone who has all the power in the world, and yet none of it at the same time. She later reflects on the powers she does not have: “Why, Lord Wessex. Lost your wife so soon?” “Indeed, I am a bride short, and my ship sails for the new world on the evening tide. How is this to end?” “As stories must when love’s denied — with tears, and a journey. Those whom God has joined in marriage, not even I can put asunder. Master Kent. Lord Wessex, as I foretold, has lost his wife in the playhouse. Go make your farewells, and send her out. It’s time to settle accounts.”

10. Gender is but a performance. One of the more interesting subtextual elements of this film is how it chooses to approach gender. Most obviously, Viola convincingly played two male parts at the same time – that of her pseudonym, Thomas Kent, and as Romeo Montague. She would never have been discovered if she had not made love with Shakespeare in a place where they could be spied on. She binds her breasts when playing Thomas, which is a common practice used by transgender men. The laws requiring that only men can be actors cause another layer of representation of gender – older men must play older women, and prepubescent boys play young women. They do not show shame or discomfort at being made to crossdress – it is a just part to play, just like all gender is an instinctive societal role that is played. In the end, when Shakespeare immortalizes Viola as the heroine of his next play, Twelfth Night, that play eventually becomes famous for its metacommentary on the nature of gender and theatre itself: Viola is a female character who masquerades as a man, but is played by a young man masquerading as a woman. A man plays a woman playing a man. The lines of gender are blurred – even in Shakespeare’s time he knew that there’s no such thing as the gender binary.
This film deserves to be loved again. Its producers may have bought its many Academy Awards (though I don’t think anyone is going to argue about Judi Dench’s win) but that does not invalidate the film’s greatness. It is one of the few comedies to win Best Picture, and though it is bittersweet, it is a film that fills me with joy every time I watch it. And anyway, I’m an English major. Loving Shakespeare comes with the territory.

Myrna Waldron is a feminist writer/blogger with a particular emphasis on all things nerdy. She lives in Toronto and has studied English and Film at York University. Myrna has a particular interest in the animation medium, having written extensively on American, Canadian and Japanese animation. She also has a passion for Sci-Fi & Fantasy literature, pop culture literature such as cartoons/comics, and the gaming subculture. She maintains a personal collection of blog posts, rants, essays and musings at The Soapboxing Geek, and tweets with reckless pottymouthed abandon at @SoapboxingGeek. 

Guest Post: ‘Skyfall’: It’s M’s World, Bond Just Lives in It

M (Judi Dench) in Skyfall


Warning: Spoilers ahead!

For fifty years, James Bond movies have varied wildly in quality, but not quantities. There’s always been plenty of punching, driving, drinking, smooth-talking, and seducing. This year’s release, Skyfall, features the fetching Bérénice Lim Marlohe and a blond-mopped Javier Bardem. But director Sam Mendes has done something different with his first punt at the series. While Bond still gets up to his usual japes, he’s not the centre of the film. Instead, Mendes has made a $150 million action blockbuster about a 77-year-old woman. It is her choices, not Bond’s, that shape the fates of those around her. Dame Judi Dench’s M is Skyfall’s steely heart.
You’d need a bulldozer to excavate the sexism generated by half a century’s worth of Bonds. But in his world, M is the single authority figure and the one woman who doesn’t start thinking with her knickers the moment he smirks at her. Not that their relationship is devoid of sexual undertones. Naomie Harris is capable as the lovely field agent Eve. But she and Daniel Craig don’t have any thing like the spark that he generates with M.
Allegedly inspired by Dame Stella Rimington, Director General of Britain’s MI5 in the mid-90s, Dench made her Bond debut in1995’s Goldeneye. Pierce Brosnan’s cocky Bond was properly introduced with her withering put-down, “I think you’re a sexist misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War.” It became one of the movie’s signature lines, establishing the tone of M’s relationship with her most difficult employee.

M (Judi Dench) in Skyfall

Skyfall’s opening sequence shows us M in action. She’s directing a mission in Turkey where Bond gets shot, presumed killed, on a fluffed order from her command. He chooses to stay dead and takes off to a beach to drink and sulk. It’s only the sight of M’s office under siege that lures him back to London. MI6 has been bombed, and its director is clearly the target. M returns to her house late at night, to discover Bond has dropped in to announce his resurrection. She is grumpy, frustrated, and exhilarated by 007’s return. He’s taciturn and flippant, but it says it all that she is his first port of call. She concludes their first scene together by throwing him out, snapping “You’re not bloody sleeping here!”
Mendes has worked with Dench before, directing her onstage in The Cherry Orchard. His camera lovingly dwells on her magnificently non-Botoxed features and silver hair. Unlike most directors, he doesn’t try to hide her slight 5’1 stature. There are many shots of her framed by large empty rooms, looking like a small black-clad anchor.
M’s nemesis turns out to be Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem), a former agent of hers, presumed dead. His experience was markedly similar to Bond’s at the start of the film. Abandoned by MI6 to preserve an operation, Silva endured torture and re-emerged as the leader of a terrorist cartel. Along with Bond, he could see their sacrifice by M as testimony to her fierce loyalty to her country. Only one of them chooses to. It’s not the one with the stupid hair.

L-R: James Bond (Daniel Craig), M (Judi Dench) and Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem) in Skyfall

Silva placed his trust in M, and she – according to his warped understanding of the game – betrayed him as a protector. You’d think building yourself up as a globe trotting mercenary would satisfy his wounded pride. But he nurses a vendetta against “the old woman”. Bardem doesn’t leave much to linger in the subtext with his predatory gasps of “Mother!” He is obsessive, inescapable, and possessed of the seemingly unlimited resources available to a Bond villain. When his six foot bulk looms over her it is as grotesque and terrifying as the Queen Alien going after Newt.
It is Silva’s similarities with Bond that makes him such an effective bad guy, crowned by his fixation on M. Together they make a combative threesome that would thrill Hitchcock or Buñuel. Silva attempts to pit the two of them against each other, revealing to Bond that M lied to him about his fitness for fieldwork. It’s a critically flawed tactic. Silva assumes that because many of their strengths and weaknesses run parallel, Bond will read M’s deceit as another symbolic death blow. Bond, of course,has never been averse to telling lies to get his way.
Perhaps that’s why M’s order to shoot in Turkey ultimately brought them closer. M’s failing made her more relatable to Bond, a master of duplicity, and someone who has spent significant amounts of celluloid treating people as if they’re disposable. Skyfall shamelessly draws on the Oedipus myth. Silva and Bond are wayward sons killed by and drawn back to the maternal figure. No wonder Q always hides in the agency
basement.
As Silva closes in to MI6, there are several forces working against its leader. One of them is Gareth Mallory, Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee. After the disaster in Turkey where Bond gets shot, he summons M to gently broach the subject of dignified retirement. She tells him in so many words to suck it and promptly exits. Mallory’s left hind wearing an expression of resigned affection. It’s not so different to how M has sometimes looked at Bond.

M (Judi Dench) in Skyfall
Mallory turns out to be more chivalrous than could be expected from a policy wonk. When M’s being raked over the coals by a stroppy MP (Helen McCrory in full Medusa mode), he reclaims the floor for her rebuttal. She rewards this with a floor-clearing defence rich in Tennyson and sass. We don’t get to see the pupils of his
eyes form into little love hearts before they get rudely interrupted by Silva’s gunfire. Mallory plights his troth to M by diving in front of a bullet. He goes on to support the comprehensively unofficial plan Bond hatches with Q (Ben Whishaw) and Tanner (Rory Kinnear) to smuggle her away from London.
Bond takes M to his childhood home in Scotland, and in case anyone missed the portentous meaning, we get a short speech about orphans en route. The Skyfall of the title turns out to be the unloved manor home of his youth. There she meets Kincade (Albert Finney). He is the gameskeeper and the man who taught a young James how to shoot. Within minutes of meeting M he’s macking on her, which makes us wonder what else Bond picked up from him.
L-R: James Bond (Daniel Craig) and M (Judi Dench) in Skyfall

Finney is comparable to Rory Kinnear’s Tanner, M’s right hand in MI6. In their scenes with her they demonstrate loyalty to M – or as Kincade calls her, Emily – without question. It’s different from the give-and-take between Bond and M.
Skyfall shows us M in the field, deftly assembling DIY cluster bombs and wielding a gun. But it is only to Bond that she shows vulnerability, and vice versa. Whatever the filmmakers try to make her stand in for – Queen, Country, Mother, Lover, Rosebud – the best part of M and Bond’s relationship is what exists just beyond their mutual snarking. By the end of the film, Dench can sag into an old chair and look tired and worn, admitting to her agent that she’s made big mistakes. Together, they have half a minute of screen time to be more mortal than James Bond usually is allowed to be.
By the end of the movie, she dies in his arms. They had shared something notably missing from their interactions with the other characters: a deep abiding respect and trust. Her legacy lives on, in the form of a ceramic bulldog and another totem of  loyalty – Mallory, newly installed as M’s heir.
——
Margaret Howie cheerfully lives with her love of Robert Mitchum and her feminist sensibility in South London. Her favourite Bond is Roger Moore, because he’s the only movie star with a name that is also a bad pick-up line.

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

Growing up, my little brother was an enormous James Bond fan. He rewatched the films repeatedly on video; he developed an encyclopedic knowledge of all the villains, plots, and gadgets from reading his glossy making-of books; and, in an anecdote our mother never tires of retelling, he wanted to be Bond “without the kissing.”

Thanks to his enthusiasm, and everyone else’s moderate enjoyment, each new Brosnan Bond film was cause for a Family Outing to the cinema (and we have never been big on Family Cinema Outings; our taste in films is too disparate). For me, this meant a couple hours’ quality nap time. I snoozed happily through Tomorrow Never Dies, The World Is Not Enough, and Die Another Day.
Me, watching a James Bond movie, 1997-2002.
Casino Royale, of course, famously upset some Bond fans who felt it was too serious, too Bourne-y, and unfaithful to the sense of fun that had always previously characterized the series. And maybe it is indeed a complete break with the rest of the franchise, because it’s the first Bond film that kept me awake for its entire (bladder-busting, 145-minute) runtime.
Bond is a British institution, and every new film is quite the cultural event back in Blighty. It’s a slightly different perspective from this side of the Atlantic, but in some ways the US is an appropriate place to be for the release of Skyfall: director Sam Mendes is a Brit, but he’s most famous for a film with “American” in the title. This latest offering turns out to be not only self-reflexive on the half-century-old Bond film franchise itself, but also a somewhat disturbing meditation on Britain’s role in the modern world.
Before I get into a geopolitical reading of the film, let’s talk feminism: this is NOT a good film for its women characters. The Craig Bond films have been weird about women in general. They don’t seem to be quite sure whether or not they want to get away from the traditional Bond treatment of women as interchangeable totty for 007’s shagging pleasure. On the one hand, Casino Royale won feminist plaudits for recapitulating Dr No‘s famous Ursula-Andress-rising-from-the-sea moment with a ripped Daniel Craig in the role of Anadyomeneeye-candy. On the other hand, Skyfall features Bond walking in on a former child sex slave in her shower, and that is objectively more squicktastic than most Bond seductions.
Even the one where he shags Honor Blackman straight.
Plus, without getting too far into spoiler territory, by the end of the film the role of women in the MI6 workplace is not exactly inspiring for one’s feminist sensibilities.
SPOILER: this is the final shot of MI6 at the end of Skyfall.
Having said all of which, the film does focus significantly on one female character. Dame Judi is of course a British icon, and – particularly in the wake of the Olympics opening ceremony stunt – it’s not a huge leap to see her M as representative of the queen (and, by extension, the UK as a whole): she’s talked about obsessively as a “little old woman” who holds people inexplicably in her thrall and power, and unfailing loyalty to her is presented as an irrational but ultimately very British characteristic.
I should make it clear that I am not a fan of monarchies, empires, or jingoism, and that my own British nationality is so compromised by my third-culture childhood that it doesn’t really have abstract, personal, emotional, or ontological relevance for me. As such, I don’t care much for the endless, usually racist and Islamophobic debates over what British identity IS or whether the Royal Family is relevant(IMO: this, and no).
However, I do think that there is a very good reason for the continuance of these discussions, and it is this: Britain has never really bothered to process the loss of its empire.
By this I mean both that Britain has failed to properly grapple with or repent for its imperial sins, and that it has not yet seriously reconsidered its place in the current global milieu. The former is the more difficult task, and I still don’t see anyone trying to do anything about it; on the contrary, imperialism, via western neoliberalism, looks to be reinscribed through the very public conversation on modern Britain’s role that has arisen in the past few years. Between the Royal wedding, the Jubilee, and the London Olympics, Britain has begun to gain something of a sense of itself in the 21stcentury, and I don’t know if that’s entirely a good thing.
The British brain. See, it does too exist.
21st-century Britishness is precarious and conflicted, but still deeply troublesome (and still, I think, built on a feeling of entitlement to control others). Skyfall beats you over the head with its theme of whether the Good Old Ways are useful in the modern world, but that’s because this is a question that has plagued Britain since at least WWII. Bond first meets young tech-savvy Q in front of Turner’s Fighting Temeraire, and the obsessive harping on the motif of Old vs. New doesn’t get any subtler, between the callbacks to Bond movies past and the, well, explicit conversations about whether the old ways are useful in the modern world.
And yet the film has a striking caginess about the real world. The London Underground hijinks almost entirely avoid evoking 7/7. The villain of the piece is a former British intelligence agent with a grievance about his mistreatment at British hands, but he’s played by Javier Bardem; and, while many of the world’s countries have legitimate grievances about their mistreatment at British hands, Spain is waaaaay down the list. Giving the villain a purely personal grievance against M allows for a paralleled symbolism: as M represents imperial Britain, so Bardem’s character represents any or all of the formerly colonized territories of the world.
The film chooses not to engage with the perspective of the colonized. Bardem’s desire for revenge on M is a Very Bad Thing, and Bond takes M “back in time” to defend her. Bear in mind that I’ve been reading M as a symbol of the British Empire, and you’ll realize that I do not love where this is going.
***Spoiler ho***
Bond loses M, but another M arises to take her place. The Union Jack still flies over London. MI6 still operates. The new M still has missions for Bond, offered in front of another painting, this time of an intact fleet of ships. The Good Old Way of territorial imperialism may be gone, but the same colonizing work can still be done – in newer, slicker, more insidious ways.
 
The top-hatted octopus-man is James Bond. Okay, it’s not a perfect metaphor.


Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

Notes on ‘Notes on a Scandal’

     
     Moviegoers seeking a simple, erotic film laden with illicit trysts between a teacher and student may be left unsatisfied with Notes on a Scandal. While an affair between a teacher, Sheba (Cate Blanchett), and high school student, Steven (Andrew Simpson) serves as a definitive catalyst, Notes largely centers around the ambiguous relationship between Sheba and Barbara (Dame Judi Dench), a seasoned teacher at the same London comprehensive school.

     Sheba is free-spirited and idealistic about her ability to make a difference in her pupils’ lives. Having been in the education system for decades, Barbara is slightly less optimistic. Despite their different schools of thought, when Barbara offers the fresh-faced Sheba disciplinary advice, a hopeful friendship develops between the two. Unknowingly, Sheba has consented to serve as a replacement for one of Jennifer, Barbara’s former friend who left under unclear circumstances.       
     Notes is a film that can be continuously (and pointlessly) picked apart in search of a clear protagonist and antagonist. Their relationship mirrors Newton’s third law: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. When Sheba is guilty of infidelity and statutory rape, Barbara also becomes guilty of blackmail. When Sheba sees the best in others, Barbara does as well. When one woman keeps secrets, so does the other. Neither woman can be exclusively deemed saint or sinner.

     In cinematography, perhaps this is the highest possible form of feminism. Despite featuring a promiscuous adult and older woman, Notes does not typecast female characters into unrealistic “slut”, “wife material”, and “old bag” categories. Sheba’s husband, children, and paramour are rarities on-screen. In fact, upon his discovery, Sheba reassures her husband that the affair has nothing to do with him. There is minimal focus on Steven and Sheba’s sexual acts. Viewers are forced to wade through action, subtext, and their own gut feelings in search of a clear answer that refuses to reveal itself. 

     In a memorable scene where Barbara smokes a cigarette while bathing, the following journal entry serves as a voiceover: 

“People like Sheba think they know what it is to be lonely. Bot of the drip, drip of the long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. What it’s like to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the launderette. Or to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor’s hand send a jolt of longing straight to your groin. Of this, Sheba and her like have no clue.”

 While Barbara stagnates in her lonely past, Sheba is shrouded in the pleasantry of hers. In a parallel scene, she listens to Siouxsie and the Banshees while applying thick black eyeliner as her youthful lover stands near.

     However, when Steven dons a hat that she’s made for her son, Sheba snaps. The children, the son with Down Syndrome and the adolescent daughter, come into focus. The illusion of the past becomes shattered.

     Just as an aside, Juno Temple—the young actor who plays Sheba’s daughter—aces her role as a petulant daughter. For those interested in intense, incidentally homoerotic dramas about academia, loneliness and sexual taboo, her role in Notes on a Scandalevokes her performance in Cracks.)

     For those seasoned lesbian subtext detectives who—like me—have religiously watched Xena: Warrior Princess and Rizzoli and Isles, there is significant evidence in favor of Barb wanting more than passionate friendship from her colleague:
  1. In her initial journal entries about Sheba, Barb expresses her belief that she is “the one”; that they could become “companions.”
  2. During a moment where Sheba is stressed, Barb runs her fingers up and down Sheba’s hands and arms, reminiscing on a time in her schooling where she and her female peers “used to stroke each other.” It makes Sheba uncomfortable.
  3. When Sheba discovers Barbara’s diaries during the height of her statutory rape scandal, she yells, “So what it it, Bar? You want to roll around the floor like lovers? You want to fuck me, Barbara?” (She also calls “Virginia-Friggin’ Woolf”, yet there are arguably more similarities between Barb and the protagonist of Radclyffe Hall’s “Well of Loneliness.”)
  4.  Barbara is pre-occupied with gold stars.

When picking apart subtext, last names are also relevant. Barbara Covett covets Sheba Hart, who has a lot of heart for her students, including Steven Connelly, who consher into believing that his feelings are much more than pubescent lust.

     When Barb accusingly asks Sheba while she continues her relationship with Steven even after Barb blackmails her, Sheba responds, “Secrets can be seductive.”  Ultimately, Sheba is hardly the only one guilty of infidelity. Barb’s journals—which inevitably certify her as insane in Sheba’s mind—are well-hidden from her previous and current “companion,” and document her every manipulative action and thought. 

Barbara’s one true love is fittingly ambiguous in gender and sexuality: Paper. Even while pursuing Sheba, she still carries on an affair with the notebooks that inevitably speeds up the destruction of her connection with Sheba.

Amid all the ambiguity, only one this is definite: Despite wanting all of her friend, there are still parts of herself which Barbara is unwilling to unveil.

***

While she doesn’t quite have the accent, Sarah Fonseca’s been known to accidently type ‘ya’ll’ in her articles. Thank g-d for copyeditors.
     Sarah runs frantically between writing and feminist club meetings on her university’s campus. Fortunately, those two spheres collide more than one would think. She is heavily involved with National Organization for Women, Creative Writing Club, and Random Acts of Poetry at Georgia Southern University.
     Sarah is a staff writer for Georgia Southern’s George-Anne newspaper, and occasionally contributes to other publications within the community. Her fiction has been published in The Q Review and recognized by the Harbuck Scholarship committee.
      Sarah is currently applying for fellowship with Lambda Literary, and plans to present her paper entitled On the Queering of Hair at next year’s National Women’s Studies Association Conference. 

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Stephanie’s Picks:

Sundance, Women In Film Promote Female Filmmakers from Boston.com

Naomi Watts, Judi Dench–The Women of J. Edgar from ClickTheCity.com

The Rise of the Female-Led Action Film from The Atlantic

The Bigger Picture: What Happens When We Find “The Line” as Viewers? from HitFix.com [Trigger Warning for discussion of rape]

Top Ten Kickass Movie Women from Time

Amber’s Picks:

Five Female-Directed Films that Deserved Oscar Nominations from Canonball

Bridesmaids‘ Melissa McCarthy: Hilarious Performance, Not Oscar Worthy from Time

It’s a Good Time to Be a Black Woman, Except on TV from Jezebel

I Write Letters: Dear Parks and Recreation from Shakesville

Three Women Red Tails Left Out from The Root

Megan‘s Picks:

The Oscar Noms: It Sucks To Be a Female Filmmaker Part 2 from Women and Hollywood

What Bigelow Effect? The Number of Women Directors in Hollywood Falls to 5 Percent from Women and Hollywood

5 Black Actresses Who Deserve an Oscar from Clutch Magazine 

What Charlize Theron Doesn’t Get About Black Hollywood from The Daily Beast

What have you been reading–or writing–this week? Leave your links in the comments!