Women in Trouble
With bonus Cannes section
Watching
The Northman (2022)
The Northman is a movie about three women; noted Scandinavian Alexander Skarsgård is mostly on hand for his proven ability to maintain visible abs for the duration of a film shoot.
The first of these women, with both the least screentime and the most outsize impact on the imagination, is played by Björk. A blind seeress with a wheat-derived headpiece that appears to have been thought up by the greatest minds of Project Runway and Drag Race working in tandem, she drops in for a scene as though from another movie altogether, one by a director with a taste for tactile, homemade pleasures of a far different sort than the blood-guts-and-lava spectacle that dominates the rest of the film.
The second woman is played by Anya Taylor-Joy, whose career director Robert Eggers helped to launch by casting her in The VVitch, which I am still spelling that way so help me God. Here she is Olga of the Birch Forest, a comely Slav to warm Skarsgård’s bed at night and furnish him with a late-movie trolley problem in the form of offspring to complicate his revenge quest. In one sense Taylor-Joy is just filling the requisite role of blonde du jour, but in another she (26F) is very much auditioning for the part of Anna Karenina (27F) in a re-adaptation that is by no means in the works but which I’m now afraid I’ve just spoken into being. As long as someone other than Eggers directs…
The third is played by Nicole Kidman, in a supporting role as distressed damsel Queen Gudrún, widowed from Ethan Hawke and remarried by her brother-in-law (Claes Bang)’s hand. Savvy AMC moviegoers know that you don’t just cast Kidman in a background role (although that’s what it is, for most of the film), and indeed she rises to the occasion of selling the Big Late-Story Twist. Not once during that scene did I think There’s her Oscar clip!, not least of all because Eggers has a combined one (1) Oscar nomination between his two previous movies. The only downside to Kidman getting a good day’s wage performing as a character not derived from a famous 20th-century figure is that the work isn’t spread around fairly where it should be: this town still isn’t big enough for two actresses over the age of fifty to get comparably-sized roles in the same film.
Inland Empire (2006)
“A woman in trouble,” the famous tagline to Lynch’s probably-final feature film, ought to have won a truth in advertising award. In this three-hour movie, Laura Dern:
is filmed in unflattering close ups on consumer-grade cameras at short, distortion-prone focal lengths;
gets a portentous first-act visit from stealth Lynchverse MVP Grace Zabriskie, who could teach Anya Taylor-Joy a thing or two about hard-to-place Eastern European accents;
has to promote her character’s new movie on a talk show nosily hosted by Dern’s own mother (Diane Ladd), which feels like it should be in violation of the Geneva conventions;
walks through a door on a film set into an alternate universe (?) where she must share a house with half a sorority squad’s worth of sex worker-coded women prone to dancing the Locomotion and vanishing into thin air;
bleeds to death on Hollywood Boulevard while an Asian woman speaking perfectly comprehensible English tells a weird story which is nevertheless subtitled, also Terry Crews is there just kind of doing nothing so the dial on the device labeled “What Are David Lynch’s Racial Politics?” is flying all over the place.
There’s also an in-universe TV show called Rabbits, about humanoid rabbit-headed people who talk to each other in non-sequiturs over a laugh track that’s occasionally interrupted by horrific lights and noises from hell. Sounds like trouble to me! Dern’s work running this gauntlet was unjustly ignored by the Academy, despite the best efforts of Lynch and that cow.
Inland Empire is a sister film to Mulholland Drive, which similarly deals with actresses, dream logic, and the seedy underbelly of Hollywood. Laura Harring, who headlined that film with Naomi Watts, appears just before the end credits of this one (she also voices one of the Rabbits). Curled up on a red damask chair all rattlesnake-like, she blows a kiss to Dern, seated across from her on a couch beside Nastassja Kinski, while Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman” jitters underneath. The gesture is sinister, as are most gestures in David Lynch films regardless of context, but also knowing in a sisterly way. Harring infamously never had the career that Watts did after Mulholland Drive, and seeing her here in 2022, knowing that Dern, too, would escape Harring’s fate in the long run, makes the bit all the more wistful. Dern was never destined to disappear: she always had nepotism and Jurassic Park on her side, even if her stint as an emotional support lesbian for Ellen on the eponymous sitcom set her back a few years. By no means an undeserving celebrity, Dern was always at an advantage navigating the showbiz labyrinth that swallows other actresses alive; Inland Empire is a fitting and frightening memorial to the ones who don’t get out.
Happening (2021)
Director Audrey Diwan, who won the Golden Lion at last year’s Venice Film Festival, shoots Happening in a tight 1:37:1 aspect ratio that hems in her characters from all sides so you know they’re in trouble. Set in France in the early 1960s and based on the novel by Annie Ernaux, Happening posits one high schooler’s quest to illegaly abort an unplanned pregnancy as a life-ruining thrill ride.
Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei) is strikingly beautiful and effortlessly smart, winning the admiration and projected hopes of her literature professor in one scene and arguing with her friends over the relative merits of Camus and Sartre’s philosophies in another. Her parents (one of whom is played by Sandrine Bonnaire, whom I didn’t even recognize) are working class, which makes it all the more tragic when Anne’s academic aspirations are diverted by her pregnancy. The signs that she’s pregnant are obvious but she resists accepting that conclusion until she hears it from the mouth of the school nurse (Fabrizio Rongione, on loan from the Dardenne Brothers Cinematic Universe), a well-behaved authority figure capable of speaking only in historically contextualizing clangers (“No doctor will risk the legal consequences of performing an abortion!” etc.).
Diwan’s movie is a difficult sit, which is a testament to her directorial talent, but something about it also doesn’t sit well. It feels lazy to make a point of how smart your lead character is only to have her intelligence serve the narrative end of being woefully dashed. At no point during or after her ordeal does Anne reflect on the experience in a way that would lead her outside her immediate needs to consider her larger context—and, importantly, the other women with unwanted pregnancies who are less lucky than she is in the end. The film’s most arresting moment comes when the woman who finally assists Anne with a backwoods abortion (a perfectly-cast Anna Mouglalis) huskily tosses off a comment about all the other women who die from putting bleach up their uteruses. The casualness of the line, along with what it leaves to the imagination, has a sickening staying power that the film’s more visually explicit moments only approach without matching.
Anne shares much in common with the abortion-seeking women of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Alice T., Never Rarely Sometimes Always, all of whom are unwedded, childless, and constrained by restrictions on abortion ranging from geographical inaccessibility to outright illegality. Interestingly, she struck me as less like the women of Agnès Varda’s One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, despite sharing more circumstances in common. Varda’s movie starts around the same time as Happening, when abortion is still illegal in France, and opens with Pomme, a girl Anne’s age, putting up the money for Suzanne, a few-years-older friend with two children, to abort an unexpected and untenable third child.
For Varda, female solidarity is the sine qua non of a story about abortion. In Happening, Anne mostly endures her suffering in isolation from women who might otherwise have been part of a more robust support network. Magloulis’s character performs abortions at great personal risk that bespeaks her solidarity with women everywhere, but her relationship with Anne is transactional in a way that Anne’s relationships with classmates and friends are not. Poor, exemplary Louise Chevillotte, who deserves better than the five minutes she’s given here as an older classmate, has one throwaway line early in the film before she’s called back at the climax to save Anne’s life. You would think a deeper friendship might follow, even if only in a brief epilogue, but Diwan leaves no time for it.
What’s more, Varda has a much larger capacity than Diwan for imagining the ways that women combat their oppression. The characters of One Sings, the Other Doesn’t sing, dance, make art—and suffer, yes, but the latter does not preclude the capacity for using all the former as self-expression, self-care, and even political organizing. Happening is a largely joyless movie, and all the moments where Anne gets to blow off some steam through dancing or sex require the presence of men. In a telling sequence, Anne watches a classmate demonstrate her favorite method of masturbating. Just as the girl is climaxing, Diwan cuts to a shot of Anne throwing up in the bathroom. If Diwan intends to show how patriarchy interferes with women’s bodies and access to pleasure even when men aren’t in the room, it feels an awful lot more like she’s reifying exactly what her movie wants to critique.
By all accounts Men sounds like it would have fit this newsletter’s theme perfectly, but I also kept seeing people call it Alex Garland’s mother!—no thanks! Girl’s in some real deep trouble if that’s the kind of movie she’s trapped in.
Reading
In an earlier draft of this newsletter I tried to write up Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, which fits the theme in its own way, but things were running long and this is a difficult movie to describe in brief. At any rate, I liked and related to what Willow Maclay had to say a lot:
This is not a tragic story of the internet, or even how scary the internet can be, but something more nuanced. For younger millennials and gen-Z the internet isn’t a boogeyman, but as natural as the air one breathes. I did not grow up with a smart-phone or a strong internet connection, but the communities that I did make online changed my life in astronomical ways for the better. Schoenbrun’s film has sympathy for that connection and the distance that can feel so very large when that symbiosis is severed.
My Annual Attempt to Describe to You All of the Interesting Movies That Premiered at Cannes, Without Having Seen Any of Them
The consensus pick out of Cannes this year sounds like Aftersun, a father-daughter drama by Charlotte Wells starring recovering normal person Paul Mescal and Frankie Coro, who you don’t know yet. It premiered outside the Competition and A24 has already picked it up for U.S. distribution, along with Grand Prix-winning Close, a pre-queer boys-being-friends movie with perennial Tim favorite Émilie Dequenne, by Belgian director Lukas Dhont. Dhont’s previous movie, Girl, played into just about every transphobic storytelling trope in the book so, uh, I’m proceeding with caution on this one. The film that turned the most heads was a disgusting movie about human surgery the likes of which you’ve never seen before. No, I’m not referring to David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, which by all accounts was tamer than advertised, but rather to De Humani Corporis Fabrica, the latest documentary from Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab sickos Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel. The first thing I heard about Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness was there’s a ton of vomiting so that’s a hard pass from me, even though it walked home with the Palme d’Or, Östlund’s second.
Returning to the Competition for the first time since 1988, Claire Denis bombed with critics with her English-language Stars at Noon but nevertheless split the Grand Prix with Dhont. Hirokazu Kore-eda also debuted a work made outside his usual country and language, to much better buzz. Broker, a South Korea-set found-family flick in the style of Kore-eda’s Palme-winning Shoplifters, brought Best Actor glory to Song Kang-ho, who has quickly become one of the most beloved faces in cinema today. Also delivering the goods from Korea, Park Chan-wook’s erotic detective thriller Decision to Leave took the Best Director prize. Cristian Mungiu’s R.M.N. and the Dardenne brothers’ Tori and Lokita both dealt with racism and xenophobia in a Romanian and Belgian context respectively, though critics of the latter have been louder than what I usually hear from the anti-Dardennes camp. The Dardennes took home a special Cannes 75th Anniversary prize, while Mungiu left with nothing. Neither did Albert Serra take anything home for his Pacifiction, a weird Tahitian odyssey already beloved by the Film Comment set, though its being miraculously added to Competition at the last minute seems like prize enough. Best Actress went to Zahra Amir Ebrahimi, who has had a tumultuous life since a 2006 sex tape scandal (in which she was wrongfully(?) accused of appearing in one, though I don’t understand all the details) derailed her career in Iran and drove her into eventual exile in France, though her film, Holy Spider, received only middling reviews.
Outside the main competition, Vicky Krieps lit up Un Certain Regard with her performances in Corsage, an Empress Elisabeth of Austria biopic with all the windows open, and More Than Ever, a terminal-illness romance co-starring the late Gaspard Ulliel in his final role. I, personally, am looking forward to Le Petit Nicolas: Qu’est-ce qu’on attend pour être heureux? if not for the French-class nostalgia then for the traditional-ish animation that preserves the expressiveness of the book’s original illustrations. Although I am on the record as an Ornithologist skeptic, I would be lying if I told you I am anything less than giddy with anticipation for João Pedro Rodrigues’s Will-o’-the-Wisp, a homoerotic musical about a prince who joins the fire academy just in time for the annual Sexy Firemen Calendar fundraiser photoshoot. There’s also a Tunisian movie about people having conversations under a fig tree called, mmhmm, Under the Fig Tree. Cannes does not historically care much for South or Latin American cinema, and this year the only title of note was Fabián Hernández’s A Male, which, seemingly on the same continuum as Dhont’s film, is about a young man overcoming repressive expectations on male affection and emotionality. And for all you Kierkegaard heads out there (I presume), Godland sends a Danish priest to Iceland in the 19th century on a combination evangelism–anthropology mission that turns into…well, you know how that kind of story usually works out.