Julie Delpy – Bitch Flicks

10 Women-Directed Films for Halloween

Are spine-chilling films always in demand because they help us dialogue with and about death? … In the past year, I’ve been focused on seeing films directed by women because I participated in the “52 Films by Women” initiative.

This guest post written by Laura Shamas originally appeared at Venus in Orange. It is cross-posted with permission.

I’m not a horror film fan per se, but I’ve seen some scary, eerie stuff through the years, and Halloween is always a good time to view them. Are spine-chilling films always in demand because they help us dialogue with and about death? C.G. Jung once wrote: “Death is the hardest thing from the outside and as long as we are outside of it. But once inside you taste of such a completeness and peace and fulfillment that you don’t want to return.”

In the past year, I’ve been focused on seeing films directed by women because I participated in the “52 Films by Women” initiative. The 10 films detailed below (for adults, not kids!) have strong psychological components, too. I’ve divided them into well-known Halloween-ish folklore categories: monsters, strange illness, haunted house (ghosts), killer, losing one’s head (lost), witches, and vampires.

MONSTER

1. The Babadook (2014)
Written and directed by Jennifer Kent

This film is about a lonely widow, her young son, and their journey through grief. A mysterious book suddenly appears in their home, and launches a trajectory of events related to a home-invading monster. What a fascinating portrayal of aspects of motherhood in this film. The tone and cinematography are original; the key performances are strong. The conclusion is truly inventive, and, for me, unexpected. I can’t wait to see Kent’s next film. (Note: female protagonist. Available through streaming services, like Amazon and Netflix).

STRANGE ILLNESS

2. The Fits (2015)
Written and directed by Anna Rose Holmer

This film took my breath away. It centers on the extraordinary performance of Royalty Hightower as Toni, an eleven-year-old tomboy who hangs out with her older brother in the gym. When an all-girl dance troupe rehearses in the same community center, Toni becomes fascinated by the aspiring performers, and joins them. Then a strange sort of “illness” descends on the girls. As I watched the film, Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible came to mind; I’ve examined the film version of it before. I don’t want to give anything away, but the ending of The Fits was revelatory and mesmerizing. It involves a different sort of fear of the unknown and a transformation, but with tremendous female resonance. I eagerly await more of Holmer’s work as well. (Female protagonist, available on streaming platforms.)

HAUNTED HOUSE (GHOSTS)

3. A Cry from Within (2014)
Written by Deborah Twiss, co-directed by Twiss and Zach Miller

This is a ghost story with a particular feminine twist. Twiss stars as a married mother with two young kids. The film examines what happens when a city family moves into a drafty old mansion in a small town. This is a familiar set-up, and some tropes from the “haunted house” genre are used here predictably. Yet, as the film gradually turns towards its true theme, it held my interest: a spirited quest to heal a gruesome family history. Perhaps some of it is melodramatic, but I appreciated the different sort of twist in the third act; it concludes with a strong depiction of the “shadow” side of motherhood and ensuing generational repercussions. (Female protagonist, available on streaming platforms.)

4. The Invitation (2015)
Directed by Karyn Kusama

The film is about Will (Logan Marshall-Green), a grief-stricken man haunted by a past tragedy that occurred in his former house in the Hollywood Hills. As it begins, Will and his girlfriend hit a coyote in the rain on the way to a dinner party, hosted by his ex-wife and her new husband — a foreshadowing of what’s to come. At first it seems as if it’s going to be like The Big Chill: a gathering of old friends reminiscing, catching up, talking about what’s new. But then Will’s ex-wife and her new husband show a movie clip before dinner that sets the eerie tone of what’s to come. Let’s just say that if you’re invited to a dinner party in the Hills, this film will make you reconsider showing up. The house becomes a character of sorts, and old memories emerge like ghosts in flashbacks as terror reigns. (Male protagonist, available on streaming platforms.)

5. The Silent House (2011)
Co-directed by Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, written by Lau

This 2011 film, an American version of a 2010 Uruguayan film titled La Casa Muda, is another “Haunted House” type of film with a twist at the end. Based on a “true story” from its Uruguayan origins, the movie is seemingly filmed in a single continuous shot, which gives it a lot of tension. The Silent House follows Elizabeth Olson as Sarah, a young woman who, along with her father and uncle, are moving out of a dark old family home near a shore, and encounter strange noises, specters, old photos that no one should see, and more. Of course, the power is not on. When Sarah’s father is knocked out on a staircase, Sarah knows there’s someone else in the house. The revenge component in the film’s conclusion will resonate with many. (Female protagonist, available to stream on Amazon.)

KILLER

6. The Hitch-Hiker (1953)
Directed by Ida Lupino, written by Lupino, Robert L. Joseph, and Collier Young

As part of this initiative, I’ve tried to catch up on many of Lupino’s films. The Hitch-Hiker is considered the first mainstream film noir feature to be directed by a woman. It varies from standard film noir fare because of its desert locales (as opposed to urban settings). A tale of two American men who are ambushed by a terrifying killer in Mexico, and their attempts to escape danger, the film’s original tagline was: “When was the last time you invited death into your car?” (Male protagonists. You can watch it for free on YouTube here. A version with higher resolution also streams on Amazon.)

LOSING ONE’S HEAD (or LOST)

7. The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza) (2008)
Written and directed by Lucrecia Martel

Made in Argentina, it’s perfectly titled. The film’s ominous psychological atmosphere produces a slow burn sort of scare and a dawning realization as you watch it; it’s not a conventional horror “scream” viewing experience. A strange auto accident on a deserted country road is at the center of a mystery; the protagonist is the driver Veronica or “Vero” to her friends (Maria Onetto), a middle-aged married dentist. We wonder: who or what has been hit? Is the victim okay? As the movie continues, we come to understand the true identity of the Headless Woman. (Female protagonist, available on streaming platforms, including Hulu.)

WITCHES

8. The Countess (2009)
Written and directed by Julie Delpy

Starring Julie Delpy, the film is a bloody biographical account of Hungarian Countess Erzsébet Báthory, who lived from 1560 to 1614. The film depicts the Countess’ fascination with death; even as a young girl, Báthory declared: “…I would have to raise an army to conquer death.” Thematically, this period piece examines the possibility that unrequited love could lead to madness, and that an obsession with youthful appearance could launch serial killings, as the Countess searches for virginal blood as a magical skin elixir. Because of the focus on bloodletting and torture in her story, Báthory became connected to vampirism through legend. But witches figure prominently in the film in several ways: Erzsébet’s estate is successfully run by a witch named Anna Darvulia (played by Anamaria Marinca), who’s also one of the Countess’ lovers; the Countess is cursed by a witch in a key roadside scene that changes her life: “Soon you will look like me”; and later, when she is on trial, Báthory is notably not tried for witchcraft, although she might have been. The ending brings information that forces a reconsideration of all we’ve just seen. (Female protagonist, available to stream on Amazon).

VAMPIRES

9. Near Dark (1987)
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, co-written by Bigelow and Eric Red

I’ve long wanted to catch up on Bigelow’s earlier films, and have watched two so far as part of this initiative. But no Halloween film list is complete without a vampire movie, let alone a vampire Western like this one.

A lesson you learn quickly in Near Dark: never pick up hitchhikers at night in Kansas, Oklahoma or Texas. The movie is campy, bloody and violent; it debuted in October 1987, a part of the 1980’s vampire movie trend. The story revolves around Caleb (Adrian Pasdar), a young cowboy in a small mid-western town who inadvertently becomes part of a car-stealing gang of southern vampires. The frequent tasting of death in the film, and its repeated reverence for nighttime, reminded me again of Jung’s quote about death: “But once inside you taste of such a completeness and peace and fulfillment that you don’t want to return.” The ending of this one also pleasantly surprised me. (Male protagonist, available on DVD.)

10. A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014)
Written and directed by Ana Lily Amirpour

This is a highly stylized, fascinating film. It’s a unique Persian-language film that follows a mysterious vampire figure named The Girl (Sheila Vand) who haunts the rough streets of “Bad City” at night in a chador, and encounters a young gardener named Arash (Arash Mirandi). Arash’s father is a heroin addict and his mother is dead; Arash is under threat from a tough character who keys his car as the film starts, and after that initial sequence, Arash befriends a beautiful stray cat who becomes part of the action. Amirpour’s film is so atmospheric, beautifully shot in black and white. The plot is untraditional; the ending was also unexpected. Some of the images are unforgettable, and the acting is strong. (Male and female lead characters, available via streaming.)

These ten “scary” films richly explore a range of psychological and social issues: grief; the arrival of puberty; abuse and repressed memories; the aging brain; unrequited love and growing old; justice; and becoming an adult. Most have plot surprises at the end, which makes the viewing all the more worthwhile.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

Why The Babadook Is the Feminist Horror Film of the Year
The Babadook: Jennifer Kent on Her Savage Domestic Fairy Tale
Patterns in Poor Parenting: The Babadook and Mommy
“The More You Deny Me, the Stronger I’ll Get”: The Babadook, Mothers, and Mental Illness
The Babadook and the Horrors of Motherhood
The Fits: A Coming-of-Age Story about Belonging and Identity
Male Mask, Female Voice: The Noir of Ida Lupino
9 Pretty Great Lesbian Vampire Movies
Kathyrn Bigelow’s Near Dark: Busting Stereotypes and Drawing Blood
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and Scares Us
Feminist Fangs: The Activist Symbolism of Violent Vampire Women

Laura Shamas is a writer, myth lover, and a film consultant. For more of her writing on the topic of female trios: We Three: The Mythology of Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters. Her website is LauraShamas.com.

Nine Pretty Great Lesbian Vampire Movies

Almost unfailingly exploitative in its portrayal of queer women, this specific sub-genre of film stands alone in a few ways, not the least of which being that the vampires, while murderous and ultimately doomed, are powerful, lonely women, often living their lives outside of society’s rules.

This guest post by Sara Century appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

Vampires. Lesbians. These two things are as intertwined as the stars and the sky, at least in popular fiction. The vampire lesbian sub-genre finds its basis in an unfinished poem by Coleridge 1797-ish, and continuing onward and up to the modern era with entries such as 2010 German film We Are the Night, and beyond. There are hundreds of lesbian vampire stories in the world, and very few of them deviate from the basic plot of the 1872 novella Carmilla by Joseph Le Fanu. You can just read that story and you’ll have the basic gist: lesbian vampire seduces straight woman, is murdered by men. If that sounds like a flimsy plot excuse for violence against women, that’s because that is 1,000 percent what it is. On the other hand, if there’s hundreds of anything, at least a few of them are bound to be good. I personally have a pretty strong love for lesbian vampire films, which, for better or worse, helped me to define my own images of sexuality as a young gay. Almost unfailingly exploitative in its portrayal of queer women, this specific sub-genre of film stands alone in a few ways, not the least of which being that the vampires, while murderous and ultimately doomed, are powerful, lonely women, often living their lives outside of society’s rules. And I love everything about that… except the part where they’re all mass murderers. When there is so little representation of powerful queer women in film, it becomes difficult to fully dismiss the few that exist, even if they are ultimately negative or problematic.

For all these reasons, I felt a need to compile a list of lesbian vampire films that impacted me in some way, or that I found particularly enjoyable to watch. Without further ado, my nine favorite lesbian vampire films.

9. The Moth Diaries – 2011

I liked this one. It’s a little meta, in that the girl is reading and narrating the short story Carmilla while in a movie based on the short story, Carmilla. If you can handle that, you’ll be pretty down with most of this film. There’s no organ music, which is a solid fail on the part of many films, but it’s from a female writer/director team, and I don’t think it gets enough props for being as enjoyable as it is. Lily Cole is impressively creepy as Ernessa, the Carmilla analog of the film. The main character Rebecca is immediately distrustful of Ernessa, but her friend Lucy (yep) falls under Ernessa’s sway. And so on, and so forth. There’s some pretty disturbing stuff in here: suicide features prominently in the story, the general lack of consent during sex scenes that you often see in lesbian vampire movies is definitely in there, and Rebecca makes out with her teacher, which freaks me out more than most of the rest of the movie. My critique would be that, as meta as the story gets, it never really resolves any of the questions it asks itself. There’s little in the way of socially relevent commentary here, which seems odd for a film that immediately opens a gaping hole in the fourth wall and then leaves it there for the entire course of the narrative. That said, I like this film’s self-awareness, and there’s definitely a few creepy moments that are worth the price of admission.

8. Blood and Roses – 1960

This movie makes a lot of “best of” lists, mostly because it was the first lesbian vampire film that explicitly expressed the queerness of its main character in no uncertain terms. We see a lot of what would ultimately become alternately beloved and maligned tropes of the genre: the love triangle, the arty dream sequence in the middle of the narrative, the bizarre similarity of a character to a portrait of a long-dead ancestor, and the sexually confused girlfriend character.

Our vampire Carmilla’s sexual agency, as well as her frustration, are equally compelling. She flirts with her crushes, and is upset by their rejection of her. She feeds on village girls after playing with them like a cat with a mouse. She is clearly doomed from the very moment she first appears onscreen, and yet, for all these reasons, she’s by far the most interesting character in the film.

What Blood and Roses said to me when I watched it as a young queer woman could be a much longer piece of writing, but, briefly, these images were among the first moments of queer visibility in North American cinema. As problematic as they are, they deserve analysis, and they deserve to be considered for their impact on both queer and straight audiences of their time. Besides all that, though, Blood and Roses is a campy and fun horror film from the 1960s, so if that sounds up your alley, definitely check it out.

7. Daughters of Darkness – 1971

In the 1970s, there was a fad in horror films where privileged, angry men with Beatles hair and snappy wardrobes were the main characters of pretty much every single movie. That’s going strong here, where the main character looks exactly like this:

Wowza. Anyway, the real main character is obviously not that guy, but this extremely fictionalized version of Elizabeth Bathory, at this point hundreds of years old, played by the wonderfully over-the-top Delphine Seyrig. Delphine has a respectable history in art house films of the 1970s, and worked with several of the best directors of her day. She seems to have great fun with the hypersexualized Bathory, and the whole film gets much more interesting when she shows up. The beginning of the movie is just the straight couple getting married and talking a lot, so bring on the lesbian vampires, my friends. Can I just say, as messed up as she is, Bathory is just shockingly beautiful through this whole movie. All of her outfits are the best outfits I have ever seen, and she is my style icon from here to eternity. Also perfectly fashionable, her vampire sidekick, whose simple style and bobbed hair are based on the glorious silent film star, Louise Brooks. I’m just letting you know, this movie rules. Persistent themes of the sexually aggressive and sadistic vampire focusing on the confused, flippant blonde woman are in full force here, and I would say this portrayal of the ancient and wicked lesbian vampire character is one of the more fascinating.

6. The Countess – 2009

This film is about Countess Elizabeth Bathory, widely considered to be one of the most sadistic mass murderers of all time. I say “considered to be” because, to be honest, nobody has the slightest damn idea what actually happened there. Was she a mass murderer? Probably? People were not keeping extensive records of this sort of thing in 1610, and, in fact destroyed all evidence of wrongdoing to prevent a scandal. She was of royal blood, and therefore never went to trial. What I’m saying is that all the information currently available surrounding this case is strongly based in rumor. Still, she is the person on whom much of Western World vampire mythology is based on, so if anyone has the right to be on a list about lesbian vampires, it’s the countess. The story follows the legends of what we believe to be true about her life, and carries us all the way through to her bitter end, with the entirely fictional subplot of a doomed affair with a younger man. I wasn’t personally that into the added love story of the film, but it definitely sets up some of the creepiest scenes in the whole movie, so I’ll allow it. This movie was done by Julie Delpy, who both directs and stars as Bathory, like a boss. Honestly, this film is just flat out better made than anything else on the list in concern to production values, budget, and acting skill, so if you’re into watching something less campy and more real, this is the one for you.

5. The Blood Spattered Bride – 1972

This movie starts with one of my least favorite opening scenes of all time, but if you can get through the weird rape fantasy that kicks it off, the feminist commentary actually gets really interesting as the movie goes along. The tale follows two newlyweds, Susan and her nameless husband, who exists not so much as a character, but as a representation of director Vincente Aranda’s perception of the fascist patriarchy. He comes across about as likeable as a fascist patriarchy, too, more or less crying a river every time his wife doesn’t respond to his aggressive sexual advances. A great portion of this film is Susan progressing through the story arc tropes of most major feminist characters of the 1970s: bride, to unhappy bride, to lesbian, to misandrist, to murderer. That said, honestly, I don’t really blame her, because she is literally married to the human embodiment of misogyny. As an audience member, you’ll find yourself rooting for this guy’s death pretty hard I think, so I can’t imagine what it’d be like to be married to him. She literally locks herself in a cage to get away from him, uses quotes from a book to tell him she hates him, and finally flies into a full-out screaming fit that, let’s be real, is not entirely unprovoked. So, when the dreamy and beautiful Carmilla shows up in a totally bizarre scene that I’m not even going to describe right now because you should just watch it, it’s obvious that Susan is about to get straight up seduced. When your options are “man you hate who borderline rapes you a lot” or “ghostly vampire with really pretty eyes that tells you to kill your legitimately terrible husband,” I guess I’d probably go with the latter, too. I mean, let’s be real, the third option of “get the Hell out of there” is the only real option, but if she did that, there’d be no movie, so spree of murder and terror with dreamy girlfriend it is. To the credit of the film, Susan is a very interesting character. She ultimately goes the really wrong direction with it, but her feminist theory begins in a good place. Societal loathing of queer women ultimately causes her to snap when she realizes that, as a lesbian, the world will punish her sexuality and turn her into a pariah. That is a totally legit concerns for 1972. Susan is by far the best and most interesting part of this film, which is otherwise mostly a campy horror film with unsettling moments of sexual violence and the familiar art house dreaminess of most of the films on this list.

4. The Hunger – 1983

The Hunger is one of the more famous entries in the lesbian vampire canon, so, if you’ve seen one movie on this list, the law of averages would imply that it’d be this one. The beginning of this movie finds David Bowie as John Blaylock and Catherine Deneuve as Miriam Blaylock in a goth club watching Bauhaus. They are vampires, swinger vampires. They pick up another Goth couple and kill them with a tiny blade kept inside the ankh (yes, ankh) Miriam keeps around her neck.

It. Is. Nine. Teen. Eighty. Three. As. Fuck. Right. Now.

There’s a lot of cool stuff in this movie. It’s really well shot, Catherine Deneuve is pretty much the greatest actor on the planet, the soundtrack rules, and David Bowie… just, David Bowie. This film also has one of the most famously great lesbian sex scenes in cinema history. Miriam and Susan Sarandon’s character, Dr. Sarah Roberts, hook up for the first time (only time? I don’t know) to the most lesbian song EVER, aka “The Flower Duet” from Léo Delibes’ opera Lakmé. “Sounds like a love song,” says Sarah. “Then I suppose that’s what it is,” says Miriam. You bet it is, Miriam! Moments later, those two are making out. Another slight alteration on the standard lesbian vampire tropes is that Dr. Roberts, the supposed victim of the film, is the one that initiates sex, here, rather than, as we so often see in film, the vampire preying on a human’s naiveté and weakness.

Sticking well within queer tropes, however, Miriam is honestly a real U-Haul vampire, and waits all of 10 seconds after John’s death before she tries to marry Sarah pretty much out of nowhere. We are talking about someone that has an eternity ahead of her that can’t even wait like a month after her husband’s “death” before she starts moving her girlfriend in. Which is cold as Hell, because they were married for something like 300 years. Well, I don’t want to spoil the twists and turns this story takes for y’all, so I guess I’ll cut myself off there, but, more or less, this movie is famous for a reason, and if you’re in the mood to watch a scary film that is just the most ’80s thing you’ve seen in your life, this is likely going to be your best option.

3. Nadja – 1994

I feel like this film gets overlooked by both the vampire crowd as well as the indie crowd, and it’s kind of a shame, since it has all the requirements of being a cult classic. There’s nothing particularly new in this film, but there’s a lot to like about it. The creepy vampire as played by Elina Lowensohn really sells the film. She’s one of my all time faves. The cinematography is really great, and the film looks just stunning in black and white. Especially interesting is the use of a child’s toy camera for some scenes, lending a simple, stylized perspective at key moments. There’s a lot of pretty amusing mid-90s, Generation X style soul-searching from the white, heterosexual couple at the center of the film, as well as some genuinely on point observations on the human condition from the impressively coherent vampires. As many of these films are products of their time, I must say that Nadja is about the most 1994 film you’re liable to watch in your life. Instead of the standard skintight dress fluttering softly in the wind, the female love interest of the vampire is wearing a straight up flannel shirt and jeans, and if she had slight stubble I would definitely mistake her for Kurt Cobain. At certain moments, the film looks and sounds a bit like a music video for a Portishead song, but the aesthetic is pulled off to perfection, and it really works. The overall stylishness of Nadja has only aged for the better in the two decades since its release.

2. Vampyros Lesbos – 1971

This is where I start to get emotional. Vampyros Lesbos features my favorite opening to a film probably ever, with a bizarre shot of the vampire accompanied by noise music as the credits roll, followed immediately by our hero, the vampiric Nadine Carody, doing an erotic dance in a mirror with herself. She kisses herself in the mirror while holding a candlebra, while a blond-haired mannequin watches her. Ultimately, the countess turns, and begins kissing the mannequin, while her future lover Linda Westinghouse looks on, as intrigued as her mustached boyfriend is uncomfortable. The whole time, one of my all-time favorite songs is playing, a dark, dreamy song with an irrestistably basic Hammond organ pre-recorded drumbeat and chilling yet seductive organ sounds. And that is how you start a movie, everyone. You now have my full attention. Vampyros Lesbos is honestly just a flawless victory. It’s over-the-top, set very much with a psychedelic backdrop, and Soledad Miranda is absolutely enchanting as the countess. The comparatively less interesting “girlfriend” character Linda Westinghouse is really great in this movie. Her acting is stilted, but it works perfectly for this agonized and hestitant character, who is as attracted as she is repelled by the beautiful vampire. What I’m getting at here is that Vampyros Lesbos is a great movie (greatest movie?), and well worth your time if you’re a horror fan, a lesbian fan, an art house fan, or basically anyone (who is over the age of 18). Yes, this film is just as exploitative to queer women as any other lesbian vampire movie, but if you just focus on the intriguing, mysterious countess and her compelling monolgues, the brilliant soundtrack, and the beautifully shot and haunting love scenes between Linda and Nadine, you’ll do OK.

1. Fascination – 1979

The No. 1 spot is a tie between Vampyros Lesbos and Fascination, because I definitely love both equally, but loving things equally is not how internet listicles work, so Fascination it is. I’ve seen dozens of lesbian vampire films, but there’s something about this one. It doesn’t just slightly deviate from the tropes, it starts with a weird premise, introduces multiple tropes, and then just goes completely off the rails with them, until it concludes on a note that could only be described as utterly bizarre. To me, adding art house weirdness to horror films just makes a good thing even better, so I find Fascination to be delightful, haunting, and aesthetically beautiful. The movies of Jean Rolin are often about vampires, definitely well within the realm of art house cinema, and always highly eroticized. Fascination in specific has a just bananas plot trajectory: it pretty much starts with a whole lot of lesbian sex, which then becomes straight sex, which then goes back to being lesbian sex. They’re kind of vampires, or not? One of the main characters terrorizes the countryside with a scythe, there’s a coven of witches, someone gets devoured alive… it is goddamned epic. I especially love the characters, despite how weird and evil they all are. I particularly love the character of Eva, who is very much a problematic favorite, in that pretty much every action she takes in the film ends with her committing murder at some point. The scenery is gorgeous, the cinematography is simple and beautiful, the actors seem like they’re having fun… it’s all in all a perfect 1970s horror film.

Sara Century is a multimedia performance artist, and you can follow her work at saracentury.wordpress.com.

The Flattening of Celine: How ‘Before Midnight’ Reduces a Feminist Icon

This is a guest post by Molly McCaffrey.

Before Midnight movie poster

There are numerous reasons why Before Midnight—the third film in the Richard Linklater Before Sunrise/Before Sunset trilogy—is an important film.

Jesse and Celine in Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight

It’s an important film first and foremost because it’s a film about grown-ups doing grown-up things. The main characters—Celine (played by Julie Delpy) and Jesse (played by Ethan Hawke)—are in their forties raising two kids together, so the film revolves around the kind of issues such people face: how to be good parents, how to balance the needs of their careers, how to keep the spark alive in their relationship, how to deal with the aging process, etc.

Celine, Jesse, and daughters in the car

Thankfully the film doesn’t ever give into the gross-out humor that seems to almost be a requirement now for other movies about middle-age—This Is 40, Funny People, and Bridesmaids come to mind (as if moviegoers won’t see a movie that doesn’t have at least one fart joke or an explosion).

Movie poster for This Is 40

Before Midnight—like its predecessors—is also important because of its focus on character development, writing, and acting. This is because, thankfully, the major players and co-writers—Linklater, Delpy, and Hawke—believe in creating art that is both realistic and thoughtful. It seems obvious that the three of them want viewers to walk out of the theater asking relevant philosophical questions about both themselves and the characters, a goal which on its own makes these films admirable.

Jesse and Celine holding hands

Further demonstrating its importance is the fact that, unlike almost every other movie made today, the characters in this film look real. Sure, when the first film in the trilogy—Before Sunrise—came out, these actors had movie star faces and bodies:

Jesse and Celine in Before Sunrise

But by now they look like regular people:

Jesse and Celine in Before Midnight

Celine has fleshy arms, big hips, thick thighs, and a bit of a stomach while Jesse’s age shows in his drawn face, his lined forehead, and the countless wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. Neither of these actors is likely to be cast in the part of the leading woman or man in a Hollywood film, but it’s their so-called flaws that make them so interesting and, in the case of Celine, so beautiful and such an inspiration. If more actresses looked like Celine, then maybe American women would finally learn to give up the notion that they must be thin to be attractive.

Jesse and Celine in Before Midnight

But for all of its accomplishments, there is a major problem at the heart of Before Midnight, and that problem is that Celine’s character is no longer believable or even entirely empathetic. This is in contrast to Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, where both Celine and Jesse are depicted as the most likeable and well-rounded liberals on the planet.

Celine and Jesse

In all three of the films, Celine’s feminism is a central focus of the story: she talks to Jesse about her desire to have her own life, her own ideas, and to not be defined by a man. And in Before Sunset and Before Sunrise, she expresses a desire to fall in love and share her life with a man in a committed relationship. In that way, Celine is a wonderful depiction of a modern heterosexual feminist, something we don’t see often enough on the big (or little) screen.

Celine and Jesse arguing in the car

But in Before Midnight, Celine’s feminism pushes her to behave in ways we’ve not seen her do before—she seems much more hostile and much less empathetic toward Jesse even though he has supported her values and her career throughout their nine-year relationship.

Celine and daughters

This is especially surprising given that in the first two films, Celine and Jesse agree about gender roles and feminist issues. But in Before Midnight they fight about it from start to finish—even though Jesse agrees with all of Celine’s ideals, making Celine’s depiction unrealistic and troubling.

This problem manifests itself in the following ways: *SPOILERS AHEAD*

1) Celine demonstrates no empathy for Jesse when he expresses regret after they drop off his son at the airport at the end of the summer so he can return home to his mother in the U.S.

Later Celine claims that Jesse is always moody after his son leaves, so it’s surprising that she isn’t more empathetic in this situation. Isn’t that what people do in a healthy relationship? Anticipate each other’s struggles and help them through it? This is just the first example of the ways that Celine acts as if they are in an unhealthy or unhappy relationship even though there are no other signs that they are.

2) Instead of being empathetic in that moment, Celine picks a fight with Jesse, insisting that he wants her to give up her career and move to the States even though he doesn’t ever say that he does.

It would have been so much more interesting for them to have a real discussion about this issue since that’s what healthy couples usually do in these types of impossible situations—acknowledge the difficulty of it, weigh the pros and cons over a period of time, and then make a decision. But Celine seems to see Jesse as incapable of compromising or working with her even though he has evidently done so in the past.

3) She won’t consider moving to the U.S., so Jesse can live near his son even though he moved to France so she could be near her mother when giving birth to their twin daughters.

Not only won’t she move, she doesn’t even want to talk about moving. Her resistance to merely discussing the idea seems strange simply because he has moved for her in the past, and again a healthy relationship between two intelligent adults often requires both of them to put the other’s career first at different times.

4) Celine brings up their problems in front of others at dinner.

There’s not much to say about this except that it’s such an immature move that it doesn’t fit at all with what we already know about Celine, a successful, intelligent, confident woman.

5) She offers little support when Jesse’s grandmother dies.

Not only does she change the subject pretty quickly, but she also declines to go to the funeral when he asks her to do so.

6) Celine implies Jesse was only drawn to her for superficial reasons.

At one point Celine asks Jesse if he would still want her to spend the day with him if he saw her on a train today. It’s a ridiculous question considering how beautiful and intelligent Celine is, especially given that Jesse hasn’t aged as well as she has, a fact acknowledged by Jesse when he says, “The real question is would you want to get off the train with me.” As a result, her question seems to imply that he—and all men by extension—are only attracted to young women and could not possibly find a forty-year-old woman attractive, an idea that may be believable in Hollywood but doesn’t hold water in the world Linklater has created for Celine and Jesse.

7) She resents his career and does so while simultaneously asking him to respect hers.

This resentment is demonstrated when she complains about their trip to Greece to spend time with another author, when she is reluctant to autograph Jesse’s books for a fan in their hotel (even though the books are about her), and when she insists he is never allowed to write about her again. It’s hard to believe that a true feminist—like the Celine we have come to know and love in the earlier films—would indulge in this kind of hypocritical behavior.

8) She holds Jesse responsible for all of her problems with men and the patriarchal society we live in.

She does this even though he’s proven he’s not that kind of guy and understands she’s not the kind of woman who would put up with that kind of man, explaining, “You could never be submissive to anybody.”

9) Finally, this problem comes to an ugly head when Celine tells Jesse—at the height of their argument about their future—that she doesn’t think she loves him anymore and then walks out on him.

It’s a cruel thing to say even if she does mean it, but the fact that Jesse doesn’t take it seriously and they make up leads the viewer to believe that she doesn’t even mean it and has possibly even said—or insinuated it—before. In that sense, it feels like she is playing a game with him, a dangerous childish game that is the adult equivalent of sticking your tongue out at someone. It’s a moment when Celine shows no respect for Jesse’s feelings, and viewers are left to wonder how she can expect him to respect her if she doesn’t do the same for him.

******

Because other aspects of this film—including acting and characterization—are so strong, I can only conclude that these problems with Celine are the result of bad writing. It’s certainly true that the writing in Before Midnight lacks the subtlety and complexity evident in the first two films.

Good writing demands well-rounded characters, but Celine seems more flat and one-dimensional in this film than she ever has before. Jesse’s flaws are rather ordinary—he doesn’t like to clean the house, and he has stubbornly held onto his slacker facial hair. But Celine’s flaws are the opposite of ordinary—rather than being average, they are so extreme in the third film that they don’t even seem believable given what else we know about her character. If she’s an educated, intelligent, confident, and strong woman, why doesn’t she trust the man who loves these things about her?

Though they haven’t done it before, Linklater, Delpy, and Hawke fall back on stereotypical ideas about what it means to be a feminist when writing Celine’s dialogue for this film. They make her seem harsh and narrow-minded—even irrational at times—rather than thoughtful and open-minded. In this way, the film harkens back to another well-known “talky” film about a heterosexual couple discussing important issues, 1978’s Same Time, Next Year.

Movie poster for Same Time, Next Year

Unfortunately it feels like Before Midnight also co-opted that film’s take on intelligent couples by merely showing them in constant disagreement. It’s a depiction that feels outdated given what we know by now about communication in healthy, equitable relationships.

This seems to be an honest mistake, but it’s a disappointing one nonetheless, especially since it’s so hard to find movies about strong feminists and because the two previous films sidestepped these landmines so well by making Celine both willful and caring.

In fact, by depicting strong, intelligent women as incapable of compromise and empathy, Before Midnight reinforces all of the ugly stereotypes about feminists and sends the message that you can’t be a good feminist if you stay home with the kids or sew curtains or move for your spouse. When in reality, feminists—female and male alike—can do all of the above since feminism isn’t about acting a certain way but rather about embracing equality.

This misrepresentation is alluded to when Celine says to Jesse, “I feel close to you… But sometimes, I don’t know? I feel like you’re breathing helium and I’m breathing oxygen.”

It’s this comment that best sums up the problems with the film because it implies that men and women are reduced simply to their differences and that they are, in fact, so different that they cannot possibly relate, agree, compromise, or even get along past a certain point in their relationship. It’s a rehashing of the old men-are-from-Mars-women-are-from-Venus idea that is anti-feminist and unbelievable as well as being one that this viewer found very difficult to relate to.

Molly McCaffrey is the author of the short story collection How to Survive Graduate School & Other Disasters, the co-editor of Commutability: Stories about the Journey from Here to There, and the founder of I Will Not Diet, a blog devoted to healthy living and body acceptance. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati and has worked with Academy Award winner Barbara Kopple and World War Z author, Max Brooks. Currently she teaches at Western Kentucky University and designs books for Steel Toe Books. She has just finished work on her first memoir, You Belong to Us, which tells the story of McCaffrey meeting her biological family.

Travel Films Week: The One-Night Stand That Wasn’t: ‘Before Sunrise’ and ‘Before Sunset’s Jesse and Celine

Before Sunset movie poster

This is a guest review by Carleen Tibbetts.

I could easily and happily blame Richard Linklater for making me believe in destiny, fate, kismet, or the idea of a soul mate. When Before Sunrise was released, I was twelve or thirteen. I remember getting it from the video store with my best friend when we had one of our regular sleepovers. I sat there, greasy-and-brace-faced, completely swindled by the words that tumbled out of Ethan Hawke’s crooked mouth. I wondered if any of the boys whose names I drew on my notebooks or the sides of my Converse One-Stars would ever feel the way about me that Ethan Hawke felt about Julie Delpy.

Before Sunrise follows two seemingly idealistic twenty-somethings who meet by chance while abroad. They impulsively decide to spend a day and night together wandering the streets of Vienna and end up falling hard and fast for each other. The film opens on a train with a middle-aged couple quarreling in German. Celine (Julie Delpy), fed up with their arguing, moves seats across from Jesse (Ethan Hawke), and they soon become distracted by each other. Celine tells him that as couples grow older, they lose the ability to hear one another, which is ironic because the movie is nearly non-stop dialogue between Jesse and Celine.

There’s no denying the physical and intellectual chemistry between them. Not wanting the experience to end, Jesse convinces Celine to join him in Vienna by telling her she’ll look back on her life as an older, married woman and regret not taking a chance on him. She agrees. They tell the first people they meet that they’re on their honeymoon, and the further we get into the film and the more they reveal themselves layer by layer to each other, the more believable this becomes. They seem so oddly at ease with each other, it seems so effortless, so meant to be . . . the first time I watched it, I wondered whether they were going to spontaneously get married. Now, given my own experiences with missed connections, what-if’s, and horrendous timing, the romantic in me wants to yell, “Do you think it can get any better than this? What are you waiting for; start your forever now!”

In one adorable scene, Jesse and Celine pretend to call their close friends and describe the experience of meeting each other to them:

Not everything is coming up roses, though. For all the charming scenes involving carnival kisses at sunset, gypsy fortune tellers telling them they are stardust, and street poets composing impromptu verse for them, Celine and Jesse exhibit a fair amount of bitterness and cynicism. It becomes harder to tell who is more jaded. Jesse thinks love is a selfish escape for those who don’t know how to be or can’t be alone. Celine believes everything that we as humans do in life is a way to be loved more, yet she is the one wants to be rational and adult about everything. She’s the one who keeps trying to put the brakes on this thing to keep it from going anywhere. She thinks it’s foolish for them to think they’re going to see each other again and doesn’t want to ruin the magic of the night by allowing it to blossom into a relationship she believes would fizzle and disappoint. She’s totally downplaying her level of emotional investment. Perhaps it’s a defense mechanism in which Celine overcompensates and protects herself from possible heartache by appearing as detached as possible. They agree not to project any delusions of a future together, get their goodbyes out of the way so it will be less painful to part in the morning, and toast their “one and only night together.”

Celine reveals she decided to sleep with Jesse when she got off the train with him, but that it would probably be too painful for her, and she doesn’t want to just be some one-night stand. She says she can’t help it, “maybe it’s a female thing.” In another wildly romantic outpouring, Jesse tells Celine if he had the choice of not seeing her again, or marrying her on the spot, he’d marry her, because “People have gotten married for a lot less.” Whether or not we’re willing to admit it to ourselves, as women, some part of us, no matter how small, wants to hear these things and feel this special to someone. Regardless of Jesse’s sincerity, Celine gives in to his gushing sentimentality. They grope and kiss, and the next thing we see is the bluing sky that signifies their time together coming to a close.

Celine and Jesse in Before Sunrise

Jesse and Celine scrap the idea that never seeing each other again is the way to play this. They plan to meet in exactly six months at the train station to see if they can pick up with the same intensity with which they left off. The film closes with ghostly daytime shots of all the places that were bustling when they’d visited the night before, with each of them in transit, lost in reflection, looking six months into the future.

Jesse and Celine’s story doesn’t end here or sixth months from that night. Flash forward nine years to 2004’s Before Sunset (which I saw in the theater as a twenty-one year old, and it continued to delude me). Jesse is now a married writer in Paris on the final stop of a book tour promoting his novel about the night he spent with Celine. His readers demand to know whether the characters meet in six months as they’d promised, and as Jesse answers that “time is a lie,” he glances out the window and sees Celine looking in on his reading. Jesse wants to catch up, but, again, there is limited time as he’s got to get to the airport in a matter of hours.

They begin walking the streets of Paris and address the burning question: just what the hell happened at that train station six months later? Celine asks Jesse if he showed, and at first he brushes it off, claiming he didn’t. Yet when she tells him her grandmother’s death prevented her from going, he admits he was there, looking everywhere for her. If only Craigslist’s missed connections was around in the mid-90’s! They discover they lost yet another chance to rekindle their relationship when Celine tells Jesse she lived in New York for several years, minutes away from him.

Julie Delpy as Celine and Ethan Hawke as Jesse

Everything boils down to timing and circumstance. Jesse and Celine are both off the market. Jesse is stagnating in a passionless, joyless marriage he endures for the sake of his son. He confesses that he could not stop thinking about Celine leading up to the wedding, and that he thought he actually saw her in New York on the day he got married blocks away, as it turns out, from where she lived. Celine’s boyfriend is conveniently away the majority of the time, which works in her favor because she can’t easily move on or fully replace someone.

It’s clear that neither Jesse nor Celine have moved on and that those mere hours together ruined them for their subsequent lovers. Earlier, Jesse admitted that he wrote the book as a confirmation that he was able to love someone that deeply, that his connection with Celine was honest and real, and that he also wrote it in the hopes that she’d read it and they’d be able to find each other again. He admits he’s haunted by dreams of her rushing past him on a train in an endless loop, or her lying in bed pregnant next to him, and twists the knife a little deeper by telling Celine she will make a great mother someday.

Angered to the point of tears, Celine tells Jesse, “You come to Paris all romantic and married—fuck you!” His book allowed painful memories to rush to the surface, memories she’d worked hard to suppress. She used up her idealism and romanticism that one night, and it robbed her of the ability to open herself up that way again. The let down after their six-month no-show left her cold, numb, and unwilling to put effort into her subsequent relationships. He insists before he leaves that she play him one song she’s written, which she does, a song expressly about their night together:

Perhaps it’s that immediacy that comes with age Jesse and Celine discussed earlier, and the realization that they lost what could have been many happy years together that lead them to give it another shot. The film closes with Celine impersonating Nina Simone, saying, “Baby, you are gonna miss that plane,” Jesse admitting, “I know,” and the slow fade as he watches her dance, knowing he’s home already:

Fortunately (or, maybe unfortunately), the third installment, Before Midnight, is already in theaters and picks up another nine years later with Jesse and Celine married with children of their own:

Carleen Tibbetts lives in Oakland. Her poems and reviews have appeared in various journals including Word Riot, kill author, Monkeybicycle, Metazen, Coconut, H_NGM_N, Horse Less Press, and other sites.