Tag: Ren Jender

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

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

StrangerPoster

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

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

 

The main couple at the lake
The main couple at the lake

 

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

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

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

 

Franck and Henri
Franck and Henri

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

Franck in the water
Franck in the water

 

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

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

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

 

FranckNamelessManStranger

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

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

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

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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.

The Women Both Admired and Ignored in ’20 Feet From Stardom’

The background vocalists are mostly women of color often singing behind white, male leads and the film poses the question of why these white guys (whose voices are not as strong as the women featured) became stars and their backup singers did not. The answer turns out to be more complicated than we might have thought.

20FtDarleneLove

When I was in high school, The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” wasn’t new, but it didn’t have the baggage of being associated with Martin Scorcese films, Dexter, or The Simpsons. I remember wondering about the woman whose powerful vocals make up half the song. In those days duets between men and women were a staple on the radio with both artists’ names above the title. But no one ever mentioned this woman. Years later with the advent of the internet and Wikipedia I looked up her name, Merry Clayton, and was surprised I didn’t recognize it. When I had heard the song I was sure I was hearing someone who had gone on to record other hits.

In a way, I had been right. Among many other songs, Merry Clayton sang on Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” Joe Cocker’s “Feelin’ Alright,” and Ringo Starr’s “Oh My My,” but because she was a backup singer, her name was buried in the credits and never mentioned on the radio when stations played these songs over and over. So even though many of us have heard her voice throughout our lives and maybe have even bought the songs and albums she sang on, most of us do not know her name.

Merry Clayton
Merry Clayton

The Oscar-nominated documentary 20 Feet From Stardom (directed by Morgan Neville) attempts to right this injustice by focusing on Clayton and a number of other backup singers whose voices we know, but whose names we often do not: Judith Hill (though some may recognize her from The Voice), Claudia Lennear, Lisa Fischer, Táta Vega, The Waters, as well as former back-up singers whose names became well-known like Darlene Love, the 60s girl-group singer who is in The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and Luther Vandross, who went from singing background on and cowriting and arranging hit David Bowie songs to his own successful solo career.

The background vocalists are mostly women of color often singing behind white, male leads and the film poses the question of why these white guys (whose voices are not as strong as the women featured) became stars and their backup singers did not. The answer turns out to be more complicated than we might have thought.

Lisa Fischer
Lisa Fischer

Anyone who has worked in the arts has seen enough examples to know talent is no guarantee of success– which some of the popular artists who have worked with the backup singers featured admit in the film. We see and hear solo performances from Clayton and Fischer and although they’re good (Fischer’s single won a Grammy), the songs they perform are not close to the caliber of “Gimme Shelter.” What makes a song (and its singer) a hit is tricky: sometimes the vocalists’ collaborators are the key (Mick Jagger with Keith Richards–or Bowie with Vandross), sometimes grooming from a powerful recording executive and producer does the trick (like Clive Davis for Whitney Houston) and sometimes artists become successful on the strength of their songwriting skills instead of their vocal prowess (Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, and Bob Dylan among many, many others).

As Darlene Love mentions she and the other girl-group singers modified their sound according to the wishes of producers so, for example, in the background vocals for “The Monster Mash” they changed their style to “sound white.” A singer’s popularity often depends on a distinctive style. Even Aretha Franklin didn’t become the Aretha Franklin we know today until she was allowed to sing and play piano as she had when she had sung gospel. In previous, secular recordings she was backed by an orchestra including plenty of strings, in a effort to try to replicate the success of Sarah Vaughn. The backup singers’ flexibility and skill in creating generic vocals might have also been their downfall in achieving success on their own.

Claudia Lennear
Claudia Lennear

Some backup singers have crossed over to great, popular success under their own names. but Sheryl Crowe and Emmylou Harris are white women, Luther Vandross was a Black man and Leon Russell was a white guy. The door doesn’t seem open to women of color. The film touches on some of what the women have had to deal with, acknowledging the racism in “Sweet Home Alabama,” which Clayton says her now-deceased husband convinced her to take part in, so her voice could be a retort to the song’s lyrics. The opening credits unroll to the sound of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” with its infamous chorus of, “And all the colored girls sing…” When the song was released “colored” wasn’t as strong a slur as it is today, but it also was not a word that most Black people were still using to refer to themselves. Progressive white people didn’t use it then either. The song “Brown Sugar” was rumored to be written about Lennear (who dated Mick Jagger around the time it was written) and its lyrics are also cringe-worthy.

JaggerFischer20Ft
Mick Jagger and Lisa Fischer in the 90s

The women are often in the position of being not just ear candy, but eye candy as well. We see a younger, slender Lisa Fischer in spandex eventually replacing Merry Clayton when the Rolling Stones tour and play “Gimme Shelter”–though Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have become visibly older and more fossil-like in the intervening years. Fischer is now 55, and toured with the Stones in 2013 (as she has in each of their tours for the last 24 years), but the precariousness of these gigs for women as they age makes Lennear’s long-ago decision to quit the business and teach Spanish to kids instead seem like a sensible one.

Now that the music industry is collapsing onto itself, the women who are still singing backup complain “my phone has not rung,” and struggle to make a living. So I’m puzzled why so much of the audience and critics see this film as a “feel-good” experience. At the end I couldn’t help thinking what the future would hold for these women: if this film is the last vestige of an era, the way a stuffed passenger pigeon in a museum is all that remains of the flocks that used to cover the sky.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kgRq_pGN2g” autohide=”0″]

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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.

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.

‘Concussion’: When Queer Marriage in The Suburbs Isn’t Enough

Some clues for her motives are in the scenes between Abby and her spouse. They are affectionate and loving with each other, even when they’re alone, but the sex has gone out of their marriage. After a disastrous first encounter with an escort, we feel Abby’s ache of longing when a second “better” escort begins to touch her. Later we see Eleanor’s first client, a 23-year-old virgin, react to Eleanor’s touch in much the same way.

ConcussionHeader

How many distinctive, acclaimed films about queer women can be released in American theaters at the same time? If we extrapolate from the actions of film distributors in the past few months, the answer is apparently: only one. Concussion was named one of the top 20 films of the year by Slate’s Dana Stevens and was also named one of the top films of 2013 in Salon. Shortly after its premiere, at last year’s Sundance, The Weinstein Company acquired it for distribution. For most films that acquisition (and the later support from reviews in traditional media) would mean a national release, but the film had a very limited run in theaters this fall and never played a theater in my art-house-friendly city. The film is on Video On Demand, iTunes, and Google Play, but deserves much more attention than most films that never have a national theatrical run.

This film about a queer woman is, unlike Blue Is The Warmest Color, directed and written by a queer woman (Stacie Passon who is nominated for “Best First Feature” in the Independent Spirit Awards ), and in many aspects is the answer to those who dismissed Blue as a product of the male gaze. Instead of a teenage protagonist, the main character in Concussion, Abby (played by Robin Weigert: Andrew O’Hehir in Salon summed up her performance as “OMFG”), is a 40-something, stay-at-home Mom, married to another woman and living in the suburbs.

When her son accidentally hits her in the face with a baseball, we see the confusion and blood in the family car ride to the hospital, as she moans to no one in particular, “I don’t want this. I don’t want this. I don’t want this.”

bruisedAbby

In the ER Abby says she is going back to work in the city (and that she really means it this time). Abby doesn’t need to work for money: her spouse, Kate, is a divorce attorney, kept busy by the dissatisfied wives in their social circle. We see the wives’ well-maintained bodies in slow motion, at the beginning of the film, in spin and yoga classes as David Bowie sings on the soundtrack, “Oh you pretty things…”

Passon knows this world well She lives in the town (Montclair) Abby does. She is married to a woman and has children, one of whom accidentally hit her in the face with a baseball. The parallels between her life and Abby’s may be why the character and setting seem so fully realized.

Abby for the most part blends in with her straight women friends but we see she’s different from them–and not just in her orientation. She reads books while she vacuums. When a friend is circulating a “new motherhood” survey for an article in a parenting magazine, Abby writes of dreams in which she sticks her then newborn son in the microwave–and other dreams in which she and her son are married. She writes, “My poor baby, I didn’t know whether to kill him, fuck him, or eat him.”

At times Abby’s queerness does separate her from the other women. When Abby mentions to her friend that one of the group of women they work out with is “cute,”  the friend (played by Janel Maloney) reproaches Abby, “She’s not a lesbian!”

Abby and the contractor in the loft
Abby and the contractor in the loft

Abby starts work with a contractor to refurbish a city loft. As they transform the apartment, she transforms too, first hiring women to have sex with her and then working out of the loft as a high-priced escort, “Eleanor,” whose clients are all women.

A woman character turning to sex work for reasons other than money is usually a male artist’s conceit, as in Luis Buñuel’s great Belle de Jour, which features stunning, beautifully dressed, doctor’s wife, Catherine Deneuve, working in a brothel while her handsome, attentive (but clueless) husband sees his patients. In women’s memoirs of sex work (like Michelle Tea’s Rent Girl) the money is the point of the work (as it is with most work).

A sex worker character whose clients are all women (when the vast majority of sex work clients are men) is also usually the creation of a straight male artist–and is usually a male character so the work avoids any explicit same-sex scenes.

Abby's second encounter with an escort
Abby’s second encounter with an escort

Perhaps because Concussion turns that last trope on its head (or perhaps because New York is a big city that can cater to many kinds of tastes) we accept the conceit of a woman over 40 seeing women clients (for $800 a session) every day. The queer women we see in sexual situations in Concussion are not cut from the same Playboy-ready cloth as the two women in Blue: one client is fat, another is an obvious real-life survivor of breast cancer and some of her clients, like Eleanor herself, are nowhere near their 20s anymore.

Robin Weigert doesn’t have a Barbie Doll face or a porn model’s body, but does have a passing resemblance to the young Ellen Barkin. Weigert exudes the same confidence and sexiness–reminding us those two qualities are often one and the same.

Concussion has a scene similar to one in Blue in which a straight man interrogates a queer woman about her sexuality. But because Abby is in her 40s, the mocking tone she takes with him is completely different from what we hear from the 20-something main character in Blue, Adele.

The female gaze?
The female gaze?

In Concussion are we seeing the female gaze? Well, we’re definitely seeing one woman’s gaze, that of Passon. The sex scenes in Concussion, unlike Blue, don’t seem like outtakes from an amateur porn video, but flow from the other nonsexual encounters in the film. (Concussion’s expert cinematographer is David Kruta.) We also don’t see full frontal nudity from any of the actresses, and although we see the bare breasts of some of Eleanor’s clients, we never see hers. Eleanor/ Abby is both a psychological and corporeal enigma to us.

Some clues for her motives are in the scenes between Abby and her spouse. They are affectionate and loving with each other, even when they’re alone, but the sex has gone out of their marriage. After a disastrous first encounter with an escort, we feel Abby’s ache of longing when a second “better” escort begins to touch her. Later we see Eleanor’s first client, a 23-year-old virgin, react to Eleanor’s touch in much the same way.

Abby and her spouse
Abby and her spouse

In the city we see Abby in punk rock t-shirts (vintage Blondie and the now-defunct C.B.G.B) and boyshort underwear and in the suburbs we see her fitting in with her friends in yoga pants and an expensive down-filled jacket. At a suburban dinner party the guests talk about their days hanging out in pre-gentrified downtown New York clubs, Squeezebox and The Limelight, and we realize yes, many of  the club kids of the 90s have become comfortable, suburban Moms and Dads.

The loft is decorated with posters for Louise Bourgeois and The Guerrilla Girls and has Diet For a New America on the bookshelf, distinct touches some of us in the audience recognize from our own living spaces. In the dialogue we hear echoes of conversations we too have had (or overheard) at parties: “I finally took the Myers-Briggs.” Writers of satire often seem to want their audience to hate the people, especially the women, they create (the Annette Bening character in American Beauty is just one example). Passon’s satire is much trickier–and kinder. She wants us to recognize these people. She wants us to recognize ourselves in them.

AbbyLaundry

The film Passon says inspired Concussion is from the 1970s: Jeanne Dielman.., (and is also written and directed by a queer woman, Chantal Akerman). In Concussion, as in Dielman, we see the first signs of the housewife/sex-worker protagonist starting to unravel when she fails to stick to her usual daily routine: Abby misses picking up the kids after school for the first time in six years. Unlike Dielman, Passon’s film captures the monotony of domestic tasks, but doesn’t ask the audience to endure that boredom themselves.

Although Concussion was made before queer marriage became legal in New Jersey, the film brings up some interesting questions about the queer community’s quest for “equality.” What if we become just as disenchanted with being soccer Moms as straight women sometimes do? What then? At the end Abby throws herself into a home renovation project, the way so many of our married friends, straight and queer do, and we marvel at the mystery of other people’s marriages, not just in the film, but all around us.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8Wg–Mh8YY ” autohide=”0″]

 

‘The Great Beauty’ of Little Temptations

‘The Great Beauty’ (‘La Grande Belleza’ in its native Italy)–winner of Best Foreign Language Film at The Golden Globes (and nominated in the same category for an Academy Award)–could easily have been an example of what the great film critic Pauline Kael called “The Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties”: European films in which very wealthy, attractive people are depressed in spite of their beautiful homes, expensive clothes, and jet-set lifestyles. These films, especially to contemporary audiences, can seem like at any moment they will cross the line into parody, with one of the characters spoofing an old Weill/Brecht tune, “Oh no, not another opulent location! Oh no, not another expensive, tailored suit! Oh no, not more sex with gorgeous, unhappy people!”

Toni Servillo in 'The Great Beauty'

The Great Beauty (La Grande Belleza in its native Italy)–winner of Best Foreign Language Film at The Golden Globes (and nominated in the same category for an Academy Award)–could easily have been an example of what the great film critic Pauline Kael called “The Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties“: European films in which very wealthy, attractive people are depressed in spite of their beautiful homes, expensive clothes, and jet-set lifestyles. These films, especially to contemporary audiences, can seem like at any moment they will cross the line into parody, with one of the characters spoofing an old Weill/Brecht tune, “Oh no, not another opulent location! Oh no, not another expensive, tailored suit! Oh no, not more sex with gorgeous, unhappy people!”

Superficially, The Great Beauty resembles these films with a dissatisfied main character at its center: Jep (played by the director, Paolo Sorrentino‘s longtime star, Toni Servillo) a celebrity journalist who wrote one acclaimed novel forty years before and has been dining out on his reputation ever since. Servillo, after making a delayed appearance in the film (in a great entrance, he steps out of a line dance at his own chaotic, noisy birthday party to light the first of countless cigarettes) is in nearly every scene that follows, framed in the middle of the breathtaking scenery and lush interiors of Rome. The film makes us want to visit, but as one great visual outdoes another we realize outside of the cinematographer, Luca Bigazzi’s, lens the city could never live up to this ideal.

Beautiful Scenery and Beautiful Suits
Beautiful scenery and beautiful suits

The man who has every social and material advantage but remains unhappy is a staple in every art form: Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Richard Cory” (also a Simon and Garfunkel song), The Kinks’ “A Well Respected Man,” the Jack Nicholson character in Five Easy Pieces and Shakespeare’s Hamlet are just a few examples. The character is always a man: women exist in these works to either support him, betray him, or both. The popularity of “the people who have everything but really have nothing” can also be seen, in TV shows like Downton Abbey and, back in the 80s, Dallas and Dynasty, as an attempt at social control. The message in these works for those without money or power is: “Even if you had what you want, you still wouldn’t be happy.”

Sorrentino avoids these pitfalls, in part because the energy and fantasy-level luxury that make up the characters’ lives are allowed to dazzle us: even Jep’s mid-rise apartment and well-tended garden overlook the ruins of The Colosseum. We understand why Jep would spend forty years in this world, but after a few parties we come to understand why he is sick of them. We see Jep is a thoughtful and decent man, but weak, like Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth who said, “We resist the great temptations, but it is the little ones that eventually pull us down.”

A nervous party-goer helps create a work of art.

Servillo’s charming, insinuating performance also saves the film from becoming a chorus of “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me”: in spite of his discontent the character never raises his voice: his life is easy and enviable so he never has to. The movie is also a portrait of Italy at a critical juncture. Not just the main character, who often thinks back to his first love, but others in the film, like the country itself, are trapped in the past: a “princess” rents herself and her husband out to parties where her bloodline will add some social cachet, even though they live in a cramped, ugly apartment–underneath the glittering museum her childhood home has become.

Instead of positing that the characters will find some missing and essential part of themselves by revisiting their memories (as so many films have posited before it) The Great Beauty sidesteps that possibility: Jep sees an opportunity to find out why his first love left him when her husband mentions she kept a diary, then in the next breath he tells Jep he threw it away. The princess’s empty, pristine old bedroom in the museum will never be her room again, just a backdrop for taped audio about the history of her family the museum-goers listen to.

the-great-beauty09
Dadina

The film avoids disaster in other ways. I was afraid the little person we first see as part of the raucous, debauched party at the beginning, who then regains consciousness the morning after at the now empty site, might be the art-film trope Peter Dinklage’s character in Living in Oblivion described as “Make it weird. Put a dwarf in it!”  But blue-haired Dadina (Giovanna Vignola) turns out to be Jep’s editor–his boss–at the magazine where he works. She regularly eats with him at the dining table inside her office and is one of his closest–and in one scene, most tender–friends.

Some scenes had the potential to devolve into the misogyny that often accompanies this type of storyline, as when Jep interviews a Marina Abramović-like performance artist and gets her to admit she doesn’t know what her quasi-mystical pronouncements mean, or the scene when, after a fellow-partygoer provokes him, he dismantles her illusions point by point. But Jep is quiet and matter-of-fact in these scenes: he has none of Jack Nicholson’s relish in denigrating women. He asks the partygoer several times to stop asking him to analyze her before he lets her have it. When he does, we see, like Truman Capote before him, Jep’s sojourn in the world of celebrity hasn’t dimmed the novelist’s gift for observation.

At The Strip Club
At The Strip Club

At one point Jep makes a stripper (who is the daughter of an old acquaintance, the strip club’s manager) his companion, but she’s in her 40s, 20-something years younger than Jep, but not the 25-year-old we’ve come to expect in these roles. As other partygoers gossip over her spangled catsuit, he treats her as an intelligent apprentice in the art of negotiating the highest social circles. They don’t have a sexual relationship. Earlier Jep falls into bed with a woman–again much more age-appropriate than she would be in an American film–and we can see these encounters don’t have the same appeal for him as they might have when he was younger. But the film is devoid of the hostility toward women we’ve come to take for granted in similar films. He’s playful with the woman, asking, “What did you say your job was?”

 She answers, “Me? I’m rich.”

“That’s a good job!”

Sorrentino criticizes the vanity of Jep’s circle, showing a botox party (which makes looking at some of subsequent close-ups of middle-aged actresses in the film difficult–something Sorrentino might have done intentionally) but later Sorrentino exposes Jep’s vanity as well, when we see his torso usually covered by a smart suit jacket (often in a primary color) wrapped in the velcro equivalent of Spanx.  

the-great-beauty-nuns

In this film Sorrentino also focuses on nuns and clergy who wander in and out of the frame like birds–or aliens: the young nun at the botox party wants the shot so her hands will stop sweating, and a Mother-Teresa-like figure collapses on the bare floor of Jep’s elegant apartment to sleep. Sorrentino’s interest in religious figures reminded me of Luis Buñuel’s obsession, though Sorrentino seems to see them as clueless and out-of-step (during a party one cleric can speak only about recipes) and not, as Buñuel did, an active harm to the culture. That difference may be a statement about the Catholic Church’s disappearing relevance as much as about the two directors’ style and tone. 

As much as I loved the film: at two hours and 20 minutes it’s about a half an hour too long. We could use fewer of the parties. We get it: they’re not as fun as they might seem. The film also falters in a brief scene in which a delegation from Africa (who come to see the Mother Teresa figure) are dressed as if they were extras in a Tarzan movie. I’m a little disappointed that the film won The Golden Globe over Blue Is The Warmest Color (which isn’t nominated for an Oscar, because of a technicality). The Great Beauty is a worthy film, but it’s also one that I recommended to my mother, which I most definitely would not with Blue. I’d love if the “Best Foreign Language Film” reflected how exciting and innovative the greatest films from non-English speaking countries are these days.

Still, film is a tricky medium: a movie about a character without redeeming qualities (like The Wolf of Wall Street) can seem like a paean to outrageously bad and sometimes criminal behavior (especially when its real-life protagonist continues to make money from his misdeeds) no matter how much the filmmakers disavow those intentions. Movies about obtuse misanthropes like Nebraska and Inside Llewyn Davis can seem obtuse and misanthropic themselves. The Great Beauty is about a bored, jaded man but doesn’t leave its audience bored–or jaded which is itself an achievement.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxWdwx5Hkiw”]

What’s Missing ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’ and ‘The Punk Singer’

Films like ‘Llewyn Davis’ make me particularly grateful for documentaries. Sini Anderson’s ‘The Punk Singer’ (disclaimer: I know Anderson slightly and produced one of her shows when she was with Sister Spit in the ’90s) is all about music and politics: feminism and women, while focusing on one person, Kathleen Hanna, formerly of the bands Bikini Kill, Le Tigre and current front-woman of The Julie Ruin.

Oscar Isaac as Llewyn Davis
Oscar Isaac as Llewyn Davis

Inside Llewyn Davis made many critics’ top ten lists this year, and a lot of people are rooting for the film this awards season. I’m not one of them. I see enough movies that one more about a white guy (Oscar Isaac, who plays the eponymous role, is Latino, but the script makes sure to establish the character is white) who is also an “asshole” as Carey Mulligan (unrecognizable in long, black, Beatnik hair and bangs: she plays fellow folksinger Jean) hisses throughout the film, should not faze me. The songs and their performances are as pretty and forgettable as the presence of Justin Timberlake, again foisted on an indifferent movie-going public, this time playing Jean’s husband and musical partner Jim. So why did this film piss me off so much?

Llewyn Davis and most of the folk performers he sees and interacts with are white guys (Mulligan is one of two women we see onstage. Davis heckles the second.) We see two people of color in the film: an African American man, who is asked to clean up shit in a nursing home (really) and an Asian American woman who is the butt of the joke at a dinner party. In most mainstream films we’ve become so inured to seeing the world through white-guy (asshole or not) eyes that we’ve mistaken their stories for the “true” and “real” stories of the time. But in 1961, when the film takes place, the rising superstar on the folk coffeehouse scene was a young Latina named Joan Baez, whose own fame gave a boost to the career of her-then boyfriend Bob Dylan (whose character has a cameo appearance toward the end of the film).

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Xlmb8gG7HU” title=”Joan%20Baez%20%22Silver%20Dagger%22″ autohide=”0″]

Baez wasn’t an anomaly. Martin Luther King called Odetta “the queen of American folk music” when she, along with Baez, played at The March On Washington in 1963. The following song is from a live album Odetta recorded in Carnegie Hall just before the time the events of the film take place.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iZj6P-bkcY” title=”Odetta%20%22Sometimes%20I%20Feel%20Like%20A%20Motherless%20Child%22″ autohide=”0″]

In a year that has seen a breakthrough of African American directors making films about African Americans, some prominent Black writers have expressed discomfort with the stream of movies that show Black people being tortured and killed instead of just living their lives. Editing people of color out of a history, like that of Greenwich Village folk scene in the 1960s, in which they had a prominent role, but were neither tortured nor killed, does not help this problem.

I don’t expect strict historical accuracy from a period film, but I would like it to at least resemble the place and time it depicts– and in more than just its album covers, clothes and hazy, smoke-filled interiors. As the adage about musical theater goes, “the audience doesn’t go out humming the scenery.” The absence in the film of performers of color belies the history of folk music in New York City, where in the decades before the sixties, performers like Josh White and Lead Belly popularized the genre.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCiJ4QQG9WQ ” autohide=”0″]

Those performers didn’t just introduce the songs to the public, they directly influenced the performers who came after them: Pete Seeger gave credit to Lead Belly for his guitar playing style, which he then taught on record to fledgling folkies. Dave Van Ronk, whose posthumously published autobiography provides the loose basis for the script also cited gospel and blues as his musical inspiration. That influence is apparent in Van Ronk’s songs, which are a world away from the whiter-than white, radio-ready music we hear in the film. Oscar Isaac, who was a musician before he was an actor (he sings and plays well and has a striking screen presence in spite of the script) has said in interviews that his own style is more blues-influenced but that the filmmakers (and the music producer of the film, T Bone Burnett, who previously worked with the Coen brothers on the hit soundtrack for O Brother, Where Art Thou) wanted the music to take a different direction.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=754sRFIHIrA” title=”Dave%20Van%20Ronk%20%22He%20Was%20A%20Friend%20Of%20Mine%22″ autohide=”0″]

Perhaps in part because of the African American influence even white folk performers from the coffeehouse scene were outspoken supporters of civil rights and other “progressive” (at the time) causes. The March On Washington featured not just Baez and Odetta, but Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary. The civil rights movement for many young people (including, most famously, Dylan and Baez) led to the antiwar movement, which then, for many women, led to the feminist movement. Perhaps the most infuriating thing about Inside Llewyn Davis is how rabidly (and anachronistically) apolitical it is. Because Black people barely exist in its universe, no one concerns themselves with civil rights. Even though one of the folk performers is a soldier in uniform who hitchhikes from his base every weekend to perform in the coffeehouses (the character is based on singer-songwriter Tom Paxton), no one (except that character himself) is antiwar.

 The song from the film most likely to stay with audience members (for better or worse) is “Please Mr. Kennedy” in which the singer pleads that he doesn’t want to go “to outer space”. The song it’s based on is a doo-wop record released in 1962 in which the singer asks that Kennedy not send him to Vietnam.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW6lQKLn5B8″ title=”Mickey%20Woods%20%22Please%20Mr.%20Kennedy%22%20″ autohide=”0″]

 In its portrayal of the women on the folk scene, the film borders on science fiction. Jean tells Llewyn that she would like to have a baby with Jim and move to the suburbs when any number of women, (like Joyce Johnson and Hettie Jones) who were in Greenwich Village at the time have written in detail that they (and the other women they knew) went to Greenwich Village to escape conventional, suburban family life. Had the Coen brothers bothered to read any accounts from women who had abortions when the procedure was still against the law, they would, as Van Ronk’s ex-wife Terri Thal’s excellent counterpoint notes, not have portrayed abortion as a matter-of-fact sideline for a licensed OB-GYN with a nice, clean, airy office and waiting room. As if the film weren’t dismissive enough of women performers, the script also posits that Jean has to fuck a sleazy club owner to get a gig, which Thal calls bullshit and I call misogyny– since it presents as fact the oldest dismissal of any woman’s accomplishments: “She slept her way to the top.”

Films like Llewyn Davis make me particularly grateful for documentaries. Sini Anderson’s The Punk Singer (disclaimer: I know Anderson slightly and produced one of her shows when she was with Sister Spit in the ’90s) is all about music and politics: feminism and women, while focusing on one person, Kathleen Hanna, formerly of the bands Bikini Kill, Le Tigre and current front-woman of The Julie Ruin.

Kathleen Hanna
Kathleen Hanna

The film spotlights the neglected history of the Riot Grrrl movement through Hanna’s trajectory. We see through interviews and video of live performances, what Hanna’s music meant to her fans (the best of these interviews are with other musicians like Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney and Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz, Hanna’s husband, who gushes about her work in the way every artist wants her partner to) and to the culture. As someone who was not eighteen when Bikini Kill were on the scene I never saw them live, but the clips in the film are electrifying. Hanna is every bit the badass the fans remember, whether she is singing and dancing her way across the stage wearing a skimpy top and “Slut” written across her abdomen or when she commands rowdy young men in the audience (or as she calls them “fuckers”) to stand in the back so women can be safe in the front (or even sit on the stage to escape harm). At that time post-punk shows were an excellent place to get a head-injury: I remember the band L7 had to stop playing and the house lights in the club went up while we in the audience waited for an ambulance to come for someone who fell (or was hit) while crowd-surfing.

Hanna in the earliest days of Bikini Kill
Hanna in the earliest days of Bikini Kill

Every movement likes to think of itself as completely original, and Riot Grrrl is no different, but I would have liked to see and hear more about Hanna’s feminist musical influences and antecedents. I was eighteen during the first wave of post-punk bands and remember well that many of them (and the original punk bands) included women: Siouxsie Sioux, Poly Styrene, Penelope Houston, Pauline Black, hell, even the Go-Go’s started as a punk band. And some of those artists were unequivocal feminists: Styrene said she would shave her head if one more journalist called her a “sex symbol” and then followed through. The post punk Au Pairs were singing about feminist issues a good decade before the Riot Grrrl scene.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaiXfdYCZCw” title=”Au%20Pairs%20%22It%27s%20Obvious%22″ autohide=”0″]

Hanna wrote compellingly about Styrene when she died and what I missed most in the film was Hanna’s voice as a writer (rather than an interview subject). Hanna began as a spoken-word artist, so maybe she wouldn’t have been listening to most of the music I’ve listed, though she must have heard, and was perhaps influenced by that other spoken-word artist turned singer: Patti Smith.

The film includes a video of a feminist community meeting Bikini Kill holds when they move from Olympia, Washington to Washington D.C. and we see the only two Black women (besides a gratuitous inclusion of a Rebecca Walker Third Wave feminism clip) in the film, which reminds us that the problems white feminists have in making room for Black women and intersectionality have been with us for a while now.

I was a fan of the band Hanna formed after Bikini Kill broke up, Le Tigre, and Hanna’s description of their songs as music they would make if “everything were great” rings true. I saw them live very early on, when Sadie Benning was still part of the trio, before JD Samson joined: the film never mentions Benning, even though she was a founding member. Hanna had a long intro to one of the songs that instead of being the embarrassing ramble I expected was a sweet story about the neighbors who made her feel safe during her troubled childhood. Perhaps Hanna’s between-song patter is how she keeps in touch with her spoken-word roots.

I also wish the film addressed Le Tigre’s participation in The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, which many in the queer community and beyond have boycotted for years because the Fest excludes trans women. The band members’ silence on the issue isn’t consistent with their message of inclusion.

After years of chronic illness Hanna has started another band The Julie Ruin (whom we see perform in the last scene of the film). They just released a new record, and even though it’s front-woman is now 45, their songs are some of the best things I’ve heard on college radio. Viva The Punk Singer !

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwrXC5OXqgc” title=”%27The%20Punk%20Singer%27%20Trailer”]

 

 See also at Bitch Flicks: The Punk Singer and a Room of Her–and Our–Own, by Leigh Kolb

 

 

The Sex Scenes Are Shit, and the Director’s an Asshole, but You Should Still See ‘Blue Is the Warmest Color’

A three-hour art film about two queer women with subtitles is like a dream come true for me: I’ve sat through arty, subtitled films twice that long–which didn’t have a trace of queer content. So I’ve obsessively read everything I can about Blue Is The Warmest Color. And I’m puzzled. In an age when writers of color like Wesley Morris and Roxane Gay bring added perspective and insight to their reviews of films like, Django Unchained and 12 Years A Slave, why are straight men the overwhelming majority of people telling the world whether or not the sex scenes in Blue are convincing?

Blue Is the Warmest Color poster
Blue Is the Warmest Color poster

 

This is a guest post by Ren Jender.

A three-hour art film about two queer women with subtitles is like a dream come true for me: I’ve sat through arty, subtitled films twice that long–which didn’t have a trace of queer content. So I’ve obsessively read everything I can about Blue Is The Warmest Color.  And I’m puzzled. In an age when writers of color like Wesley Morris and Roxane Gay bring added perspective and insight to their reviews of films like, Django Unchained and 12 Years A Slave, why are straight men the overwhelming majority of people telling the world whether or not the sex scenes in Blue are convincing?

I saw the film about five months after it had won the top prize at Cannes (in an unusual move the jury awarded the prize to the two stars, Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos, as well as the director, Abdellatif Kechiche) just prior to its US release. Julie Maroh (the queer author of the original graphic novel on which the film is based) prepared me to not love the sex scenes, which she described as “porn,” ” brutal and surgical,” and “cold.”

What I didn’t expect, in a film that is told almost entirely in close-ups on faces, was the director  (who also co-wrote the script) framing the sex scenes so they have as much tits and ass–especially ass–in them as possible. The actresses (Seydoux as Emma and Exarchopoulos as Adèle: the director named the main character and the film itself–the French title is La vie d’Adèle—after the woman playing the lead) do a beautiful job of making us believe in this romance–during the rest of the film. But here they are stuck playing a joyless game of naked Twister. We can practically hear the director shout, “Put your hand there! Put your face there! No, there! Now slap her ass! Again!” The ass slapping reminded me of the moment in male-directed, girl-on-girl porn clips, in which, to keep the audience from getting bored and give the actresses something to do, one woman is directed to slap (or tap: it makes a noise like slapping) the vulva of the other woman–even though: I don’t want my vulva slapped, and I’ve never met another queer woman who wants her vulva slapped nor one who gets pleasure from slapping the vulva of another woman.

The director frames a scene in a museum much like the sex scenes, so we get an eyeful of the breasts and buttocks from the nude artworks, as if the scene takes place at a peepshow. If the director had been able to stop ogling women’s body parts, he could have redeemed himself. A woman (who has never had sex with another woman) seeing nudes in the company of the woman to whom she has a strong sexual attraction is a situation rife with possibility. And part of what makes Adèle and Emma’s bond believable is the instant and electrifying attraction they have to each other: Adèle literally stops traffic when she first sees Emma and fantasizes about her that night, though the two haven’t even spoken. Every other moment of their relationship feels genuine (except when one woman hits the other during a fight, which also feels like a man’s version of what two women do when they’re alone), so we feel cheated during the naked sex scenes.

We see what the nude scenes could have been later in the film when the characters have a sexual moment but stay fully clothed–which is maybe why the director doesn’t ruin the mood. The camera focuses on their faces and the emotion that plays across them. Perhaps Kechiche finally learned that no one is able to act with her ass. 

Besides being a creep, Kechiche is an asshole. He cheated his crew out of overtime pay and continued a long tradition of male directors harassing their very young, very naked actresses on the set. When the two women had the temerity to complain, well, you can read for yourself his translated public statements at at Flavorwire. In spite of himself and those ten bad minutes (out of 180), Kechiche’s Blue Is The Warmest Color is a great film everyone should see.

Although the filmmakers (I am including the actresses since, according to all parties, improvisation played a big part in the finished film) and straight reviewers are quick to describe the film as being a universal one of first love, and as Maroh has pointed out no queer women had a prominent role in the creation of the film, it captures queer life and love well, especially the intensity and desperation of a teenager’s first relationship with another woman. When the two have their big fight I cringed in recognition–as I did during many other moments.

The isolation Adèle experiences in her relationship with Emma is nothing like the peer-pressure romance she has at the beginning of the film with the sensitive, good-looking, older boy at school. Her high school friends (most of whom have the same neat, fashionable haircut; Adèle’s hair is messily piled on her head but at the same time always gets in her face) seem more eager about the relationship (“He likes you!”) than Adèle does.

After she breaks up with the boy, we see Adèle walking away from the high school friends who are calling her name to be with Emma. Adèle is opening her life to the elements, to a tornado, knowing nothing will be the same afterward and not caring about the consequences. So we’re not surprised that Adèle clings to Emma like a life preserver. And we’re also not surprised to see that later in the film, without Emma, she starts to sink.

After she’s finished with school, Adèle doesn’t talk with straight coworkers about her personal life, even though she gets along with them and likes her job. She wants to avoid coming out to them. She even hides her true address, so none of them find out she lives with a woman. When heartbreak comes she can’t tell the people she works with why she doesn’t feel like dancing with the preschoolers they look after, so she goes through the motions, letting her real feelings surface only after everyone has left, and the day is done.

Lea Seydoux
Lea Seydoux (Emma)

 

Seydoux (whose previous roles are nothing like the one she plays here) makes Emma a beautiful butch, especially in her later scenes in which she seems lit from within, as if she stepped out of a Renoir painting. Emma is an artist herself and so stunning even those of us who are art-snobs can almost forgive her shitty paintings: the director seems to know as much about the art world as he does about sex between women.

Even in the mainstream films queer women love, we usually have to ignore the discrepancy between how non-character actresses in mainstream films are supposed to look and how butches look. Popular films will sometimes feature a butch who wears makeup heavy enough to be visible on camera, or we will see a woman who is supposed to be butch who has obvious breast implants. Though individual butches may have these attributes, they don’t signal “butch” to other queer women, including those in a film audience.

With her pale lashes and unpainted mouth Seydoux is one of the most recognizable butches I’ve seen in any movie, including those made by queer women. And her Emma pleasantly surprises us in the way that people in real life sometimes surprise us. We expect flirtatious, teasing, older Emma, who has her arm around another woman when she first sees Adèle, and a posse of admirers at the women’s bar, to break Adèle’s heart, but Emma turns out to be a serial monogamist who genuinely cares about Adèle. When Adèle first sees the inevitable cracks forming in her relationship with Emma she does the one thing guaranteed to destroy it (without consciously admitting what she is doing). Adèle ends up breaking her own heart.

Seeing the two actresses play the scene in the café toward the end is like watching two great musicians play together. Some viewers have complained the film is too long, but Blue takes time to unwind the way relationships take time, the way heartbreak takes time, the way life takes time. Even at three hours we just want more.

The film also excels in capturing the experiences of queer women who are femmes. At one point, we see Adèle (who wears skirts and heels) cook for, serve and then clean up for a large group of people she barely knows while her butch girlfriend (whose friends are the party guests) literally lies back with her hands under her head. I’ve played a similar “wife” role to a butch partner–and seen too many other femmes I know do so too.

In a long scene at the party, a man corners Adèle into a conversation about her sexuality, his eyes glittering (he could be a stand-in for the director!), and she’s too polite to tell him to fuck off. I’ve been to that party, met that man, and been that woman.

Adele Exarchopoulos
Adele Exarchopoulos (Adèle)

 

 Adèle is beautiful in the conventional sense (with her hair down, she resembles a younger, more well-fed version of Angelina Jolie), but we see that she doesn’t fit in either at the women’s bar, where she first speaks to Emma or later at the party among her girlfriend’s arty, more conventionally queer-looking friends. She is always, always getting attention from men, even the ones who know she is with Emma–but garners hardly any notice from other queer women.

Though Blue Is The Warmest Color is directed by a straight guy (and one who is, let’s not forget, a creepy asshole) it is, I would argue, a feminist film. It’s centered on one woman and takes her seriously. And Exarchopoulos gives the role (as Adèle jokingly tells Emma she will give her “study” of sex with women) her “all.”  Exarchopoulos’s face here is like a landscape in a Terrence Malick film and Blue, like the works of Malick, should absolutely, positively be seen in a theater, so the experience can wash over us, the way we see seawater wash over Adèle’s face when she is on a working holiday at the beach.

In Blue we see every aspect of Adèle’s life: as a schlumpy teenager, a student of French literature, a daughter, a girlfriend, a protestor, a “friend,” a teacher and finally a stylish twenty-something, alone. Films that cover this range in a man’s life are commonplace, but this week I was supposed to see three acclaimed American movies before their release (some of which competed with Blue at Cannes and may very well compete with it again at the Oscars), and the women in them are, according to even the glowing reviews, types and stereotypes: cute old ladies who talk dirty (and get cheap laughs for doing so) and bitchy ex-girlfriends who show that though the male protagonists may be losers, they aren’t gay losers. So sitting through three hours in a movie theater and focusing on one woman’s life (especially a queer woman’s) was a relief and something I could use a lot more of.  SEE THIS FILM.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2OLRrocn3s”]

 

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. She almost dressed as “Emma” for Halloween, but then decided to be “zombie Lou Reed” instead.

2013 Oscar Week: ‘How to Survive a Plague’: When Aging Itself Becomes a Triumph

Guest post written by Ren Jender.

When the late Ed Koch, former mayor of New York City, saw How To Survive a Plague, journalist/director David France’s Oscar-nominated documentary about ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) New York, he wrote a review for his local neighborhood newspaper. The review was not just a rave but recommended the activists profiled receive Presidential Medals of Freedom! Koch didn’t mention those same people and many others spent much time (including a demonstration documented at the beginning of the film) protesting his administration’s criminally inadequate response to the AIDS crisis. Some of the people he praised in his review, including one of the founders of ACT UP, Larry Kramer, have called him a “murderer.”

Ed Koch image via Peter Staley, POZ Blogs

Koch is an extreme example of the mainstream’s counterintuitive embrace of this film in particular and ACT UP in general. Although we see video of hateful, reactionary Jesse Helms spewing venom toward the group from the floor of the U.S. Senate we would never know most mainstream (and even some of the gay press’) coverage of ACT UP actions, like the one disrupting a service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral (to protest the Catholic Church’s stance on safer sex) or the one shutting down the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) — archival footage from both actions is part of the film– was far from laudatory.

Still, France’s overview, fortified by his work on AIDS issues in the gay press during the crisis years, is impressive even to those of us who were there. Though I never attended ACT UP meetings I took part in my city’s ACT UP demonstrations (“demos”), did safer sex outreach with ACT UP members and went to the huge Kennebunkport demo, shown in the film, where George H.W. Bush was hung in effigy.

In the beginning of Plague intertitles and footage of people with AIDS close to the end of their lives set the scene, then archival video (including interviews) from ACT UP’s own media collective takes over most of the narrative. We see a loud, crowded meeting of the group where an action is planned and then the action itself, ending with activists being carted off one-by-one, screaming chants all the way to the police wagon. The film captures in this demonstration and the ones it shows later the camaraderie, exuberance and carnival-like atmosphere of ACT UP’s brand of activism, so necessary in an epidemic which devastated everyone in its path. 
AIDS decimated the population of gay and bisexual men during the period covered in Plague, and I’m not sure most young queers realize the effect that loss still has on our community. In the film, I noticed the t-shirts many of the activists wore (the film repeatedly captures on many bodies the unisex, activist uniform of: a t-shirt, motorcycle jacket, jeans and Doc Martins) were unmistakably designed by acclaimed artist Keith Haring (which he did as a fundraiser for ACT UP: he also makes a brief, wordless appearance in a demonstration in the film). The music in Plague is by cellist and vocalist Arthur Russell. Both men died of AIDS in the early nineties. They make up one small corner of the heart of queer culture lost during that time period. 
France expertly pieces together newsreel footage and present-day interviews, but for most of the story he culled hundreds of hours of ACT UP’s own electrifying videotape, some of which is also included in United in Anger another film released in 2012 about ACT UP New York. Audiences should see both, because at least as many riveting films could be made about the AIDS crisis as have been made about World War II. 
I’ve read some blog criticism that How To Survive a Plague is the rich, white, male version of United in Anger. In contrast to Plague,Anger spotlights many more HIV-positive women and women of color in ACT UP as well as men of color. It also makes clear that part of the schism (also documented in Plague) between ACT UP and the Treatment Action Group (which helped develop protocols for drug trials and accelerated drug approval by working with pharmaceutical companies) was because the latter was made up mostly of white, gay men. But since Plague is, in the end, about (spoiler alert) those who survived HIV, its focus on privileged, white, gay men, while not enviable, is inevitable.

How to Survive a Plague
Part of what galvanized these men into action was their outrage that even though they had been bond traders, movie producers, PR executives and Ivy League graduates, because they were gay (or bisexual) and because they were HIV-positive, the medical establishment and the government still treated them as if they were scum. The film documents in interviews with them as well as scientists their tireless work. We see, toward the beginning, a member of the drug buyer’s club rattle off a laundry list of medications before saying, “None of which work, by the way.” Toward the end, years later, we see how the Treatment Action Group helped bring to market the protease inhibitors and combination drug therapies that continue to extend the lives of many people with HIV (at least those with access to these drugs) today. 
Those drugs have not eradicated AIDS, but changed it from a virus that killed everyone it infected (we see one man quietly recite the ACT UP chant “ACT UP. Fight back. Fight AIDS,” to end the eulogy he gives at a fellow ACT UP member’s public funeral procession, then see his own obituary in the newspaper) to a disease that many people can now live with for decades. 
One of the most moving scenes in the film is close to the end when we see the survivors (many of whom we had seen only in archival footage up to this point) in a series of long, silent close-ups, as they are now, all of those twenty years etched onto their faces and the wrinkles, jowls, grey hair and aging itself becomes a triumph, as it rarely is on American movie screens. 
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Ren Jender is a writer/performer and producer whose work appears regularly on xoJane. She is currently soliciting work for a film anthology made up of short films by queer women writers. Follow her on Twitter at @RenJender.

Best Documentary Oscar Nominee: Pina

Pina: Feminism in Motion
This is a guest post from Ren Jender.
When I’m at the movies all the usual filters come down: I cry in response to the most manipulative scenes—and even more embarrassingly at coming attractions for films I would never dream of seeing. Fellow moviegoers hear my loud laugh even when the filmmaker doesn’t seem to be in on the joke. I rarely talk back to films (except to the really terrible ones), but near the beginning of Pina, Wim Wenders’ great, 3-D exploration of the late choreographer and dancer Pina Bausch’s work, a long line of dancers trudged toward the camera enacting in unison a series of gestures a woman had explained were a tribute to the changing of the seasons. The dancers slowly made their way along a sheer curtain that bisected the screen and ended somewhere in the audience’s lap. As the dancers stepped forward, trance-like, they seemed to enter the room: the empty seats in front of the stage in the film blended into the empty seats in the first few rows of the movie theater. I couldn’t help myself: I said to the screen, “Cool!”
The rest of Pina never quite equals the wonder of that moment, but it does capture, in original and striking ways, the beauty and mystery of Bausch’s work by bringing us right inside of it. Fred Astaire probably wouldn’t have approved but watching this company of dancers captured separately and up close, with their arms held out to us beseechingly, is nearly as different from watching dance onstage—or dancers filmed as it they were onstage, from a respectful distance, as trying to ice-skate is different from watching figure skaters on TV.
In “The Rite of Spring,” traces of the fresh dirt we see raked onto the stage before the piece begins become visible on the women’s thin, light-colored slip dresses and anguished faces as they offer themselves one-by-one to the group of shirtless male dancers—before running away at the last minute. The last woman dancer to offer herself doesn’t run, but the terror in her eyes and her quaking body—that seems to anticipate the male dancer will soon literally drag her through the dirt—reminded me of the unabashed purity of emotion found in silent films.
Pina isn’t silent, but long stretches pass without words. Intermittent scenes feature members of the company sharing a few memories of Pina herself. Wenders has captured each dancer alone in close-up silently looking at the camera while he or she, in voice over, talks in his or her native language—Korean, Portuguese, Croatian, Russian, Spanish and French as well as German. “You’re just going to have to get crazier,” one woman recalls Pina counseling her, but the film offers no more deep, detailed explanation and analysis of the work, no behind-the-scenes peek or even dances presented in their entirety. Pina is less like a traditional, chatty, dance documentary (of which Frederick Wiseman’s 2010 La Danse is one example) than it is like Koyaanisqatsi, which, with its time-lapsed segments set to a score by Philip Glass, also set a mood where words were superfluous.
Bausch started her company in the early 70s and the sexual politics in her work is unmistakable, not just in “The Rite of Spring,” but in most of the dances shown in the film. A group of younger men put their hands on a withdrawn middle-aged woman. They grab not just at her breasts but also at her hand—to kiss it—and take turns stroking her nose and chin as if she were a very young child. In “Dance Hall” the men in the company reach to grope the women while the women cringe, try to escape and bat errant hands away, a familiar scenario, even though the men are seated and the women stand against the opposite wall.

A man in “Café Müller” tries to force a couple into a Hollywood-style, romantic embrace, repositioning their bodies each time the woman falls to the floor from her partner’s hands, even though their pose has a progressively shorter duration each time the man tries to re-orchestrate it.
But the dances have their light moments as well: a woman in a short, red dress runs across a row of chairs, giving a sweet cry of relief, “Oooooh” as she knocks each one down. She brings to life the idea an older dancer expresses: that being in Bausch’s company is a chance to play as children play—for the rest of one’s life.
In another sequence, slender Azusa Seyama (“extremely thin” like “young” is not, we see, the given for dancers in Bausch’s company as it would be in most of the rest of the dance world) poses and grimaces alongside an impressive set of muscular arms only to pull away and reveal the male dancer flexing behind her. He then puts her arm over his shoulder and launches her into the air, whirling her around and around, an amusement park ride most of us will never get the chance to board.

We see women dancers repeatedly climb seated, male dancers as if lightly dancing up steps. The women end by poking the men’s chests with their toes—and the men smile at them throughout. In this era when so many people make grim trips to the gym part of their weekly routine, seeing beautiful bodies that are toned and sculpted to perform feats of wonder instead of just to look good is a revelation.
Although Bausch’s life’s work and her company of dancers are the focus of the film, Wim Wenders’ inventive yet unobtrusive direction and the work of his team of cinematographers, Alain Derobe, Helene Louvart and Jorg Widmer, provides the gilt frame around the portrait: sweeping crane shots, gorgeous colors and lighting effects that I hadn’t thought possible in 3-D. Color is particularly important in Bausch’s work: the bright pink of the dress first worn by an adolescent girl, then a grown woman then an elderly woman (each standing still in the middle of a line of her peers) in “Dance Hall” stuck with me long after I had left the theater, like seeing the shadow of the sun when one closes one’s eyes to a clear sky. Much of Pina has stayed with me in the same way. In a year when the Oscars have shown so little respect for women, barely nominating them outside of gender-specific categories, Pina—which is nominated for “Best Documentary Feature”—is a film well worth rooting for. 
Trailer:


Ren Jender is a writer/performer/producer based in Boston who occasionally projects “radical” phrases on the sides of buildings.