Women in difficulty

If the downside of Fleabag’s legacy is endless reiterations of dissipation and disintegration by thirtysomething women, the upside lies in its example of young-ish women writing about the complexities of their own experience to create nuanced roles for themselves.  Much better to have women talking about their own difficulties, rather than male-directed “woman in jeopardy” flicks.  Here are some good examples.
 
Saint Frances (MC-83, Kanopy) is definitely Kelly O’Sullivan’s show, though nicely framed by first-time director Alex Thompson.  She’s a 34-year-old waitress wondering where the promise of her youth went, when she stumbles into a job as nanny to a highly-perceptive 6-year-old with two mommies and a newborn brother.  As Franny, the title character, Ramona Edith-Williams is very winning.  Ms. O’Sullivan’s writing is witty and observant, and her performance put me in mind of Brie Larson, which is high praise.  The two make an endearing pair, without ever turning saccharine.  The cringe factor is supplied by multiple blood leakings, rather than by drink and drugs.  And the whole package is delivered with a sense of low-key truthfulness.
 
Herself (MC-71, AMZ) is an Amazon import from Ireland, written by and starring Clare Dunne, as a battered wife who has tenuously escaped with two young daughters from her violent husband.  Some welfare agency is putting them up in an airport hotel, but the father retains visitation rights even under his own restraining order.  If the script tries to work in too many twists (perhaps because of additional writers), instead of digging deeper into the reality of the situation, it certainly serves as an effective calling card for Ms. Dunne as a versatile actress. The supporting cast is fine, led by Harriet Walter.  I felt a bit manipulated, but nonetheless was moved.  Director Phyllida Lloyd is no Ken Loach or Mike Leigh, but this film does contain truths about real lives in distress, despite third-act piling on.
 
In South Mountain (MC-79, AMZ), the protagonist is somewhat older and her problem is the familiar one, a cheating husband.  But there’s a lot more going on, and this film leaks it out artfully, in an aura of modest realism that accumulates real power.  Talia Balsam gives a watchful but revealing performance in the lead, an art teacher at a community college in the Catskills.  The story, written and directed by Hilary Brougher, is told in essentially one location, on a handful of days over the course of one summer.  The dissolving couple has two daughters, and the family is interwoven with a neighboring single mother with two teen kids of her own.  The area is attractively evoked with “pillow shots” of a nearby falls and the titular mountain.  For a patient and attentive viewer, this is a hidden gem.
 
Once I started commenting on films under this heading, I began to realize how many movies fit the rubric.  And Babyteeth (MC-77, Hulu), winner of nine Australian Academy Awards, is one of the best.  In this case the women in difficulty are a 16-year-old with cancer, and her mother.  Eliza Scanlen is the girl, Essie Davis and Ben Mendelsohn the parents.  This is the first feature for director Shannon Murphy, adapted by Rita Kalnejais from her own play.  The film is a sequence of captioned vignettes, which tell the story with a pleasing obliqueness, relying on the viewer to pay attention and make the narrative leaps.  The Sydney setting is mainly the swank modern house of the family, the father a psychiatrist and the mother a professional pianist.  Their issues are confronted with indirection, by themselves and by the filmmakers.  The catalyst comes from the sudden crush the private-girls-school student develops for a classic bad boy, a 23-year-old homeless drug dealer (Toby Wallace).  The less you know about where this all goes, the more striking will be the film’s elliptical approach.  The performances are all stellar, the story powerful, and the visuals sublime.  I went into this film with little expectation, but came out numbering it among my best of 2020.

Elizabeth is Missing (MC-86, PBS) stretches this elastic category in another direction, toward dementia.  Glenda Jackson returns to acting after more than twenty years as a Labour MP, to play an 84-year-old woman who needs post-it notes and wall labels to remember from one moment to the next, but manages to delve into deep memory to unfold some mysteries from the past.  The mystery aspect is not especially satisfying, but Glenda Jackson’s portrait of the flickerings and emotions of Alzheimer’s is enlightening and affecting.
 

Ammonite (MC-73, AMZ) has met with a highly divided response (Metacritic scores range from 100 to 45), but I have to recuse myself from adjudicating.  This was a film I wanted to see from the moment I heard it was being shot.  I was bound to immerse myself in Francis Lee’s film, since I am so familiar with its locations, from a visit to Lyme Regis three years ago.  And how can you go wrong with passionate sex scenes between Kate Winslet and Saiorse Ronan?  So I was pre-sold, and not at all disappointed with the result.  Some compare the film unfavorably, in the vein of period lesbian romance, to Portrait of a Lady on Fire, but it’s very much its own thing, a study in grey and blue, mist and mud, except for the occasional candle flame.  The film starts in the renowned “Ammonite graveyard,” with Kate digging into the role of Mary Anning, the amateur (in the best sense) paleontologist whose fossil finds made the “Jurassic Coast” a tourist destination from the early 19^th century on.  Saiorse is the ailing wife of one of those aristocratic tourists, who gets left in the care of the recessive and reluctant Kate/Mary, bringing a bit of blond sunlight into her drab, dirty, bedraggled life.  We never really crack the rock to reveal the Mary within, but Kate’s silences speak volumes about buried feelings, about loneliness and passion, about attraction and repulsion, about love and vocation.  The sense of period and place, class and gender, is wonderfully rendered, though the story speculates freely about the relationship between two actual longtime friends.  But what a treat to walk out the Cobb again, and down the beach under the Blue Lias cliffs!
 
One last film to close out this heading:  I’m not going to send you off in search of Eternal Beauty (MC-71, Kanopy), but personally I was glad to see it.  Ever since Happy-Go-Lucky, I’ve followed all of Sally Hawkins’ work, and I have a particular interest in films about mental illness, having worked on a book with a friend who was for many years a psychiatric nurse on a locked ward.  In Craig Roberts’ intimate and knowing film, Hawkins plays a schizophrenic woman, and like her, the viewer has a hard time sorting out what is real and what is hallucination.  It’s disorienting, but then that’s the point, innit?  Without underlining its themes, the film illustrates two truths, first that the “crazy” person is often the one acting out general family dysfunction, and second that from within the psyche of the sufferer, schizophrenia often seems like a liberating superpower.  The supporting cast is fine, but Sally is the show here, in a range from depression to mania.