Women, Film Won’t Protect You Anymore

The woman on screen, in our western patriarchal society, is, outrageously, still little more than an object. She is love interest, muse, femme fatale, she is familial, a sister or a mother.  Rarely is she portrayed anywhere near an equal, rationally or intellectually, even in integrity, which is a position reserved for another male, someone not dissimilar to the protagonist. A woman is too much the other, too subordinate and too different, for this role, besides her desirability and her lack of masculinity, proves the protagonist’s machismo, and thus worth.  This notion may seem extreme, trite, or dated even, but in an industry where actresses have blurred into little more than wide-eyed, insipient, and undernourished commodities, passed around by the fat cat male bastions of the industry, we are yet to truly experience the medium of film through the female gaze, regardless of how earth shattering a female winning the academy award for best director is.  Hollywood after all, is a spin machine, though not to detract from Katherine Bigelow’s deserved win, she is the exception that proves the rule.  At the dawn of Hollywood, men and woman were treated similarly, as property, owned by the studios, stuffed with pills, their imperfections public and private smoothed over, at some point men broke away from their clutches, but the women stayed behind.  If the philosopher Judith Butler’s idea of gender performance is to be applied to film, actresses perform not once, but twice for the cameras. Butler’s credo is that gender is a performance played out by woman and men, a social patriarchal indoctrination to ultimately result in ‘breeding,’ or the procreation of man.  The female gender, historically certainly the subordinate one, is manipulated by the patriarchy, their performance is secured from birth so as to procure a mate, to be mother.  The female is defunct and passive, whereas the male is active, assertive, and empowered.  In many films the female part is an object of desire, the holy grail of the chase, she is constantly being observed, rarely is she actively perusing or pursuing.  Woody Allen’s Annie Hall is an example of the male gaze, capturing the female performance.  It is a subversive film, yet it maintains the classic Hollywood prescription, boy meets girl, and girl breaks away.  Annie (Diane Keaton) herself dresses so as to deflect from gender stereotype, she wears mannish trousers and blazers, she toys with her femininity, however it is inherently her character that divulges her gendered insecurity.  At one point she plays on her gender to get what she wants, she calls Alvy (Woody Allen) over to her appartment when she sees a spider, a definitive effeminate phobia.  What is most concerning in surmising the female gaze, is the reality of the overwhelming omnipresence of the male gaze, woman have, in truth, learnt only to look at themselves from the male perspective.  A film like Barbara Loden’s Wanda is so revelatory, and so important in the western film cannon, because it offers a female director portraying a female character, and one so strange and fragile, that the film is as though the pretence of gender has been stripped away, leaving just the core of the character.  Woman need more Wandas.

Wanda – dir.Barbara Loden, 1970

Wanda (Barbara Loden), as her name phonetically suggests, wanders. She walks around the industrial wasteland of her town, distracted and solitary. Her pale fragile figure skimming the black coals of the quarries, like foam on coffee.  She walks around in a peppermint haze, a colour that permeates the film, like an aura around the sadness. The film, in long lingering shots, follows Wanda as she goes from the courtroom, where swiftly, and uncontested, she divorces her husband and leaves her children, to cafés, cars, and cinemas, where she is invariably picked up by strangers, pick-pocketed, and abandoned.  Finally she enters a bar where she meets moustachioed man, Mr Dennis (Michael Higgins) who unknowingly to her is in the process of robbing the joint.  Wanda, whose character is frail and disconcertingly unfeigned, is so cracked that the light shines through.  She emanates goodness, innocence even, dressed in white dress and shoes.  Yet she’s a bad mother, her husband told the court, and she’s clearly a drifter with a perpetual sadness that seeks that old on the road cliché, the comfort of strangers. Mr Dennis is no comfort, an oddly family-man looking criminal, he is clearly on the brink of some horrendous maniacal descent. Bespectacled and menacing, Mr Dennis emits extraordinary unhappiness and discontent, he leads Wanda on a criminal escapade, telling her she hasn’t done anything until now, and yet ultimately fools only himself with his words.  Wanda, who throughout the film remains unaffected by the physical and mental tortures she endures, finally displays an outward sense of grief after the tragedy of Mr Dennis. Her still silent figure crammed in between various revelers, she is unable to mask the effect of the wretched days’ events, and we watch her pretty face crumble as the stirring music plays on.

★★★★★

2 Days in Paris – dir.Julie Delpy, 2007

Though this film will inevitably draw comparisons to Before Sunset, same girl, same city, it’s an original in its own right.  The film zings along endearingly, largely due to its own self-conscious parodying of a light French farce.  French lady, Marion (Julie Delpy), and her American boyfriend Jack (Adam Goldberg), have come to Paris for two nights, where they are to stay in Marion’s flat, on the floor above her enfants terribles type parents.  Jack is a little uptight, he’s a New Yorker don’t you know, so whilst he preoccupies himself with the pitfalls of hypochondria, Marion takes off her spectacles and explores the possibility of romantically moving on from this quirky foreigner who has come along, seemingly  to just humiliate and isolate himself from the footloose Parisians at every available opportunity.  Jack gets threatened when Marion’s exes crop up out of flower stalls from nowhere, he gets a little paranoid when he interprets some questionable French text messages that he sneakily reads on her phone. ‘Paris is hell!’ Jack declares as they break up on the banks of the Seine. A quip to Sartre perhaps, or as it transpires later, he just stayed up watching ‘M’ all night. The strengths of this film are most definitely in the credulity of the relationship that we witness unravel.  Jack is a tattooed totem of neurosis who finds himself out of depth with the laissez faire wooziness of Marion’s family, friends and exes.  Marion, who we are primarily to believe is  cooler and calmer than her boyfriend, her self offers a glimpse of amusing hypochondria.  Convincing herself at a party, that she has had an allergic reaction to some muscles. But perhaps her anxieties run even deeper than that, she is afraid, she tells Jack, of being with just one person for the rest of her life. He accuses her of being a squirrel, collecting men like nuts to have for winter. This film is at its weakest and most disjointed with scenes that seem inserted to politically punctuate the plot, such as Jack sending a group of Bush voting American rednecks the wrong way round Paris.  The film’s successes lies mostly with the fluidity and likability of the performances.  In particular Goldberg’s, whose stand out is the metro scene, where he comically attempts to ward off a strange little man, by casting stern animated faces at him, well at least it made him forget about the threat of terrorism for a while, George Bush, his sinuses, his headaches…

★★★★☆