Feminéma’s La Jefita Awards: Part I

Feminéma's new La Jefita statuette for those women bosses of film

I know what you’re thinking: at last! An unabashedly subjective set of awards given by an anonymous blogger to her favorite women on and off screen — as a protest against a sexist and male-dominated film industry! Awards that feature a statuette based on genuine Cycladic art of the early Bronze Age! And now handily divided into two parts for ease of reading!

The raves are pouring in, from humans and spam-bots alike: “I’ve waited months for this handy list, and I can hardly wait to visit my video store.”

“Could you choose a few more obscure films, already?”

“I take excellent pleasure in reading articles with quality content material. This write-up is 1 such writing that I can appreciate. Maintain up the excellent function. 560942.”

Yup, it’s La Jefita time here at Themyscira/Paradise Island, where our crack team of snarky feminist film fans has been scouring our many lists of favorite films and great scenes to boil it all down to a carefully-calibrated list of winners. (Winners: contact us to receive your awards, which you must receive in person.)

First, a few bookkeeping points: Our one rule is that no single person or film could win in two separate categories, although a winner can receive an honorable mention in a different category. (This is why we choose categories like Best Role for a Veteran Actress Who Is Not Helen Mirren or Meryl Streep, which will be awarded during Part 2). We are good small-d democrats here at Feminéma — “spread the love around” is our guiding raison d’être.

A related note: we at Feminéma want to express our distress at the contrast between, on the one hand, the omnipresence of blonde white girls like Jessica Chastain, Chloë Moretz, and Elle Fanning — they’re great and all, but they’re everywhere — and the virtual invisibility of people of color in top-notch film. It is a central aspect of our feminism that we call for greater diversity in casting, directing, writing, and producing overall. We can only hope that 2012’s Best Director nominees might have non-white faces as well as women among them.

Finally, you’ll remember that our Best Actress La Jefita prize has already been awarded to Joyce McKinney of Errol Morris’s Tabloid. In mentioning this again, we fully intend to list our Honorable Mentions as soon as we’ve seen two more films.

And now, on to what you’ve all been waiting for!

Feminéma’s Film of the Year (Which Also Happens to Be a Female-Oriented Film):

Poetry, by Lee Chang-dong (Korea). I wrote extensively about this immediately after seeing it, so here I’ll only add two comments. First, this film has stuck with me, poking at my conscious mind, in the intervening months in a way that some of the year’s “big” films did not. Second, this was a terrific year for film, especially “important” films like The Tree of Life and Take Shelter that deal with the biggest of themes (existence, forgiveness, apocalypse…). I will argue that, even alongside those audacious films, Poetry deals with even more relevant matters — responsibility — and that given the state of our world, this is the film we need right now. It’s ostensibly a more quiet film, but will shake you to the core.

Go out of your way to see Poetry. Let its leisurely pace and surprising plot turns wash over you, and the sense of mutual responsibility grow. It’s truly one of the best film I’ve seen in years — and if the members of these Awards committees bothered to see more films with subtitles and non-white faces it’d outpace The Tree of Life and The Artist in prizes.

Most Feminist Period Drama that Avoids Anachronism:

A tricky category — it’s so hard to get the balance right. After much hemming and hawing, and after composing many pro and con lists, we have determined that only Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre can be the winner. Mia Wasikowska’s perfect portrayal of Jane was matched by a beautiful script by Moira Buffini that carefully uses Brontë’s own language to tell a tale that underlines how much Jane wants not just true love, but a true equality with Rochester. (Add to that the fact that the film fassbendered me to a bubbling mass of goo, and we have the perfect feminist period drama.)

Mmmm. Muttonchop sideburns.

Honorable Mentions: La Princesse de Montpensier by Bertrand Tavernier and Cracks by Jordan Scott (yes, Ridley Scott’s daughter). Sadly, there’s a lot of anachronism out there: even if I stretched the category to include miniseries, I just couldn’t nominate Downton Abbey, The Hour, or South Riding because of their overly idealistic portrayals of women’s rights; while as historically spot-on as Mildred Pierce was, it’s no feminist tale.

I still haven’t seen The Mysteries of Lisbon but will make a note during Part II of the La Jefitas if it deserves a prize, too.

Sexiest Scene in which a Woman Eats Food (aka the Tom Jones Prize):

Another tricky category. Because I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, when you get a typical actress into a scene in which she’s expected to eat, she instantly reveals how little she likes/is allowed to eat food. Every single time I see such a scene, I become hyper aware of the fact that she’s looking at that food thinking, “This is the ninth take of this scene, and there are 50 calories per bite. That means I’ve eaten 450 calories in the last two hours.” Most don’t eat at all onscreen; all those scenes at dinner tables consist of no one putting food in their mouths. Thus, when I see an actress devouring food with gusto, I feel an instant sexual charge.

Thus, the best I can do is Sara Forestier from The Names of Love (Le nom des gens), a film in which her character, Bahia, wears her all her many passions on her sleeve, eating among others. When, that is, she’s wearing clothes at all. One might complain that Bahia is the Manic Pixie Dream Girl On Steroids — in fact, a central concept in the film is that she’s such a good leftist that she sleeps with conservative men to convert them away from their fascistic politics. (What can I say? it works for me; I was ready for a supremely fluffy French comedy.) Even if the manic pixie trope sets your teeth on edge, you’ll find yourself drawn to Forestier. The film won’t win any feminist prizes from me, but I quite enjoyed it nevertheless and would watch her again in anything.

(A brief pause to remember last year’s winner with a big sigh: Tilda Swinton in I Am Love. Now that was sexy eating.) Sadly, there are no honorable mentions for this prize. But I’m watching carefully as we begin a new year of film.

Most Realistic Portrayal of Teen Girls (also known as: Shameless Plug of a Little-Known Great Film That Needs a La Jefita Award):

Claire Sloma and Amanda Bauer in The Myth of the American Sleepover. There’s something a bit magical about this film, which I’ve already written about at length — a film that up-ends the typical teen dramedy and makes some lovely points that I wish had seemed possible for me back in high school. I loved this film for its frontloading of real teen girls and the real situations they get themselves into; I loved it for that weird combination of leisureliness and urgency that infused real summer nights in high school; and I loved it that it didn’t devolve into a pregnancy melodrama or a story about cliques. And just look at Sloma’s face; it makes me want to cry.

After seeing it, you’ll wonder whether you’ve ever seen a film that showed teen girls like this. And you’ll join my Sloma fan club.

Best uncelebrated supporting-supporting actress in a comic role: 

Nina Arianda only has a few lines in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris as Carol, the insecure wife of Paul, the overbearing, pedantic professor (Michael Sheen), but she almost steals each one of those scenes. She struggles to please and to pronounce her French words properly. She fawns over Paul in a way that makes you realize quickly how futile it is — taking photos of him as he holds forth annoyingly, for example, in the scene below. I don’t know how many of you readers are also academics, but Sheen’s portrayal of that professor was hilariously, perfectly accurate — and Carol is just as recognizable a type, that younger woman who married her former professor a while back and is still trying to make it work. (Skin: crawls.)

Arianda also had nice, slightly larger parts in Win Win and Higher Ground, although nothing that let her express her gift for wit that she displayed in Midnight in Paris. Let’s hope that with these three 2011 films, Arianda is getting more attention — and that she’s got a good agent.

Most Depressingly Anti-Feminist Theme for Female-Oriented Film: Fairy Tales.

C’mon, people. I couldn’t bear to see Catherine Hardwicke’s vomit-inducing Red Riding Hood (highest rating on Feminéma’s Vomit-O-Meter® yet, and I only saw the trailer!). Nor did I see Julia Leigh’s poorly rated Sleeping Beauty, though I’m likely to see it sometime soon. I did see Catherine Breillat’s weak effort, The Sleeping Beauty — such a disappointment after I quite liked her Bluebeard (Le barbe bleue of 2009). I was also less impressed with Tangled than most critics.

I like fairy tales and think they offer all manner of feminist possibilities for retelling. (Why, I even tried to write one myself.) Problem is, they seem to offer anti-feminists just one more chance to trot out their enlightened sexism.  Filmmakers have not yet realized that fairy tales have become a site for critique rather than retrograde confirmation of sexism. (Please, read Malinda Lo’s Huntress or A. S. Byatt’s The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.)

And this is only Part 1 of the La Jefitas! Stay tuned for the final roster of winners and honorable mentions — in such categories as:

• 2011’s Most Feminist Film! (Such an important category that it might be divided into three categories for clarity, and because I’m having trouble choosing a single winner!)
• Most Realistic Dialogue that Women Might Actually Say, and Which Passes the Bechdel Test!
• Best Fight Scene in which a Woman Kicks a Man’s Ass!
• Best Veteran Actress who is not Helen Mirren or Meryl Streep!
• And Best Female-Directed Film! (This one is turning out to be a scorcher — can it be that I’ll divide this into separate categories, too?)
  

“Beauty and the Beast” (1946)

Fairy tales are preoccupied with subjects so weird yet familiar that it’s no wonder we’re still thinking about them. At heart they capture a child’s view of the world: full of mystery, magic, and logics wholly concealed from us. The action in Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la bête, 1946) begins, for example, when Belle’s father plucks a rose to take home to his daughter — upon which the Beast suddenly appears, all fur and aristocratic clothing and that somewhat dainty overbite, to pronounce, “You could have taken anything but my roses. You stole a rose, so you must die.” Plot twists like that don’t amount to morality tales so much as remind children of the irrationality of the universe: you never know what small act might condemn you to punishment (which is exactly what childhood often feels like). Fairy tales also love to draw stark contrasts between beautiful and ugly characters. I loved Cocteau’s beautiful, weird film — it’s among the very best films I’ve seen in the past few years — and I’m fascinated by its strange messages about beauty, ugliness, and love.

Fairy tales also tend to headline female characters. No wonder, then, that female directors in particular have turned to fairy tales recently — Sleeping Beauty has been made twice in the last year (by Catherine Breillat and Julia Leigh), Rapunzel was retold for Tangled, Breillat’s brilliant, weird Bluebeard appeared a couple of years ago, and then there was that unfortunate Catherine Hardwicke version of Red Riding Hood (read Stuart Heritage’s very funny response to watching the trailer at the Guardian website). Of course, these have required significant revision for modern viewers who expect their heroines to have motives beyond a willingness to suffer prettily. Fairy tale heroines are also kind — so no one watching Beauty and the Beast will be surprised when the lovely, selfless Belle (Josette Day) takes her father’s place at the Beast’s castle, with the full expectation that he will kill her for her father’s crime of plucking that rose. But don’t get too attached to Belle, because she’s not really the star of the show.

In watching this film you overlook Belle in favor of the Beast (played by French heartthrob Jean Marais, who also appears as Belle’s sort-of suitor, Avenant, and the Prince at the end). The Beast is gorgeous, tragic, and has the most beautifully expressive eyes. We understand that the film wants to contrast Belle’s beauty with the Beast’s ugliness, but one finds oneself increasingly confused by that contrast because he’s so much more compelling and beautiful — tormented by his own demons and his growing love for the slightly colorless and indecisive Belle. He asks her to marry him every night, and every night she refuses, believing she must return to her sick father. When he grants her permission to leave on a short trip home he gives her the golden key to all his riches, telling her that it proves his eternal love, and warning her that if she does not return, he will die.

The most endearing aspect of the story comes at the conclusion, which once again deals with beauty and ugliness. To cut the plot short, Belle’s good-for-nothing brother and the rejected Avenant plot to steal the Beast’s treasure and kill him. When she realizes their trickery, she races back to the castle to save the Beast — but she has discovered her true love for him too late. He lies dying for want of her. Yet at that very moment she gazes at him, heartsick, the Beast transforms into a beautiful young prince with chiseled features in a ruff collar, smiling delightedly at her. No wonder she’s disturbed:

Belle:  Where is the Beast?
Prince:  He is no more. It is I, Belle. [He explains he could only be saved by a loving look.]
Belle:  Can such miracles really happen?
Prince:  You and I are living proof. Love can turn a man into a beast. But love can also make an ugly man handsome. [She looks at him skeptically.] What’s wrong, Belle? it’s almost as if you miss my ugliness.

Of course she misses the Beast. This new grinning, self-important prettyboy has presented himself to her, and appears so pleased with his own attractiveness that it alters their relationship. We miss the Beast, too. The tale’s message proves elusive. Surely we were supposed to learn that looks don’t matter; but now that I think about it, the story features a character named Belle who falls in love with a beast, only to find him transformed into a French movie star. You see: it tells us that looks really matter.

I could go on — there’s so much to be said about the Beast’s castle, which Cocteau fills with disembodied arms that hold candelabras or pour one’s wine, doors that open on their own, and marble busts with eyes that open and heads that swivel. But ultimately I think it’s a film about beauty and ugliness — topics crucial to the little girls who read fairy stories and imagine undying love and princes and castles. Now, if only we had fairy tales about perfectly ordinary-looking girls.