THE WOMEN, PART I: Reviews of Sex and the City 2, Mother and Child, Please Give and The Father of My Children

According to traditional wisdom, movies about women and starring women are few and far between. This is, and always has been, complete hogwash. While it is true that studio, tent pole films are often devoid of actresses or female characters of any import, independent and foreign films have more than taken up the slack. And now even the studios have slowly begun to realize that women are willing to spend money on movies so that at last, but not least, we are finally getting a few films from those Mounts of Olympus aimed at the distaff part of the population. All is not right in the world, but it’s not, nor has it ever been, as bad as people have painted it.

In Sex and the City 2, there is one scene that basically sums up the problems with the movie. Carrie Bradshaw (played, of course, by Sarah Jessica Parker) is in Dubai talking to a valet who has been assigned to serve her every need. When she asks him if he is married, he tells her that his wife is in India and they only see each other every few months if they can afford it. Does Carrie think, “OMG, there are people in the world so bad off financially, they can’t even live with their spouse?” Of course not. She thinks, “Hm, if this person can have a successful relationship with his wife though he only sees her every three months, maybe my husband’s request for a couple of days off a week from our marriage might not be as unreasonable as I thought”. Sex in the City is about four women who got to Dubai, see a country, experience a different culture, interact with a whole new ethnic group…and don’t learn a damn thing. I went with my friend R. (name changed to protect the innocent, or at least his profession in the industry) and he called it vulgar. I’m not sure I can disagree. The four friends end up in Dubai when Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall), the sexual adventurer of the foursome, gets a potential job offer from a businessman who wants to hire Samantha to do PR and sell his country as a tourist attraction. Now you would think that someone who made a name for herself doing PR would know that it’s probably unwise to insult the country of the businessman who wishes to hire you, but from the moment Samantha steps off the plane, she does nothing but act in, as suggested by my friend, the most vulgar manner imaginable. This might be all right if she had done it for political reasons, in response to the way Dubai treats their female citizens, say; but no, she does it because, well, she’s kinda (again, as my friend suggested) vulgar, which in certain circumstances is empowering and funny, but in others, it’s just, well…vulgar. In fact, she acts like Edina Muldoon in Absolutely Fabulous and there are times when the whole movie seems like a parody of the episode where Edina and Patsy went to Morocco. For a movie about women’s liberation (the quartet even does a karaoki version of “I Am Woman”), the writer/director Michael Patrick King seems to have trouble seeing the women of Dubai as little more than an occasion for a joke. I’m sure that for King the second class citizens of Dubai are little more than a punch line, but I’m not sure they would quite see it the same way. After a few adventures, and when all the requisite character arcs of a formulaic tent pole film have been covered, all four characters return to the city a little older. If only they had returned a little wiser.

In Sex and the City 2, four women go to Dubai and never experience anything more than their own backyard. In Mother and Child, the latest from writer/director Rodrigo Garcia, three women never leave their own back yard, but experience the whole universe. The three women are Karen (Annette Bening, who seems to be having a good year, what with The Kids Are All Right coming out soon); Elizabeth (Naomi Watts); and Lucy (Kerry Washington). Exactly how these three people fit into each other’s universes is not revealed at first, though it quickly becomes clear that Elizabeth is the daughter that Karen gave up when she got pregnant at age fourteen. This revelation also gives the plot a bit of grounding, since we know that eventually the two will somehow connect again; but how exactly does Lucy fit into all this? Well, she in turns adopts the baby Elizabeth has when Elizabeth dies in childbirth; but that’s not the end of it, not by a long shot. During the film, there is a lot of discussion as to whether God exists or if He brings meaning and order to the universe. At times, these conversations seem a little forced. But they are necessary, because in a deeply moving and surprising ending, Karen, a woman with a chip on her shoulder who does all she can to alienate those around her, realizes that everyone, chip or no chip, is actually connected, that there is a spiritual unity to the universe and that she is part of it and the proof is closer than she would have ever thought. This is a movie you watch to see actors really dig into characters that have meat and bones. Jerry, my best friend in Chicago, who also loved the movie, said that in Annette Bening he now has his first strong possibility for his list of the best of 2010. He also predicts an Oscar nomination. I’m not so sure. As wonderful as she is, it’s still an independent film opening rather early in the year. She may have a better chance with The Kids Are All Right. Naomi Watts has the most difficult role to play, mainly because her character starts out with all the clinical characteristics of a sociopath; she manipulates people in quite evil ways at time and with not one whit of a guilty conscience about it. Then when she gets pregnant, she suddenly reverses herself and leaves all the sociopathology behind (the hormones, maybe?). To a certain degree, one of the themes of the movie is that a woman has to connect with their child in some way in order to fully become themselves; but to change from a sociopath to a human being when you get a bun in the oven is really going there thematically. I’m not sure I bought it, but Watts made it damn entertaining. Last but not least Washington keeps up with her co-stars; annoying and off putting at times, like all the others, she more than earns your empathy by movie’s end. This is an ensemble movie in which the characters never really interact. It’s also a deeply moving film about the need for people to connect, to find meaning in their lives by reaching out to each other, even if they do never meet. Sort of a contradiction in terms, but that’s the universe for you.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE STRONG WOMEN GONE, PART DEUX (TO EUROPE APPARENTLY)

Everyone complains about the roles written for women, but no one’s doing anything about it. Well, that’s not totally true since three movies with strong female characters have opened in the last couple of months, but you might not know it based on the attention and box office given to such movies as The Ugly Truth and The Proposal.

Seraphine is the lovely, lyrical and based on a true story film about an obscure painter in the early 1900’s (at least obscure to American audiences), a lower class working woman who does cleaning and laundry but paints in her free time because she received a message from her guardian angel to do so. She does the usual artist stuff: she talks to trees (though fortunately, not like Clint Eastwood in Paint Your Wagon); makes much of her own paint from various liquids, like chicken blood, that she steals because she doesn’t have enough money to buy them; goes without food to purchase her supplies; and stays up all night singing and making awful noises while painting, driving her landlord to distraction. She’s also out of step. The art world is changing, but new forms like impressionism are still finding it difficult to gain a foothold, so Seraphine is ridiculed by her bourgeois employee for her somewhat fanciful interpretation of the natural world she sees around her. But Seraphine doesn’t care; like the Blues Brothers she’s on a mission from God. Then into her life stumbles a gay German art critic in town for his health (this is where the plot diverges from the one with Jake and Elwood). The critic accidentally discovers one of her paintings and starts representing her, but first WWI gets in the way (don’t you hate it when that happens) and then the stock market crashes in 1929 (damn you, Herbert Hoover). She then slowly loses her mind and spends the end of her life in a mental institution. Seraphine is played by the magnificent Yalonde Moreau who has already received a slew of acting awards, including the Cesar, in one of those performances in which the actress totally disappears into her role. The screenplay, perhaps as beautiful as Seraphine’s paintings, is by Marc Abdelnour and the director Martin Provost.

If one saw the previews to The Girl From Monaco, one would think it one of those delightfully quirky French comedies that often graces our shores. One couldn’t be more wrong. Though there is humor in it, it’s actually a rather serious story about a lawyer who becomes so obsessed by an ambitious weather girl who likes to manipulate and use men that the lawyer is in danger of losing a very important murder case (I don’t remember Perry Mason ever having this problem, but this is France after all). It’s a perfectly enjoyable movie, nothing great, but not boring. Its main strength is the femme fatale character played by Louise Bourgoin. There is just something about her that makes one believe that she could get a man to do anything she wanted, even if he fully well knows it means his own destruction. She’s one of those people who will sleep with you, then have sex with someone in the next room knowing that the next time she asks you to do something, you will. What can one do but kill her, which is what the lawyer does (or manipulates someone into doing, much like he himself was manipulated). The script, by Benoit Graffin (who also worked on the fun Priceless and the wonderful Apres vous) and director Anne Fontaine, is enjoyable enough, but it stumbles when it comes to the court case itself. The strategy of the lawyer played by Fabrice Luchini is never very clear and he makes speeches and cross examines witnesses in ways that would drive Jack McCoy to distraction). In the end, his defense seems to be that someone’s mother has the right to kill a man if the man is her son’s lover and threatens to expose the son’s homosexuality to the world. It’s hard to say what to make of such a homophobic attitude; what’s even more horrifying is the writer has the jury find the mother not guilty on this basis. Though I enjoyed the movie well enough, I left feeling that I and the director and writer lived in a very different moral world.

Lorna’s Silence is the latest film from the Dardenne brothers (Jean-Pierre and Luc), two of my favorite filmmakers in the world. They’ve already graced us with such possible masterpieces as Rosetta, La promesse, The Son, L’enfant. Lorna, played with quiet intensity by Arta Dobroshi, is an Albanian immigrant who, for money, agrees to a sham marriage to Claudy, a drug addict, arranged by mobster Fabio so that she can become a Belgian citizen. To fulfill her Faustian bargain, she would then help or allow Fabio to kill Claudy, so she could then, for more money, marry a Russian immigrant so he can become a citizen. Her goal is to open a snack shop with her immigrant boyfriend. It’s a pretty neat little scam, until Lorna develops a conscious, helps Claudy get off the drugs and tries to just divorce him rather than kill him. It doesn’t work; Claudy is killed without her knowledge. But by then, she has had sex with Claudy and thinks she is pregnant by him and has to find a way to survive since she’s put a kibosh on the new marriage and Fabio now wants his pound of flesh in the death of Lorna. As in all of the Dardenne films, this is about someone who has to make a momentous moral choice and the suspense is often as great or greater than whether James Bond will stop Dr. No. I do think this film does make a slight misstep by making Lorna’s pregnancy an hysterical one; there doesn’t seem to be a satisfying point to this. But just because it may not be as good as their other ones doesn’t mean the film isn’t better than most others.

But the question does become, why can Europe make films with exciting and strong female characters like this, but the U.S. can’t? Is it the way European films are financed, so that directors and writers there can make films that don’t have to make the massive profits they do here? Is it because the audiences in Europe are more open to movies about women? Is it because there are more writers and directors there who are simply interested in making films with women as central characters and they don’t feel the need to degrade them all the time? I wish I knew.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE STRONG WOMEN GONE (Apparently to TV, though not to the AFI)

Two interesting articles in the LA Times.

One is an excellent article by Mary McNamara as to the different ways women characters are portrayed in movies as opposed to television (deftly called the Shrew versus Shrewd). I know what she means. I often read romantic comedies for contests and a production company and instead of sympathizing with them, I often want to say, isn't it time for you to get a life rather than revolving your whole existence around the lack of a man in it. McNamara also does a good job of historical perspective by reminding people that knocking women off their pedestal is nothing new. This brought Katherine Hepburn back from being box office poison with The Philadelphia Story and was especially a common theme about women in film after WWII in which society wanted women to stop working and go back to being barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-women28-2009jul28,0,1374126.story

Patrick Goldstein in The Big Picture wrote an article about the AFI which seems to be spot on. I remember when the AFI annual award began and I always used to look forward to it. It was one of the most intelligent awards show on television recognizing some of the most remarkable people in show business. But it lost its lustre as the honorees got younger and seemed to be chosen for ratings sake. Goldstein has a great point: if the purpose of the AFI award is to honor those who have contributed to the art of cinema in significant ways, then why haven't any artists other than directors and actors been singled out: where are the awards that should go to writers, cinematographers and composers. And while we're on the subject, costume and set designers, editors, etc. The Oscars often aren't much better, but they have given special awards to editors and set designers (and in their defense, most of the people mentioned by Goldstein that are overlooked by AFI have already won an Oscar). However, he fails to mention that women are rarely rewarded by the AFI which has been heavily skewed toward men.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/the_big_picture/2009/07/afi-life-achievement-award-how-it-was-destroyed-by-tv-.html