I know I promised Miranda July, but you'll have to wait another week for her. Instead, I want to talk about movies (incidentally, if you haven't seen MJ's Me and You and Everyone We Know, check it out immediately).
My mom started the longest running women’s film festival in the world when I was just a wee young thing in the otherwise culturally-deprived city of Colorado Springs, Colorado. I grew up, nestled in the crook up her arm, watching the documentaries and feature films—always by and about women—that she would screen each year. It was, as you might imagine, ridiculously influential.
It also led to my family’s annual tradition (our version of a religious holiday) of going to the Telluride Film Festival. (By the by, check out the pic on the homepage...totally NOT Telluride). This year, I decided I’d take notes along the way and do a gender analysis of sorts of the films I saw. (My family is hardcore about movies, by the by; we saw 17 full-length films over the course of a weekend). So here you go…
Persepolis
I reviewed these graphic memoirs by Iranian feminist Marjane Satrapi awhile ago, so you know I was excited to see the U.S. premier of the live animation version. The film was exactly like the first book, so I have to admit to being a bit bored after an hour and half. If you haven’t read the book, the film is a great alternative. Having said that, I am beside myself with happiness that the film has the potential to reach an American audience who isn’t as likely to pick up a book. I loved Satrapi’s comment in a local newspaper about why she chose to tell such a complicated and vast political story of a nation through just one pair of eyes (her own, of course):
I am basically convinced that individualism is the basis of democracy. If we don’t put enough importance to one person, then there is no democracy. Democracy is about the fact that each person counts. Each vote counts. There’s nothing more international and universal than one human being.
I’m Not There
Todd Haynes, that gender-bending director of some renown, premiered his film about Bob Dylan. The movie was built around the idea that Dylan was not one man, but a fragmented, complex evolution of many personas (almost all of them projected upon him by his biggest fans and harshest critics). I was fascinated from start to finish, if not a little confused about some of the fundamentals. While I ached for just one more organizing principle to the film, I was challenged in a way that made me really respect Haynes’ experimental efforts. At least six actors play Dylan at different stages, including the achingly brilliant Cate Blanchett. I have no doubt she will get an academy award nomination for her performance. Bravo to Haynes for making the choice to cast a woman as one of Dylan’s many identities, pointing to a profound truth about the ridiculousness of the gender binary.
Juno
If you see any of the movies on this list, make this the one. Juno is the story of a fast-talking, sarcastic teenage girl who gets pregnant by her cross-country running, nerdy friend in the middle o’ the suburbs and handles it with fierce kindness and witty humor.
It was so refreshing to see a young female character on the big screen who not only refused to have a pity party, but approached life with a sort of biting snarky zeal that is actually far more representative of most of my gal pals than Lindsey Lohan or the other usual images in Hollywood blockbusters. Abortion is not only said out loud (ahem, Knocked Up), but treated as legitimate option. (I won’t say anything more about the plot because I don’t want to spoil anything.)
In extra cool points, Juno was written by Diablo Cody, a young bad ass gal who wanted to recreate a time when teenage girls were concerned with being original, not with their jewel-encrusted cell phones. Amen.
Redacted
This film gets the “my soul was obliterated� award of the whole festival, namely because it told the story of US soldiers raping a 15-year-old Iraqi girl and murdering her family (ah yes, based on a true story) in a cinema verite style of sorts.
Brian De Palma (most well-known for making Scarface) was behind this compelling, though no doubt flawed movie. I hung out afterwards with a family friend who is a Vietnam vet and he was totally offended by the one dimensional portrayal of the soldiers (testosterone-poisoned, young, and dumb). Another family friend, this one in the film business, felt like the very low production values didn’t do anyone (not the soldiers, not the Iraqi civilians, nobody) justice.
I agree with all of the above critiques, but I also have to say that I think the film was intended as a fire hydrant experience. It seems like DePalma is so disgusted with the war that he wanted to create a piece of bold propaganda that would force America audiences to deal with the worst atrocities and realities of our time. It is one tiny, hyperbolic slice of a much more complex and nuanced reality, but I can’t help but feel like we Americans—many of us numb to the daily reports of more and more violence and chaos—need this kind of crude slap in the face.
On a gender-related note, I thought the way that DePalma dealt with masculinity was—if not exaggerated—definitely important for all of us to think about. The links between war, masculinity, power, and sex are blindingly clear and too often overlooked.
Brick Lane
This was the most gorgeous movie of the festival, hands down. Sarah Gavron, a really likable, smart woman filmmaker from England, adapted Monica Ali’s bestselling book about a Bangladeshi immigrant in London with absolute visual mastery. The movie deals with the immigrant experience in a truly original and nuanced way. No one in this film is all good or bad; instead everyone is just trying to figure out what it means to be between two homes, two times, and two loves.
The brave choice to deal with racial tensions post-9/11 in London is admirable, and God damn the young male protagonist is H-O-doubleT and his love scenes with the brilliant Tannishtha Chatterjee were full of that charged sensual tension that seems lost on too many modern filmmakers.
4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days
If Redacted gets the “my soul was obliterated� award, this film gets the “I’m so glad this audience is watching this� award. A Romanian filmmaker—notably male—made this hour and half, painfully realistic story about getting an abortion in Eastern Europe in the late 80s. It follows Anamaria Marinca, an actress who gave a powerfully natural performance, as she does a million little things necessary in order to get her friend an abortion. The ordinariness of the shots were the perfect contrast to the extraordinary measures that the two college students must go to in order to make a choice that is rightfully theirs in the first place (though illegal in communist Romania under Ceausescu’s dictatorship).
I don’t need to tell feministing readers that this was the perfect film to watch if you need some inspiration to protect Roe v. Wade or have a friend that needs some convincing about just how critical our right to abortion truly is.
If I Die Far From You
This was an amazing and deeply disturbing short film about the unprecedented number of missing and murdered women in Juarez, Mexico by young filmmaker Roberto Canales. In nine minutes, he managed to depict the gruesome horror of this ongoing situation so poignantly that it made newspaper articles or statistics seem futile in comparison. This would be a really affecting film to use in any gender studies course, though I warn you that it is graphic to an eye-covering degree. Some students might be disturbed…as we all should be with this very real situation.
Unfortunately, the festival organized a horrifically antiquated panel on gender titled “Is there a woman behind every good movie? The gender shift in the film world� After reading the title and gagging, I decided I better listen into what the festival organizers were calling a progressive conversation.
It was disappointing on almost every level. Not only did the moderator ask vague, uninteresting questions like “How has your life as a woman informed your work?� but he managed to hog much of the air time with his own masturbatory drivel. As a result of his poor facilitation, many of the panelists gave uninteresting answers (including, disappointingly, Laura Linney, whose work I really respect.) I don’t blame them entirely…they were just trying to avoid the lazily-articulated, essentialism that the framing of the panel pressed on them. It honestly felt like I was back in 1987. I started looking around for shoulder pads.
I’m writing a letter to the festival organizers about what a sorry excuse for gender analysis the whole thing turned out to be, and suggest a more visionary, 2007 way of approaching the task next time…how about a panel on gender as a significant theme in a lot of the best of modern film with both women and men on the panel and a moderator who actually cares and knows about the issues? How novel.
And on a non-gender related note, definitely see Into the Wild, The Counterfeiters, and And When Did You Last See Your Father? when they come out. All were faves among my family and friends.
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Nice round-up. I would love to see I'm Not There, Juno, Brick Lane (a very interesting road in London, certainly a sort of crossroads of gentrification and working class culture, a divide between East and West London, and rich in South Asian culture too), and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days. I hope some of them come to the Chicago Film Festival next month!