Romance – Page 11 – Bitch Flicks

Notes from the Telluride Film Festival: Reviews of ‘The Invisible Woman’ and ‘Gravity’

Usually movies with such mainstream blockbuster potential are not portrayed at Telluride Film Festival. Telluride opts for more artistic limited release movies. But I suspect Cuaron’s credibility, including casting a woman in the lead over Clooney, made it a Telluride film.

Still from The Invisible Woman — Still from *The Invisible Woman*

This is a guest post by Atima Omara-Alwala.

The Woman Behind Charles Dickens: A Review of the Film The Invisible Woman

“You men live your lives, while we are left behind. I see no freedom where I stand!” yells protagonist Ellen Ternan at a Dickens’ colleague.

Ternan is the mistress of renowned English novelist Charles Dickens. And that sums up the movie The Invisible Woman. Ternan became the 18-year-old mistress to then 45-year-old Charles Dickens, who was at the height of his fame. Based on the novel of the same name, it accounts their life together, the scandal it caused, as Dickens was still married to his wife. While the film is meant to be focused on this torrid affair between Dickens and Ternan it, by extension, is a telling of the unfortunate status of women in the Victorian era.

English actor Ralph Fiennes, a celebrated actor of his generation (Schindler’s List, Quiz Show, The English Patient, The End of the Affair, to name a few) plays the larger than life Charles Dickens and Felicity Jones plays Ellen Ternan. Invisible Woman is the second film Fiennes directed after Coriolanus.

The Invisible Woman is sumptuous in its costumes and details of the Victorian era, but occasionally lacks in the chain that builds up to the affair. Ternan, whose family of moderately successful actors are good friends of Dickens, finds herself in his company due to a play he is building. You instantly see why Dickens falls for Ternan–she is young, spirited, and passionate about his novels and short stories. Jones’ Ternan does a good job in not overdoing the “fan girl” role, as that can cross over to creepy rather quickly. Her love and understanding of his books touches Fiennes’ Dickens perhaps because his wife doesn’t seem that invested in his work and Ellen is rather young and pretty. One also suspects her adoration soothes his ego. Chats of his works turn to meaningful conversations of life ,which pale in comparison to the awkward stilted and physically passionless relationship that exists between Dickens and his wife, Catherine.

Felicity Jones in The Invisible Woman — Felicity Jones in *The Invisible Woman*

Ternan finds herself at a crossroads in her relationship with Dickens, as her family realizes his adoration of her and her growing affection for him. While she hopes to become an actress, it is made clear to her by the women in her family that she is not good enough to survive in the profession. Since she has not too much formal educational training, any money to inherit, or other marital prospects, the best she can hope for is a relationship with Dickens, who cannot divorce his wife in Victoria era England. But can provide for Ternan. It is not a “choice” that thrills her, especially as she views Dickens’ callousness toward his wife–which includes but is NOT limited to a public letter in the London Times announcing he and his wife (unbeknownst to his wife) have agreed to separate (worse than texting your ex you’re through with them) and forcing his wife to deliver a gift meant for Ternan but accidentally delivered to her so (in Dickens’ mind) the wife can see for herself nothing exists between them.

I personally love Charles Dickens’ writings and thought he was quite the advocate for justice for the poor, but I was stunned at the sheer humiliation he put his wife through. You can imagine Ternan’s thoughts: if he’s that callous to the women who bore TEN of his children, how the hell is he going to treat me?

My biggest complaint was, while I saw a chemistry between Fiennes and Jones, the buildup was not always potent enough for me to think this was supposed to be the renowned passionate affair it apparently was. The timeline was fuzzy at times. Fiennes is outstanding per usual as the larger than life author, and Jones is an ingénue with promise who perhaps reached her limits in playing an older and wiser Ternan after Dickens’ passing, trapped in reflection and struggling to free herself from his ghost. Either way, go see it, if for nothing else to no more about this author and see another outstanding Ralph Fiennes performance.

Movie poster for Gravity — Movie poster for *Gravity*

A Brilliant Woman Hero: A Review of the Film Gravity

If you ever doubted a woman could literally reach for the stars, Sandra Bullock changes your mind in her performance as Dr. Ryan Stone, a brilliant astronaut who becomes a hero in Gravity. The film is directed by Alfonso Cuaron, who also directed A Little Princess (1995), Y Tu Mamá También (2001), and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004). Gravity is a 3D movie with George Clooney as Bullock’s co star. Clooney plays fellow astronaut, Matt Kowalsky.

Dr. Stone and Kowalsky, along with others, are in space on a mission when debris from a satellite crashes into their space shuttle Explorer, killing most of their crew. Dr. Stone and Kowalsky (on limited oxygen) must find a way to survive.

Sandra Bullock in Gravity — Sandra Bullock in *Gravity*

Bullock is wonderfully nuanced in her role as Dr. Ryan Stone and I can see why reviews coming back from Venice International Film Festival have her touted for another Oscar nomination. Cuaron portrays a complex, brilliant astronaut with a sad past who is driven by her work. With her male colleagues (particularly Clooney’s Kowalsky, whom she interacts the most with), she confidently holds her own in what she does. When the space shuttle is hit, and Dr. Stone–a less experienced astronaut–is sent flying into space in a breathtaking 3D moment, she is rightfully panicked. I worried she might become the damsel in distress that Kowalsky rescues, but Bullock does not take you into unnecessary hysterics. If anything, the 3D movie makes the audience more empathetic to how scary the reality of flying untethered into space is. The rest of the movie is an exercise in her using her mental and physical reserves to brainstorm her way out of hairy situations, while the debris still in orbit rotates back around every so often to threaten her survival. I found myself mentally cheering her on as I think all viewers–especially women–will to the end.

Atima Omara-Alwala is a political strategist and activist of 10 years who has served as staff on eight federal and local political campaigns and other progressive causes. Atima’s work has had a particular focus on women’s political empowerment and leadership, reproductive justice, health care, communities of color and how gender and race is reflected in pop culture. Her writings on the topics have also been featured at Ms. Magazine, Women’s Enews, and RH Reality Check.

‘Earth Girls Are Easy’ and Charming

This guest post by Libby White appears as part of our theme week on Cult Films and B Movies.

I’ve loved Earth Girls Are Easy since I was a child. My mother and I would watch it together regularly, even though many of the sexual moments went beyond my comprehension at the time. Having become an adult in the 80s, my mother was a big fan of shows like In Living Color, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. And Earth Girls Are Easy can best be described as the love child of both.

Campy, with over-the-top 80s style, and catchy, but ridiculous, musical numbers, it was a box office flop that faded into obscurity for many years. But it prevailed and has recently reemerged (thanks to DVD and the Internet), and has become a fledgling cult classic.

Taking place in San Fernando Valley, California, the movie revolves around Valerie Gail (Geena Davis), a love-sick manicurist who is desperate to please her unfaithful fiancé, Ted. A classic Valley-girl and hopelessly devoted, Valerie is shocked when a spaceship carrying three aliens suddenly lands in her pool one morning. When she realizes the three creatures are harmless, she takes them to her salon to be made over by her friend Candy (Julie Brown). Sheared of their colorful fur, the two women are delighted to realize that underneath, the aliens appear like normal, even attractive, human men. They decide to take the aliens out on the town, and end up at a crowded club, where Zeebo and Wiploc (Damon Wayans and Jim Carrey), become hits with the club’s women. Mac (Jeff Goldblum), has his eyes set on Valerie, however, and the two share a quiet moment together on the roof.

When Valerie finally takes the men back home, Ted is there waiting, and demands that the three men leave his house. Valerie reminds Ted that he no longer is welcome due to his cheating, and the police come and take him away. In an attempt to console her, Mac follows Valerie to her bedroom, and the two end up making love.

The next morning, Mac, Wiploc, and Zeebo repair the spaceship, and Mac announces that they will be ready to leave shortly. Valerie is visibly crestfallen, but is interrupted by an apologetic phone call from Ted. Unbeknownst to Valerie, Mac overhears her trying to work things out with Ted. Meanwhile outside, Woody, a pool-boy, comes by and convinces Wiploc and Zeebo to go to the beach with him to pick up women, and the three get caught up in an accidental robbery, a police chase, and a forced trip to the hospital. Valerie and Mac team up to break them out, using the aliens’ otherworldly powers to fool Ted, the attending doctor, and escape.

When they arrive back at home, Mac, believing Valerie to still be in love with Ted, uses his powers to distract her while he and his comrades move onto the now-working spaceship. Valerie snaps out of it however, and admits to Mac that she has fallen in love with him, and jumps onto the ship to join him. Candy happens by just as they take off into the sunset, and Valerie waves goodbye.

The casting for Earth Girls Are Easy is one of its best attributes, and it feels as if each character is essential to the movie. Each actor brought with him or her a special spark to the film from his or her own personal styles; Damon Wayans and Jim Carrey being the comedy, Jeff Goldblum the smoldering seduction, Julie Brown the music, and Geena Davis, the charisma.

Geena Davis is a long-time advocate for the fair representation of women in media, and has been a feminist icon for decades. And while Earth Girls was filmed several years before her rise into activism, Valerie Gail is a good female character (despite such stereotypical flaws as occasional air-headedness and thinking marriage will fix all of a relationship’s problems). She is the voice of reason to Candy’s party-girl recklessness with the aliens, and is as loyal as they come to those she cares about. And the chemistry between Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum is palpable. Considering the two were married at the time of filming, it’s easy to believe that Valerie could meet and fall in love with Mac all within a day. Damon Wayans’ and Jim Carrey’s characters are adorably hilarious as well, stealing scene after scene with their constant troublemaking.

Julie Brown is truly at home as Candy, having both written and produced Earth Girls Are Easy based off of one of her original songs. She went on to make a stage show version of the film as well, clips of which can be found online. Several of Brown’s songs are included in the movie, either as major musical numbers or as background music. And while her “Valley Girl” characters are a defining part of her career, underneath the 80s slang, Brown is a triple-threat of talent. It is no question that without her, Earth Girls would have lost its fun spirit.

Being set in the Valley in the 80s, the film portrays much of the vapidness and consumerism popular at the time, with two of the film’s songs, “Brand New Girl,” and “’Cause I’m a Blonde,” focusing on changing or criticizing women’s appearances. “’Cause I’m a Blonde” is purposely satirical, however, and really serves more to make fun of the blonde “Valley Girl” stereotype than to support it. There is even a cameo from a long-forgotten social icon, Angelyne, which furthers the movie’s mocking of itself. Angelyne, while only briefly seen, was nominated for a Raspberry Award for her performance in Earth Girls, demonstrating the underlying level of petty hatred the public had for her and the lifestyle she represented. Still, Earth Girls itself almost tries to up-play the vapidness of its characters as a parody, as if trying to get the audience to laugh at the incredulousness of their behavior, while simultaneously rooting for them. More than 20 years later, I can only guess that the film originally provided a sense of escapism to the curious. A dose of supposed “Valley life” for those on the outside.

At times the movie can feel jarring; the most notable scene being when a conversation by the pool suddenly cuts to the musical number, “’Cause I’m a Blonde.” This was done to make up for several scenes that had been dropped from the final cut, and ends up leaving certain transitions into scenes overly noticeable.

Like every cult classic, Earth Girls Are Easy isn’t without its flaws. Luckily, its charm outweighs its imperfections. And while its high-energy goofiness may not be for everyone, it nevertheless has slowly been climbing the ranks of Cult Classics as it is rediscovered by old and new generations. If you ever need a shot of perky and fun energy, Earth Girls is the perfect film to deliver it.

Libby White is a self-proclaimed cinephile and Volunteer Firefighter who currently works as a Guard for Nissan’s headquarters in Tennessee.

A Study in Contrasts: ‘The Hunger’

Perhaps for the movie’s purposes, that doesn’t matter: the story seems to be far more driven by the desire to create an artistic film, rather than an intellectually/ethically/scientifically engaging narrative. The scientific aspect for example—the part of the film I found personally most engaging, that it is possible to tamper with the natural life-cycle, halting the aging process in its tracks—is touched upon but it seems, at least to me, to be more of a plot device for bringing Sarah into Miriam’s life than an attempt to explore an ethically challenging issue. The biology behind Miriam’s present state and the fate of her lovers is similarly irrelevant.

John Blaylock in the opening scene, set to music by Bauhaus

This guest post by Amanda Civitello and Rebecca Bennett appears as part of our theme week on Cult Films and B Movies.

The Hunger, the 1983 art-house vampire flick by director Tony Scott, is perhaps the definition of “cult film,” with its plot, characterization, soundtrack, and costuming skirting the line between camp and Art. It might not be an especially good movie, despite its all-star cast – Catherine Deneuve stars as the immortal vampire, Miriam; David Bowie plays her centuries-old lover John; Susan Sarandon stars as Sarah, a scientific researcher who becomes Miriam’s new love interest – but it’s frequently beautiful and grotesque, often at the same time. It is, after all, a lavish vampire movie whose vampires are educated, cultured, and well-traveled, but definitely not “vegetarian.” Miriam and John live in a luxurious New York City townhouse decorated with antiquities that serve as a kind of timeline of her existence; she, after all, is an ancient Egyptian. John is a far more recent development (the 18^th century) in her life, for the curse of Miriam’s existence is that those whom she turns enjoy an extraordinarily long lifespan, but are not immortal. Over the course of the film, we realize that John’s accelerated aging has put Miriam on the search for a new lover, so that she will not be alone when he finally expires. Dr. Sarah Roberts, a gerontologist, enters Miriam’s life at the perfect time. Ultimately, The Hunger succeeds as a work of visual art but fails on its narrative: rather than engage with the ethical issues raised by ancient vampires living and hunting in contemporary New York, it often refrains from exploring these complex tensions, privileging the visual over the story, making for a rich picture whose story falls flat. For those looking for a “classy” vampire movie for Halloween, this might be it – but be warned, art-house or not, The Hunger is incredibly bloody.

[RB]: The first thing that strikes me in watching the film is the interesting juxtaposition between the contemporary (1980s) and the classical. You see this in the soundtrack, of course, but also in the costuming and the set design. The Blaylock townhouse, for example, is filled with a seeming hodgepodge of antiquities and yet its inhabitants are thoroughly modern.

[AC]: I think it makes sense to approach the film this way, because it’s most successful as an audio-visual experience; it’s far less successful as a story. Let’s start with the music, because that’s something that almost overwhelms the film itself. The soundtrack is really beautiful in its blending of classical work (Ravel, Délibes, Allegri) with the original soundtrack by Howard Blake, and the occasional contemporary popular work.

[RB]: And this is most effective when there’s more than one kind of contrast. For example, the scene in which the aging John attempts to feed is backed by upbeat hiphop but set within a vintage-looking space, with archways and pillars. Alongside the presence of the beatbox and rollerblades, there’s this fairly antique vampire attempting to murder someone for sustenance. Tony Scott reinforces and even exploits our natural tendency to compare and contrast in the way the scenes are constructed.

[AC]: And there’s the contrast between Miriam and John’s cultured daytime existence and the primal, animalistic nature of their nighttime excursions. I think the soundtrack is used really effectively to that end. Consider the love scene between Miriam and Sarah – which is largely responsible for the film’s cult status. It begins with an impromptu concert in which Miriam plays Délibes’s “The Flower Duet,” from the opera Lakmé, and then, as they go to bed, changes to a vocal performance of the duet. It’s a beautifully romantic, soft love scene, set as it is against such a heady, operatic song. And then Miriam removes the cap from her ankh pendant, and suddenly there’s blood – and through it all, the soundtrack continues with the duet.

[RB]: This is also the case when John murders Alice, one of their music students. She’s playing a beautifully haunting piece of music which continues even as John slits her throat. There seems to be a persistent juxtaposition of the horrific and bloody against the beautiful, such as during the love scene between Sarah and Miriam. The movie’s costuming is similarly effective. As well as simply serving to emphasise just how divine Deneuve truly is, there’s something of a vintage feel to her clothing which reiterates what we already know about her character—that Miriam is a centuries old vampire. I think it’s worth comparing Miriam and Sarah to make this distinction. Sarah is consistently dressed in distinctly modern clothes—androgynous suits and cotton t-shirts. Miriam, on the other hand, though hardly decked out in the eighteenth century garb we see in the flashback to the beginning of Miriam and John’s time together, seems to be somewhat inspired by the elegance of the 1940s.

[AC]: The Hunger is one of those films in which Deneuve was exclusively dressed by Yves Saint Laurent (another is Indochine). Sarandon was not. There’s such a contrast in the design and aesthetics of their clothes; using YSL sets Deneuve apart from everyone else, who wear whatever the wardrobe department rustled up. Miriam’s distinctive look – a big part of what Sarandon’s character deems “European” – is in large part the YSL look. YSL is for the modern, classically elegant, powerful woman – and I think that’s basically Miriam’s character, in a nutshell. That’s important when you’ve got Miriam, dressed to the nines in YSL suits and veiled hats, prowling a nightclub for unsuspecting people to murder. Because she’s wearing clothes that are identifiably YSL – and that don’t exist as “costumes” – the film is able to reinforce that contrast between Miriam’s refinement and animalism while emphasizing her modernity. She might be a glam vampire, but she’s not an Elizabethan caricature.

Classical music — Miriam, John, and their young music student, Alice

[RB]: You learn something new every day! YSL or not, I do still think that Miriam’s costumes serve to emphasise the fact her “otherness” for lack of a better word, as well as the rather dangerous brand of elegance and sensuality which draws people like John and Sarah into her web.

[AC]: I think the film encapsulates that attraction really well, but is confusing on other points. I haven’t read the novel (or its subsequent sequels), but I think part of the reason why the story fails is because it doesn’t elaborate on the novel’s ideas about the nature of vampirism, which takes a sci-fi approach. In the novel, Miriam wasn’t ever human; she’s a different kind of species that resists aging and is very hard to kill. She learns that she can transfer some of her traits, like an extended lifespan, to a lover by sharing blood. This explains why her lovers can’t be turned completely, and why they hover as empty shells. The central premise of the film doesn’t really make sense without this justification. If you approach the film with more traditional vampire lore in mind, you’re searching for a reasonable explanation for why the lovers she turns don’t turn all the way – and moreover, you have to try to work out how Miriam managed to get the way she is. The novel’s reasoning makes far more sense.

Club dudes — The Manhattan nightclub John and Miriam frequent in order to hunt

[RB]: Perhaps for the movie’s purposes, that doesn’t matter: the story seems to be far more driven by the desire to create an artistic film, rather than an intellectually/ethically/scientifically engaging narrative. The scientific aspect for example—the part of the film I found personally most engaging, that it is possible to tamper with the natural life-cycle, halting the aging process in its tracks—is touched upon but it seems, at least to me, to be more of a plot device for bringing Sarah into Miriam’s life than an attempt to explore an ethically challenging issue. The biology behind Miriam’s present state and the fate of her lovers is similarly irrelevant.

[AC]: One thing that I really wish the film had actually addressed is the tension of Miriam’s existence. We know that the fact that she’s condemned a parade of lovers to a miserable half-life, locked away in steel coffins but still “conscious,” tortures her. She actively looks to science to extend John’s life by following Sarah’s research; when it becomes apparent that he has declined beyond all hope, she mourns. And yet, she still turns her attention to someone new. Why?

[RB]: I suppose as distraught as Miriam might be by the loss of John and her many other lovers, loneliness would be worse. She loves her companions, but it would be worse to exist alone rather than remain faithful to the memory of what they once were and mourn perpetually. Or perhaps it simply serves to drive the narrative forward!

[AC]: And what does that say about her as a character? On the one hand, while it isn’t anything new to see a female villain, Miriam has a conscience. It’s almost as if she can’t help herself.

[RB]: I think it’s significant that she’s motivated by that fear of loneliness. After all, her former lovers are all trapped in those steel coffins because she cannot bear to kill them and end their suffering. It’s incredibly selfish – as is her plan to turn Sarah – but incredibly sad as well.

Miriam mourning — Miriam in mourning for John

[AC]: I have to say, I really despise the ending (in which her former lovers extract their revenge on Miriam, helping Sarah to make Miriam like them), because it doesn’t make sense. In the DVD commentary, Sarandon says, “All the rules that we’d spent the entire film delineating, that Miriam lived forever and was indestructible, and all the people that she transformed [eventually] died, and that I killed myself rather than be an addict [were ignored]. Suddenly I was kind of living, she was kind of half dying… Nobody knew what was going on, and I thought that was a shame.” And I think she’s right. Beyond being implausible in a narrative sense, the ending basically rewrites everything we’ve come to know about Sarah. I think it would have been a more satisfying end to the film to have seen Miriam in London, alone at her piano or, alternatively, with a new lover. It would have been a far more powerful statement for Sarah to have killed herself, and for the final scenes to show Miriam facing the prospect of eternity alone.

Amanda Civitello and Rebecca Bennett are the two halves of a very happy couple who became close while collaborating on this review of Sleepy Hollow, which probably makes them the first Bitch Flicks couple. Together they founded and edit Iris | New Fiction, a new, nonprofit literary magazine of fiction, poetry, and visual art for LGBTQ+ teens and their allies. Catch up with Amanda at her site and twitter, and say hi to Rebecca on twitter.

‘Enough Said’: The Ex-Wife, the Masseuse, and Her Lover

James Gandolfini as Albert and Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Eva

This is a guest post by Heather Brown.

The only other Nicole Holofcener film I had seen before Enough Said (2013) was Walking and Talking (1996), a delightful indie movie about Gen X-ers trying to navigate love and friendship in NYC. Though there are many fans of the movies she made in between these two—and many compelling reviews—I wasn’t sure I needed to hurry up and watch them. I figured that I, like many viewers, pretty well know that rich, white people have problems just like the rest of us. Granted, most of us generally slog through life without quandaries like having to worry about why the maid insists on putting the hairbrush in the silverware drawer. But now that I’ve seen Holofcener’s latest you can bet that I’ll be moving other films like Please Give (2010) and Lovely and Amazing (2001) up on my Netflix queue.

Enough Said is set against the backdrop of people in L.A. with economic and social privilege that goes unremarked upon, but Holofcener does not dwell on these factors and instead shines a light on the flaws and vulnerabilities of middle-aged single parents in a way that is sympathetic and tender. It doesn’t hurt that one of these characters, Albert, is played by the late James Gandolfini, whose slobby charm is made even more winsome by fact that this was one of his final film performances. Albert is about as sweet and low-key as Tony Soprano was fierce and explosive, and it’s easy to see how the earthy masseuse Eva (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) finds him endearing.

Catherine Keener as Marianne and Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Eva in Enough Said — Catherine Keener as Marianne and Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Eva in *Enough Said*

As the story goes, Albert and Eva are introduced at a party, and later he asks her out to dinner. Unbeknownst to them both, the party that brought them together also put Eva in conversation with Albert’s ex-wife, Marianne, played by Catherine Keener. Marianne is a poet, which Eva finds intriguing. And as it happens, Marianne is also in need of a good masseuse. You know what happens next. Would that Albert and Marianne’s separation was an amicable one, perhaps there would be nothing to discuss about her ex as she lay prone on the massage table as Eva works her magic. Not so, of course. Once Eva realizes that the man she finds herself growing more and more attracted to is the very man Marianne can’t cease to skewer during each massage, trouble starts brewing.

What follows is Eva eagerly drinking in Marianne’s ire about Albert, as she reads Eva a list of his faults. Unsurprisingly, many of these shortcomings involve his eating, hygiene, dress, and home décor tendencies. (As Marianne tells her, “My ex-husband and I had zero in common, and I was completely repulsed by him sexually.”) Eva can’t seem to trust her own feelings and judgment and gets deeper into a one-sided friendship with Marianne, whose narcissism is almost too obvious for Eva to notice.

All that said, the plot really turns on Eva’s relationship with her daughter Ellen (Tracey Fairaway), and her impending departure to college on the opposite coast. Eva is having a difficult time losing her daughter to this inevitable next step (and indeed, so is Albert, whose daughter Tess, played by Eve Hawson, is also on her way out of the nest). Because we follow Eva’s story the closest, we, too, are put through the emotional ringer of seeing Eva express her desire to pull Ellen tighter by proxy of Ellen’s friend Chloe (Tavi Gevinson), who feels closer to Eva than she does her own mother. Ellen resents her mother’s misplaced neediness, and their conflict is handled with nuance and grace. And it’s not as if Eva’s married friends Will and Sarah (played by Ben Falcone and Toni Colette) have it figured out; Sarah, for instance, is obsessed with rearranging the furniture, which Will finds perplexing. Their exchanges are especially amusing, as is much of the film overall.

Still from Enough Said — Still from *Enough Said*

What I found most compelling about this film is Eva’s obsession with Albert’s physicality, but not for the reasons you might expect. Yes, Albert is clearly overweight and could stand to show up to a second date with a button-down instead of a T-shirt, but it’s the way that Eva tallies up his faults that shows her to be the one who could stand to do some work on herself. Audiences are quite used to seeing relationships in romantic comedies wherein men and women’s attractiveness is asymmetrical (see: almost every Judd Apatow film). If you’re like me, you find this troubling and tired and yet another example of Hollywood’s gendered double standard. But Enough Said calls into question Eva’s superficiality and preoccupation with Albert’s physical flaws (from his caloric intake to his loud, labored nose breathing) rather than condone her attitude as a reasonable response. Holofcener offers a subtle yet powerful critique of women’s tendencies to promote amongst themselves an ethos of moral superiority as expressed in physical health and well-being. After all, the central irony of Eva is that while her livelihood is to provide a healthful touch, she will not allow herself to be the recipient of the same tenderness. Practicing massage requires acceptance and kindness toward the body—something that does not come easy to her when it comes to letting herself connect with Albert.

Without spoiling the ending, let’s just say Enough Said leaves us with a sweetly unresolved last scene. It’s rare that a romantic-comedy hints that in fact, yes, it is possible for people to come together without the expectation that one or both people need to change in order to win the other’s affection. Holofcener’s film makes a refreshing case for suspending judgment for the sake of trusting one’s gut feeling—and the importance of following your own way.

Heather Brown lives in Chicago, Ill., and works as a freelance instructional designer and online writing instructor. She lives for feminism, movies, live music, road trips, and cheese.

The Way We Talk: Cody’s ‘Paradise’ and Hess’ ‘Austenland’

When the trailers for Jerusha Hess’ Austenland and Diablo Cody’s Paradise first premiered, there was a lot of talk about the two young female directors and their debut films. Each woman had good credits, Cody for writing the academy award-winning script for Juno, and Hess for her work on the surprising cult-hit, Napoleon Dynamite.

At first, the hype was positive; Cody would hopefully turn out another witty conglomerate of social insight and angsty sarcasm and Hess might bring a quirky, women’s-focused comedy to the table.

Written by Rachel Redfern

When the trailers for Jerusha Hess’ Austenland and Diablo Cody’s Paradise first premiered, there was a lot of talk about the two young female directors and their debut films. Each woman had good credits–Cody for writing the academy award-winning script for Juno, and Hess for her work on the surprising cult-hit Napoleon Dynamite.

At first, the hype was positive; Cody would hopefully turn out another witty conglomerate of social insight and angsty sarcasm and Hess might bring a quirky, women-focused comedy to the table.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Blu3_Mxpimc”]

And then they each released a bit more information about their projects: Cody’s Paradise was a story of a young Christian woman recovering from a plane who decides to sample the pleasures of the world in Las Vegas. And Hess’ Austenland featured an obsessed Austen fan who travels to England to live out her unrealistic romantic fantasies in an Austen theme park.

Instantly, the tone surrounding the two films changed; Paradise would be an edgier piece with great commentary about the loss of innocence, whereas Austenland would be a fluffy rehash of romantic clichés.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbHr8YyjSlg”]

In the world of “women’s film,” the conversation can move quickly from one of support, to one of derision. Even just a film’s association with a topic normally seen as “girly” is instantly belittled and pushed to the background. A shame, since Jane Austen’s insight into social classes and wealth make her still relevant today, and some of her writings included fabulous satire about over-indulgent romantic media. By extension, Austenland had some true potential for meta-commentary about romantic comedies and the dangers of “fandom.”

Unfortunately, both films have disappointed critics, box office sales, and audiences—neither film proving to be original, funny or insightful (or apparently, even well-acted).

But the worst part is, setbacks like these always take female directing down a bit, proving fodder for those who make quippy remarks about how women “just aren’t funny,” and can’t really direct. With only 11% of Hollywood directors being women, we still under-represent half the population going to see movies in a big way, and it’s always sad to see young directors struggling after only one film.

But, hopefully, Hess and Cody won’t give up, and instead, will return with new stunningly original characters and winning comedy. We need it.

What do you think? Did you enjoy Paradise or Austenland? How will this impact female directors in the future? Can they bounce back from these two flops?

Older Women Week: The Extraordinary Romance of an Ordinary "Old Girl": Thoughts on ‘Ali: Fear Eats the Soul’

Of course older women have traditionally not been allowed to be sexual beings, and mothers have always been held to a higher sexual standard than fathers. In fact, when a woman of any age does not conform or transgresses sexually she customarily suffers greater social condemnation. What Ali: Fear Eats the Soul makes clear is that the Whore-Madonna complex still reigned supreme in 1970s Germany. When Emmi first tells her daughter and son-in-law that she has fallen in love with a much younger man, they laugh. The thought of an old mother in love and lust is so impossible, so unnatural—horrific, in fact—that laughter is the only fitting response. When she introduces her children to her new husband, one son calls her a whore and another kicks in her television. In the eyes of her deeply conventional, racist children, Emmi is guilty of the most profane double betrayal—racial disloyalty and defilement of the maternal role.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

This is a guest post by Rachael Johnson.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is a tale of interracial and intergenerational love set in West Germany in the 1970s. It was both written and directed by one of the key figures of the New German Cinema, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In his short yet productive life–he died aged 37 of a drug-related heart attack–the workaholic Fassbinder made countless remarkable films and pursued an equally remarkable private life. Anti-bourgeois and anti-establishment, the bisexual Bavarian earned a legendary reputation as a flammable wild child and libertine of extreme appetites. Influenced by Douglas Sirk’s socially subversive melodramas, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is a fascinating exploration of sexual taboos and non-conformity as well as a searing critique of German racism. It is, also, a deeply affecting love story.

The lovers are Ali, a Moroccan-born mechanic in his thirties and Emmi, a white German woman around 60. Tall, bearded and muscular, Ali is played by El Hedi ben Salam, then a lover of the director. Emmi, played by Brigitte Mira, is a small woman of average looks with a pleasant, pudgy face. There is nothing glamorous about Fassbinder’s heroine, and it is this very ordinariness that endears her to the viewer and makes the story all the more poignant. A lonely widow with three married children she rarely sees, there is, it seems, little remarkable about Emmi either. Nor is she a privileged hausfrau. She cleans for a living.

The bar

The two meet in a bar frequented by Arab immigrants. Emmi takes shelter from the rain, but she is also drawn by the ‘exotic’ music. It is a fairly odd scene. The bar maid is a buxom, blonde German woman, and there is only a handful of customers. They stare impassively at Emmi when she enters. A long shot emphasizes her vulnerability and isolation. She sits by the door and asks the bar maid about her clientele and selection of music. She orders a coke and keeps her coat on. The women mock her and a female companion of Ali prods him to dance with ‘the old girl.’ He obeys her with a mock salute. The others stare at the couple, of course, but Ali is gracious, and they learn a little about each other. He accompanies Emmi home and their extraordinary romance begins in a sweet, ordinary fashion.

Fassbinder lays bare the nasty, pervasive nature of racism in West German society during the seventies. Ali, we soon learn, only calls himself Ali because white Germans have maliciously given him the stereotypical name. His life is hard. He works constantly and drinks heavily. He tells Emmi that he shares a room with five other foreign workers. ‘German master/Arab dog’ is how he describes race relations at his garage. Racism is a constant in the lovers’ lives. Emmi listens with unease as her fellow cleaning women dole out dehumanizing descriptions of immigrants as dirty, lazy, dangerous and hypersexual. Her female neighbors gossip incessantly about her affair and fix merciless eyes on her lover. Her son-in-law, Eugen, played by Fassbinder himself, is a lazy boor enraged at the mere mention of his Turkish foreman. When her landlord’s son accuses her of subletting due to Ali’s presence, Emmi tells him that the young Moroccan is her fiancé. The ruse becomes a reality when they mutually agree to tie the knot. Emmi’s children, neighbors and co-workers ostracize her and her new husband. She is forced to eat lunch alone at work, and he is humiliated by the local shop-keeper. Only the passage of time and naked self-interest mellow their attitude.

Ali surrounded by Emmi’s coworkers

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul explores the impact of racism on human relationships. Fassbinder specifically underscores how its evil even infects those of an intimate nature. Emmi’s relationship with Ali sours and she is shown to be capable of reproducing the racism of her compatriots. Impatient with his craving for couscous, a sign, of course, of deep homesickness, she tells her husband to adapt to German customs. On one occasion, she encourages her co-workers’ sexual objectification of Ali, an objectification that smacks of unsavory white voyeurism. When he quits the room, she puts it down to a changeable ‘foreign mentality.’ Emmi is, of course, a product of her nation’s past. In the 1970s, Germany’s history of genocidal racism was still a living, breathing memory. Emmi was a young woman when the Nazis were in power. When she tells Ali that she and her father were members of the party, it is a quiet, forever mind-blowing reminder that membership was the norm.

Emmi with Eugen and Krista

There are, nevertheless, indications that Emmi was always a little different. She crosses borders. Her parents did not want her to marry a foreigner after the war, but she married a Polish man. She is not a xenophobe like her father. She enters the immigrants’ bar because she is drawn to the sounds of others. Emmi is genuinely curious about other cultures and accepts cultural differences. She is hospitable and questions why white Germans and foreigners cannot be friends. She is appalled to hear of Ali’s intolerable living conditions. Curiosity, empathy, attraction and love make up Emmi’s feelings for Ali. Although she will never suffer the daily degradations and abuse he suffers, she is also a victim of racism. Although she tries to hide it, she is, in fact, tormented by the hatred besieging them. Emmi is derided and marginalized by white Germans for loving and marrying an Arab man. A neighbor asks, at one point, if she is a ‘real’ German due to her Polish last name. White women who have affairs with North African and Turkish foreign workers are labeled ‘filthy whores’ by her co-workers. Although a manifestly provincial product of her time and place, Emmi artlessly manages to challenge German racism through the simple, human act of loving. In the socio-historical context of post-war West Germany, she is a nonconformist.

Ali and Emmi

Seemingly unsophisticated, Emmi also breaks sexual taboos. She is a desiring old woman, and it is this desire that outrages and disgusts her children. Of course older women have traditionally not been allowed to be sexual beings, and mothers have always been held to a higher sexual standard than fathers. In fact, when a woman of any age does not conform or transgresses sexually she customarily suffers greater social condemnation. What Ali: Fear Eats the Soul makes clear is that the Whore-Madonna complex still reigned supreme in 1970s Germany. When Emmi first tells her daughter and son-in-law that she has fallen in love with a much younger man, they laugh. The thought of an old mother in love and lust is so impossible, so unnatural–horrific, in fact–that laughter is the only fitting response. When she introduces her children to her new husband, one son calls her a whore and another kicks in her television. In the eyes of her deeply conventional, racist children, Emmi is guilty of the most profane double betrayal–racial disloyalty and defilement of the maternal role.

Her daughter Krista mirrors her brothers. She calls Emmi’s home ‘a pigsty.’ There is, it must be said, little female solidarity apparent in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. The older woman’s female peers and acquaintances seem for the most part to be slaves of convention, regarding issues of race and gender. Ali’s female friends are manifestly threatened by Emmi’s sexuality. One calls his wife ‘a filthy old whore’ behind her back. ‘It’ll never work out. It’s unnatural, plain unnatural,’ she spits, with some jealousy. Does Fassbinder identify women in particular with convention? Or does he see his female characters as parts of the patriarchal system?

Emmi and Ali embrace

Fassbinder’s portrayal of Emmi’s passion is, however, empathetic and quite revolutionary. He never depicts the older woman’s desire as warped and unnatural, and it is worth reflecting how rare an attitude this is on screen. Emmi’s sexual subjectivity is acknowledged. When she momentarily looks at Ali showering, she tells him, ‘You are very beautiful, Ali.’ Her looking does not here denote exploitative voyeurism. Her softly delivered words are addressed to her husband only. He smiles back at her. An older female gaze, of course, doubly reverses cinematic male-female conventions of objectification. In this very short scene, the director recognizes Emmi’s subversive female gaze while, it must be said, expressing his own sexuality. Ultimately, Fassbinder understands that his heroine is, at heart, driven by an entirely natural desire for intimate human companionship as well as a simple need for love.

Their intergenerational relationship comprises painful personal humiliations–issuing from racism and infidelity–but it is also an essentially loving one. Ali’s everyday interactions with Emmi are, from the very start, characterized by kindness, devotion and respect. He and Emmi share their insecurities, comfort each other and enjoy each other’s company. Her daughter’s so-called conventional marriage pales in comparison. There are many achingly poignant, well-observed moments in this love story. On the street where she lives, an anxious Emmi fearing that she had lost her new love, cries Ali’s name before running toward him like a little girl. The warm, relaxed way Ali strokes Emmi’s arm their first night together is another arresting sign of their unusual bond. Their supposedly impossible relationship always seems authentic. Fassbinder reveals the unlikely pair’s fundamental affinities. They are both victims of loneliness and social alienation, and they are both hard-working, working-class people.

Emmi and Ali have dinner

There is an essential humanity to Fassbinder’s characterization of both lovers, and their unusual love story is told with tenderness. Unsurprisingly, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul was well received internationally. It honors the empathetic imagination and pays touching tribute to the outsider. It also shows how an ordinary ‘old girl’ can quietly tear down racial boundaries as well as defy conventional expectations of female desire.

Rachael Johnson has contributed articles to CINEACTION, www.objectif-cinema.com and www.jgcinema.com.

Girl Meets Girl, The Movie: On the Color-Drenched Postcards from Paradise in Al Benoit’s ‘Warpaint’

Movie still from Warpaint

This is a guest post by Jaye Johnson previously appeared at Gay Agenda and is cross-posted with permission.

“All that I know is I’m breathing.” —from an untitled song on the Warpaint soundtrack

Carey and Audrey, the two totes adorbs heroines in Al Benoit’s coming-of-age girl-girl drama Warpaint fall delightfully in line with the 20-something-year-old indie filmmaker’s aesthetic, in that there is (seemingly) no aesthetic—that’s how seamless this fully Kickstarter-funded production is.

In her own words, here’s a nice little backgrounder from the director.

Warpaint, a short film, tells the story of Carey and Audrey, two seventeen-year-old girls who fall in love over a summer at their parents’ lake houses. Warpaint was a passion project, inspired by a someone very close to me. We made it on a very minimal budget and a tight 4-day shooting schedule. We had just enough budget to rent out the C300, which was extremely lovely. I hope you enjoy our little film.

As you fall in love with Benoit’s narrative and her characters, you feel like you’re flipping through picture postcards of private, sweet memories. You recall similar memories of your own.

Movie still from Warpaint

Many kids are self-aware and snarky, sarcastic and so on, but Audrey and Carey only lightly touch upon such nuanced, grownup humor. It’s evident they’re still kids when they argue about one of them almost saying a “bad word,” or say curse words such as “bull poop.” They’re still figuring things out, and that element is one of the many enchanting elements in Warpaint.

There’s no prurience here, only innocence. Even though the characters’ dialogue can be snarky and naughty at times, the vibe is entirely about young women acting their age … both girls are only 17. Nobody’s trying to be precocious here, and as their relationship evolves, romance hits them both as a pleasant yet natural surprise, as they’re both still at that nebulous age where holding hands may or may not be read as having lesbian tendencies. Their relationship is given time to breathe, and they’re able to figure out their own footing, no matter how uncertain the steps are.

Movie still from Warpaint

Benoit’s directorial work brings to mind the lyricism of filmmaker Ang Lee, in that the soundtrack does a lot of the talking for the characters, and the landscape, environment, and scenery evoke much of the mood. No talky dialogue is needed. This filmmakers knows the craft enough to leverage all its pieces and tell a story well. The soundtrack selections are light and playful, at times wistful, glittery, summery, sweeping, and reflective.

There’s much laughter … there are many long takes of one girl or another gazing directly at the camera (and into your soul). Much of the sadness and complexity of their love for each other happens off camera and is only vaguely referred to in the conversations we get to hear. Their time is limited, and they’re going to make the most of it, as joyfully as possible, paying little or no mind to any restraints, parental pressures, or closets to speak of.

Movie still from Warpaint

Too, these young women aren’t punished for loving each other or for having lesbian tendencies (that all too common go-to film trope is hopefully so easy and so over), and what the girls go through together is realistic and authentic. Nothing’s easily solved or resolved, but we, along with the characters, see their time together as something to be savored, no matter how bittersweet.

We clock time with the characters as they frolic, muse, sail (yes, child–sailing!), play make believe, run, skip, jump … just all of it. Benoit isn’t afraid to let these young girls go there … stories don’t always have to be about kids who are 17 going on 35. And haven’t you had a gorgeous memory or two memories like that? Y’know, playful, happy?

Sweet?

Click here to visit writer-director Al Benoit’s homepage. To watch Warpaint, click here.

Jaye Johnson is a social media & content manager (plus: VA and writer, ‘natch). If you’re looking to connect with an LGBTQ-inclusive editorial assistant and/or manager for content curation (a.k.a. White Hat editorial SEO, social shares), PR help, “content massage,” admin assistance and overall good vibes, she welcomes you to get in touch.

‘Elizabethtown’ After the Manic Pixie Dream Girl

DVD cover for Elizabethtown

This is a guest review by Amanda Civitello.

When she was ten, my little sister pronounced herself a “Young Feminist in Training” and authored an editorial for a school newspaper entitled, “Sarah Palin: Feminist? No!” I was surprised, then, when she said last week that she wanted to watch Elizabethtown for our girls’ movie night. “Really?” I asked. “The film that launched the Manic Pixie Dream Girl?” She shrugged, and, as she predicted, I loved it. I loved it for what it is: a fun little moralistic summer movie with a good soundtrack and an interesting – if somewhat farfetched – premise, as well as an incredibly moving final fifteen minutes. The story of a failed shoe designer whose plans for suicide in the wake of his “fiasco” are foiled by his father’s premature death, writer/director Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown stars Orlando Bloom as Drew, the brooding architect of a catastrophic business failure, and Kirsten Dunst as Claire, the woman who descends from the sky – practically literally; she’s a flight attendant – to rescue him from his melancholy with an overabundance of quirky good cheer. But rather than find it a guilty pleasure, something I liked in spite of the inadequacies and disappointments of its manic pixie of a female lead character, I found that Claire didn’t really merit the MPDG moniker at all.

From its first appearance, in a review of Elizabethtown by film critic Nathan Rabin, the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” seemed preternaturally possessed of staying power. It had two things going for it: a catchy name and truth. There are too many films in which a female lead seems to exist solely to improve the outlook of the male lead with a winning combination of pep, quirkiness, and vintage clothing. Unsurprisingly, it’s very easy to find a plethora of examples of characters fitting this trope.

Kirsten Dunst (Claire) and Orlando Bloom (Drew) in Elizabethtown. This is just before Drew tells Claire she needn’t make jokes to be likeable.

The idea of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl was, at the beginning, a critique of those films that view women through an unabashedly male gaze, in which the viewer identifies primarily with the leading man and is therefore predisposed to regarding the leading lady as an extension of the man. (Elizabethtown makes Drew the identifiable character from the first few moments, which consist of voiceovers from Orlando Bloom. We’re definitely supposed to watch Claire, not stand in her shoes.) In many cases – as in the case of Elizabethtown, as Nathan Rabin so rightly argued – the female character does serve to remind the male of his zest for life, and that’s all she seems to do. The MPDG was meant to describe a phenomenon of the male gaze as evident in scripts written by men and films made by men, as Rabin explicitly stated: “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” At its inception, therefore, the MPDG was all about critiquing men. In recent years, however, as writers have pointed out, the MPDG label has expanded to become more broad. It’s often used to describe a kind of woman, rather than how she is written/seen by a man, and to incorporate characters and films – like Annie Hall – without good reason, and has actually been used to describe real women. It’s even become shorthand for one real woman in particular: Zooey Deschanel. It’s ridiculously simplistic and extraordinarily misogynistic to reduce a real woman to a trope.

For me, then, the MPDG label, while it started out as a catchy, if somewhat simplisti, truthism, turned problematic and even pejorative in recent years. (As a side note, because it isn’t really germane to this post: using the word “manic” is troubling as well. After all, “manic” is a weighty word, associated as it is with bipolar disorder. There are other, but less memorable, words that could better describe the kind of peppy, preternatural cheerfulness that hangs about these characters. My discomfort with the use of “manic” is compounded when the character demonstrates depressive tendencies, as does Claire in Elizabethtown. When the term is applied to real people with real conditions it’s even more troubling, as it is here to Edith Bouvier Beale, who suffered from a stress-related condition with tragic consequences.) It was, therefore, with great relief that I read the many articles this past spring/summer heralding the demise of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. You don’t need me to summarize them, so check out these posts from Jezebel and xojane, and let’s get back to Elizabethtown, because now that we have poked holes in the trope itself, and others have concurred or found other reasons to get rid of it, I think the film that launched the MPDG deserves a second look.

“Do you ever just think, ‘I’m fooling everybody?'” — Claire

Elizabethtown is an interesting little indie-esque effort from Cameron Crowe. By and large, it succumbs far too readily to mistakes that detract from the enjoyment of the film. The great moments – and there are two – manage to redeem it in my estimation. The first is a long conversation between Drew and Claire, in which Bloom and Dunst really manage to capture the joy of recognizing oneself in someone else, and in which Crowe effectively contrasts their discussion – alternately probing and amusingly shallow – with the ordinary tasks we all do while on the phone. The second sequence is Drew’s cross-country road trip with his father’s ashes, following a map that Claire has (mostly unbelievably) made for him. The stops on Claire’s map are all places of historic, national, or cultural importance. Drew scatters some of his father’s ashes in the waters of the Mississippi and along a stretch of flat American highway surrounded by farmland. He visits the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel and Earnestine and Hazel’s Bar & Grill in Tennessee. It’s a reminder of all the things worth seeing and visiting in this country (and, like lots of other reviewers, has made me totally game for a road trip). Drew’s trip is juxtaposed with memories of his childhood, and we see little Drew dancing and roadtripping with his dad, and it’s this connection – the idea that someone’s dad can be to him as great a man as Martin Luther King, Jr. – that is really compelling. But these effective and moving scenes are hampered by the many, many scenes that don’t work, most notably Drew’s mother Hollie’s (Susan Sarandon) big moment at her husband’s memorial. That, unfortunately, is the victim of poor editing: the first part of her scene is a comedy routine detailing all the things she’s tried to learn since her husband’s death, and at one point, borders on the ridiculously crass (it is a memorial service, after all). The second part, the part that should have stood mostly on its own, with only a few words of introduction, is a moving little tap dance she performs to their favorite song. Like the road trip that follows, it’s a quiet, personal moment that’s deeply rooted in the little things that give life meaning.

With regard to its female characters, Elizabethtown has far more issues. Of the three female characters – Claire, Drew’s sister Heather, and their mother, Hollie – each is the victim of poor writing. The characterization of Heather in particular is downright egregious: it seems that her only personality trait is a kind of modern-day hysteria. She’s a woman who begs her brother to “handle everything” with regard to their father’s death because he’s the only one capable of it, who watches her mother flit from activity to activity in a frantic display of unmoored grief, and occasionally widens her eyes and throws up her hands and shrieks. While deep, raw grief is to be expected, as a grown woman with a kid, Heather is the caricature of the stereotypical woman who just can’t deal with it, because she’s just too darn emotional.

Drew and Claire

Claire, on the other hand, is at least compelling in spite of her faults. She’s interesting, and she has an admittedly underdeveloped back story. She’s a self-described “helper” and a “substitute person.” She invents trips to Hawaii and waxes on about boyfriends that don’t exist. She is, at her heart, immersed in much the same pursuit of happiness as Drew. She has her own struggles which we grasp only tenuously. The problem with Elizabethtown is that it doesn’t explore that complexity nearly enough – but not that it doesn’t exist in the first place. Claire isn’t a vacuously vapid MPDG; she has beginnings of a complex characterization that the writer only hints at, but doesn’t seem to think is worth developing. There were opportunities to do so: Why doesn’t the conversation about Claire’s unnecessary jokes continue? Why don’t we get to see an answer to Drew’s confrontation about the faux-boyfriend? Why, when we know as well as Drew that she has something slightly darker lurking beneath the quirky veneer, do we not get to see it? In my book, that’s a bit worse than creating a one-note plot device of a character.

So: did Claire deserve to be the original Manic Pixie Dream Girl? I don’t think so. I think it was perhaps a fair assessment upon a single viewing. But tucking her neatly into the MPDG box denies vital aspects of Claire’s character. True, we don’t know much about her ambition or life apart from Drew. That’s absolutely a failing on Cameron Crowe’s part as screenwriter. And for part of the film, Claire certainly does fill that role for Drew. She’s there to answer the phone when he wants someone – anyone – to talk to, happy to sit on hold waiting for him while he bounces between his fuming ex-girlfriend and crying sister, neither of whom – credit where it’s due – particularly like being kept on hold. Claire is the placid one, patiently waiting her turn to work her magic, as Drew expects. What saves Elizabethtown is that Drew comes to recognize that his sort-of girlfriend is not an MPDG.

“I’m impossible to forget, but I’m hard to remember.” — Claire

When Drew says, “You don’t have to make a joke. I like you without the jokes,” he pinpoints Claire for what she is: a complex character hiding behind a cheerful façade. Midway through the movie, he realizes that he doesn’t need Claire to be anything but who she is. He calls her out for the jokes he previously found engaging and attractive and confronts her about her imaginary boyfriend Ben. It’s a shame that Elizabethtown doesn’t show us this new Claire. We’re presented with a glimpse of the real woman, and then she slips away. This most interesting shift, when Drew realizes that he doesn’t want an MPDG for a girlfriend anyway, is given the least amount of exploration, because the film almost immediately switches to the long closing sequence of Drew’s cross-country road trip, back to the overarching theme of grief.

Drew isn’t the only one to think this way. Claire’s theory of “substitute people” actively refutes the MPDG pigeonhole. In describing this theory – which basically sounds a whole lot like Manic Pixie(-ish) Dream People – Claire is asserting that she knows perfectly well the image she projects. The implication, of course, is that it’s nothing but an image. She knows just as well as Drew that what she’s saying is a convenient label, nothing more. She’s aware of it in much the same way as is Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, although Clementine is far more direct in her refutation of the MPDG label: “Too many guys think I’m a concept, or I complete them, or I’m gonna make them alive. But I’m just a fucked-up girl who’s lookin’ for my own peace of mind; don’t assign me yours.”

“You shouldn’t be a substitute for anybody.” — Drew

Elizabethtown’s major problem is that it makes a halfhearted attempt to be a love story, when really, it’d have done far better to focus on grief. It would have been a much more compelling movie, because the moments that shine are the ones which have Drew – sometimes with Claire – facing the full implications of what happened. Would we have read the film differently from the start if there’d been no sex scene, no agonizing introspection over whether or not they’re dating? I think so. And it would have been refreshing to see a movie featuring a male/female friendship that wasn’t aching to become more.

In the end, from the oversaturated colors to the overwhelming (but expectedly awesome) soundtrack and the entirely implausible narrative, Elizabethtown is a kind of fairy tale: the kind of story that sticks with you in spite of its tenuous grip on reality, the kind of confection that you enjoy even though it falls apart when you look too closely. Cameron Crowe would have been better to structure Elizabethtown like 500 Days of Summer. 500 Days of Summer works because of its nonlinear narrative and impressionistic array of short scenes. Where Elizabethtown explicates far too much, spelling out each character’s thought process and motivation, 500 Days of Summer allows for the audience to draw conclusions and make connections between scenes. When the story is written in such a way, when there’s no need to explain everything, the characters can be more spontaneous. They can have moments in which they do not conform to our expectations of them. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind works, in part, for the same reason. ESotSM and 500 Days of Summer are not passive films. They require far more thought from the audience than does a film like Elizabethtown, where all plotlines seem to find a neat little happy ending. They work precisely because they’re impressionistic, which is, at least in my opinion, the most effective way to treat a modern fairytale.

Amanda Civitello is a Chicago-based freelance writer and Northwestern grad with an interest in arts and literary criticism. She has contributed reviews of Rebecca, Sleepy Hollow, and Downton Abbey to Bitch Flicks. You can find her online at amandacivitello.com.

‘Sixteen Candles,’ Rape Culture, and the Anti-Woman Politics of 2013

Movie posters for Sixteen Candles

Written by Stephanie Rogers (but not in time for Wedding Week).

Holy fuck this movie. I started watching it like OH YEAH MY CHILDHOOD MOLLY RINGWALD ADOLESCENCE IS SO HARD and after two scenes, I put that shit on pause like, WHEN DID SOMEONE WRITE ALL THESE RACIST HOMOPHOBIC SEXIST ABLEIST RAPEY PARTS THAT WEREN’T HERE BEFORE I WOULD’VE REMEMBERED THEM.

Nostalgia is a sneaky bitch.

I wanted to write about all the wonderful things I thought I remembered about Sixteen Candles: a sympathetic and complex female protagonist, the awkwardness of adolescence, the embarrassing interactions with parents and grandparents who JUST DON’T GET IT, crushing hard on older boys—and yes, all that stuff is still there. And of course, there’s that absolutely fantastic final wedding scene in which a woman consents to marry a dude while under the influence of a fuckload of muscle relaxers. OH WAIT WHUT.

Ginny Baker getting married while super high

Turns out, that shit ain’t so funny once feminism becomes a thing in your life.

The kind of adorable premise of Sixteen Candles is that Molly Ringwald (Samantha Baker) wakes up one morning as a sixteen-year-old woman who still hasn’t yet grown the breasts she wants. Her family, however, forgets her birthday because of the chaos surrounding her older sister Ginny’s upcoming wedding; relatives drive into town, future in-laws set up dinner dates, and poor Samantha gets the cold shoulder. It reminded me of the time my parents handed me an unwrapped Stephen King novel on my sixteenth birthday like a couple of emotionally neglectful and shitty assholes, but, you know, at least they REMEMBERED it.

Anyway, she rides the bus to school (with all the LOSERS), and in her Independent Study “class” the hot senior she likes, Jake Ryan, intercepts a note meant for her friend Randy. And—wouldn’t you know it—the note says, I WOULD TOTALLY DO IT WITH JAKE RYAN BUT HE DOESN’T KNOW I’M ALIVE. Well he sure as fuck knows NOW, Samantha.

Samantha and Randy, totally grossed out, ride the bus to school

So, these are the important things in Sixteen Candles: Samantha’s family forgets her birthday; she’s in love with a hot senior who’s dating Caroline (the most popular girl in school); and there’s a big ol’ geek (Farmer Ted) from Sam’s daily bus rides who won’t stop stalking her. Oh, and Long Duk Dong exists [insert racist gong sound here]. Seriously, every time Long Duk Dong appears on screen, a fucking GONG GOES OFF on the soundtrack. I suppose that lines up quite nicely with the scene where he falls out of a tree yelling, “BONSAI.”

Since the entire movie is like a machine gun firing of RACIST HOMOPHOBIC SEXIST ABLEIST RAPEY parts, the only way I know how to effectively talk about it is to look at the very problematic screenplay. So, fasten your seatbelts and heed your trigger warnings.

The 80s were quite possibly a nightmare.

Long Duk Dong falls out of a tree (BONSAI) after a drunken night at the homecoming dance

The first few scenes do a decent job of showing the forgotten-birthday slash upcoming-wedding fiasco occurring in the Baker household. Sam stands in front of her bedroom mirror before school, analyzing her brand new sixteen-year-old self and says, “You need four inches of bod and a great birthday.” I can get behind that idea; growing up comes with all kinds of stresses and confusion, especially for women in high school who’ve begun to feel even more insecure about their bodies (having had sufficient time to fully absorb the toxic beauty culture).

“Chronologically, you’re 16 today. Physically? You’re still 15.” –Samantha Baker, looking in the mirror

While Samantha laments the lack of changes in her physical appearance, her little brother Mike pretends to almost-punch their younger sister. When he gets in trouble for it, he says, “Dad, I didn’t hit her. I’d like to very much and probably will later, but give me a break. You know my method. I don’t hit her when you’re just down the hall.” It’s easy to laugh this off—I chuckled when I first heard it. But after five seconds of thinking about my reaction, I realized my brain gave Mike a pass because of that whole “boys will be boys” thing, and then I got pissed at myself.

The problem with eye-rolling away the “harmless” offenses of young boys is that it gives boys (and later, men) a license to act like fuckers with no actual repercussions. The “boys will be boys” mantra is one of the most insidious manifestations of rape culture because it conditions both boys and girls at a young age to believe boys just can’t help themselves; violence in boys is inherent and not worth trying to control. And people today—including political “leaders”—often use that excuse to justify the violent actions of men toward women.

Mike Baker explains to his dad that he hasn’t hit his younger sister … yet

Unfortunately, Sixteen Candles continues to reinforce this idea throughout the film.

The Geek, aka Farmer Ted—a freshman who’s obsessed with Samantha—represents this more than any other character. The film presents his stalking behavior as endearing, which means that all his interactions with Samantha (and with the popular kids at school) end with a silent, “Poor guy!” exclamation. Things just really aren’t going his way! And look how hard he’s trying! (Poor guy.) He first appears on the bus home from school and sits next to Samantha, even though she makes it quite clear—with a bunch of comments about getting dudes to kick his ass who “lust wimp blood”—that she wants him to leave her alone. Then this interaction takes place:

Ted: You know, I’m getting input here that I’m reading as relatively hostile.

Samantha: Go to hell.

Ted: Come on, what’s the problem here? I’m a boy, you’re a girl. Is there anything wrong with me trying to put together some kind of relationship between us?

[The bus stops.]

Ted: Look, I know you have to go. Just answer one question.

Samantha: Yes, you’re a total fag.

Ted: That’s not the question … Am I turning you on?

[Samantha rolls her eyes and exits the bus.]

POOR GUY! Also homophobia. Like, all over the place in this movie. The words “fag” and “faggot” flood the script and always refer to men who lack conventional masculine traits or who haven’t yet “bagged a babe.” And the emphasis on “Man-Up Already!” puts women in harm’s way more than once.

Samantha looks irritated when her stalker, Farmer Ted, refuses to leave her alone. Also Joan Cusack for no reason.

The most terrifying instance of this happens toward the end of the film when Ted ends up at Jake’s party after the school homecoming dance, and the two of them bond by objectifying women together (and subsequently creating a nice little movie template to last for generations). The atrocities involve a very drunk, passed-out Caroline (which reminded me so much of what happened in Steubenville that I had to turn off the movie for a while and regroup) and a pair of Samantha’s underwear.

This is how we get to that point: After Jake snags Samantha’s unintentional declaration of love during Independent Study, he becomes interested in her. He tells a jock friend of his (while they do chin-ups together in gym class), “It’s kinda cool, the way she’s always looking at me.” His friend responds—amid all that hot testosterone—that “maybe she’s retarded.” (This statement sounds even worse within the context of a film that includes a possibly disabled character, played by Joan Cusack, who lacks mobility and “hilariously” spends five minutes trying to drink from a water fountain. Her role exists as nothing more than a punch line; she literally says nothing.)

Joan Cusack drinking water (queue laughter)

Joan Cusack drinking a beer (queue laughter)

Jake’s girlfriend, Caroline, picks up on his waning interest in her and says to him at the school dance, “You’ve been acting weird all night. Are you screwing around?” He immediately gaslights her with, “Me? Are you crazy?” to which she responds, “I don’t know, Jake. I’m getting strange signals.” Yup, Caroline—IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD NOT REALLY.

Meanwhile, in an abandoned car somewhere on school premises (perhaps a shop lab/classroom), Samantha sits alone, lamenting Jake’s probable hatred of her after their interaction in the gym where he said, “Hi!” and she freaked out and ran away. Farmer Ted stalk-finds her and climbs into the passenger seat. Some words happen, blah blah blah, and a potentially interesting commentary on the culture of masculinity gets undercut by Ted asking Samantha (who Ted referred to lovingly as “fully-aged sophomore meat” to his dude-bros earlier in the film) if he can borrow her underwear to use as proof that they banged. Of course she gives her underwear to him because.

Ted holds up Samantha’s underwear to a group of dude-bros who each paid a buck to see them

Cut to Jake’s after-party: everyone is finally gone; his house is a mess; Caroline is passed out drunk as fuck in his bedroom; and he finds Ted trapped inside a glass coffee table (a product of bullying). Then, at last, after Jake confesses to Ted that he thinks Samantha hates him (because she ran away from him in the gym), we’re treated to a true Male Bonding Moment:

Ted: You see, [girls] know guys are, like, in perpetual heat, right? They know this shit. And they enjoy pumping us up. It’s pure power politics, I’m telling you … You know how many times a week I go without lunch because some bitch borrows my lunch money? Any halfway decent girl can rob me blind because I’m too torqued up to say no.

Jake: I can get a piece of ass anytime I want. Shit, I got Caroline in my bedroom right now, passed out cold. I could violate her ten different ways if I wanted to.

Ted: What are you waiting for?

C’MON JAKE WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR GO RAPE YOUR GIRLFRIEND. Or wait, no, maybe let’s let Ted rape her?

Jake: I’ll make a deal with you. Let me keep these [Samantha’s underwear, duh]. I’ll let you take Caroline home … She’s so blitzed she won’t know the difference.

Ted carrying a drunk Caroline to the car

And then Ted throws a passed-out Caroline over his shoulder and puts her in the passenger seat of a convertible. This scene took me immediately back to the horrific images of two men carrying around a drunk woman in Steubenville who they later raped—and were convicted of raping (thanks largely to social media). This scene, undoubtedly “funny” in the 80s and certainly still funny to people who like to claim this shit is harmless, helped lay the groundwork for Steubenville, and for Cleveland, and for Richmond, where as many as 20 witnesses watched men beat and gang rape a woman for over two hours without reporting it. On their high school campus. During their homecoming dance.

Jake and Ted talk about how to fool Caroline

People who claim to believe films and TV and pop culture moments like this are somehow disconnected from perpetuating rape need to take a step back and really think about the message this sends. I refuse to accept that a person could watch this scene from an iconic John Hughes film—where, after a party, a drunk woman is literally passed around by two men and photographed—and not see the connection between the Steubenville rape—where, after a party, a woman was literally passed around by two men and photographed.

Caroline looks drunk and confused while Ted’s friends take a photo as proof that he hooked up with her

And it only gets worse. Caroline wakes up out of nowhere and puts a birth control pill in Ted’s mouth. Once he realizes what he’s swallowed, he says, “You have any idea what that’ll do to a guy my age?” Caroline responds, “I know exactly what it’ll do to a girl my age. It makes it okay to be really super careless!”

It makes it okay to be really super careless.

IT MAKES IT OKAY TO BE REALLY SUPER CARELESS.

So I guess the current anti-choice, anti-contraception, anti-woman Republicans found a John Hughes screenplay from 30 years ago and decided to use this cautionary tale as their entire fucking platform. See what happens when women have access to birth control? It makes it okay to be really super careless! And get drunk! And allow dudes to rape them!

Of course, believing that Caroline is raped in Sixteen Candles requires believing that a woman can’t consent to sex when she’s too “blitzed to know the difference” between her actual boyfriend and a random freshman geek. I mean, there’s forcible rape, and there’s not-really rape, right? And this obviously isn’t REAL rape since Ted and Caroline actually have THIS FUCKING CONVERSATION when they wake up in a church parking lot the next morning:

Ted: Did we, uh …

Caroline: Yeah. I’m pretty sure.

Ted: Of course I enjoyed it … uh … did you?

Caroline: Hmmm. You know, I have this weird feeling I did … You were pretty crazy … you know what I like best? Waking up in your arms.

Fuck you, John Hughes.

Caroline wakes up, unsure of who Ted is, but very sexually satisfied

And so many more problems exist in this film that I can’t fully get into in the space of one already long review, but the fact that Ginny (Sam’s sister) starts her period and therefore needs to take FOUR muscle relaxers to dull the pain also illustrates major problems with consent; her father at one point appears to pick her up and drag her down the aisle on her wedding day. (And, congratulations for understanding, John Hughes, that when women bleed every month, it requires a borderline drug overdose to contain the horror.)


Ginny’s dad drags her down the aisle on her wedding day

The racism, too, blows my mind. Long Duk Dong, a foreign exchange student living with Samantha’s grandparents, speaks in played-for-laughs broken English during the following monologue over dinner: “Very clever dinner. Appetizing food fit neatly into interesting round pie … I love, uh, visiting with Grandma and Grandpa … and writing letters to parents … and pushing lawn-mowing machine … so Grandpa’s hyena don’t get disturbed,” accompanied by such sentences as, “The Donger need food.” (I also love it, not really, when Samantha’s best friend Randy mishears Sam and thinks she’s interested in a Black guy. “A BLACK guy?!?!” Randy exclaims … then sighs with relief once she realizes the misunderstanding.)

Long Duk Dong talks to the Baker family over dinner

And I haven’t even touched on the problematic issues with class happening in Sixteen Candles. (Hughes does class relations a tiny bit better in Pretty in Pink.)

Basically, it freaks me out—as it should—when I watch movies or television shows from 30 years ago and see how closely the politics resemble today’s anti-woman agenda. Phrases like “legitimate rape” and “forcible rape” shouldn’t exist in 2013. In 2013, politicians like Wendy Davis shouldn’t have to stand up and speak for 13 hours—with no food, water, or restroom breaks—in order to stop a bill from passing in Texas that would virtually shut down access to safe and legal abortions in the entire state. Women should be able to walk down the street for contraception in 2013, whether it’s for condoms or for the morning after pill. The US political landscape in 2013 should NOT include talking points lifted directly from a 1984 film about teenagers.

I know John Hughes is a national fucking treasure, but please tell me our government officials aren’t using his screenplays as legislative blueprints for the future of American politics.

Travel Films Week: Marriage Is A Bumpy Road: ‘Two For The Road’s Difficult Journey

Movie poster for Two for the Road

Written by Myrna Waldron.

Two For The Road’s nonlinear narrative follows the courtship and marriage of Mark (Albert Finney) and Joanna Wallace (Audrey Hepburn) over a period of 12 years. In the present day, the Wallaces are preparing to go to a party celebrating a house that workaholic architect Mark has designed. As they pass by a church holding a wedding, they look inside the car and find the bride and groom looking utterly miserable. Joanna comments, “They don’t look very happy.” Mark replies, “Why should they? They just got married.”

The Wallaces’ marriage is fractured and close to the breaking point. They think back to the various road trip vacations they’ve taken together, and reflect on just where things went wrong, and why. The Joanna of 10 years ago is a conservatively dressed young woman who is a member of a travelling choir. Mark is travelling on his own to do research on European architecture. They are brought together by chance–Joanna’s entire troupe has come down with chicken pox, and Mark was hoping to fool around with one of the more flirtatious members of Joanna’s choir (a one-scene wonder played by Jacqueline Bisset).

Each of their road trips across time serves as a metaphor for the state of their relationship. As they start out as young hitchhikers, there is a feeling of freedom interwoven throughout. Mark talks about how he dislikes marriage because he sees it as a “contract.” He correctly deduces that Joanna is a virgin, and stops just short of bragging about all the casual sex he’s had. It’s important to note that Joanna had never had a lover before she met Mark. She’s completely devoted to him, and he takes her for granted. She impulsively decides to stay hitchhiking with Mark because she believes she’s in love with him–their entire courtship is a string of impulsive decisions. At the end of their week together, after they spend hours frolicking on the beach, Joanna runs off sobbing because she believes that she’ll be nothing but a beautiful memory to him. Mark then proposes to her in a desperate attempt to get her to stay with him. This impulsivity is one reason why, later on, we are meant to wonder whether they should have married in the first place.

Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney in Two for the Road

There is certainly a great deal of agency enveloped in Joanna’s character. Mark might be the dominant one, but she is clearly not going to let him dictate her life or their marriage. It was she who decided to enter into a relationship with Mark and she who decided that she wasn’t going to let Mark turn the memory of her into a meaningless fling. Mark claims to dislike the idea of marriage, but Joanna means enough to him that he will give up his expected bachelorhood for her. Joanna is the glue holding their marriage together, which is metaphorically represented through the running joke where Joanna always locates Mark’s missing passport. As Mark says, she is indispensable.

The next road trip the Wallaces take, chronologically, is with the family of Mark’s former girlfriend Cathy (Eleanor Bron, whom Beatles fans may recognize from Help!). The Wallaces have been married almost 2 years at this point. Cathy has married Howard Maxwell-Manchester (William Daniels), a stogy, neurotic dictator of a man who uses “Communists” as an insult, and makes ridiculously illogical decisions all in the name of sticking to his own predetermined rules. They have a daughter, Ruthie, and they have adopted a childrearing philosophy of “Leaving things to [her] own decision.” This results in a child who is spoiled, bratty, destructive, and nasty. Mark and Joanna’s miserable road trip with the Maxwell-Manchesters illustrates the kind of marriage neither of them wants to have. Mark asks Joanna, “Do you still want to have a child?” Joanna answers, “I still want a child. I just don’t want THAT child.” Howie speaks condescendingly to everyone and has influenced Cathy’s thinking to the point where she mindlessly echoes his philosophies. Instead of disciplining their child when she is obnoxious, they tell off Joanna for being hostile and resentful towards Ruthie. Howie even makes a sexist jab at Joanna and assumes she dislikes Ruthie because she represents the child she wants to have.

Still from Two for the Road

During this road trip, the only thing keeping the Wallaces sane is each other. The crowded car, overly rigid schedule, and horrible parenting metaphorically represent the resentment that the Wallaces have for the Maxwell-Manchesters, and how the Maxwell-Manchesters keep judging the state of their marriage. The Maxwell-Manchesters pry into personal details, dictate how the Wallaces are expected to “behave,” and treat Joanna like a baby factory (and a mere extension of her husband) instead of as a woman. There is particular dramatic irony when the Wallaces have finally had enough (as Ruthie has repeated nasty things that Cathy has said about Joanna behind her back), and Howie accuses Mark of trying to dominate Joanna’s thinking and acting. It is particularly hypocritical for Howie to make this accusation, as he couldn’t be more conservative and dominating if he tried, and Mark is actually doing what Joanna wanted all along, which was to be on their own away from the Maxwell-Manchesters.

Hypocrisy is a common theme in this film, particularly in Mark’s case. I have found it difficult to sympathize with him, as he’s foul-tempered, selfish, irrational, a workaholic, overly ambitious, and, worst of all, ignores his wife and daughter. He claims he hates the idea of marriage and yet impulsively marries Joanna. He says he’ll never ignore a hitchhiker as long as he lives, and 10 years later, he breaks that promise. He has a one-night-stand while on a business trip alone, but writes a letter to Joanna full of lies about how much he misses her. Once he becomes successful, he claims that he has given Joanna everything that she ever wanted, but in truth, has just given to her everything that he wants. (He reminds me a bit of Homer Simpson gifting Marge a bowling ball with his name on it.)

Still from Two for the Road

It seems that the more disastrous the road trip is, the closer it brings Joanna and Mark together. The next time they vacation, Mark has bought himself an MG TD that turns out to be a clunker. The car repeatedly breaks down, and Joanna fixes it. The car is an obvious metaphor for how their marriage turns out. On this trip, Joanna tells Mark that she is pregnant. Once again his hypocrisy comes out, because although in the past he expressed that he did not want children, he is ecstatic at her announcement. Their car eventually catches on fire, and in the process of disposing of it, they meet Maurice Dalbret (Claude Dauphin), a wealthy but demanding man who hires Mark for his architectural talents. Maurice is the fire that threatens to burn their marriage down.

Maurice’s entrance into their lives serves as a turning point on their marriage road, because he monopolizes Mark’s attention to a ridiculous degree. Mark is thrilled to be successful and living the high life, but all Joanna wants is attention from her husband. Money and success go to Mark’s head, and he becomes such a workaholic that he pushes Joanna away. The screenplay was written by a man (Frederic Raphael) but the sympathy of the story clearly lies with Joanna. She has been repeatedly wronged by Mark, so when she makes her own regrettable decisions, they are significantly more sympathetic. This is also notable since infidelity situations in pop culture inevitably end up blaming the woman in the relationship, whether she was the one who did the cheating or not. In each case, it is Mark’s fault–his fault for thinking of sex as meaningless, and his fault for ignoring his wife and child through his endless ambition.

The story makes a very important commentary on marriage. Fighting is inevitable, as are periods of silence. The Wallaces repeatedly comment on how married people can sit at a fancy dinner table and have nothing to say to each other. But honesty, faithfulness, agreement on important matters (such as children), communication and attention are critical to keeping that marriage a success. Joanna and Mark especially repeatedly fail at this, and it stretches their marriage to a near-breaking point. They constantly question each other about why they are still together.

Still from Two for the Road

Mark eventually drives Joanna into the arms of Maurice’s wife’s brother David (Georges Descrieres). Despite his own infidelity, Mark is deeply wounded and humiliated by Joanna’s affair, even though it lasted only one day. Joanna was so desperate for someone to talk to her and understand her that she leapt at the first opportunity. She herself has broken a promise that she would love and be faithful to Mark forever, but because Mark neglected her so profoundly, he is to blame for her affair. Can their marriage survive their mutual infidelities? SHOULD it survive?

The film respects its audience enough not to definitively give an answer. The Wallaces survive the multiple bumps in the road and keep on driving. Both of them need to change for their marriage to work, and fortunately, change is implied metaphorically through their final road trip. Instead of once again driving through France and stopping at the same spots repeatedly, Mark instead drives to Rome to start working for a new client. Instead of staying and enduring Maurice’s demands, he quietly rejects him and explicitly chooses Joanna. No longer being under the thumb of Maurice can only make things better, since it was his entering into their lives that changed the course of their marriage.

In the final moment of the film, the Wallaces share one last exchange. Once again, Joanna has found Mark’s passport for him. In response, he says, “Bitch.” She replies, “Bastard.” Those final words struck me so heavily. Do they mean those insults? Are they being playful? Do they need to snipe and be sarcastic at each other in order to survive? I want to believe that those final words were affectionate, but I found myself feeling ambivalent as to whether this marriage was worth saving.

Admittedly, I have not yet gotten married myself, but I felt as if I was a participant in this marriage as I watched the film. Comparing the heady early days of their courtship to the infidelities and fights of the modern day feels almost as painful as if I’d suffered through the memories myself. Joanna deserves a husband who is wholly devoted to her. Mark is talented enough that he shouldn’t be held back. I can see that there is love there between them, and that they genuinely don’t want to break up. But there is still resentment, selfishness, and infidelity.

Can they work through these problems? Only the road ahead will tell us.

Myrna Waldron is a feminist writer/blogger with a particular emphasis on all things nerdy. She lives in Toronto and has studied English and Film at York University. Myrna has a particular interest in the animation medium, having written extensively on American, Canadian and Japanese animation. She also has a passion for Sci-Fi & Fantasy literature, pop culture literature such as cartoons/comics, and the gaming subculture. She maintains a personal collection of blog posts, rants, essays and musings at The Soapboxing Geek, and tweets with reckless pottymouthed abandon at @SoapboxingGeek.

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

Before Sunset movie poster

This is a guest review by Carleen Tibbetts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Celine and Jesse in Before Sunrise

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

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

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

Julie Delpy as Celine and Ethan Hawke as Jesse

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travel Films Week: In Defense of ‘Eat, Pray, Love’

Julia Roberts in Eat Pray Love

Written by Megan Kearns. A version of this article was originally published at The Opinioness of the World. Cross-posted with permission.

I had been looking forward to watching Eat, Pray, Love ever since I saw the trailer. I read the book a few ago, its popularity piqued my curiosity. The prospect of leaving life behind to travel for a year intrigued the armchair traveler in me. I picked the book up…and couldn’t put it down. I loved it. Author Elizabeth Gilbert drew me in with her honesty, humor and raw vulnerability. So I was eager to see the film adaptation.

The film follows Elizabeth “Liz” Gilbert, a successful writer with a seemingly perfect husband and home. Yet as she attains more and more of what she thinks she wants, Liz’s unhappiness grows and her world begins to crumble. Liz endures a devastating divorce followed by a fling with an actor. When that relationship falls apart, her pain consumes her and she’s unsure where to turn. Yearning to reignite her passion for life, Liz decides to travel, living abroad for one year. She chooses to live for four months in Italy to focus on pleasure (“eat”), then India to connect with her spirituality (“pray”) and finally Bali to learn how to balance the two and ultimately lead a life in harmony (“love”).

Julia Roberts eating pizza in Eat, Pray, Love

Lush and gorgeous, the film exhibits breathtaking vistas. It spurs you to want to pick up, leave everything behind and move to Italy, India or Bali. And megastar Julia Roberts is likable, capturing Gilbert’s curiosity about the unfolding world around her. My inner foodie enjoyed the decadent food scenes, which are a big part of the book, reminiscent of those in Julie and Julia. The film boasts a stellar supporting cast, particularly Viola Davis (love her), Mike O’Malley and Richard Jenkins. However, Javier Bardem’s talents are wasted here.

In the book, we have the pleasure of Gilbert’s humorous and vulnerable voice to guide us. While it’s sort of present in the film, it’s somehow diluted. One of the most heartbreaking yet touching moments for me in the book is when Gilbert sobs on her bathroom floor, begging god for help, as she doesn’t know what else to do. She prays that she’s not pregnant, even though she thinks a baby is what she’s supposed to want. Although the film sadly erases her pregnancy scare. I never felt, as much as she tried, that Roberts captures Gilbert’s depression and how she hit rock bottom.

I’m glad the movie retains the female friendship between Liz and Wayan as well as Wayan’s struggle to buy a house in Bali after she leaves her abusive marriage. But in the book, Gilbert spends far more time with Wayan and her daughter Tutti than the movie would lead you to believe, preferring to focus instead on the romance between Liz and Felipe, a Brazilian businessman in Bali.

Gilbert, with the help of friends and teachers along the way, finds the answers she seeks. Yet she also finds them within herself. But the film ignores this important distinction. Especially at the end, it’s as if Liz needs others to tell her what to do, rather than coming to decisions on her own accord. The book, while ending on a fairy-tale ending, focuses on Gilbert’s self-transformation, shifting from always revolving around a man to finding herself and what she wants. She realizes that you have to truly love yourself before you can love another. Gilbert learns to forgive herself, lets go of her unhappiness and embraces life.

Eat, Pray, Love

The movie makes interesting commentaries on gender. When Liz eats dinner with Felipe, he tells her how he stayed at home with his kids while his wife worked. Liz calls him “a good feminist husband.” In Italy, there’s a great scene where Liz and her friends celebrate an American Thanksgiving dinner to say goodbye. Her Italian tutor’s mother asks if she’s married. When she replies no, the mother declares that she doesn’t understand why a woman would go off and travel by herself. Her friend Sophie comes to her defense saying that no one would say that to her if she were a man and calls her brave for traveling alone. Another woman at the dinner comments on the difficulty of women’s choices.

There’s a pervasive notion that women will go see movies in the theatre about men as well as films about women, while men will only go see films starring men. Women and Hollywood’s Melissa Silverstein writes about Eat Pray Love and how “if women like it, it must be stupid” all about how women’s stories and interests are devalued and treated as less important than men’s interests. Silverstein writes:

“Why is it that things that appeal to women are made to seem trivial, stupid and less than? Is it about the fact that large groups of women are embracing something? Is it a fear that if enough women like something we’ll figure out how screwed we’ve been on so many issues that we will all just come together and revolt? Pleeze. Newflash — we aren’t that organized. Shit, we buy more books and see more films, yet stuff that appeals to women is constantly demeaned. Aren’t our dollars as green as the guys?”

Eat, Pray, Love

In her articulate and fascinating Bitch Media article, “Eat Pray Spend”, Joshunda Sanders Diana Barnes-Brown look at the gender theme of Eat Pray Love in a different light. Talking about the book, they write about the pervasive problem of privileged literature (“priv-lit”), asserting that women like Gilbert, Oprah and other self-help gurus tell women to buy their way to happiness. She writes:

“Priv-lit perpetuates several negative assumptions about women and their relationship to money and responsibility. The first is that women can or should be willing to spend extravagantly, leave our families, or abandon our jobs in order to fit ill-defined notions of what it is to be “whole.” Another is the infantilizing notion that we need guides—often strangers who don’t know the specifics of our financial, spiritual, or emotional histories—to tell us the best way forward. The most problematic assumption, and the one that ties it most closely to current, mainstream forms of misogyny, is that women are inherently and deeply flawed, in need of consistent improvement throughout their lives, and those who don’t invest in addressing those flaws are ultimately doomed to making themselves, if not others, miserable.”

Sanders and Barnes-Brown raise many valid points on sexism and consumerism. There’s something to be said for how our capitalist culture continually purports money and possessions as the path to happiness. If we buy this skin cream that erases wrinkles…if we lose weight…if we buy new clothes…we’ll fix ourselves, shed all our problems and finally attain happiness. But in all their Eat Pray Love criticism, Sanders and Barnes-Brown fail to mention Gilbert was able to travel in the first place due to an advance on a book deal from her publisher. So technically, she was still working. Of course this crucial piece of information IS woefully absent from the film. And the Eat Pray Love “merchandising machine” certainly works to undercut existential messages in the film. Regardless of how Liz funded her trip, it doesn’t invalidate the lessons she learned. Gilbert didn’t intentionally write a self-help manual — she shared her individual experiences. Rather, she wrote a manifesto to let go of fear and follow your dreams, whatever they may be.

Now, I’m no fan of director Ryan Murphy. Too often he erases bisexuality, perpetuates racist stereotypes and reinforcing misogyny in his TV series. But I don’t think the film perpetuates the misogynistic idea that all women are flawed and must be fixed. Liz was incredibly depressed and unhappy in her marriage. She struggled to get pregnant only to realize she didn’t want to have children. She wanted to finally stop putting off learning Italian and embrace her love of yoga. Although it could certainly be because I read the book which shares Liz’s background and her internal monologue, many details which the film glosses over or eliminates. “But if all you have to go on is Movie Liz, she seems like kind of a selfish jerk, and that makes her voyage to better self-care very hard to care about.”

Eat, Pray, Love

While most people can’t jet off to Europe and Asia on a year-long trip (um, I sure as hell can’t afford that), I still think there are aspects of the film and Liz’s journey people can relate to. In addition to being eye candy, Eat Pray Love raises interesting questions about gender and expectations. Women are supposed to want marriage and babies. And yet what we want may differ from societal standards. Society rigidly dictates what women are supposed to want but may feel disillusioned when they achieve those goals and still aren’t happy. Too many women sacrifice their own happiness for others. There’s nothing wrong with putting yourself and your needs first.

Many people often let things hold them back from going after what they want. If people want to go back to school to earn their degree, they think they’re too old. If they want to travel, they think they don’t have the money or the time. As someone raised in a financially-struggling, working class household, who’s often worked two jobs to make ends meet, I’m well aware of the fiscal and time constraints in people’s lives. Yet I think Liz’s story is a testament to seize the moment, to pursue your passions. Walking away from the life you have always known to dare to try something different, to push yourself out of your comfort zone is not only daunting but incredibly brave.

Many will bemoan that Liz is a wealthy privileged white woman who could afford to take a year out of her life. And she is. But would anyone utter this complaint if she were a man? Gilbert emphasizes that you don’t need to travel around the world to find happiness. Despite its flaws, the film (and book) reminds us to chart our own course, no matter what anyone tells us. And that lesson is priceless.