Russell Brand – Bitch Flicks

This guest post by Bethany Ainsworth-Coles appears as part of our theme week on Female Friendship.

SPOILERS AHEAD

St. Trinian’s is a British comedy legend. In the series of films, a rabble of girls are taught by a selection of oddities and petty criminals, brewing vodka, and doing what they do best. Of course what they do best is illegal, but that’s what these girls are meant to do. In 2007, the films were resurrected with St. Trinian’s, which like so much media directed toward girls, was panned by critics. However, what it is at its heart is girls banding together to save their school with their teachers and winning. It doesn’t matter how they dress, what group they belong to, or their age.

Now the school itself run by the fantastic Miss Camilla Fritton (played by Rupert Everett) and its group of misfit teaching staff includes the big drinker Matron (Celia Imrie) as Camilla’s best friend and confidante. Their friendship is lovely as it is framed not just as two old women best friends. They aren’t the standard old ladies of film past; they are hard drinking, pill-poppers who look after each other, such as turning up to support Camilla when her dog is killed.

Matron and Miss Fritton judging people

The friendships throughout the film defy the general limits that films put on girls’ cinema. The groups (e.g. the emos, posh tottiess, chavs, geeks, etc.) frequently band together. When word gets round that the school needs money, all the girls band together to save it by robbing the national gallery of “Girl with a Pearl Earring.” Isn’t that great? Girls banding together to perform a successful heist with cover, dynamite, and some seriously fantastic dancing is just one of the reasons this film deserves more love. The girls work together–every group from the feral first years to the hippie girl (Juno Temple), and even the school secretary joins in.

The girls working together

Whilst most of the groups already know and tolerate each other, Taylor (a chav as played by Kathryn Drysdale) and Andrea (an emo as played by Paloma Faith–yes that Paloma Faith) become friends through circumstance. Whilst they despise each other since they are from different social circles, when the geeks choose them as the two other girls to actually steal the picture, they slowly become friends. Yes, it’s that trope again, but this time it really works. Their relationship is integral–even though Andrea inadvertently strands the head girl on the other side with the picture–she and Taylor both celebrate when they win. Realistically, they don’t become best friends either but they grow a new tolerance for each other that is certainly an admirable thing to show in a film for girls.

Whilst they work outside their groups, the groups are shown as equally important. Unlike films that actively scathe group systems (e.g. Mean Girls), St. Trinian’s endorses it. This is especially seen with the posh totties’ Chelsea, Chloe, and Peaches (Tamsin Egerton, Antonia Bernath, and Amara Karan). At face value, they seem like spoiled rich girls; however, they are actually bright charming women who simply enjoy their lifestyles and how they look. They win the quiz through Chloe’s intelligence, not through looks. Also they are pretty strong women who take no prisoners, especially dealing with creepy men taking their trousers down in their dorm room. Of course, everyone knows the only way to deal with that is to chuck that nasty piece of work out of the window and into the fountain below.

Now another interesting friendship is between Camilla and the head girl, Kelly (Gemma Arterton). Camilla doesn’t treat her as someone lesser but treats her as an equal and gives her tasks that she knows will be good for Kelly. However when Kelly can’t finish the heist, instead of letting the girl take the fall, she gets out a grappling hook, zips over, and saves her. It’s not seen as a weakness of Kelly’s either; her needing help is a positive. She can rely on Camilla to save her just like she can rely on her school.

Now whilst this seems like an odd collection of friendships, it is an important selection of lessons. It fosters the idea that girls working together will always be better than scheming men, and will always sort things out even if they do need help. Girls are fearless: willing to steal, blow up iron bars, fight back against creeps, and speak out. And most importantly, it’s OK to make mistakes. The girls also enjoy themselves doing it. What’s better than spending an evening repainting their spiv’s car whilst nattering on to their mates? Nothing apart from convincing the general public your school is exceptional. Which it is in a way. The girls enjoy being themselves, modifying their uniforms to match their personalities, and embracing being girls. There are no uniform codes, no rules against makeup, they brew vodka in science, and aren’t frowned upon for that. They may not be the demure schoolgirls people expect, but they sure are the best.

Like all good films for girls, it suffered like all good films for women, and was panned by male critics who didn’t understand why girls could be so fantastic.

A tense moment for everyone

The soundtrack for St. Trinian’s even consists of mainly girls. It features everyone from the Noisettes, Lady Sovereign, and Girls Aloud does the theme song. This entire film celebrates female friendships and girls in general. Isn’t that fabulous? It is a film with genuine adventure, laughs that don’t depend on mocking the girls but laughing with them. In fact, all the men are pointless and ripe for being used for their cause. This cast of male characters includes Stephen Fry, the Bursar (Toby Jones), the spiv Flash Harry (Russell Brand), Fritton’s own brother (Everett Still), and Geoffrey Thwaites (Colin Firth), who is Camilla’s vague love interest–and antagonist–who is exposed at the end in more ways than one.

In St. Trinian’s, girls are the most important. Their friendships are valued above anything else because without them their scheming wouldn’t work and then they would be in normal schools… and who wants that?

Bethany Ainsworth-Coles is a young writer from England who enjoys over analyzing things and watching films. She tweets over at https://twitter.com/wierdbuthatsok

The survivor of a horrific plane crash, Lamb wears compression body stockings over her burns and constantly taking pain pills

It probably says something about Diablo Cody’s directorial debut, Paradise , that despite its creator’s celebrated career and feminist street-cred, it premiered and disappeared without me hearing a thing about it. And it’s easy to see why: Paradise is cloying, tone-deaf and awkward, and such a perfect storm of awful and offensive that I’m kind of obsessed with figuring it out.

How did Cody, who wrote such memorable female characters as quippy Juno McGruff (say what you want about Juno, but the film knew what it was and stuck to it), and antiheroine Mavis Gary in the much adored Young Adult, as well as deconstructing toxic female friendships in Jennifer’s Body, fall so far off base with Lamb Mannerheim?

As sugary sweet as the cotton candy on its title card, Paradise is the story of a young girl (Julianne Hough) raised in extreme Christian church who renounces her faith after she is scarred in a horrific plane crash. After giving a speech to her congregation about her newfound atheism, she uses the money from a massive settlement to jet off to Las Vegas, the fabled den of vice condemned in her pastor’s sermons, to complete a list of sins she believes she’s missed out on.

It’s an interesting enough set-up, fruitful ground for several interesting stories, that could delve easily into topics like survivor’s guilt, sex addiction, pain killer addiction (rumor has it an earlier draft went further down this road), white guilt, or a nuanced examination of modern day extreme christianity. As a young woman who grew up in a religion so extreme that she could only listen to Christian music, and wasn’t allowed to drink, wear pants, cut her hair or associate with Muslims or LGBT individuals, there’s certainly areas to explore in Lamb’s relation to herself as a woman, her opinion of her own vanity and how she feels looking back on how bigoted she used to be. But this is not that movie.
So what went wrong?

Loray gives Lamb a mini-makeover, converting her maxi-skirt to mini

To start with, Paradise never establishes its tone or its stance on religion. Though in some parts, it’s atheistic, attempting to make a point about problems and hypocrisy associated with religious belief in general, in some its taking on Lamb’s extreme christianity specifically, but throughout the film, Lamb is still presented as being better than everyone she encounters because for all her pretense, she maintains her christian values and fear of anything she was taught led to damnation. Lamb is a magical, pure unicorn whose quest to sin never goes very far, but who, just by being herself, fixes the lives of her new friends, womanizer William (Russell Brand) and Black stereotype Loray (Octavia Spencer). Rather than giving depth to her character, Lamb’s religious upbringing is used as a device to explain her social handicap and ignorance of anything in pop culture. She’s written like a time traveller or an escapee from an Amish cult, except every so often she stops to make one of Diablo Cody’s signature referential jokes. As the film ends without Lamb forming any stance on religion, nor deciding to compromise with her parents, the way it is stressed throughout the film makes no sense, for something that ultimately becomes a complete non-issue.

Over the course of the night, Lamb is trying to complete the sins written on this napkin

Even Lamb’s quest to sin is held back from getting to the darker places one would expect. Lamb takes a drink and spits it out, Lamb pees in an alleyway, Lamb bets a couple dollars on a slot machine, Lamb peeks through her finger at a dirty magazine, Lamb buys pot but doesn’t seem to use it, Lamb eats a dessert called a chocolate orgasm, but never has a real one. There are no anticipated scenes of Lamb playing for big money surrounded by a group at a blackjack table or ducking into a strip club. The most adult thing Lamb does is have a long conversation with Amber, a prostitute in a club bathroom, where again her mere presence seems to be enough to ‘save’ someone. There are no real stakes, so it never feels like an actual movie for adults, only the set-up for a sugary sitcom. Her new friends are roped into following Lamb around the city for no other real reason than that they find her innocence exotic, and the only real conflict is when they lose her, only to quickly find her again, having never been in any real danger.

Lamb, as her name implies, is written as an innocent who needs to be cared for, and is constantly infantilized. Her religion and the naiveté caused by it gives the other characters a reason to treat her this way and it’s shocking when midway through Lamb mentions being in college and that the man who died in the plane crash was her fiancé.

The one glimpse we are given of Lamb’s past is a video of her performance at a church talent show

Because viewers never get a solid sense of what Lamb’s life was like when she was faithful and are only given brief glimpses of a video of her singing gospel songs, the reveal that she was courting the boy who died seems unbelievable for the character who has neither before or after suggesting she is mourning a lost love or has ever cared for anyone romantically. Lamb doesn’t seem like a grown woman grappling with a challenge to her faith and the consequent rewriting of her system of values, but a sheltered child who has decided on something (atheism) without thinking about it and refuses to reconsider even though her heart doesn’t really seem to be in it, and the film treats her that way as well.

Paradise seems to adopt the disturbing stance that if Lamb were allowed a real descent into dens of vice, she would lose what supposedly makes her interesting as a character: her purity. She attempts to have sex with William but is rejected out of hand because he doesn’t want to ‘take her innocence’. And that is what this film really is, it gives the character enough autonomy to run around a bit and see things, to meet a prostitute to pay her for a conversation, but never to do anything that might risk her purity or the sugary foundation that is her personality just under the thin veneer of snark and acidity. Lamb is not allowed to grow and experiment and get to know herself on her own terms.

Nick Offerman and Holly Hunter are criminally underused as Lamb’s parents

Even in her own movie, her function is to fix William’s womanizing ways and teach him to “respect” women in only the most patronizing, virtue guarding way and to force Loray into abandoning her cynicism and reconnecting with the family she had said earlier on she felt uncomfortable around. Sassy nightclub singer, Loray also plays into the offensive magical negro trope, something the film acknowledges, attempting (and failing) to make it okay by having the character say she doesn’t like that she is treated as a magical negro and explain what it means.

Lamb is so thinly developed and grounded in reality that her ultimate decision to go home to her parents and make peace with her community cannot be viewed as the victorious end of her internal journey. She doesn’t change or grow as a person, instead her own journey as a character is to cause the journeys of her friends. It’s quite a feat to write a character who is both protagonist and narrator, yet still manages to be a Manic Pixie Dream Girl , and especially sad for a film written and directed by a woman.

Paradise is not the journey of a young girl who’s lost her faith as it purports to be because Lamb continues to hold onto vestiges of it and be both constrained and defined by it, always pulling back before committing to sinning. Even her decision to use her settlement money to help Amber, William, and Loray isn’t the about face in character the film wants it to be.

Lamb, with Loray and William, consults her list

This could work if Lamb’s reaction to the plane crash had been to become a self-absorbed person, living only for herself and committed to living in luxury and at the end of film decided to spend her life and money helping others while living an ordinary life, however, even on her night of sinful abandon, Lamb is always sweet, always thinking of others and frankly, not concerned enough about herself and what she wants.

And it’s sad because it could have been an interesting and unique story. I felt Paradise had the potential to be great fun as a TV show and indeed, watching the movie felt like watching a repackaged pilot. On a network, Lamb could be checking off a list of sins while giving away money in her adventures, based in Las Vegas hotel and indulging in Vegas iconography. On cable, the events of Paradise would be only the pilot episode, after which Lamb would go home and function as an outsider/former insider commenting on religious culture and small-town life, while trying to start her own charitable foundation.

Also worthy of discussion is the film’s portrayal of Lamb as a burn victim, which is complicated by cultural beauty expectations. In an interview, Cody said there was a lot of discussion of the extent of Lamb’s burns. She wanted Lamb to have burns on her face, but the studio would not allow the film’s lead to look less then conventionally beautiful. Cody also acknowledges that Lamb’s hair would have burnt off in the crash and could not have grown back to its massive length in the year since, but again, Lamb was not allowed to be bald.

Lamb doesn’t quite enjoy her first sip of alcohol

A young female character grappling with the gulf between her extreme religious background and the forbidden things that interest her as a young modern woman is a narrative we don’t often see, and I wish Diablo Cody had done a better job with it.

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Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. She recently graduated from Carleton University where she majored in journalism and minored in film.

Tag: Russell Brand

‘St. Trinian’s’: Girlish Wiles and Cunning Friendships

Diablo Cody’s ‘Paradise’: Manic Pixie and the Napkin of Sin