Ren Jender – Page 9 – Bitch Flicks

Girls, Consent, and Sex in ‘Palo Alto’ and ‘I Believe In Unicorns’

Films set in high school are often about boys; films which feature high school girl characters complex enough to surprise an audience (one measure of good screenwriting) are relatively rare–‘Say Anything’, ‘Mean Girls,’ ‘Clueless’ and from earlier this year ‘It Felt Like Love.’ ‘Palo Alto,’ the first film directed by Gia Coppola (niece of Sofia and granddaughter of Francis), who also wrote the script (based on the stories of James Franco) focuses on several main characters in high school, including April (‘American Horror Story’s’ Emma Roberts, whose auburn hair and dark eyebrows recall her Aunt Julia’s). We see her as she plays soccer, babysits, goes to boozy parties and is alone in her room.

Films set in high school are often about boys; films which feature high school girl characters complex enough to surprise an audience (one measure of good screenwriting) are relatively rare–Say Anything, Mean Girls, Clueless and from earlier this year, It Felt Like Love. Palo Alto, the first film directed by Gia Coppola (niece of Sofia and granddaughter of Francis), who also wrote the script (based on the stories of James Franco) focuses on several main characters in high school, including April (American Horror Story’s Emma Roberts, whose auburn hair and dark eyebrows recall her Aunt Julia’s). We see her as she plays soccer, babysits, goes to boozy parties, and is alone in her room.

April’s mother and stepfather, like some of the other parents we see later in the film are perfectly pleasant to April but seem to have never grown up themselves. April’s mother interrupts her constant kitchen cell phone conversation with “Jamal” to coo at her daugher and make her the occasional meal. April’s stepfather (a nearly unrecognizable Val Kilmer) holes away in a separate part of the house, drinks from a mug that has his own photo on it and rewrites April’s term paper even though she asked him to merely look it over. Neither one ever asks April where she’s been or when she’s coming home; “cool” parenting becomes a study in benign neglect.

Disaffected, wealthy young people aren’t new subjects for a film, but perhaps because Coppola is not far from the age (and background) of her characters some of the details resonate: the way “friends” pour alcohol down the throat of one of the main characters who is late to a party so he can be as drunk (or drunker) than they are, the game of “I Have Never” at the party which becomes an opportunity to reveal others’ secrets told in confidence, the banter between girl athletes who think their coach is cute (“What do you think his o-face looks like?”), the bedroom of Emily (Zoe Levin)–whom the others call “blow job queen,” a label she does her best to live up to–full of little-girl knick knacks and stuffed animals.

Palo Alto is based on the book of short stories of the same name by James Franco (who plays April’s coach, Mr. B.; she babysits his young son). Franco also helped get financing for the film. No one should confuse Palo Alto with one of Franco’s many projects that would elicit zero curiosity from the public if his name weren’t attached, and I haven’t read the book, which may be to blame, but in spite of how much time we spend with April, and in spite of Roberts, who radiates intelligence and wariness in the role, I didn’t have much emotional investment in the character.

The storyline about April and her coach is initially a promising one. He’s relatively young and good-looking and pays special attention to her, very like some of the real life scenarios in which teachers have sex with high school students. But April doesn’t seem ditzy or desperate enough to think sex with her teacher is a good idea, and he doesn’t seem smooth or clever enough to work through the natural resistance of a student with a stable (if lax) home life and a thoughtful nature. In the late 70s and early 80s when I went to high school, all of us suspected one of the girls in my class was having an inappropriate relationship with the biology teacher–the sexual tension between them was apparent from 50 feet away, even when they were just talking to one another in the hall. Teachers and students today would have to be more discreet, and the lack of depth in Franco and Roberts’ connection fits with later developments in their story, but we never get the feeling much is at stake when they fuck (which we don’t see) let alone when they find themselves attracted to one another–even though he’s endangering his job, abusing his position and breaking the law, and she is putting herself in the position to be hurt, exploited or both (and could also easily turn him in to the authorities).

Coppola does a better job of verisimilitude with Emily who seems surprised that her many hookups with boys don’t turn into relationships or even into friendship. At one point she has sex with a boy, Fred (Nat Wolff) she’s hooked up with before, and he invites other boys to also have sex with her; whether the sex Emily has with them is consensual is unclear. Coppola has Fred tell the story in voiceover without showing any of the action (or even the lead-up to it), an intriguing choice that keeps a possibly nonconsensual encounter from titillating the audience–and keeps the audience from deciding for ourselves whether the sex seems consensual or not.

Perhaps because of the sex scenes, Emily is played by an adult, as is April, who nevertheless makes a convincing teen in her yellow sweatshirt and skeleton hoodie. But when we see the travails of Teddy (Jack Kilmer, Val’s son with Joanne Walley) in the film, the two actresses’ relative maturity stands in stark contrast to Kilmer’s tender face touched with vestiges of baby fat–he is 18, not just playing a teenager, and the difference between him and the other actors takes us out of the movie. Seeing the other actors share scenes with Kilmer reminds me of an English stage actress who wondered, when she was a very young woman, why she couldn’t get larger roles playing against the older women in the company. “I didn’t realize (a thirty-something actress) could play a teenager on stage and it would work–unless you put a real teenager right next to her.”

Kilmer has been described as “androgynous” but “amorphous” is a better descriptor, and, much like a similarly soft and young-looking Gina Piersanti in It Felt Like Love, his being the age of the character is an essential element of what makes him so good in the part. Teddy is a teenager we’ve known and maybe even been, but one we don’t often see onscreen. He is sensitive and artistic, but afraid of being ridiculed by his best friend, Fred. So Teddy is unable to say “no” to Fred even when he knows he will end up getting in trouble (and maybe even end up in court) because of him. We see that he genuinely cares for April, but that he lets a jealous Fred drag him away from her more than once. Palo Alto is a film in which we often dread what teens will do next, so at the end, when Teddy finally does the right thing, and, in her own way, so does Emily, we breathe a sigh of relief.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7Q3oeHsIj0″]

Writer-director Leah Meyerhoff’s I Believe In Unicorns is a much more minor film than Palo Alto but has some similarities–a high school girl has her first sexual relationship with an older man. The main character, Davina (Natalia Dyer), lives with and cares for her mother who uses a wheelchair and also doesn’t have full use of her hands (Meyerhoff’s own mother, Toni Meyerhoff, plays the part. She has multiple sclerosis and Meyerhoff cared for her when she was growing up).

Davina spends a lot of her time awash in fantasies that seem like those of a much younger girl (her room is also like a younger girl’s); one sequence involves fireworks (it evokes a similar scene in Beasts of the Southern Wild) and others involve a stop-motion animated unicorn and dragon in a forest. Meyerhoff’s talent as the director of experimental shorts is apparent in these scenes, but her script does not come close to equaling it. The mother is nearly silent (which may be because of her disability), and we don’t get a sense of what happens to her when her daughter runs away to be with a man/boy who has already graduated, Sterling (Peter Vack)– even though the mother seems to have no one else to help care for her.

We see brief glimpses of what the film could have been: the kiss Davina exchanges with her friend Clara (Amy Seimetz) when asked how Sterling kisses, Davina squatting down and spitting up after performing oral sex on Sterling for the first time and Davina and Sterling’s encounters which alternate between the two of them feasting on each other’s mouths teenager-style to rough sex that is sometimes just under and sometimes over Davina’s line of consent. Sterling alternately abuses Davina and cries in fear that he will abandon her and Dyer’s presence is lovely and vulnerable throughout the film. “Do you really like me or is this just temporary,” she asks him in a heartbreaking moment. Although Vack is a competent performer, he looks distractingly like a male model (he could have come from the cover of a romance novel), which makes the “real” sequences seem just a dystopian continuation of the fantasy ones, a problem not helped by the two of them never seeming to completely run out of money and having clean, shiny, flawless hair after living out of a car for an unspecified period of time. We also don’t know for sure until toward the end of the film that Sterling is an adult (although an emotionally stunted one). Vack is obviously an adult: his height and muscled body threaten to overwhelm the petite Dyer (who was 17 when the film was shot) in their scenes together, but because so many films put adults in high school roles we don’t realize how creepy Sterling is from the beginning. He not only has sex with a girl who is not yet an adult, but also chooses one who looks even younger than she is–and she’s still enough of a kid to place animal miniatures on the dashboard of his car.

In the question and answer period after the film, Meyerhoff explained how difficult casting Davina was and how the filmmaking team went through hundreds of actresses before they found Dyer. It’s a familiar story (similar to Hittman’s casting of Piersanti in It Felt Like Love). I wish this writer-director had put that same effort into writing a coherent script for her talented actors.

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane, and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

‘Belle’: A Costume Drama Like and Unlike the Others

People of color are often omitted from historical dramas (except to play slaves or servants), with the rationale that it’s not “realistic” to have them in the cast. We can see through this excuse in historical dramas in which casting people of color would match the story being told, but white people still have the biggest roles in–and sometimes even make up the entire cast of–the film, as in the recently released ‘Noah.’ Historical “realism” is not always what we think it is: literature and visual art through the ages confirm that people of color who weren’t slaves, like Alexandre Dumas the author of ‘The Three Musketeers,’ have been in Europe for as long as people have lived there. We need to see more of their stories onscreen.

People of color are often omitted from historical dramas (except to play slaves or servants) with the rationale that it’s not “realistic” to have them in the cast. We can see through this excuse in the historical dramas in which casting people of color would match the story being told, but white people still have the biggest roles in–and sometimes even make up the entire cast of–the film, as in the recently released Noah. Historical “realism” is also not always what we think it is: literature and visual art through the ages confirm that people of color who weren’t slaves, like Alexandre Dumas the author of The Three Musketeers, have been in Europe for as long as people have lived there. We need to see more of their stories onscreen.

Director Amma Asante, in her second feature, Belle tells the based-on-fact story (the script is by Misan Sagay) of a young biracial girl, whose Royal Navy Admiral father (Matthew Goode) takes her to the family estate just outside of London, so his great-uncle’s family and servants can raise her in late-18th-century, upper-class luxury her father says is “due to her.”

The girl, Dido, grows into a beautiful young woman (Gugu Mbatha-Raw in a star-making turn), wearing the finest dresses, often the same cut (with the outrageously low necklines and the upward thrust of breasts typical of the period–like a Maxim cover gone out of control) but in a different shade from those of her blonde, white cousin and companion Elizabeth (Sarah Gadon). Dido carries her father’s last name, and, when he dies, inherits a £2,000 annuity which, as Elizabeth points out, makes her an heiress. But Dido is not allowed to eat dinner with the family–or the servants, because, as her great-uncle, Lord Mansfield (Tom Wilkinson) tells her, neither situation would be “correct” for a woman of her color and social standing.

Dido’s isolation increases when her aunts take the initiative in finding a rich husband for her cousin who, because her father has remarried, has no dowry. Lord Mansfield hands the house keys to Dido and explains that since no gentleman will marry her (because of the color of her skin) and because of her social standing she cannot marry a man who isn’t a gentleman, she can soon replace her “spinster” Aunt Mary (Penelope Wilton) as the caretaker of the house.

During the family’s stay in London, Dido does attract suitors, for her beauty, charm and for her money. Fans of Jane Austen may see some parallels with her work, especially in Dido’s initial fraught interactions with John (Sam Reid), the vicar’s abolitionist son. Belle fails to give the same sense, as the best adaptations of Austen do (like 1995’s Persuasion) of the death grip manners and custom combined with the mores and opinions of their families and social circle had on women, especially young women, at that time (and the film takes place some decades before the works of Austen do). The film pays little attention to the necessity of a young man and a young woman of courting age to always have a chaperone present, a tradition that survives today in some strict religious communities in which the prospective bride and groom spend hardly any time alone together before they are married.

We see the reason for chaperones when Dido is alone with the loathsome older brother of the penniless gentleman who wishes to marry her. The brother manhandles her as he tells her how disgusting he finds her, and then, out of the camera’s range, seems to sexually assault her. This scene is the only part of the film that, at that time of strict sex segregation among unmarried, unrelated gentry, shows how privileged, white men felt free to sexually prey on women of color. Although the film makes clear that Dido’s father loved her mother, the implications of his meeting her on a Spanish slave ship are disturbing: the mother is never called a slave, so we can infer Dido’s father never owned her (unlike Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings, the mother of his children who were born into slavery) but the relationship (while not rape, as it would be between a slave and owner no matter how much one “loved” the other) would still be an abuse of power if Dido’s mother worked for her father as a paid servant, as Mabel (Bethan Mary-James), the Black maid at the family’s London house, does.

The customs and mores of the present day always corrupt the “realism” of costume dramas: the well-scrubbed faces and bodies of the actors belying the fact that daily bathing is a relatively recent innovation, their clothes, in the days before dry-cleaning are spotless (in very early silent films we see stained clothes–over a hundred years after the events of Belle take place–were the norm), their accents in 18th century England are an anachronism. We suspend our disbelief to ooh and ahh over the pretty dresses, grand mansions and drawing room antics.

The problem with Belle is: we have to suspend our disbelief about the rampant racism, and to some degree the sexism (Dido, at one point, is the only woman in a court full of men and not one of them tries to throw her out) of the time as well. We see plenty of racist sentiment directed toward Dido (especially from Miranda Richardson, who plays the gossipy, sharp-tongued mother of Dido’s gentleman suitor), but the “good” people like Dido’s great-uncle and John end up espousing beliefs about racial equality very much like those the “good” white people of today might. Even though one character wrote a court decision that (spoiler alert) laid the framework for the eventual abolition of slavery in England, and the other (spoiler alert) married a Black woman, giving these 18th century characters (especially those based on real people who lived at the time) the mindset of the 21st century has the effect, as in Downton Abbey and to a lesser degree in Mad Men, of downplaying the racism of the past, the legacy of which we still see in the present.

Dido_ElizabethPortrait — The real Dido and Elizabeth

Americans don’t have to go back nearly 250 years and over an ocean to find overt racism about the “mixing” of the races from “good” white people. Abraham Lincoln, who signed the U.S. Emancipation Proclamation about 80 years after the events of the film take place, espoused racist beliefs in historical documents. Film and television producers avoided showing white and Black people together in any relationship other than as master and servant (even on talk shows) well into the 1960s. In the 1970s, when my family lived next door to an interracial couple, the children in the neighborhood called their son and daughter “zebras.”

The second of Dido’s suitors, John, is radically forward-thinking for the time. Much religious rhetoric in those days supported slavery, the way a lot of religious rhetoric today supports homophobia, so John would have had to be something of an apostate too: an unusual position for the son of a clergyman. He also would have been considered a crank and an outcast (like many forward-thinking people throughout history) in most social circles of the time. Instead, he suffers from Perfect Man Syndrome, a disease that also afflicts the romantic leads in Short Term 12 and the upcoming releases Obvious Child and Dear White People: men who are so ceaselessly caring, who never say the wrong thing no matter how aggrieved they are, that they might as well sprout wings and fly into the clouds as angels. Sam Reid’s relative lack of skill as an actor doesn’t help: I had to suppress a giggle when he shouts, “I love her,” in a scene that isn’t supposed to be humorous. The flawless Mbatha-Raw, in particular, shows him up, as does the presence of Wilkinson, Richardson, Wilton and Emily Watson (who plays Wilkinson’s wife) in the film who all give the type of serviceable performances that will neither diminish nor enhance their reputations as great actors. The film score by Rachel Portman (one of the few women who regularly composes music for movies) is also uninspired: cuing the audience to feel emotions the film doesn’t quite earn.

That said, Belle has a great lead performance from a Black actress in a Black woman director’s film of a Black woman’s script about a Black woman in European history (who wasn’t a slave): an opportunity that doesn’t come very often for audiences, so you shouldn’t miss it. If the long line for the women’s restroom after the film is any indication (women are the main audience for costume dramas in film and on TV) Belle will probably be a big art house success. Still, we see glimmers of a better, deeper movie in too few moments of Belle: in Dido’s own initial snobbishness, the trappings of which have left her in a lonely, untenable position. Later, we see her two identities, as an upper class woman and a Black woman, at odds with each other, captured most poignantly when Dido is asked to sit for a family portrait. At first we don’t understand why she’s upset at the request, until she points out that in the paintings on the walls of the mansion, Black people are always positioned at the feet of white people (as pet dogs, cats and birds were often painted with children at the time: in the otherwise excellent A Royal Affair–which takes place during the same general period–a Black child is also portrayed as a “pet” for the white upper class). At the end of the movie the director unveils the real portrait that inspired the film and in the original Dido’s face we see an expression hinting at the more complex and nuanced conduit to the past Belle might have been.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFi8YCxq2VU”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane, and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

Women As Perpetrators of Violence in ‘Freeway’

In films, as in life, women aren’t supposed to be violent. Women make up the majority of violent crime victims (domestic violence, assault, rape, and murder) but they don’t usually retaliate in kind. Even in the relatively rare film where a woman seriously injures or kills a rapist, like ‘Thelma and Louise’, she does so with lots of tears and anguish–in that film from both from the woman pulling the trigger and the one whom the man attempted to rape. The unwritten rule in movies seems to be that in order to justify a woman killing or even assaulting someone, we need to see her or some other woman suffer, a lot, beforehand. Contrast that rule with the male heroes of action films who leave dozens of corpses in their wake, and not one of the dead has raped or otherwise tortured the hero beforehand–though the hero may be avenging some great wrong the dead guy (or guys) did to his wife or daughter.

This post by Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on Rape Revenge Fantasies.

In films, as in life, women aren’t supposed to be violent. Women make up the majority of violent crime victims (domestic violence, assault, rape, and murder) but they don’t usually retaliate in kind. Even in the relatively rare film where a woman seriously injures or kills a rapist, like Thelma and Louise, she does so with lots of tears and anguish–in that film from both from the woman pulling the trigger and the one whom the man attempted to rape. The unwritten rule in movies seems to be that in order to justify a woman killing or even assaulting someone, we need to see her or some other woman suffer, a lot, beforehand. Contrast that rule with the male heroes of action films who leave dozens of corpses in their wake, and not one of the dead has raped or otherwise tortured the hero beforehand–though the hero may be avenging some great wrong the dead guy (or guys) did to his wife or daughter.

Any experienced moviegoer will see all the signs in the beginning of Freeway pointing to the eventual degradation of its protagonist Vanessa (played by a pre-stardom Reese Witherspoon). She’s an “illiterate” (a script this uneven should be careful about throwing that word around) high school student in a midriff-baring halter top (the film is a runway of 90s fashion that would best be forgotten) who fights off her meth-head stepfather’s advances while her mother does sex work to support her own meth habit. After both her parents are arrested the movie takes off (and finds its comic horror tone) when Vanessa is left alone with her social worker, who doesn’t see any other option but foster care. While addressing the woman in the most respectful manner (“I’ll leave the keys on the TV”), Vanessa chains her to the bed and escapes.

As she sets off, Vanessa wears a red leather jacket and carries her things (including cans of beer) in a wicker basket, evoking Little Red Riding Hood (as do the tacky, sexist illustrations under the opening credits). She makes her way along the freeway to where her grandmother lives.

The family shitbox car breaks down, and Bob (a pre-24 Kiefer Sutherland), who is driving by, sees her ass bent over the open hood and stops to help. When he can’t fix the car, he offers her a ride, which she accepts. Bob, in his shiny SUV, pleated khakis, and glasses, talks like Mr. Rogers and works as a therapist. He gets Vanessa to speak at length with him about her troubled background, including her stepfather’s sexual abuse. But when (while still driving) he initiates a “powerful new” therapy in which he asks Vanessa to detail her feelings using explicit language and humiliating details she figures out that, like many men who pretend to help women, he’s a creep. When she tries to get out of the car, she finds the door handle is missing, which Bob dangles in front of her and then uses to hit her. We find out Bob is the freeway rapist and killer Vanessa has seen reports about on TV.

Bob holds a razor to her throat and tells her to take off her pants. She stalls him by telling him she will have to unlace her boots first, but kicks him in the head, rolls into the backseat and holds a loaded gun to his head while shrieking at him to drop the razor out of the window. She hits the back of his head with the gun more than once while he drives, then instructs him to pull over into a middle-of-nowhere exit. When he tries to talk her out of it, she shrieks, “You want to get shot a bunch of times?” Vanessa’s rage in this and later scenes is like an altered state from her usual manner, but she’s not hysterical. When they stop, Bob plays the role usually played by a woman in a movie, crying and pleading for his life while Vanessa decides what she should do with him. “The time for talk is over now,” she tells him, adopting his therapist demeanor. She asks if he’s accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior, and when he says he has, she says in a thoughtful way, “That’s good. That’s really good.” At this point I thought she would let him go, because of the unwritten rule: we hadn’t seen her subjugated, and she could probably get away without further violence. Instead she shoots him in the neck and leaves him for dead.

She makes her way to a truck stop diner, covered in blood (again part of the Red Riding Hood motif). She’s arrested as she leaves. We see her entering the juvenile detention facility, her face scrubbed of her heavy eye-makeup, so she looks young, vulnerable, and angelic. When one “chola,” Mesquita (Alanna Ubach), and her companions start to threaten her (as, we learn later, a first step in getting Vanessa to “put out”) we think the movie will turn into Born Innocent (this film even has, as Born Innocent did, a weird young lesbian inmate, but this one is a character, not a predator, and is played by an excellent Brittany Murphy) or any of the other women-in-prison films in which the new inmate is assaulted–except Vanessa’s the one who attacks first–and keeps on punching. She yells at Mesquita all the while, beating her into unconsciousness and turning her face into a bloody mess until the staff grab Vanessa and throw her into solitary–where she uses her time alone to make a shiv.

In her preliminary hearing Vanessa sees that Bob isn’t dead, but is left with permanent disfiguring injuries. He, of course, is posing as an innocent victim of a robbery, and just as he predicted–before she shot him–the authorities believe his word, not hers. “Holy shit,” she says, her eyes opening wide as she sees him across the courtroom and we steel ourselves for her inevitable tears, anguish and suffering, but we don’t get them. Instead, Vanessa taunts him in her thick Southern accent, “Look who got hit with the ugly stick!” When he and his wife later appear on television (to lobby for juveniles like Vanessa to be tried as adults) she watches with the other girls at the facility and taunts him further, imitating his electronically aided voice and alluding to his grotesquely distorted mouth, “My dick may not function, but I haven’t lost my smile.”

Women in films and in life are sorry for so many things, all the time, even those things that aren’t their fault; a film heroine (or antiheroine) like Vanessa, so hilariously unrepentant about her acts of violence, is a triumph. Also refreshing for the audience is being in the position of cheering on a woman threatening and assaulting men (Mesquita is Vanessa’s only female victim, and they become feminist allies by the end) when so much film and television continues to offer up men’s abuse of women–sexual and otherwise–as entertainment.

The writer-director Matthew Bright doesn’t exactly have a magic touch with all the actors (Michael T. Weiss as the stepfather and Brooke Shields as Bob’s wife are particularly execrable), and some of what passes as “satire” in the script, especially before Vanessa gets on the freeway, falls as flat as the worst Saturday Night Live skits. But Witherspoon’s Vanessa shows off the expert comic timing she would later become famous for. She also gets all the best lines. Her scenes with Sutherland (who is great at projecting both creepiness and “normalcy”) when she has her gun on him are a stellar parody of the therapist-patient relationship, with the roles reversed. Her Vanessa also uses her voice to make up for her small stature when she intimidates her victims, the way Ben Kingsley’s character did in Sexy Beast. With Dan Hedaya as one of the police detectives on her case it’s easy to see Vanessa as the violent, class-conscious, NC-17 (the film was censored to finally receive an R rating) version of the main character, Cher, in Clueless (Hedaya played Cher’s father in the film, which was released one year before Freeway). Both of them are headstrong Southern California blondes whom audiences at first underestimate, but by the end come to respect. Freeway is far from a perfect film but well worth seeing, even for those who don’t count themselves as fans of Witherspoon.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eQbglH0FJ4″]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane, and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

“I Believe ‘Anita'”

Women and girl characters in film (and the plays and works of literature films are based on) lie a lot. I don’t mean that they tell an occasional (or not so occasional) untruth, the way male characters often do. I mean that the role of a woman or girl in the movie can many times be summed up as “the liar.” The student in ‘The Children’s Hour’, the girl in ‘Atonement’, the girl in ‘The Hunt’, the two teenagers in ‘Wild Things’ the Demi Moore character in ‘Disclosure’ are all liars who disrupt the lives of those around them, usually men, whom they falsely accuse of sexual misconduct or abuse. The men are, of course, always completely innocent of the charges.

Women and girl characters in film (and the plays and works of literature films are based on) lie a lot. I don’t mean that they tell an occasional (or not so occasional) untruth, the way male characters often do. I mean that the role of a woman or girl in a movie can many times be summed up as “the liar.” The student in The Children’s Hour, the girl in Atonement, the girl in The Hunt, the two teenagers in Wild Things, the Demi Moore character in Disclosure are all liars who disrupt the lives of those around them, usually men, whom they falsely accuse of sexual misconduct or abuse. The men are, of course, always completely innocent of the charges.

This scenario is the opposite of the common real life situation, in which a woman or girl lies (or pretends nothing is wrong) when she has been raped, sexually abused or sexually harassed. She doesn’t bring charges. She tries to function as if the rape, abuse or harassment hasn’t occurred and decides not to disrupt her own family or career by calling public attention to what has happened to her. Those stories we pretty much never see played out in film.

Unless that film is Anita, the new documentary from Oscar-winner Freida Lee Mock about Anita Hill, the woman who came forward during the confirmation hearings, over 20 years ago, for Clarence Thomas as Supreme Court Justice. Thomas had sexually harassed Hill when he was her boss at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the agency that is supposed to implement Federal laws against discrimination, including sexual harassment. She had never pressed charges and had even kept a professional relationship with Thomas (for the sake of her career) after moving on from the EEOC. But when officials were interviewing his former coworkers and assistants for a background check, Hill felt she had to tell the truth.

The FBI file that contained Hill’s private interview was leaked to the press. Women politicians and reporters were outraged that the Senate had been prepared to confirm Thomas without looking into his past conduct, so hearings were called in which Hill was subpoenaed to testify in person. We see the media following her with cameras and lights even before her appearance in the Senate, as she makes her way across the University of Oklahoma campus where she was a tenured law professor. “I just want to teach my class,” she tells them. In a humorous moment that didn’t make it into the news stories of the time she mentions what was then her legal specialty. “I can answer any questions you have about contracts.”

The Senate committee grilled her for hours at a time over the course of days, but Hill never lost her composure in spite of being forced to repeat, on national live television, the explicit details of Thomas’s harassment, which included references to pornography and his own anatomy. The excerpts of the hearing are the most striking part of the film, and the documentary could use more of them.

ThomasHillAnita — Thomas and Hill when they worked at the EEOC

The Republicans on the committee (we see some particularly despicable moments from Alan Simpson and Arlen Spector), eager to confirm Thomas, portray Hill as a liar. These old white men do their best to denigrate her, and although the footage of the hearings shows that they never succeeded in diminishing her clear-eyed, precise testimony, they did succeed, in the off-camera arena, in diminishing her reputation.

The film shows, so we don’t forget, that Hill’s testimony was confirmed by four others whom she had told about the harassment at the time it was occurring. They gave their sworn testimony in front of live national television and one of them, another African American woman even mentions why Hill had kept in touch with Thomas, “My mother always told me, as I’m sure her mother told her, that wherever you leave, make sure you leave friends there, because you never know when you will need them.” She goes on to detail that for this very reason she exchanges Christmas cards with former colleagues she can’t stand.

The film also includes the information that Thomas had harassed other women in the workplace, at least one of whom was also subpoenaed, but mysteriously never called to testify. In the live question and answer period after the showing I attended, Hill explicitly blamed now Vice President, then Judiciary Committee Chair, Joe Biden, for this decision. She explained the “he said, she said” narrative the committee wanted to put forth would have been disrupted if more than one woman had offered testimony of how Thomas had harassed her.

Because of the all-white membership of the committee, Thomas could get away, in his own testimony, with labeling the hearings “a high tech lynching” (the folly of that description is pointed out in the film by the male African American corporate lawyer whose testimony confirmed Hill’s) while ignoring that Hill too was African American. Hill sums up this narrative as “I had a gender. He had a race.”

Hill always had the support of her large (she is one of 13 children), close family. In another clip that never made its way into the news stories of the time, we see her 79-year-old mother giving her a hug at the Senate hearing witness table and stand beside her outside of her family home back in Oklahoma, when the media ask for a statement on Thomas’s confirmation. Dignified as always, Hill tells them that she hopes her testimony will encourage other women to speak up about harassment in their own workplaces.

In spite of her tenured position at The University of Oklahoma, Hill felt the pressure from local Republican politicians (who targeted not just her, but also went after the Dean and the institution itself) to resign and eventually moved across the country to a position at Brandeis University where she is now at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management. She also travels around the country lecturing on sexual harassment, which, she points out, she wouldn’t have felt free to do if she had stayed at the University of Oklahoma. We see that Hill even has a supportive, long term boyfriend. Although the footage of this part of her life is less dramatic than that of the testimony I understand why the director includes it. After people in her own hometown angrily confronted Hill on the street about her testimony, after famously being called “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” (by a writer who later recanted though the slander lives on), in spite of Thomas being confirmed and sitting on the court to this day when even Hill’s lawyer’s 12-year-old daughter told her Dad, “I believe Anita,” and in spite of politicians and courts still explicitly or implicitly labeling women as liars when they seek justice against powerful men, we need to see at least one happy ending–to give the rest of us the fortitude to continue fighting.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGrWaCCVfq0″]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane, and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

‘Under The Skin’ of the Femme Fatale

Most of these films demonstrate a lack of curiosity about how these women came to be the characters we see: no one in real life becomes as deceptive, manipulative, and callous toward others as these characters are without a backstory, which usually never makes it into these films. So we’re probably overdue for a femme fatale who literally drops, fully formed from the sky: Scarlett Johansson’s main, unnamed character in Jonathan Glazer’s ‘Under The Skin,’ an alien in the guise of a beautiful woman. Johansson, wearing a short black wig, drives around Scotland in a nondescript, white van asking men walking alone along the road for directions and then, if she ascertains, through a few questions, that they won’t be missed, she offers them a ride.

The woman who lures men to their doom is a trope that goes back to the earliest days of film. Theda Bara, one of the first silent screen actresses to have an image of wanton carnality instead of the virginal purity of other stars of the era like Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish, was referred to as a “vamp“–short for vampire– for her sexy roles in which she proved the downfall of the men attracted to her. “Vampy” and femme fatale characters have provided career peaks for many actresses since, from classic Hollywood film noir–Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity and Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice through the late 20th century with Kathleen Turner in Body Heat in the 80s and Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction in the 90s. In this century, the vampire of Let The Right One In (and its inferior American remake), who appears to the world an ordinary 12-year-old girl, manages to enlist both a man and a boy as her servants (while preying on others for fresh blood).

Most of these films demonstrate a lack of curiosity about how these women came to be the characters we see: no one in real life becomes as deceptive, manipulative, and callous toward others as these characters are without a backstory, which usually never makes it into these films. So we’re probably overdue for a femme fatale who literally drops, fully formed from the sky: Scarlett Johansson’s main, unnamed character in Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin, an alien in the guise of a beautiful woman. Johansson, wearing a short black wig, drives around Scotland in a nondescript white van asking men walking alone along the road for directions and then, if she ascertains, through a few questions, that they won’t be missed, she offers them a ride.

JohanssonCompactSkin — Johansson’s alien on the prowl

We’re cued to how the main character sees human beings in one of the earliest scenes in which a naked Johansson strips the clothes from a freshly killed young woman (it’s unclear whether Johansson or her silent male assistant–also an alien in human guise–did the deed), so she can wear them as her own. As a tear falls down the dead woman’s face, Johansson’s character picks up an ant crawling on the woman’s now naked body and focuses on it as if it were a puppy. The ant helps explain Johansson’s attitude to humans: she’s not cruel. She just sees them as expendable and as removed from her own existence as most of us see insects.

The media and the filmmakers have made a point of revealing that some (but not all) of the encounters Johansson has in the van were unscripted, the men in them random passersby (who didn’t recognize the star of The Avengers), the camera hidden. This information seems pointless given how ordinary those conversations are–as far as we can tell. The accents of most of these men are so heavy they should have been subtitled for American audiences and perhaps UK ones as well.

But Glazer has a great touch with professional actors: he made the justly acclaimed Sexy Beast with Ben Kingsley as an unforgettable, ultraviolent, pint-size gangster: the anti-Gandhi. In Glazer’s less acclaimed (but still creepy and atmospheric) Birth he gave us a stricken, affecting Nicole Kidman (also in a short wig) as a woman accosted by an 10-year-old boy who convinces her he is the reincarnation of her dead husband. Johansson hasn’t always impressed me in her movie roles, (I didn’t believe a minute of Her: Johansson’s performance as Samantha was not the whole reason why, but certainly didn’t help) and in interviews she seems to confirm our worst suspicions of how ill-informed and insensitive to people outside their sphere movie stars can be. But she pulls the audience in here, as if we too are her victims, a relief, since for much of the film Johansson is the sole, silent person onscreen. In other scenes, when she talks to the men in a passable English accent (which sounds more natural than the Jersey accent she used in Don Jon) her eyes glitter with emotion. At first we mistake this passion for empathy (and the men mistake it for lust), but her excitement turns out to be the thrill of the hunt.

Each unlucky man follows her into a room (while the disturbing score by Mica Levi plays in the background) in which she strips her clothing as she walks, encouraging the man to do the same (this film isn’t one that discriminates in its nudity: the actors who go to her place are shown in full-frontal shots, two of them with erections) Without realizing he is doing so, his eyes focused on Johansson each man sinks completely into the black hole/digestive tank under his feet, while she pads across the smooth surface like a cat.

In the outside world, we see her knock out a swimmer who saves a man from drowning (the man then tragically goes back into the water to try to save his wife) and ignore the screaming toddler the couple has left behind on the beach. She starts to feel for the humans around her only when, outside of the insular world of her van, walking on city streets, she trips and falls face first on the sidewalk–and men like the ones she has been preying on help her up and ask if she’s okay. She’s as disconcerted by their doing so as if a small band of dragonflies did the same for one of us.

Later she picks up a loner (Adam Pearson) who appears to have the same disease as The Elephant Man (the actor has Neurofibromatosis), his facial features radically distorted. Because she’s an alien, Johansson’s character neither looks away from his face nor stares at it. She stops the van, asks him if he’s ever touched a woman and places his hand on her neck. She does take him back to her place, but the sight of a trapped fly trying to escape a room sparks something in her conscience. She flees the city (and her male assistant) to the Scottish Highlands where she experiences both the best and worst of human nature in men (she rarely interacts with women).

In this latter part of Skin the filmmakers seem to want to show Johansson’s character finding out what being human means. The problem is: Johansson’s character knows, from the start of the film how to be, by all appearances, a human woman— and the filmmakers never seem curious how she learned to do so. This film isn’t big on explanation–for anything, but this omission nagged at me in a way the other missing pieces didn’t.

The guise Johansson’s character chooses for herself is one which seems like it would require some research. Like the vampire in Let The Right One In she knows inhabiting a female form will make humans less wary of her, but she also somehow knows to take on all the arbitrary and sometimes contradictory attributes that make a woman attractive in the Western contemporary movie-star/model sense: full breasts (but a small waist), full lips (but a small jaw) and large eyes (but slender eyebrows). Equally puzzling, Johansson’s character knows, from the start, how to act like a conventionally attractive woman. She puts on a bra as if she had spent her adult life doing so; she walks in heels (she even knows to run down stairs in them–sideways, so she won’t trip) without wavering or falling (except for the one time); she applies makeup so it accentuates rather than makes grotesque her eyes and lips. Teenage, femme girls spend years wobbling and stumbling in heels and using too heavy a hand with blush and eyeliner before getting the hang of any of these things, but the filmmakers seem to think these skills come naturally with a female body, the way prizes used to come in cereal boxes. Johansson’s character never says a wrong word or has an awkward moment when she flirts with the men: she doesn’t talk to them with a young teenage girl’s uncertainty, but with the easy confidence of someone who has garnered male attention for most of her years.

If we had seen Johansson’s character struggle and falter with being a convincing, normal-seeming woman earlier in the film, we could better understand–and more easily suspend our belief for–her struggle later with the trials of being in a woman’s body. She has no idea how to maneuver amid men’s various intentions toward her, like the consensual encounter she cuts short when she finds, to her shock (in one of the film’s few comic moments) just what comprises heterosexual intercourse.

Toward the end, Johansson’s character removes the mask she has been wearing throughout the film, and as she looks down on it, it blinks back at her. It’s a visually stunning moment that might have been more emotionally resonant if the filmmakers had bothered to better explore what the world–and movies–expect women to be.

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

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

Domestic Violence in ‘The Long Goodbye’

During the late 70s and early 80s, the one place on television I did see a serious and unflinching depiction of domestic violence was when the UHF station (that had a “Creature Double Feature” on Saturday afternoons) showed, on a school night, Robert Altman’s 1973 masterpiece ‘The Long Goodbye’ (now streaming on Netflix) based on the novel by Raymond Chandler (also the author of the book adapted into the Humphrey Bogart/ Lauren Bacall vehicle ‘The Big Sleep’). Unlike the film adaptation of ‘Farewell My Lovely,’ another Chandler novel brought to the screen in the 70s (this time with Robert Mitchum in the lead), ‘Goodbye’ wasn’t a period piece but updated to “Me” generation Los Angeles with a slightly scruffy Elliott Gould (who had previously co-starred in Altman’s ‘M*A*S*H’ as Trapper John) playing Phillip Marlowe, the same private detective character Mitchum played in ‘Lovely’ and whom Bogart made famous. The film also shares the same screenwriter with ‘Sleep,’ Leigh Brackett. In the forties as well as the seventies she was one of the few women whose screenplays were actually produced. Brackett also wrote for the series ‘The Rockford Files’ which has the same smart-ass, 70s sensibility and southern California setting.

When I was growing up in the 70s and early 80s, depictions and references to domestic violence were everywhere on TV–not as cautionary tales or public service announcements, but as incidental and inevitable parts of life. Humorous daytime programming like Bugs Bunny used domestic violence as fodder for jokes as did reruns of That Girl. Dramatic evening fare like Dynasty and special network showings of Gone With The Wind showed “sympathetic” male characters hitting or raping their wives with no personal or legal consequences. Domestic violence was barely against the law in those days. Miles Davis in his autobiography tells of sharing a laugh with the police officer his then-girlfriend, the actress Cicely Tyson had called after Davis beat the shit out of her. The officer left without talking to her or arresting him.

During the late 70s and early 80s, the one place on television I did see a serious and unflinching depiction of domestic violence was when the UHF station (that had a “Creature Double Feature” on Saturday afternoons) showed, on a school night, Robert Altman’s 1973 masterpiece The Long Goodbye (now streaming on Netflix), based on the novel by Raymond Chandler (also the author of the book adapted into the Humphrey Bogart/ Lauren Bacall vehicle The Big Sleep). Unlike the film adaptation of Farewell My Lovely another Chandler novel brought to the screen in the 70s (this time with Robert Mitchum in the lead), Goodbye wasn’t a period piece but updated to “Me” generation Los Angeles with a slightly scruffy Elliott Gould (who had previously starred in Altman’s M*A*S*H as Trapper John) playing Philip Marlowe, the same private detective character Mitchum played in Lovely and whom Bogart made famous. The film also shares the same screenwriter with Sleep, Leigh Brackett. In the 40s as well as the 70s she was one of the few women whose screenplays were actually produced. Brackett also wrote for the series The Rockford Files which has the same smart-ass, 70s sensibility in a southern California setting.

LONG-GOODBYEGouldNeighbors — Philip Marlowe and his neighbors

Instead of Bogart visiting mansions and private greenhouses, Gould’s Marlowe travels from a tacky, dark-paneled dive bar–in which sunshine comes through an open door like an unwelcome intruder–to a client’s Malibu beach house with huge windows framed in white wood around views that are like a coffee table book of artists’ landscapes come to life and then back to the funky apartment building where he lives across the balcony from a group of young women who make candles, get stoned and practice topless yoga. Gould’s Marlowe is handsome and relatively young, but enough years older than the women–and far enough removed from their post-counterculture lifestyle–that they call him “Mr. Marlowe.”

This Marlowe has a touch of the 60s counterculture in him as well (his anti-authoritarian streak is also present in the Marlowe of the novels from the 30s, 40s and 50s), which we see in his non-cooperation when police question him, first at home and then at the station (in a scene marred by a brief reference to blackface when Marlowe uses the ink on his hands leftover from fingerprinting to darken his cheeks and forehead and asks for a banjo). The police inform him that his friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton)–who we’ve seen Marlowe give a ride to Tijuana the night before–has beaten his wife, Sylvia, to death. When the police hand Marlowe the photos of her body (which the camera keeps from our eyes), his cool evaporates, but he still doesn’t give the police any information. He tells them his friend couldn’t have possibly committed the crime.

Marlowe is released when the police close the case–because they find out that Lennox is also dead, and left a suicide note confessing to the crime. Marlowe, still unconvinced of Lennox’s guilt, decides to investigate the case himself.

A pre-Star Wars John Williams composed the title song with Johnny Mercer which, in an amusing touch is, in different renditions, the only music (beside a little bit of “Hooray for Hollywood” at the beginning and end) in the film: the guy at the piano in the bar is practicing it, the radio station in the car has a woman singing it, a Muzak version plays in a supermarket and the melody flows from the horns of a Mexican funeral procession.

LongGoodbyeGouldVanPallandt — Philip Marlowe and Eileen Wade

Domestic violence seems to seep into every corner of the film in a similar vein. Marlowe says to Eileen Wade (Nina Van Pallandt) a client looking for her missing husband, Roger (Sterling Hayden). “Don’t tell me you ran into a door,” about the bruise on her face. We can see she’s afraid of alcoholic, unstable Roger: when Marlowe finds him and brings him back, she cringes as Roger suddenly raises his arm. Roger also doesn’t mind making a scene in public: after a humiliating encounter with his “doctor” at a house party he orders everyone to go home, just a moment after Eileen, always the good hostess, had asked if any of the guests wanted more wine, her pretend-nothing-is-wrong demeanor familiar to those of us who have spent time in abusive households. Their neighbors disperse without checking to see if she will be safe. Marlowe is the only one who stays with her. He suggests that she spend the night at a friend’s. She tells him no, because the last time she did so she came home to see her husband had smashed all her belongings– and was unconscious on the floor.

The cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, points his camera through windows and captures reflections in scenes all through the film, so picture and window frames become the frames of shots. But Zsigmond’s most exhilarating work comes when Marlowe and Eileen are in her beachfront home after a candlelit dinner and he questions her about Sylvia’s death. While we see and hear their conversation we make out, through the glass behind them, another character–whom Eileen catches sight of at the last minute–stumbling into the surf. Both she and Marlowe dash across the beach into the ocean, but the churning water tosses them like ping pong balls across the frame. They scream the drowned character’s name above the crash of waves, but we can barely hear them over the din as they struggle to keep from being swept away in the tide themselves. Exhausted and defeated, they collapse on the shore. When the police come, they are both wrapped in towels, with wealthy Malibu spectators clustered around, engaged in an impromptu drinking party, which Marlowe, drunk himself, denounces, then leaves.

Long-Goodbye-Gould — Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe

Brackett’s script and particularly Gould’s performance are like a mashup of the best parts of 1930s and 40s screwball comedies and detective movies from the same era with 70s realism thrown in. The gangster, Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell) who comes to Marlowe looking for the money Terry stole from him, is something of a comedian himself, which leaves the audience unprepared for the moment when, without warning, he brutalizes a woman character. This scene isn’t one, like those in so many films since the standards against violence were first loosened, in the 1960s, where the audience can ignore the humanity of the victim: we hear her screams of agony, not just in this scene but as a backdrop to the ones that follow. We see her struck, not through the eyes of the perpetrator (as these scenes are usually framed), but through the eyes of outraged and sickened spectators: Marlowe and the gangster’s underlings. After Augustine orders her to be taken away, he says to Marlowe, “Now, that’s someone I love. You, I don’t even like.” The joke makes the violence even harder to stomach. In a later scene Augustine, shirks responsibility for the incident, referring to it as “the night (she) became ill.”

When, as a teenager, I read the book, The Big Sleep (the title of which I hadn’t even realized was a reference to death), I was surprised at how much darker it was than the film I had grown up seeing on TV. Because The Long Goodbye was made in the 70s, its movie version could remain truer to Chandler’s pessimistic vision while using contemporary details and Altman’s trademark overlapping dialogue and improvisation. Altman added to his usual repertory cast of actors (before he became famous for Kung Fu and Kill Bill, David Carradine made an appearance here as the chatty pothead who shares a jail cell with Marlowe) skilled non-actors (Van Pallandt had been a folksinger in Europe, Bouton an ex-pro-baseball player, Rydell a director) to make a world we recognize, in which the men who seem funny and charming abuse women, a woman who has been abused may have other, hidden dimensions and the shaggy-haired, harmless-seeming jokester who declares throughout the film, “It’s OK with me,” is, in the end, the only one who has enough sense of right and wrong to try to get justice for a woman’s senseless murder.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeNyD9UFXHs”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

Carmen Maura: Pedro Almodóvar’s Essential Star

Writer-director Pedro Almodóvar was able to ride the wave of art house popularity starting in the 80s when theaters were more likely to program subtitled films. He came to prominence in no small part because of his star, Carmen Maura who first gained the attention of U.S. audiences in ‘Law of Desire,’ Almodóvar’s 1987 film, as Tina, the transsexual actress who is the sister of the main character, the gay director Pablo (Eusebio Poncela).

This post by Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on The Great Actresses.

I skipped this year’s Oscars for many reasons, not the least of which were the nominees in the “Best Actress” category. Amy Adams and Sandra Bullock are perfectly acceptable screen presences, but no acting either has done could compare to the intensity and range of the performances non-nominees Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux gave in Blue Is The Warmest Color. The Academy Awards take place in the U.S. and usually honor U.S. films, but Marion Cotillard won for the French film La Vie en Rose, in 2008—which insiders credit to skillful studio lobbying, Cotillard’s charm with Academy voters and the fact that even the most mediocre film biographies can win Oscars for its stars. In 1962 Sophia Loren won for the Italian film Two Women, but in that era the film-going public were more used to having to read subtitles to take in a decent movie. Art houses today are more likely to fill their bills with U.S. “independent” fluff like The Grand Budapest Hotel which, in spite of featuring Tilda Swinton and playing once an hour on the hour at two separate movie theaters in my city right now, I have no desire to see.

Writer-director Pedro Almodóvar was able to ride the wave of art house popularity starting in the 80s when theaters were more likely to program subtitled films. He came to prominence in no small part because of his star, Carmen Maura who first gained the attention of U.S. audiences in Law of Desire, Almodóvar’s 1987 film, as Tina, the transsexual actress who is the sister of the main character, the gay director, Pablo (Eusebio Poncela).

Tina and her brother in Law of Desire — Tina and her brother in *Law of Desire*

Maura is electrifying in all of her scenes (including toward the end with a very young Antonio Banderas). With her tight, bright, short dresses, red permed hair and long earrings, her hands held up for balance as she minces in her high heels, Tina could easily devolve into caricature, especially with the convoluted history Almodovar gives her. Tina had an affair with her own father pre-transition leading to her parents’ divorce–and later she had gender reassignment surgery at her father/lover’s urging. Maura’s Tina can be outrageous: in one famous scene she convinces a municipal worker with a street cleaning hose to soak her whole body and writhes in ecstasy under the forceful blast of water. But Tina is allowed to have poignant moments as well. While she is playing the lead in Jean Cocteau’s play The Human Voice (her brother is the director), her lover, a woman (played by trans actress Bibí Andersen, later known as Bibiana Fernández) looks on from the wings, preparing to leave Tina for a man. When the lover is ready to turn away, Tina says “Wait,” and both in character and as herself recites part of the play’s monologue directly to her lover, trying to convince her not to go. “That would be cruel,” she says, “And you have never been cruel.” The lover leaves anyway.

Tina’s bond with her brother is also believable and touching: the many twists of the plot (an Almodóvar specialty) wouldn’t work if the audience weren’t convinced the two genuinely care for one another. When her brother is in the hospital with temporary amnesia after a car accident she tells him the story of their family: their mother is dead, their father left Tina years before.”You’re everything to me,” she says to Pablo, and even though her brother still has no memory he asks for a hug (since he’s too injured to do so himself). Toward the end of the film when Pablo has regained his memory he puts himself in danger to save his sister, and we can’t help thinking that if one of them has to die, we’d miss Pablo a lot less than we’d miss Tina.

Maura also carried Almodóvar’s next film: the breakthrough American hit, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in which she played the protagonist, Pepa, a woman who lives in a penthouse that looks like it came from the Marilyn Monroe, Betty Grable, Lauren Bacall vehicle How To Marry a Millionaire. Like the main character in The Human Voice, Pepa is trying to talk to her lover on the phone, but the (circa 1988) technology keeps getting in her way, as she leaves message after message for her lover and waits in vain for him to call back (and repeatedly abuses her phone in retaliation for his silence). Unlike the main character in the solo Human Voice, Pepa’s life is constantly traversed by others: her lover’s grown son (Banderas again), a naive friend who was the unwitting host of a gang of Shiite terrorists, the lover’s vengeful ex-wife (also his son’s mother) and even a gazpacho-loving, hard-to-please young woman (played by another of Almodóvar’s film regulars, Rossy de Palma) who wants to rent Pepa’s apartment.

I saw Verge when it first came out and remember being disappointed, perhaps because the film had zero queer content (unlike Law of Desire, which had hardly any straight characters) or because the film seemed much more conventional than Law. Part of the pleasure of Almodóvar’s films is his trademark absurdity, usually midway between the sensibilities of the other out gay directors popular when he started his career, Rainer Werner Fassbinder in Germany and a pre-Broadway-musical John Waters in the U.S.: Almodóvar at times matched the tragedy of the former’s work and the camp of the latter’s. In 1988 Verge struck me as having too little of either, but seeing it now, I have a new appreciation for the film–and for Maura’s performance in the lead. Pepa might wear high heels, 80s-style high “fashion” and carry an assortment of colorful shopping bags, like Tina, but she would never ask to be hosed down, she just wants to be listened to. And when she realizes her lover has no intention of doing so, in spite of her increasingly desperate messages, she knows she’s better off alone. In a scene near the end, perfectly played by Maura, Pepa tells him that she would have taken him back a day before or even earlier that day, but not at the moment–and never again in their lives. Her resolve will be familiar to any of us who have cried and humiliated ourselves over lovers and then made the decision to finally stop.

After Verge, Maura and Almodóvar had a falling out and didn’t work together for nearly twenty years. In many of the films Almodóvar made during that time, especially those that were part of his 90s resurgence, he still seemed to be writing roles for Maura: the author in The Flower of My Secret, the cop’s wife in Live Flesh, the actress in All About My Mother. In 2006’s Volver (which translates as “Returning”), Maura played the “ghost” mother, Irene, who “returns” to her two grown daughters (including Penelope Cruz’s Raimunda) four years after her “death.” The mother wears house dresses and knee highs but, as the earlier characters Maura played might have, makes one of her first requests that her hairdresser daughter cut, style and color her long, straggly, grey hair.

Carmen Maura in Volver — Carmen Maura in *Volver*

As usual in an Almodóvar film, in Volver men do great wrongs to the women in their lives, (Almodóvar does not usually talk about his romantic relationships with men, but one can infer from his films that many of them have not gone well), so women have to rely on each other for emotional sustenance. As in Law Maura plays the scenes with her family with heart-breaking conviction. When her granddaughter asks her why she has returned she answers, “Because I was lonely.” When Maura and Cruz’s characters cry, on separate occasions, in discovery of the other, four years older than at their previous meeting and later reconcile, the scenes have the emotional resonance of the reunion of two long-lost lovers–or of a great writer-director and the equally great actress for whom his films seem custom-made.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L2AJmNoUgo”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

‘It Felt Like Love’ (or Something): One High School Girl’s Sexual Exploration

Some of these scenes we watch like they are part of a horror movie, wanting to say to Lila, “What are you thinking?” Lila, with all her lies (to her father, to Chiara, to her neighbor and to Sammy) never takes the audience (or anyone else) completely into her confidence, so we don’t know what she might do next–and dread seeing her do it. Besides Chiara (who does offer some limited advice and support) Lila has no female figure in her life who can help her navigate the complicated sexual landscape in which boys treat her as if she’s not there. While she listens and watches they talk shit about other girls (and even about her), look at porn and listen to hip-hop in which a man brags that “she fuck me…until she bleed cum.” Lila’s mother is dead and her father hardly seems like someone she can talk to. We can see she wants someone to care about her comings and goings as much as she wants sex: when she texts Sammy or calls him and gets his voice mail the family dog is often her only company.

Films that focus on a 14- or 15-year-old seeking out sexual experience are not unusual, but ones that do so from a female perspective are. The Norwegian movie Turn Me On, Dammit!, written and directed by a woman, Jannicke Systad Jacobsen, featured a teenage protagonist who wanted sex, but the actress who played her was a young adult, not a kid, so laughing at her scenes of lust gone awry was easy. For a film as powerful and unsettling as writer-director Eliza Hittman’s first feature, It Felt Like Love, which will soon have a theatrical run after playing at the Sundance NEXT section in 2013, we have to go back more than 25 years to David Leland’s Wish You Were Here with the magnificent Emily Lloyd in the lead as a girl who both longs for and is eventually undone by sex.

Hittman’s film focuses on one girl growing up in an unhip section of Brooklyn (though as in Girls, it’s the alternative universe version of Brooklyn where hardly any people of color reside). Lila (hauntingly embodied by Gina Piersanti, just 14 at the time the film was shot) spends the summer hanging out with her friend Chiara (Giovanna Salimeni) and the latest in Chiara’s succession of boyfriends, Patrick (Jesse Cordasco). Lila’s pale, open face, often shot in close-up, with her bud-like mouth and dark eyes, thickly lined in black is reminiscent of the 60s supermodel Penelope Tree with dense bangs that cover her forehead along with long, luxuriant hair that brings to mind the other “dolly bird” actresses and models of that era. But for the same random reasons (which never last beyond graduation) many of us remember from our own high school years, well-tanned Chiara with her bikini and short shorts and skirts is the one who receives all the attention from boys, while Lila sits on the beach, in a one-piece bathing suit that’s a little too big for her, her face covered in zinc oxide.

In one early scene Chiara’s boyfriend Patrick breaks into an empty house that he invites the girls into and pilfers a cheap-looking “promise” ring from a music box as Lila watches. He puts his finger to his lips, the same gesture he makes when Chiara shows the ring Patrick “got” for her to Lila. And as close as Lila is to Chiara (she dyes her hair an identical color to her friend’s and in one scene Chiara asks Lila to look under her skirt to check and see if “there’s anything there” on her itchy vulva) Lila never tells Chiara Patrick’s secret.

Patrick’s presumptuousness–and Lila’s response to it–is a precursor for the relationships (if one can call them that) which Lila develops with the boys she meets at the beach and parties, who all resemble Patrick, with their slim, hairless but muscular bare torsos (often the subject of close-ups, in Sean Porter’s striking and expert cinematography) they are all about the same height and have similar, unflattering, short haircuts. They reminded me of the one boy the girls who appointed themselves the leaders in such matters determined was the “cute guy” in my seventh-grade gym class. He was inarticulate, not smart and not even good-looking by most measures, but seemed the kind of boy girls were supposed to like, as opposed to the scrawnier (or tubbier), soft-faced ones we girls could actually talk to. Lila readily buys into the peer-determined standard of attractiveness: the middle-school neighbor boy she hangs out with and “confides” mostly lies to is just a friend. The barely verbal, college boy with the tattoo winding around his shoulder whom she sees at the beach (and of whom Chiara says, “He’d fuck anything”) Sammy (Ronen Rubinstein) is the boy she pursues.

The problem is: she hasn’t even been introduced to or talked to him. And because Lila is at the very beginning of forming her own identity, and Sammy barely acknowledges her–as either a pretty girl or just a person–neither of them have anything to say to one another. Even when she visits his workplace he continues to merely tolerate her company as her machinations to spend time with him (and to try to make him want to spend time with her) become progressively more desperate.

Although another world of cultural and social opportunities would be just a subway ride away for Lila, she, for the moment, is stuck in a very limited high school social sphere those of us who grew up in the suburbs will recognize. Because Lila is so young she doesn’t realize she can escape and doesn’t find out, until too late, what the audience knows from the start, that no matter what she does to or for Sammy (or pretends to), he still won’t give a shit about her. In the same way she doesn’t know (but her father does) that Chiara’s romance with Patrick won’t last, no matter how “in love” they say they are. In the end Lila is too young to know that Sammy, if he did reciprocate her interest would have to be something of a loser himself, because she’s just a kid, yet to be formed.

THE WRITER-DIRECTOR TALKS ABOUT THE FILM

I was able to speak by phone to Eliza Hittman (whose remarks here are edited for clarity and concision). Hittman says this film was influenced by French writer-director Catherine Breillat (Romance, Fat Girl): “There’s so much that’s provocative in her work. It explores power dynamics between women and also these views of romantic love and different types of sexual experiences that you don’t necessarily encounter in a film about young women growing up.

“Catherine Breillat is part of a movement that explores sex as hard. I think a lot of times you watch films about girls who are pursuing men and the main character is super-sexualized. What’s different about this film is, the intention of the character is the same, but in this film you don’t want to see her have the experience. She’s not ready and it’s not reciprocated. That’s uncomfortable to watch but I feel like it’s true, at least of my experience growing up.

“(Lila’s age) is when all of the pressure starts. (You are) looking for models, so you build your identity. That’s why the character dyes her hair like her friend.”

Hittman says, “The title (of the film) for me is about wanting to have a certain type of intimacy without quite knowing what it is. When you’re that age you’re always (wondering) what love is. I was listening to that song, “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)” from the 60s. This character is pursuing something and not really knowing the difference between positive and negative experience.”

Although the film will have theatrical releases in New York (this Friday, March 21) and Los Angeles (on March 28) and has received good reviews, like Concussion, another well-reviewed film about a woman from a woman writer-director that was part of Sundance in 2013, it won’t play theaters in my very art-house-friendly city, but will be available on VOD. I can’t shake the feeling if the film were directed by a man, and told from the viewpoint of Sammy, it would be in more theaters. I asked Hittman to comment on distribution of women-directed, women-centered films, “I will say that it does feel like there are limited options for women telling stories about women.You get to Sundance and you have, or I had, this realization that everybody buying and selling movies is male. I think that affects the market in some way.”

You can help change this status quo by making plans to see Hittman’s disturbing, distinctive film however you can. More info, including on future screenings of the film, can be found at http://itfeltlikelove.com

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrqcUMN4s8E “]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

‘Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me’: Being a “Difficult” Older Woman

I remember a woman artist friend talking about Barbra Streisand: “When people called her ‘difficult’, it was probably just because she asked for a microphone that worked.” Broadway musical star Elaine Stritch’s reputation for being “difficult” is familiar even to those of us who can’t stand Broadway musicals. But all through the documentary ‘Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me’ (directed by Chiemi Karasawa who first met Stritch in a hair salon) I couldn’t help wondering if an 87-year-old man behaving the way Stritch (who was 87 when the documentary was shot) does in the film would be denigrated the way she has been (men are rarely called “difficult”–no matter what they do).

I remember a woman artist friend talking about Barbra Streisand: “When people called her ‘difficult,’ it was probably just because she asked for a microphone that worked.” Broadway musical star Elaine Stritch’s reputation for being “difficult” is familiar even to those of us who can’t stand Broadway musicals. But all through the documentary Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me (directed by Chiemi Karasawa, who first met Stritch in a hair salon), I couldn’t help wondering if an 87-year-old man behaving the way Stritch (who was 87 when the documentary was shot) does in the film would be denigrated the way she has been (men are rarely called “difficult”–no matter what they do). Certainly the men Stritch has worked with in her long career don’t seem easygoing. In one scene Stritch reads aloud a letter Woody Allen wrote her in the ’80s listing point by point the circumstances under which he’ll work with her. One of his many conditions is that she can’t second-guess his wardrobe choices. Earlier we see Alec Baldwin have a hissy fit on camera because he thinks Stritch is stepping on his laugh line (Stritch is playing his character’s mother on 30 Rock). When he stalks out she laughs at him–as does the crew.

This partially Indiegogo-funded film has some superficial resemblance to Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, another documentary that followed a famous older, “difficult” woman as she prepared for and performed in shows, but Stritch doesn’t seem interested in using the film as a tool to bolster her image, the way Rivers did. Shoot Me has no scenes as cringe-worthy as the one in which Rivers takes her grandson to deliver meals to people with AIDS (as if Rivers headlining a fundraiser wouldn’t be a better use of resources) or the one in which Rivers mentions that she pays for the private school tuition of her employees’ children.

Stritch makes her home in a hotel, never had children, and her husband died 30 years ago, so she is free to focus on her own health, career and legacy–and doesn’t feel the need to launch a revisionist propaganda campaign. Stritch isn’t afraid to mumble wry asides when fans in the street approach, and she raises her fists in victory when she learns that she will still be paid for a gig canceled in the wake of a hurricane.

Stritch’s legendary directness and humor are aimed right at the filmmakers and audience, when, in the middle of talking about something else, she looks up to say, “Don’t you think that camera is awfully close?” When the camera pulls back she continues, “We’re not making a skin commercial here.”

Like many other artists, Stritch is working decades beyond the age most people retire. But the activities many senior citizens take up after they stop working–travel, singing, dancing, and acting–have been the staples of Stritch’s career since just before the end of World War II. When she was based in London (a fact that doesn’t make its way into the film though she even starred in a successful TV series there), she worked with the great English actor Sir John Gielgud (in the 1977 film Providence), who made his last film appearance in 1998 when he was 94. Gielgud was able to temper the exertion of his later work by taking smaller roles in films and also acting in radio dramas. For Stritch, her continued career is much more demanding: song and (in a limited way) dance in live appearances where she is the show.

Elaine Stritch, Triumphant During Her Live Show — Elaine Stritch, triumphant during her live show

Stritch has diabetes and some memory loss (her recall of long-ago events like her improbable–but photo-verified–two dates with a very young John F. Kennedy is razor-sharp) as well as an unsteady gait (she sometimes uses a cane and although she is unassisted while onstage, she needs assistance to make it there) and her voice shows the effects of age, but she’s still an effective performer. Before I saw the film I thought that audiences must go to her shows for nostalgia or for the same reason people in the mid-1990s went to see Courtney Love live, to see if she made it all the way through her act without collapsing or having a breakdown onstage.

Some of the film’s reviews seem to want to reframe the film as a pathetic spectacle with Stritch as an object of pity. They call Shoot Me “grim,” “painful,” and “about aging and its myriad horrors.” These reviewers seem determined to review their own fears of aging (or what they imagine the life of an older woman is like) instead of what is actually onscreen. In the same way that disabled and older people shouldn’t be called “inspiring” just for living their lives in ways many of us who aren’t disabled or very old do, the film shows us that the effects of aging for Stritch aren’t tragic–any more than they are advantageous–but just inconveniences and obstacles for her to work around. Stritch herself says of her worry about forgetting song lyrics, “The fear is part of the excitement.”

Excerpts of the show in the film, as well as vintage clips of her recording her signature “Ladies Who Lunch” for a cast album, and even a clip of her acceptance speech for winning an Emmy show that she lets the audience (or in the cast recording, her songwriters) not just see her vulnerabilities, but share them and empathize with them. We see her in rehearsal for the show forgetting the lyrics to “I Feel Pretty” repeatedly and then, during the show, she forgets again, but makes the moment a comic one, getting the audience to root for her as she (eventually) comes up with the next line.

Stritch and her musical director, Rob Bowman

Stritch has a lot of friends, many of whom are much younger than she is: every time we see a shot of her bed at the hotel where she lives we also see a wall covered in post-it notes of names (some of them well-known to us through movies and television) with the phone numbers digitally blurred. Though Stritch has no children we see unrelated, younger people pitch in to help her: during the show and rehearsal, musical director, Rob Bowman, for an upcoming dedication, an assistant who sorts through old photos and other memorabilia and for miscellaneous errands a woman who sat next to her at an AA meeting long ago and in spite of Stritch’s demands (Elaine not only wanted a ride home from the woman; she told her she needed to clean up her car before picking her up again), credits Stritch with helping her maintain sobriety.

Stritch, after many years of recovery, informs us that she allows herself one drink a day, then after a hospitalization (for diabetes) stops drinking again, then during a birthday party at the end is back to “one drink a day.” But the definition of alcoholism is the inability to have just one drink. The revelation that since her retirement (always just around the corner in the film, which was shot two years ago, but as of last year, when she did one last show and moved out of New York seems permanent now), she has upped her limit to two drinks is worrying. In the film she argues that at 87 a limited amount of drinking won’t harm her and is something she feels like she deserves. She says, “It’s wonderful being almost 87. You can get away with just about anything.” Now that she’s 89, she might be right.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQysjiUA68U”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

‘Short Term 12,’ ‘In A World,’ and Athena

Local film festivals have proliferated in recent years–every city and town seems to want its own Sundance and my city is no exception: every spring it has a well-respected, week-long independent film festival with celebrity appearances and panels. But well-publicized festivals focusing on women don’t seem to be part of this trend. In the 90s women in the arts, not just film, seemed to finally be given a chance to do their own work and tell their own stories. In the era of ‘Thelma and Louise,’ women taking up a more equitable piece of the pie in filmmaking (as well as in writing books and in the visual arts) seemed inevitable. In the 21st century we seem to be going backward: the percentage of women making films has dropped since 2012 so we’re overdue for a festival like Athena: “a celebration of women and leadership.”

In the 90s and early 00s women’s film festivals were more common than they are now: my local independent art house had one that lasted a week every year, complete with celebrity appearances and panels. Of course, some of the films were crap (or just not my taste) and I remember one panel in which successful women directors made the puzzling argument that so few women were allowed to direct films because movies were “a business.” I’m sure law firms, banks, publishers, and uh, businesses would be glad to know that all they had to do was declare, “Hey, we’re a business” and they magically wouldn’t have to put any more women in leadership positions either.

Local film festivals have proliferated in recent years–every city and town seems to want its own Sundance and my city is no exception: every spring it has a well-respected, week-long independent film festival with celebrity appearances and panels. But well-publicized festivals focusing on women don’t seem to be part of this trend. In the 90s women in the arts, not just film, seemed to finally be given a chance to do their own work and tell their own stories. In the era of Thelma and Louise women taking up a more equitable piece of the pie in filmmaking (as well as in writing books and in the visual arts) seemed inevitable. In the 21st century we seem to be going backward: the percentage of women making films has dropped since 2012 so we’re overdue for a festival like Athena: “a celebration of women and leadership.”

Athena afforded me the chance to see, among other films, two features I had missed when they had regular runs in theaters: Short Term 12 (written and directed by Destin Cretton, nominated for several Independent Spirit Awards and included on several best of 2013 lists) and In A World, written and directed by as well as starring Lake Bell.

Short_Term_12_GraceJayden — Grace and Jayden

Short Term 12 received excellent reviews when it opened this past fall, as it did during its premiere during last year’s SXSW, but suffered from a lackluster performance at the box office, perhaps in part because of the trailer, which makes the film seem like another rebel-goes-against-the system movie, an oversimplification of the many currents running through the film.

Grace (Brie Larson), the main character, works at a group home for kids who seem to range from middle-school-age to 18. Cretton himself worked at a similar facility and more than one scene has the counselors: Grace, Grace’s live-in boyfriend Mason (John Gallagher Jr.), newcomer Nate (Rami Malek) and Jessica ( Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s Stephanie Beatriz who gets hardly any lines) first shooting the shit and joking with each other as coworkers in an office might and then having to leap into action in the face of a crisis: a sudden shift familiar to anyone who has worked in direct care.

Short Term 12 gets right for much of the film, what so many other films about human services get wrong. Larson’s Grace seems to be wearing hardly any, if any, makeup and what she wears to work consists of high top sneakers, skinny jeans and a loose shirt–clothes that can be thrown away if they get ripped or stained. When we see her dressed up later in the film, she doesn’t suddenly seem to have acquired a stylist (the one other “ordinary” women characters in mainstream movies have): she wears ankle boots that don’t really match her not-very-flattering dress and still eschews makeup. She rides a bike to the facility: most of these “counseling” jobs pay very little, so the character couldn’t afford the new car a more mainstream film would give her. She’s also the boss on the floor, the manager, and she’s not portrayed as manipulative or mean, as so many other women bosses are in films, just alternately (and appropriately) authoritative, playful and tender with the kids.

short-term-12GraceMason — Grace and Mason

Short Term 12 is based on a short film of the same name made by the writer-director in 2008, in which the protagonist was a man. Some aspects of the gender change go smoothly. We find out Grace has a history of her own much like the troubled kids she looks after, and the film contains the first instance I’ve seen where a woman commits (mild) self-injury in response to some very stressful news but avoids treating her like a headcase. Saintly Mason (impossibly patient and understanding with Grace; he even does all the cooking) also comes from an unstable background (though eventually he landed with a large, very close, Latino-headed, multiracial foster family). The film starts to strain credulity here: although some people working in human services are trying to give back to a system that helped them, those people are often not the most effective at their jobs (or if they are, stay for a limited time and then go on to other careers). Many of the people who end up doing the best work for the longest time in direct care are, like Nate, from relatively stable backgrounds that enable them to deal with the stress of the job without reliving their own trauma (they are also able to occasionally rely on their middle-class or wealthy families for rental deposits on apartments or used cars to make up for their very low salaries). In real life, the “Graces” of the world, no matter how kindly, or what inside knowledge they would bring to a care facility, would get a job in an office, retail, a restaurant, anywhere that wouldn’t dredge up the ghosts of the past (which Grace has avoided talking to even Mason about).

Grace also has an unplanned pregnancy and here the film really veers off into Fantasyland. What Cretton never seems to consider is: the job we’ve seen that Grace loves and is so good at is one she could never keep if she has the baby. The work is physically rough (adolescents kick at and strike out at counselors, certainly not ideal for a woman in the latter stages of pregnancy) and human services direct care jobs don’t typically offer paid maternity leave or childcare. Even if she were able to return to the care facility, her salary is probably barely enough to support one person, let alone two: Mason’s wages kicked in would barely make a difference.

Troubling too is the latter part of the film when Grace identifies deeply with Jayden, (Kaitlyn Dever) a sharply dressed, artistic, new girl in the facility who, we find out, shares not only Grace’s flair for pencil sketching, but also seems to give signs that she has been abused. Grace’s ensuing actions made me think Cretton has seen too many Bruce Willis and Jack Nicholson films. Her overinvolvement in Jayden’s home life includes breaking and entering and vandalism–and nearly involves assault and battery with a deadly weapon. All the while, Cretton seems not to realize that Grace’s behavior is endangering Jayden more than anyone else.

Of course it all works out in the end. Jayden tells authorities about her father’s abuse; Grace decides to go through with the pregnancy; even the kid turning 18 and aging out of the facility, the one who attempted suicide, gets a foxy, new girlfriend and a job afterward. Hollywood endings can’t help polluting even “realistic” independent films.

In a World is a much lighter film than Short Term 12 and a lot sloppier: many of the contrivances seem like placeholders in the script, meant to be replaced with better-thought out action later on, but the movie still contains some truths that don’t make their way into films directed and written by men. Bell plays Carol who is struggling to make a living as a vocal coach and a voice over artist. We see her midway in the film in a circumstance that male directors and writers rarely present, where a man who we’ve seen is somewhat repellent and seems to be feeding her a line to have sex with her succeeds, not because the Carol doesn’t realize he’s feeding her a line (and is perhaps not who he seems) but because he’s reasonably attractive and it’s only for one night. Bell presents the Irish guy (Jason O’Mara) who tempts Carol’s sister (Michaela Watkins) into cheating on her good-guy husband (Rob Corddry) as genuinely handsome and charming: too many straight male directors seem to not notice that the men who get all the ladies in their films would leave most women cold.

Bell isn’t above using men’s bodies as a kind of punch line either, the way women’s bodies (especially old or fat ones) are used in other films. When Carol’s Dad (Fred Melamed) is shirtless, as he is for more than one scene, we see him in all his hairy-backed, saggy-pecced glory.

When Carol and her real love interest (Demetri Martin) in the film first kiss, she’s the one who makes the first move. When they kiss a second time she first feeds him a line of her own (though unlike that of her one-night stand her line isn’t insincere). All these moments might seem like tiny victories in a film, but other women seem to want to support Bell’s vision: cameos in the film include Eva Longoria (trying to approximate cockney vowels with a cork in her mouth), Cameron Diaz and Geena Davis. Maybe they noticed, as many of the rest of us have, that the trajectory from performer to director that seems so easy and natural for men (both Jon Hamm and John Slattery from Mad Men have also directed more than one episode of the series) is not one that women can readily follow (neither Christina Hendricks nor Elisabeth Moss, nor any other actress on the series has directed a single episode of Mad Men–yet).

That reason is the crux at my argument that as good a film as Short Term 12 is (and as “strong” as its female protagonist may be) because it’s directed by a man, it doesn’t belong in Athena or any other women’s film festival. The producer of 12 told the audience in the Q & A after the film that the writer-director, as a result of this modestly budgeted, not very financially successful film (which won some minor awards) was now writing something for Jennifer Lawrence. In an earlier “master class” (really a Q & A) with Callie Khouri, the writer of the big-budget, huge hit Thelma and Louise (for which she won an Academy Award) informed us that she didn’t get to direct a feature film for ten years after Thelma came out–and hasn’t gotten to direct one since. Khouri isn’t the only one who is facing resistance: it’s a story other women who have made well-reviewed, theater-released films are still telling today–and won’t stop telling until they get the showcases they deserve.

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

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

‘Looking’: When a Straight Woman is the “Gay Best Friend”

The HBO series ‘Looking,’ which focuses on the lives of gay men (co-created by the gay writer-director Andrew Haigh who made the art-house film ‘Weekend’; two of the main cast members, including the lead, are also out gay men) occupies a ground somewhere in between, in which women do exist, though only in supporting roles–but those roles are cast and, written with an acuity that transcends their brief time onscreen.

Warning: This review contains spoilers for the first seven episodes of the first season of HBO’s Looking.

No matter how much is written about the series Girls, “wives and girlfriends” could be the de facto description of most speaking roles for women on television and in film. Because women are the plus-ones in the script we’re not surprised that their parts, when compared with the male characters have fewer lines, less complexity and less variability–in age, race, body type and conventional attractiveness. The uncomfortable truth is: the only reason women are in these many of these shows and films (besides for decoration, to act as a kind of talking furniture) is to communicate that even though the male characters seem to spend most of their time and emotional energy interacting with each other– and the audience can’t help noticing the homoerotic tension between them–they’re not queer.

So what happens to women’s roles when the main male characters are queer? In some cases, like the excellent recent release Stranger By The Lake, women aren’t in the picture at all–not surprising, since the film takes place in a cruising ground. But the absence of women also reflects the strata of gay men whose social circle is made up almost entirely of other gay men, even outside of sexual situations. In the case of the execrable American version of Queer As Folk the token woman couple were written alternately as villains or annoyances: their erratic behavior providing the flimsiest of excuses to propel the storylines of the male characters.

The HBO series Looking, which focuses on the lives of gay men (co-created by the gay writer-director Andrew Haigh who made the art-house film Weekend; two of the main cast members, including the lead, are also out gay men) occupies a ground somewhere in between, in which women do exist, though only in supporting roles–but those roles are cast and written with an acuity that transcends their brief time onscreen.

The most prominent example is Doris (Lauren Weedman) who is the best friend, roommate and long ago ex-lover of one of the series main characters, Dom (out gay actor Murray Bartlett). Unlike other fictional f*g hags, Doris isn’t secretly still in love with Dom (as the Meryl Streep character was with the Ed Harris character in The Hours) nor is she a woman so desperately unhappy with her own life that she can’t stop meddling in and monopolizing Dom’s. She has a challenging career as a pediatric nurse, and although she is much less glamorous than most of the other women on television, we see her making out with Dom’s male coworker during Dom’s birthday party (though just once on TV or in a movie I’d like to see the relatively common occurence of a f*g hag going with her friends to the gay bar, picking up a woman there and going on to forge a queer identity of her own). Instead Doris plays the role usually given to “The Gay Best Friend” in a romantic comedy. She has all the best lines and an acid delivery but is also a loyal friend and the voice of reason.

When Dom wants to contact an abusive ex-boyfriend (who was, at one time, also a meth addict but has since become a successful realtor) Doris warns him off doing so, but when Dom sees the guy anyway, tells him she understands why.

Doris asks, “Did you at least ask him for your money back?”

“No,” Dom answers.

Doris then asks “Why not,” and her tone has no anger in it, just a sad compassion that seems to illustrate a long history between the two friends.

In the most recent episode (Episode 7, the penultimate of this season, but the series has just been renewed for a second season, with Weedman becoming a cast regular) we finally got to meet the mother of the main character Patrick Murray (Jonathan Groff). His mother has been something of a bogeyman since the first episode when Dom advised Patrick to stop dating only the men he thought his mother would approve of. Patrick, who designs video games, then pursued and eventually became boyfriends with Richie (Raúl Castillo) a Mexican American barber. With Richie and Patrick’s relationship, Looking is able to touch on some class and race schisms that exist in the gay men’s community–but also beyond–that other series and movies rarely show.

Richie and Patrick spend an idyllic day together

Patrick isn’t a racist exactly (his best friend is Latino–and also a main character–wanna-be artist, Agustín, played by Frankie J. Alvarez), but, except for most of one idyllic all-day date that takes up the whole of Episode 5 (directed by Haigh, it echoes the structure, if not quite the emotional sweep of Weekend) he can’t seem to stop himself from saying racially and culturally insensitive things to Richie, which nearly prevented he and Richie from getting together in the first place. Patrick’s awkwardness with Richie is a result of his moving in mostly white, affluent (or at least artist-class) circles and shows a reality rarely seen on TV or in movies: that white people, even the ones who say they aren’t racist, often have no idea how to be in interracial relationships–and aren’t very good at learning from their mistakes. The show also captures tensions within the Latino community, when college educated, Miami-raised Cuban American Agustín accuses Patrick of “slumming” with working class, Mexican American Richie.

In Episode 7, Richie was supposed to finally meet Patrick’s mother (Julia Duffy from Newhart) at his sister’s wedding, but after a morning full of disasters: spilled coffee on a dress shirt, a parking ticket, Patrick’s mother’s misplaced phone (which the hotel won’t give to Richie because, he says, “I guess I don’t look like a ‘Murray'”) Richie and Patrick argue, and Richie says he thinks it’s too soon to meet Patrick’s family. So Patrick goes to the wedding alone.

patrick-richie-psychic-looking — Patrick and Richie

Making the excuses familiar to those of us who have fought with our partners right before or during major social events (“food poisoning” Patrick says), Patrick meets up with his mother, a persnickety and perpetually dissatisfied woman (she complains about the state of the grass on the grounds of the wedding site) who calls Richie “Richard” and “friend” instead of “boyfriend.”

At the end of the festivities (scenes of cake pops, bad dancing to the B-52s and the groom removing the bride’s garter will elicit groans of recognition among any queer who has felt alienated at a straight wedding) Patrick tells his mother, “You’re the real reason Richie isn’t here,” blaming the argument he had with Richie (ostensibly because Richie suggested Patrick smoke a joint in the car to relax before the wedding) on his mother’s lofty expectations.

But Patrick’s mother herself is munching on a pot-laced Rice Krispie treat (Patrick’s family is from Colorado, where marijuana is legal) and tells Patrick, “I don’t think you can blame me for Richie. If he’s not here, that’s on you, sweetie.” She also tells him that marijuana has helped her since she went off Lexapro, which Patrick had no idea she was taking.”If you asked me how I was doing every now and then,” she counters, “you’d know.” And with just a few lines (and an expert reading from Duffy) Looking turns an “evil” and “unreasonable” mother character into a sympathetic person with wants and needs of her own. And echoes the experience of so many of us as we strive to become people different from who our mothers see us as. Our mothers change too and become different people from the ones we wanted so badly to distance ourselves from.

With Blue Is The Warmest Color, Concussion, and Stranger By The Lake, this past year has been a great one for queer characters’ stories on the big screen–and Looking has now brought that same depth and quality to the small screen. I can’t wait for Season 2.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_G5Ud5A0NHg&list=UUVTQuK2CaWaTgSsoNkn5AiQ&feature=c4-overview”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

‘Moms Mabley’ and The Hard Work of Show Business

People who don’t work in the arts don’t realize how much work goes into it. Writers write hundreds of pages before any reader (who isn’t a blood relative) loves their work. Musicians practice for countless hours and write a lot of shitty songs before they compose a tune that makes someone want to sing along. Moms Mabley, the Black, queer woman comedian born in 1894 in the Jim Crow south, ran away at age 14 to become a performer and spent much of the next 66 years onstage, performing and polishing her own comedy routines. Her long experience may be why her work, nearly 40 years after her death, still elicits laughs.

Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley (original title, Moms Mabley: I Got Somethin’ to Tell You) shown on HBO and also as part of the Athena Film Festival, is a remembrance of Mabley, who died in 1975 (at the age of 81). Moms (“Jackie” was the original first name she chose to perform under) was popular, at one time making $10,000 a week (in mid-20th century dollars) on the chitlin’ circuit and for years putting on five shows a day(!) at The Apollo in Harlem (she and the other performers would have their barbecues in The Apollo’s courtyard between sets). During the 60s and early 70s she released 18 comedy albums (albums were the equivalent of cable television specials for comedians in those days). Unlike Redd Foxx, another African American comedian who experienced some of the same strictures of segregation-era America (and who also put out a lot of popular comedy albums), Mabley never got her own late-in-life television show, so her name if largely forgotten–undoubtedly the reason Whoopi Goldberg’s name became part of the film’s title.

The project seems to be a labor of love for Goldberg, who, before writing and performing in her own one-woman show (the vehicle which first brought her to prominence in the 80s) performed a one-woman show as Mabley, working from Mabley’s own material. Goldberg directed the documentary as well as narrating it. This film is only the second directing credit in Goldberg’s long career and her inexperience shows. Goldberg tells us early on that we don’t know much about Mabley’s early life, but Mabley’s Wikipedia entry contains more coherent information than is in this disjointed documentary.

The reason to see the film is not for the interviews with bleary-eyed Famous People Who Saw Mabley Perform Live or even the interviews with comedians (including Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall, Joan Rivers and Kathy Griffin) whose work she influenced, but to see Mabley’s work itself. She always played an old woman onstage, even when she was young, with the costume of a brightly patterned housedress, equally colorful, Gilligan-style bucket hat and kneesocks, ugly, big, flat shoes (almost like a clown’s) and for the crowning touch she removed her dentures, so as Eddie Murphy states she “was like someone in your family.” She (like other Black performers) wasn’t allowed to appear on television in variety, awards or talk shows until the 60s and 70s–when she had become old in real life, but was still a vital performer. The film also plays routines from her albums, delivered by a Flash-animated Moms.

For those who think queer identity began at Stonewall, or was for white people only, we see old black and white photos of Mabley in the men’s clothing she wore offstage. A dancer who shared a dressing room with Mabley at the old Apollo confirms that Mabley surrounded herself with young women, unlike her onstage persona who often talked about her preference for “young men.” The dancer says that in those days she didn’t think of Mabley as “gay” or “lesbian” but as “Mr. Moms.”

We see clips of Mabley on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and on Merv Griffin: she seems like she would be a better–and funnier–guest than most of the people we see on talk show couches today. As the documentary points out, performers who came from a vaudeville background (as Mabley did) had to know how to dance and sing as well as be funny. We see her in a ridiculously campy Playboy television special with centerfold models and their sideburned dates in formal wear, stiffly swaying to the music as she sings (in her usual onstage costume) a sincere version of “Abraham, Martin and John” (as is pointed out in the film, she actually knew two of the dead men she was singing about). That cover of the song originally sung by Dion became a top 40 hit making her the oldest person (she was then in her 70s) to be on the charts.

We also see clips from her last movie Amazing Grace (she had made her debut in 1933, in The Emperor Jones which starred Paul Robeson), but the film does not seem like the best use for her talents. This documentary made me wish she had done a concert film to preserve her work, the way Richard Pryor (who also counted her as one of his influences) was able to preserve his own routines.

Still we can laugh at the audio of her performances even as the animated Moms, like the white comics’ impressions of her in interviews, sometimes skates dangerously close to stereotype. What may be most remarkable about Mabley’s career is: even as she was playing a loudly dressed, toothless character, her work never descended into self-hatred, though for much of her career, women comedians, like Phyllis Diller, made themselves the butt of every joke, and racist images of Black people were what was “popular” in comedy. In the 50s before Mabley was allowed on television–even though she had an established career by then–Amos and Andy was a huge hit. Her influence also stretches beyond those who name her as one. As she said herself, “Every comedian has stolen from me except for Jack Benny. He was an original. The same for Redd Foxx. He’s a born comedian.”

We see a clip of her toward the end of her life at The Grammys co-presenting with a very young Kris Kristofferson and she seems just what that moribund show could use right now. Breaking up the inane cue-card patter, she takes out her teeth (on camera) and she and Kristofferson give each other a loud kiss on the lips.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4maAWskn1A” autohide=”0″]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.