Poor Things and the Folly of Patriarchal Feminism
As the reviews for Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest film starring Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Mark Ruffalo and Ramy Youssef, started coming in, I was ready to dislike the film based on those alone. I’ve seen the trailers, of course, and was cautiously optimistic, despite the magnification and stylization of the “Born Yesterday” trope: a particularly unsettling film cliché that makes painfully obvious the fascination of older men with young, almost childlike, women. In addition to that, most of the reviews (written by men) praised the film for its inventiveness, bold use of sex scenes, unabashed wide-eyed joy and freedom, and a pure lust for life, mostly provided by Emma Stone as Bella Baxter. The reviews went on to say that the Poor Things tracked the protagonist’s fascinating development from a naïve child to an erudite woman, a feminist retelling of Frankenstein – indelible, inventive, incredible!
… or I Shouldn’t Have Read the Book
As the reviews for Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest film starring Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Mark Ruffalo and Ramy Youssef, started coming in, I was ready to dislike the film based on those alone. I’ve seen the trailers, of course, and was cautiously optimistic, despite the magnification and stylization of the “Born Yesterday” trope: a particularly unsettling film cliché that makes painfully obvious the fascination of older men with young, almost childlike, women. In addition to that, most of the reviews (written by men) praised the film for its inventiveness, bold use of sex scenes, unabashed wide-eyed joy and freedom, and a pure lust for life, mostly provided by Emma Stone as Bella Baxter. The reviews went on to say that the Poor Things tracked the protagonist’s fascinating development from a naïve child to an erudite woman, a feminist retelling of Frankenstein – indelible, inventive, incredible!
Now, I’ve become a shrewd hag in recent years, wandering the woods sniffing out innocent victims to lecture them on feminism – this is my lot in life and I will bear it. In addition to my full-time hobby of being as annoying as possible, I also developed somewhat of a sixth sense when it comes to supposedly feminist movies, or rather the vocabulary used by film critics to describe them. “Bold, inventive, playful, joyful, creative” – these words come to mind when I recall this particular kind of criticism directed at Greta Gerwig’s latest juggernaut, Barbie (which I liked, chill!).
In my review of Barbie, however, I concluded that its specific brand of feminism was rather exclusionary in nature, pertaining to only a handful of privileged, mostly white, able, and wealthy women, whose experiences with the patriarchy are, while still quite uncomfortable and painful, mitigated by their position in our flawed society. Within this framework, however, the film does genuinely try to convey a “girl power” message and, supported by great acting, directing, and writing as well as an extraordinary production design, somewhat succeeds.
Why am I talking about Barbie?
Well, in both films we follow a very sheltered female protagonist with no clue about the social norms of the outside world as they’re plunged into a patriarchal society. They emerge from it (kind of) unscathed only due to their cheery and innocent outlook in life. It is their innocence and inquisitiveness about the origins of the oppressive norms they encounter, and their subsequent understanding that most of them are nonsensical, that leads the now enlightened women to the desire to better humanity and/or themselves.
I’ve written extensively on why Barbie simultaneously fails and succeeds in regard to its plot, but compared to Poor Things, it is indeed a feminist masterpiece.
🚨MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD!🚨
1. The Curious Case of Alisdair Gray
Alisdair Gray was a staunch postmodernist, imbuing his sometimes outrageous tales with, as is genre convention, a flurry of literary references, narrative traps, some well-placed low-brow humor and, in his case, fervent anti-authoritarianism. Poor Things, published in 1992, ticks all of the above and more. In addition to the prose, the story is told through illustrations, author’s notes and even a fake erratum. By the end of the book (yes, including the erratum) the characters feel so painfully real that saying goodbye to them was inexplicably woeful.
But first: a short summary.
In 1990 Alisdair Gray gets his hands on a book entitled EPISODES FROM THE EARLY LIFE of a SCOTTISH PUBLIC HEALTH OFFICER/Archibald McCandless M.D., which his friend and historian Michael Donnelly rescued from the municipal incinerator in the 70-ies. He finds the book so fascinating that he agrees to act as editor and publish it with some minor changes, like the title, which he changes to Poor Things. What follows is his account of checking historical facts and confirming, at least for himself, that everything in this book is historically accurate.
In McCandless’ account of his early life, we learn about his upbringing in rural Scotland, his outcast status at Glasgow University where he’s studying medicine, and his friendship with Dr. Godwin Baxter, a genius surgeon and researcher at the university. His friendship with Baxter, whom he describes as being of hideous appearance, but of a mild and friendly demeanor, develops over the course of long walks, both outsiders having found themselves enjoying each other’s company. Before long, Baxter invites McCandless to his house, where the young man meets Ms. Dinwiddie, Baxter’s trusted housekeeper, as well as Bella Baxter, Godwin’s supposed niece.
McCandless is immediately smitten with beautiful Bella and her peculiar childlike behavior. As he inquires further about her, Baxter reveals that, by means of no importance, he had procured the fresh corpse of a pregnant woman, who had drowned herself, and then revived her with science. He proudly continues to expand on his medical escapades, until he excitedly admits the full truth of his experiment: respecting the woman’s wishes to remain dead, he, instead of reviving her brain, transplanted her infant’s brain into her head, thus making Bella Baxter. McCandless is both fascinated and appalled, both at Baxter playing God and succeeding and at his ulterior motives regarding Bella.
Baxter plans to educate Bella into a fine young woman (again) and then marry her, for he is “about to possess what men have hopelessly yearned for throughout ages: the soul of an innocent, trusting, depending child inside the opulent body of a radiantly lovely woman” (pp. 35-36). Huffing and puffing, McCandless swears to protect her honor. To be fair, at this stage of the story he only half believes that Bella was revived by Baxter, instead choosing to believe Baxter’s cover story of her having been in a horrific train accident, which left her severely mentally disabled1.
Apart from teaching Bella everything he knows about medicine and other sciences, Baxter plans an around-the-world tour with her, where she continues to be educated by several different teachers. Therefore, McCandless next meets Bella and Godwin fifteen months later, while walking in the park. Bella seems much older and now displays the intellectual capabilities of a very precocious ten-year-old. Anyway, they get engaged in the bushes (for marriage). Before they can enter into marital bliss, however, Bella is seduced by skeezy Duncan Wedderburn and, having discovered her adventurous spirit and interest in sex (she mentions “kissing hands” with one of her female teachers), lets him whisk her away, fully intent on using him for sex and further education away from her parental figure, whom she calls God (cute).
Having been deprived of his child bride, McCandless is understandably listless, but Baxter assures him calmly that this is an educational matter and Bella will soon tire of Wedderburn and return to Glasgow to marry him. After a while, they get two letters from Duncan and Bella, respectively. Both describe their elopement across Europe, through the Mediterranean, to Odessa and finally Paris.
Wedderburn describes a horrific odyssey, in which he’s used and abused by Bella, while having only the best intentions of making her his wife and the lawful Mrs. Wedderburn.
“I exposed all my past iniquities more frankly and fully than I ever have courage and space to do here […] because (blind fool that I was) I believed we would soon be man and wife! […] I was so sure Bella would soon be my bride that, by a piece of harmless chicanery, I obtained a passport on which we were named as husband and wife.” (p. 81)
She, however, refuses to marry him and continues to spend his money and ply him with sex and alcohol, whether he wants it or not. Finally, Wedderburn finds God and determines that Bella must be the bride of Satan, a Jezebel, the whore of Babylon, and Godwin the Devil who unleashed her upon the world. As Bella practically abandons him to his fate on a train back to Glasgow, he is then admitted to an asylum by his mother upon arrival.
Bella’s letter tells a different story, and we finally get an unadulterated look at the world from her perspective, half-way through the book, which is still interspersed with occasional commentary from McCandless and Baxter.
Her story details their journey through Europe, where they partake in hours of “wedding” (this is how Bella calls sex). Wedderburn is uptight and possessive from the start and often questions Bella about her whereabouts and with whom she’s spoken.
“I’m not the only man you ever loved – admit it you have had hundreds before me!”
“Not hundreds – no. I never counted them, but half a hundred might be about right.”
He gasped, gaped, groaned, writhed, sobbed and tore his hair then asked for details.
That is how I learned that he did not think that kissing hands is love.
Love (Wedder thinks) only deserves the name when men insert their middle footless leg.
“If that is so Dear Wedder, rest assured you are the only man I ever loved.”
“ Liar cheat whore!”, he screamed. “I am no fool! You are not a virgin! Who deflowered you first?” (p. 106)
They travel some more, which Bella finds boring and is constantly put upon by Wedderburn’s jealousy. She describes being in a waking sleep most of the time, until she jolts awake in a gambling den in Odessa. For a while, Bella puts up with Wedderburn winning and losing and whining and bitching, but doesn’t take him very seriously. As Wedderburn’s obsession starts to take over their entire life, however, with him spending everything on his drug and gambling addiction, Bella feels increasingly sorry for him and takes on the responsibility to somehow get him back to Glasgow and subsequently get rid of him.
To that end she persuades Duncan to board a simple cargo ship from Odessa to Marseille, where, she hopes, he’ll be able to kick his addictions. On the ship, Duncan is increasingly unresponsive and takes up the Bible, while Bella consorts with the other passengers. She befriends Englishman Harry Astley, a nihilist, and Dr. Hooker, an American racist. One day, after much discussion of the white man’s burden, the good doctor volunteers to show her the “real world” by taking her on an excursion when they make halt in Alexandria.
There, they stop at a posh restaurant, which is exclusively frequented by whites. In front of the restaurant, however, Bella sees The Poor (tm) “amusing folk on the veranda by bowing and praying to them and wriggling their bodies and grinning comically until someone on the veranda flung a coin” (p. 172). Bella runs out, as she sees a young blind girl carrying a baby, to give her money. Her purse tears, and she is swamped by sick and writhing children trying to get to the coins, while she tries to save the girl and her baby and bring them home with her. Astley and the doctor talk her out of it, and the crowd is violently dispersed.
After being dragged away kicking and screaming, Bella returns to the ship distraught and in a haze, only to find a deeply depressed unresponsive Wedderburn. She then proceeds to repeatedly have sex with him against his wishes, which she acknowledges and still continues, leaving him a broken man.
"The damage to Wedder was done after I returned from Alexandria. I rushed into our cabin and wed wed wed wed him, wedding and wedding and wedding until he begged me not to, said he could give no more but he could and did – it was the only thing which stopped me thinking about what I have seen.” (p. 153)
From further conversations with Hooker and Astley, with whom she begins a short-lived platonic romance, and her readings on different ideologies, in the days that follow Bella concludes that she must become a socialist and fight for a better society. She also writes that this is where she finally shed her childhood selfishness.
They arrive in Paris and, after Wedderburn gambles away their last money while she is procuring lodgings for them, Bella finally breaks into her secret stash Baxter gave her at her departure and sends Duncan back to Glasgow. Now penniless herself, she goes to work as a sex worker to do “a job as well and fast as possible, not for pleasure but cash like most people do” (p. 180). She chooses to leave the establishment a couple of weeks later, because she doesn’t agree with the administrative health officials’ harassment of the sex workers under the guise of a health inspection.
She then makes it to Glasgow anyway.
As soon as Baxter and McCandless stop reading her letter, Bella arrives and is now ready to marry the latter. Their wedding is however interrupted by two men claiming to be Bella’s, or Victoria’s as they call her, husband and father respectively. What follows is a long-winded back and forth, where both sides try to prove that Bella is and is not Victoria2. After Bella refuses to leave, her alleged husband Colonel Aubrey la Pole Blessington tries to kidnap her by force but is stopped by Bella herself. She then recognizes him as a client from her days at the brothel and he silently kills himself a couple of days later, which frees Bella/Victoria up to finally marry McCandless.
They marry, Godwin dies and bequeaths them all his money, Bella decides that she has to become a doctor to heal the world and becomes a famous practitioner with her own charity clinic as well as a prominent member of the Fabian Society3. Everyone lives happily ever after.
The End.
Gray is the first narrator we encounter in the book, followed by McCandless himself, Duncan Wedderburn, Bella Baxter and finally Victoria McCandless M.D. – all of which are extraordinarily human and delightfully unreliable. Their tales, when pieced together, however, tell a fascinating story about Victorian society, the full scope of its (ridiculous) political, medical, and societal mores, and how these notions still affect our modern sensibilities, our imagination and British society overall.
Sprinkle in a ton of references to Victorian gothic literature (Frankenstein, H.G. Wells), some modernist classics (Lolita) and a smattering of Russian literature, combine with full-grown men cringing at the mere mention of lady parts and what to do with them, seal the deal with the stark realism, and you got yourself a postmodernist nightmare masterpiece.
The book is unapologetically political, invoking colonialism and all its horrifying consequences as well as early forms of socialism and feminism, including the suffragette movement. At its core, it asks and fails to answer the age-old question – what makes us human? – making itself part of the huge tapestry of the Nature vs. Nurture debate. In the end, Gray settles on the notion that a fully adult person is only a politically educated one – a person who can, with conviction, take on the responsibility for themselves as well as for others. It is not a feminist book, but it is a book about feminism and how a woman of any century develops an ideological sense of right and wrong.
The reason as to why the whole “child bride” thing doesn’t feel as uncomfortable in the book, as it will in the movie, is because it has a clear narrative purpose. Bella’s childishness is not supposed to be taken literally. It’s representative of the selfishness and short-sightedness of a politically uneducated person. When Bella witnesses the horrors of poverty and her own role in creating it in Alexandria, she decides to become a political actor and consequently sheds her childlike demeanor and becomes an adult.
Bella develops a sense of responsibility and compassion even for a toxic worm like Wedderburn and then curates and nurtures it into a fully formed conviction. Only when Bella fully understands the cultural, ideological, and philosophical background of the words and convictions hurled at her from every man she encounters, is she able to find herself in the midst of all their grandstanding – and defy them.
The film, however, made some changes…
2. No Thoughts, Just Vibes
In the epilogue to Archie McCandless’ book, Alisdair Gray includes a letter from Dr. Victoria McCandless M.D., in which she speaks up against the supposed autobiography her late husband wrote about her. She tells her own story, which is much more compelling, albeit not as fantastical as Archie’s Frankenstein pastiche. After relaying her version of events, while she tries to surmise why he would write something like that about her, she says this:
“Having had a childhood, which privileged people would’ve thought “no childhood”, he wrote a book suggesting that God had none either – that God had always been as Archie knew him, because Sir Colin [Baxter’s father] had manufactured God by the Frankenstein method. Then he deprived me of childhood and schooling by suggesting I was not mentally me, when I first met him, but my baby daughter. Having invented this equality of deprivation for all of us, he could then easily describe, how I loved him at first sight and how Godwin envied him.” (p. 273)
Victoria exposes McCandless’ memoir as a lie, a book he wrote while already bedridden due to MS, and the last hurrah of a loving, but jealous husband. And regardless of whether that’s true or not, as, in my opinion, both of their accounts are bound to teem with truths and untruths alike, we still get a fuller picture of those people, of their imperfections and ridiculous humanness and all that they wanted to bring to light and keep hidden.
Here's what Tony McNamara, the writer of Poor Things (2023), has to say in this regard:
““The fingerprints of childhood and society weren’t on her as a character,” McNamara tells Variety’s Awards Circuit podcast. “I’m writing someone who just greets experience in a really open, adventurous, optimistic [way]: ‘I wonder what it is. And I don’t have any preconceptions about how I should feel about it, how I should judge it. Anything. I’m just in a constant state of self-creation.’“ (Riley 2024)
It is no surprise then that the movie only adapts McCandless’ version of events.
The skeletal structure of the plot is mostly intact: Godwin (God) Baxter (Willem Dafoe) makes Bella (Emma Stone), Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) finds out about it and falls in love with her, they get engaged, she runs away with Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), sees horrible things in Alexandria, works at a brothel, comes back and gets ambushed by her ex-husband Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott), marries McCandles and lives happily ever after, while studying to be a doctor.
The similarities end here, however. Lanthimos and McNamara neither bothered to take the epilogue into account, nor were they particularly interested in the politics of the very political book they were adapting. They blunder into every poorly concealed plot trap Alisdair Gray had laid, as some of the changes in the movie convey the exact opposite message compared to the book, and also skew into a kind of childish cruel humor, which is never shown to have any narrative purpose.
Just like in McCandless’ memoir, Godwin Baxter is portrayed as an actual Frankenstein’s monster of his father’s design, who abused and mistreated him by relentlessly experimenting on his body, until he required special assistance to live. This abuse, however, is never reckoned with in the film. Baxter’s physical insufficiencies are frequently used as comic relief, and his tendencies to use and abuse humans for science which directly resulted from his father’s abuse are depicted as unpleasant, but harmless. Godwin’s designs on Bella as a sexual partner are erased completely, due to the decision to make him a eunuch in the film, therefore also stripping him of any human desire.
Seen here: Fun!
This metamorphosis from a character with both complex and very real motivations into a flat caricature befalls all of the side characters that made it from the book into the movie, as well as most of the newly invented characters.
Max is a bland yes-man and complacent to a point where I had to wonder, whether both Lanthimos and McNamara view men who express any kind of agreement with feminist ideas as weak and effeminate. Blessington is a gun-wielding one-note villain, Wedderburn is a cardboard cutout toxic boyfriend, Harry Astley (Jarrod Carmichael) is a guy that exists, and don’t get me started on all the other female characters except Bella.
3. Sex, Sex, Sex!
Sex is quite important to Bella in the book. Her descriptions of her “wedding” Wedderburn or her clients are not graphic, but rather show a secure contentment in her needing this kind of pleasure. This normalizes female sexuality, rather than exotifying it. In his, I admit, quite clumsy way Gray reassures readers that female sexuality is normal, that it’s neither superior nor inferior to male sexuality.
In the movie Bella calls sex “furious jumping”, and it looks like bargain bin porn.
Bella’s sexual awakening begins with a disastrous excursion into the outside world. You see, additionally to him being a source of comic relief, Godwin is also portrayed like the father in a 1980-ies sitcom. He’s overly possessive and protective of Bella, to a point where he doesn’t let her out of the house. On one occasion, Bella persuades Baxter and McCandles to let her go outside. As you might’ve guessed, Bella doesn’t get any educational travel in the movie. Their little foray ends in disaster, as Bella throws a temper tantrum, because God doesn’t let her out of the carriage to get ice cream. Reasoning with a toddler is hard, so Baxter and McCandles do the only humane thing: they violently sedate Bella with chloroform and carry her unconscious body back to the house4.
There, while still unconscious, she’s stripped naked by the housekeeper Ms. Prim (Vicky Pepperdine) in a long, porn-like scene, where we the voyeuristic audience get a full-frontal view of her smooth hairless body. Here begins the film’s obsession with sex and Bella’s genitalia, for all of Bella’s growth as a person as well as a political entity is closely tied to her sexual desires and nothing else.
For this to work, however, Lanthimos has to establish a new baseline for desired sexual behavior:
Immediately after the above scene, Bella awakens from her chloroform-induced slumber and starts masturbating. Not only is she instantly good at it, she also has a lot of fun doing it. So much so that she tries to masturbate at the breakfast table, proudly wanting to show Ms. Prim that she’s found a way to always be happy. Comically appalled, Ms. Prim, who hates Bella for no reason other than comic relief, leaves the room in a huff. Max, who was hired by Baxter to track Bella’s development and has hopelessly fallen in love with her by now, walks in and hurriedly stops her by explaining that that’s not proper behavior. Like the toddler that she is, Bella doesn’t like to be told off for something that she likes doing, but unlike a toddler, she doesn’t ask any questions as to why she’s not allowed to do it, she just accepts and rebels against it.
Lanthimos chooses this contrived “not allowing someone to masturbate at the breakfast table” norm as the basis of an entire narrative around Bella rejecting all oppressive societal norms, ultimately revealing the core principle of the movie – the notion of a personal freedom born out of the lack of life experience and, therefore, shame. This has been confirmed in several interviews.
Here’s Lanthimos in The Guardian:
“Well, shame is one thing that we are conditioned to feel in certain situations and Emma’s character doesn’t have that,” he says. “She never got to know what shame is, so she is totally free to give her mind, her thoughts, her opinions, her body, whatever.” (Kermode 2023)
And here’s McNamara again:
““There is a kind of wish fulfillment in the movie,” he adds. “Like, What would my experience be if I could let go of all this stuff I carry around?”“ (Riley 2024)
The result is horrifying. Ridding Bella of story, experience and depth means that she also doesn’t develop any boundaries, physical or mental. With Bella’s lack of understanding of healthy boundaries and with her inquisitive nature severely diminished, it’s not a surprise that her tryst with Wedderburn looks much different in the movie.
In the book Wedderburn is established as a skeezy lawyer, who one day visits Godwin to set up his will. When he spots Bella, he immediately wants and seduces her, which starts their little sexcapade. The movie, however, has to go out of its way with his introduction. It starts out similarly. Wedderburn visits Godwin to set up his will, he spots that Baxter wants to bequeath all of his money to Bella and comments on how extraordinary a woman must be to elicit such trust.
Mothers, lock up your daughters!
He excuses himself to go to the bathroom, but immediately starts creeping through the mansion like a cartoon villain, peeking into all the rooms in search for Bella. While sulking in her room, because she can’t masturbate at the table, she’s found by Wedderburn. After they exchange a couple of words, he immediately molests her by nonchalantly putting his hand between her legs. As Bella doesn’t have any boundaries, she just accepts it and wants more, because it felt good5.
By skewing our perspective on the idea of what a healthy sexual relationship actually looks like, the movie supplants it with its own version: a version where no one cares much for consequences or informed consent, and where the entirety of female bodily autonomy is purely expressed by Bella craving, getting, and enjoying lots of straight penetrative sex6.
A baseline where boundaries and consent are anathema to joy.
Later in the brothel, Bella does express some concerns about consent and the degrading practice of letting a man choose a prostitute from a line-up. However, she does so, because the man in question, played by French actor Laurant Borel, repulses her so much, she’s ready to start a revolution over it. This scene ends with Toinette (Suzy Bemba), a fellow prostitute, then having to service him for free with no consequence to Bella’s philosophy or development.
Toinette pondering her life choices.
It’s hard to ignore how this newly established baseline for female sexuality showcases the “correct” way of how women are supposed to react to sexual advances, and even how they’re supposed to enjoy sex in general. Moreover, it establishes that there are no unwanted sexual advances, and that penetrative sex is the pinnacle of pleasure7. Bella’s supposed freedom and wide-eyed joy is primarily devised for straight men – their gaze, their tastes, their fantasies.
Lanthimos and McNamara engineered themselves the perfect waifu!
Fathers, lock up your sons!
In one of the more iconic scenes of the movie, Bella hears music and instinctively gives in to it and starts dancing furiously. In this flurry of silk gown and limbs, we’re supposed to see a freed woman - free of shame, self-consciousness and oppressing societal norms. And while I also desperately want to give in, surrender to the film’s absurdity, I’m instead horrified by the director openly grooming the audience; pulling us into his fantasies of the perfect, naïve, boundary-less woman, who never says no, indeed never even thinks about this word.
4. Am I the Drama?
Bella and Wedderburn dance for a while, until he assaults a man for flirting with her. He then, turned on by Bella’s free-style dancing, proceeds to ask her to marry him, which she refuses. Instead, she tells him rather impartially about a sexual encounter with another man, which Wedderburn takes… badly. So badly that next day, he lures her into a huge trunk and kidnaps her onto a ship bound to France8.
On the ship, Bella is distraught at first, furious at Wedderburn for kidnapping her. However, although she makes fast friends with fellow passengers Harry Astley and Martha Van Kurtzroc9 (Hanna Schygulla), she doesn’t tell them about the kidnapping, not even in passing.
Remember kids, real feminists don’t ask for help, even when they’re being kidnapped!
While Wedderburn continues to be a colossal dick, Bella spends her time with Astley, whose characterization is best summed up with “some guy”, and Martha, who gives Bella books on various subjects and is genuinely nice to her. For the crime of making Bella marginally smarter, however, Wedderburn attempts to murder Martha, which is played as a gag, and no one is mad at him for it.
One day Astley decides to shake Bella from her naivete and show her “the real world” at their next stop in Alexandria.
…
Let’s talk production design.
Poor Things is, for all intents and purposes, a beautiful movie. From its distinct acting style to the writing and costume design it’s supposed to evoke a grand adventure, a human experience without the baggage of social mores.
The production design, free from the limits of “boring adult” imagination, shows the world through the eyes of a child … a retro-futuristic, Belle Epoque-inspired child. Designers James Price and Shona Heath employ miniatures and beautifully painted backdrops to evoke a theater production with a grand budget, whose cardboard fakeness and creamy pastel color palette give the movie a magical DIY feel. Price and Heath perfectly encapsulate the grand childhood adventures I had just by sitting in my room with some cardboard cut-outs and a very active imagination (minus the sex-stuff).
However, the drawback to the whimsy is that Bella’s character-defining moment in Alexandria falls incredibly flat. In the movie, Alexandria is an island akin to an elaborate amusement park attraction, consisting of a restaurant situated on a high cliff, said cliff and something indistinguishable at the bottom of the island. When Harry and Bella look down the sheer cliff into the indistinguishable abyss, they just see some nondescript brown people writhing and moaning in a … Poor Pittm. This distance completely takes away the visceral component of Bella’s experiences in the book. So, when she tries to hurl herself off the cliff and collapses crying, it is nothing more than a childish overreaction.
A reaction, which, according to the movie, she has to grow out of. So, she runs back to the ship, gathers all of Wedderburn’s money and runs out again in an attempt to … throw it into the Poor Pit (tm). Unfortunately, she’s intercepted by two sailors, who say that she can’t go anywhere, as the ship is about to cast off. Instead, they offer to safeguard the money for her and give it to The Poor™ on her behalf, while cartoonishly grinning at each-other.
With that the movie flattens and cheapens Bella’s desire for a better world. Don’t even try, it says, derisively. Why bother?, it croons. The human desire for a better world is discarded in favor of a cynical arbitrary notion of personal freedom. Instead of learning compassion and shedding her childish selfishness, this Bella learns that compassion is childish and, in a way, selfish.
Now penniless, Wedderburn and Bella make it to Paris. It is reiterated that their predicament is entirely Bella’s fault and that her trying to help the poor was a stupid and selfish endeavor. While Wedderburn sulks on a bench, Bella wanders into a brothel and discovers a satisfactory mode of money-making. Wedderburn disapproves, she breaks into her secret stash of money and sends him home.
What follows is a very long portion of the movie, where Bella is shown sleeping with a lot of freaky men and one woman, as she has an out-of-the-blue relationship with Toinette, the fellow prostitute who has to service a client for free, because he was too ugly for Bella. As the objectification oozes out of the screen, I start to fall asleep … my God, men are boring.
There are some intermissions in the porn, however. Bella starts to go to socialist meetings with Toinette, which are never shown in detail, and we don’t see them discussing any specific ideas, except once where she says that prostitutes “own their own means of production” (fair enough). She also wears a very cute school-girl outfit and seems to visit some medicine-related lectures in a university (?) – not clear. Back to the freaky fucking!
I think this is where she’s supposed to become the “erudite woman” I’ve been reading about in the reviews, but her entire stay in Paris is so incredibly static. She doesn’t learn or improve anything. In the above incident with the ugly man, where she weakly argues in favor of enthusiastic consent, she’s quickly shut down by Swiney (Kathryn Hunter), the madame of the establishment, who calls Bella to her office and shows her an allegedly sick baby. This baby, Swiney claims, is her granddaughter and needs expensive medicine to survive, so the brothel has to run as it does, because if not, the baby would die.
Again, the movie argues for not disturbing the status quo. “This is how the world works”, it says. “If you rebel, babies die!”.
As is already established, Bella doesn’t ask any further questions, and although she’s interested in medicine, doesn’t offer to examine the baby. She just stops talking about consent altogether. What follows are more very boring sex-scenes. It’s not hard to imagine why Lanthimos and McNamara prolonged (my suffering) Bella’s stay at the brothel ad infinitum. At some point, she gets a letter from McCandles informing her that God is sick, and that’s it, she leaves the brothel with nothing learned and goes back to England.
5. Cruelty is Compassion
In her last days at the brothel, Bella ponders cruelty at length. Unlike in the book, she didn’t quite manage to send Wedderburn home; instead, he remains in Paris for some time, following her like a lost drunk puppy, ranting at her and calling her a whore. While lying in bed with Toinette, Bella says that she’s tempted to be cruel to Wedderburn but doesn’t want to succumb to it.
When Bella returns to London and learns about her real providence, this revelation doesn’t elicit a lot of feelings from her. Being upset at that would be too childish, I guess. So, instead, we quickly move on to her trying and failing to marry McCandles. As expected, they’re interrupted by Alfie Blessington, who wants his Vicky back. Bella decides to go with him to learn more about her old life.
At their lavish prison-like mansion, she discovers that she was really unhappy10 and that she was cruel to her staff and enjoyed it. Learning about her selfish past shocks her at first, but we’re quickly reassured that Bella is not Victoria and that she’s defeated the siren song of casual cruelty. She also discovers that her husband wants to sedate her and bring her to a surgeon for a clitorectomy, which she refuses valiantly and shoots him in the foot.
It is fascinating how much the movie concentrates in Bella’s genitalia. The phrase “the thing between your legs” is used frequently throughout the movie to teach Bella about womanhood or something. When Blessington tries to persuade Bella to drink the sedative, with a revolver pointing at her, she looks upon the drink and says that she sometimes wishes to be rid of her searching nature.
So, Bella herself believes that her curiosity, her striving to be and do good, to rid the world of poverty and evil, are a result of her having a lot of sex. This is the thesis of the movie.
Anyway, Bella shoots Blessington and, set on saving his life, brings him to Baxter’s clinic/house to operate on him. She and Max save his life and then (totally non-cruelly and humanely and absolutely humorously and funnily) kill him by swapping his brain with a goat’s.
It's just that some people are deserving of cruelty.
By making Wedderburn as whiny and annoying as possible and Blessington just pure evil, by making Max complacent and Godwin a eunuch, Lanthimos populates his movie with inhuman male characters who seem so thoughtless, lifeless and evil in comparison to Bella that we don’t have another choice than to believe that she’s in the right all the time. In this constellation she’s right to be mean to Wedderburn, she’s right to treat Max like shit, and she’s absolutely correct in her assessment that killing Blessington is the right course of action.
With that Lanthimos just replaces a male oppressor with a female one, without even rattling at existent power structures. That’s not enough, however. With all its nods to the status quo, its derision of Bella’s genuine attempts at helping people, the movie establishes just one way Bella can go: “Conform to the status quo, amass as much status as possible, and then do unto others that’s been done to you.” For it is only Bella who gets to enjoy being on top the food chain, all the other female characters are either treated as sex objects, comic relief or are, unfortunately, Felicity (Margaret Qualley).
Felicity is brought into the world by Baxter and McCandles out of boredom and jealousy at Bella’s grand adventure with Wedderburn. Her birth is shown thusly:
Baxter and McCandles are drunk and very sad. Baxter jokes around that he could make “another one”. Jump cut. A woman is repeatedly getting hit in the face with a ball. Comedy! Turns out, they somehow found another pregnant corpse and did the same thing to her as with Bella. But what’s that? She’s not developing as fast as Bella! A travesty! So, they abuse her, a lot. As her motor skills are developing very slowly and she can’t catch a ball, Max just doesn’t have another choice than to hit her in the face until she falls unconscious. Are you laughing yet?
They continue to abuse Felicity, calling her “it” and “an experiment”, while she continues to not understand what she did wrong. At some point Baxter and McCandles lose interest and give her to Ms. Prim, who treats her equally badly. When Bella returns, she’s shortly upset at Baxter for making “another one”, but she also doesn’t do anything to help Felicity. In the idyllic ending of the movie, we see Felicity finally catching a ball and getting sent to fetch water for Blessington the goat: yay, she’s advanced to a lowly servant. ARE YOU LAUGHING YET?
6. The Incurious Case of Yorgos Lanthimos
With the inclusion of Felicity as a running gag, the film shows a nigh apocalyptic dog-eats-dog world. Baxter would do anything for science, Max would do anything to get Bella, and Bella would do anything for fun and pleasure, anything but show compassion.
In my darkest moments, I put on a tinfoil hat and cannot help but wonder whether these films are praised specifically because they don't reach beyond the existing power structures. Instead, they exist only to uphold a patriarchal system predicated on casual misogyny, exclusion and, most of all, cruelty.
McNamara and Lanthimos cannot fathom a world with no existing oppressive structure. Therefore, there’s is a fundamental flaw in their brand of feminist ideology:
In addition to absolutely and harmfully misunderstanding female sexuality, they also assume that women want to be sexist back, that a woman in power is just a man with a different “thing between the legs”.
But what if women don’t want to perpetuate patriarchal structures? What if they don’t want to take on the traits of the oppressor and just oppress back?
In the epilogue as well as the erratum Gray tells the entire life story of Victoria McCandless M.D., the first woman to graduate from a medical college in Scotland. She was a socialist, a suffragette, lost two of her sons during the Great War and then continued to try and save the world the only way she knew how – medicine and stubbornness. Victoria was an extremely flawed woman and an even more flawed feminist, putting forth ideas which were quite harmful and never backing down from them, putting forth ideas of kindness and love and never backing down from them either – all the while running a clinic for the poorest of the poor and helping women as much as she could.
Although Gray himself couldn’t conceive of a world outside its societal order, he at least tried to conceive of a character who could (writing is tricksy like that). He wrote into existence a woman who didn't just try to change society from within, she tried to abolish its notions of women, sex, love and war altogether, all the while still being part of said society. She failed, she was ridiculed, she died alone, but not forgotten.
At the very end of the movie we’re shown an idyllic scene. Bella reclines on a comfy garden chair, while Blessington the goat dreamily chews on some brush. Ms. Prim and Felicity are playing ball, Toinette is sitting by Bella’s side, just existing, I guess, and Max, the ever-loving husband and utter wet blanket, tells her how awesome she is at medicine. She casts a satisfied glance at her kingdom of cruelty and abuse, smiles and sips some gin.
For all intents and purposes, Bella succeeded, where Victoria failed.
The movie actively and purposefully refutes every progressive, feminist, humanist or socialist notion the book puts forth. Where Gray tries to not sensationalize female sexuality, Lanthimos makes it a spectacle; where Gray writes of Bella’s slow and steady enlightenment, Lanthimos derides this notion, instead insisting on the adherence to a patriarchal status quo. Where the book deals in the ambiguity and ridiculousness of human nature, the movie proffers a cynical black-and-white philosophy and constructs a world where only a chosen few get a seat at the table (or at a comfy garden chair).
But if we, as a society, can’t imagine ourselves trying and failing. If we can’t imagine the complex ambiguity of being a socialist or feminist as an eternal path of learning and compassion, which sometimes leads us to utter stupidity and sometimes to enlightenment. If we can’t do that even in fiction, we’ll succumb to Yorgos Lanthimos’ complacent, cruel, black-and-white all-or-nothing mentality. We’ll mistake cruelty for compassion, basic abuse for feminism, and shower a movie about that with all the awards and accolades, it doesn’t deserve.
Oh … we already did.
↩ 1. The choice is yours, dear reader, to decide whether Archie here has fallen in love with a literal toddler, who cannot comprehend the world around her, or a severely disabled woman, who cannot comprehend the world around her for different reasons.
↩ 2. Granted, the long-winded back and forth is absolutely intentional and is supposed to make you want to skip the chapter entirely.
↩ 3. A socialist organization that exists to this day with) a reputation to boot.
↩ 4. I swear people laughed at that in the movie theater.
↩ 5. At least Barbie had the good sense of decking the man who grabbed her ass.
↩ 6. I don’t want to assume, but someone is sure obsessed with his middle footless leg.
↩ 7. This movie is incredibly straight.
↩ 8. Agency shmagency, amirite??
↩ 9. I guess racist Dr. Hooker was too risqué.
↩ 10. Well, duh! You did commit suicide
Sources:
Gray, Alisdair. Poor Things (Digital Edition). Mariner Books, October 2023
Poor Things. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, Element Pictures, TSG Entertainment, Film4 Productions, 2023
Barbie
Hello, Friends!
Barbie has officially made more than one Billion Dollars at the box office and my review, or rather deep-dive, into its plasticky feminist messaging is finally done.
For your reading pleasure, there’s a non-spoiler and spoiler section, in case you’re interested in watching the movie and having some fun first, before diving into its ideology and politics.
So, without further ado. Enjoy!
Welcome to Greta and Mattel’s Play Corner
In a scene near the end of the first act Barbie (Margot Robbie), having wound up in the real world to fix the tear between reality and Barbieland, has been escorted to Mattel headquarters by shady black-clad gentlemen in shady black armored cars. At this point, having suffered a setback of her own, Barbie doesn’t really know what to do next, so she goes along in the hopes that her creators can fix the problem.
She’s escorted to the top floor to meet the management headed by CEO (no name given) played by Will Ferrell. CEO is a kind of evil, but harmless, even dorky creature. He’s aware of the power he holds over little girls’ imaginations (even relishing in it), as well as his responsibility towards the bottom line of the company, and simultaneously he convinces himself that he’s doing it for female empowerment. In other words: he’s a caricature of a corporate shill, blissfully ignoring his male privilege (let’s call him CEO Ken).
As Barbie arrives at the top floor, CEO Ken (along with CFO Ken and COO Ken) convinces her to get back into a giant box (the one in mint condition that Barbies usually come in) to fix the tear in reality. That way, they promise, she can go back to Barbieland and everything’ll go back to normal. She agrees, but before she steps into the box, she has one last request: she wants to meet the female CEO of Mattel, the woman who runs the show.
This seemingly innocent request makes CEO Ken inexplicably angry. Mattel is a company that’s built for and by women, he proclaims. After all, they have “gender neutral bathrooms up the wazoo”, and they did have two (or so) female CEOs, one in the nineties and another one!1 The scene is obviously played for laughs, with CEO Ken being the butt of the joke. But then this phrase explodes out of his middle-aged mouth: “Now, get back in the box, you Jezebel!”, followed by: “What? You’re not allowed to say Jezebel anymore?”
Jezebel? What?
Obviously, Jezebel is supposed to be a jocular stand-in for the word bitch, and I, and others at the theater, definitely chuckled. But (if I may overthink for a moment2) Jezebel is also the woman whose name is synonymous with pure evil, wanton sexual depravity and heresy. The woman who is also undergoing a kind of redemption3 as the victim of biblical misogyny.
Thanks to my obsessive brain, this scene stuck with me longer than most scenes in the movie. The blatant invocation of the worst woman in the Bible, spoken in a moment of misdirected male rage and entitlement, made me wonder. Is this movie supposed to redeem Barbie? Redeem her from all the feminist criticisms hurled her way pretty much since her inception (modeled after a German sex doll no less)? The unrealistic body standards, the consumerist lifestyle, the blonde hyper-sexualized femininity – reexamined and recontextualized in this pink overly stylized movie?
Let’s see.
This marks the end of the somewhat spoiler-free section of the review. In short, yeah, the movie is entertaining and quite funny. The actors are spot-on, and the grand set design alone is worth a watch. I’d definitely recommend watching this movie for the spectacle, the humor, and the warm and fuzzy feeling you get when you don’t have to think about something too hard!
✨ SPOILERS AHEAD ✨ ✨ SPOILERS AHEAD ✨ ✨ SPOILERS AHEAD ✨
✨ Part 1: Pretend Existentialism ✨
The movie begins with a shot-for-shot recreation of the Dawn of Men sequence from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, wherein Helen Mirren narrates the first arrival of Barbie on the girls’ toy scene, previously dominated by baby dolls and pretend motherhood. While the girls rip off their aprons and ferociously smash their plastic babies into the barren post-war ground, Mirren continues to narrate the evolution of Barbie. If Barbie could be anything4, she says, have a career, her own money and everything she wanted, you could, too. Thus, Barbie solved all the problems posited by the patriarchy and catapulted women into a new and empowered future.
“At least, that’s what the Barbies believe. Who am I to burst their bubble? ”
If anyone could burst my bubble anytime, it’s Helen Mirren
To highlight life in Barbieland, we meet Stereotypical Barbie, as she goes about her perfect day. She wakes up, showers, eats breakfast, and of course changes cute outfits in-between scenes. On her pretend drive through town, she cheerily greets every Barbie she sees. We meet (President) Barbie (Issa Rae), (Lawyer) Barbie5 (Sharon Rooney6), (Writer) Barbie (Alexandra Shipp) during her Nobel Prize ceremony, and so many more Barbies along with their incredible achievements and careers.
Every job of importance, from garbage disposal to the supreme court, is performed by Barbies supporting their sisters with cheers and a heartwarming “Hi, Barbie!” everywhere. Barbieland is a collaborative paradise (albeit within the frame of the real world and its hierarchical structures).
(Main Character) Barbie arrives at the beach greeting even more Barbies, including (Mermaid) Barbie (Dua Lipa), but what’s this? Who’s vying for her attention? Why, it’s (Beach) Ken (Ryan Gosling) and all the other Kens, whose job is … beach, and they’re damn good at it, too. (Beach) Ken tries to impress Barbie by shredding some waves but fails miserably as he collides with the plastic water. Before Dr. Barbie can heal his wounded pride, (Tourist) Ken (Simu Liu), (Beach) Ken’s most bitter rival, tries to taunt him into an epic beach-off, but is stopped by Barbie.
Anyway, how about a huge blow-out party with all the Barbies and a choreography to bespoke music? Barbie’s got you. As the Barbies dance and the Kens try to get their attention, we know that it’s the best night ever, we all wanted this night, indeed every night, to be just like this – forever. By the way, have you ever thought about dying?
This one question not only derails the party but is also a harbinger of terrible change in (Main Character) Barbie’s life. As early as next day she starts “malfunctioning”. Her heels fall flat on the ground, the pretend water in her pretend shower is cold, and she falls off of her roof instead of gracefully gliding into her car as usual. After a good 30 seconds of barfing noises at the sight of her flat feet7, the Barbies tell Barbie to go to Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), a Barbie that has been played with too hard, has mangled hair and is always in the splits.
At Weird Barbie’s weird house, Barbie asks Weird Barbie to fix her so that she can go back to her perfect life. Unfortunately, it’s too late. The girl who’s been playing with her is sad, and her emotions somehow opened a rift between the real world and Barbieland and are now affecting (Stereotypical) Barbie’s emotional state as well. After some hesitation, Barbie agrees to go to the real world, after the actual threat is revealed – whole body cellulite!8
(It is, indeed, later revealed that the horrible things which made Barbie malfunction are perpetual thoughts of death and a life with whole-body cellulite9.)
Barbie goes to the real world accompanied by Ken, who was taunted by Ken to go with her. After arriving at Venice Beach, they both feel a clear shift in perception. While Barbie feels the unwanted attention from men with definite violent undercurrents, including sleazy comments, Ken is delighted by all the free and positive attention as well as the basic respect people seem to have for him. After some hijinks, Barbie sends Ken away so that she can think and figure out where she can find the girl she came to console.
She closes her eyes, breathes deeply and reaches out. Her mind is flooded with memories of a mother-daughter relationship that seems to have gone sour as soon as the kid hit puberty. With the help of the memories Barbie is able to find out where the girl goes to school. When she opens her eyes, however, everything feels different. She looks around and sees beauty – in small interactions, in a family going for a stroll, and in an old woman sitting next to her on the bench (Ann Roth10). Barbie looks at the woman, and at the height of her first burst of human emotions she accepts ageing and death, as she tells the woman how beautiful she is, to which she replies, “Don’t I know it!”. Beautiful scene, movie over, let’s go cry in the bathroom!
Unfortunately, Ken comes back with incredible news of his own: the real world is run by men with the help of a thing called patriarchy, which is great and has horses and stuff. Barbie doesn’t get to hear the great news11, however, as they have to depart to the school she saw in her vision.
Which brings us to the Jezebel scene. Barbie has just been shut down by Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), who blatantly told her that Barbie has not saved womankind from anything and has even added to their plight by propagating unrealistic body standards, a wildly consumerist lifestyle, a very narrow white thin definition of femininity, and basically called her a bimbo (haven’t we been reclaiming this word for the last decade?). By the way, these concerns remain largely unexamined within the movie, except for when they’re uttered by a precocious teen, which dismisses them outright.
However, credit where credit is due: the criticism of Barbie being less of an idea and more of a product is lightly touched upon in a very visually satisfying way. The production design of the Mattel headquarters has the same plasticky artificiality as Barbieland and shows a world where a bunch of man-children pretend-play with big ideas and money in phallically shaped buildings without any notion of the real world they’re influencing12. Unfortunately, this very vanilla criticism doesn’t go beyond showing the upper management of Mattel as a bunch of adorkable corporate Kens.
They couldn’t hurt a fly
In a very funny Benny Hill-inspired chase sequence, Barbie escapes the Corporate Kens and gets scooped up by Gloria (America Ferrera), the CEO’s executive assistant, Sasha’s mom and (gasp) the “girl”13 who was actually playing with (Main Character) Barbie. Bored in her job, sad because she’s losing touch with her daughter and overall unsatisfied of what she’s become, Gloria started dreaming of a simpler time – a time when play was equally as important as work and other responsibilities. Unfortunately, her real-world troubles crept into her blissful playing time, and so (Perpetual Thoughts of Death and Full-Body Cellulite) Barbie as well as the rift between the two worlds was created.
As soon as Gloria and Barbie reunite, Barbie knows what to do. She needs to take Sasha and Gloria to Barbieland to show them how a society run by women actually works. After all, this is what Barbie was supposed to do in the first place, right?
✨✨ History Excurse ✨✨
Barbie was first marketed as a teen model – a young woman about town, who had a ton of different outfits, her own money and no dependents. From her inception, she herself wasn’t dependent on outside male validation and was neither forced to nurture male egos nor any children. Which means that her relationships with her siblings, friends and cousins, as well as Ken, were based on actual sympathy rather than restrictive norms. In short, yes, Barbie was a relief from the constraining gender roles of the 1950s.
However, Women were on the cusp of liberation in the 1960s anyway, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique came out in 1963, sparking second-wave feminism (and everything good and bad that came with it). Ruth Handler, co-founder and president of Mattel, who is credited with inventing Barbie, saw that women were changing in the post-war years and understood this political climate far better than her husband or any man could. She knew that Barbie would sell, not because she would inspire young minds, but because she actually looked at young girls as a viable demographic to sell to14.
However, Women were on the cusp of liberation in the 1960s anyway, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique came out in 1963, sparking second-wave feminism (and everything good and bad that came with it). Ruth Handler, co-founder and president of Mattel, who is credited with inventing Barbie, saw that women were changing in the post-war years and understood this political climate far better than her husband or any man could. She knew that Barbie would sell, not because she would inspire young minds, but because she actually looked at young girls as a viable demographic to sell to[14].
✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨
Instead of acknowledging the fact that Barbie is a consumerist product that sometimes manages to inspires people, and how dangerously intertwined capitalism and culture actually are, the movie staunchly (stubbornly even) positions itself in favor of Barbie always having been an Idea (capital letter “I”) for the greater good15. Even though Ruth Handler appears twice in the movie as an adorable old lady ghost played by Rhea Perlman (an adorable old lady), both appearances paint her as a benevolent God, helping her creation to finally find herself, and less as a person with financial as well as creative ambitions. In the grand scheme of things, she’s also just a figment of imagination in this particular installment of Greta’s play corner. She is: (Simplified Beyond Recognition Ghost of Ruth Handler) Barbie16.
Adorable
✨ Part 2: Pretend Patriarchy ✨
Barbie, Gloria and Sasha make it back to Barbieland, followed by the (Upper Management) Kens, only to discover that Ken has returned there earlier (Biff style) and has instituted his own version of patriarchy with what he’s learned from the real world (brewskis, horses and submissive women Barbies).
Introducing: (Stealing a Time Machine, Going Back to the Past and Giving the Almanac to Your Younger Self, so that He Can Get Rich and Become Donald Trump) Ken. Accessories include: Sports Almanac, Time Machine, A Cane to Abuse People With and an Attitude. Out Now! Only Free.99
In his newly formed Kendom (Biff) Ken has brainwashed all the previously amazing Barbies into serving him and the other Kens, while being their “long-term long-distance low-commitment casual girlfriends”. He’s also destroyed Barbie’s dream house and turned it into his Mojo Dojo Casa House, which is awesome and has a mini fridge for his brewskis.
The patriarchy Ken propagates is, of course, played for laughs most of the time, as the Kens frolic about Kendom kensplaining movies, cars, sports and money to unsuspecting Barbies. However, again, the movie is actually quite close to making a point.
The Kens feel disenfranchised and trapped both in their dependence on the Barbies’ attention and their absolute lack of actual contribution to the world they’re living in. This results in a Barbieland version of arrested emotional development and a lack of a distinct sense of self. So, they sink ever further into a morass of loneliness, petty rivalries with other Kens and emotional immaturity, which results in them not being able to form any viable emotional connections. Instead of dealing with these emotions, they blame the Barbies for their misfortune and, as a result, subjugate them, vandalize their property and take over Barbieland by force.
These are the effects of the patriarchy on men. Greta identifies and shows them with terrifying clarity. How awesome is it then that she’s created a framework, a world fully built on play and fanciful thoughts, to playfully show us how these effects could be ameliorated – not a solution, but a suggestion of how, for example, women and men could collaborate to get out of this mess together; or how the Kens can bond in a meaningful way to understand that they need each other and not some fake subjugated girlfriend to form a strong sense of self; or anything really…..
✨ Part 3: White Feminism and The Speech ✨
After seeing what Ken has done to Barbieland, Barbie falls (literally) into a deep crisis and sends Gloria and Sasha away. Later she's scooped up by (Weird) Barbie and some allies, who didn’t fall for Ken’s version of patriarchy. Sasha, however, can’t leave Barbieland in disarray, and together with discontinued doll Alan (Michael Cerra), who is one of a kind and therefore even more lonely than the average Ken, they return to (Weird) Barbie’s house, where all of the misfits have gathered.
Gloria asks Barbie what’s wrong, and Barbie (by now almost human) breaks down, lamenting that she’s neither pretty, nor smart, nor interesting enough (the narrator chimes in again at this point, to lampshade Margot Robbie’s beauty).
As heartbreaking as it may seem to see Margot Robbie say that she’s not beautiful enough, Barbie’s statement doesn’t make sense. For whom is she not beautiful/smart/interesting enough? Barbieland appreciates her as she is, Kendom is a joke and no one cares about the Kens anyway, and she’s not human yet, so the real world is also not a concern.
This is not an existential crisis; it’s a prompt for The Speech.
After hearing the absolutely beautiful and perfect in every way Barbie utter those words, Gloria turns into (Gloria Steinem) Barbie and delivers the emotional climax of the movie (America Ferrera is a great actress and she does great in this scene, no shade)17.
After hearing the absolutely beautiful and perfect in every way Barbie utter those words, Gloria turns into (Gloria Steinem) Barbie and delivers the emotional climax of the movie (America Ferrera is a great actress and she does great in this scene, no shade)[17].
“It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow, we’re always doing it wrong.
You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can’t ask for money because that’s crass. You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean. You have to lead, but you can’t squash other people’s ideas. You’re supposed to love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman, but also always be looking out for other people. You have to answer for men’s bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you’re accused of complaining.
You’re supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you’re supposed to be a part of the sisterhood. But always stand out and always be grateful. But never forget that the system is rigged. So, find a way to acknowledge that but also always be grateful. You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It’s too hard! It’s too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.
I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don’t even know.”
We have to talk about this.
Gloria’s speech is the emotional core of the movie, it is well delivered and just feels right. The impossible standards, the contradictory requirements, just the pure insanity of being a woman – finally someone said it. Finally, you, Gloria, set the record straight:
“By giving voice to the cognitive dissonance of being a woman under the patriarchy, you robbed it of its power. ”
But, really?
What about the systemic oppression of marginalized women, the everyday threat of sexual violence, the systemic attack on women’s bodily autonomy? What about the fact that men hold most positions of power, regardless of how good it feels to ✨slay✨? What about the pay gap, unpaid care work, emotional labor, the frickin’ thigh gap …. the orgasm gap, for Christ’s sake!
What about the actual patriarchy?
Although we see a variety of races, body types and gender identities in Barbieland, their experiences with the aforementioned patriarchy are not mentioned or highlighted in any kind (if they have any lines of dialogue at all). Our main character, however, is (Stereotypical) Barbie, with the stereotype being: white, cis, thin and able. By giving this particular main character most of the screen time and dialogue lines, Gerwig opts for a simplified non-intersectional approach, saying that all women are the same and face the same diffuse oppression. Her kind of patriarchal oppression is highly individual, more of a set of contradictory guidelines than an actual threat.
In short – the movie is about how patriarchy makes one feel, not what it actually does.
Having white privilege doesn’t mean that Barbie’s life is without hardship, as we see in the short time she spends in the real world. As soon as she arrives, she is immediately sexually harassed and intimidated18. She has uncomfortable gender roles and expectations hoisted upon her and should she choose to become human, she’ll experience a barrage of double standards.
However, her and Ken’s white privilege comes in handy, after a man at the beach sexually assaults Barbie and she instinctively punches him in the face. She (and Ken) get arrested presumably for assault and immediately let go, but not before Barbie is verbally and very openly harassed by the cops processing them. Following that, they decide to get some less revealing clothes and get arrested again, this time for stealing. But again, they’re immediately let go, despite not having any money or lawyers. Both incidences of criminal behaviour result from men harassing Barbie, and although it’s an uncomfortable situation, nothing else of consequence happens to her (or Ken).
It’s both hard and very easy to imagine what would’ve happened if (Writer) Barbie or (President) Barbie had chosen to go the real world instead. Their experiences would’ve vastly differed from what (Stereotypical) Barbie encountered, as Black women are much more likely19 to be sexually assaulted and criminalized.
Another great example of Barbie’s (and Ken’s) easy accessibility in the world comes soon after, when she goes to Sasha’s school in this outfit:
She proceeds to wander about the school (Ken even goes into the library), until she finds Sasha and her friends in the cafeteria. Having acquired her target, Barbie approaches them, while no-one bats an eye at a weirdly happy lady in a weird outfit, and talks to them proclaiming that she’s Barbie.
Again, it’s not hard to imagine what could’ve happened, if (Doctor) Barbie, played by trans actress Hari Nef, had been in Barbie’s stead. As the current inhuman campaign against trans individuals seeks to take away20 their human rights as we speak, with trans women in particular being called groomers and rapists21, this scene would’ve played a lot more differently and (I imagine) violently.
White (cis, thin, etc.) privilege is baked into the very fabric of the movie - the choices Barbie (and Ken) are allowed to make and the places they’re allowed to visit without repercussions are proof of that. As soon as a woman diverges from the “norm”, however, patriarchy and the subsequent oppression become even more of a threat to physical and mental health, additionally to the “cognitive dissonance of being a woman under patriarchy”.
Actually, we only have to look as far as Mattel’s own back yard for further examples of this terrible dichotomy: In 2020 a report22 from China Labor Watch, Action Aid France and Solidar Suisse came out and revealed the horrific conditions the female workers who make Barbie in Mattel factories have to face, including rampant sexual harassment. Although Mattel has been alerted to these issues several times, they chose not to act on them.
Mattel is not interested in making a movie about how the practices of patriarchal structures actually affect women. A truly feminist film would be incredibly bad for business, you see. What they’re interested in is a veneer of feminism and wokeness, which they’ve easily achieved just by hiring indie-darling Greta Gerwig.
Patriarchy is not the same for everyone, oppression is not some diffuse concept and, unfortunately, you cannot rob either of their power just by stating how it makes one particular group of women feel.
✨ Conclusion: I’m a Barbie Girl, in a Barbie World? ✨
After the speech, (Writer) Barbie, whom the others abducted to try to deprogram her (questionable), snaps back to reality, because of the aforementioned “giving voice to the cognitive dissonance……..” (bla bla). And so, the (Guerilla) Barbies formulate a heist plan, which they narrate while standing over a map of Barbieland (let’s get heisty!).
They distract the Kens with the already deprogrammed Barbies by making them kensplain stuff, while forcing the brain-washed Barbies into a pink van23, subjecting them to snippets of dissonant double standards for women until they get woke. It doesn’t take long, as there are like seven Barbies in total. The crown jewel of their plan is then to play the Kens against each other by showing affection to their rivals.
“Now that they think they have power over you, they’ll start wondering whether they have enough power over each other.”
It works, of course, and culminates in a grand epic awesome beach-off between the warring factions of Kens led by (Beach) Ken and (Tourist) Ken respectively. It’s also a musical number, with a dance and everything. It’s amazing!
In his song, (Beach) Ken laments his fate of being Just Ken. Is it his “fate to live and die a life of blonde fragility”, he croons? What would it take for her to “see the man behind the tan” and fight for him? In the course of the musical number, however, Ken becomes increasingly aware of his predicament, and the song pivots into a grand dance number, with all the Kens realizing that they’re actually “enough and they’re great at doing stuff”, and ends with them holding hands – emotional connection achieved, feel the kenergy!
“My name’s Ken and so am I, put that manly hand in mine. So, hey world, check me out, yeah, I’m just Ken!”
Meanwhile, the Barbies storm the capitol and reinstate the Barbieland constitution, thus ending Kendom and saving themselves from patriarchy and taking back their dream houses.
And if this was the end of the patriarchy story line, I would’ve been incredibly happy (mostly because the song made me inexplicably happy to begin with).
The Kens did the work and, mirroring the Barbies’ examination of their congnitive dissonance under the patriarchy, rejected the pure performance of masculinity in favor of their need for genuine emotional connection and self-actualization – awesome!
Now, they can go to the Barbies, apologize and rebuild Barbieland as a land of equal opportunity for everyone (except Barbies with cellulite or flat feet ✨barf✨).
Upon their return from battle and their super awesome song, however, Ken doesn’t take the destruction of his kingdom and Mojo Dojo Casa House very well, and, although the song should’ve done the heavy lifting, Barbie has to apologize to him for having boundaries24.
After she does all the emotional labor for Ken and reiterates that he has to find a sense of self outside of Beach and Barbie, the (Corporate) Kens finally catch up with the plot and are ready to close the rift and return everything to its former glory. (President) Barbie, however, doesn’t want to return everything to how it was, instead giving the Kens their first seats as minor judges.
“In a couple of years, the Kens will have the same amount power in Barbieland as women have in the real world.”
Why? Why does Barbieland has to function like the real world? Why can’t we use the opportunity and at least try to find a solution to the obvious problems that plague the us?
Well, that’s obviously not why the Barbie movie was made.
Much like Barbie herself, it’s a pink, beautiful and smart summer blockbuster and just like Ruth Handler, Mattel and Greta Gerwig have found a lucrative demographic to cater it to – us. The perpetually online, the hyper aware, the helpless in the face of a burning world.
They identified that they can regurgitate to us the same consumption friendly “girl power feminism” from any Barbie commercial since the 80-ies, but with a sprinkle of commodified feminist language. It’s no coincidence or surprise that everyone, who saw this movie already has the readily available internet socio- and psycho babble vocabulary to talk about it.
In the end, by holding on to the existing patriarchal structures of the real world, the concept of the “flattering top”25, cellulite jokes or by not giving enough dialogue to any of the diverse cast, the Barbie movie doesn’t move anything, doesn’t go beyond what we already know.
It’s just a consumerist product made for our generation.
Stare into the void
Meanwhile, Barbie is ready to become human. The ghost of Ruth Handler appears and takes her to the void, where she makes sure that Barbie understands what life and death actually mean. She takes Barbie’s hands and shows her what humanity is about (take notes, there’ll be an exam): A Billy Eilish song starts playing and Barbie closes her eyes. She sees memories shot on the crappiest camera you can find. Women laughing, children giggling, adorable old ladies smiling, laughing, giggling, smiling, laughing, giggling…..
She opens her eyes, a tear rolls down her perfectly symmetrical face, she smiles.
So, what is an icon to do when she finally becomes human? How can she make meaning, instead of being an object of imagination? What does it mean for her to be a woman?
Do we meet her at a university educating herself? Do we get a glimpse of her being a community leader? Do we see her volunteering at a women’s shelter?
No, silly. She’s a woman now. We meet her at a gynecologist appointment, of course.
↩ 1. If you’re interested: Jill Barad was CEO from 1997-2000 and Margo Geordianis from 2018-2020
↩ 2. Sike! I don’t need permission for that!
↩ 3. Michael Satchell (Jan. 25, 2008). Jezebel was a Killer and Prostitute, but She had Her Good Side: The reigning icon of womanly evil. U.S. News and World Report (last accessed: Aug. 08, 2023)
↩ 4. “You Can Be Anything” is a trademarked statement held by Mattel since 1984. In 2015 it became the official Barbie slogan. (Natalie Yeung (Jul.21, 2023). The Barbie “You can Be Anything” Slogan. Profolus (last accessed: Aug. 3, 2023))
↩ 5. Curvy Barbie was added to the Barbie line-up in 2016 among other body-shapes like “petite” and “tall”
↩ 6. Kudos on the incredible casting choice!
↩ 7. Huh, for a society that has embraced disabled Barbie, they sure are not kind to disabilities that they deem gross or unusual
↩ 8. Huh, for a society that has embraced Fat Barbie, they sure are quick to jump on the fear-mongering wagon of cellulite, a thing that has been specifically invented by men to make women hate their bodies and spend an inordinate amount of time and money fixing it.
↩ 9. Kelsey Miller (May 14, 2018). Cellulite Isn’t Real. This Is How It Was Invented. Refinery29 (last accessed: Aug. 3, 2023)
↩ 10. Oscar-winning costume designer and overall bad-ass
↩ 11. Because she doesn’t prioritize his thoughts and feelings (sic!)
↩ 12. That’s some Succession level commentary right here.
↩ 13. (This video has nothing to do with my review, I just really like it.) Rowan Ellis (Aug. 1, 2023). the perpetual infantilisation of millenial women. Rowas Ellis - YouTube Channel (last accessed: Aug. 03, 2023)
↩ 14. After all, Mattel was the first ever toy company to broadcast commercials directly to children through their ties to the Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club.
↩ 15. Look, honey! Greta’s playing revisionist history. How cute!
↩ 16. BTW, I’d love an older Barbie edition! I’d kill for feminist icon Jane Fonda Barbie, laid back Lily Tomlin Barbie … ANGELA LANSBURY BARBIE!!!!
↩ 17. Buckle up, it’s a long one!
↩ 18. Victims of Sexual Violence: Statistics. Rainn (last accessed: Aug. 03, 2023)
↩ 19. National Black Women’s Justice Institute (Orginal Post: Apr. 2021, Updated: Apr. 11, 2021). Black Women, Sexual Assault and Criminalization. (last accessed: Aug. 04, 2023)
↩ 20. hrc.org Resources (Last updated: Jul. 25, 2023). Map: Attacks on Gender Affirming Care by State. Human Rights Campaign Foundation (last accessed: Aug. 03, 2023)
↩ 21. Henry Berg-Brousseau (Aug. 10, 2022). NEW REPORT: Anti-LGBTQ+ Grooming Narrative Surged More Than 400% on Social Media Following Florida's "Don't Say Gay or Trans" Law As Social Platforms Enabled Extremist Politicians and their Allies to Peddle Inflamatory, Discriminatory Rhetoric. Human Rights Campaign Foundation (last accessed: Aug. 05, 2023)
↩ 22. ActionAid France, China Labor Watch, Solidar Suisse (Dec 05, 2020). China: NFO report reveals Barbie-making female workers in Mattel Group’s factories are exposed to risks of sexual harassment. Business & Human Rights Resource Center (last accessed: Aug. 04, 2023)
↩ 23. Is this a reference to A Clockwork Orange?
↩ 24. You know who doesn’t apologize for brainwashing her friends, destroying her house and trying to take over the country?
↩ 25. Gray Chapman (Nov. 28, 2016). What Do We Really Mean When We Say Something Is “Flattering”?: Often, the word “flattering” simply boils down to camouflaging your body’s flaws. Racked (last accessed: Aug. 03, 2023)
Asteroid City
Hi, guys!
I’m slowly chippping away on my summer reviews, starting with this deep-dive into Wes Anderson’s newest pastel-colored masterpiece Asteroid City.
I genuinely think that this movie is Anderson at his best, perfectly balancing his highly stylized visual style with a deep emotional core.
The Jawbreaker with a Squishy Center
Directed by Wes Anderson
What is a director like Wes Anderson to do when it’s time for him to make his own version of The Fabelmans? A deeply personal drama, about the interconnectedness of family, love and grief. We’re all not getting any younger, so how do we reflect on our lives when the time comes? How do we gaze into the abyss of our past choices?
Wes Anderson thinking with his eyes
Well. In case of Anderson, we direct the outstanding thespians of our newest movie to act as mime-like and detached as possible, throw in an alien for good measure, and most importantly, hide the touchy-feely stuff in the middle, where it’s compressed by layer upon layer of pastel sugary candy. Also, the roadrunner – meep meep!
We open on a scene in black-and-white Academy ratio, as we’re greeted by Bryan Cranston in his best 1950s attire, narrating a special televised production as well as the behind-the-scenes of Asteroid City, the newest play by famous all-american playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton). Earp has recently finished his magnum opus about infinity and whatever else and is ready to put it on stage for our entertainment. The director Schubert Green (Adrian Brody) and the actors are introduced, and then we’re quickly moved to the actual play.
Intense
In the most pastel widescreen you’ll ever experience (at least until the next Anderson movie), the play within a narrated televised production opens with a train happily transporting Californian goods (so many avocados) across the desert, set to an Alexandre Desplat soundtrack.
The train passes a desert town named Asteroid City that consists of a garage and motel, as well as an observatory and research station at the huge and by all accounts ancient asteroid crater (open for visitors from 9 to 5, Sundays closed). Asteroid City is also mostly empty allotments that can be bought in a vending machine at the motel (retro future is here).
Everything you need, while grieving your dead wife in the middle of nowhere
As the train goes on its merry way, transporting its goods to avocado toast lovers everywhere, a broken down car is being towed into the garage. Here, we meet (some of) our protagonists: Augie Steenbeck (John Hall/Jason Schwartzman), war photographer and recent widower, Woodrow Steenbeck alias Brainiac (Understudy/Jake Ryan), his son, a genius and one of the winners of the Junior Stargazer and Space Cadet Convention, which takes place in Asteroid City, and Augie’s three young daughters Andromeda, Pandora and Cassiopeia (Ella Faris, Gracie Faris, Willan Faris).
Augie phones his father-in-law Stanley Zak (Tom Hanks), with whom he has a contentious relationship (we know that, because one of them is a WASP). Stanley chews him out for not yet telling the children that their mother died three weeks ago, but also begrudgingly agrees to come to Asteroid City to get the girls, while Augie stays with Woodrow for the convention, at which he is an awardee for inventing a… scientific thingamajig (yes, I’m spoiling everything, except the inventions of the junior stargazers – don’t at me).
Like many a small child, Andromeda, Pandora and Cassiopeia, much like their namesakes, move in mysterious, barely comprehensible ways and contain multitudes. Dressed in frilly clothes, they vehemently deny being princesses, instead choosing to be either vampires, mummies, witches or whatever strikes their fancy in that particular moment. However, as Augie finally confesses to his children that their mother is dead and that he’s been keeping this from them (mostly, because he doesn’t want to confront his feelings, let alone the feeling of his children), the girls are the only ones who, despite their very limited comprehension of death, start working though their grief, albeit in a very peculiar way.
When Stanley arrives, the girls are hard at work, having stolen their mother’s ashes and performing a resurrection ritual, while burying the ashes in a hole behind the hotel. Naturally, he scoffs at the inappropriate burial place and wants to bury the ashes in a proper place, although, after much witchy protest he agrees to leave the ashes in the hole until after the convention.
While the little starlets mill about the desert town, the other participants of the convention arrive in Asteroid City. The awardees with their parents, the military led by General Gibson (Jeffrey Wright) which funds the whole convention and gives out the awards as well as a grant to promising young scientists, a stranded group of cowboy musicians (who are just…there), and a primary school group with their young teacher. It’s kind of a summer camp … with emotional baggage and aliens.
While his sisters move throughout the movie largely undisturbed and uncontested, from the get-go Woodrow has a much more limited scope of movement. He’s trapped in a tight observational corset of everyone around him. His peers, when after the awards ceremony they practically force him to sit with them, so that he doesn’t have time or space to start processing the death of his mother; his father, who takes the knowledge that Woodrow already suspected that she was dead as a sign that everything’s alright; and lastly his own desire to squash his grief with the sheer power of his youthful arrogance and enormous brain. So, as the awardees retire for the night and Woodrow awkwardly tells his love interest Dinah (Grace Edwards) that his mother has died, he tries his best to be nonchalant about it (it doesn’t work).
Augie, meanwhile, has found his own way of salvation (or at least distraction) in Midge Campbell (Mercedes Ford/Scarlett Johansson), a movie actress (heh, an actress playing and actress playing an actress – neat!) and Dinah’s mother. With their motel windows being opposite each other, they start talking and bonding over their profound loneliness and trauma – Augie from losing his wife and being an absentee father, and Midge from being used and abused by men her entire life and being an absentee mother (fun all around). In typical Anderson fashion, the characters are framed opposite each other, confined in stylized sets that reflect their character, while rarely actually sharing a scene together, emphasizing their loneliness on a visual level. Together they rehearse the depressive dialogue from Midge’s upcoming movie, where Augie plays the part of the husband, left behind after his wife commits suicide (it’s not subtle). They also sleep together.
Craters everywhere – their souls are as pockmarked as the surface of the moon.
An alien decides to crash the party midway through the movie and steal the eponymous asteroid. Augie takes a picture.
The universe is chaos, relinquish control – give in.
Say cheese!
Unfortunately, because we’re (oh so) human and need a reason for everything, the second half of the play takes place in military-imposed quarantine, as the government tries to hush up what’s happened in Asteroid City, while subjecting the characters to physical and psychlogical tests. Just like Augie tried to hide the fact that his wife has died to avoid confronting his feelings of inadequacy and helplessness, General Gibson does the same thing, deferring to protocols and a memo from the president for guidance.
However there’s no quarantine on the truth, and inside Asteroid City the minds wander. The young geniuses, in an act of light treason, steal some equipment from the observatory and try to, unsuccessfully, contact the alien, while their parents are driven to a murderous rage by boredom and the excellent Martinis from the Martini vending machine at the hotel.
Eventually the truth gets out thanks to an intrepid school reporter and Augie’s picture and Asteroid City turns into a spectacle and favorite destination of every believer out there. As General Gibson is about to announce the end of the quarantine, the alien makes a second appearance to return the asteroid, the general tries to reinstate the quarantine immediately after the last visit, but the characters revolt, using the awardee’s inventions to shoot their way out of the camp.
Behind the scenes of Asteroid City life also rife with trauma and loss. The director Schubert Green is going through a painful divorce and living backstage during the production. While the writer Conrad Earp, who is implied to have been in a romantic relationship with John Hall, has tragically died before the televised production and left a crater of his own.
After the second appearance of the alien, Hall exits the set in an existential crisis and presumably grieving his romantic partner. He states that he still doesn’t understand the play, he doesn’t know what the alien or any of it means and goes to Schubert for guidance. The director tells him that he doesn’t have to understand the story to tell it.
Confused, Hall goes out for a smoke and by stroke of fate meets the actress, who was supposed to play his wife (Margot Robbie), but was cut out of the production. Together, standing on opposite balconies, mirroring the scenes Augie shares with Midge, they recite the monologue they were supposed to have near the end of the play. A dream sequence, where Augie meets his late wife on the moon and they just talk – no goodbyes, no saintly advise, just one more precious moment with a loved one.
Watching a Wes Anderson movie is always a study in symbolism. Like an old-timey explorer (hat and all), you descend into a flurry of stylized images, perfectly symmetrical shots and quirky acting. Underneath the sometimes impenetrable set dressing, however, is always an emotional core – flawed patriarchs, broken (man)children suffering from the consequences of arrested development, family life mirroring class struggles and vice versa. And at first glance, Asteroid City is no exception.
Augie, Stanley, Schubert, Conrad might be considered patriarchs – flawed, arrogant, self-absorbed. Woodrow and the other junior stargazers are typical precocious children acting like adults, and their parents are detached vultures profiting from their children’s genius ideas (as is the military).
What makes Asteroid City unique, however, is that the characters that would’ve been prominent or even main characters in other Anderson movies are set dressing, red herrings, deployed to conceal a surprisingly deep exploration of male grief and, how men in particular are allowed or not allowed to show emotions. As an alternative to open grief Anderson deliberately offers the protagonists escapism in the form of the exploration of the stars, endless talking about anything else than the actual topic at hand and juvenile (“boy”) interests like jetpacks, lasers, soldiers, cowboys and aliens. If we look closer, however, the soldiers are tired and helpless, the cowboys are total softies and artists at heart, and the alien is just kind of there, indecipherable in its purpose. Every character in the movie, including the writer, director and actors, revolves around a huge crater in the middle of the Nevada desert – at some point looking at it becomes inevitable.
When the quarantine is lifted and the world has lost interest in the existence of aliens, Augie wakes up to find everyone but his family gone, including Midge. Before breakfast, despite Stanley’s protests, which the sisters win simply by exhausting him, the Steenbecks decide to leave the ashes in the hole behind the motel, choosing to leave her at the crater – a wound that never really closes.
Or, uhhhh … does close … sometimes
Augie admits that he was going to abandon his children with their grandfather, but has since changed his mind, while Stanley finally admits that he never liked Augie, but that they’re welcome to stay as long as they like, choosing family over personal dislikes. Only then, after freeing themselves of their own and the world’s expectations, are they allowed to leave. They all sit down in the Asteroid City diner before departure, and Augie gets a note from Midge with her P.O. box address on it, while Woodrow has hooked up with Dinah the night before and has been awarded a $5000 grant, indicating that they’re both ready to move on (or at least try).
“Clear vision ahead with a rear vision mirror” (subtle)
They were the first to arrive and the last to go, it is their denial we’ve been experiencing, their coming to terms with an immeasurable loss – it is them we want to give a hug, pat them on the head and say “there, there”.
But, for the purposes of not being too dramatic and entirely discarding escapism as a valid coping mechanism for grief, the movie closes with the roadrunner dancing (yes) to Alexandre Desplat, while credits roll.
Meep away!
The miniatures are also awesome!
Afire (Roter Himmel)/Undine
Hi, friends!
I’m working on a couple of ideas simultaneously and my publishing schedule is a mess. I’ll try to return to Weekly Wax next week, but for now, here’s a deep-dive into Christian Petzold’s new (and not so new) movie, which both premiered at the Berlin International Festival in 2020 and 2023 respectively.
Enjoy!
Directed by Christian Petzold
Afire is written and directed by prominent German director and one of the originators of the Berlin School, Christian Petzold. It premiered at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival and was awarded the Silver Bear Grand Jury Price.
The story is set in a holiday home near the resort town of Ahrenshoop on the Baltic Sea. Although it’s peak holiday season, the town is empty, due to the constant threat of wildfires that’ve been consuming the nearby woods, with the fire department struggling to contain them. Although they see the fires illuminating the horizon a fiery red at night, our protagonists convince themselves that they’re safe, due to the wind mostly coming from the sea and blowing against the flames (a very flimsy reason, if you ask me. It’s as if the fire has some kind of symbolic meaning or whatever).
From left to right: Leon, Nadja, Felix, Devid
Childhood friends Leon (Thomas Schubert) and Felix (Langston Uibel) are planning to spend the summer in Felix’ family vacation home and work on their respective creative projects. Leon is finishing up the final draft of his second book, which he knows is terrible, but trudges on nonetheless, betting everything on the visit of his editor Helmut (Matthias Brand) to fix the mess. Felix meanwhile has to make a photography portfolio for his admission into art college with the very general theme of “water”. However, their plans get a tad complicated, when Felix’ mother fails to mention that Nadja (Paula Beer), the daughter of one of her colleagues, also decided to spend the summer in the house and work in the nearby town as an ice cream vendor.
Afire in is German cinemas right now and the second movie in a planned trilogy, so I decided to watch the first one to put things into perspective.
Undine is written and directed by Christian Petzold and is therefore also a prime example of the general style of the Berlin School, which mostly depicts disillusioned young people living in faceless cities, existing on the precipice between boredom and world- and/or self-shattering events. The film premiered at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival and also stars Paula Beer as the titular Undine, which earned her the Silver Bear for Best Actress.
Undine Wibeau lives in Berlin in a bland high-rise apartment and works for the Berlin Senate Department for Urban Development, Construction and Residence as a tour guide, where she lectures tourists on the various developments of Berlin throughout its illustrious history.
We meet Undine in café opposite her workplace, where her boyfriend Johannes (Jacob Matschenz) is in the process of mansplaining to her that she really should’ve known that he was going to break up with her. See, he said that he wanted to see her and not that they should meet, which means that it’s really her fault she didn’t anticipate the news. Undine doesn’t take it well and nervously reminds him that, if he leaves her, she has to murder him. She tells him to wait for her until she returns from a guided tour, and then to tell her that he still loves her (…or else). Throughout the tour she seems distracted, thinking of Johannes sitting in the café.
Meanwhile the newly minted roommates in Afire are not at all happy with the situation. For the first couple of days the boys don’t even see Nadja, but rather hear her and her sexual partner’s loud disembodied voices through the thin walls of the house. At one point Leon can’t bear it anymore and goes to sleep in the garden, where he sees a very attractive man (Devid) leave the house. Felix is not particularly bothered by it. He spends his days at the beach, planning his photography project and meeting new people. Leon, however, is fuming and refuses to entertain any thoughts other than his work, but the more he tries to fix the book, the grumpier he gets.
Leon and Felix are supposed to be childhood friends, but the only (kind of) friendly interaction that they have is a scene at the beginning of the movie, as their car breaks down on the road and they have to go to the house on foot. Leon is already quite grumpy, and as Felix forgets the way and sprints down a road to scout ahead, Leon is stranded in the forest. He hears helicopters flying overhead and animals screeching but fails to see anything, and right as he’s losing his nerve, Felix jump-scares him from behind. They (play?)fight and then move on to the house. That’s it, this is the scene that sets up their friendship. For the next one and half hours, Leon proceeds to be as mean and dismissive to Felix as possible. He dismisses Felix’s creative skills, ignores his attempts at showing him his ideas for the portfolio, makes fun of his sexuality, and is all in all a black hole of self-righteous self-pity throughout the movie.
Best frens!
There are two philosophies regarding art at the heart of the movie. Leon treats writing as serious, lonely and highly cerebral work. In his opinion, a writer is an inherently tortured being, very sensitive to criticism and bears the invisible burden of creation (which make him take himself much more seriously that the other characters). He doesn’t share his work with anyone he deems “unworthy” (not educated enough).
There’s a pivotal scene somewhere in the middle of the movie, where Leon and Nadja get to really chat for the first time. He tells her about his book and insecurities, outright admitting that his editor is coming to tell him that he hates his book. Nadja tries to be encouraging and asks, what the book is called, as he answers (Club Sandwich… worst title ever) she pauses (doesn’t laugh or smile, just a tiny pause) at which he gets defensive and rude. She asks whether she can read the book and he refuses, citing a story from his childhood as one of the causes of his deep insecurity. As he was a child, he read one of his stories to a cleaning lady and she said it’s funny (that’s it, that’s his trauma), likening Nadja to a cleaning lady, at which she gets angry (classist).
Next time he sees her, however, he gives her the book as an apology for comparing to her to a cleaning lady (again, classist) and she accepts. During his wait, it seems that he’s on the precipice of accepting the collaborative approach to art. He seems more relaxed and talks to Felix and Devid (Enno Trebs) (one of Nadja’s hookups and the lifeguard at the local beach) without scowling at them. After Nadja is finished, however, she rejects the book (hard). She tells him that it’s bullshit and that he knows it. As he asks her to elaborate, she refuses (based on the passages we later hear from the book, I understand). He storms off, muttering under his breath that she’s just a dumb ice-cream lady, who doesn’t understand him or his writing (this guy!).
Leon sulking on the beach, after Nadja rejected him his book.
His reaction to his writing being rejected by a (lower class) woman, shows how much it’s directly tied to his masculinity. When Felix scoffs at his word choice (work), Leon gets defensive and accuses his “friend” of thinking that writing is not manly enough to call it work.
Felix’ approach to art (and life in general) is much more emotional and, at its core, collaborative. He shares his ideas with the people around him and listens to their advice and critiques, which arguably makes his portfolio better in the end. However, the way the situation is resolved, it becomes quite clear which side the movie settles on.
No one, least of all Leon himself, can escape his rage and self-loathing; his perception informs the entire movie (meaning, we’re stuck in his unpleasant head for a while). While Nadja, Felix and Devid, act like normal young people on a sea-side vacation, Leon perceives them as a nuisance at best and hostile at worst. Every pause, every word unspoken becomes a feedback loop in his head, where silence is filled with self-loathing and imposter syndrome (a fun guy to be around).
However, the movie (and by extension the writer and director) sees Leon as a flawed, but relatable character. His behavior is called out by Nadja and Felix a couple of timesand he sometimes even seems sick of himself, but it goes nowhere and it’s quickly dropped in favor of a flacid self-discovery story.
According to Paracelsus, Undines are water spirits akin to mermaids or naiads. They don’t have a soul and can only gain one and a subsequent life on earth through marriage to a human (man). Should this human deceive her, however, he dies (or has to die) and she has to return to the waters and give up her earthly life.
When Undine returns to the café, Johannes is gone, and it’s quite obvious by now that she doesn’t want to go through with her threat. She wants to stay in Berlin and live a self-sufficient life (kind of). While looking for Johannes in the café, the aquarium in the middle of the dining room catches her attention, as the little diver inside seems to whisper her name.
Save meeee…..
At that moment, Christoph, an industrial diver, who wanted to thank her for the guided tour and invite her for a cup of coffee, introduces himself to her. Mesmerized by her alluring empty eyes (conjecture), he stumbles backwards and bumps into the aquarium, breaking it and freeing the little diver. Undine tries to push him away, but they both end up soaking wet and with a couple of shallow cuts. As fate commands, they fall in love and develop a loving long-distance relationship.
Some time into the relationship, while on a walk with Christoph, however, Undine sees Johannes and his wife/girlfriend Nora passing by and her heart stops (literally). The short glimpse of Johannes’ girlfriend/wife Nora (Julia Franz Richter) is a great example of how Petzold views and writes women. She gets three lines of dialogue (mostly screeching) and the visuals tell us everything we need to know about her. She is blond, has make-up on, dons revealing clothing and high heels, and (worst of all) talks with her hands and has a shrill voice. Compared to mousy Undine, who has piercing mysterious eyes, doesn’t talk a lot, wears the same two outfits (one of which is a work outfit and the other dutifully purchased on notliketheothergirls.com/white-t) over and over again, and more importantly has small boobs, it’s clear who we’re supposed to sympathize with.
Leon continues to be a little shit to everyone, but especially to Devid, who is conventionally attractive and masculine (I’m sure that has nothing to do with anything). And so, we see the world through this particular lens (warning: your eyes might get stuck, if you eyeroll too hard): Devid cruises through life without a care in his world and has faced no difficulties in his life whatsoever. Felix is still working on his vapid portfolio, where he photographs people from behind while they’re looking at the sea, and then from the front as a portrait, that’s stupid. And what’s with that bitch Nadja? Hawking her ice-cream on the beach and letting multiple men fuck her brains out – low-life.
This dinner is absolutely normal and not intense whatsoever …
It’s laughably clear that he’s threatened by Devid’s good looks and overall positivity, Felix’s creativity and talent and by Nadja’s sexuality, especially as he begins to develop feelings for her. It almost seems that in order to maintain his view of the people around him, he deliberately keeps himself ignorant of them, absolving himself from getting to know them and discover that they’re real people. In the end it’s easier for them to remain a total fiction (the thing is, we’re not given any other perspectives either, they appear as shallow to us, as to him).
After seeing Undine with Christoph, Johannes pivots and tries to get her back by promising her to leave his partner for real this time (charming). Undine rejects him, finally sure of her love for Christoph, but just as she thinks that she’s successfully evaded her own mythology, she gets a call from Christoph, asking her about Johannes. He asks her whether she was waiting for someone the day they met at the café. As she says no, he demands to know whether it was the man they met this morning, the man who made her heart stop, but she still denies it. Disappointed by her dishonesty, he hangs up and doesn’t answer the phone anymore.
Undine tries to call him throughout the night, but can only leave him a voicemail, before deciding to pay him a visit herself. She arrives at Christoph’s usual diving spot, only to find police and one of his colleagues waiting for her to promptly redirect her to the hospital, where Christoph is being treated for severe brain damage after being under water without air for twelve minutes. At the hospital Christoph’s colleague Monika (Maryam Zaree) is sleeping at his bedside. Distraught, she tells Undine that Christoph has been announced braindead.
Undine, having just found out about Christoph’s death, tells Monika that she and Christoph have spoken on the phone last night and that they had a fight. At the mention of the phone call, Monika gets extraordinarily aggressive and accosts Undine, accuses her of lying and literally bullies her out of the room, as Christoph had been already hospitalized at the time the phone call took place. (So, that means, that he, already dead, pierced the veil between life and death to call his love one last time to …….. whine about her having an ex? Really? We’re dealing with this level of incredible pettiness here? Wow!)
There are no positive interactions between Undine and any other female character in the movie, speaking to Petzold’s incredibly extensive blind spot when it comes to women. All of them (even Nadja and Undine) can be reduced to stereotypes, their lives revolving solely around men, while his (straight) male characters (even the minor ones) are allowed to have rich inner (mostly shitty) lives. In all fairness, I don’t think that Petzold is a raging misogynist, just more of a common one.
These interactions do have a meaning within the movie itself. It seems like Undine is holding on for dear life when it comes to staying in Berlin. Everything around her breaks (the aquarium in the café when she meets Christoph, coffee cups, the toy diver Christoph gives her, etc.), her clothes look wrinkled and ill-fitting, and the interactions with the other characters become strained out of nowhere (her boss Anne (Anne Ratte-Polle) is a bitch to her for no reason, Monika is aggressive to her in a situation, where she shouldn’t be). This visual representation of the world expelling her is very well done, but done nonetheless with the help of the age-old catty female stereotype.
Monika is just one of the guys…
Taking Christoph’s accident as a sign that she can’t escape her fate, Undine goes to Johannes’ house he shares with Nora. Undine finds them both in the pool, and once Nora goes inside, slips into the pool and drowns Johannes, finally fulfilling her promise to him. This scene is fantastic! The hair and make-up, as well as the slick silk blouse that she wears, make Undine look like and actual mermaid, and the blue lighting from below gives the entire murder scene a maritime salty feel. After the murder, she then finds a suitable body of water and goes under, while Christoph suddenly awakens in the hospital screaming Undine’s name in a panic.
Meanwhile, Leon is so deep in his torturous writing throes that he barely notices anything going on around him. This is masterfully reflected in the sound design. Throughout the entire movie we hear, but never see, flies buzzing, helicopters flying overhead and animals making noises in the forest; we’re introduced to Nadja by hearing her have sex somewhere in the house. What Leon also fails to notice is the budding relationship between Felix (his supposed best friend he’s been treating like shit) and Devid (the guy he hates for being hot). As an aside, after Leon finds out that they’re in a gay relationship, they all but disappear from the movie, and he doesn’t perceive Devid as a threat anymore (do with that, as you will).
On the day Leon’s editor arrives, we finally get to hear some of the passages from the book and they’s re bad. Leon sees that Helmut hates it, but doesn’t really understand why and hopes that, if they work on it some more, he’ll come around somehow. As Leon hunkers down, to work on it through the weekend, Helmut breaks the news that he can’t stay that long, due to some important circumstances and that he’ll depart the next morning.
As Leon frantically tries to convince Helmut to work on the book some more, Nadja arrives from work and invites him for dinner. Instead of commiserating with Leon, Helmut helps Felix with the concept of his portfolio, giving him the last piece of the puzzle (a third layer of the composition with only the sea as the subject) and offers to help him with the accompanying blurbs for the images. As Nadja asks Leon to help in the kitchen, he yells at her for taking precious time away from him and the book by letting Helmut help Felix.
Helmut continues to (brazenly) be nice to other people during dinner and asks Nadja why she’s staying at the house in the first place, whether her work at the ice-cream stand is temporary and what she actually does for a living; weirdly enough all of the questions are answered by Devid, as she nervously glances at Leon. Devid says that she was rejected a grant for her PhD and, after some encouragement, she reveals that she has a post-grad in literature and is writing her doctorate thesis on the poetry of Heinrich Heine. As Helmut starts reciting one of the poems Nadja helps him and ends up reciting it in full, while Leon glares at her. Seeing Helmut devoting more time to Felix and Nadja as well as the revelation that Nadja is not just a stupid ice-cream lady (as he’d hoped she’d be) makes Leon even more mad, as he goes to sulk.
The next day, Felix and Devid go to retrieve Felix’ dead car, which they’ve abandoned on the day of their arrival, while Leon and Nadja fight about the revelation of her (for him) new-found status. Huffing and puffing, he demands to know why she let him believe that she was just an ice-cream vendor, to which she simply replies that he never bothered to ask her any questions whatsoever. Their fight is cut short as the dreaded fire alarm sounds, indicating that the wildfire has made it to their neck of the woods, and at the same time Helmut doubles over in pain and collapses on the ground.
Without much hesitation, Nadja drives Helmut to the hospital in his tiny car, while Leon runs there on foot through the forest. On his way he sees a group of boars fleeing the fire, and as he catches up to them, he sees a piglet burning and dying right in front of him. While he stares at the dead animal, he hears and then finally sees a wall of flame approaching him and runs after the surviving boar, until he gets out of the woods and into the hospital. There he finds a sleeping Nadja and collapses beside her.
Christoph gets better a couple months after the accident and goes to Berlin to look for Undine. There, he quickly discovers that she hasn’t been seen in months and that her entire life was temporary. She lived in a short time rental and only freelanced as a tour guide. She led a life from which she could simply disappear, barely remembered, even after just a couple of months of absence.
At the hospital Nadja and Leon finally get to see Helmut, who tries to hide his illness from them, but is evidently leaving the oncology department as they find him. He tells Leon that his book is crap and that he believes that he can write an amazing second book (more on that later), if and when he abandons this project. Helmut also tells him that he will supervise the project, as much as he can, before he has to give it to another editor.
Leon doesn’t pay attention, as to where this conversation takes place and and retreats in to his entitled shell once again (not that he ever left it). On their way home, he accuses Nadja and Helmut of conspiring against him and her in particular for telling Helmut, what she thought about Club Sandwich. Now, he continues, they will concentrate on her doctorate thesis, while Leon gets the short end of the stick, while being paired with some lowly intern (a thought he has, after Helmut tells him that the editor, he’ll hand his project over to is female). Nadja, tired of his bullshit, literally has to spell out that Helmut was in oncology and that he’s dying.
While Undine desperately tries to escape her fate and the mythology behind it, Leon actively revels in the self-mythology of the lonely, tortured writer. So much so that, instead of thinking about it for one moment, he catches up to Nadja in the house and begins another vapid apology. He tries to confess his love for her (a person he just accused of taking away his editor and never asked any personal questions) before he’s interrupted by two policemen entering the property. Without much fanfare they inform Nadja that Felix and Devid have been caught in the fire and were found dead in the burned forest clutching each other (yes, we indeed buried our gays). We don’t even see their final moments, instead sending them with Leon (great).
The plot jumps forward two years, and Christoph is fully recovered and living with Monika, who’s pregnant with his child. He gets an assignment to work on the same pipes as two years ago, when he had his accident. Monika is worried, but he agrees, nonetheless. While finishing up, he sees Undine’s hand touching his glove and, looking up, he sees her floating in the water staring (that’s what she does best) at him. However, when he goes to check the video after getting out of the water, there’s no evidence of their encounter.
Later that night, Christoph gets up and goes to the lake once more, to look for Undine. Monika follows him and begs him to get out of the water, but he just stares at her (his terrified pregnant girlfriend) and dives into it. Under water, he and Undine hold hands, and as the camera pivots to Monika, we see Christoph hugging her and clutching the toy diver that he gave Undine as a gift. He and Monika leave, and we see them fade into the distance from the point of view of the water.
The epilogue to Afire is narrated by Helmut reading from Leon’s new book. The scene renders the events after he and Nadja got notified of Felix’ and Devid’s death. They go to the morgue to identify the bodies and as Nadja cries, Leon can’t will himself to show any emotions, even at the horrifying revelation that Felix and Devid apparently didn’t suffocate but burned to death. Seeing that, she leaves, and he stays to do all the administrative work, including notifying Felix’s mother. After that he wanders to the sea, finally looking at it in all its bioluminescent beauty, and starts crying.
This is supposed to be a cathartic moment. A happy ending carved out of tragedy, but, oh my, does it suck. Even after Felix’s death, the story is still about Leon and his shitty writing, it’s about him being sad that Nadja left the house without saying goodbye and it’s about him finally being able to cry. It’s still a navel-gazing mess disguised as a story of self-discovery. Not only did Leon treat his supposed childhood best friend and his boyfriend like shit for the entire duration of the movie, not only did the movie bury its gays, no, Leon stole their tragedy for his book, for his (supposed) happy ending (Ugh!).
Helmut stops reading and congratulates Leon on a job well done (debatable). They briefly discuss Felix’ death and Leon doesn’t show any emotions, except when Helmut says that he spoke with Felix’ mother. Oblivious to everything Leon says that there shouldn’t be any legal issues, as he changed all the names and locations (this man has no character arc) and, instead of berating him, Helmut just says that he wanted her permission to use one of Felix’ photographs for the book. It turns out to be a picture of Nadja taken from behind, as she stares out into the water (probably wishing she could get away from him).
They’re obviously in a hospice facility, and Helmut has to get ready for a medical procedure. He gives Leon something to read and kicks him out. While wandering the grounds Leon sees Nadja, who came to visit Helmut. As they see each other (after Leon struggles to hide in the bushes for a while) Nadja gives him a warm, welcoming smile. A smile that says “well done”, a smile that says “you finally found your voice”.
This ending (and all of her scenes really) shows so clearly that Nadja was written by a man. Her world, actions, feelings and motivations revolve solely around Leon. She is a foil for his repressed sexual feelings, a lowly ice-cream lady turned academic to make him learn a lesson about assuming, an object of desire and lastly the last bit of encouragement that he needs to live a fulfilling creative life. And Undine is no different…
The myth of the Undine is a myth conceived by men about women. By men like Paracelsus, who created them as water spirits (who, for some reason, had to have a gender); by men like Jean Giraudoux, who made her into a vengeful spirit, a soulless thing, before finding salvation in marriage (to a man, of course), but bound to kill, if he ever cheats on her (she, of course, cannot be unfaithful, her spouse is her entire world); and finally by men like Petzold, who pretends to give her a way out, but takes it away, as soon as her goals and feelings become ambiguous (can she love Christoph and still have feelings for Johannes? – No! Monogamy is key), making the ghost of her dead boyfriend a vengeful (petty) spirit instead. Her autonomy ends, as soon as it gets inconvenient for the men around her. Although the ending is supposed to be hopeful — after all, Undine didn’t take Christoph for herself, but rather let him go and chose a life of proud (very wet) solitude — she is, nonetheless, punished by having to fulfill the mythology hoisted upon her by men and the society they created.
The myth of the manly writer, on the other hand, is self-imposed. Looking at overtly masculine role models like Ernest Hemingway or closed-off supposed geniuses like H. P. Lovecraft, Leon constructs a mythologizing cell for himself and his mind that he never manages to break. Although he’s shown how life and art can be different by Felix, whose collaborate approach to art is set up to be the opposite of Leon’s grand writing mirage, Felix turns out to be gay and then is swiftly disposed of in the fire. His death is then used by Leon to get out of his writing slump and we’re specifically shown that he didn’t change at all. Like a parasite, he took others’ experiences and a great tragedy and filtered them through his own inadequate, insecure brain to get some content out of it.
Christian Petzold, it seems, doesn’t want his characters to change, as those who want to change either get consumed by a wildfire or have to live out their life in the murky waters of a tiny nameless lake somewhere in Berlin.
Translation: The editor thinks it shit.
A Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
In a delightful scene, reminiscent of an all-girls pajama party, somewhere in the middle of A Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the main characters Marianne (Noémie Merlant), Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) and Sophie (Luàna Bajrami) read Ovid’s retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice aloud. With rising tension they intone the last scene of the myth, as Orpheus, who was explicitly told by Hades not to look back before he and his beloved cross the threshold to the world of the living, looks back and dooms Eurydice to a second death and an eternity in the underworld. “Read it again!” Sophie demands, Héloïse reads the passage for a second and third time, a wild discussion erupts, giggling laughter. Orpheus was right to turn around, or was he, why would he do such a thing? Sophie is inconsolable, Héloïse thinks it was impatience, but Marianne offers another interpretation: “He made not the lover’s choice, but a poet’s.”
SPOILERS!
Directed by Céline Sciamma
Women in Space and Time Part 3/3
(Our) Space
In a delightful scene, reminiscent of an all-girls pajama party, somewhere in the middle of A Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the main characters Marianne (Noémie Merlant), Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) and Sophie (Luàna Bajrami) read Ovid’s retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice aloud. With rising tension they intone the last scene of the myth, as Orpheus, who was explicitly told by Hades not to look back before he and his beloved cross the threshold to the world of the living, looks back and dooms Eurydice to a second death and an eternity in the underworld. “Read it again!” Sophie demands, Héloïse reads the passage for a second and third time, a wild discussion erupts, giggling laughter. Orpheus was right to turn around, or was he, why would he do such a thing? Sophie is inconsolable, Héloïse thinks it was impatience, but Marianne offers another interpretation: “He made not the lover’s choice, but a poet’s.”
Art and myth are at the heart of Orpheus’ world, he is the the son of Apollo, God of the sun, poetry, truth and prophesy (to name just a few of his responsibilities), and Calliope, the muse of eloquence and epic poetry. It is no wonder, then, that their son found himself the protagonist of one of the most enduring myths of all time. A myth of opposites – love and loss, music and silence, light and darkness and, of course, life and death. A myth that has been told and retold by countless painters, musicians, writers and poets – an interpretation game for the ages. Céline Sciamma (no doubt also daughter of some creativity related deity) takes on the myth in A Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a deeply sapphic movie about a painter and her muse, her reflection.
Part 1: From under the Eyelids
Unlike the myth, the movie begins with Marianne’s journey to the underworld, as is tradition, on a boat with a lone disinterested ferryman. Clutching her painting materials, she braces herself against the unrelenting waves of the ocean, until the boat almost keels over and throws her canvasses over board. Although the ocean is no less dangerous than the river Styx itself, Marianne flings herself after the canvasses and retrieves them, while being impartially watched by the only man we’ll see for a while. Now having undergone the full passage ritual, she finally arrives at the island, where she’s supposed to paint a portrait of Héloïse, a reclusive young woman, as a wedding gift for her betrothed in Italy. Should the future prospect like the painting, he will take Héloïse and, most importantly, her mother from the dreary island in the Normandy to shimmering Milan.
On the beach alone …. you know the rest.
Héloïse is not as eager as her dear mother the Countess (Valeria Golino), about being married off to a random rich guy, as she was raised in a convent and wasn’t prepared for marriage whatsoever. Unfortunately, her older sister, the one who was supposed to get married, flung herself off a cliff prior to the events of the movie, so the younger daughter has to suffice to rescue the family from financial ruin. The Countess tells Marianne that she is to pose as Héloïse’s walking companion, as she is the second painter who tried to paint Héloïse’s portrait, after she categorically refused to pose for the first one (a man). Marianne is given the task of observing Héloïse during their shared walks along the cliffs, where her sister killed herself, and the beach below.
Prior to Eurydice’s death, her love story with Orpheus was as clear as day. He was an amazing artist, a musician to rival the God of the sun himself. When he played, the world swayed in the rhythm of his lyre. When she heard him play, it was pretty much a done deal. They fell in love and were soon married. Marianne, on the other hand, cannot directly woo her muse with her skills, she has to observe, catch glimpses, of eyes, hands, neck and shoulders, and then carefully transcribe what she saw at night in the dim candlelight of her sparse studio. The image is distorted by memory and twilight. Her inspiration, her muse, cannot be directly looked upon, they walk in silence.
Their tragic and incredibly beautiful downfall begins when Marianne finishes the portrait of the person she surreptitiously observed for days. The Countess is eager to please her daughter’s future husband and wants to send the portrait to him at once, but Marianne, consumed by guilt, asks her whether she can show it to Héloïse first and come clean. During their walks, the two women have grown fond of each other and shared enough time together that it feels wrong not to tell her at that point. Conflict arises nonetheless, as Héloïse despises the face she sees staring back at her, a face devoid of any sharp characteristics or imperfections, an idea of a beautiful woman, a mockery of the living breathing human she perceives herself to be. Here, too, Sciamma’s retelling diverges from the myth.
In any adaptation, be it Ovid, Virgil or Gaiman, Orpheus felt unapologetically real. His talent and art are real, in Anaïs Mitchell’s interpretation the natural world’s reaction to his song is even shown in occurrences like rain, sunshine or the changing of seasons. Subsequently we, the reader, experience his emotions with him. His infatuation with Eurydice, his grief when she dies, and his hubris and utter unraveling at the fateful moment in the underworld. Even his death is visceral in a sense hers isn’t. While he was torn apart by a horde of ravenous women (I mean…), she was killed by a snake, a silent killer no one saw coming.
In A Portrait of a Lady on Fire Héloïse is only silent while, she’s being deceived, observed and painted without her consent. Confronted with Marianne’s art, however, she is utterly and vocally unimpressed, even doubting the painter’s qualifications and artistry. As soon as she turns from object to subject, she demands to be heard, demands space. Something Eurydice never was afforded. Pained by the rejection, something Orpheus never experienced, Marianne destroys the painting just before the Countess’ inspection.
This physically hurt…
Mommy dearest is, of course, furious and wants to kick Marianne out, but Héloïse, having glimpsed a side to Marianne she desperately wants to explore, finally agrees to sit for the portrait. The Countess departs with an ultimatum: “I’ll be back in 5 days, until then the portrait is finished.” Both agree and the mother departs.
Part 2: The Gaze
The idea of purely female spaces has been weaponized against trans people for a while now, and it still manages to reach unimaginably dumb and horrific heights with trans athletes being denied access to locker rooms and trans women in general being harangued and labeled groomers or rapists for using the ladies’ room. The fear that is being coopted by TERFs and their best friends the Nazis to rile up the populace is simple: trans women are men in disguise, who are slaves to their perverted desires and have one purpose – infiltrate a woman’s private space (a designated space just for women) and to sexually assault them without consequence. A wisp of a scenario that doesn’t withstand even a cursory glance and falls back into the sewer, where it belongs, if afforded a full-on stare and inspection.
Nonetheless, political agenda aside, why are women so protective of purely female spaces? – The answer is simple, of course. Men (straight, cis, and all that jazz). Men, who, if they want to rape, don’t need disguises or silly plans to get what they want. They have mostly already infiltrated every aspect of a woman’s life, be it as doctors, bosses, trainers, policemen and, let’s not forget, as politicians, who still have the power to make harmful legislation regarding our bodies and reproductive systems (haha, you actually believed the “political agenda aside” thing).
It might feel overwhelming to think about all the ways one is unsafe in the world. It is for me at least. And so the idea of a purely female space (trans women very much welcome and appreciated) calms me, gives me a respite, before I have to go out there again. A Portrait of a Lady on Fire is such a space.
I mentioned before that the only man we’ll see for a while is the boatman who ferries Marianne from the mainland to the craggy island, where she is to stay until she’s finished the portrait. The house she arrives in is hauntingly empty, with only the Countess, Héloïse, Sophie (the housemaid) and Marianne populating it, before the Countess’ departure in the middle of the movie. The mansion is situated not far from a tiny village with potentially some men, which we never see. This remote island is not only devoid of men, it’s also devoid of the idea of men. Except in some very specific instances (Héloïse’s looming marriage, Orpheus), they’re not talked or thought about. They are utterly unimportant.
The mise en scene and cinematography reflect that. They feel light and breezy, there’s room to breathe, to lounge about in unflattering positions and wear the same outfit every single day, no one to impress, no one to stimulate with your very being.
After the Countess’ ultimatum, Marianne restarts the process of painting, now with a proper model. In a deliberately slow and meticulous scene, she poses Héloïse, paying attention to every detail, before retreating behind the canvas watching, observing, painting. Meanwhile Sophie confesses that she is pregnant and that she doesn’t want to keep the baby. In a scene invoking the spirit of everything feminine (which I adore), they first try every home recipe they know of (in the 18th century). Sophie runs up and down the beach to try to exhaust herself, and after that doesn’t seem to work they try some kind of homebrew out of flowers they picked in front of the house, which also doesn’t work.
Sophie’s abortion is centered in the second half of the movie as one of the quintessential female experiences. It’s not a coincidence that they know at least one hack to try. Knowledge of how to deal with unwanted pregnancies (and contraceptives) has been passed on for as long as there were women around. With all that’s going on in the US now, these scenes are prescient in many ways, but mainly they show that there always will be information on abortions, as well as people willing to provide them, regardless of the legality (or safety).
When the house recipes don’t work, the three women, who are friends and (for all intents and purposes) equals by now, go to the village for a witchy rave bonfire. All the women of the area are gathered around the fire, laughing, talking, relaxed. Sophie saunters over to a wisened woman and talks to her, after which she tells Marianne and Héloïse that the woman agreed to abort her pregnancy, to which they offer to come with her. The village women then draw closer to the fire and start jamming chanting, while Marianne and Héloïse stare at each other through the fire. This being the only scene that has music in it, the entire progression. While the chant crescendos, the two women turn to each other and look each other in the eyes, until Héloïse’s dress catches on fire and she falls unconscious (I CANNOT overstate how beautiful this movie is!). Marianne offers her hand to help Héloïse up, and the scene cuts to daytime and them kissing in an alcove by the sea (OMG!).
The same night, Marianne wanders to Héloïse’s room and they spend the night together. From this moment on, she is haunted by a ghostly appearance of Héloïse in a wedding dress, signaling the impending end to their budding romance.
Meanwhile it’s time for Sophie to go to the midwife in the village to terminate her pregnancy. They’re greeted at the door by a young girl, who helps Sophie to undress. Several generations of women are shown helping with different steps of the process, until the eldest finally begins the (very painful) process. Sophie is asked to lie down on a bed, where a small child is playing with a baby (where else should they be in a one room hut?). In a lesser movie the baby would be used to showcase what Sophie is missing (or something trite like that), but the scene is incredibly powerful, because nothing like that is even hinted at. It is powerful, because we see women being in charge of everything that is happening to them. When Marianne attempts to divert her gaze from the procedure, Héloïse tells her to watch. Watch, this is reality, this is womanhood.
Afterwards, while Sophie is resting, Héloïse pulls the mattress she’s lying on to the ground and assumes the position the midwife assumed, while carrying out the abortion. “It’s time to paint!” She says, thus immortalizing this quintessential event in oil on canvas.
On the last day of the Countess’ ultimatum Marianne and Héloïse look at the finished portrait together. It has become a piece of collaborative art, as the line that separated artist and model became increasingly blurry during their sessions together. It was not only Marianne who gazed upon her muse, but in this instance, the muse looked back. She was both the assessed and the assessor. Only by getting to know Héloïse, by letting her control her image, did Marianne manage to capture her essence on canvas.
At the mention of the purpose of the portrait, Marianne becomes jealous and is promptly called out for it. “It’s terrible! Now that you’ve had me for a little while, you’re angry at me!”, Héloïse bluntly tells her. The notion of a lover as property is swiftly banned to the world of men. There is a notion that women can let go easier, but I personally don’t subscribe to that. Women can be as creepily possessive as men in my experience. They fight and then immediately reconcile at the beach, deciding to enjoy their last moments together as much as possible. They lie on the recamiere sofa, taking each other in, eyes focused on every part of their respective bodies. Héloïse asks Marianne to draw herself onto page 28 of Héloïse’s book, redirecting the artist’s gaze unto herself.
Back with Orpheus, there is a lot of speculation as to why he turned around at the last moment. Anger, doubt, hubris? Sciamma posits the artist’s choice. He looked back to take in the idea of his muse and to be able to leave the actual person behind, or as Héloïse says, “At some point you will see the picture,when you think of me.” In this retelling Orpheus accepts his folly of wanting to bring his beloved back from the dead and makes the decision to leave her alone, once and for all, while retaining her memory. Eurydice, of course, doesn’t have a say in this either.
The real world announces its presence, even before the Countess can scrutinize the portrait. In the morning, Marianne descends the stairs for breakfast and find the boatman from before behind the table being served food by Sophie.
A man. EWW!
The intrusion of this normalcy is nauseating. The Countess soon approves the portrait, pays Marianne and bids her farewell. She says her goodbyes to Sophie, who is inconsolable, and then goes up to the Countess’ drawing room to see Héloïse one last time. She meets them in the middle of Héloïse trying on the gift her mother got her – a lavish wedding dress. Marianne hugs both of them, savoring the last fleeting moment of physical contact with her muse, and flees downstairs, the camera following at her heels. As she opens the door, Héloïse appears silently behind her and demands she turn around. We end on Héloïse, clad in white standing on the stairs, lit with a ghostly blueish white light, before everything goes black. Eurydice finally took control of her ending.
Part 3: From Across the Room
There is one retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice that I like most of all. It’s a side quest in the game Hades (2021) by Supergiant Games. In it, Orpheus, still depressed even in death, is now Hades’ court musician, as he hasn’t forgotten his song from the songster’s last foray into the underworld. Orpheus still misses Eurydice and is consumed by guilt over what’s happened. He refuses to sing, and so Hades puts him in the dungeon. You, as the main character Zagreus, son of Hades, can free Orpheus from his sentence and with that begin his side quest. As soon as you free Orpheus, you can find Eurydice in Asphodel (one of the many “hells” you have to cross to get out of Hades).
When you meet her, Eurydice is content. She moved on, built a life in afterlife and seems to enjoy her new existence much more than Orpheus does. When we meet her, she sings her signature song, which perfectly sums up her feelings on what happened with her husband and her existence in general. She sings, “Farewell, to all the earthly remains. No burdens, no further debts to be paid. […] Goodbye, to all the plans that we made. No contracts, I’m free to do as I may. […]” Finally, she has the freedom to just be herself. Finally she has a song of her own. You have the option to reunite her and Orpheus. But why would I do that? As you must’ve guessed, I opted out of this option. He had his chance.
Marianne never talks to Héloïse again, but sees her on two separate occasions years later. The first time she is at a gallery, showing her painting of The Fall of Eurydice, a painting with her father’s name on it.
Just take a moment and appreciate the color palette of this frickin’ movie!
While looking at the art program she spots something and makes her way to the other side of the gallery. The crowded room is a far cry from the lofty interiors of the mansion on the island where they spent their time together. After pushing through a mass of mostly male bodies, which don’t budge when she passes (it’s not subtle), she arrives a portrait of Héloïse holding a child by the hand. Marianne looks at the portrait, the portrait impartially stares back, until she notices that Héloïse is holding her finger in the her book to show page 28.
The last time Marianne sees her is at the opera, as she spots Héloïse across the hall, sitting down. We zoom in on her face, as the first measures of Presto of Vivaldi’s Summer play. She is mesmerized, cries and laughs at the same time. At this moment, she is free.
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
She gets up at 5 am, before anyone else in the house, and makes breakfast. Her movements are precise, she knows perfectly well what she’s doing (no bumbling about like a normal person at 5 a.m.). She navigates her bright and meticulously curated apartment in a spotless housecoat that she never needs to adjust. Her life is contained within these four walls and is entirely in service to her family, dog and, most importantly, her audience.
SPOILERS!
Directed by Chantal Akerman
Women in Space and Time Part 2/3
(Her) Time
She gets up at 5 am, before anyone else in the house, and makes breakfast. Her movements are precise, she knows perfectly well what she’s doing (no bumbling about like a normal person at 5 a.m.). She navigates her bright and meticulously curated apartment in a spotless housecoat that she never needs to adjust. Her life is contained within these four walls and is entirely in service to her family, dog and, most importantly, her audience.
If you thought that I’m talking about Sight & Sound’s newly minted Greatest Film of All Time Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelle, you’re mistaken (although you, dear reader, have most likely never seen this movie). Instead, I’ve been procrastinating writing about this 3-hour paragon of slow cinema by watching Honeyjubu, a very successful paragon of slow YouTube who is currently sitting at 2.1 million subscribers. But first things first.
5 A.M.
Jeanne Dielman is a 1975 movie in which we experience three days in the life of Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig), a housewife and single mother of her teenage son Sylvain (Jan Decorte). In these three days we see her clean, cook, and run errands in real time and in minute detail. Her routine is carried out with habitual robot-like precision. In the afternoons, before cooking dinner, she prostitutes herself, which seems like just another of her many daily tasks. By the time the mood starts to shift, her routine and quirks have become a familiar pattern, so when her perfect order starts to unravel, even the smallest detail becomes overbearingly important for assessing Jeanne’s mood and level of discomfort. After a particularly stressful third day, Jeanne snaps and we’re left wondering what will become of her and her daily routine.
The movie is written and directed by Chantal Akerman, who, in the span of her 30-year-long career, pioneered and perfected the art of slow avant-garde cinema. An art form that perceives time as a separate entity, not to be manipulated, but cherished and carefully coerced into filling out spaces as well as influencing the movement within these spaces. We watch Jeanne walk from room to room, cook and clean in long static shots, letting her tell her story, regardless of our gaze, by taking her time. To watch slow cinema is to surrender control to every scene and sound and to let your thoughts intermingle with anything the director chooses to show you. Not a simple task – excruciatingly boring for some, relaxing for others and even engaging for the very few (it’s me. I’m the few).
As with many a slow film, Jeanne Dielman is a very tactile experience. As the camera lingers on the pastel walls of Jeanne’s apartment, the frilly curtains, her fuzzy housecoat – masterfully lit by the cinematographer Babette Mangolte, Akerman’s long-time collaborator in all things avant-garde – you start to feel the air of the apartment the texture of its walls. As the action mostly unfolds within this single space, the lighting imitates the light’s progression from day to night, in such a natural fashion that I thought that the movie was shot without artificial lighting.
The same tactile experience goes for sound, as the movie doesn’t have a soundtrack, but opts for a rich soundscape instead. Every sound becomes part of Jeanne’s story, as we see her days unfold, in which the clattering of pots and pans, the rustle of her clients’ coats and the sound of her brushing her hair with furious intensity become a manner of communication with the outside world as well as with herself.
The movie consists of long uninterrupted scenes of all the things that are usually elided in movies, as Akerman shows us housework in ritualized regular patterns. Cooking, washing dishes and hands, making the bed – these particles of Jeanne’s universe are given careful consideration and attention to detail.
The infamous Schnitzel scene.
Take the first scene of the movie:
Day one starts in media res, as Jeanne habitually turns on the stove and puts some salt into the pot, not really registering the amount she puts in. The door bell rings and she removes her housecoat in two calm collected motions, without disturbing her cardigan underneath, before folding the housecoat and putting it away. As she opens the door, we see her torso sideways, hands folded, as she receives the coat from a visitor. She then hangs it up and goes to her bedroom, as the visitor follows. The shot lingers at the exact same frame, as light becomes dark and the two emerge from the bedroom. The man takes his coat, while Jeanne matter-of-factly waits and receives her money, before they part ways.
Belgian film legend Henri Storck as Jeanne’s first client.
This entire tableau is mesmerizing. Always being at the center of the frame, Jeanne is in full control, taking as much time and space as needed. The camera, positioned at a low height, often slightly looking up at her, follows her, recording her every movement in upfront whole-body or mid shots without zooming in. Even when she takes a bath after her afternoon visitor, her body is not fragmented, instead the camera positions her in the center, as she meticulously cleans herself and then the bathtub. There is no eroticism, but pragmatism with heavy undertones of compulsion that will become clearer in days to come. With a static impartial camera, our gaze becomes secondary to Jeanne, as we enter the world of a truly objective gaze.
Shot by an all-female team, the movie garnered a lot of feminist support when it came out, and for good reason. From the point of view of a 1975 feminist, this movie accurately portrays the dire consequences of a patriarchal society on women – a life in service to men, regardless of whether these men are husbands, sons or johns. Heterosexual sex is depicted as a tool of oppression, as well as obsession. Jeanne’s adolescent son talks at length about sex and how he imagines it to be. In a particularly oedipal scene, he confides in her that he was terrified of his father penetrating her, when he was told how sex works by one of his peers. In the same scene, rigid and half-hidden in the shadows, Jeanne deliberately tells him that it is something women have to endure in order to fulfil their natural roles as mothers and caregivers (no fun detected). With this background Jeanne’s work as a part-time prostitute is not depicted as sexual liberation, but another facet of servitude. It is, after all, a movie about the invisible woman and her labor. We’re shown the work that “unliberated” housewives have been doing for centuries in minute detail – so underrated that their right to exist was debated by fellow women and ridiculed by the men they served.
Modernity doesn’t negate anything the movie stood for in the seventies, but to understand the movie’s relevance for a modern-day audience, it is crucial to (re)conceive of Jeanne Dielman as a modern woman.
Billy Joel lyrics aside, the moniker of “modern woman” is a multi-faceted beast, however, I want to focus on the Millennial definition of this term. The modern woman of today has entered the work force as well as the educational system many years ago and enjoys certain liberties within these systems. In many ways, she has a lot of choices, which movies like The Worst Person in the World (Joachim Trier, 2022) portray as a kind of selfish paralysis, where the many avenues that can be pursued in life are treated as obstacles to the one thing that the protagonist finally has to settle on – and settle she must. Depending on the inclinations of the director, there are two main avenues the modern woman can pursue – family or work.
Should she choose family at the end of the movie, she is shown in serene over-exposed shots, fawning over a baby, seemingly forgetting any talents or interests that she wanted to pursue before making this crucial choice. Should she choose work, however, there always has to be a reminder of what she’s lost. In The Worst Person in the World, we see Julie working as a set photographer, after she’s finally settled on photography in the span of the movie. While wrapping up, she sees her ex, who left her because she was pregnant, with another woman happily cooing to a child, suggesting that he just didn’t want kids with her. This particular kind of scene is repeated at the beginning of the German rom-com Einfach Mal Was Schönes (Karoline Herfurth, 2022) about Karla, a middle-aged career-driven woman, who gave up on her desire to have children because of her ex, but resurrects it as soon as she sees him with a child of his own. As much as we want feminism to be obsolete, even this small sample shows how far away we still are from an actually liberated choice-driven woman.
Jeanne Dielman clearly didn’t have as many choices as Julia or Karla in life, but her depiction still speaks to a struggle that many of us still face today. She is a single parent without a support network, as we don’t see her meaningfully interact with anyone, including her own son.
Although Akerman didn’t think in these terms in 1975, she depicts something that still plagues a lot of women that are in (mostly heterosexual) relationships or have a family today – the mental load. The expectation is that they have to plan and organize family life, despite also working full time, while the men in their lives do much less to much more acclaim. The same particularity that is used for depicting Jeanne’s daily life is deployed when showing her son being serviced and propped up as the patriarch of the house, behaving like some husbands (and, let’s be honest, teenage sons) still do today. When he arrives at home, Jeanne is already waiting by the door to take his coat, and then proceeds to serve him dinner, at which he reads a book, absolutely ignoring her, only answering questions when asked. There is no talk at the table, no “how was your day, mother?”, just an entitled acceptance of all he is given. This proceeds into the second day, where he, as he doesn’t find his mother at the door, proceeds to call for her, finally finding her in the kitchen and handing her his coat there.
In light of all the service she is providing, her entire being is so tied up in organizing, planning and maintaining her and Sylvain’s life to an exhausting degree, that she can’t conceive of a life outside her four walls. The rigidity of her daily routine and meal plans is curated, almost manicured, as she goes about her tasks – the ritualization lightening the burden of constant planning. Her desire for freedom is supplanted by her desire for order, as her apartment becomes the one place she can control. But with this control also comes the inability to rest, as we see on the third day. Her home becomes a map of her entire existence and the space where she can live out her quirks and compulsions. When she goes into a room and switches on the light, the room comes into being, and when she leaves it, it vanishes with the flick of light switch. Lights, menus, cleaning and a missing button on a coat become matters of utmost importance and the failure to adhere to certain patterns become the stuff of drama and suspense. The more Jeanne slips from her chronological pattern, the more she enters into a state of restlessness and despair.
So, from the perspective of these modern parameters, the three days we spend with Jeanne tell an entirely different, but not less relevant story. A story of perfection, exhaustion and loneliness. A burden so heavy, no one should be carrying it alone.
Day 1: The Dream
It was no coincidence that I started binge-watching Honeyjubu while procrastinating on Jeanne Dielman. More than any other Youtuber that ostensibly does the same, her content always struck me as otherworldly. She very rarely goes out of her immaculate apartment, outfitted by state-of the-art cooking equipment and white and beige walls with no pictures on them. The way she moves through the space and the shot of how she gets up in the morning and immediately goes to the rice container to measure out the rice and get it on the stove for breakfast is uncannily similar in every video. When she cooks, everything she makes is perfect. Perfectly cubed tofu joins perfectly sliced onions in an impossibly full pot that never ever boils over.
Just a normal week-night dinner. Nothing to see here. Very normal…
This perfection is, of course, the result of editing that achieves a level of curation that borders on dystopian sterility. So, why do so many people, including myself, enjoy this almost creepy display of perfection?
Easy. Satisfaction and pattern recognition. The same satisfaction that arises when you stick a square peg into a square hole or doodle in a zen garden, only to turn it into a perfectly smooth surface, when you get tired of the swirly patterns. In Honeyjubu’s videos as well as on Jeanne’s perfect little first day, everything has its place. There is no idleness, no confusion, no painful decision what to make for dinner or what to do next (or so it seems). You simply observe a woman who seems to have it together. Her mind isn’t frayed by a thousand different tasks. No worries about how to fit work, relationships, socialization, money, household and stimulating hobbies into a 24-hour-day cross her mind. Her world is small. Her daily routines predictable. Her habits precise and thrifty. She lives in a simple pastel world, where she has her cooking, cleaning and servitude – the dream. Does it matter then that she reads the letter from her sister from Canada in a tired, monotone voice? That her son ignores and treats her like a household slave? Does it matter how vigorously she brushes her hair? No, everything is perfect. I need that.
Dinner rolls around and everything goes smoothly. Everything is ready when Sylvain arrives, and they eat in silence, as Jeanne serves soup and then the second course. After dinner, Sylvain does his homework and then they spend the evening listening to music, while Jeanne knits a sweater. There is serenity in this scene and a suggestion that their evenings have always been like that – as Akerman lets us fill in the blanks of Jeanne’s life.
Ugh. Twat!
Day 2: Demimonde
Relaxed and refreshed Jeanne (and I) starts the next day, even before the alarm clock chimes. Like clockwork Jeanne puts on her fuzzy coat and goes to shine Sylvain’s shoes (an activity that made me hate that little twat forever), before waking him up for breakfast and sending him to school with some money that she takes from a jar in the living room.
Again, her precision is both delightful and scary, made all the more disturbing by the fact that I like it so much that I resist any social commentary that might be lurking in her movements – in the shadows, between the lines. She runs some errands, where we see her drinking coffee. I notice that this is the first and last time she does something for herself. She sits at a corner table and serenely stares into the distance, while drinking a cup of coffee – and here, I hit a snag. Looking at her at that moment, I feel exhausted, her chores suddenly becoming excruciatingly real. I feel tired and need to take a nap. There are unfortunately no naps in our future, and with a lot of the day still to go, Jeanne goes home.
At home, her neighbor drops off her baby for a while (women supporting women) and while babysitting, Jeanne starts to prepare dinner. In a steady symmetrical full-body shot, we see her as she lovingly breads thinly slices veal cutlets in elegant focused motions (the gloop, shlarp, shlop of the soundscape is weirdly delightful, too). Her head bowed in concentration, a detached look on her face, I relax again. She seems to like it, so why shouldn’t I? Maybe she’s not exhausted, maybe she loves her perfect domestic bliss of a life. As I continue to blindly hold on to my satisfaction, her neighbor stops by to pick up her daughter and chats with Jeanne about, what she wants to make for dinner – a riveting conversation. (The nagging feeling of exhaustion and being trapped returns to the back of my mind.)
At the moment the doorbell rings and announces the arrival of this day’s client, Jeanne’s reaction harkens back to the beginning of the movie. She salts the potatoes, elegantly removes her house frock and goes to open the door and take the visitor’s coat. They proceed to go to her bedroom.
The moment they emerge from the bedroom, however, something feels off. Jeanne’s hair is a tad disheveled; she is impatient to get the client out of the door, and as she goes to put the money into the jar in the living room, she forgets to put the lid back on. She discovers that the potatoes are overcooked, after which she proceeds to aimlessly and indecisively wander the apartment, pot in hand, until she snaps out of it and discards the potatoes (the scene is also darkly comedic). This seemingly small misstep causes her an enormous amount of stress, as we get a glimpse of what’s to come when time starts to slip out of her grasp. The subtle suspense that has been building since the scene at the café comes to the forefront, as she reluctantly buys new potatoes and very angrily starts peeling them, only to be interrupted by her incompetent son, who, as mentioned before, couldn’t fathom hanging up his coat himself.
Never has potato peeling been so riveting.
The dinner scene from the first day is repeated almost verbatim with the difference that the potatoes aren’t ready. The wait is excruciatingly silent, as Jeanne and Sylvain sit motionless at the dinner table. Being outside of her comfort zone, Jeanne doesn’t know how to be idle or spontaneous, and so she gets up multiple times to check on the potatoes, before returning to sit and stare some more. Her frustration is palpable, as Sylvain accosts her with his oedipal musings about sex and love. As an extension, by breaking the satisfying pattern of the first day Akerman also frustrates the audience and lets them sit in the uncomfortable knowledge that they might not know, what comes next.
Day 3: Surrender
Jeanne’s time seems to fold in on itself, as she tries, but fails to resurrect her daily routine. She gets up and puts on her fuzzy coat, forgetting to close a button. As usual she goes to shine Sylvain’s shoes, but can’t really concentrate on it and drops the brush. After seeing Sylvain off to school, she goes to run errands in the city, only to discover that time has betrayed her. She arrives either too late or too early, doesn’t find anything she’s looking for, and doesn’t even get her favorite seat at the café.
The tension of time not doing what it’s supposed to becomes unnerving when Jeanne returns home, but doesn’t find anything to occupy herself with. After she’s prepared dinner, she sits down and tries to drink a relaxing cup of coffee, which tastes terrible. Jeanne tries to make it taste better first adding milk and then sugar, her face and movements becoming more and more agitated before she slams the coffee cup on the table. In her serene and ordered home, this genuine expression of anger makes one jump. The film now being as suspenseful as a thriller, everything she does makes me exceedingly nervous. As she’s not able to relax, she again tries to find something to do, only to end up sitting on her lounge chair for protracted periods of time, clenching a washing rag in one hand and always reaching into her breast pocket, as though looking for smokes, with the other. Just staring, waiting (at this point, I’m exhausted).
The doorbell rings and she welcomes her daily afternoon client. This visit being the last remnant of Jeanne’s ritualized routine. As usual, they disappear into the bedroom, but this time we follow them. In a most uncomfortable sex scene, we see Jeanne lying under the man, staring straight ahead at the ceiling. At some point she tries to wiggle herself out from under him, but doesn’t succeed, before he finishes. There are definite hints of something non-consensual happening, but I think that Akerman was expressing her general unease with heterosexual sex overall. Regardless, it was very uncomfortable to watch, consensual or no.
After sex, Jeanne gets dressed at her dressing table, while staring at the dozing man behind her in the mirror. For a short moment, her movements return to the languid precision we saw at the beginning of the film, as she dresses. After zipping up her skirt, she takes a pair of scissors and stabs the man on the bed. The last seven minutes of the movie, we watch Jeanne, hands and blouse bloody, sitting at her dining table, breathing and stretching her neck. The burden of maintaining perfection and of being taken for granted has been lifted, her freedom could only be bought with blood.
After the movie ended, I also stared a lot longer at the dark screen than usual. I wondered, what would become of stupid Sylvain and the meatloaf she prepared, before murdering a dude. Can the little twat survive without someone hanging up his coat when he comes home from school? I found myself wishing for her to smartly get rid of the body, so she can get back to her small ordered world. But she won’t, and maybe, we shouldn’t either.
On the Beach at Night Alone (2017)
When I’m down, which is a lot lately, I find myself looking at the program of my fair city’s film museum to see whether they run any interesting retrospectives. In January (the worst of months) they ran a Joanna Hogg retrospective (which is an essay in and of itself), as well as one on the South Korean director and auteur Hong Sang-soo. To my great shame, he didn’t ring a bell. Thankfully shame is my greatest motivator, so I immediately bought a ticket to the 2017 movie On the Beach at Night Alone starring Kim Min-hee (a mouthful of a title which I since then managed to merely get right two times on the first try).
SPOILERS!
Directed by Hong Sang-soo
Women in Space and Time Part 1/3
(My) Dream
When I’m down, which is a lot lately, I find myself looking at the program of my fair city’s film museum to see whether they run any interesting retrospectives. In January (the worst of months) they ran a Joanna Hogg retrospective (which is an essay in and of itself), as well as one on the South Korean director and auteur Hong Sang-soo. To my great shame, he didn’t ring a bell. Thankfully shame is my greatest motivator, so I immediately bought a ticket to the 2017 movie On the Beach at Night Alone starring Kim Min-hee (a mouthful of a title which I since then managed to merely get right two times on the first try).
In 2015, Hong Sang-soo, who was married at the time, and Kim Min-hee made their relationship public and were eviscerated by the Korean press, which ended Min-hee’s career. She’s been exclusively acting and otherwise working on Sang-soo’s movies ever since. Their collaborative body of work since they were dubbed “Korea’s adulterous couple” has been a meditation on uncomfortable romantic encounters, relationships in the movie industry and the overall pain of being a romantic sexual being in a rigid society.
Part One: In Waiting
Young-hee (Kim Min-hee), a washed-up actress, goes to Hamburg to visit her friend Jee-young (Seo Young-hwa) and to recover from an affair with a married director (Moon Sung-Keun) and the subsequent media scandal that wiped out her career. She is still very much in love with the man, which makes it hard to deal with both the break-up and the societal repercussions at once.
Young-hee’s visit to Hamburg consists of a somewhat ritualistic daily route from Jee-young’s apartment to a sausage stand to a park and back. We first meet them at the sausage stand, with Young-hee praising the filling nature of German food, before they depart to the park. At the park, they’re verbally accosted by a black-clad stranger, who asks for the time and, when they don’t immediately answer, leaves in a huff. The man ends up stalking them in the park. Sitting on a bench in the park they talk about Young-hee’s realtionship to the director, and we get glimpses of her desperately wishing for something else, the freedom to be whereever and whoever she wants. A freedom that Korea can’t afford her. Multiple times she expresses her desire to stay in Hamburg and live with her friend, by which she’s unceremoniously rejected.
For now, however, she is in an endless state of tortured waiting, as shown in the endless repetition of their routine, the never-ending interrogations of whether she or her friend are hungry and the constant question, whether the director will visit her in Hamburg. Throughout the entirety of Part One, time is irrelevant, capitulating before Young-hee’s overwhelming desire to see her ex-lover. And so, she and her friend become tragicomic figures, not unlike Vladimir and Estragon from Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett.
The similarities to the play, and specifically its stale stillness, become apparent after their first exchange with the stalker in the park. Before crossing a small river, Young-hee starts praying, which denotes a somewhat spiritual motif. After crossing the bridge, the women find themselves pursued by the man in black and hurriedly leave the park. While wandering the streets, Young-hee and Jee-young observe several strange people, without meaningfully interacting with them, just passing the time until He finally arrives. The director, like Godot, sends Young-hee an e-mail and promises to come this Saturday (coincidentally Godot also promised to arrive on Saturday in the play), but with no clear sense of time, there is no understanding, when this Saturday will arrive or whether it’s long passed. Their sense of time is further eroded by the constant twilight and gloomy winter days, which all look the same after a while, giving the movie overall an out-of-time feel.
The dialogue between the two women is warm, but always subtly adversarial, and nowhere is it more apparent than in their ample talk of food (again very similar to Vladimir and Estragon’s dynamic). Korean society and the film industry are always present in the background of every conversation and every longing look. So much so that it feels like a character of its own. Young-hee wants to be free of it, feeling its tight leash every time she talks about her relationship.
It is Korean custom to ask whether one’s eaten as a common greeting, with most people expecting a “yes” in return; a simple transaction of “how are you?” and “I’m fine”. Here, however, the questioning becomes an intense interrogation of belonging, as Jee-young, a lonely introverted woman, always rejects food of any kind, regardless of whether she’s eaten, and Young-hee, on the other hand, never says no when offered food. Therefore, Jee-young conforms to the colloquial standard, regardless of her well-being, while Young-hee, someone in the process of being shunned by Korean society, does not.
In the Part One finale Young-hee is at the beach at night (just as the title promised), drawing a portrait of her director in the sand. While preparing to go home, she stares at the water, contemplating her desire to see him again. Before she can go home with Jee-young, however, she’s knocked unconscious by the stalker from the park and carried away into Part Two. At this point she is everyone and no-one. By virtue of her being an actress, she embodies a little bit of everyone in Waiting for Godot and their constant struggle with an eternity of waiting and repetition.
In their final scene together, Jee-young marvels at the portrait’s good looks, which introduces us the leitmotif of Part Two.
Part Two: The Law of Attraction
Time starts up again, as we see Young-hee blankly staring at the screen in an empty cinema, looking as if she just saw Part One (I also looked like that, after that ending). Outside she meets Chun-woo (Kwon Hae-hyo), an old acquaintance from the industry, which is the first, but certainly not the last person from her old life she accidentally meets. She tells him that she came back to Korea a while back and, as she always wanted to see the winter sea, is visiting their mutual friend Jun-hee (Song Seon-mi) in Gangneung, a coastal city in the east of the country. He then invites her for coffee to a café he and Myung-soo (Jung Jae-yong), another mutual from the industry, opened together, which turns out to be the café she and Jun-hee were planning to meet at all along.
Right from the beginning, Chun-woo comments on Young-hee’s looks. He says how much she’s matured since they last saw each other (presumably before she went to Hamburg), and that it suits her. In turn, Young-hee admires his youthful looks. These comments about age and looks permeate every conversation in Part Two. In the evening they all end up together drinking at a dinner party. In a drunken haze, Jun-hee remarks on how attractive Young-hee has become. The word is specifically being used, as she does seem to coincidentally attract people from her past a lot.
And then they kiss. …No, really!
During the dinner party, we get the first of two drunken outbursts from Young-hee, who is mostly quiet and easily steamrolled when she’s sober. Unlike in Hamburg, where she was able to speak her truth in relative peace, here she has to rely on alcohol to give weight to her emotions. In her “in-vino-veritas” moment, she talks about how no-one is entitled to love, which quickly changes to the notion that no-one has the right to love, showing that she’s is still hurting from the break-up and the additional burden of her failed career. The scene is also highly cringe, watch at your own risk.
Although everyone assures her how beautiful and talented she is, she knows that getting back into the business will be nearly impossible. With Seoul looming in the distance, she wonders whether she could just stay in Gangneung, echoing her thoughts that she expressed in Hamburg, but now with less conviction. It is as though being home takes away her fluidity, making her more concrete. Time, it seems, as intangible as it was in Part One, started moving with an unparalleled violence, reminding Young-hee that, especially for an actress, it is both an asset and a threat. It is her personal stalker, calling the shots and following her everywhere she goes.
We meet the man in black from Part One once more, as she checks into a sea-side hotel, but now she doesn’t notice him as he stands outside her windows overlooking the eternal winter sea.
By the way, I have no idea, what he represents. Time? Death? All of the above? Who knows…..
After a light lunch drinking session (there’s a lot of drinking in this movie) in the hotel with Chun-woo and Jun-hee and them assuring her that everything will be fine, they depart for the night, as Young-hee goes for a walk on the beach. In a familiar scene, she draws a portrait of the director in the sand, while looking at the swaying body of water in front of her, before lying down and falling asleep. Not long after, she gets startled out of her nap by her director’s assistant, who happens to be scouting locations for his next movie at that exact beach. Young-hee’s law of attraction working wonders again, she gets invited to dinner with the director and his crew.
During dinner, with ample amounts of alcohol already consumed, the movie gears up for its final confrontation. A confrontation, I imagine, a lot of people dream of, after an especially messy break-up. The director Sang-won, who remarkably resembles Sang-soo, talks about the movie that he’s about to make. It doesn’t have a script, as he wants to go with the flow and see where every scene takes him. The only thing he knows is that it’s supposed to be about someone he loves and him reckoning with his anger, regret and love towards this person. The fact that he’s still allowed to make movies, while Young-hee is pretty much stranded, doesn’t escape anyone’s attention.
After hearing this, Young-hee flies into a righteous, alcohol-fueled rage, saying everything that everyone everywhere always wanted to say to an ex. She scolds him for having (dumb) regrets, making him cry in the process (very satisfying, would recommend). With tears in his eyes, he reads her a passage from a book that strangely sounds like their own first romantic encounter, and after shouting some more, gives her the book, as a symbol of closure of their doomed romance.
That awkward moment, when your boss dukes it out with his ex and breaks down sobbing at your company dinner.
She wakes up at the beach, the drawing on the sand gone and someone else trying to wake her off-screen. After a last glance at the sea, she turns and walks.
On the Beach at Night Alone
by Walt Whitman
On the beach at night alone,
As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,
As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future.
A vast similitude interlocks all,
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets,
All distances of place however wide,
All distances of time, all inanimate forms,
All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,
All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,
All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,
All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,
This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d,
And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.
… but wait. As much as I agree with Whitman that everything is similar under the eternal gaze of the sea and the stars and the clef of the universe and as much as this movie is a perfect cinematic representation of the poem, I’d like to propose another ending.
We don’t know, where Young-hee is going, we don’t know, what freedom this oneiric closure afforded her, so I’d like to say to her…
To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall
by Kim Adonizzio
If you ever woke in your dress at 4am ever
closed your legs to someone you loved opened
them for someone you didn’t moved against
a pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beach
seaweed clinging to your ankles paid
good money for a bad haircut backed away
from a mirror that wanted to kill you bled
into the back seat for lack of a tampon
if you swam across a river under rain sang
using a dildo for a microphone stayed up
to watch the moon eat the sun entire
ripped out the stitches in your heart
because why not if you think nothing &
no one can / listen I love you joy is coming
… and wish her all the best. She certainly deserves it.
Tár
Hasn’t this movie been hyped enough? you might ask. To which I say, dear hypothetical reader, no. I’m still quite salty that it didn’t get any Oscars, so we’re talking about it.
SPOILERS!
Directed by Todd Field
Berlinale Top 3 (3/3)
USA 2022
Hasn’t this movie been hyped enough? you might ask. To which I say, dear hypothetical reader, no. I’m still quite salty that it didn’t get any Oscars, so we’re talking about it.
We open on a phone screen showing a middle-aged woman (Kate Blanchett) slumped against the seat of a private jet wearing a sleep mask. She obviously doesn’t know that she’s being filmed. Comments appear on the screen deriding her sleep schedule and age. This will not be the last time we see her being secretly filmed and discussed on a live stream of some sort, nor will it be the last time her privacy is invaded.
Coughing, paper crinkling, some chewing – she touches her ear nervously – muttering, more coughing – finally her assistant Francesca Lentini (Noémie Merlant) appears with a hand sanitizer and some pills. The world calms down. Misophonia – a phenomenon that causes strong negative emotions and reactions to certain trigger sounds including coughing, loud chewing, ticking or the clicking of a pen – all of which we will have the pleasure to listen to in surround sound during Tár’s descent into madness (my ears are already bleeding). New Yorker journalist Adam Gopnik, playing himself, comes up behind her, “Ready for them?”
In the best expositional scene I’ve seen in years, Adam lists off all of Lydia Tár’s accolades, while she’s sitting on-stage, trying not to fidget in front of the audience of the New Yorker press event she’s attending. “If you’re here then you know who she is. One of the most important musical figures of our era” – Adam begins. This is how the world sees Lydia Tár: she’s great at music, she is widely influential, has a tonne of awards, and is a trailblazer who was mentored by none other than Leonard Bernstein, or Lenny as she affectionately calls him. In short – she made it.
Gopnik’s exposition is intercut with scenes of Lydia and Francesca, the floor strewn with Deutsche Grammophon LPs of great men conducting Mahler’s Fifth. Like a game, they’re choosing which cover to imitate, how to style the cover of her own CD box-set of the live-recording of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, the last of nine symphonies of his, which she will perform as the head conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic.
The actual cover of the official Tár soundtrack. The gall! The audacity!
Since the use of its fourth Movement, the Adagietto, in Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971), Mahler’s Fifth had an intimate relationship to film. With the piece itself being love incarnate, beginning with drawn out phrases of sweet longing, followed by buoyant strings and brass sections, the Adagietto has been used to showcase love in all its facets (longing, joy, obsession). In Death in Venice it both underlines the main character’s ennui and dissatisfaction with life and his art, and also accompanies, almost caresses, the man’s budding obsession with a young boy he sees on his journey to Venice – to a great and uncomfortable effect. The Adagietto also recently made its comeback in Decision to Leave (2022), directed by Park Chan-wook (one of my Top 10 of 2022), where it plays a crucial role in underlining the main character’s obsession with a suspect and his eventual professional and personal unraveling as he acts on his obsession.
Just by choosing to highlight the Adagietto, Todd Field gives us a glimpse into what Tár will be about – love, obsession, professional and personal unraveling due to one’s actions. Besides the Adagietto, however, Tár’s own composition titled “For Petra”, composed by Hildur Guðnadóttir, who provided the entire score, plays a deciding role in the movie. Diegetically “For Petra” is also a labor of love, as Tár’s relationship with her daughter is the only genuine loving relationship in the movie, but Tár´s love sounds distinctly different that Mahler’s. Where Mahler teased longing and unabashed joy out of the strings, Guðnadottir (Tár) pulls them into mechanical sound formations, cold and almost robotic in nature. However, right at the end of the piece, the formations start to quiver, to fall apart and become tender and soft, before petering out into nothingness.
But for now Gopnik continues to list Tár’s accolades, while she and Francesca are shown to settle on the cover reading “GUSTAV MAHLER. SYMPHONIE NO.5 – BERLINER PHILHARMONIKER. CLAUDIO ABBADO.” showing Abbado annotating the score, while self-importantly sitting in a philharmonic hall. They proceed to imitate the picture in style by making a custom-tailored suit, similar to the one Abbado is wearing, as well as putting theater seats in front of a mirror in Tár’s apartment, so that she can practice the pose. It is also made clear that her and Francesca are in a relationship at the beginning of this decision making process, but that the relationship is over by the time Tár poses in front of the mirror, alone.
In the final moments of Adam’s introduction, Francesca steps into frame and creepily, almost robotically lip synchs what is said on stage – she doesn’t look happy.
During the interview itself, where Tár shows herself to be very charming and excited for the recording of Mahler’s Fifth, saying that she chose love as the main motif for her direction of this particular piece, we see a red-headed woman observing from the back of the hall. She is later revealed to be Krista Taylor (Sylvia Flote), a former fellow at the Accordion Conducting Fellowship, Tár’s scholarship program for female conductors, who, for some reason, bugs Francesca relentlessly with unsettling e-mails which Tár instructs her to ignore.
Pictured: Francesca looking not happy.
Next up is a meeting with her business partner Eliot Kaplan (Mark Strong), with whom she manages the scholarship program, he himself an aspiring conductor. Despite having a strained, almost antagonistic relationship with Tár, he tries to pick her brain on the matter of conducting, but has to reluctantly accept her patronizing comments to “do his own thing”. The power dynamics are clear – he has to suck up to her (sic!).
The phrase “sucking up” is never used in the dialogue directly, but the concept remains an extensive motif when it comes to the power dynamics in the classical music scene, as it is portrayed in the movie. In a particularly intense scene with her wife, we’re told how Tár had to learn the “lay of the land” to become the head conductor in Berlin, implying that this community, as many others, is not at all a meritocracy, but has its own set of arbitrary rules and politics. Her wining and dining the former head conductor Andris Davis (Julian Glover), even eight years after she took over from him, to stay on his good side is just one example of many. Eventually she accrues enough power to be “sucked up” to, and also to have the privilege to forget her own struggles and ignore or deride the struggles of others. The origin of this expression (schoolboy slang pertaining to the performance of oral sex to get into someone’s good graces) is also not lost on the movie, as we later learn how Tár (ab)uses her power.
At a masterclass at Juilliard, Tár embarrasses a kid, who, in his own words, doesn’t like Bach, because he was a white straight cis man (a statement that is both valid and kind of dumb). She counters with a surface-level good argument pointing out that, when he is out of college and a working musician, he certainly wouldn’t want to be judged exclusively on his race or sexual orientation alone. She, of course, obfuscates the fact that, as a black queer man, he probably has been judged by exactly these aspects his entire life. She also (conveniently) forgets that, by admission of her own wife, they “barely survived” the headlines when they came out as a couple. As he storms out of the class, having called her bitch (which she was), she calls him a robot, a word that she uses frequently to describe people she doesn’t like.
Back in Berlin, we finally get to see why people put up her in the first place. Standing at the podium, magnificent, overlooking the entire orchestra, hearing every single instrument, every wrong intonation, every wrong inclination, shaping Mahler’s symphony in her own image – driven, grandiose, self-absorbed.
Power
Surrounded by both admiration and (very silent) contempt, she lives her life with her wife Sharon Goodnow (Nina Hoss), the concertmaster of the orchestra. As we’ve seen in the opening scene with Francesca, as well as a short scene in New York, indicating that she hooked up with someone the evening before returning to Berlin, Tár frequently cheats on Sharon as well as keeps her in the dark regarding many things in her life. One can only assume why Sharon stays with her, but one of the reasons is probably their daughter Petra (Mila Bogojevic), who is the only person who calls her Lydia and whom Tár genuinely loves.
At the height of her career and current obsession with finishing Mahler’s symphony cycle, her world comes crashing down, just as she starts a new cycle of her own. Olga Metkina (Sophie Kauer), a new very young and energetic cellist from Russia, arrives for an audition at the orchestra. Tár is immediately smitten with her and we get to experience her pattern of abuse first hand.
By changing her scores at the audition, she gets Olga into the orchestra. During a mandatory dinner with her, Tár scopes out how she can pull the young woman deeper into her orbit. After the cellist tells her that she excelled at playing the solo in the Elgar Concerto in a Russian youth orchestra, she decides the next day to perform the concerto as a companion piece at the live recording. By manipulating some more, she finally accomplishes the task of tacitly taking away the solo from the first cellist of the orchestra and giving it to Olga, which ensures private one-on-one rehearsals until the concert. This entire maneuver comes so naturally to her, one has to wonder how many times she did something like that before.
Actual cellist Sophie Kauer as Olga
Fortunately for Olga (unfortunately for everyone else), Krista Taylor commits suicide during this “wooing” phase, and Tár reacts by instructing Francesca to delete her entire correspondence with Krista. Francesca is obviously distraught, lamenting how close the three of them were at one point, to which Tár responds by saying that they couldn’t have done anything to prevent it and that Krista started to “make demands” and that she was disturbed. After Francesca leaves, Tár opens her own e-mails regarding Krista. We see what Olga can expect, if she doesn’t comply with the next phase of Tár’s advances. E-mail upon e-mail pops up on screen, all of them addressed to different orchestras, in which Tár systematically blackballs Krista’s budding career by describing her as disturbed, crazy and subsequently a danger to any orchestra that would take a chance on her.
The scene at the masterclass comes to mind. Was is satisfying when Tár “owned” the student? When he stormed out of the room? I bet that for some it was, and the division between the people who enjoyed her taking down a much too sensitive kid and those who didn’t informs how the movie is going to be perceived as it takes us into the rabbit hole of accusations and “cancel culture”.
I mean, what if Krista actually WAS crazy and obsessed with Tár, as she later claims in a board meeting of the Philharmonic, when the news of the suicide reach them and rumors of sexual misconduct at Accordion start surfacing? What if Olga is totally taking advantage of Tár’s weaknesses and poor impulse control? (Spoiler: she isn’t. Olga doesn’t have any power. Even her ability to stay in the country is dependent on Lydia’s mood swings.)
As Tár one day decides to snoop around in Francesca’s laptop to check whether she’s deleted her correspondence with Krista, as instructed, and finds out that she didn’t, she immediately retaliates by denying Francesca the spot as her co-conductor, having ousted the last one out of spite and because he clicked his pen too much (normal and understandable behavior from Tár). This spot has been promised to Francesca on the down-low for a long time, which was also the reason why she stayed on with Tár for so long. Francesca quits in the middle of the night and disappears from the movie, although her presence will be felt down the line.
On a trip to New York, promoting her memoir “Tár on Tár” (what a stupid title), she takes Olga with her, habitually initiating the next phase of her pattern, but her plans falter as Olga doesn’t show any interest in her, perpetually stares into her phone and flirts with boys (gasp!). As more and more accusations of sexual misconduct from other Accordion fellows surface, Tár has to appear in court for a deposition, where it is revealed that Francesca has handed over her correspondence with Krista (and maybe more) to the prosecutor. Although we don’t know the outcome of the deposition, Tár subsequently loses the control of the fellowship and her partnership with Kaplan.
During this entire ruinous period, Tár seems flabbergasted by every new development. The accusations, the realization that Olga is not at all interested in her and that she can’t do anything about it, now that her power is waning, everything takes her by surprise. Isn’t power supposed to insulate you from such things? Is this a witch hunt?
After she returns, everything else, her marriage and family life, her career, her sway over Olga, crumbles bit by bit, until we’re left with a life in shambles. This culminates in the live recording being conducted by Eliot, who she is convinced stole her score, as she couldn’t find it anywhere on the evening before she departed for New York. She reacts by sneaking into the philharmonic at the night of the recording and barreling onto the stage like a wrestler, ready to take down her opponent (genuinely terrifying performance by Blanchett there). She violently accosts Eliot, screaming to the orchestra to revert their attention to her and bellowing “This is my score!!! Mine!!!!”, while kicking Eliot in the ribs. All this during the beginning measures of the first part of the symphony, the Trauermarsch (the funeral march).
She … doesn’t take it well.
A disgraced Tár travels to New York once again to meet with CAMI Music (Columbia Artists Management, Inc.), for a “fresh start”. She will be conducting a youth orchestra in Cambodia for a live viewing of the Monster Hunter video game at a gaming convention. After her visit to CAMI, she finally returns … home.
Staten Island, a small-lot pre-war neighborhood. Tár exits the taxi and goes into a faded two-story house. Inside, a musty interior, an out-of tune piano. She ascends the stair, entering a small room. Music school awards made out to Linda Tarr line the bedroom wall, ice hockey trophies on the shelves. She opens a small closet, the upper shelf is lined with video tapes of Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts, all marked by year. Tár chooses one and plays it, Leonard Bernstein conducts Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5. “Didn’t you feel triumphant?”, Bernstein begins. The nature of music, he continues, is not about “sharps and flats and chords and all that business,” it’s about what you feel when you hear it, it’s about “feelings that are so deep that we have not words for them”; and she cries.
Throughout the movie Tár speaks of Bernstein being her mentor, although it’s an obvious lie, as the timeline doesn’t add up. The people around her let her lie about it, intoxicated by her talent maybe, or by the prestige of being in the good graces of a woman conductor, a rare thing for sure. And here is one of the core questions of the movie: Why is Tár, an abuser, a woman? Why not make her a man, a Harvey Weinstein-esque monster, sleazy and grotesque? The same question was angrily posited by Marin Alsop, a real-life conductor, who was appalled by this depiction of a female conductor eerily similar to herself. She said that the movie and especially the character is an affront to women and feminism. Instead of depicting a woman in power as an uplifting tale of triumph, Todd Field decided to depict a woman in power abusing her power. Why?
The simple answer is: patriarchy still exists.
The longer answer is: remember “robot” being Tár’s favorite word for people she doesn’t like? In her mind a robot is inherently a slave, an imitator of the dominant societal narrative it sees around it. Gen Z and Millennials, following this logic, perceive our current narrative (being overly woke and permanently offended) and they adopt it, perform it, without thinking or active reflection on their part. At no point does she consider by whom her own narrative is shaped or that the world is changing. Young people are less and less impressed with the grandeur and self-importance of old crusty structures, while these structures mistake their waning reverence for vapidness. Tár, in her (very humble) opinion, is not a robot. She’s a genderless trailblazer, too talented to be stopped by petty identity politics.
She is, of course, wrong. First and foremost, she is a woman in a male-dominated field – a woman in the middle of a field, alone. Not a ballbuster, girl boss, sonic barrier breaker, but merely a transplant that has to assimilate to the existing rules to survive, rather than making or breaking them. Thus, Tár’s use of the power she got, while obliterating herself into the patriarchal structure, will also imitate the dominant system (trading sexual favors for opportunities, being a sexual predator without consequence, etc.). Does that excuse her preying on vulnerable young women? – Never! Does this explain why Todd Field made Tár a woman? – I think so.
Tár is not an affront to feminism, but rather more of commentary on the current state of the movement. Women from previous generations who ventured into male-dominated fields are still met with corrosive and dehumanizing expectations as soon as they “make it”. Once they do, they have to be paragons of feminism and representatives of all women ever. These expectations, expressed by, among others, Marin Alsop, can’t (don’t want to) deal with the fact that a woman in this position (fictional or not) can and will be the product of her environment and generation (and shitty character). She is not afforded the right to be a sleazy pervert. She is Woman! Why doesn’t she act like it?
Or, you know, it is another tragic tale of a great artist being claimed by cancel culture (lol, no!).
… decaying sound.
There is a Stone
There Is a Stone is an epitome to the sweet nothingness of life. Whereas the movies of this genre I’ve written about before utilized their slowness for a distinct purpose (human connection, exploration of time and space, etc.), this one seems actively and entirely devoid of purpose, and achieves the warmest and fuzziest results you can imagine.
SPOILERS!
Directed by Tatsunari Ota
Berlinale Top 3 (2/3)
Japan 2022
As you might’ve guessed by now, I love slow cinema. I’ve written about it before and, you guessed it, will do again in the near future. It is a genre of cinema that fascinates me to no end, a meditative state of cinematic sounds, images and shorthand. And so, it’s no surprise that at least one of these movies has made it into my Berlinale Top 3.
There Is a Stone is an epitome to the sweet nothingness of life. Whereas the movies of this genre I’ve written about before utilized their slowness for a distinct purpose (human connection, exploration of time and space, etc.), this one seems actively and entirely devoid of purpose, and achieves the warmest and fuzziest results you can imagine.
We open on a static shot of an arid stony landscape. The dry grass is swaying in the wind, the sunlight is all-consuming and harsh, it’s going to be a hot day. A girl comes up the hill and into view and looks around. When she doesn’t seem to find what she’s looking for, she spots a local and asks him whether there is anything of note in the area, yes, she’s already seen the ruins, anything else? The local man seems genuinely baffled by the idea of “interesting stuff”, and the girl apologizes profusely and wanders away (a little too quickly).
After recovering from the shock of being asked a question (I’m with you, dude!) the guy offers to bring the girl to the train station in his car. We learn that she’s a student from Tokyo on a school break, traveling through nearby towns to look at ruins and other interesting stuff. He is impressed. I am, too.
At the train station, she discovers that the train to Tokyo doesn’t leave until the evening, and so decides to pass the time, somehow. First she’s invited to play soccer with some kids (incidentally it’s the second Japanese slow movie that has adults interacting with children in a weird way. What gives, Japan?), but they wander away to their homes as soon as our girl gets into the game (rude!).
After some wandering about, she sees a guy skipping rocks on the river and watches him, until he notices and, thinking that she said something, nonchalantly crosses the river to get to her. This is one of the first small charming moments between our protagonists. He tries to teach her to skip stones, but she doesn’t succeed, and, when she tries to leave, he kind of follows her. Like a puppy. She finds a cool rock, he loses it and vows to find it. They explore the river shore, play with a huge stick and build rock pyramids together.
As the sun slowly goes down and the first hints of an evening breeze start to envelop the river, we feel their play date naturally wind down. Trying to prolong it leads to conflict, for example, as they try to get to the place he lost her rock, he wants to press on, but she, obviously tired, does not. They fight (kind of) and go their separate ways.
The entire movie is shot in natural lighting on a bright summer day, so we get hard sunlight in the morning and noon when they meet, and we follow them through the day with the onset of golden light in the late afternoon, and finally the blue hour where they part. Just like the light and nature in general, the river is a constant throughout the entirety of their short-lived friendship. It’s always front and center in every shot, where the characters wander in and out of frame, without the camera following them. In general, the camera just seems to “hang around”, not particularly interested in tight cinematography or artful shots, acting as the third friend in their little group.
I don’t know, dear reader, how your summer holidays looked as a kid, but I distinctly remember mine (WARNING: old people reminiscing ahead).
I spent my summers at my grandparents’ house in the country side (I swear, it wasn’t as fancy as it sounds). It was situated in a tiny village, where, most of the days, there was not much to do, except tending to the garden or digging for potatoes (fun times). So, after the first couple of days, when the potatoes were dug and the strawberry fields plundered, me and my cousin just wandered around the village, the nearby woods and the lake (which was, probably, more like a pond).
During our wanderings, we would often pick up any other kid that found themselves in our sleepy village via parents, grandparents, etc. and we’d roam the surroundings together for a while. There was the tentative bond of city kids being thrown into the country side. Everything was exciting and new. We would play with huge sticks we found in the woods, make “plates and pots” out of the clay from the pond, or bug the cows from the surrounding farmsteads. Most of the time, we wouldn’t catch the other kid’s name at the end of our adventurous day, and then they would kind of fade into their own life and potato digging.
At the end of There Is a Stone, the girl tries to go home, but her phone dies. She wanders the streets of the empty town, searching for some sign of life, and ends up at a fuel station, which happens to be open. Inside there is a couch and a wall socket, so she hooks up her phone and falls asleep on the couch.
Meanwhile, the man returns home and reminisces about the day in his diary.
“Went to river after work to skip stones. Getting better at it. Met a girl at the river. Did’t catch her name. Lost her stone. Played with a stick. Made a stone pyramid. Will look for stone tomorrow.”
This is it. Summer, a fleeting friendship, seemingly unimportant things are suddenly the most interesting you’ve ever seen. You meet, you part. Sundown, sleep, repeat.
There Is a Stone is an incredibly charming movie with the power to instill a sense of summer adventure into the most crusty of hearts.
Pick one. I dare you!
The Cemetery of Cinema
Going to the cinema never lost its sheen to me, even in the pandemic. After the long dry spell, I was incredibly (almost embarassingly) excited to go back there and was met by Tenet (2020) by Christopher Nolan, a much hyped, but unenjoyable experience. The first visit to the cinema that I can remember was also a profound disappointment – Dreamworks’ Anastasia (1997) directed by Don Bluth. But despite being very young and angry at the entire world for presenting me with this mediocrity (I was a little shit back than), the feeling, the atmosphere of being in a movie theater stuck.
SPOILERS!
Directed by Thierno Souleymane Diallo
Berlinale Top 3 (1/3)
France/Senegal/Guinea/Saudi Arabia 2023
Going to the cinema never lost its sheen to me, even in the pandemic. After the long dry spell, I was incredibly (almost embarassingly) excited to go back there and was met by Tenet (2020) by Christopher Nolan, a much hyped, but unenjoyable experience. The first visit to the cinema that I can remember was also a profound disappointment – Dreamworks’ Anastasia (1997) directed by Don Bluth. But despite being very young and angry at the entire world for presenting me with this mediocrity (I was a little shit back than), the feeling, the atmosphere of being in a movie theater stuck. The seats, the darkness, the silver screen that demanded your attention regardless of how fidgety you might be otherwise. You can’t stop watching, even if you want to, in a sense. Whatever is happening on-screen becomes your entire world for however long it takes to tell its story (singing bats included).
The communal experience of cinema is profound as well. Everything, from standing in line (listening to workplace gossip is always a personal highlight), to hearing the crispity-crunch of popcorn before the curtain goes up, dials you into the experience that is about to follow. And then the shared emotional experience of watching something with other people, hearing them laugh when you laugh and seeing some of them wipe a tear, just as you’re frantically looking for a hanky in your (kinda filthy) purse after the movie ends, is enough to make you feel a part of something bigger than the sum of its parts.
Does this sound (grossly) melodramatic and (might I say) tropey? Yes, it does. But, what happens if all of that doesn’t exist? No cinemas, no movies, no shared history, nothing.
Thierno Souleymane Diallo is on a quest through Guinea to answer exactly this question. After he graduated from several local universities including the state funded film school Institut Supérieur des Arts Mory Kanté, Diallo was thrust into a defunct movie industry without a chance to make any movies in his home country. In the middle of his journey, which he undertakes barefoot armed with a camera and boom mic, he visits his alma mater, where the students ask him why he’s traveling barefoot. He answers that the state has paid for his education for 5 years, but neglected to mention that, after his studies, there will be no place for him to work: “I live in a country, where there’s no money to make films. How am I supposed to get money to buy shoes?” Despite this unfortunate start, he did make several short films between 2013 and 2018, before securing funding from several countries (see above) to make a full length movie.
His interest is sparked after he hears about a almost mythical movie called Mouramani (dir. Mamadou Touré, 1953), the first Guinean movie ever made, which has been lost to time and is somewhat of a myth among Guinean directors and film enthusiasts alike. Fascinated by the lack of information about the movie and its plot (its supposed to be a movie about the first king of the Baté Empire that is either about a man and his faithful dog or about the Islamization of the Malinka people), he embarks on journey to find the movie As it is unclear, where to even begin the search, we watch Diallo traveling to several abandoned cinemas and archives from Kankan in eastern Guinea, to Diankana and Conakry, to sift through moldy film reels that have been left to rot many years prior.
The first Guinean president Ahmed Sékou Touré, a self-proclaimed socialist, was a big proponent of cinema as a propaganda and educational tool, and soon the state-controlled film studio/distributor Syli-Cinéma-Photo was founded. Although cinema was very tightly ideologically controlled and incarceration of intellectuals was common, this was the only film industry that’s ever existed in Guinea. After the death of Touré, the 1984 coup d’état ousted his party from government, and with it the state-controlled film industry. Syli cinemas and archives were raided and destroyed, film reels burnt or left to rot. Although Syli was replaced by the Centre Culturel Franco-Guinéen, they neither had the experts nor the means to save the remaining film reels, and so mostly burned them themselves. The film industry never recovered, no new cinemas were built.
In this aftermath, The Cemetery of Cinema takes place. On his way, Diallo interviews film enthusiasts, former directors and even a former state censor, always asking the same questions “Did you see Mouramani when it came out? Is it real?” and gets similar answers every time: No, they didn’t see Mouramani. It is definitely real. There is a deep sense of loss pervading the interviews, a longing for cinema and its communal experience, regardless of the control the state seemed to have over the content. As he interviews one of his former teachers, a director, his deep sadness is felt, even as the talks about making movies about a the sewer system in Conacry to inform the public. The former directors long to direct, the aficionados long to take in, there’s definitely a sense of something missing in all of their lives.
Additionally to the loss, there is also a deep frustration at the state and the incompetence or unwillingness in conserving the films that did exist. Almost all of the interviewees express the opinion that Diallo is wasting his time in searching for the movie in Guinea. Instead, they say, he has to go to France – an almost magical place of hope and a working archival system. Before going to Paris, Diallo chats to some bootleggers of Bollywood movies, who sell DVDs translated into the local languages. Bootlegging, as it turns out, is the only functioning distribution system for movies in Guinea, besides SAT TV, with them being unconcerned with national and international copyright laws.
In Paris he dons a swanky blue suit and full-body cardboard “armor” with details about Mouramani (when, where and by whom it was made) to move people to start a search of their own. Still barefoot he wanders through Paris and especially makes note of the cinemas, open, bustling with visitors, alive. Eventually he reaches the Archives françaises du film in Bois D’Arcy, but doesn’t find the movie there either, not on the grounds or in the system of all the national movie archives. Mouramani is truly lost.
So, like the arbiter of new Guinean cinema that he wants to be, Diallo recreates Mouramani in a four-minute short film from the little information he has about it. It’s bright and beautiful and has a dog in it (what’s not to love?). It is of note that the first Guinean film ever made was not about the colonizers or their effects on the country. It was about the inception of Guinea and about its first king (and most probably his dog).
Compared to how many Bible adaptations we’re afforded, Guinea wasn’t even afforded one founding myth. Sitting on the plush seats of a huge Berlin cinema, I found myself mourning the film industry of a country I didn’t know anything about prior to watching this movie, a movie about a country that lost the culture-forming power of cinema as well as its quality to retain the memories of entire generations.
Compartment No. 6 (2022)
Compartment No. 6 is an internationally co-produced movie filmed entirely in Russian with a tiny bit of Finnish sprinkled within.
Laura (Seidi Haarla), a Finnish archaeology student, travels to Moscow to learn Russian and experience the culture. There she meets the exuberant Irina (Dinara Drukarova), a typical Russian intellectual, who invites her into her life and bed. For a short time, Laura’s life becomes a whirlwind of museums and galleries, as she immerses herself deeper and deeper into Irina’s world of stimulating soirées filled with smoking, laughter, dancing and amazing conversations. After Irina introduces Laura to the Kanozero Petroglyphs, a series of rock drawings from the 2nd and 3rd Millennium B.C., located on the Kola Peninsula near the arctic city of Murmansk, she is fascinated and they plan to go there together. At the end, Laura ends up going alone, due to Irina’s waning interest in her and the trip.
SPOILERS!
Directed by Juho Kuosmanen
Compartment No. 6 is an internationally co-produced movie filmed entirely in Russian with a tiny bit of Finnish sprinkled within.
Laura (Seidi Haarla), a Finnish archaeology student, travels to Moscow to learn Russian and experience the culture. There she meets the exuberant Irina (Dinara Drukarova), a typical Russian intellectual, who invites her into her life and bed. For a short time, Laura’s life becomes a whirlwind of museums and galleries, as she immerses herself deeper and deeper into Irina’s world of stimulating soirées filled with smoking, laughter, dancing and amazing conversations. After Irina introduces Laura to the Kanozero Petroglyphs, a series of rock drawings from the 2nd and 3rd Millennium B.C., located on the Kola Peninsula near the arctic city of Murmansk, she is fascinated and they plan to go there together. At the end, Laura ends up going alone, due to Irina’s waning interest in her and the trip.
The movie begins at a party in Irina’s apartment, the night before Laura’s departure to Murmansk. Irina, always the center of attention, introduces Laura to everyone as “her Finnish friend” and congratulates her on going to see the petroglyphs, at which point one of Irina’s many acquaintances says that it’s “important to see and understand one’s past, to better understand the present”, to which Laura seems to agree. From Laura’s perspective, we get a glimpse into the inner workings (and failings) of Moscow intelligentsia; an inherently cerebral, unempathetic world that seems quite alluring at first glance, with witty conversations and a deep knowledge of literature and culture, but then turns out to be petty and empty.
We’re introduced to Irina, a professor of literature, while she’s playing a guessing game of book quotes. There is no reflection on the quotes themselves, but an immense pride in the skill of rote memorization. The game also doubles as a cruel test of belonging, as Laura, after giving an incorrect answer, is patronized and snobbishly corrected. Within this framework the notions about the past and the present become nonsensical, as, from Laura’s perspective, she won’t learn anything about her own present or past, while looking at the drawings. This crowd clearly doesn’t think it worth getting to know her or ask her any questions. They are uninterested in anyone who they deem unworthy of joining - in this case someone who has an accent and therefore no full command of their revered language.
Classist ideas permeate Russian culture at large, and the one that’s still happily propagated is the stark division of the intelligence and the working classes, which is also tied to their respective usage and understanding of the Russian language. The working class is crude, uneducated and, in intelligentsia lingo, “gray”, as opposed to the enlightened academically trained intellectual. As in most classist structures, these intellectuals make being part of their class their entire personality, with inside jokes and strict rules of entry and belonging. In a way, the movie shows and outsider’s perspective on this behavior and tries to challenge this harmful set of beliefs.
On the train ride from Moscow to Murmansk, which takes 3 days and 2 nights, Laura ends up sharing a tiny compartment with the gruff and uncouth miner Lyokha (Yury Borisov), who’s a perfect example of a “gray” man. He sets the mood by taking out a half-finished bottle of vodka as soon as he enters the compartment and asks Laura, whether she’s going to Murmansk to “sell pussy”, within an hour after departure. Disgusted, Laura makes up her mind at an interim stop in St. Peterburg and calls Irina to tell her that she’s decided to go back. Irina, in turn, seems uninterested and even reluctant to entertain the idea. Hurt and angry, Laura doubles down on her commitment to the journey and returns to the train.
Russia is a big country, and finding yourself on an overnight train ride that can span several days with a stranger is an inherently Russian experience. Cramped into a tiny compartment for days, you eat and drink together, experience the highs and lows of the commodities afforded by a Soviet train together, and, often, talk for hours. Knowing that you’ll never see that person again erodes personal inhibitions one tidbit at a time, until you open up to air decades-long grievances or to share long-forgotten joys. Laura looks at this uniquely Russian experience from the outside and slowly warms up to it, as the journey becomes the destination.
At the beginning of their relationship, Laura and Lyokha strictly adhere to the rules and restrictions of their respective social circles. Lyokha, a sensitive man, doesn’t show any emotions, except for confident brashness, to protect himself from a society that doesn’t value emotionality in men. Despite the fact that the intelligentsia took great pleasure in correcting her and was never interested in what she had to say, to a point where she started doubting her own thoughts, feelings and actions, Laura still wants to be part of that group that instilled in her the inherent distrust of the working class. When Lyokha asks why she wants to see the petroglyphs, she directly quotes the man from the party, showing that she really doesn’t know, except that someone smart said it.
Laura clings to the hope that seeing the petroglyphs will change how she and, most importantly, Irina, feels about herself. Lyokha, meanwhile, is on his way to work, hoping to find a way out of perpetual poverty and a lifetime of petty theft, avoiding to think about how a lack of human connection might be at the root of his problems. Both are desperate for basic understanding and support, at first shunning each other, due to their seemingly insurmountable class-based differences. After, setting aside some those, however, they end up bonding over previously unexplored commonalities and desires.
At one point Laura invites a Finnish traveler to their compartment. Lyokha, seemingly jealous, is visibly insulted and suspicious of the newcomer, while Laura is glad to have someone to talk to in her native tongue. Language again, being the main factor of belonging. They don’t get along great, but for a while she holds on to him, as the only lifeline to something familiar. As the man departs, however, she finds out that he stole her video camera that had all her memories of Moscow and Irina on it. Taking the last remnants of her old life, but simultaneously opening her up for change.
Devastated, she ends up telling Lyokha about her relationship with Irina, which she kept a secret due to the fear of homophobia. She admits that she loved how Irina looked at her more than Irina herself, and that she doesn’t miss her as much as she would like to, and how she loved the idea of being a part of this apartment, the conversations, the world, knowing that she never belonged. Lyokha just listens, without interruption or judgement.
At the end of the train ride, Laura and Lyokha grow closer, even kissing at one point, after which Lyokha, looking visibly uncomfortable in the intimate situation, disappears and Laura disembarks alone. At the hotel, she is told that it’s impossible to go to the petroglyphs in winter due to the harsh weather conditions, confirming that Irina, who booked the trip and the hotel, never really intended to travel there. After touring the city, Laura, not ready to depart, manages to contact Lyokha and he, determined to help her one last time, organizes the trip to the Kola Peninsula by the sheer power of his will and skills of persuasion.
The petroglyphs now a mere afterthought, they wander around in the snow storm, playing and laughing like children. Friendship and love become one, as they depart, having both found closure and a tidbit of happiness amid the frozen lakes. In the last bittersweet moments of the movie Lyokha confesses his love for Laura, as she speeds away in a taxi.
A formulaic, but tender movie, Compartment No. 6 implores us not to waste time on societal norms and to find connection in the unlikeliest of places.
Babylon (2023)
“That’s LA. They worship everything and they value nothing.” (La La Land, Damien Chazelle)
Babylon is a spiritual continuation of Damien Chazelle’s fascination with Hollywood, after his 2016 hit musical La La Land. The movie transports us into the 1920-s and explores the murky frenzied time of silent film Hollywood, its shift to the talkies, and the joys, excesses and pain of wannabe starlets, established stars and everyone in-between.
SPOILERS!
Directed by Damien Chazelle
“That’s LA. They worship everything and they value nothing.” (La La Land, Damien Chazelle)
Babylon is a spiritual continuation of Damien Chazelle’s fascination with Hollywood, after his 2016 hit musical La La Land. The movie transports us into the 1920-s and explores the murky frenzied time of silent film Hollywood, its shift to the talkies, and the joys, excesses and pain of wannabe starlets, established stars and everyone in-between.
Like in La La Land, the score by Justin Hurwitz is a major part of Babylon. Raw jazz, bold brass, tinny percussion and tribal drums and choruses dominate Hurwitz’s version of 1920-s Hollywood to an exhilarating and sometimes terrifying effect. I fully recommend just listening to the soundtrack alone. It will give you a kick of old Hollywood glamour laced with cocaine and various bodily fluids – what a mood to start the day in! DP Linus Sandgren, also one of Chazelle’s a long-time collaborators, created a lush world with blooming flares and searing highlights, capturing every body and landscape in motion. That resulted in an impressionistic image of a world in flux – be it a wild party, a burning desert or a badly-lit deprived underground sex den.
The three main stories that encapsulate the rise and fall of the silent movie era and its stars, as Hollywood painfully transitions into the talkies, begin at a lavish party in a desert mansion owned by studio exec Bob Levine (Flea) of the fictional Kinescope Pictures. (As an aside: casting Flea, of Red Hot Chili Peppers fame, as the proprietor of a party full of literal fornication in Cali, was a genius move!) We’re first introduced to Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a sly assistant with a penchant for problem solving, as he is given the task of transporting an elephant up the hill to the party in a wagon meant for horses. After some auto- and elephant wrangling, he finally arrives and is immediately given shit for being late. As the party gets more and more wild, with the guests getting up to more and more deprived activities, we see Manny managing the guests, stopping overly nosy gossip reporter Elinor St. John from discovering the “powder room”, which is a room filled with mountains of cocaine, as well as getting rid of the body of a young actress who overdosed during a urolagniac act with another actor.
Meanwhile Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), a bold as brass ambitious born-to-be-a-star, tries to crash the party, after literally crashing a stolen car into a statue. Manny eventually helps her get in and, at her request, leads her to the “powder room”, where he inadvertently and forever falls in love with her. In their brief, cocaine-fueled encounter they confide in each other that they both want to be part of something greater – and that something happens to be Hollywood. Where nothing happens for real and you can be anyone you want, reinventing and recreating yourself every single day. After they move into the main house, Manny watches as Nellie dances to the blaring primal sounds of Justin Hurwitz’ soundtrack, weaving in and out of the crowd – feeling at home as the frenzied bacchanal clashes around her.
During Mannie’s and Nellie’s bonding pact, Jack Conrad, the biggest star in the world, arrives at the scene with his wife (Olivia Wilde), who leaves, demanding a divorce, without ever entering the party. Charismatic, suave, at the top of his game, Jack owns the party as soon as he enters, seducing a waitress just by way of existing. As the evening continues, he mostly sits at his table, reveling in the debauchery around him and drinks an ungodly amount of alcohol, hinting at the alcoholism that will plague him until the end of his days. The music swells to a crescendo of brass, drums and tribal vocalizations; the elephant is let out to a chorus of terrified and exciting screams and the entertainment, represented by unappreciated trombonist Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) and exotified Chinese-American cabaret singer Lady Fey Zhou (Li Jun Li), wind down the party at dawn to enjoy themselves just a little at the end of the insanity, before starting all over again next evening.
At dawn, Nellie gets her break as Bob Levine casts her on the spot to replace the actress that overdosed earlier in the evening, and Manny gets his chance as he drives blacked-out Jack Conrad home and earns his respect and a spot on set as his assistant by virtue of being there when Jack wakes up. It’s morning. The sun is shining. Hollywood is waking up. It’s time to go to work.
Title card: Babylon.
This exquisite twenty-minute-long prologue sums up what Babylon is about. A roaring party that always has to end at some point, the cynical nature of execs accepting any depravity, as long as the stars show up on set next morning, the interchangeability of working actresses and their diminished value as either sex-objects or eye candy, the rise and fall of big stars and the upstarts that are trained to take their place. At face value, this should be a straight-up long-winded teary-eyed drama, but Damian Chazelle loves Hollywood and everything it has to offer – the good and the bad. In fact, he loves it so much that he wants to set the record straight – show an unsanitized version of the industry. A picture that includes women behind the camera and black people on set. Chazelle challenges the white-washed notion of Hollywood by contrasting Babylon with Singin’ in the Rain (1952), a wildly successful movie about the transition from silent film to talkies. For him Hollywood is, and always has been, the most magical place on earth; and it is this sincere love that, at first, draws one into the world of the movie.
Only after the 3-hour-epic has ended, did I understand the intention behind this entire movie – it’s a huge “Uhm, well actually…”, treating the audience as dunces to be educated and the characters as lifeless props.
Chazelle explores Hollywood both at the cusp of the most pivotal change in its existence and at the height of the last hurrah of the era that started it all. In the silent era, there were no rules, no previous role models to adhere to. Super-stardom was new and exhilarating, as the world gave the stars everything it had to offer, and having made it to Hollywood must’ve felt like the other side of the rainbow – real and magical at the same time. The irreverence for bodily integrity is beautifully shown, in Jack’s epic shoot with a German director (Spike Jonze). In the Ben Hur-esque epic, we first see the director in a frenzy, because the extras are striking due to the poor working conditions (serious injuries, being fed slop), and because of all of the cameras being broken due to the uncontrolled nature of the fighting scenes. At this point you have to remember (yes, there will be a test) that modern Hollywood is highly unionized because of these bad practices. Despite these horrific conditions, however, Chazelle quickly focuses on the magic of a perfectly wrapped up scene and somehow praises the ludicrous risk-taking involved in the making of silent era movies.
As love makes blind and, in his fervor to educate us, he chooses to approach every aspect of the movie like the aforementioned human rights violations.
Every character is modeled on the stars of that era, their characteristics, obsessions and downfalls. Nellie is inspired by it-girls Clara Bow and Jean Crawford, who both died young and had a tumultuous life in front and behind the camera. Jack is suave matinee silent star John Gilbert incarnate, who lost his career and status as the best paid actor in Hollywood when the talkies came around. Manny is modeled after Rene Cardona, a Cuban immigrant, who made it through the ranks of MGM execs and was heavily involved in the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema. And so, not just the main characters, but every character ends up being an amalgam of real-life persons who contributed to this era of Hollywood - actual stories that were thought forgotten or unimportant before being resurrected in these characters.
But herein lies the crux of the matter. Chazelle lovingly recreates a past era with his characters, and although they feel deeply human, they also uncannily resemble deep fakes - simulacra of actual people. Their stories belong to the countless people referenced for their creation, their motives cobbled together from dead desires and dreams. Instead of using actual people as mere inspirations and imbuing the characters with a rich life of their own, they all feel like puppets being steered down a trodden path; mere vessels for long-forgotten memories. They don’t have any control over their lives, and subsequently there is no meaningful character development to be had.
So, we look on as the times and values change and a Hollywood that was open for upstarts of any upbringing becomes enamored with compelling origin stories and types; “you get a new name that sounds better that your real name, they change your appearance to make you “prettier” and then they give you an origin story to make you interesting and brand you as a type”. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akaPSGMi03k Be Kind Rewind, 3:00 – 3:18) The parties become “classier”, with predominantly white upper-class tycoons like Willian Hearst controlling what movies get made and the freedom afforded to those who’re different wanes, with morality clauses on the horizon. The Hollywood ecosystem – the musicians, the gossip reporters, the actors – all have to change accordingly, but not everyone survives the change.
Like her real-life counterparts, after failing at making the jump to the talkies, Nellie is forgotten and walks into the night, after racking up a mountain of gambling debt, only getting a tiny epitaph for dying of a drug overdose in the press that used to adore her at the height of her career. Jack, just like John Gilbert, doesn’t make it in the talkies either and dies a violent death, after he feels his star waning and being eviscerated by the press for underperforming. Manny flees Hollywood abandoning his career, after failing to wrangle Nellie into something the shifting values of 1930-s Hollywood demanded. Lady Fey departs for Europe, after being fired by Kinescope for having an inappropriate relationship with Nellie, ringing in a new era for openly LGTBTQ+ industry professionals. The list goes on and on, the movie mourning every loss of talent, every loss of freedom – every loss of life – in the name of progress and unsubtly invites us to mourn with it
Ostensibly Babylon is about the cyclicality of Hollywood and how with every fulfilled dream, there will be a fall and after every high there must be a low. And so, in the epilogue, Manny visits LA once more and goes to the movies, where he sees Singin’ in the Rain (1952), which is considered one of the best musical films ever made. We come full-circle, as we see one-to-one scenes of the characters we just saw suffer, comedically adjusting to the new era and failing. Their humiliation is turned to comedy, their pain into music, their likenesses used and reused in the fabric of Hollywood cinema in a self-aggrandizing spiral of progress, loss, dreams and death. The movie wants us to cry at that moment – I don’t.
Holy Spider (2023)
Holy Spider is a fictional retelling of the murders of 16 sex workers by the so-called “spider killer”, Saeed Hanaei, in the Iranian city of Mashhad, a place of great religious significance for Shiite Muslims. Due to a high unemployment rate and an opium crisis in the early 00-s, many women took up sex work to survive, so prostitutes walking the streets of Mashhad became a common sight.
SPOILERS!
Directed by Ali Abbasi
Holy Spider is a fictional retelling of the murders of 16 sex workers by the so-called “spider killer”, Saeed Hanaei, in the Iranian city of Mashhad, a place of great religious significance for Shiite Muslims. Due to a high unemployment rate and an opium crisis in the early 00-s, many women took up sex work to survive, so prostitutes walking the streets of Mashhad became a common sight. Hanaei claimed to be on a holy mission to cleanse society from these impurities, after his wife was mistaken for a prostitute by a taxi driver. These killing have been met with no resistance by police and local authorities at the time, as investigation was very slow and reluctant. As the victim count reached 9, however, Tehran, forced to acknowledge the murders as wells as the opium crisis, sent a special investigation unit to deal with the killer. Hanaei was eventually caught, after his last victim fought back and at great risk for herself, reported him to the police a couple of days later. Hanaei’s trial was highly politicized, as religious conservatives organized rallies in staunch support of his motives and vision of society. With this, a political division came to the forefront that has been brewing since the re-election of the somewhat liberal Muhammad Khatami in 2001, with extreme conservatives on the one side and reformists on the other. After a lengthy (and very showy) trial and with considerable pressure from Tehran, Hanaei was convicted and hanged. Although most of his conservative supporters turned from him, as the fact that he’s slept with at least 13 of his victims came to light, extreme right-wing groups as well as his teenage son Ali still supported him, until his demise, saying that his father was a hero and that someone else will continue his holy work.
Iran has since relapsed into a conservative theocracy that made headlines in early September, as Jina “Mahsa” Amini dies, after being arrested and brutally beaten by the Iranian morality police for “improperly” wearing her hijab. The 22-year-old woman’s death has since sparked a revolutionary protest movement, with women burning their hijabs and cutting their hair, while protesting for basic human right and freedom for women under the slogan “women, life, freedom”. Mahsa Amini has been added to the Forbes list of the 100 Most Powerful Women.
Holy Spider premiered to a seven-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2022 and has been praised by many western critics for being groundbreaking for showing sexual and violent scenes on screen, as well for the critical depiction of patriarchal violence towards women. Zar Amir-Ebrahimi, who plays the fictional investigative journalist Arezoo Rahimi, who comes to Mashhad to investigate the violent murders, deservedly won Best Actress, as her performance was incredibly intense and sincere. The cast and crew are avid supporters of the Iranian protest movement and have been seen holding up “women, life, freedom” posters at the UK premier of Holy Spider in October 2022. Abbasi himself has admitted, that the movie has been viewed differently and more politically, since the death of Mahsa Amini, which he didn’t intend. However, he is proud to contribute to the protests and claims that Holy Spider is a highly subversive movie that finally shows women, as they are, instead of just “talking heads”, as is still tradition in state-sanctioned Iranian cinema.
Although Holy Spider has been described as an Iranian movie, it is, in fact, not. Abbasi, after studying architecture and film in Sweden and Denmark respectively, he is now based out of Copenhagen and is in self-imposed exile, for fear of political oppression, especially after the release of Holy Spider and the protest movement latching on to it, as a symbol of freedom. The movie has also been entirely financed by European film funding institutions, like the Berlin-based One Two Productions and Sweden’s Nordisk Film Production. Doing this research as well as reading the patronizing reviews by western critics, I wonder who the intended audience for this movie actually is. The answer is – us – white people.
Holy Spider is the third movie made about the “spider killer”, since his execution, the first being “Along Came a Spider” (2002) by Iranian journalist and documentary filmmaker Maziar Bahari, which follows the trial and even secures an interview with Hanaei, before his execution. This interview is conducted by the journalist Roya Karimi Majd, who worked with Bahari on the documentary overall. Many of the interview scenes in the latter half of Holy Spider are directly inspired by the interviews conducted in the documentary, some of the quotes even directly lifted from it.
Holy Spider sees Rahimi and her Mashhad-based colleague Sharifi (Arash Ashtiani) navigating the dark underbelly of Iranian society and butting heads with uncooperative policemen and local authorities. I couldn’t find any sources for this hypothesis, but it feels like Rahimi and Sharifi were heavily inspired by Majd and Bahari, although they only investigated the “spider killer”, after he was caught. Eventually Rahimi catches the killer, Saeed Azimi (Mehdi Bajestani), red-handed, after dressing up like a prostitute and going with him, as he picks her up on his bike. After he brings her to his apartment and tries to strangle her, she barely escapes and reports him to the police.
The movie claims to empathize with the plight of women, suffering from the Iranian patriarchal society, but, as a product of this same society, it fails, resulting in very male-centric movie. Although we’re shown glimpses into the life of one of the Azimi’s victims, at the beginning of the movie, the life we’re shown is miserable. We’re shown scabs, wounds and bruises. The woman goes to her usual spot and begs for opium from a local dealer to forget, how terrible her life is. We see dull eyes and badly applied make-up. This is it, these 16 women, who we don’t even know by name, except for two of them, are all wretches – no joy, no life, no nothing. We can only sympathize with them, says the movie, if they are so miserable, that they’re barely human anymore.
This dehumanization is underlined throughout the movie, as it draws a stark line between “good” and “bad” women, starting with the character of Rahimi herself. Instead of the sex worker who fought back and reported Hanaei, at great risk for herself, being the main character, we get a fictitious outsider with no skin in the game whatsoever. Rahimi is a journalist from Tehran, a well-educated journalist. A much better protagonist, than a prostitute, it seems. By the way, Rahimi’s only motivation that we get, is the way men see and treat her as well as the trauma she’s incurred from them. In lieu of an actual characterization with meaningful motives of her own, Abbasi gives Rahimi short hair, painted toe nails and an attitude, to consolidate her status as a hardened reporter.
The victims and the alleged main character’s motivations and desires, however, don’t really matter, as its main fascination is with the killer – his contradictions, doubts and convictions. Bajestani, as Azimi, chews the scenery, as though it was a delicious piece of beef jerky, with such delight and relish that I instantly understood what genre, we’re actually in. Although touted as a “Persian Noir”, the movie is instead a sleazy 90-ies erotic thriller, with all the genre conventions of its brethren like Basic Instinct (1992) or Fatal Attraction (1997). So much was I reminded of this type of movie that I almost expected 90-ies Michael Douglas to show up. Speaking of genre conventions. Since Jack the Ripper, killing prostitutes has been the favorite past-time of many a killer, including in the classic “Night Stalker” (1986) and everything that followed.
Rahimi’s fear is palpable, as she walks the streets of Mashhad or interacts with obstinate policemen, as the entitlement of the men of this society to a woman’s attention, space and body is shown with terrifying clarity. In one particularly disturbing scene, a policeman, she’s been dealing with before, gains access to her hotel room under false pretenses and makes a violent pass at her, as she tries to kick him out. After he finally leaves, she is so shaken that she doesn’t go to the police with any new information, before she entraps the killer, instead enlisting the help of Sharifi, the “good man” representation of this movie. When it comes to the brutal killing of the sex workers, however, no such clarity is employed. Instead, the movie switches from political commentary to erotic thriller mode and revels in Azimi’s anticipation before the murder as well as the act itself. Parted lips, terrified eyes, twitching legs and limp feet are shown in excruciating detail, as we observe Azimi’s horned up face, while he’s strangling the women with their own head scarfs. They don’t fight back; they don’t cry out – this privilege being reserved only for Rahimi during her heroic entrapment and daring escape.
So much does Holy Spider rely on Americanized genre tropes that it produced this particularly horrific scene:
Azimi picks up another prostitute and brings her to his apartment with the intention of killing her. She also happens to be a fat woman – and here, the movie decides to have a bit of fun. In a bizarre directorial and writing decision, this character is written as the most fatphobic comedic female fat character ever put on film (overly confident, sexually liberated, absolutely unaware of her fatness and ugliness). After Azimi realizes that he can’t strangle this beast of a woman, we are shown a fun side by side shot, as we see the woman ignorantly chatting away in the living room, while Azimi frantically searches his kitchen to find a weapon to slay the whale. After finding his choices insufficient, he proceeds to brutalize her with his bare hands and strangles her. It is the most brutal and bloody killing in the entire movie. After the most nauseating instance of fatphobia, I’ve seen in a while, we are graced with a fat joke as the punchline. Azimi struggles to get the body to his bike, visibly moaning and straining, even injuring himself in the process (laughter in the cinema). At the point, when he finally manages to get her onto his bike with a bizarrely loud thump (more laughter in the cinema), I was so stunned by this scene, that I was genuinely surprised that there was no fart sound.
In their infatuation with their version of the “spider killer” the filmmakers also made the dubious choice to not only give him more screen time than Rahimi (the main character), took weird liberties with the depiction of the trial and his mental state. They portrayed him as an exceedingly pious man, faltering at even the slightest touch of the wretches he tried to get rid of, conveniently omitting that the real killer slept with his victims. Although there was no evidence of Hanaei having a mental illness, the film also shows him having severe hallucinations, shifting the blame. As the truth has been altered, the movie Azimi never loses support and his son as well as his wife are shown to be ardent supporters.
The main theme of the movie is, of course, the toll the patriarchal system, as well as misogyny being passed down from father to son, takes on Iranian women. In the last scene, after everything is said and done, Rahimi watches the interview she conducted with Ali. He enthusiastically recreates his father’s methods of killing, meticulously explaining and showing every step on his little sister, on camera. The scene is horrific, but also underlines the sex-workers’ roles in this particular moral – if we don’t stop misogyny, it argues, they will come for the “good” ones next. Without any introspection or insight, the movie also unwittingly posits this kind of behavior and generational misogyny as the only possible future for Iran. Luckily, looking at the protests, it is not.
Holy Spider is a sleazy erotic thriller, obsessed with its killer and focused so much on the eroticism of the murders that it drowns its political message in a plethora of feet shots. The fact that it is lauded as a feminist movie by western critics boggles my mind and shows that, we, as critics should pause and examine our own biases, rooted in patriarchal and colonialist structures, and meditate on our perception of non-Eurocentric movies. As most of the reviews I’ve read bring to mind the image of a parent exuberantly praising a child for something that they’ve done 20% correctly, while ignoring everything else in the process.