Women under duress

I came up with this heading, and subsequently nearly every film I was watching seemed to fall under the rubric.  So this theme will help me get current at last.

Among the most beset of women is the title character of Gett: The Trial of Viviane Absalem (MC-90, NFX).  The Gett in question is permission to divorce, and since in Israel marriage is not a civil matter, it’s a religious court that must decide.  The woman in question is played by Ronit Elkabetz, memorable from Late Marriage and others.  She also writes and directs, in partnership with her brother Shlomi.  Her character is the wife seeking a divorce, but she winds up as the one under trial in these Kafkaesque proceedings, as her husband stonewalls and the panel of rabbis temporizes.  The claustrophobic setting, and the exclusive use of POV shots, with the camera always viewing from the perspective of one of the participants -- who may even be looking away from the speaker -- make for a unsettling experience.  In this Oscar-nominated chamber drama, the backstory is a puzzle to solve, with sly humor punctuated by emotional outbursts.  If you liked A Separation from Iran, you’ll probably like this film from Israel, unless you’re a hardliner on either side.

In Clouds of Sils Maria (MC-78, NFX), Juliette Binoche is the woman under duress, playing a successful international film star (what a reach!), who has been lured back on stage to act in the play that kickstarted her career.  She’s a difficult character, who puts a lot of stress on her personal assistant, played naturalistically and self-effacingly by Kristen Stewart (who won Best Actress at Cannes), with sly sideward glances at her own immense celebrity from the Twilight series (none of which I’ve seen).  The title of the film – as well as the play within -- refers to a meteorological phenomenon, where clouds glide through an Alpine valley like a snake.  The play is about an older woman victimized in a lesbian affair with a younger.  Juliette once played the hot young number, but is now cast as the pitiful older woman, no easy transition for her.  She runs lines with her assistant, and it’s hard to tell what emotions come from the play, and which from their own personal interactions.  Olivier Assayas’ film is a cross between Persona and All About Eve, with many nods to other classic and not-so-classic films, but entirely his own.  And made compelling by his actresses and their various masks.  (Chloé Grace Moretz plays the third, a notorious young film star who becomes the seductress in the play.)

I wrote about the British tv series Babylon in my last post, and noted my fixation on Brit Marling.  She graduated from Georgetown as valedictorian, with a degree in economics at the behest of her parents, but soon rejected Goldman Sachs, and Hollywood acting, to make D-I-Y films with two friends from college, which she co-wrote, co-produced and starred in.  Both came out at Sundance in 2011, and her career was launched.  With Mike Cahill she made Another Earth (MC-66, NFX), and with Zal Batmanglij made Sound of My Voice (MC-67, NFX), both of them extraordinarily ambitious and accomplished, given the budgets and circumstances of their making.  And in each, a sci-fi set-up, reminiscent of Melancholia and The Terminator respectively, yields smart, low-fi films grounded in Marling’s ethereal beauty and other-worldly demeanor (something of a type for her, though she seems quite the opposite in interviews, quick-witted and lively, instead of languorous, intense, and enigmatic).

Another Earth is what appears in the sky, apparently a doppelganger of our own.  Brit is a high-school senior bound to study physics at MIT, when her life veers drastically off-course and she winds up in prison, coming out four years later, still stunned by her wrong turn and desperate for atonement.  The planet in the sky is a big honking metaphor for an alternate outcome to one’s life, but despite implausibility, the film is serious-minded and provocative.

Sound of My Voice follows a couple who want to make a debunking documentary about a cult, which meets clandestinely in a SoCal basement, where they are mesmerized (as are we) by Brit, portraying a woman who claims to be a time traveler from the future, promising to help her followers survive the coming apocalypse of civil war.  Not giving the game away, even at the very end, the film leaves us to guess just who she is, and what her motives are.  This is a bargain-basement mind-bender, doing a lot with a little.

Then with Zal again, she made The East (MC-68, NFX), about another cultish cadre, this time the eponymous ecoterrorist cell.  Brit plays a corporate security agent working for Patricia Clarkson, who tries to infiltrate the group to forestall any acts against the companies who pay them for protection.  This time she’s the one drawn in, and compromised in her beliefs.  The cell is led by Alexander Skarsgard, and includes Ellen Page.  Their schemes are reticent with violence, but dependent on wit and humiliation to make their points, against polluters and other corporate malefactors.  This turns into a thriller with a brain, and a bit of heart.

Another female filmmaker I’ve been following lately is Céline Sciamma, so I caught up with her first film, Water Lilies (2008, MC-65, NFX), which is not as good as her subsequent Tomboy and Girlhood (both recently reviewed on this blog), but makes a promising start to a trilogy of films about teenage girls forging a sexual identity.  In this case, the girls are all on a synchronized-swimming team, and much of the film takes place in the pool and locker room, as an outcast girl betrays her chubby friend for a crush on the queen bee (or mermaid princess, in this case).  This is a young film maker staking out her territory, before mastering it.

In the same vein, but a totally different setting, Pariah (2011, MC-79, NFX), written and directed by Dee Rees and centered on the glowing central performance by Adepero Oduye, follows a black Brooklyn teenager, as she tries to find her own way, between a slightly older lesbian friend and her straight-laced parents, while seeking the grail of actual sex.  Shot by Bradford Young, and featuring good performances all round, this film may be familiar in its coming-out contours, but engrossing in its specificities.  Pariah seems much more authentic -- and precious -- than Precious.

Next we address three uncomfortable comedies that concern stressed-out women.  Welcome to Me (MC-67, NFX) is the most surprising, as Kristen Wiig continues to show her legitimate acting chops, playing an Oprah-obsessed borderline personality (if such a diagnosis makes any sense) who goes off her meds, wins the lottery, and decides to spend the loot on hosting her own reality tv show.  Her essential oddness fascinates and horrifies in turn, and she develops a following among hipsters who see her show as performance art, rather than the acting out of quirks and grudges.  Wiig seems authentically strange, and remains within the character without winking, or trying to win us over.  Linda Cardellini is the longtime true friend she finally alienates.  With Wes Bentley and Joan Cusack in the control room, Shira Piven’s film becomes a media satire, as well as an amusing, yet perceptive and sympathetic, character study of mental disquiet.

In Laggies (MC-63, NFX), Kiera Knightley, whom I never find as charming as I’m supposed to, is a woman who decides to drop out of her life when her longtime live-in boyfriend proposes marriage, for which she doesn’t feel ready.  Or for a job.  Nor does she still bond with her friends, who have left high school hijinks behind for proper husbands and children.  So she runs away, meets a group of teenagers who ask her to buy booze for them, and in short order is bunking in the bedroom of one of them, Chloé Grace Moretz, and flirting with her father, Sam Rockwell.  Lynn Shelton’s films are never all they promise to be, but this one lags further behind than usual.

On the other hand, I liked While We’re Young (MC-76, NFX) more than any Noah Baumbach film since The Squid and the Whale, primarily for the all-out performance of Naomi Watts as a woman trying to turn back the hands of time, as she and her husband Ben Stiller fall under the influence of a younger couple, played by Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried.  Always cinema-savvy, Baumbach here has a lot of fun with Stiller as a frustrated documentarian, caught between his father-in-law’s eminence in the field, and Driver’s drive to make a name for himself doing the same.  Meanwhile, our sympathies go to the women, one who has a loser for a husband, and the other a user.  There’s a lot of amusing observation of generational differences, but Naomi’s energy is the force that really breaks through.

It’s the women who bear the brunt of change when an ISIS affiliate takes over a section of Mali, in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu (MC-91, NFX, AMZ).  They must cover themselves and submit, though some find ways to resist.  This Oscar-nominated film is remarkable in offering understanding not just to the victims of Islamist fundamentalism, but to the perpetrators of jihad, with their wide array of mixed motives, from teenagers wanting to be part of a gang, to frustrated officer types longing for real power.  Religion is the least of it, as a local imam instructs some of the jihadi on the actual meaning of Islam.  You can appreciate this film simply as exotic and beautiful, though disturbingly so, and even witty at times, but its implications ramify widely, in a world where we face a disturbing force we little comprehend.  Pairs nicely with Sissako’s other film named for a city in Mali, Bamako.

I conclude this grouping with a very strong recommendation for a documentary that bends this category a bit, being rather about a “woman under the dress.”  Even if you have less interest in fashion than myself, which would be saying something, I strongly urge you to see Iris (MC-80, NFX), the penultimate film from master of direct cinema Albert Maysles, reminiscent of -- but antithetical to -- his famous Grey Gardens.  Here’s an old lady with her wits about her, for sure.  With her husband Carl, Iris Apfel had a successful career as an interior designer, but in her eighties, the Met’s fashion department mounted an exhibition of clothes and accessories she had collected over decades of world travel, which turned her into a fashion icon, and as she puts it, a “geriatric starlet.”  Showy, over-the-top, and hungry for attention, Iris is not the kind of 93-year-old I would normally gravitate to, but there is something down to earth about her, blunt and sharp at the same time, with clear vision and artistic purpose, that makes her entirely lovable, at least within the confines of this warm-hearted 80 minutes between old, very old, friends.