Ren Jender – Page 3 – Bitch Flicks

‘A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night’ and Scares Us

This repost by Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.

Nice girls aren’t supposed to walk alone in the dark, even in the movies. So in the generically titled A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, the debut feature from writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour, we in the audience wonder what a woman in a black cloak (a traditional Iranian garment called a chador) is doing on the streets of a largely empty desert town in the wee hours. We see her witness a pimp (Dominic Rains) exploit and then cheat a sex worker (Mozhan Marnò). We soon find out the woman in the chador, The Girl–we never find out her name (played, unforgettably, by Sheila Vand) is no ordinary woman, but a vampire with fangs that retract like a cat’s claws–or a switchblade.

The film takes place in a parallel California which contains a Farsi-speaking, Iranian enclave called “Bad City.” We know we’re not in Iran because the pimp has visible tattoos and later we see a woman in public with her hair and much of her body uncovered. Also The Girl wears her chador in such a way that we see her hipster, stripey, boat shirt (too short for modest dress) and skinny jeans underneath.

In spite of its surface differences, the film to which Girl has the greatest parallel is probably David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Like that film, every sumptuous, black and white shot is framed and lit with care, creating an alternate universe for the audience to lose themselves in. And as in Eraserhead, even what we hear is fussed over in a way that grabs our attention: incidental sounds are recorded close. The proximity doesn’t alienate us, the way less skillful dubbing in other films often does, but gives us a heightened sense of intimacy, as if we are almost touching the characters.

When The Girl interrogates The Street Urchin (a young boy played by Milad Eghbali) the film shows a truth that many films, including horror films, elide–but that the other recent acclaimed horror film directed by a woman, The Babadook, also addresses–the first person who scares us when we are children is often a woman, whether it’s a mother or another woman authority figure. Tilda Swinton has said that her character in Snowpiercer was based on a particularly terrifying nanny from her own childhood. Few lines in films this year have been more chilling than the one The Girl leaves The Street Urchin with after she threatens him: “Be a good boy.”

Like Michael Almereyda, who, in the ’90s made a stylish black and white film about a woman vampire among New York hipsters, Nadja (its star, Elina Löwensohn, had eyes you couldn’t look away from, much like Vand’s) Amirpour combines familiar elements in an unfamiliar way for maximum resonance. In Almereyda’s modern day New York Hamlet (from 2000), he famously incorporated a video of Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh talking about “being” in the background of a scene, priming us to later hear Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy.

In Girl Amirpour gets at how women in modest Muslim dress (including those from Iran) are used for xenophobic and anti-Islamic fear-mongering (often in the guise of “feminism”) in the US (like in the recent ad campaign for Homeland) but also uses a chador’s resemblance to a cape to give us an eerily familiar–but new–“Dracula” silhouette. When The Girl rides on the skateboard The Street Urchin leaves behind (after he runs away from her in terror) the chador billows around her as she rolls down the road, and she becomes, without CGI trickery, a bat in flight.

Americans often read chador on women to mean vulnerability, but like the frail-seeming, pale, young, blonde Mae in another beautifully-shot, vampire Western (also directed by a woman, the pre-Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow) 1987’s Near Dark, who, when her cowboy boyfriend lassoes her as a “joke” takes hold of the rope and pulls him in, The Girl has hidden reserves of strength. The Girl becomes an avenging angel in black, attacking the men we see abuse women, using her “traditional” quiet passivity to draw these guys close. As the abusive men do with the cat who is many times in the frame (rarely has a filmmaker caught how much of our daily lives our animals witness) they ascribe motivations and personas to The Girl which are more about their own perceptions than about who she is or what she is thinking.

Like a number of films Girl has an early scene, fast becoming a campy cliché, in which a woman suggestively sucks the finger of a man. But when The Girl takes the pimp’s forefinger into her mouth, he gets more than he bargained for.

And as we do with Mae, we see that The Girl is lonely, and a hapless, good-looking guy, Arash, played by Arash Marandi touches something in her. When they meet, he’s coming from a costume party where he’s taken some of the club drugs he was dealing and is still wearing a vampire cape as he stares into a street light. She immediately becomes protective of him.

Vand’s presence burns through the screen. She has the intensity of the great silent actresses–and in many of her scenes, the ones in her room plastered with ’80s music posters, dancing by herself to Farsi synth-pop records or even when she interacts with other characters, she often does not speak. This film is low on back story but Vand’s face, especially her huge dark eyes (we see her put on her heavy eyeliner in the bathroom mirror before she goes out) tells us what she is feeling in every scene.

Amirpour’s camera (the magnificent cinematography is by Lyle Vincent) lingers over Arash’s beauty–his high cheekbones and large, long-lashed eyes under a dark, curly version of James Dean’s pompadour–in a way few male filmmakers would. His clothes (a plain white t-shirt and jeans that hug his muscled body) also evoke Dean’s. And even though the pimp, Saeed, is a villain, meant to repel us, Amirpour lets us take in the attractiveness of his body, especially in a shirtless scene with The Girl when his pants hang very low and we see the full extent of his tattoos–and his muscles.

LA has enough Iranian-Americans in it that some have nicknamed it “Tehrangeles” (after Iran’s capital), but I can’t think of another film produced near there (Girl was actually filmed in Bakersfield) in which most (or all) of the cast is of Persian descent, but no one is a terrorist or a relic from the old country. These characters speak Farsi to each other but, except for Arash’s father, with his drug addiction and collection of pre-revolutionary framed photos of family (complete with 60s-style teased hair on the women), these people aren’t living in the past–even The Girl’s retro record collection, clothes and bobbed hair reflect present-day fashion.

We can never know for sure, but just as with Black actress Gugu Mbatha-Raw giving two terrific, completely different star-turns in movies in one year but the media still largely ignoring her, I wonder if Amirpour’s flawless visual sense, skill with actors and unique reworking of a genre many of us thought didn’t have an original angle left would garner more attention if she were a white guy. Girl is distributed in partnership with VICE‘s film arm and has even made some year-end, top-10 lists, but I had to go to New York to see it and whole countries (like Canada) have yet to get even limited distribution. Nevertheless Amirpour continues to work on films unimpeded. Her next work is about cannibals. I can’t wait until its release.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YGmTdo3vuY” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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

‘Female Perversions’ Still Strikingly Relevant Nearly Two Decades Later

Like ‘Mean Girls’, ‘Female Perversions’ script (co-written by Streitfeld and Julie Hébert) is an adaptation of a book of the same name of nonfiction, feminist psychology, the concepts and ideas of which are plugged into a fictionalized narrative (and, in this film sometimes into bus stop placards and advertisements that appear in magazines).

While looking at a highly subjective list of 100 great films by women (which is itself a reaction to the subjective list the BBC released of “top 100 American films“–that included only three directed by women) I had a mixed reaction. I was gratified to see some films I thought would be overlooked (XXY), appalled to see one of the worst films I’ve had to sit through this year (Eden), disappointed that critics often don’t look beyond the obvious films for women with interesting, varied careers (Chantal Akerman, Gillian Armstrong, Jane Campion and Sofia Coppola have all directed better but less well-known films than the ones on the list) and skeptical critics actually saw at least one of the films included (Shirley Clarke’s The Connection). But I also thought of the films that were milestones in my own viewing history that didn’t make the cut: one of the most vivid that remains surprisingly relevant today is Susan Streitfeld’s Female Perversions.

Like Mean Girls, Female Perversions’ script (co-written by Streitfeld and Julie Hébert) is an adaptation of a book of the same name of nonfiction, feminist psychology, the concepts and ideas of which are plugged into a fictionalized narrative (and, in this film sometimes into bus stop placards and advertisements that appear in magazines). The main character is Eve Stephens (Tilda Swinton, looking impossibly young and beautiful in her American film debut) a Los Angeles prosecutor who is widely thought to be the next person the governor will appoint as a judge to the appeals court. Her male boss assures her, “First of all, politically, he must appoint a woman,” and “he actually wants to appoint a woman,” reminding us of every paternalistic man who never stops reminding women how much he “supports” them.

We see Eve arguing a case as the men in the courtroom ogle her in her sharp, chic (for the mid-nineties) off-white suit and matching high heels as the camera lingers on a loose thread coming from a seam (the excellent cinematographer is, in a great rarity for a film directed and written by women, also a woman: Teresa Medina). Later she sees herself on television giving a statement to reporters after she has won the case and all she can notice is the dark lipstick staining her two front teeth.

SwintonPorizkova — Not only is Eve expected to perform impeccably and advance in her profession, she’s expected to have perfect hair, clothes and makeup– and an enviable personal life too

As an opening quote onscreen from the book makes clear, the “perversions” in the film are actually the contradictory and unattainable standards conventionally feminine women are supposed to aspire to. Not only is Eve expected to perform impeccably and advance in her profession, she’s expected to have perfect hair, clothes and makeup– and an enviable personal life too (and this pressure on women has only increased in the nearly 20 years since the film’s release). She eats M & Ms, as she stays in her office working until 9:30 p.m. (leaving only when the Latina cleaning woman comes in), ordering flowers for herself to show up the next day with a double-entendre message “from” her equally high-powered, career-focused boyfriend. She then picks up a woman (a psychiatrist, played by Karen Sillas) on the elevator as she leaves the building. Before they get off, we see Eve’s receptive body language and hear the flirtatiousness in her voice as she asks the psychiatrist out for a drink. The next day a real card (and considerably more modest flowers) await her in the office from “the young doctor” alongside the big bouquet Eve ordered for herself.

Being pushed and pulled in so many directions makes Eve sometimes behave erratically, raging when she isn’t in the presence of others and imagining figures grabbing her and whispering sometimes obscene insults into her ear. When she hallucinates an upscale clothing clerk is judging her body as “wide across the hips” she tries on a piece of sheer lingerie and comes sashaying out of the dressing room wearing it for all to see.

SwintonPerversions — I’m not sure I’ve ever seen nudity used as well in a film as it is in ‘Perversions’

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen nudity used as well in a film as it is in Perversions, as Renaissance-style art in the somewhat scary fantasies in Eve’s head when she has sex (these scenes are reminiscent of the work Swinton did with out gay director Derek Jarman) and to make the sex scenes themselves deeper and more realistic. We don’t see the first encounter with Sillas’s character but we do see another, which starts with Sillas’s character mock-analyzing Eve and her answering, in jest, “Finally someone understands me.” What follows is much more like the hot sex people have in real life than what we’re used to seeing passed off as “hot sex” onscreen–especially between two women. Eve’s bare bottom is used to show, in the scene the next morning, how discombobulated she is, when she wakes up alone, in the blouse she wore with her suit and nothing else.

We also see how the forced politeness of acceptable, feminine behavior not only fuels Eve’s rage when she’s alone, but also renders her relationship with the psychiatrist shallow and unsatisfying. When Sillas’s character visits Eve, Eve claims she wasn’t bothered when she suddenly left, the way a good guest says she’s enjoying her stay no matter how she really feels. When the two talk they have a choreography of crossed and uncrossed legs and offered drinks that underlies the complex choreography of emotions that Eve is, by adhering to norms (as well as using her work as a kind of shield and excuse to keep their interaction short) cutting herself off from.

We also see Eve’s sister, Maddie (Amy Madigan) who lives in the desert and is about to defend her Ph.D. Maddie gets an erotic charge from shoplifting even as we see, in one scene, she immediately throws away an item she’s stolen. Madigan holds her own in scenes with Swinton, no small feat since Eve is one of Swinton’s best performances: she frequently injects an almost slapstick physicality into the character though we’re not watching a comedy (the film does have one great funny payoff involving Eve’s “lucky suit”).

The film isn’t perfect. The ending is a mess (the film just stops instead of offering any real resolution) and I could have done without the only Latinas we see literally standing in silent witness to Eve’s behavior. But I was sad to see Streitfeld has barely worked as a director since the film was released, one of the many women who made one great film and was never allowed to make another.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gN9Ca45l8cg” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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

‘Mistress America’: Passing The Bechdel Test All The Way Through

I didn’t expect Gerwig and Baumbach together to create in the second film (‘Frances Ha’ was the first) the two offscreen romantic partners have written in which Gerwig plays the lead and Baumbach directs, a movie that (in spite of its terrible title) is one of the delights of this summer: ‘Mistress America’.

I haven’t seen a movie directed by Noah Baumbach since The Squid and the Whale, a film that made me hate every critic who praised it and made me mistrust any person who said, “I liked it.” For the past decade he has been one of the filmmakers whose career infuriates me; his output makes me think of all the more deserving work (much of it from women) which hasn’t been funded

I first took notice of Greta Gerwig when she was in the execrable Whit Stillman film Damsels in Distress. Although I walked out at the halfway point of a preview screening (past a standing figure in the dark by the doorway whom I now recognize was Stillman himself). I could see Gerwig’s talent underneath the ridiculously mannered dialogue and stilted action. I didn’t expect Gerwig and Baumbach together to create in the second film (Frances Ha was the first) the two offscreen romantic partners have written in which Gerwig plays the lead and Baumbach directs, a movie that (in spite of its terrible title) is one of the delights of this summer: Mistress America.

The protagonist, Tracy (played by Lola Kirke: sister of Girls’ Jemima Kirke: I wondered why she looked so familiar) is in her first semester at Barnard in New York City and is having trouble finding the fun and stimulation college life–and New York–is supposed to be brimming with. Her dorm-mate alternates between chastising her and making fun of her (much more realistic than Boyhood‘s dorm-mate, embarrassed but politely deferential when she walked into her own room and found her roommate’s brother in bed with his girlfriend) and Tracy falls asleep in one of her literature classes–which leads to her making her first college friend, Tony (Matthew Shear) who surreptitiously wakes her. The two of them share writing ambitions and commiserate over screwdrivers in his room when they both have stories rejected by the campus literary magazine. But when he gets a girlfriend, Nicolette (Jasmine Cephas Jones) Tracy finds herself alone again, and her mother suggests she call Brooke (Gerwig) the 30-year-old daughter of the man the mother is engaged to marry.

MistressParty — The two have a night that is full of everything Tracy feels she’s been missing

Brooke meets Tracy in the chaotic, tourist-ridden Times Square where Brooke has an apartment. She explains,”I got off the bus from Jersey. I thought this was the cool place to live.” The two have a night that is full of everything Tracy feels she’s been missing: they first have a good, cheap, dinner, get backstage passes for a band who invite Brooke to join them onstage (she makes out with the bass player at the afterparty while Tracy looks on). Brooke and Tracy dance and talk, not about boyfriends (except very briefly) but about their own ambitions: Brooke cobbles together a living with interior decorating, a little tutoring and as the teacher of a spin class, but she also has concrete plans to open a restaurant. After that first night (when Tracy crashes on the couch in Brooke’s apartment) they spend time together throughout the semester, which helps Tracy come out of her shell.
Brooke doesn’t just have cool friends and know the right places to go (not to mention the savvy to find a place in the middle of Times Square where she can live by herself for not much money) but is also hilariously, gloriously opinionated. When she’s caught on camera kissing the band’s bass player she says, “Must we document ourselves all the time? Must we?”

When an old high school classmate confronts Brooke in a bar about her treatment of her when they were younger, Brooke is dismissive, saying that she doesn’t care what the woman thinks of her–and the woman shouldn’t care either. In the middle of a confrontation between Tony, a jealous Nicolette and Tracy, Brooke says, “There’s no cheating when you’re 18, you should all be touching each other all the time.”

MistressAl0ne — The real revelation here is Lola Kirke, who, as Tracy, starts off unsure of herself but accrues confidence at a record pace.

Tracy writes the title short story, revolving around a very lightly fictionalized Brooke, “Claudia” which contains some truths that Tracy would never say to her face, an interesting development considering Baumbach wrote The Squid and The Whale about his own parents–and his portrait of them was not a flattering one. But Tracy’s story seems far too knowing and polished for an 18-year-old college student to have written: Gerwig and Baumbach missed an opportunity to parody a faux-sophisticated writing style as we hear Tracy read parts of the story as the film’s voiceover. Tracy also becomes less hesitant to express her opinions off the page: before she met Brooke , when Tony asked for “notes” on his story she had none, though he had plenty of suggestions for hers. Afterward she tells him he should stop trying for humor in his writing, because he doesn’t have a sense of humor in real life. At a later point he says to her, “You used to be so nice,” reminding us that, especially in describing young women “nice” is another way of saying “unformed”, “overly polite” or “afraid to say what she’s really thinking.”

I kept waiting for this film to go terribly wrong. The movies in which a younger man gloms onto an older one as an inspiration or role model usually show the older man has some great flaw, and free-living, fun women like Brooke in films (not just narrative ones) are usually punished, so I wondered if she would turn out to be a compulsive liar (since a lot of what she claims seems to be far-fetched) a drug addict or would have an untreated bipolar disorder and we would see her depressive side of in the latter half of the film. But Brooke’s downfall (which is more like a reckoning) doesn’t lie within herself but within the changes New York and other large cities have undergone in the past two or three decades. At one time someone like Brooke could make her way with nothing but ideas and ambition, but now young creative types and the places they like to hang out are at the mercy of the very rich, the only people who can afford to live in great swaths of those cities. The real-life restaurant where Brooke and Tracy have their first dinner closed one of their locations, unable to make a profit in today’s high-rent Manhattan.

Gerwig has, with Baumbach, written a role that she was born to play: her slightly spacy delivery serves as a disguise for Brooke’s razor-sharp observations. When a wealthy patron tells her that she’s funny and doesn’t know it, she corrects him, “”I know I’m funny. I know everything about myself.” But the real revelation here is Lola Kirke, who, as Tracy, starts off unsure of herself but accrues confidence at a record pace. In some ways, Tracy, with her brown shoulder-length hair in bulky, unflattering, outdated sweaters (which may be Baumbach reaching back to his own college years, the way the soundtrack includes familiar ’80s synth pop) is much more ordinary and natural than the young women we’re used to seeing in film but when she smiles and her eyes gleam at her newfound naughtiness, she burns a hole in the screen.

By the end both women have come into their own in a way films rarely acknowledge women do: the closest example I can think of is An Education but the focus in that film was on only one character. I would have liked to see this film explore the characters’ sexuality a little more: Tracy says (in the voiceover) that she’s “so in love” with “Claudia” and their chemistry together does seem to teeter to the non-platonic, though they never even kiss. Still I can’t complain when not just one but both of the main women characters end up single—and happy in their independence. When you leave the theater you’ll be smiling too.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6z8MCW16uZY” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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‘Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten’: Rock ‘n’ Roll, the ’60s and Genocide

Because no archival photos and footage of most of the Pol Pot era exists, films about the Cambodian genocide have had to use creative ways to tell what happened. The Oscar-nominated documentary ‘The Missing Picture’ from a couple of years ago used clay figurines as a visual complement to the narration. John Pirozzi’s ‘Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten’ uses the popular music of Cambodia in the ’60s and ’70s (and the artists who made it) to detail the country’s trajectory.

Do we need to see atrocities to fully absorb their horror? It’s a question I ask whenever a new video turns up showing a police officer killing an unarmed person. The answer for me is no: I don’t need to see suffering and death to believe they happen. But I know I’m not in the majority. A year ago the photos of Mike Brown’s body lying in the street and video of police gassing participants in the peaceful protests afterward were the catalyst for many to join protests of their own–though a much smaller band of activists had been exposing and protesting police violence, especially that against Black people, for decades.

The same way many police departments want to keep dashboard and body cameras far from their officers, The Pol Pot regime in Cambodia kept cameras–and “outsiders”–out of the country so that their slaughter of their own people (an estimated 3 million, over 25 percent of the population) could escape the notice of much of the rest of the world. Because no archival photos and footage of most of the Pol Pot era exists, films about the Cambodian genocide have had to use creative ways to tell what happened. The Oscar-nominated documentary The Missing Picture from a couple of years ago used clay figurines as a visual complement to the narration. John Pirozzi’s Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten uses the popular music of Cambodia in the ’60s and ’70s (and the artists who made it) to detail the country’s trajectory.

MadMenInCambodia — “Mad Men”–and women–in Cambodia.

We see a woman with high teased hair in a tight, tight dress singing as couples dance in the early ’60s (a lot of the pristine film footage is from the estate of King Sihanouk, Cambodia’s leader from when it first broke free from French colonial rule in 1955 to 1970), which could be a scene from the early seasons of Mad Men, except the people dancing are all Cambodian and even though they move their bodies like Westerners, their hands move more freely in graceful swooping gestures. The music seems familiar too: the way one of the main male stars Sinn Sisamouth, is posed (always wearing a suit or tux) on his records’ cover art and the type of songs he sang (and his lasting popularity) bring to mind Frank Sinatra–especially his later efforts to seem more relevant by collaborating with younger performers.

Musicians of the time tell us the capital, Phnom Penh “was the hub where bands from the countryside met.” The film spends as much time documenting the careers of women musicians as it does male ones–and the most knowlegable “fan” of the music interviewed (who was a teenager in Phnom Penh when the music was new) is also a woman, which should not be a rarity in films about contemporary, popular music, but is.

gogobootsForgotten — The film includes as many women as men in its story.

She tells us, “I was not a shy kid. I was like, ‘Just give me the music. I’ll dance.'” She shares with us details about the most popular woman singers of the time that a male fan might have left out. When she talks about the biggest woman star, Ros Serey Sothea she notes that she was a farm girl (her father had abandoned the family and she sang to support her mother and siblings) and that she was “dark-skinned” (which is not always apparent in early cover art for her records).

Like music from the ’60s in Britain and the US we see and hear (the film is chock full of songs from the era) the scene evolve with time, from kicky cocktail and Afro-Cuban style music in the early ’60s to poppy guitar bands with pretty boys in matching suits a few years later. Members of one of the first of these bands tell us they copied the choreographed moves of Cliff Richard and his band in the 1961 British film The Young Ones which we see confirmed as scenes of the Cambodian band’s live performances and scenes of performances in the film are intercut. Later in the ’60s and into the early ’70s we see Cambodian bands adopted more free-form fashions and dancing along with a harder rock sound. We hear a version of Santana’s “Oye Como Va” sung in Khmer that sounds as good if not better than the original.

Some of politics of the time we notice in subtext: early ’60s street footage shows children living in abject poverty: most of the musicians, besides Serey Sothea, were from wealthy families. We also hear explicitly from an American commentator that Cambodia was not a democracy and see Sihanouk, during an interview, coolly defend his execution of communists. But he apparently didn’t kill enough of them to satisfy the American government’s tastes (the US was fighting Communists just over the border in Vietnam) and Sihanouk was overthrown in a military coup, the leadership of which openly allied itself with the US (Sihanouk had declared Cambodia “neutral” in the Cold War). During this time the US relentlessly bombed Cambodia in a badly thought-out effort to destroy Communist strongholds: instead the bombing (which killed an estimated one million people) galvanized most of the people in the countryside to join the anti-Western communists, The Khmer Rouge (and Sihanouk in exile had, in desperation, allied himself with them too, in hopes of returning to power).

ForgottenRecordCoverArt — Ros Serey Sothea and Sinn Sisamouth,

The military leadership used singers Sisamouth and Serey Sothea in propaganda (we see Serey Sothea in military fatigues parachuting from a plane) but their popularity couldn’t counteract the devastation the bombing brought. Phnom Penh, the last holdout against Communists was eventually “liberated” by The Khmer Rouge and its leader Pol Pot. At first, the residents, including musicians, celebrated. But as a surviving member of the royal family tells us (in translated French) “If you want to eliminate values from past societies you have to eliminate the artists, because artists are influential.” The Western-influenced capital was evacuated and everyone who had lived there, including musicians, were put to work in rice fields and other manual labor in the countryside, much as we see the “decadent” gay men of Fidel Castro’s 1960s Cuba were put to work in the sugar cane fields in Before Night Falls.

I was hoping the film would employ a similar technique to How To Survive a Plague and show us musicians who survived the genocide but whom we had not yet seen in contemporary interviews. But the vast majority of musicians we come to know in the film (and sometimes even their children) were either killed for not following orders, for being affiliated with the previous government or for simply being a “bad” (counter-revolutionary) influence. Some, though they succeeded in escaping detection, died of starvation. One woman, whom we see dancing wildly and joyfully onstage as a member of a popular late ’60s band cries as she tells us that during Pol Pot’s reign when anyone asked about her past in the city, “I told them I was a banana seller… I lied to them. That saved my life.”

The musicians who survived thought they would be killed too, but when Vietnamese forces invaded the country in 1979, the genocide stopped. But because no records were kept, no one knows how most of those killed, including the most famous musicians, died or where their bodies are buried. Now not just the surviving musicians but the fans–as well as those of us in the audience–hear something deeper and more resonant than nostalgia in the music that came before Pol Pot (and which was banned under his regime). As the dedicated Phnom Penh fan tells us, when she and others worked the rice fields and no Khmer Rouge official could hear them, “We would sing.”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ipq4FefX5Ps” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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‘An Open Secret’ Many Don’t Want To Know

This time Berg focuses on sexual abuse of children in Hollywood, perpetrated specifically by managers and other adults in positions of authority over male child actors. The 13-year-old girl Polanski raped was an an aspiring model, who believed that he was going to put her photo in French ‘Vogue.’ The boys–now all grown men–interviewed in ‘Secret’ believed that their managers and other adults who abused them were key to their careers and would blackball them if they spoke up, so kept quiet.

Rape denialism is such a pervasive force that even those of us who consider ourselves informed feminists forget that Bill Cosby was the subject of rape charges (and paid settlements to victims) for many years before his actions had any effect on his career or reputation. Meanwhile, no actor in Hollywood seems to turn down an offer to be in the latest Woody Allen film, even though his daughter, Dylan Farrow has come forward as an adult to write that her father did indeed rape her when she was 7. Two decades ago, tabloids closely followed this police investigation until its conclusion, in which the State of Connecticut said they had probable cause but would not charge Allen. Acclaimed director Roman Polanski is a convicted rapist of a 13-year-old girl, whom he plied with alcohol and drugs beforehand. After he fled the US to avoid serving prison time he worked freely in Europe and even won an Academy Award, eventually spending a short time under “house arrest” in luxurious Swiss digs–but never extradited to the US to serve real prison time.

The last example is the one that is perhaps the most relevant to the new documentary, An Open Secret by Amy Berg, who was nominated for an Oscar for 2006’s Deliver Us From Evil about sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church. This time Berg focuses on sexual abuse of children in Hollywood, perpetrated specifically by managers and other adults in positions of authority over male child actors. The 13-year-old girl Polanski raped was an an aspiring model, who believed that he was going to put her photo in French Vogue. The boys–now all grown men–interviewed in Secret believed that their managers and other adults who abused them were key to their careers and would blackball them if they spoke up, so kept quiet.

OpenSecretMichaelHarrah — Michael Harrah

About child sexual abuse, Hollywood stalwart and, until recently, the chair of The Young Performers Committee for SAG/AFTRA (the union all performers in major Hollywood commercials, television productions and films have to belong to) Michael Harrah (who managed child actors–some quite successful) says, “It wasn’t uncommon,” of his own time as a child actor. Harrah has also always had some of his underage clients live at his house and late in the film is confronted by one, now an adult, who says, “I hated when you had me sleep in your bed and tried to touch me,” which Harrah tellingly does not deny (though later when confronted in an interview says he doesn’t remember the incident and says he’s “not particularly” attracted to young boys). Another one-time child actor confronts his former manager Marty Weiss (now a convicted child rapist, but who served very little prison time) on tape about his abuse. Like Harrah, Weiss brushes off the severity of what he did, saying the conversation he and his client (identified as Evan H. in the film, but articles about the film and case use his full name: Evan Henzi) had before he first abused him let him know that Evan was “interested.” Evan shoots back, “I was not interested at 12.”

If you think, in spite of its important subject matter, the film I’ve described so far seems at least a little exploitative and lurid, you’d be right. And structurally this film is a mess. Maybe because I’ve seen carefully crafted documentaries recently like (T)ERROR and Out in the Night, which combine multiple viewpoints into compelling and easily comprehensible story lines, I was frustrated at the muddle An Open Secret makes of its overlapping stories. I understood only after reading articles to follow up that Henzi was the main impetus behind Weiss’s conviction and that another interviewee, Michael Egan, was close friends and “coworkers” with Mark Ryan (who was a young adult at the time) at the estate where underage boys who wanted to succeed in show business were preyed on by rich and powerful men (which again is not just a rumor or “allegation”: the adult who owned the mansion is now a convicted child rapist–though he too fled to Europe to avoid prison time).

Egan’s presence in the film complicates it and may be one reason for its disjointedness. Egan sued director Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects, X-Men) for sexual abuse and apparently an earlier cut of the film included many more mentions of Singer’s name and presence at the mansion. Now we just hear a few random mentions and see some footage of Singer promoting the business the adults at the estate ran: an online video production company whose “shows,” shot at the estate, featured underage boys. The clips we see of the shows are so bad the well-known investors–not just Singer but Michael Huffington and others–were likely paying for access to the young actors (Huffington as well as Singer spent time visiting the estate) rather than making a prudent business investment.

Some people have referred to Egan, who has had legal troubles of his own, as “discredited” but I would urge those people to watch the excellent The Boys of St. Vincent (originally a miniseries, based on Catholic priests’ sexual abuse of children in Canada and their subsequent trials) to see that victims of sexual abuse are often very troubled adults who can easily cross into illegal activity themselves, including perpetuating the cycle of abuse–which is not the crime Egan is accused of, but does seem to be what Harrah is confessing in the phone call with a former client.

Secret uses clips from a “very special” episode of Diff’rent Strokes to intersperse with an interview of co-star Todd Bridges talking about his experience of abuse at the hands of adults in power when he was a child actor. The film could do with an infusion of other narrative clips about sexual abuse of children. When the film in voiceover described the process of grooming I thought back to Brian Cox’s character in the great L.I.E. and his interplay with his potential victim (who is the main character of the film) played by a young Paul Dano. What that film got right is something missing from Berg’s: that even if Dano’s character was gay (as he seemed to be) and willingly spent time with Cox’s character what Cox was trying to do with him was still wrong. None of the grown men in Secret out themselves as queer, which leaves the film open to perceptions of homophobia (which I don’t share) since Huffington and Singer (along with some other men alleged to consort with the young boys at the estate) are some of the most powerful out gay men in Southern California.

Although all the victims in this film are boys (now grown men), I was not surprised to see the advocates for them in this film are women; BizParentz’ Anne Henry, the prosecutor in the Weiss case and Berg herself–because most women are very familiar with the attempts to “discredit” survivors of child sexual abuse and other forms of rape. Still I would have liked to have seen at least one girl (now a grown woman) survivor, though maybe they were all afraid of the same notoriety that has followed the now grown woman Polanski raped. As with most of the survivors of sexual abuse Berg interviews she “left the business,” never to appear as herself (as opposed to a much talked about rape survivor) in a magazine, a film, or on TV ever again.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JpHUaMBARU” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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Trans Women of Color In a Theater Near You: ‘Mala Mala’ and ‘Tangerine’

Whenever people who aren’t queer make a film about queers, I’m always very wary about seeing it. Over 30 years ago, I had made up my mind to go to my first queer bar, but stopped in a revival movie house to see a film beforehand, which contained a surprise: an explicit male-male rape scene. The victim was the main character, in a jailhouse. His attacker was his cell mate, a grotesque, possibly mentally disabled, bald giant who had some teeth missing: he smiled as he came and sent a shiver of revulsion through the audience. No reviewer had warned about this scene, probably because this portrayal of a queer character was typical for the time. After the film was over I didn’t go to the bar. I just headed home instead.

Maybe sitting through years of shitty queer characters in films and TV has sensitized me, because, even though I’m not trans*, I often get a similar, sickly feeling about films and TV with trans* characters made by people who aren’t trans*, most recently the two (or maybe it was one and a half) episodes of the Emmy-nominated Transparent I watched when (cis) people I respect raved about it. The trans women I’ve known seem very unlike the long-suffering main character (played by a man in a dress: Jeffrey Tambor, who is winning awards for the role). They also don’t seem like the martyr played by Jared Leto (another award-winning man in a dress) in the clips I’ve seen from Dallas Buyers Club. The trans women I’ve known also aren’t the metaphorical punching bag Transamerica‘s Felicity Huffman (for once a woman– though a cis one–in a dress: perhaps why she didn’t win as many awards) played either.

In the first few scenes of the recently released documentary Mala Mala (directed by Antonio Santini and Dan Sickles) about trans* women in Puerto Rico I briefly had some trepidation when the camera (the striking cinematography is by Adam Uhl) couldn’t resist (like director Abdellatif Kechiche with his star in Blue Is The Warmest Color) an objectifying focus on the ass of trans activist Ivana. She tells us she wanted her hips and thighs to resemble those of the Latina women she admired, even though her frame is quite slender. Though proud to be Puerto Rican (and often acting as a spokesperson for trans rights there) Ivana considers herself “made in Ecuador” where she had her procedures done.

ZaharaNonDrag — “Zahara Montiere” out of drag

But the film has enough different types of trans* people (including some drag queens and others who don’t consider themselves women: I would have liked to see interviews with the dark-skinned Afro-Latinas we see in performance) and spends a lot of time letting us get to know them (without seeming to waste a moment) that I forgot about the fascination with Ivana’s butt. We first meet Ivana when she is distributing condoms to trans women sex workers on the street. We get the low-down on what sex work is like for trans women from Sandy who tells us she and other trans women have to be more beautiful than the cis women sex workers on the street or they won’t attract clients.

Some of the trans* people we also get to know are: an older woman who laments what she sees as a lack of reflection in younger trans women, a drag queen with an interest in corporate law whose role model is Marilyn Monroe, a trans guy who isn’t able to get testosterone, and a drag queen who carefully differentiates herself from “prostitutes” and becomes a contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race. By focusing on nine people who often have differing opinions, the film gives us a taste of the richness and variety found within the trans* community. And because the film stays focused on these nine, we see them go through transformations that transcend the physical. Sex worker Sandy allies herself with Ivana, while also wondering why the funds set aside for trans* women in Puerto Rico don’t do more for them. They band together with other trans* women to form a new trans* rights group with Sandy telling us that they will wear shirts up to her necks and pants that cover their legs (in contrast to her usual short, low-cut dresses) so legislators will focus on their faces and what they have to say. Kickstarter-funded and executive-produced by veteran of the New Queer Cinema Christine Vachon, Mala Mala is beautiful to look at (from Puerto Rico’s green hills and blue ocean to neon tinted street scenes) and is one of the best and most moving films–narrative or documentary–I’ve seen all year.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rftiozFCa8″ iv_load_policy=”3″]

Tangerine, a comedy (directed by Sean Baker who also co-wrote the script with Chris Bergoch) that had its premiere at Sundance is about trans women of color sex workers and has been getting some surprisingly glowing reviews. Maybe because I kept comparing it to Mala Mala, I was disappointed. I can see what people reacted to: the two main characters, Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor) are vivid and funny (and played by talented, trans women). The film is also stunning to look at: co-cinematographers Baker and Radium Cheung give us a Los Angeles that has never looked more crisp and unforgiving in its sunniness, especially amazing considering the film was shot entirely on iPhones (equipped with special lenses, but still). Perhaps those who love this film were reminded of the early work of John Waters or Pedro Almodóvar, but those two, at least before they became big-time directors were part of milieu they made films about, which isn’t the impression I get about Baker (who has also worked as a TV producer). Some of the interplay between the characters seems pretty generic: the plot, if there is one, focuses on Sin-Dee trying to track down the woman (“A real bitch with vagina and everything”) Sin-Dee’s pimp, Chester, “cheated” on her with. Waters and Almodóvar didn’t have the tightest plots in their early films either (one of Waters’ films centered on Divine getting “cha-cha heels”), but the details seemed more acutely observed–and nobody said about their films, when they were first released, that they seemed like anyone else’s.

Tangerine has some good comic moments: I was especially taken with a scene, shot from the inside of the front windshield, of a blow job received during a car wash and Rodriguez’s peerless reading of lines like “I promise, I promise” in response to Alexandra asking her to not cause “drama” But we see how little we know about Alexandra and Sin-Dee’s interior lives when we spend time with Armenian immigrant cab-driver, Razmik (Karren Karagulian). Unlike the rest of the characters, Razmik has the ability to surprise us and to make us wonder what he’s thinking–or what he’ll do next. A film with trans women actresses this good shouldn’t have a cis man be its most interesting character. If trans women start making their own films with iPhones, maybe we’ll see characters that match these women’s talents.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALSwWTb88ZU” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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‘Dope’: A High School Tall Tale Not About White Kids in Suburbia

White, straight boys in suburbia: I’m a white person who grew up in the suburbs and I’m sick of seeing you in films. I watched ‘Me and Earl and The Dying Girl’ (with its one cliché-ridden Black character) and if I’d been at home instead of at a theater I would have spent nearly the entire runtime saying aloud, “I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care.” I couldn’t stand the privileged behavior most straight, white, cis, able-bodied boys exhibited when I was in high school–and most other high school girls, even the straight ones, along with guys who weren’t straight–couldn’t stand it either. Together we formed a majority. My high school was so ordinary, I feel secure in extrapolating that most high schools are the same–but films about high school focus on the same people most of us tried to avoid.

White, straight boys in suburbia: I’m a white person who grew up in the suburbs and I’m sick of seeing you in films. I watched Me and Earl and The Dying Girl (with its one cliché-ridden Black character) and if I’d been at home instead of at a theater I would have spent nearly the entire runtime saying aloud, “I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care.” I couldn’t stand the privileged behavior most straight, white, cis, able-bodied boys exhibited when I was in high school–and most other high school girls, even the straight ones, along with guys who weren’t straight–couldn’t stand it either. Together we formed a majority. My high school was so ordinary, I feel secure in extrapolating that most high schools are the same–but films about high school focus on the same people most of us tried to avoid.

Television is a better place to see different types of high school kids. On The Fosters 14-year-old white best friends Jude and Connor have become an uncloseted couple, with support from Jude’s queer foster parents, (Lena, a Black school principal and Stef, a white cop) and resistance from Connor’s single, straight Dad. A couple of weeks ago Jude and Connor went to a queer prom, devised by teenager Cole (the platonic date of Jude’s older sister, Callie, for the event) a white trans character played by a young trans guy, Tom Phelan: we see his top surgery scars when he takes off his shirt to swim at a beach. The show, which in many other ways is just as soapy and contrived as other TV dramas, in these details reflects the world outside TV many of us recognize, which no one, if they had most “high school” movies as the only evidence, would guess existed.

We can see a portrait of high school life for kids who aren’t white, straight and suburban in Dope, the film written and directed by Rick Famuyiwa (whose parents are Nigerian immigrants) which focuses on a main character, Malcolm (Shameik Moore) who is a half-Nigerian, straight, high school senior, living with a single US-born mother (Kimberly Elise) in a “bad” Los Angeles neighborhood. He also happens to be a nerd who gets good grades, is obsessed with early 1990s hip-hop, clothing and hairstyles (he has a flattop fade) and has two friends in school who share his interests: Jib (Tony Revolori) and soft butch, Diggy (Kiersey Clemons). As the film tells us, some of the stereotypically “white” things the three like include Black alternative band TV on the Radio and Black actor and comedian Donald Glover.

Listening to Malcolm describe his neighborhood, where he and his friends have to avoid certain streets or the BMX bikes they use to get around will be stolen, or his high school, where we see his new sneakers taken off his feet by bullies is a refreshing change from the main character in Earl (and the many movies like it) endlessly droning on about the cliques in his boring, mostly white, suburban high school. But living in his neighborhood means Malcolm has contact with people many suburban, white teens don’t, like drug dealer Dom (A$ap Rocky) who takes a liking to Malcolm saying of him, “He’s probably got one of those photogenic brains.” Dom uses Malcolm as a go-between to the beautiful Nakia (Zoë Kravitz looking stunningly like her mother, Lisa Bonet, did in the late ’80s and early ’90s) who is studying for her GED. Nakia tells Malcolm she’ll go to Dom’s birthday party (at a club) if he will and so starts Malcolm’s fall down a rabbit hole of drugs, guns, car chases and intrigue, accompanied, for most of the journey, by Diggy and Jib.

DopeTrioClub — Malcolm, Jib and Diggy at the club

Although I would have liked to see more of her life apart from Malcolm, Laymons’ Diggy deserves special mention, a butch woman of color who is never a joke and doesn’t have any aspirations to be seen as tough. At the same time, she’s not a passive character: when Malcolm finds he has a bunch of molly (which back in the day was Exstasy or just “E”) that in one of the film’s turns of fancy, he is forced to sell, she’s the one who says, “”All we have to do is find the white people. Go to Coachella.” She also is the one who clips their (dull) stoner, white friend Will (Blake Anderson) on the ear every time he says the n-word, even the one time he negotiates permission. “It was a reflex,” she explains.

The film is a nice melange of an updated, John Hughes film (without the racist jokes) and early Tarantino (ditto) though the writing, while including some sharp humor in the comedic sequences, falls flat in the dramatic scenes. I should also point out that while the male characters (including the lead, Moore) are allowed to be many different shades of Black, all the women characters (save for the underused “Mom” Elise) could easily pass the paper-bag test. Still, I enjoyed the scenes with Korean American, Black model Chanel Iman as a bored rich girl, Lily. She’s a different type of femme fatale than we’re used to seeing. Shown in flimsy lingerie and topless, she doesn’t have breast implants, and she gets to shine in her later comic moments with some of the few bodily fluid jokes I’ve found funny–in any film.

Some prominent Black critics have made known their dislike of Dope, and I can guess why. The vein that runs through the plot, that even a harmless nerd like Malcolm, because of where he comes from, can’t avoid drug-running for powerful, corrupt dealers, is perilously close to what racists think about Black people in general (or Donald Trump thinks about Latinos). In an interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, Famuyiwa explained that he based the film on an encounter he had as a kid in his old neighborhood, accepting a ride in a drug dealer’s fancy car, only to be pulled over by the police. He wasn’t arrested (and wasn’t forced to deal drugs either), but if he had stuck to the facts in his script, this film probably wouldn’t have garnered the attention it has, including from producers Sean Combs, Forest Whitaker (who is also the narrator) and Pharrell Williams (who also wrote the film’s original songs: most of the rest of soundtrack is vintage hip-hop). Will anyone besides white guys ever allowed to be true, non-drug-dealing nerds in high school movies? Let’s hope so.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=strEm9amZuo” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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‘Amy’: Our Love Didn’t Do Her Any Favors

Mainstream media loves to watch when a famous woman–Courtney Love, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan–breaks down in public. The posts and articles all feign “concern” but what they really do is exploit the problems of these women for clicks. Perhaps the most extreme recent example is Amy Winehouse, whose single “Rehab” was climbing up the charts at the same time that the paparazzi (particularly dogged and shameless in her native England, where tabloids have illegally hacked celebrity phones) captured her worsening alcoholism and addiction.

Because media covered Winehouse so relentlessly we have plenty of video of her during her bright, burning fame. She was young enough that even during her early teenage years–before she was famous–friends shot plenty of video of her (“Amy, give us a smile, then we can turn the camera off”) as well. In the new documentary Amy (which opens tomorrow, Friday, July 3) director Asif Kapadia doesn’t need to use “re-enactments” or the other types of visual filler we see in most documentaries. Instead, as audio interviews with her colleagues, friends, and family play we see Amy herself, first at 14, during a friend’s party, singing “Happy Birthday” like a torch song. Two years later we hear her sing an American songbook standard with the National Youth Orchestra, already sounding like an adult with a couple of albums under her belt. She signed her first major record deal when she was still a teenager and put out that prize-winning album when she was 20.

Winehouse was charming, opinionated, and funny: we see and hear her throw some epic shade on the singer Dido, fellow Grammy-nominee Justin Timberlake (Amy was the winner), and the company that put out her first album. But we also learn that even as a child she was very troubled. We hear her voice in an interview saying that when she was 9 years old, her father left the family and she decided no one could stop her from doing anything–including wearing makeup and other activities not usually associated with 9-year-olds. Her mother says that Amy chastised her later for not being tougher with her while she was growing up. Amy also told her mother early on about her bulimia, but in what would be a theme in Winehouse’s short life, no one thought fit to intervene.

Winehouse, who was as transparent in her interviews as she was in her songs (we find out that as in the famous lyric from the song “Rehab” she ended up not going to detox because her father didn’t think she needed it) also tells a journalist that she suffers from depression. Although she alludes to being on medication at one point, we don’t see any evidence that she ever saw a therapist.

A fiction that follows artists of all types is that somehow emotional turmoil is good for them, helping them to create great art and that the creation itself acts as a kind of therapy. One look at the number of acclaimed artists who have killed themselves should disabuse people of the notion that an artist’s work is “therapy,” any more than bookkeeping is “therapy” for an accountant.

We see Winehouse working on the album that will make her, at 23, world-famous, Back To Black. She looks chipper and healthy as she remarks after recording the vocal for the title track, “Oh it’s a bit upsetting at the end, isn’t it?” She wrote the songs on the record about her breakup with boyfriend (and eventual husband) Blake Fielder-Civil (referred to as Blake Fielder in the film) telling an interviewer, “I fell in love with someone I would have died for.”

Fielder-Civil admits he introduced her to heroin. But Winehouse talks about spending her days drinking and smoking weed before they ever met. Savvy enough to get a major label contract at 18, she probably knew that involvement with Fielder-Civil, who worked at a club that was a hangout for notorious addicts like musician (and one-time Kate Moss boyfriend) Pete Doherty, might lead to more drugs. Fielder-Civil’s addiction (and easy access to substances) might have been part of the attraction (because we certainly don’t see any other attractive qualities about him in the film). Once reunited the two were in a me-and-you-against-the-world relationship that addiction often fosters. A drug counselor who saw the couple says that he thought Fielder-Civil was holding Winehouse back from getting clean and sober; Fielder-Civil realized the relationship would end if the two of them no longer had drugs as a bond.

As Winehouse became more successful she, like Nina Simone, had more and more people financially dependent on her and fewer friends (at least two of the people closest to her had given her ultimatums over her drug and alcohol use–so-called “tough love” which, as with most addicts, didn’t work). She was also isolated because an army of photographers and film crews stalked her whenever she left her North London home; the white flashes and camera lights plus the cacophony of cameras and shouts that greet her whenever she opens a door seem like a bomb blast. We become complicit in this coverage as we see, from a paparazzo camera zooming in on the window of her home, her husband being arrested. Later we see footage of her, looking emotionally and physically devastated, still wearing her trademark beehive hairstyle, visiting the prison where he is held. After she becomes tabloid fodder, the same talk show hosts who applauded her when she sang “Rehab” on their shows make cheap jokes about her addiction in their opening monologues. In one of the last scenes we see paparazzi footage of family and friends sobbing outside her funeral.

amyFather — Amy Winehouse and her father

Her manager at the time of her death, like the other people who made their livelihood from her (including, sadly, her father, who visits her in St. Lucia with a reality camera crew in tow) always shrugged off confronting her about her deterioration (which included the bulimia, a factor in her death from alcohol poisoning). We see the police remove a body bag from the same home the paparazzi stalked and hear fans who loved her cry, but that love, as she says about Fielder-Civil’s “didn’t do me any favors.”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za3lZcrzzcM” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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“24/7” Music: ‘What Happened, Miss Simone?’ and ‘Eden’

Anyone could make a pretty good video montage of Nina Simone in popular culture: first that iconic Chanel commercial featuring Simone’s version of “My Baby Just Cares For Me,” then an early pre-Wallace-and-Gromit Aardman Studios short in which a sexy, clay-mation cat chanteuse sings the same song (in Simone’s voice), and finally Julie Delpy near the very end of Before Sunset imitating Simone’s stage patter (white people, please, let’s not mimic Black people ever) for Ethan Hawke. But what these clips lack is Simone’s face, when her dark skin, wide nose, and full lips differentiated her from other Black women who were popular stars in the mid-twentieth century, like Diahann Carroll and Lena Horne, and even the Black women we see in movies and TV today. A recent bio-pic of Simone, which never had a real release in theaters, featured lighter-skinned star Zoe Saldana wearing dark makeup and a fake nose to play one of the first Black woman entertainers who performed with her hair natural and long earrings that brushed her shoulders in African-inspired dresses and head wraps.

Liz Garbus’s new documentary, What Happened, Miss Simone? (which opens in New York this week and will be streaming on Netflix starting this Friday, June 26) has glorious closeups of Simone’s face throughout. The film commences with a clip of a live performance at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival when, after a long glare at the audience, she says, “We’ll start from the beginning.”

Simone grew up poor in the Jim Crow South, but because her mother was a preacher, played the piano from a young age. At a church concert a couple of white women recognized Simone’s talent and she began to train as a classical pianist with the town’s white instructor. Simone practiced seven or eight hours every day, so even as a child was isolated from her peers, both Black and white. Segregation kept her from fulfilling her early dream; although she was able to attend Julliard (thanks to fundraising efforts in her hometown) she failed her audition for The Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. She later learned she was turned down because she was Black (a side note: classical auditions are now conducted with the musician hidden from view, a change that has been key in helping modern orchestras get closer to gender parity).

Simone adopted the pseudonym we know her by (she was born Eunice Waymon) taking “Nina” from a boyfriend’s nickname for her and “Simone” from the French actress Simone Signoret to perform the “devil’s music” in bars to support herself and her family. She had never sung before but was told at her first job she had to. Incorporating virtuoso piano technique with the greatest jazz improvisers’ instincts (Simone says she would sometimes change key in the middle of a song–her longtime guitarist Al Schackman was one of the few musicians who could keep up with her) along with a beautiful, distinctive voice and a deep, emotional connection to whatever she sang, she soon became a star. She performed blues, pop, and jazz songs as well as show tunes, remaking each of them in her own style. As critic Stanley Crouch says during the film, no one would ever mistake her work for that of anyone else.

SimoneMakeup — Nina Simone prepares for a concert

She married a New York vice cop, Andrew Stroud, who became her manager (which rarely turns out well). He physically and sexually abused her and pushed her to perform and tour more, even as she, like a lot of musicians who while away much of their childhood practicing, began to question if she really wanted a music career.

The civil rights movement gave her renewed purpose: she cultivated friendships with other Black artists, like Langston Hughes (who co-wrote with her “Backlash Blues”) and Lorraine Hansberry (the godmother of Simone’s daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, who is interviewed extensively in the film). Simone also performed for the marchers with Martin Luther King at Selma and wrote “Mississippi Goddam” in response to the killing of Medgar Edgers and the four little girls in Alabama. She was close to Malcolm X’s wife and children and lived a short distance from them in Mount Vernon, New York, where her daughter became an honorary member of their family.

Like many others from that era she became disillusioned in the wake of the assassinations of civil rights leaders, and when the revolution so many spoke of and believed in during the 1960s never came. Manifesting symptoms of the bipolar disorder doctors would eventually diagnose (her mental illness was probably exacerbated by the beatings) she abandoned her marriage–and, for a time, her daughter–and never lived in the United States again.

The film has many great performance clips of Simone (including a moment in Montreux where she goes from palpable anger to laughter as an audience member spontaneously shouts out to her). I wish the film included even more of Simone’s music. The interviews are all first-rate and thorough, even as the interviewees, like Stroud and Schackman, seem to have opposing viewpoints. Lisa Simone Kelly is remarkably even-tempered in her remembrances of her mother as a genius and a star, but also as the person who physically and emotionally abused her. She says, “People think that when she came out onstage she became Nina Simone. My mother was Nina Simone 24/7 and that’s where it became a problem.”

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

In theory I’m the ideal audience member to see Eden, Mia Hansen-Løve’s latest film, a fictionalized bio of her brother Sven Hansen-Løve (he co-wrote the script) about his days as a well-known DJ in Paris. Although I’ve never been to Paris, I spent enough time in US clubs in the 1990s that when I recognized a familiar song quietly humming in the background of an early scene, I started swaying in my seat in anticipation of hearing the song at full volume and becoming enveloped in a mass of lights and dancing bodies. But those few faint notes were all the film included; the characters end up walking away from the music in that scene, a metaphor for the film itself.

EdenCouple — A frustrated couple in a frustrating film

We all want to do the best we can for our families (well, most of us do) but Hansen-Løve seems to have zero affinity for the music, fashion, atmosphere, and dancing of the club scene in the ’90s and 2000s. Her idea of a great club scene is one in which the main character says of Daft Punk, “They’re killing it,” instead of letting us see, hear, and come to that conclusion ourselves. She should have steered her brother to a different director.

Additionally, the women in the life of the main character, who never gives us any reason to care about him, Paul (Félix de Givry) are, with one exception, nothing more than the interchangeable ciphers we’ve seen in every movie about straight, white, male protagonists. Each woman is ready to drop everything, either to accompany Paul on his US tour or clean up after him when he vomits. Greta Gerwig, in an English-speaking role, is the only one allowed ambitions of her own and she is on screen far too briefly.

Somewhere in this film of club scenes that are often tedious and indistinguishable from each other (Eden is 131 minutes long, but you’ll swear it lasts the same couple of decades the film covers) is the bare bones of a decent story: what it’s like to outlive the fashionability of one’s talents and tastes. After a disastrous gig, a drunk and drugged-out Paul is carried home from the club by his friends and as they pass an older woman on the staircase she says something about, “The youth of today.”

He retorts, “I’m 34!” That’s a pretty good line, but it’s the only one in this morass of a film.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2l1T9xs-o0o” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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Review and Q & A: ‘Out in the Night’ and the Myth of “Killer Lesbians”

At February’s Athena Film Festival I saw the documentary ‘Out in the Night’ (showing this Monday, June 22 on PBS’s POV) about a group of queer women who defend themselves against a man who harassed them in the street. The film shows newspaper clips referring to the seven women, friends from Newark out for a night in the West Village (historically the queer part of NYC) as a “lesbian wolfpack” and “killer lesbians”–as if groups of queer women habitually roam city streets and take revenge on men who give them shit. The group of us ‘Bitch Flicks’ writers sitting together at the screening said simply, “We wish.”

When Basic Instinct came out in the early ’90s I joined a group of queer women in protest. We handed out flyers and spoiled the movie by telling moviegoers in line, “Catherine did it!” One woman I knew dressed for the protest as the vampire lesbian, a staple in both good films (The Hunger) and bad ones (Dracula’s Daughter, Blood and Roses, Daughters of the Darkness–the list is endless). She later went on to direct the “making of” section of the DVD for Basic Instinct, detailing in it some of the ambiguity she felt, even at the time, because killer queer women, like the ones in Instinct, are both harmful (making us seem even more scary and “unnatural” to straight people) and kind of cool (women who kill are so outside the norm of what films allow women to do that we can’t help admiring them).

At February’s Athena Film Festival I saw the documentary Out in the Night (showing this Monday, June 22 on PBS’s POV) about a group of queer women who defend themselves against a man who harassed them in the street. The film shows newspaper clips referring to the seven women, friends from Newark out for a night in the West Village (historically the queer part of NYC) as a “lesbian wolfpack” and “killer lesbians”–as if groups of queer women habitually roam city streets and take revenge on men who give them shit. The group of us Bitch Flicks writers sitting together at the screening said simply, “We wish.”

But mythology, whether it comes from the tabloids or from movies is a powerful force. Though we see throughout the film, in incisive interviews with the women (one of whom says “If we had chose to call 911 instead of defending ourselves, one of us would be dead”) and blurry footage from a security camera (with helpful clarification from the filmmakers) the group were legitimately defending themselves (one woman lost a chunk of her hair, including some scalp to the man). But the combination of race (all the women are Black), sexuality, and gender identity (at least two of the group are gender-nonconforming) means that the seven were the ones arrested and charged with “gang assault” and even attempted murder.

What follows is the story after the tabloids have lost interest, but is as compelling as a tightly scripted thriller. A racist, homophobic and barely functioning justice system convicts those who plead “not guilty” (these four, the “NJ4” are the focus of the film) and we see them trying to hold it together in prison talking to their supportive families (one of the women, Renata, has a little boy who says, “Mommy, can you do me a favor? If someone tries to fight you, can you walk away from it now?”) and to queer, gender-nonconforming director Blair Dorosh-Walther. The film is beautifully shot by the director of photography Daniel Patterson; the sunshine in some of the outdoor interviews with members of the NJ4 offers a welcome respite from the enraging succession of events. And we do get to see each of the four eventually out of prison: three of them traveled with the film to discuss it after screenings.

RenataTerrainNight — Terrain and Renata after their release

The following is a transcription, edited for concision and clarity, from the audience Q and A with three of the NJ4 and director Blair Dorosh-Walther after the screening of Out in the Night at Athena.

I’m sure the discrimination that you all face and that anyone who has been to prison doesn’t end when you leave, so just let us know what it’s been like moving forward after prison.

Patreese Johnson:. Since I was the last one to go home it’s still fresh. I came home last August 2013. I’ve been home a year. I miss school. I finally got a job. It’s seasonal. I had to wait around for the season to come around to get a job. Since I got a felony it’s been really hard to find an occupation unless you know somebody who knows somebody. It’s hard to get assistance from the government.

Terrain Dandridge: I came home in ’08 so I’ve been home for quite some time now. When I first came home I went straight to California, San Francisco, with a support system out there did The Dyke March and saw Angela Davis.

Renata Hill: I came home in April of 2010 and I do have a felony on my record and it has been really hard. I mean I’ve had two jobs since I came home, but it was a struggle to get them as well as a struggle to keep them. I had to fight for custody of my son. We went through the shelter system because as Patreese mentioned it’s really hard to find housing with a felony especially once they see “gang assault”, they just automatically assume the worst. I moved into my own apartment the end of August, early September. And April is my last month on parole so I’ll no longer belong to the state of NY and I’m in school.

You all seem really comfortable in the film, being filmed and I’m wondering what the relationship building process was like between you and Blair.

Renata It wasn’t as easy as it may look. Blair was really gentle coming into the picture. Like she explained to us her feelings behind it, the media and how it made her feel. She did all the necessary things, like she got to know our family members. She wasn’t somebody who wanted to just come in and wanted to know the story. She was the outside person advocating for us the hardest. She became like a family member to us. And she also, throughout the process, when things got really difficult to talk about, she respected our privacy, She gave us our space. Now she can’t get rid of us.

Patreese: She was another support system the we can rely on, and she never let us down to this day. It was easy to always talk to Blair. It wasn’t all about just work and getting the story. And she got to know us first before she started doing any filming or really got any type of question in.

Blair Dorosh-Walther: I found out about the fight initially the day after it happened. The Post, The Daily News, The New York Times all had articles coming out the day after. There was a lot of discussion happening in the greater LGBT community, in the West Village, the article in the New York Times caused me to get invested in their case because it’s the Times, not a tabloid paper. So I got involved as an activist. There were a lot of community meetings in the West Village. At first we didn’t know what happened so the conversation was around the media attention and the police. My background’s in film, but I didn’t think a white director should tell this story. And so I didn’t and was an activist for the first two years. In 2008 when their appeals were approaching, that’s when I went to them, the family members and their attorneys to see if there was interest in doing a documentary film. So we did start this long, slow process of interviewing each other, getting to know each other. I wanted to make sure they felt comfortable with me and could ask me the same questions I was asking them, but could also feel comfortable answering truthfully. We’ve been working on the film together for close to seven years.

You said as a white person you didn’t feel comfortable telling this story, why is that? Also, what are the next steps? Is there a lawsuit, civil suit or does this just stop with the film?

Blair: It’s not that I didn’t feel comfortable, it’s that I didn’t feel a white director should do it. And I think that white directors have a long history of telling African American stories through a white perspective and it’s really problematic. So that’s something that, as a filmmaker, I kept questioning and kind of checking myself and also the rest of our crew, how my race impacts the power dynamics of our storytelling. About any potential legal recourse, there’s not really anything that can happen. Additionally the guy did sue each of them. I didn’t put it in the film: he sued and because of the way their appeals turned out Patreese and Renata did have to settle, so they do owe him money.

Patreese: Honestly, I didn’t see racism in our cases. A lot of supporters came to me and said, “You’re being discriminated against. I’m telling you this wouldn’t have happened to you if this was a straight, white woman.” I thought that type of racism or discrimination was dead, but obviously it’s not. If Blair did not come to us and ask us to tell our side of the story I wouldn’t be sitting here tonight.

Renata: I’m pretty sure she experienced the same thing that we experienced on a daily basis with being treated different because of her sexuality, so that alone puts her on the same page as us. Like Patreese said, had she not come to us, doing this documentary you guys wouldn’t be watching it, because nobody else came to us, Ebony magazine, Jet magazine. Nobody came to us to get our side of the story.

Patreese: Those magazines still haven’t come to us to get our side of the story so that says a whole lot too.

Obviously the content of the film was incredibly compelling as were the people and the story, but I was really struck by the look of it and I wondered if you could talk about how you came to it.

Blair: Daniel Patterson was the director of photography. He’s been working on the film since day three. We talked a long time about how we wanted the look of the film, particularly the interviews with the women how we wanted them to be more intimate because the media attention was so outrageous. We wanted to make sure their voices were as validated as possible. Daniel Patterson is also a protege of Bradford Young who just shot Selma and is revolutionizing the way Black people are shot in film, so a part of that came through.

One of the things I wanted to address was how beautifully and positively you all are taking the experience and how supportive your families were. Talk a little bit about your life and what is it about each of your personalities that takes this incredibly complicated experience and finds light and beauty.

Terrain: Well my mom was very supportive throughout the whole situation, for all seven and then when it happened for all four, she was there for all four.

Renata: The most support I had was through my Mom, at the beginning. And I lost her early on into it, so after that and during the entire time Mama Kimma (Terrain’s mother) was always there. That was the first call I made when I lost my Mom. She’s still there.

Patreese: How did I push through? My family. I suffered from depression a lot, so that was very hard. A lot of our supporters who wrote us got us through it. When they wrote and shared their stories, that definitely lifted my spirits. And I leaned on my religion and my friends. Renata helped me. Coming to these screenings and seeing everybody here definitely helps. Because everybody’s like, “Look, I just saw this film with you and it was amazing.” I’m not just existing anymore. I’m really living. We went (with the film) to the conference called “Creating Change.” It showed me that I’m here to start making changes so this doesn’t happen to anybody else. So many young people and old people who got life and are not coming home because of violence that was done to them and they were defending themselves and no one is hearing their stories.

What’s next for each of you?

Renata: Right now I’m in my second semester studying human services.

Terrain: I’ve been working since I came home, looking forward to going to school to be a respiratory specialist.

Patreese: I’m a straight-up advocate. Everybody is separating all these issues that we have “Black Lives Matter,” “Trans Lives Matter.” I’m tired of the separation. Right now that’s where my passion is at. I don’t know what I want to be. I do want to own my own business. I want to be a physical therapist. I know I can’t work in a hospital, because of the felony.

Blair: We are working on our outreach plan right now with organizations to use the film as a tool in their campaigns. We’re also partnered with the United Nations trying to decriminalize homosexuality worldwide. There are 77 sites around the world. I work with local organizations on the ground. These four need to be honored, both for defending themselves on the street and in the courtroom for pleading “not guilty,” because they were facing 25 years.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMvwjLbM0RI”]

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Lies The Government–and Movies–Tell Us: ‘(T)ERROR’ and ‘Me and Earl and the Dying Girl’

To see a portrait of the inner workings of the FBI we have to look to films like the new documentary, ‘(T)ERROR’ co-directed by Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe, showing this Sunday, June 14 as part of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. In a highly unusual coup, an FBI informant Saeed aka “Shariff” (who used to be Cabral’s neighbor) agrees to be followed by the camera (though he complains to Cabral during closeups “You’re always getting the fucking headshots”) as he talks about his past cases and sets up a current one.

In most movies, US government agents, whether they are from the FBI, like Mulder and Scully, or from the CIA, like Melissa McCarthy’s character in Spy, invariably play the hero (or heroine) thoughtful, competent, and above all, ethical. The news tells a different story; FBI protection was a key factor in organized crime head Whitey Bulger escaping prosecution for his crimes (which included murder) for decades. When the FBI was investigating the Boston Marathon bombing they interrogated an unarmed immigrant friend of the bombers, and even though he was not implicated in the crime they shot and killed him. Just last week, after targeting a Boston-area Muslim man with surveillance for a number of months, the FBI (teaming with local police) stopped him near a CVS parking lot to “talk” to him. They ended up shooting him dead right there–at 7 a.m. on a workday morning.

To see a portrait of the inner workings of the FBI we have to look to films like the new documentary, (T)ERROR, co-directed by Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe, showing this Sunday, June 14 as part of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. In a highly unusual coup, an FBI informant Saeed aka “Shariff” (who used to be Cabral’s neighbor) agrees to be followed by the camera (though he complains to Cabral during closeups, “You’re always getting the fucking headshots”) as he talks about his past cases and sets up a current one.

Saeed is an older Black American Muslim whom we see pull up stakes from his home (so he is away from his young son) and his job as a cook in a high school cafeteria to move to a strange city with his dog and his weed, working on getting entrée into the life of a younger American jihadi who makes inflammatory YouTube videos but seems not to do much else. We see Saeed haggling with the FBI about money (he does not seem to earn much–at all–for his efforts) and admonishing them to stop being so obvious about setting this guy up.

Meanwhile, the jihadi, using Google and a piece of mail he sees on Saeed’s car dashboard figures out his FBI connection early in their acquaintance. We find out later that Saeed started his career with the FBI because he himself was charged with a crime, and then set up a man who was a friend of his to escape punishment, a chilling reminder of the questionable use of informants in the US justice system. This cycle perpetuates to the end of the film–someone barely getting by (the jihadi lives in public housing and does not to have a car) preyed upon by someone nearly as desperate, Saeed, as the FBI eggs him on. Saeed seems unrepentant about his targets, saying, “I don’t have no feelings for them. You making the Islam look bad, you gotta go,” but as he smokes blunts and bakes a succession of cakes he seems bent on convincing not just the directors and us, but himself too.

The lie the designated Sundance “breakout” movie Me And Earl And The Dying Girl (which opens this Friday, June 12) tells is familiar–that the experiences of white, straight guys are the only important ones; the main white guy can learn valuable lessons thanks to women and people of color, but nothing they do or say could possibly be as fascinating to us. The “me” of the title is Greg (Thomas Mann) a senior in high school, quirky in that cliché movie way that never crosses into weird or creepy and creative (he makes films at home with pun titles of famous works). His only friend is Earl (RJ Cyler), the Black best friend as stereotype: Earl’s main attribute is his repetition in more than one scene of the word, “titties.” Greg’s mother (Connie Britton) (she along with Nick Offerman who plays Greg’s Dad and Molly Shannon, who also plays a parent in this film, wrest what they can out of the script which bestows no human qualities on them, just more quirks) commands him to visit a girl, Rachel (Olivia Cooke), newly diagnosed with cancer, saying, “You might be someone who could make Rachel feel better.” He hasn’t hung out with Rachel since grade school and she greets him at her house by saying, “I don’t need your stupid pity,” but the two begin a friendship anyway.

Too bad Rachel is really the manic, pixie, dying girl (the one way the movie doesn’t fall into predictability is that she and Greg never embark on a romance) since we find out, too late, she is an artist as well, but her aspirations and thoughts get short shrift. Olivia Cooke does well with a limited role and gives us a glimpse of how much better the movie could have been in one scene when she gives Greg a pep-talk about his future, but when he asks about hers, she suddenly goes quiet.

Alfonso Gomez-Rejon directed the script by Jesse Andrews based on his own YA novel; future filmmakers of similar material should note that no one over 20 gives a shit about high school social hierarchy. The film has great art direction and soundtrack selection (with artists like Brian Eno and vintage Velvet Underground), but nothing can disguise or improve its white-guy narrative of “Person unlike me who changed my life for the better,” which seems more fitting for an undergrad college entrance essay than the basis for a film.

Earl has received puzzlingly decent reviews and its trailer seems to have piqued the interest of people who should know better, To try to understand how retrograde this film is, think if it were instead Me, The Girl and Dying Earl. The “me” would still be the white guy, his best friend a white girl who says “balls” a lot (which actually would make her a more nuanced character than most teenaged girls in movies, including this one) and Earl would be a variation of The Magical Negro, this one with terminal cancer who, as a last good deed, gives Greg precious guidance–and a plot that shows us all what a great guy Greg is. No one would hesitate to call bullshit on that film, so I’m unsure why no one is complaining about this one. I was also disappointed that a contemporary film that takes place in the suburb of a large American city doesn’t include any queer students in its high school especially since Greg, Rachel, and Earl would all be more interesting–and their sexless bond more true-to-life–if one or more of them were queer.

As I sat through Me and Earl I couldn’t help thinking of the Sufjan Stevens song “Casimir Pulaski Day” which covers some of the same ground–dying high school girl, quirkiness and a straight-guy narrator–but in less than six minutes reaches depths of feeling this film never comes close to. To equal the duration of this film you could instead listen to that song about 17 times–and save yourself $12.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qfmAllbYC8″ iv_load_policy=”3″]

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‘Spy’: Truly Funny and Truly Feminist

An advantage of getting older is being able to predict what types of maintream entertainment I won’t enjoy and then being able to cheerfully avoid them. I have never even seen a clip from Breaking Bad: the fulsome interviews with the (male) cast and creator on NPR were all I needed to hear. In the many years people have been posting “hilarious” Saturday Night Live clips I’ve found only “Brownie Husband” and Tiny Fey as Sarah Palin funny, so now I just skip them. With movies I am a lot more susceptible to hype, especially if the film is about a woman or women. I’ve been let down enough times that, for about the past decade, I’ve seen hardly seen anything at the multiplex, especially “comedies” which rarely make me laugh out loud or even smile. After sitting through The Devil Wears Prada, I decided I would no longer believe anyone who said, “You’ll like this one.”

The melding of feminism and marketing means that certain crappy, mainstream films try to convince us our duty is to shell out money for them just because they’re directed by women, written by women or star women. This marketing, of course, is the best way to kill movies directed by, written by, or starring women once and for all, by force-feeding us films that are supposed to be “good” for women but which give us no pleasure when pleasure, or something like it, is why we go to movies in the first place. What I find especially galling is when a film that is supposed to “empower” women ends up making one the butt of the joke, but instead of being a joke just because she’s a woman (as she would be in the usual bro-comedy) she’s a joke because she’s fat, or not white or because her appearance doesn’t conform to the ultra-femme standard of most women characters in movies. I feared that Spy, which opens this Friday, June 5, and stars Melissa McCarthy (who has been in more than one of the type of films I’ve described) might be another disappointment, but was pleasantly surprised.

The film starts out strong with a pre-credit sequence in which McCarthy’s character, Susan Cooper, from an office in Washington DC, guides spy Bradley Fine (Jude Law) through various ambushes and traps in an Eastern European mansion/castle using an earpiece, a contact lens camera and surveillance technology–plus her own expertise. She’s the super-competent office assistant that most powerful men have back at the office. She never falters and he, in the mold of James Bond and Jason Bourne never does either until the end when he confronts a villain and makes a huge error (which, in context, made me laugh out loud). At first Susan says, “Oh my God, why, why did you do that?” But then, like all great office assistants she immediately takes the blame, saying she should have taken additional measures to prevent the incident, even though we see she has already taken more than enough.

Susan has a crush on Fine (who wouldn’t? Law here is at his most charming and, unlike in some other recent roles, has hair) which keeps her in his thrall. She confesses her desire to be a real spy only to her office mate, Nancy (a wonderful Miranda Hart, whom some might recognize from Call The Midwife), who tells her, “You play it too safe.”

Also on hand is Allison Janney (in one of the brusque, take-charge roles she does so well) as the agency boss who has no patience with Susan until she realizes “We need someone invisible,” in the field. Janney’s character also counsels Susan, saying that Fine, by telling her she was best at her job as his helper was actually holding her back. Susan is eager to take on the sophisticated false identity that she’s seen Fine and the other agents given but always ends up as a variation of a frumpy, Midwestern cat-lady, a sly dig at the type of roles actresses who aren’t slender, like McCarthy, are typically asked to play.

When Nancy and Susan visit the gadget sector of the agency, instead of the cross between a hovercraft and a Segway we see a good-looking man in a suit and tie thoroughly enjoying himself on, Susan receives a bottle of “stool softeners” that are actually poison antidotes along with equally unglamorous accessories. Once in Europe she runs into another agent (who is supposed to be lying low) Rick (Jason Statham making fun of his usual “tough guy” roles) a bungling braggart who takes every opportunity to disparage Susan’s skills as a spy, even as we see that she brings the same efficiency to her work in the field as she did back in the office.

In a world where “satire” is used as a descriptor for works like Entourage, the word might not have much meaning, but Spy, in the tradition of the best satire, makes fun of conventions we might not have realized we were sick of–like the cat-lady typecasting. Also, while male action heroes like 007 and Jason Bourne never make a wrong move, no matter how extreme the situations they find themselves in and shoot and kill others with all the sensitivity of a giant swatting at flies, two of the women in Spy who kill react more like the rest of us might: neither plays it cool.

spy-rose-byrne-melissa-mccarthy — Rose Byrne as Rayna and Melissa McCarthy as Cooper (front)

I kept on waiting for the film to go wrong, for someone to humiliate Susan for her size, which miraculously never happens. Others doubt her skill and the villainess Rayna (Rose Byrne, having a ball as a spoiled, rich Daddy’s girl with a British accent) rips apart her fashion sense, even after Susan changes into flattering, chic evening wear, but no one ever comes close to making a fat “joke” or comment, which has to be some kind of milestone: imagine if Will Smith or Denzel Washington had spent a good part of their careers being the butt of racist jokes–and how different their careers would then be today.

I haven’t before seen McCarthy in a role I’ve liked, so was gratified to see how good she was in this one, which calls on her to take on multiple identities, sometimes switching personas in the middle of a scene. Writer-director Paul Feig (the director of Bridesmaids who is also one of the only male directors to publicly support the ACLU action on behalf of women directors in the industry) gives us the same settings as the real Bourne and Bond films use: European casinos, lakefront estates and helicopters, but isn’t so dazzled by them that he forgets to include jokes, good ones. For once no one is making fun of the office ladies (Hart’s Nancy also gets her turn in the field) but of those who make fun of the office ladies, like Rick, who by the end grudgingly admits that Susan has done a good job though we see he’s still not the smartest guy. I even liked the celebrity-as-himself cameo (Fifty Cent, who gets a great last line) and some of the physical comedy, which is a first for me.

The film isn’t perfect. I could have done without Peter Serafinowicz’s terrible Italian accent as a lecherous fellow agent and would remind everyone involved that Europe (not to mention Washington DC) has plenty of people of color and encourage them to cast some in speaking roles (the villains here are Eastern European, so we don’t even get Arab actors, though Bobby Cannavale, who is half Cuban, plays one hard-to-kill baddie). The film also includes a scene where Cooper and Nancy tear down a friendly, thin, well-dressed woman agent behind her back and an instance where a newly glammed-up Cooper delights in being the target of street harassment, false tropes that a woman writer-director probably wouldn’t have perpetuated. But Spy is so much better than any other film in its genre (and unceasing in its feminism: the solidarity between the women characters continues right through the end) that even those who put together the trailer must not have been able to believe it, since they strung together–badly–moments that make the movie look like the usual summer mediocrity. It’s not! Instead we finally have an action-adventure comedy that is truly funny and truly feminist–and almost makes me look forward to my next trip to the multiplex.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAqxH0IAPQI” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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