Ren Jender – Page 7 – Bitch Flicks

The Strangeness of (Surrogate) Motherhood in ‘The Innocents’

Part of what makes the excellent 1961 film ‘The Innocents’ different is the main character, the governess, Miss Giddens (played by Deborah Kerr), is thrust into a parental role suddenly. We see her at the beginning in an interview with the children’s uncle, a handsome playboy (played by Michael Redgrave, Vanessa’s father) who tells her he spends much of his time traveling and the rest in his home in London. When he offers her the job at his country estate, he takes her hand (a bold move for the Victorian era, when the film takes place) and asks if she is ready to take full responsibility for the children, because he doesn’t want to be disturbed during his adventures in London and abroad.

This post by staff writer Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on Demon and Spirit Possession.

I’m reluctant to tell people that I love a good horror film for many reasons, not the least of which is most horror films seem determined to insult the intelligence of their audiences. In the sub-genre of the “evil or possessed child” horror movie we again and again see parent characters who figure out the true nature of their children at least an hour after the audience has in The Omen, The Bad Seed, and The Exorcist. Parents in horror films go to ridiculous lengths to dismiss the strange goings-on they observe–and often pay a steep price for doing so.

Part of what makes the excellent 1961 film The Innocents different is the main character, the governess, Miss Giddens (played by Deborah Kerr), is thrust into a parental role suddenly. We see her at the beginning in an interview with the children’s uncle, a handsome playboy (played by Michael Redgrave, Vanessa’s father) who tells her he spends much of his time traveling and the rest in his home in London. When he offers her the job at his country estate, he takes her hand (a bold move for the Victorian era, when the film takes place) and asks if she is ready to take full responsibility for the children, because he doesn’t want to be disturbed during his adventures in London and abroad. The uncle’s “proposal” is an only slightly more extreme version of the “proposal” most women accepted both in the time when the film takes place and when it was filmed: that their children will be financed by the man of the house in exchange for the children’s care and upbringing to be the “woman’s work.” Miss Giddens accepts without hesitation.

The Innocents has an unusual pedigree for a horror film. It was directed by Jack Clayton (whose previous film, Room At The Top, won an Academy Award for Simone Signoret) and written by William Archibald (based on his stage play, which in turn was based on a Henry James novel, The Turn of the Screw) with help from Truman Capote (author of In Cold Blood) and John Mortimer (creator of Rumpole of the Bailey) . The velvety black and white cinematography is by Freddie Francis (who went on to work with David Lynch).

InnocentsFloraGiddensMiles — Miss Giddens, Miles, and Flora

Most of the film has a Gothic setting: a big, creaky, isolated house and its shadowy garden full of statues (including a cherub hidden under overgrown bushes from whose mouth we see, in closeup, a beetle emerge). But the children, Flora (Pamela Franklin) and Miles (Martin Stephens), are realistically children, not obvious incarnations of evil. They’re talkative and charming with Miss Giddens. They elicit her suspicion only gradually and with typical children’s behavior: pretending not to hear the questions they don’t wish to answer (or saying “I don’t remember”) and staring off into the distance for no reason. They whisper to each other and laugh as the adults look on. They’re unknowingly cruel as when Flora sticks her pet tortoise in the pond and nearly drowns the poor animal. Like the children from Edward Gorey illustrations they’re fascinated with the morbid: Flora watches a spider eat a butterfly and Miles recites a poem about a return from the grave. They can be strangely unaffected by what is happening around them as when Miles, while we hear his sister screaming in another room, warms his hands in front of the fire and smiles sweetly at Miss Giddens. He’s also unexpectedly observant as when he surmises that Miss Giddens was hired so their uncle wouldn’t have to be bothered with raising him and his sister.

When the film was first released, New Yorker critic Pauline Kael wrote that the ghosts in The Innocents were the best she’d seen in a movie. We spot Miss Jessel, the children’s old governess (who was particularly close to Flora) several times, always dressed in black–walking along a dark hallway, standing in the distant reeds near the pond in which she drowned, and sobbing at the schoolroom desk, but we never get a good look at her face. Quint, Miss Jessel’s abusive lover, who was also Miles’ companion, first appears from a distance among the cooing doves on top of a tower, the combination of fog and sun making him difficult for Miss Giddens to discern. She sees his face clearly only after she has found his picture in the music box (which plays the song the film opens with, the melody of which Flora also hums as Miss Jessel’s ghost looks on). Miss Giddens, at first not realizing she has seen a ghost describes him to the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose (Megs Jenkins) who asks, “Would you say he was very handsome?”

Miss Giddens answers, “Yes, yes, handsome, handsome but obscene.” When she finds out he died, she presses Mrs. Grose to tell her all the details of the relationship of Miss Jessel and Quint, including the sexual ones, and the exact circumstances of each of their deaths.

Searching for the truth, Kerr, in huge skirts with tight, high-necked bodices, floats along the halls and grounds. Her Miss Giddens is at turns intimidating and anxious, the type of woman men label either “overemotional” or “repressed.” This role suits Kerr’s presence like few others did–as years later a similar lead role in The Others would suit Nicole Kidman–and makes me wonder if Meryl Streep has ever considered starring in a horror movie. Kerr at that time had been a movie star for 20 years–when Mrs. Grose refers to her as “young” I wanted to correct her–but the child actors are the scene stealers here: Pamela Franklin (who would later play opposite Maggie Smith in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) makes Flora’s descent into screaming, raging fits–which begins with the common childhood chant, “I hate you. I hate you. I hate you,” all the more disturbing by the contrast of her sunny, dreamy friendliness in the first part of the film. Martin Stephens (who was also in Village of the Damned) with his wide apart eyes and heart shaped face resembles the then-first-lady Jackie Kennedy and plays Miles with just the right mix of a child’s vulnerability and an adult’s knowingness. When he finds out all the servants have left the house he brings great timing to his line to Miss Giddens, “Well, you’re afraid, and perhaps you made them so.”

InnocentsMilesGiddens — Miles and Miss Giddens

Though Miles is a pre-pubescent boy, he and Miss Giddens’ relationship has, from the beginning, flirtatious overtones; when they first meet he gives her flowers and tells her she is too pretty to be a governess. This bond echoes that between some mothers and sons, especially those mothers who don’t get much attention from adults. Later the relationship begins to turn creepy. Miss Giddens is taken aback when Miles gives her a long, inappropriate kiss goodnight (which inspired the Kate Bush song, “The Infant Kiss“) but opts to stay with him–alone–in order to “save” him. Miles also gives off a “queer kid” vibe, because of his closeness to Miss Giddens and his sister, as well as his line about being “different from the other boys” at the boarding school which expelled him.

In a climactic scene, Miss Giddens tells Miles, “My father taught me to love people and help them. Help them even if they refused my help. Even if it hurt them sometimes,” which could also be a mother’s pledge to a child. But is Miss Giddens helping? She believes the spirits of Miss Jessel and Quint are communing through the children. Both Flora and Miles do have shockingly adult outbursts. Miles calls Miss Giddens, “A damned hussy, a damned dirty-minded hag” to show how little has changed in denouncing women: now the slurs would be “fucking slut” and “ugly bitch” but the meaning is the same. Still, all children at one time or another surprise their parents with what comes out of their mouths (even when, like Miles, they express regret afterward). When Miss Giddens eggs on the children to tell her they see the ghosts they tell her she’s insane: that she’s the only one who can see them. In horror movies women are often a sobbing mess for much of the film, but Kerr soldiers through the scares, clear-eyed, until the end when her tears (like that of Kidman in The Others) are truly earned.

Enjoy this cheese-tastic trailer for the film from 1961 but know that it has only a passing resemblance to the film itself.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiW89dreaew”]

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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

‘Laggies’ and the Perils of Success

Lynn Shelton’s best known films, the great ‘Humpday’ and the equally delightful ‘Your Sister’s Sister’ stood out in a similar way. Shelton devised and wrote scripts that became the basis for the actors’ improvisation (with the ‘”‘final draft’ put together in the editing room”)–and made films that seemed fresh and distinct from the usual Hollywood product. Each film had a surprisingly tight structure and was funny in ways that never occured to mainstream filmmakers. As I sat through Shelton’s latest movie, ‘Laggies,’ (which opens this Friday, Oct. 24) I couldn’t help feeling deflated. Shelton’s transformation into a mainstream director is a little like if Bergman had had second thoughts and ended up going on a diet and let Hollywood makeup artists make her unrecognizable.

Years ago, when Ingrid Bergman first went to work in Hollywood (after a successful career in Sweden), she was wary of how American movie studios had changed the appearance of other European actresses once they were under contract. The Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo who appeared in films stateside looked very different from the actresses of the same name who were in European films a few years before. Bergman opted to keep her own eyebrows and resisted pressure to lose weight. She also wore more natural makeup than was the rule for other actresses working in Hollywood at the time. Her toned-down but still radiant look, along with her talent, may be why Bergman’s presence in films connected with audiences: she stood out among the crowd of Max-Factored, Hollywood actresses with deep hollows under sharp cheekbones.

Lynn Shelton’s best known films, the great Humpday and the equally delightful Your Sister’s Sister stood out in a similar way. Shelton devised and wrote scripts that became the basis for the actors’ improvisation (with the ‘“‘final draft’ put together in the editing room”)–and made films that seemed fresh and distinct from the usual Hollywood product. Each film had a surprisingly tight structure and was funny in ways that never occurred to mainstream filmmakers. As I sat through Shelton’s latest movie, Laggies, I couldn’t help feeling deflated. Shelton’s transformation into a mainstream director is a little like if Bergman had had second thoughts and ended up going on a diet and letting Hollywood makeup artists make her unrecognizable.

Laggies has a traditional script (in every respect) by Andrea Seigel and names familiar from the multiplex in the lead roles: Keira Knightley as Megan, an underachieving 20-something, Chloë Grace Moretz as Annika, the high school student she befriends and Sam Rockwell as Annika’s single Dad, Craig, who works as a divorce lawyer.

At the very beginning of the film we see Megan after her own prom hanging out with her best high school girlfriends in terribly framed and shot “home video.” We can barely see their faces: a clever and effective solution to the movie quandary of showing characters over a decade younger than they appear in the rest of the film. Unlike most people, who move on from their high school friends during college or in other parts of young adulthood, Megan is still hanging out with the same clique and we see from the beginning that they have grown apart. During the small, private, bachelorette party for her friend Allison (Ellie Kemper, playing a snide variation of the same character she played in Bridesmaids) we see her friends snip at her for everything from her working for her father, holding a sign pointing to his business, to touching the chest of a huge, tacky, gold-painted statue at the Chinese restaurant where the party takes place. Perpetually irritated Allison asks, “Why would you tweak the nipples? That’s Buddha.” (actually it’s Budai the so-called “laughing Buddha,” but I don’t expect the characters to know the difference).

Megan has a nice-guy, live-in boyfriend Anthony (Mark Webber), also a relic from high school, who proposes to her at Allison’s wedding reception. Megan’s reaction when she sees him start to get down on one knee is to gasp and say, “No, no, whoa! Get up!”

Megan first meets Annika outside a liquor store when the teen approaches her with a flimsy story about her and her obviously underage friends that culminates in the question: could Megan buy liquor for them? Megan says, “Someone did this for me when I was your age. It’s like a rite of passage.”

Annika says, “I had a good feeling about you.”

Megan cracks, “That makes one of us.”

That night, Megan hangs out with and gets very drunk with the teens and through a series of contrivances ends up staying at Annika’s home for a week–accompanying her to teen parties, the mall and taking part in a sleepover with Annika’s best friend Misty (Caitlyn Dever from last year’s Short Term 12). Shelton still has a great touch with actors and Knightley here reminds us that the movie in which she first received acclaim, Bend It Like Beckham, was a comedy. In Laggies, she’s at her best the times she gets to use her long skinny body for comic effect, as when she dons headphones to undulate along a busy road while she holds the sign pointing to her father’s business or folds herself against the ground into a turtle-like posture to feed Annika’s pet tortoise.

The film also has a refreshing lack of hysteria about the activities of contemporary, suburban teens. Moretz’s character is a teenager who seems more like the peers I had in high school than the stereotypes that populate most movies. Husky-voiced Annika is an unapologetic “partier” who regularly lies to her father about where she’s going and what she’s doing–and unlike similar girl characters in mainstream films we’re not cued to see her as a sociopath or an alcoholic.

The film also shows empathy for Sam Rockwell’s put-upon Dad. Rockwell has good chemistry with Knightley and a great touch with lines like the one he gets when he first sees Megan in Annika’s room, “Wow, high school students are looking rougher and rougher these days.” His Craig is a mixture of equal parts of love and exasperation he feels toward his daughter with some “embarrassing” Dad behavior thrown in. The film also refrains from completely vilifying Annika’s absentee mother, played briefly and poignantly by Gretchen Mol.

But the film’s central premise of Megan regressing to her high school days falls flat. Knightley’s Megan seems too sensible and grounded to be the kind of screwed-up (but sometimes fun) adult who hangs out with teenagers. And although Rockwell’s character briefly questions Megan’s intentions, no one else does, or comes to the conclusion that many of us would if we saw an adult spending lots of time with a high school student (including sleeping over): that the two are having sex or headed in that direction.

In this film queer people seem not to exist, a disappointment because Shelton is an out bisexual woman who created a complex and memorable title queer woman character (beautifully played by Rosemarie DeWitt) in Your Sister’s Sister and played a small, but memorable role as a queer woman herself in Humpday. Laggies, like the other mainstream American movies that assume everyone is heterosexual, is in danger of seeming outdated, especially compared to recent television shows like Please Like Me and How To Get Away With Murder, which nonchalantly depict every aspect of their queer characters’ lives–and feature them as leads.

The movie intermittently focuses on Megan’s lack of direction (she has dropped out of graduate school, where she was studying to be a therapist), but the ending, like that of a screwball comedy from the 1930s, seems to suggest her whole life is resolved by choosing the right man. This mainstream rom-com directed by Lynn Shelton is better and more nuanced than any other choice at the multiplex, but I still miss the wilder, funnier, earlier Shelton films shown at art houses–and the more complicated lives of the women–and men–at their centers.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xep7s36qZL0″]

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‘Dear White People’: Satire, But Serious

Writer-director Justin Simien’s crowd-funded ‘Dear White People’, which has its US release (and real distribution) this Friday, Oct. 17, feels like a similar breakthrough. The film follows four African American students at prestigious Winchester University: gay (though he says he doesn’t believe in “labels”) student newspaper reporter Lionel (Tyler James Williams); straight-arrow, high-achieving son of Winchester’s Dean, Troy (Brandon P Bell); ambitious aspiring reality TV star, Coco (Teyonah Parris, whom at first I didn’t recognize in modern hair, dress and light contacts: she also plays Dawn on Mad Men); and Sam (short for Samantha) White (Tessa Thompson), the acid-tongued, outspoken college radio host of the title program, which includes proclamations like “Dear white people, breaking news: the amount of Black friends required to not seem racist has now been raised to two. Sorry, your weed man Tyrone does not count.”

The following is a slightly modified repost.

When Go Fish was released 20 years ago, a straight guy friend who was in his 50s (we had met at a former workplace) couldn’t understand why I liked the film. We usually had very similar tastes in movies: both of us had enjoyed watching Winona Ryder playing a slacker in Reality Bites and had shaken our heads over how overrated Kieslowski’s Blue was. I tried to explain to him why Fish was special: the women in it looked like, dressed like, talked like and even had similar haircuts to the queer women I knew. The writer/star and writer-director were out queer women and their film had a real release and real distribution, instead of just being relegated to festivals or one or two nights at the smallest independent theater in town, the way most other queer films–especially those made by and featuring women–had been. But all his life this guy had been seeing films about straight men, by straight men and starring straight men (or at least men who could convincingly pass as straight), so he couldn’t understand why I would make such a big deal of seeing on the big screen some part of my community recognizably reflected back to me.

Writer-director Justin Simien’s crowd-funded Dear White People, which opens in US theaters (with real distribution) this Friday, Oct. 17, feels like a similar breakthrough. The film follows four African American students at prestigious Winchester University: gay (though he says he doesn’t believe in “labels”) student newspaper reporter Lionel (Tyler James Williams); straight-arrow, high-achieving son of Winchester’s Dean, Troy (Brandon P Bell); ambitious aspiring reality TV star, Coco (Teyonah Parris: at first I didn’t recognize her in modern hair, dress and light contacts–she also plays Dawn on Mad Men); and Sam (short for Samantha) White (Tessa Thompson), the acid-tongued, outspoken college radio host of the title program, which includes proclamations like “Dear white people, breaking news: the amount of Black friends required to not seem racist has now been raised to two. Sorry, your weed man Tyrone does not count.”

The film’s tagline: “Being a Black face in a white place” is an issue sometimes brought up online (as in the viral “I Too Am Harvard” video) and elsewhere but pretty much never addressed in film: Black students navigating majority white campuses in which individuals, policy and curriculum are often either unfriendly toward or clueless about the needs of students of color. Winchester’s President wants to dismantle the all-Black dorm students gravitate to. He is either misreading the consolidation of Black students as “reverse racism” (Sam later explains to the Dean why there’s no such thing) or fears the Black students banding together will be too strong a foe for his administration.

Sam, although “political” had previously shown no taste for campus elected office but runs as a protest candidate for “head of house” against the incumbent, her ex-boyfriend Troy, who will not fight the administration decision to break up the house. To everyone’s surprise–including her own–Sam wins.

: Sam

Because we’re not used to seeing films that feature more than one Black person (and often not any) in an environment full of both opportunity and microaggressions, we haven’t before observed the different approaches students (and others) take in walking this minefield. Confrontational Sam tells the campus “humor” magazine’s core of white, frat brothers (including the son of the University’s president), “On behalf of all the colored folks in the room let me apologize to all the better qualified white students whose places we’re taking up,” then throws them out of the house’s dining hall. Troy jokes and plays cards with the same group, hoping to earn a byline at the magazine: the president’s son Kurt (Kyle Gallner) brags it’s the main pipeline to Saturday Night Live’s writing staff (which makes “Winchester’s” parallels to Harvard more explicit–and is perhaps one way to understand some of the problems the real-life SNL has had in diversifying their cast of performers and writers).

Coco wants to use the fraternity and magazine to further her own goals, while the brothers use her inclusion to deflect charges of racism–and she doesn’t care what activists like Sam think of her affiliation. Conflict-averse Lionel just keeps moving–from the frat at the very beginning of the film to dorm after dorm hoping the next place he lives is the one where he isn’t the target for harassment: for his sexual orientation at the frat and for not being “Black” enough at Sam’s hall.

There’s more plot (so much more) but all of it is a fairly flimsy pretext for one-liners (many of which feel like they were gathered over a lifetime) and sketches like “The Tip Test” which begins “”Your waitress mistakes you for someone who looks like you–Black–who once ran up a $30 bill and left a dollar tip.”

Like Looking, White People also examines interracial relationships, and as in Looking the white people in those relationships don’t (with one notable exception) come off very well. But I was disappointed that the film didn’t explore the impunity with which racist (or even just microaggressive) white guys will sexually harass, demean and even assault women of color: the film’s main villain, Kurt (whose irredeemability is on the level of Joffrey in Game of Thrones) doesn’t lay a hand on (or even use any slurs to describe) Sam or Coco in spite of his deep hostility to the former and his proximity to the latter. With the barrage of rape threats outspoken women (especially women of color) continue to receive over social media, the film’s neglect to include that kind of backlash in Sam’s storyline makes it seem a little spotty. Tessa Thompson’s perpetually unimpressed but engaged face and clarion voice are the ideal vehicle for Sam’s pronouncements, but the script suddenly asking her, at the end, to become Julia Roberts in Notting Hill also fell flat–and is a missed opportunity to depict how activists need supportive relationships, even ones their peers might not approve of.

: Coco (on the left)

Coco though skillfully played by Parris (her skeptical double takes could populate an entire feature) also seems incomplete. The character is so calculating that only rarely, like at the climactic blackface party do we have a clue what she is really thinking and feeling. She’s also one of the few characters who doesn’t seem to come from an affluent or middle class background and has darker skin than the others, but the script barely addresses this disparity.

Even though Sam is presented as the main protagonist in the film, Simien is better at fleshing out his Black male characters. Nerdy Lionel with his notepad, passive demeanor, huge, messy afro, whom we see from the beginning (when we are introduced to all the different cliques of Black students at Winchester) as a misfit even among the other queer Black people, is a fully formed person and Williams plays him, including his transformation at the end, well. Simien is an out gay man and I’m probably not the only one who wondered how autobiographical Lionel is. Bell’s Troy at first seems like nothing more than a dapper A-student and class officer, but then we learn that he wants to deviate from his father’s carefully laid plans for him–and that in spite of his clean cut persona and protests to the contrary, he spends a lot of time smoking weed.

: Lionel (in front)

Dear White People cites as its influences both Spike Lee’s School Daze and National Lampoon’s Animal House, tackling a lot of thorny issues under the cover of its humor (not all of which is successful) and bringing to light scenes most audiences won’t have seen in movies before. The Independent Film Festival of Boston screenings where I saw White People were packed (as were its screenings at Sundance which were declared “one of the hottest tickets“): if its main release follows suit, many people will be going to and talking about this film. In one scene White People makes fun of the dearth of Black people in movies (one activist demands from the ticket seller at a movie house “I want my $15 back for Red Tails II.”) Perhaps the best thing Dear White People will do, like Go Fish before it, is to become a gateway for films and television in the same vein. In the two decades since Fish’s release series and films from queer women have become an indelible, if still small, part of the larger culture, from Ellen’s “Puppy Episode” to, for better or worse, The L Word–which the filmmakers of Fish had a hand in–and The Kids Are All Right to last year’s fantastic Concussion. Fish’s influence has spread so far that today 20-something queer women themselves, much like my straight friend back in the day, can’t understand why anyone made a fuss about the film in the first place.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwJhmqLU0so”]

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The Complicated Women of ‘Please Like Me’

This realism seeps into the portrayal of women characters. They’re not the fantasy women whom straight men put in their shows, nor do we see the evil matriarchs of some popular cable series who seem more a manifestation of show creators working out their issues with their own mothers than portraits of women any of us have known.

Josh Thomas’s Please Like Me is close to winding up its second season in the US on Pivot. It is produced in Australia, where Thomas is a well-known stand-up comedian. Please Like Me is trying to be a different kind of “reality” television. Although the series is fictional and tightly scripted (by Thomas, co-star Thomas Ward, Hannah Gadsby, and Liz Doran) Thomas plays a character very like himself, an out gay man named “Josh” who has a straight-guy, best friend named Tom (played by Thomas’s best friend since childhood Thomas Ward) and a dog named John (played by Thomas’s dog, John). This realism seeps into the portrayal of women characters. They’re not the fantasy women straight men put in their shows, nor are they the evil matriarchs of some popular cable series who seem more a manifestation of show creators working out their issues with their own mothers than portraits of women any of us have known.

Josh’s Mum, Rose (Debra Lawrance), tried to kill herself at the beginning of Season 1 (in a sequence that Thomas says was very much like when his own mother attempted suicide; some of these scenes, like the rest of the series are unexpectedly, deeply funny): the impetus for Josh to move back home. In last season’s final episode, she’d vomited up a half-hearted attempted overdose (following the funeral for her live-in mother-surrogate, Aunty Peg– Judi Farr) and when Josh discovered her, disoriented and partially undressed on the kitchen floor, she begged him not to hospitalize her. He reluctantly went along with her wishes. The last lines showed a touching camaraderie between the two. “How did you lose your skirt?” he asks.

She tells him she doesn’t remember but “I made sure to put on some underwear before you came home.”

“That was considerate of you,” he says, almost smiling.

In the second season’s first episode Rose gets a puppy and a makeover and can’t stop talking; at the end she announces the to the rest of the characters that she has stopped taking her medication. In the next episode she is at a “mental home” (as most of the characters call the private hospital), the place she had always wanted to avoid in the first season. She’s not happy there and uses her new roommate Ginger’s (Denise Drysdale) attempted suicide to slip out and visit Josh during a cookout he and his housemates are throwing. He brings her back and she has stayed at the “home” for most of the rest of the season except for a visit to the zoo and a camping trip with Josh.

JoshRoseCampingPleaseLikeMe — Josh and Rose go camping

The two go on the trip because Ginger, who became Rose’s close friend at the “home,” succeeded in killing herself while Rose (as well as fellow residents, Hannah–co-writer Hannah Gadsby–and Arnold played by Keegan Joyce) were away at the zoo. At night in the tent, Rose cries inconsolably in the sleeping bag next to Josh’s but is dry-faced as they hike during the day while she wonders aloud why Ginger didn’t tell her she wanted to kill herself–and is angry at her for succeeding. Josh is puzzled because Rose has tried repeatedly to kill herself so if anyone should understand Ginger’s actions she should.

Of her own attempts Rose asks, “Weren’t you angry?” Josh explains that he knew that she was attempting suicide because she had a mental “disorder,” so he didn’t take her actions personally. Then he tells her that after one attempt (Rose has tried to kill herself many more times than we have seen onscreen) doctors told him that they weren’t sure they had pumped her stomach in time–and if they hadn’t she would die slowly over the period of two weeks.

“I mean, you’re my mum…” he starts. When the doctors told him they had gotten the drugs out of her system in time and she would recover he states, “Then I got angry.” This show’s thoughtful treatment of suicidality (Thomas has spoken on mental health issues to members of the US Congress), both for those who try to take their own lives and those close to them is a striking contrast to the inconsistent, gimmicky portrayal of the same subject matter on television and in recent films like The Skeleton Twins.

I cringed at first at Josh’s father’s much younger girlfriend Mae (Renee Lim) who is originally from Thailand and has a heavy accent, because I expected her to be a stereotype. But Mae’s lines (and Lim’s delivery) make her one of the wryest wits on the show–and not in the “Asians are magic” way that Josh decries in an episode to a blind date who has just come from Reiki therapy.

When Rose first tries to kill herself, Josh’s father, Alan (David Roberts), is convinced she wanted to die because of his and Rose’s divorce, which happened many years before. Mae says to Josh, who erupts in laughter, “If your father breaks up with you, you might as well just end it all, because you have known perfect love,” before she tells Alan to get over himself.

During the visit to the zoo, Mae and Alan, along with their baby daughter, Grace, tag along and when they are alone together Alan is antsy, saying he has to get back to work. Mae (who frequently looks stressed out, with messy clothes and hair, much more life-like than the blissful, neatly dressed, perfectly coiffed new mothers of American sitcoms) tells him he works too much and that she and Grace need his presence more than they need additional money. When he counters that he bought the big house they live in for them, she holds up her daughter and asks, “Have you counted how many people are in this family?”

I thought at first that the character of Niamh (Nikita Leigh-Pritchard) would be a study in misogyny. She started out last season as the bad girlfriend (or boyfriend) everyone’s bestie has had at one point: she’s completely insufferable to everyone including Tom (who is also Josh’s roommate)–but Tom can never bring himself to end the relationship. Toward the end of Season 1 Tom did end things with Niamh or rather his new girlfriend, Claire (Caitlin Stasey ) did, interrupting his waffling to tell him (in front of Niamh!) “Oh for fuck’s sake, Tom, of course you’re choosing me.”

please_like_me_claire_naimth_tom — Claire, Tom, and Niamh

This season began with a five-year time lapse after the first (Lucas has explained that the series was in development for years and wanted his character to be closer to the age he is now) and Claire, we find out, has been in Germany for 12 months, for work, leaving Tom–and their relationship–behind. Tom has started to hook up with Niamh again, which Josh warns him against, not because of her personality, but because she still loves Tom. Josh tells him that after they have sex he imagines she feels very bad.” And you’re supposed to feel quite nice after sex.”

Niamh isn’t the asshole she was in Season 1, either. She’s sweeter, more vulnerable. We can see as clearly as Josh how much she cares about Tom in the ways she tries to get into his good graces. She has changed the way our own offscreen friends and acquaintances change through the years. The person who was charming and a little outrageous in the first encounter elicits eye-rolls in the 30th. The person who, in the beginning, seemed a little cold and distant becomes, with time, a close and trusted friend. We also see a hilarious glimpse of Niamh ‘s old self when she finds out from Josh that Tom is not only seeing someone else, but has promised to be “exclusive” with this new high-school-student girlfriend, Jenny (Charlotte Nicdao), Niamh picks up Tom’s phone, calls Jenny’s number on speaker (with Tom and Josh in the room) and informs her she and Tom had sex the night before. Before Tom can explain himself Niamh tosses the phone in a flower vase full of water. Later when she talks with Josh (who still doesn’t really like her, even though he feels bad for her) we see that she is heartbroken–and there’s no one there to comfort her.

Tom is both “such a nice boy” (as Rose calls him after he rolls a joint for the camping trip) and emotionally cloddish–in a way that is rare for straight young men on television but not for those in life. He’s genuinely sorry he cheated on and hurt Jenny, but didn’t hesitate to have sex with Niamh, as if he couldn’t have foreseen Jenny might be affected. He doesn’t understand, until she tells him, that Claire had left the country to work in Germany because their relationship wasn’t working–and is despondent at this news.

Josh’s love interests on the show are also more complex than those that populate series created by straight men. Instead of wish-fulfillment cheerleader-model types we get…male model types, but each deeply flawed in ways that sitcom creators rarely make “the girlfriend”. Season 1’s Geoffrey, though he looked like a Greek god, could barely hold a conversation with Josh. Patrick, Josh’s roommate this season, told him he enjoyed hanging out and even making out with him, but didn’t want to have sex. Arnold spends time in the same “mental home” as Rose does.

I’m happy more women are getting the chance to create more television, but I’m eager for one to be able to create a series with Please Like Me’s combination of autobiography, serious issues and comedy–not to mention its expert touch with queer characters. I can’t wait for the day an openly queer woman, playing a role she wrote, based on her own life, kisses a woman on her TV show with the pure pleasure that Thomas radiates whenever he kisses one of his male co-stars.

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

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‘The Skeleton Twins’: Suicidal Siblings

The recommended treatment for attempted suicide in this film seems to be, “Give up your apartment and move across the country to live with a family member you haven’t spoken to for ten years. And whatever you do, don’t get any therapy!” Of course if these characters were introduced to a good therapist, just as when one particularly troubled character in ‘Cold Comfort Farm’ was, we wouldn’t have a movie–which maybe wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

When I was a kid, adults (who had no idea I would grow up to be queer) would talk about how gay men killed themselves once they reached a certain age. The adults acted as if they were talking about some strange species of animal featured on a National Geographic special instead of the people they (whether the adults acknowledged them or not) passed on the street and interacted with every day. The “queers commit suicide” trope was a film staple, one that Vito Russo denounced in The Celluloid Closet and shows up in clips from the documentary of the same name. Now that openly queer people (sometimes) get to write and direct their own films, the trope comes full circle with The Skeleton Twins, directed by out gay man Craig Johnson (who also wrote the script with Mark Heyman), which begins with a gay character (Milo, played by Bill Hader) turning the volume all the way up on Blondie’s “Denis“ in his Los Angeles apartment just before he gets into the bathtub and slits his wrists (cinematographer Reed Morano does a great job in this scene as well as the rest of the film).

We see Milo’s estranged twin sister, Maggie (Kristen Wiig), about to swallow a potentially fatal handful of pills when her disconcertingly cheery ringtone interrupts. The hospital is calling to inform her of Milo’s suicide attempt. So, in the manner of middling scripts through the ages, a character, Maggie, is able to take an unspecified time off work (with no notice), book a last minute flight across the country, invite her brother to recuperate at her home in upstate New York, then spring for an extra plane ticket for him. No one, not the hospital, nor later, her mother or husband seem in the least concerned that Milo could try to kill himself again, or that a suicide attempt is a symptom of an illness which should be treated to prevent the person from dying after a fresh, successful attempt.

The recommended treatment for attempted suicide in this film seems to be “Give up your apartment and move across the country to live with a family member you haven’t spoken to for 10 years. And whatever you do, don’t get any therapy!” Of course if these characters were introduced to a good therapist, just as when one particularly troubled character in Cold Comfort Farm was, we wouldn’t have a movie–which maybe wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

Twins’ Milo and Maggie appear to come from a working-class background. Maggie is a dental hygienist (which requires training but not a four-year college degree) and Milo seems to have skipped college to try to become a “famous actor” in Los Angeles. Later we find out Milo’s childhood bully now works as an electrician. But neither Hader and especially not Wiig act or speak like the working class members of my own family or anyone else’s–though Wiig’s self tan, which makes her look as if she were rubbed with the shavings of a burnt-sienna crayon, makes her resemble some working class folks I know. Luke Wilson, on the other hand, is hilariously natural as Lance, Maggie’s good-natured, good-looking, but not terribly bright, blue-collar husband. When he announces he and Maggie are trying to have kids. Milo says,”I can’t wait to be the creepy gay uncle.”

Lance answers,”You’re hired!”

Another trope that appears in the film is: all the siblings’ problems (even their father’s suicide!) seems to be the fault of their mother (Joanna Gleason in a brief, badly written, poorly conceived role) whom we see having dinner with her children. Again, the mother’s New Age leanings as well as the home she maintains in Sedona plus the ability to jet across the country for a meditation retreat are usually the provenance of the middle class and the wealthy, so the working class status of the family seems tacked-on.

Wiig has some nice moments outside of her comic rapport with Hader (all their best scenes are in the trailer) but she’s miscast. A person with this much to hide would probably present a sunnier facade to the world, the way politicians with draconian platforms cultivate a “friendly” persona. And the script doesn’t do Wiig any favors, calling on her character to smash a fish tank in not one, but two separate scenes to show her state of mind.

Hader plays his queeny character convincingly (though perhaps not as skillfully as an out queer actor would), but Milo seems to have had pretty much no life during the 10 years he was estranged from Maggie (the decade seems to correspond with how long the characters have been out of high school–but Wiig is 41 and Hader is 36, which adds to the film’s dissonance). We see in Milo’s apartment at the beginning a tank of goldfish and a photo presumably with an ex and those two items are the sum of the years the twins have been separated. Maggie, has, on the other hand, acquired a steady job, a house, a husband, and a history.

The characters have a way of joking in a “just kidding (but not really)” way that frustrated people use to blow off steam, but the script doesn’t really explore this dynamic. When Milo is reading Marley and Me he asks his sister if she’s read it and she tells him she has and found it “sad.” He asks why and she says, “You don’t know what happens?”

“What? Does the dog die at the end? Look how much I had left,” Milo spits, motioning to a few chapters worth of pages at the end as he tosses the book aside. He later tells her he knew all along that the dog died.

The jokes in the film are good, but there aren’t enough of them to carry the movie. They are disjointed, like skits (though they are better than the skits the two were in when they were both on Saturday Night Live), instead of a language the two siblings use to communicate with one another. We don’t need to know every detail of adult siblings’ background to believe in the characters bond and relationship: You Can Count On Me made Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo’s brother/sister pair seem real, even though we didn’t learn much about their shared past and Linney and Ruffalo, like Wiig and Hader, look nothing alike. The scene in which Maggie confesses to Milo she is cheating on her husband is very much like the (superior) one in which Linney’s character tells Ruffalo’s that she is sleeping with her married boss.

Skeleton piles on the tragedy, so it becomes ridiculous. Not only did their father kill himself, but their mother is an unfeeling bitch! And Milo’s teacher in high school sexually abused him! And both Milo and Maggie have more than one scene in which they try to kill themselves! Any one of these elements would have been enough to build a film around, but put together they become an unwitting joke, like the compounded tragedy (Incest! Dead best friend! Closeted football player boyfriend!) made The Perks of Being a Wallflower laughable in spite of some good main performances.

Skeleton Twins is the second film I’ve seen (Mysterious Skin was the first) in which a gay man says the adult man who had sex with him when he was underage is the love of his life. In Mysterious Skin this claim made a little more sense: the audience heard it as evidence of how screwed up Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character was. In Twins we don’t get the sense that Milo’s affection for his abuser is anything he should suppress, and Milo’s feelings of love don’t ring true. As I’ve noted before, no matter how “in love” they thought they were, minors who have sex with their teachers usually see, when they grow up, the power imbalance and manipulation in the relationship they were too young to perceive when they were students. Milo has had no such epiphany and for that reason alone–even without the suicide attempt–he should be seeing a therapist.

Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross, when she interviewed Tina Fey a few years back, asked about Saturday Night Live‘s checkered history with its women cast members, and Fey countered by saying that a lot of women had great opportunities to showcase their talents on SNL–and not many chances to put that talent to use elsewhere after they left the show. Although former cast member Wiig had a hit with (and co-wrote) Bridesmaids, subsequent films (which she had no hand in writing) like this one seem to have little idea what to do with her. She and Hader were not only on Saturday Night Live together but appeared in minor roles as the couple who ran the amusement park in the underrated (pre-Bridesmaids) Adventureland and I couldn’t help wishing someone had made a film that starred those characters–or another pre-Bridesmaids Wiig character, the one in Drew Barrymore’s Whip It–instead of Milo and Maggie.

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

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‘Walking and Talking’ With Non-Toxic Women Friends

A short clip at the beginning of writer-director Nicole Holofcener’s first film, 1996’s ‘Walking and Talking,’ lets us know that Amelia (Catherine Keener) and Laura (Anne Heche) have been friends since adolescence. Both are in their 30s and living in New York City–Laura with her boyfriend Frank, and Amelia alone in the sort of sunlit airy apartment someone with her job, even in a pre-gentrified New York (which, like many films from then and now is also mysteriously bereft of people of color), would never be able to afford.

This post by Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on Female Friendship.

The pathetic lack of movies that pass the Bechdel test highlights another deficit in films: the screenwriter often forgets to give the women characters close women friends. An alien from another planet trying to figure out human behavior would get the impression from most movies (and a lot of TV) that women barely spend any time with other women. The alien would never guess that that the person an unpartnered woman (or one with a partner) is likely to confide in, to call in times of crisis or to just relax with, is not her guy “friend” (the one she might end up having sex with) but another woman, perhaps someone who she has been close to for years.

A short clip at the beginning of writer-director Nicole Holofcener’s first film, 1996’s Walking and Talking, lets us know that Amelia (Catherine Keener) and Laura (Anne Heche) have been friends since adolescence. Both are in their 30s and living in New York City–Laura with her boyfriend Frank, and Amelia alone in the sort of sunlit airy apartment someone with her job, even in a pre-gentrified New York (which, like many films from then and now is also mysteriously bereft of people of color), would never be able to afford.

Catherine Keener (in one of her first prominent film roles) and Anne Heche (before she dated Ellen DeGeneres) both look beautiful in most of the scenes without looking fussed over. Heche wears overalls and at one point wears a t-shirt with a hole in it to bed (much more likely sleepwear than the lingerie we see movie and TV women in long-term relationships wearing) while Keener, who has a job at the classified section of a newspaper (which, along with the landline phones–and long-distance bills–places this film firmly in the ’90s) wears–gasp–the same outfit more than once to her workplace.

The two women are allowed to be flawed in ways that women and girls in films rarely are. Laura is a therapist (she’s still in school but is close enough to getting her degree that she sees clients) and we can see that she’s neither great nor terrible at her job: she forgets one of her clients has a child–even though she had previously advised him to build a closer relationship with his son. During a session with another client, while he describes an angst-ridden sexual encounter, she becomes distracted as she fantasizes about fucking him.

Amelia has a penchant for saying the wrong thing: when she first sees Laura’s engagement ring she says it looks “fake,” but rushes to apologize and make amends when she realizes her mistake. She’s also surprisingly game and sweet with her ex-boyfriend’s father, who suffers from Alzheimer’s. When he repeats the same idea twice, she answers both times, “That sounds great,” with equal, unforced enthusiasm. Keener has worked with Holofcener in each of the director’s films but Amelia is both much funnier and kinder than the characters Keener played in Lovely and Amazing and Holofcener’s most recent release, the overrated Enough Said.

The women’s complexity also colors their relationships with men. We see Laura at turns deeply in love and irritated with the man who becomes her fiancé, Frank (Todd Field, who is better known now as a writer-director: his films include In The Bedroom and Little Children). Walking does a good job of showing how, especially in long-term relationships, those two emotions can be close to the surface at the same time.

Amelia is single and we see her mixed feelings about her best friend’s upcoming marriage from the beginning. I could have done without the heavy-handed symbolism of the 14-year-old cat, Big Jeans, the two women apparently shared when they were roommates–before Laura moved in with Frank–who is stricken with cancer (and given little chance of recovery). Still the film’s sharp wit saves even these scenes as when, just after they get the diagnosis Laura gently tells Amelia “I think you should put her down.” When Amelia motions to let the cat out of her arms, Laura says, “No, I mean…”

walking-and-talkingcat — The two friends are so close they even share a cat

Laura and Amelia are allowed to behave imperfectly the way male characters are allowed to be in many films, but women hardly ever are: Laura accepts the invitation from a waiter who has a crush on her to see him in a play and hangs out as his “date” afterward. Amelia has sex with the video clerk who has a crush on her (Kevin Corrigan, who was also excellent in a similar role in Slums of Beverly Hills ) even though she describes him as “the ugly guy” to Frank and Laura.

More importantly, Holofcener doesn’t let the characters wander too far from their core as decent human beings (something at which she has been less successful in her other films). When a screenwriter concedes a woman has woman friends, the “friends'” sole purpose can sometimes be to betray the friendship, so I was pleasantly surprised that when Amelia drops by to see Laura (when she’s out with the actor/waiter) and finds Frank alone (and ends up sharing hits off a bowl with him), they didn’t have sex, even though in everyday life most people are able to be friends with their friends’ partners–without ever fucking them.

The film captures the shifting dynamic of a single person’s interaction with a couple, sometimes finding a surprising affinity with a friend’s partner, sometimes the third wheel. And sometimes forming a united front with her friend, as when Frank, during a road trip, asks, “Do we have to listen to this vagina music all the way?” Both women simultaneously tell him, “Yes.”

We also see Laura cuts her “date” short, and Amelia decides she actually likes “the ugly guy”–and no longer thinks he’s ugly. We hear, at one point, in the background, Liz Phair (during her Exile in Guyville era): a good musical equivalent for the ups-and-downs of these women’s messy, romantic lives.

When it was released the film was a cornucopia of great, new talent: besides Holofcener herself (who has never made another film nearly this good), Heche, Keener and Field, Liev Shreiber (in one of his first film performances to receive any notice) plays Amelia’s ex-boyfriend, Andrew, and manages to make the character’s sad-sack neurosis charming. The film shows that all of these actors have a great gift for comedy–and makes me wish more movie comedies were worthy of them.

Although the women have tense moments and sometimes argue, they, like Frank and Laura, always eventually make up–and nothing they say or do to one another is bad enough that their friendship seems toxic, also a welcome surprise. Walking and Talking makes clear how important their relationship is to both women, even as they enter different stages of their lives. At the end when, just before Laura walks down the aisle, Amelia, wearing a pretty dress, hands her a shot of whiskey, we know these women–and their friendship–will be just fine.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veN5fuM-AwI”]

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‘Pride’: A Fun “Feel Good” Movie About A Very “Feel Bad” Time

Although director Matthew Warchus isn’t gay, the screenwriter Stephen Beresford is, which, after seeing the film, my gaydar told me even before I looked up his bio. The film starts and ends with the queer characters, not the working class (mostly) straight people, as the focus. Mark (Ben Schnetzer, who’s from the U.S. but went to drama school in London) keeps a huge, “Thatcher Out” banner hanging from the windows of his flat, rallies his friends and closeted newbie Joe (George MacKay) to collect money for striking coal miners as Lesbians and Gays Support The Miners–LGSM (because in those days most queer groups didn’t acknowledge the participation of bisexual and trans people). “Mining communities are being bullied just like we are,” Mark explains to the others, and the group ends up befriending one village’s striking Welsh miners and their families.

The “feel good” British comedy that also has working-class characters overcoming their homophobia was, for a time, a popular enough genre that it could’ve had its own section in video stores, which were also plentiful then. I’m thinking of films like Kinky Boots, which is now a Broadway musical and starred a pre-12 Years a Slave Chiwetel Ejiofor as the drag queen designer who saves the factory of the working class town, and The Full Monty, whose lineup of mostly working-class, bored, unemployed guys-turned-strippers by the end included a couple in love. Although I enjoyed The Full Monty (which had an acute enough take on class that it played like a comedic version of Das Kapital–with flashes of skin) by the time Kinky Boots came out, in 2005, I’d had enough of twinkle-eyed, straight characters smiling at their new-found “tolerance.” So I was hesitant to see Pride (which opens Sept. 26) with a plot synopsis (queer people help striking miners in Thatcherite Britain, loosely based on a true story), title, and even a movie poster that easily could have come from the ’90s.

Although director Matthew Warchus isn’t gay, the screenwriter Stephen Beresford is, which, after seeing the film, my gaydar told me even before I looked up his bio. The film starts and ends with the queer characters, not the working-class, (mostly) straight people, as the focus. Mark (Ben Schnetzer, who’s from the US but went to drama school in London) keeps a huge, “Thatcher Out” banner hanging from the windows of his flat and rallies his friends and closeted newbie Joe (George MacKay) to collect money for striking coal miners as Lesbians and Gays Support The Miners–LGSM (because in those days most queer groups didn’t acknowledge the participation of bisexual and trans people). “Mining communities are being bullied just like we are,” Mark explains to the others, and the group ends up befriending one Welsh village’s striking miners and their families.

I lived in London six months before the events in the film start and Pride gets the period exactly right: the music of The Smiths plays at a queer party and Pete Shelley’s “Homosapien” and Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Round” play at the queer clubs. Post-punk fashions are popular among the queers (as they were among many young Londoners then) but we see the era’s big earrings, shiny shirts, stonewashed jeans, permed hair, and Bo Derek braids (!) on queer characters too. The miners’ strike was big news: when I was back in the US more than one British import record, popular on college radio, included snippets of speeches from striking miners. And, as I’ve written elsewhere, people from most walks of British life had a fierce, abiding hatred of Margaret Thatcher.

Because the film doesn’t have only one or two queers to focus on, its characters, like Dear White People‘s Black characters, show a range of different personalities and life experiences that we’re not used to seeing in mainstream films. Mark is a funny, committed activist with the gift of gab who looks great in a black leather motorcycle jacket. He asks a crowd, when remarking on how the police have started beating up striking miners instead of harassing patrons of queer clubs, “Do you think they got sick of all that Donna Summer?” Reticent, neatly dressed, 20-year-old Joe is a college student who lives with his parents, so even though he spends much of his time doing work with an openly queer group he is not out to any of his family. We even meet a few queer women: Steph (Faye Marsay) in a mohawk and heavy eyeliner becomes Joe’s best friend and two women who are a couple join the group after they hear a rousing speech in a queer London club from village miner Dai (Paddy Considine in an unflattering period haircut).

We first meet Jonathan (Dominic West who played Jimmy on The Wire) trashed and in full drag, who, after a full day and night celebrating Pride, doesn’t quite succeed, despite persistent, enthusiastic attempts, in blowing the whistle around his neck. In spite of Jonathan being the kind of camp character whom other films (especially those made by straight people) rarely use for anything more than a few good quips and some attitude, he does turn out to have a political conscience. And some of the loveliest moments in the film are glimpses of his tender relationship with his partner: quiet, serious Gethin (out gay actor Andrew Scott whom some may recognize played Moriarty on Sherlock), the owner of the gay bookstore where the group meets. West, playing against type, makes us believe in Jonathan as a whole person, not just a caricature, though in one showy scene he can’t quite stop himself from dancing more like a straight man than a queenie, gay guy.

The film also shows nuanced portraits of the women villagers: Sian (Jessica Gunning) looks like a miner’s wife: short and busty, her pretty face framed by a mullet (in those days not just a hairstyle for older lesbians). But she doesn’t act like the little woman. She, along with Dai are the first villagers to argue that the queer group should be invited to the local hall just as the other groups who have supported the miners have been. “Your gays have arrived,” one of the older women from the village tells the two of them when the group comes to town in a van.

During their visit Jonathan coaches Sian on the legal ins and outs of being stopped and arrested for no reason (until relatively recently, police regularly harassed and arrested white queer people as they now do with Black people and trans women of color). Sian then goes to the jail and gets the police to release the illegally detained miners. We also see Imelda Staunton as Hefina show off her considerable comic abilities, quite a change from her work in movies like Vera Drake. The cast is uniformly excellent: Bill Nighy is also on hand, barely recognizable here as a slick-haired, slouched, shy villager.

Films about activism, especially queer activism, usually skip the part about it being great fun as well as a good way to get laid. We see the joy the group gets out of their work and Joe hooks up with the cute guy who asks him at “Pits and Perverts” (which would have been a better title for the movie) a benefit concert organized by LGSM, “Are you going to take my picture too?”

In many ways Pride is a very conventional film. Its script has the regulation triumph-setback-triumph structure that keeps many mainstream films from having the twists and complications that make documentaries like Stories We Tell and One Cut, One Life great. But the mix of real-life characters and events keeps Pride from becoming saccharine. The miners were striking to return to hard work that meant an early death for many of them (as well as repercussions for the environment), but they knew that work and the union were all they had. When they lost the strike the mining communities became impoverished and, with the eventual closure of the mines, remain so to this day.

Unlike a lot of films and TV shows that take place in the past, Pride‘s portrait of the ’80s isn’t clouded by nostalgia. The film shows that being shunned or kicked out of one’s family for being queer was the norm back then (though in best case scenarios the rift was temporary). A record company receptionist tells the group (when they are looking for bands for the benefit) that they don’t have any queer artists on their label–as we see posters of Elton John (who many forget was briefly married to a woman in the ’80s) and Soft Cell in the hall. And although the screenwriter is a politically aware gay man, he still gets feminism wrong. The script seems to disparage the women who form a separate group the same way the core characters do. But in the 90s I belonged to a queer activist group and gay men talked right over the women, even as we packed up and left to strike out on our own.

In a postscript we find out one of the real-life characters in LGSM died of AIDS two years after the last events of the film–as much of the queer community did in the 80s and 90s. But another real-life character goes back to school and eventually becomes a member of Parliament, continuing to serve there today. Although many will insist on calling the film “feel good” the same way they mischaracterized another film based on a true story, The King’s Speech, the real-life events of both films defy the glibness of any marketing label and in the end prove deeper, more complex and more poignant.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsFY0wHpR5o”]

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On Not Giving Women Filmmakers A “Free Pass”: ‘Kelly & Cal’

Many actresses, especially those in their 30s and older, find themselves relegated to playing “the mother” for much of their careers. Most of these films (like the recent indie hit Boyhood) seem to go out of their way to tell stories from anyone but the mother’s point of view. For a short time Jen McGowan’s Kelly & Cal (also written by a woman: Amy Lowe Starbin) seems like it will be a welcome contrast to this norm. At the beginning we see a closeup of the tired, stressed face of new mother, Kelly (Juliette Lewis), as we hear the pleasant, disembodied voice of Kelly’s OB/GYN, who indulges in the (relatively recent) abhorrent practice of referring to women who are pregnant or have recently given birth as “Mom” (instead of calling them by their names) while she rushes Kelly through her six-week checkup. The doctor isn’t the only offender: “How was your day, Mommy?” Cybill Shepherd’s squeaky clean mother-in-law later asks when she visits for dinner.

We again see closeups of Kelly’s unhappy face as she (and we) hear her baby constantly crying, interrupting her even when she tries to masturbate–after her husband proves more interested in TV than in sex. We learn Kelly’s name only when she introduces herself to Cal. They meet over her fence as Kelly sneaks a cigarette and Cal asks if he can have one too. Cal is supposed to be 17 or l8, but the handsome and not untalented Jonny Weston, who plays him, is–and looks–26. Throughout the film, whenever he talks about attending high school I felt like correcting him, “Don’t you mean graduate school?” The actor visibly being well past his teens makes Cal’s banter seem particularly inappropriate and creepy.

He tells Kelly (whom he’s just met) “You have great breasts,” then admonishes her that if she didn’t want him to comment on them she shouldn’t nurse her son with the curtains open (sort of like how some men feel free to advise celebrities never to pose for private nude photos if they don’t want the world to see them).

Kelly immediately tells him, “Get away from my house,” then sees he uses a wheelchair as he rolls back toward his own place. That evening she tells her husband she feels bad that she yelled at someone who is “handicapped,” the word used to describe Cal throughout the film, even though “people with disabilites” has been common parlance–including in the Americans With Disabilities Act–for over 25 years. I guess we should be grateful the film doesn’t have any queer characters, so we don’t have to hear them called “homosexuals.”

She used to be "wild" — She used to be “wild”

The movie really goes off the rails after Kelly appears at Cal’s garage apartment (his parents’ house hasn’t been equipped with ramps) as an apology, but quickly leaves (Juliette Lewis is quite funny in this scene; she’s better than the film deserves) when Cal continues to talk explicitly about sex (this time about his own prowess even after the accident that caused his spinal cord injury). Her actions are perfectly in keeping with everything else we’ve seen so far from Kelly. So the audience is left to wonder why, the next day, she goes back to visit Cal as if nothing has happened. If Kelly were meant to be a damaged character, a woman who felt that being in the company of someone who humiliates her by talking explicitly about her body (which he spied on while she was behind closed doors in her own house, feeding her son)–and then told her all the sexual things he could do to her–is all she deserves, I could accept this plot point. But as the part is written (up until that point in the film) and as Lewis plays her, Kelly is a level-headed sort, even if she feels lonely and out-of-place in her new role as a suburban stay-at-home mother. Kelly and Cal’s “friendship” in this context makes no sense and seems to bolster the philosophy of street harassers and “pickup artists” that talking explicitly to women they barely know (and who don’t seem open to their sexual attention) is the way to attract them.

For extended periods that follow, the film (which seems long but is actually only 110 minutes), in the tradition of soap operas, seems to forget Kelly has a baby. We see her freely drinking beer and other alcohol when before she had demurred explaining that she was still breast-feeding (if the TV series Please Like Me can be trusted, apparently breastfeeding mothers can pump their milk before the occasional drunken night out, but the movie doesn’t care enough to offer this explanation). She and Cal spend lots of time alone together, after which she often goes home to an empty house–when new parenthood means (as the start of movie makes clear, and shows is a major part of Kelly’s frustration), except for brief respites when others take over, the baby is always there.

No, really she was "wild" — No, really, she was “wild”

We get a tiny subplot that goes nowhere about Kelly once being “young and wild” and “in a band” which seems cribbed from a Wikipedia entry about “Riot Grrrl,” especially when the characters repeatedly mispronounce “Sleater-Kinney” as “Sleeter-Kinney.” The film also uses a Cyndi Lauper song, the polar opposite of “wild,” as one of of Kelly’s favorites. Kelly ends up kissing Cal because his harassment somehow ends up charming her. She also does a little breaking and entering and graffiti with him as foreplay.

Cal, on the other hand, inhabits the trope of the disabled character who feels like life is no longer worth living. A person with disabilities who becomes suicidal is such a cliché that When Billy Broke His Head, a too-infrequently seen documentary about disability–directed by a disabled man–had a sequence that was a montage of disabled characters in film after film announcing their intentions to kill themselves. Audiences would object if every woman in films wanted to off herself–or if every person of color did. And we’re glad that modern queer characters in dramas like Weekend, Keep The Lights On, and Pariah survive to the credits because in the past the rule seemed to be that one (or more) of a film’s queer characters must die by the end. But the disabled character (and there’s usually only one), if he or she isn’t busy being an inspiration to others, is, in too many films and TV shows otherwise on the brink of suicide. We could use more characters like Winston (Clifton Collins Jr.) in Sunshine Cleaning, who was missing an arm, but was neither depressed nor awe-inspiring, just a person trying to get through life.

A film with real distribution (it opens on Sept. 5) directed by a woman as well as written by one is a rare enough occurrence that I wish I didn’t have to point out all that’s wrong with Kelly & Cal. But if a film has the same old sexist (not to mention ableist) tropes, we have remember why we wanted more films by women in the first place–and see that maybe this particular example isn’t solving the problem.

As Susan Sarandon (in The Celluloid Closet) said of their love scenes in The Hunger, no one needs to get drunk to kiss Catherine Deneuve. In the same way, nobody needs to lower their standards to love the films of women like Stacie Passon, Miranda July, Dee Rees, Sarah Polley, and Andrea Arnold. But film distributors still treat an acclaimed queer woman’s film about a queer woman, Concussion, as subpar: last year the rapturous reviews it received from a number of influential critics came too late for it to have a real run in many cities that might have embraced it, (including mine which is full of art houses and is in the first state to legalize queer marriage). One Cut, One Life the documentary co-directed by and featuring Lucia Small was the best film I saw at the Independent Film Festival of Boston (where I saw Dear White People, Belle, and Obvious Child) and probably the best documentary I’ve seen this year (a year that included Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me and Anita) but even though it plays at The New York Film Festival Sept. 29 it still doesn’t, as far as I know, have a distribution deal. The only way to fight against this tide is to keep praising good films by women–and not dilute that praise by heaping it onto other films that happen to have women’s names on them.

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

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After The Brat Pack: Ally Sheedy in ‘High Art’

Although a few who had fallen under the brat pack sobriquet (like Demi Moore) continued in mainstream star-vehicles well into the 90s (and Rob Lowe, dismissed as another pretty face in the ’80s, was able to sustain a TV career into the present), most had faded from the public view by then, including Ally Sheedy (after starring in 1987’s ‘Maid to Order,’ her own ‘Weekend At Bernie’s’) –though earlier in her career she, of the whole “Pack,” received some of the best reviews for her work. Sheedy went on to reinvent herself–and make good on her earlier promise–in a series of meaty roles in independent films in the late 90s: the most well known one (for which she won several awards) was Lucy Berliner in writer-director Lisa Cholodenko’s 1998 feature debut ‘High Art.’

This post by Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on The Brat Pack.

I was already an adult when the term “Brat Pack” was coined to refer to 1980s young actresses and actors who, in spite of being slightly older than I was, usually came to prominence playing high school kids. As the ’80s petered out. most of these actors starred in progressively crappier movies (Weekend at Bernie’s is one notorious example) and audiences became clued in to how bad these films were–and stopped showing up for them.

Although a few who had fallen under the Brat Pack sobriquet (like Demi Moore) continued in mainstream star-vehicles well into the 90s (and Rob Lowe, dismissed as another pretty face in the ’80s, was able to sustain a TV career into the present) most had faded from the public view by then, including Ally Sheedy (after starring in 1987’s Maid to Order, her own Weekend At Bernie’s) –though earlier in her career she, of the whole “Pack”, received some of the best reviews for her work. Sheedy went on to reinvent herself–and make good on her earlier promise–in a series of meaty roles in independent films in the late 90s: the most well known one (for which she won several awards) was Lucy Berliner in writer-director Lisa Cholodenko’s 1998 feature debut High Art.

Radha Mitchell’s Syd is the main character, a young, ambitious hard-worker at an arty NYC photography magazine. She tells the receptionist of her promotion (one of the many ways to tell this film was made in the 90s: she got her job after working at the magazine as an intern), “I’m not really assisting anyone. I’m an assistant editor,” but we see the male editor uses her as a glorified go-fer. Reading for work in the bath at home she feels water dripping on her from above and interrupts the constant (if subdued) 24-hour drug party going on in the apartment of her upstairs neighbor, Lucy (Sheedy) to find the source of the leak. Lucy lives with her strung-out German girlfriend Greta (Patricia Clarkson, hilariously out of it for much of the film, evoking the equally heroin-addled, famous blonde, Nico, even as she name-drops gay addict-director Rainer Werner Fassbinder). While Syd wraps duct tape around the leak she notices and compliments the framed photos all around the apartment, which are Lucy’s.

Although the style of these photos (and the ones Lucy takes later) look, to contemporary eyes, like the faux-realism of American Apparel and some Calvin Klein ads, in 1998 they seemed to reference the photographer Nan Goldin who also used elements of her own life (including drug addiction, the queer community and domestic violence) as documentary fodder for her work.

Lucy turns out to have been someone who was making a name for herself before she left town a decade before. The clueless male editor Syd reports to has no idea who she is, but his boss Dominique (Anh Duong) does, as does the hot, young male photographer of the moment working on the magazine’s upcoming cover. Through Syd Dominique enlists Lucy to do their next cover instead, even though Lucy had insisted to Syd, “I don’t really do that anymore.” Lucy makes Syd her editor.

Syd had, at first, tried to get close to Lucy for professional reasons, but she finds herself snorting heroin with Lucy, in the company of Greta and her drug friends, and, while her live-in boyfriend (Gabriel Mann) cools his heels at a party in Lucy’s living room, Syd makes out with Lucy in the bedroom. Greta rouses herself long enough to notice the attention Lucy is paying to Syd, dismissing her as a “psycho-phant.”

Sheedy herself famously had her own struggles with drugs and because of them had stopped working for a time. The monologue she has in which Lucy explains to Syd how she “fucked up” seems very real. Sheedy’s face is seemingly naked of not just of makeup but of flesh, the point of her chin and cheekbones stretching her pale skin, leaving circles under her eyes. She’s startlingly thin (not merely very slender, as she was in the mid to late 80s, which in turn was a slimming down from her more full-faced look in the early 80s) in the fashion of a lot of downtown types (and junkies): her shoulder blades under thin t-shirts and tank tops are so prominent they seem ready to sprout wings.

One of Lucy's photos of Syd — One of Lucy’s photos of Syd

Sheedy also has great chemistry not just with Mitchell (who was fresh from playing another queer woman in her native Australia in the light-to-the-point-of-complete-forgettability Love and Other Catastrophes) but also with Clarkson (in the film role where critics first took notice of her). In spite of Greta often being on the verge of nodding off, she is still luscious and playful in her black lingerie and long, blonde hair partially piled on her head, like a vintage Brigitte Bardot gone awry. The film’s treatment of women’s sexuality is a nice contrast to the lesbian-bed-death clichés (and anti-chemistry) of Julianne Moore and Annette Bening in Cholodenko’s more recent The Kids Are All Right.

Cholodenko made a couple of spot-on, very funny shorts about queer women before High Art, so I was disappointed with the “tragic lesbian” turn the film takes at the end–both when I first saw the film in 1998 and rewatching it now. In a way tragedy seems like an easy out–and rings less true than the gradual relationship burnout experienced by the main gay couple also impacted by drug addiction) in Ira Sach’s excellent, autobiographical Keep The Lights On. Substance abuse in the queer community is perhaps a more pressing issue than we think it is: I wonder about the “coincidence” of two of the most closely observed, relatively recent films about drug addiction and art both made by openly queer writer-directors. But artist careers ebb and flow for reasons that are more complicated than a drug overdose: shortly after her run as the newly crowned queen of indie films, Sheedy played the lead, then walked out of an off-Broadway production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and though she’s still around (you can follow her on Twitter @allysheedy1) she hasn’t starred in many films since.

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

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What’s Happening Now in Ferguson and ‘The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975’

A film that does seem eerily relevant right now is ‘The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975,’ a collection of vintage, montage documentary footage (shot by a Swedish television crew: the film is directed by contemporary Swedish filmmaker Göran Olsson) of the Black Panthers and other Black activists plus interviews conducted with other people, some prominent, some not, from the Black community in the 60s and 70s. Audio that plays underneath some of these clips includes insightful commentary about the events of the time (and sometimes about the footage itself) from Ahmir Questlove Thompson (of The Roots and the Jimmy Fallon show), Erykah Badu, Robin Kelley, Sonia Sanchez, Abiodun Oyewole (of The Last Poets) and Talib Kweli among others as well as surviving Black activists from the 60s like Angela Davis and Kathleen Cleaver.

Like a lot of people this past week and a half I’ve barely been able to tear myself away from Twitter, where I’ve read about and seen linked the latest video and audio from the protests in Ferguson, Mo. and the escalating and unconstitutional response from police, whose killing of an unarmed, Black 18-year-old for jaywalking–with no charges for or arrest of the white officer who shot him–sparked the protests in the first place. Today I was originally scheduled to review Freedom Summer, the acclaimed documentary about the nice, white people who, at the behest of Black activists, went into Black communities in Mississipi in 1964 to fight for civil rights. I may very well review that film in the future, but this week doesn’t seem the right one to do so, any more than a review of a film like Boyhood or Love Is Strange is something I want to read, let alone write.

A film that does seem eerily relevant right now is The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, a collection of vintage montage documentary footage (shot by a Swedish television crew: the film is directed by contemporary Swedish filmmaker Göran Olsson) of the Black Panthers and other Black activists plus interviews conducted with other people, some prominent, some not, from the Black community in the 60s and 70s. Audio that plays underneath some of these clips includes insightful commentary about the events of the time (and sometimes about the footage itself) from Ahmir Questlove Thompson (of The Roots and the Jimmy Fallon show), Erykah Badu, Robin Kelley, Sonia Sanchez, Abiodun Oyewole (of The Last Poets) and Talib Kweli among others as well as surviving Black activists from the 60s like Angela Davis and Kathleen Cleaver.

Of course much has changed since the film was shot: the streets of Harlem are now filled with white gentrifiers displacing the Black families we see in the footage on stoops and sidewalks. But some of the film is startlingly current. Everyone who has called for “peace” in Ferguson this week should watch the interview with Stokely Carmichael in which he tells the cameras that nonviolence as a strategy (as the former Chair of SNCC he was well-versed in its theory and practice) doesn’t work if the oppressor doesn’t have compassion for those who are nonviolently resisting–and even though, as Abiodun Oyewole points out, “There wouldn’t be an America if it wasn’t for Black people,” the U.S., even now, doesn’t seem to have much compassion for its Black people.

Although he sweetly interviews his own mother in one sequence, Carmichael (who coined the term “Black Power“) in an infamous quote said the position of women in the movement should be “prone.” But some of the best moments in Mixtape come from women activists, especially Angela Davis, whom we see on trial for a conspiracy charge with flimsy evidence (she was later acquitted).

When asked about the “violence” of the Black Power movement Davis recounts the Birmingham church bombing which directly affected her family, because her mother was a teacher to one of the girls who was killed and a friend to one of their mothers. Davis’s mother accompanied this woman to the church after the explosion–where they both saw the body parts strewn all over the site. That night Davis’s father and other men from the community got their guns and formed a citizen patrol to protect their families. Davis concludes, her distinctive musical voice brimming with emotion, “When someone asks me about violence, I find it incredible. Because what it means is that the person who’s asking that question has absolutely no idea what Black people have gone through… have experienced in this country.” Davis and others state that her trial was a deliberate attempt by the state to make her, as a prominent Black activist, an example to others: to either kill her (the crimes of which she was accused were death penalty offenses) or imprison her for a very long time, a telling detail now when 38 percent of the U.S. prison population is Black, as is 42 percent of those on Death Row.

The Black Panther party of the 1960s is largely vilified now, but the film reminds us that they were the ones who started the practice of giving children free breakfast, which the U.S. government, perhaps embarrassed by the efforts of a group it had demonized, co-opted and continues to this day–albeit with budget cuts from Republicans and so-called “centrist” Democrats. We see the need for this aid clearly in the film when a mother sends her children off to school (in clothes I recognized as similar to my own wardrobe in first grade) with only dry cereal to eat (they have no milk in the house), telling one of the younger ones it’s “like a cookie.”

The 70s fashions aren’t the only aspect that mark the film as a product of its time. Most of the activists in interviews speak of “revolution” as an inevitability, like they are expecting it to stop by the Monday after next, but just as with the feminist movement, the queer rights movement and the Occupy movement some things improved, some things got worse and a lot stayed the same. The big, radical change never happened.

Much of the film serves as a meditative time capsule. Drugs play a prominent part in the later footage, not the happy, white hippies of the ’60s taking LSD and smoking pot, but Black men drafted as soldiers who come back from Vietnam addicted to heroin, and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI letting drug traffic run rampant in the areas designated as Black “ghettos.” J. Edgar Hoover has been dead for a long time, but neighborhoods where most of the residents are black and brown people are still more likely to be affected by drug activity and the violence that comes with it. We also see confessional footage from a woman who was formerly a heroin addict, telling of her debasement while she was using. Like some recent films the Swedish television crew can’t resist, in this clip, presenting Black suffering as entertainment, just as the mainstream media has made available for public consumption countless photos of Michael Brown’s mother in anguished grief.

One thing has changed: the (white) crew during the 60s were free to film and stand without impediment alongside the radicals we see openly talking about “revolution”, even one, like Davis, on trial for serious charges. Now media trying to let the world know what’s going on in Ferguson are shoved, arrested, and gassed. What Erykah Badu says toward the end of the film about the past could also apply now: “We have to document our history. If we gonna tell the story, let’s tell the story right.”

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

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‘Our Song’: Teen Girls Of Color As Heroines of Their Own Lives

In the 90s and early 2000s we seemed on the cusp of a sea change in which a white male teenager wasn’t the default character audiences were supposed to identify with. While films about grown women had stars like Whitney Houston (in ‘The Bodyguard’) Angela Bassett (Oscar-nominated for ‘What’s Love Got To Do With It’) and a pre “J. Lo” Jennifer Lopez (in ‘Selena’), films about teenaged girls of color popped up too. Leslie Harris’s ‘Just Another Girl on the IRT’ was released in the early 90s. In 2000 writer-director Jim McKay’s gorgeous, melancholy ‘Our Song,’ about the friendship of three teenaged girls of color (which starred Kerry Washington–in her film debut) opened in theaters.

Coming-of-age films like the current art house hit Boyhood usually focus on…boys. A girl character can be, like in the Harry Potter films, The Sidekick, (Emma Watson as Hermione) or just The Girlfriend as in Wes Anderson’s early film Rushmore. If we’re lucky we get to see a complex teenage girl character who is The Daugher, like Shailene Woodley in The Descendants. Until recent YA adaptations like The Hunger Games and The Fault in Our Stars a teenaged girl was rarely The Person the film was about. And teen girls of color? Movies are still pretty much never about them.

In the 90s and early 2000s we seemed on the cusp of a sea change in which a white male teenager wasn’t the default character audiences were supposed to identify with. While films about grown women had stars like Whitney Houston (in The Bodyguard) Angela Bassett (Oscar-nominated for What’s Love Got To Do With It) and a pre “J. Lo” Jennifer Lopez (in Selena), films about teenaged girls of color popped up too. Leslie Harris’s Just Another Girl on the IRT was released in the early 90s. In 2000 writer-director Jim McKay’s gorgeous, melancholy Our Song, about the friendship of three teenaged girls of color (which starred Kerry Washington–in her film debut) opened in theaters.

McKay (who is white) has said in interviews that part of why he wanted to make the film was to include the Jackie Robinson Steppers marching band (now known as The Brooklyn Steppers) a Brooklyn institution of Black and Latino young people which incorporates R and B and hip-hop music and dance moves into its repertoire. The scenes with the band (which the three girls all belong to) are a resounding success: all marching bands should be like this one! The real marching band members and the main actresses, Anna Simpson as Joycelyn, Melissa Martinez as Maria, and a very young Washington as Lanisha blend seamlessly into the group. The band leader (Tyrone Brown) is a character many will recognize from their own lives, especially when he lectures the band in the manner of every teacher, advisor and coach who has implored students to please try harder. Also seamless is the way other scenes of the girls interacting with their acquaintances leaves us unaware of who is a professional and who is not (the film cast people in the neighborhood alongside actors with long lists of credits): this smooth interweaving of scripted and documentary elements reminded me of the Chilean film No and its mix of vintage documentary video with scripted scenes that take place during the same events. McKay also seems to have a talent equal to Lukas Moodysson’s in writing believable and affecting dialogue for teenage girls. The naturalistic acting of the leads, especially Washington, but also Simpson and Martinez, elevates the sometimes pedestrian talk about clothes and boys into a music of its own.

oursong-bandpractice — During band practice

Seen today, the film is an unwitting nostalgia piece: the Crown Heights neighborhood in Brooklyn where the scenes were shot is largely gentrified now. In the film’s action we rarely see a white face, a contrast with recent, independently made films that take place in Brooklyn like Obvious Child and It Felt Like Love in which–as in most mainstream films, no matter where they take place–the audience rarely sees anyone onscreen who is Black or brown. We get a hint of the white influx to come when Joycelyn learns from her new high-status friends what a “mocha” is and teaches it to Lanisha and Maria who, in their mostly low-income neighborhood (which they rarely leave) have never heard the term before. Joycelyn’s job is at what seems to be The Body Shop while Lanisha and Maria work at a local, decidedly non-artisanal bakery.

At work and off Maria and Lanisha sometimes speak Spanish to each other (in one of the film’s many instances of casual bulldozing of stereotypes, Maria starts out knowing no Spanish even though her family is Latino). In one scene Maria tells Lanisha she’s “embarazada.” Lanisha, used to correcting her friend, laughs and says, “‘Embarazada’ doesn’t mean ’embarrassed.’ It means you’re pregnant.”

Maria answers, “I know what it means. I looked it up.”

LanishaOurSong — Kerry Washington as Lanisha

Maria’s passivity and seeming apathy when confronted with making decisions about her pregnancy, practice with the band, or enrolling in a new school feel true-to-life: her response to these challenges, except in the scene where she confronts the father of her baby–who doesn’t even bother to take off his headphones when she tells him the news– seems to be one big shrug, with a teenager’s lack of regard for later repercussions. Of course, of the three mothers we see, Maria’s is, by far, the least understanding and most strict: teenagers who figure out that their parents are unreasonable are usually the ones who get into the most trouble.

The film is a treasure trove of thoughtful characters who are women of color, not just the three girls but also Marlene Forte as Lanisha’s mother, gently trying to warn her daughter about her charming father’s broken promises, and even, in a brief scene, a counselor (Iris Little Thomas) who makes Maria laugh when she tells her that she too was quiet when she was her age, but now nobody can get her to shut up. About Maria’s pregnancy the counselor says, “I was just remembering ’15’ and just wondering what you might like to do.”

In the film’s closeups (the stunning cinematography is by Jim Denault) we see how little imagination fashion magazines and mainstream TV and films have in their extremely narrow vision of what makes girls and women “beautiful.” On nights out, when she undoes her usual thick braid, Maria has a glorious, long, full, frizzy lion’s mane of hair, set off by huge hoop earrings; Joycelyn’s almond eyes and velvety, dark skin are highlighted by her sparkly eyeshadow (which her very young mother, to whom she has a strong resemblance–and who acts more like her buddy and roommate–seems to borrow) and Lanisha, whose radiant, expressive face is both familiar to us, from Washington’s later stardom, and not–Washington is less slender here than we’re used to seeing her, with shorter hair and in belted, baggy jeans (fashionable for teen girls then) instead of the well-cut designer clothing she wears on the red carpet or on Scandal.

At a time when neighborhoods of mostly Black and Latino people were demonized as full of gangs and lawlessness, the only crime we see is when the girls shoplift new clothing for themselves. The film’s one instance of deadly violence is a despair-ridden murder-suicide. At the makeshift, poster board memorial for the victims, the three girls solemnly place the roses Joycelyn, though she is spending more and more time with her new friends, bought at the bodega for each of them.

The “our song” of the title is “Ooh Child” which the band rehearses and we also hear on the radio (the 1990s Chyna version, not the original Five Stairsteps’ version from the 70s). The girls first hear the song together and then, more poignantly, when they’re apart.

The girls’ increasing estrangement is a reality not often depicted on film, where friendship (unless it involves an obvious villain or some big blowout fight) usually equals “forever.” But for most of us, different people drift in and out of our lives in high school and beyond. In the last shots of the film we see a long closeup of Lanisha by herself, without either friend at her side. We recognize she is having her first, sad inkling that most of her “best friends” will move on and away from her–or she will move on from them.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jINf6OTWyUE”]

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‘Violette’: You Won’t See A Better Portrait Of Queer Women Artists This Year–Or Maybe Ever

So ‘Violette,’ a film which covers all of the 1950s (it begins in the 40s, before the end of the Nazi occupation of France during World War II and ends in 1964) is a nice change in that it focuses on not one, but two women writers who work hard over a period of years to become successful artists (both critically and financially) in their own right. The two characters come from real life: Violette Leduc (played by Emannuelle Devos, whom some will recognize as the star of Arnaud Desplechin’s films like ‘Kings and Queen’) the author of ‘La Bâtarde’ (‘The Bastard’) and Simone de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain) who wrote (among many other books) the groundbreaking feminist work ‘The Second Sex.’ In a Parisian parallel to Johnson, de Beauvoir was also the companion to Existentialist philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre.

In the memoir Minor Characters, editor and writer Joyce Johnson describes the early Beat scene in 1950s New York, when she dated Jack Kerouac. Although she and the other women on the scene are frustrated with being the “minor characters” of the title, Johnson mentions one woman, a painter, married to one of the men in the Beat social circle as being the only woman artist she knew (including Johnson herself) who took her work as seriously as a man would. Although we see plenty of evidence today of women, including women artists like Kara Walker, having the type of acclaimed careers that were not open to them in the 1950s, we rarely see that reality reflected in films. A film that focuses on an artist and that artist’s work is usually about a man, whether it’s Ed Harris in Pollock or Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote, and he usually has a supportive, encouraging woman by his side who is the main guy’s champion and cheerleader, the filmmakers not seeming to give a shit that she was an accomplished artist as well: painter Lee Krasner (played by Marcia Gay Harden) in Pollock and author Harper Lee (played by Catherine Keener) in Capote.

So Violette, a film which covers all of the 1950s (it begins in the 40s, before the end of the Nazi occupation of France during World War II and ends in 1964) is a nice change in that it focuses on not one, but two women writers who work hard over a period of years to become successful artists (both critically and financially) in their own right. The two characters come from real life: Violette Leduc (played by Emannuelle Devos, whom some will recognize as the star of Arnaud Desplechin’s films like Kings and Queen) the author of La Bâtarde (The Bastard) and Simone de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain) who wrote (among many other books) the groundbreaking feminist work The Second Sex. In a Parisian parallel to Johnson, de Beauvoir was also the companion to Existentialist philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre.

Reviews of the film led me to believe it was a portrait of a woman who is a pathetic pain in the ass who also just happens to become an acclaimed writer, but the film is more complex than the tired trope of the woman whose career is more successful than her personal life. For one thing, Leduc’s career, for much of the movie, goes nowhere. After approaching de Beauvoir as a fan and handing her the manuscript she’s been working on, Leduc’s first book comes out in a limited edition, which means no one can find it in the bookstores, so it makes hardly any money. Her next few books barely sell more. A later novel is censored; after de Beauvoir lobbies the publisher, he agrees, as a compromise, to keep the part of Leduc’s novel that describes an abortion (based on an abortion Leduc herself had when she was briefly married) but excises the passages about a sexual relationship between two schoolgirls (also based on Leduc’s early life, which was later published as Thérèse and Isabelle).

De Beauvoir’s advice to Leduc, whether she takes a brief time away from entertaining guests at her apartment or joins Leduc for dinner at a bar is always the same: “Tell it all…You’ll be doing women a favor,” even as Violette acts out every “oversensitive” artist’s worst impulses, always assuming everyone is slighting her (while ignoring all protestations and gestures to the contrary), moaning that no one really cares about her and writing about herself that “Ugliness in a woman is a mortal sin.”

Male critics have, in the context of the film, commented on Devos’ “striking, broad features,” but I wish everyone, especially men, would agree to some sort of moratorium on discussing an actress’s attractiveness. Because no one asks, “Brendan Gleeson: hot or not?” With her hourglass figure (few women look better in a plain white slip), and Betty Grable hair, Devos, as Leduc, is as attractive, and, with her 40s-style high heels, royal blue coat, and matching scarf, as glamorous, as she was as the love-object who should’ve been charged with manslaughter in Kings and Queen. Photos of the younger real-life Leduc show she was not “ugly” either: labeling herself that way was just another instance of her periodic self-loathing. We’re so used to seeing in films beautiful actresses with messy hair or toned-down makeup pretending they don’t still look great, the movie was half over before I realized that the filmmakers (director Martin Provost wrote the script with Marc Abdelnour and René de Ceccatty) didn’t buy into Leduc’s description of herself either.

As happens with a lot of temperamental people, whether they are artists or not, Leduc’s emotional outbursts, though they are rooted in her own despair, end up working to her advantage. After Violette has a fit about being cast as the mother in his amateur film, a rich “collector” friend offers her a generous advance for her next manuscript. After she rants about not being able to support herself with her writing, de Beauvoir arranges for her to receive a stipend while she works.

Leduc falls in the same sort of obsessive, unrequited, desperate love with de Beauvoir that we see her demonstrate for her gay male companion at the beginning of the film (she’s attracted to his queerness, but he remains unmoved by hers). We get a reference to the novel de Beauvoir wrote about a ménage à trois of two women with a man, but while the film name-checks her male lovers, Sartre and American novelist Nelson Algren, nothing else in the film informs us that the bisexual de Beauvoir also had sex with women–though she never has an affair with Leduc, and keeps her at a chilly arms-length for much of the film. But saying the two women don’t have a relationship is wrong.

From their very first, brisk, business-like meeting about the manuscript Leduc has handed to de Beauvoir, de Beauvoir never ceases to encourage Leduc in her writing, suggesting improvements (like cutting out the character based on the gay guy Leduc was obsessed with) and encouraging her to explore themes taken from her own life in her next work. De Beauvoir, while not maternal with Leduc (like Leduc, de Beauvoir is not eager to play “the mother”) is the ideal mentor, perhaps because as one of the only women in her social circle of post-war writers and intellectuals, she was tired of being “one of the boys.” De Beauvoir is Leduc’s champion with publishers and is not above using her own fame to prop up Leduc’s. And she is, in her way, always on Leduc’s side. During a very bad period in Leduc’s life, de Beauvoir appears at her bedside, holding up a newspaper with a laudatory review of Leduc’s latest novel for her to see. De Beauvoir even, at one point, suggests to Leduc that she travel, which, in a roundabout way, leads to the peace Leduc finds at the end of the film. Throughout the decades de Beauvoir tells a disbelieving, depressed Leduc, “Screaming and sobbing will get you nowhere. Writing will.” By the end of the film not only do we see de Beauvoir was right, but more importantly, we see that Violette knows it too.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzhp2PCOWfI”]

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