“La Princesse de Montpensier” (2010): who do you love?

There is a strange distance to our view of the characters in Bertrand Tavernier’s La Princesse de Montpensier. One can’t help but be caught up in this 16th-century tale because it might well be the most gorgeous thing you’ve ever seen — the costumes alone took my breath away, but the visions of battle, the castles, the village exteriors, the “Arabian” costume ball, all convey true wonder and pleasure. Yet the film can’t quite persuade us to love either of the two primary characters — and as a result, one finishes the film with an odd coldness. Did I love watching this beautiful film? Absolutely. Did I care for the characters? Not especially. How is that possible, given the narrative of a strong female lead with a tale of love and jealousy and the horrors of early modern marriages?

The most likely protagonist should have been the Comte de Chabannes (Lambert Wilson, above, and yes please!). Chabannes is a Huguenot (Protestant) and has chosen to fight against the Catholics during the French Wars of Religion. But almost as soon as the film opens we find him a member of a Huguenot raiding party, killing by accident a pregnant woman. Appalled by his action, he gives up the sword and swears never to fight again — to return to his life as a scholar and teacher. His former pupil, the Prince de Montpensier (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet), welcomes him back as a counselor and friend.

But before we get much attached to Chabannes, we meet the beautiful heiress Marie (Mélanie Thierry), who’s letting her handsomely scarred cousin, Henri de Guise (Gaspard Ulliel) nuzzle her neck and feel her up a bit. It’s clear it’s been going on for a while and that they expect to marry. Yet due to a political realignment of power by their fathers, Marie gets married off instead to Montpensier, whom she’s never met before.

They break this news to her in a terrific set of scenes. Marie stands in a doorway, watching de Guise at one end of a courtyard being counseled by a relative; she turns around and watches Montpensier learn of this news and turn to look at her with his signature cautiousness. de Guise turns and marches past her to challenge, aggressively, the smaller Montpensier. Later, as her future husband listens from a hallway, her father breaks the news to her:

Father: You will yield! You must! I order you! I will host les Guises tonight. You will consent before they go, or everything will wobble. This marriage suits me — you will yield, or enter a convent.

Marie: I will go. [Her father slaps her]

Father: I’ve tamed worse than you! Les Guises leave tomorrow and you’ll forget all this! Yield! You must! I’m your father! It’s your duty to obey! [He raises a hand to punch her, but her mother intervenes.]

Mother, warning him: My friend. [Later, alone with Marie.]

Mother: Control yourself, proud child. And submit. I know you are intelligent. Youth makes you defiant. Your feelings for de Guise are too conspicuous. Control them, and let reason guide you. Think what marriage to that dreamer Mayenne would lead to, bringing you near the one who desires you, and to whom you’re drawn. Sooner or later you would both yield to temptation and no good would ensue.

Marry Montpensier. He’s an ordinary brute with no reputation yet, either good or bad. Daughter, love is the most awkward of things; I thank heaven every day your father and I have been spared such trouble. Submit.

Given the drama of such a scene, you’d think by now that Marie would be our heroine, but the film doesn’t really encourage us to go there. Her compliance with her parents’ wishes — her submission — is so complete and absolute that she becomes cold, inscrutable, and so much so that she’s unsympathetic. We almost believe her dispassionate statements about duty and obedience. She has been schooled too well by her mother: she spares herself the trouble of love for her husband, or for anyone else. For more than half the film she hardly speaks a true thought or emotion.

Now, Montpensier is a perfectly nice man — not brutish at all, and perfectly willing to obey his father’s wishes — even though he knows of Marie’s total indifference and that the marriage will destroy his friendship with his cousin de Guise. He and Marie survive the horrors of the “wedding night,” in which her virginity is confirmed by her blood on the sheets and her cry of pain, audible to the women who sit in the room during the act.

But because he knows of Marie’s prior attachment to de Guise, the Prince quickly becomes a jealous husband. Marie is so beautiful that he can’t help falling in love with his wife, and tries in vain to seek confirmation that she might grow to feel the same way. Always standing with his head slightly cowed to her, Montpensier finds himself begging for signs of her growing attachment to him. One almost thinks that perhaps he is the film’s protagonist.

Except that Montpensier quickly gets dispatched to fight in the War, leaving her home with Chabannes to be educated in music, poetry, science, and all the fine arts that will make her an ornament at the court of Versailles eventually, a jewel for her husband to show off. She proves an eager student, working long hours to learn to write as well as understand the great poets. Soon Chabannes falls in love with her too.

But why?? We haven’t really grown to like her very much and, although we can see both her beauty and that she has funneled her desires into a quest for knowledge (always worthy!), she still seems cold and emotionless. When the drool-worthy Chabannes pronounces his love, I simply thought, “Really?” C’mon Tavernier, you can do better.

And so we proceed as the film unfolds a soap opera-worthy tale of various men throwing themselves at Marie. Don’t get me wrong: the beauty of the film, the clothes, and the characters make this eminently watchable. Yet by the time the curtain closes, one has the feeling that we’ll forget everything that happened to the characters, that there is no hero, no moral, and no underlying message. We have not grown to despise with all our heart the early modern practice of using women as sexual pawns in men’s power struggles. We do not denounce a vain woman’s stubborn wish to act on her sexual desires despite her lack of power to do so freely.

We mostly feel sad that she was born beautiful, because it makes men fight over her; we wish she had been ordinary-looking and modest. And we wish Tavernier had had a clearer plan with this film rather than to just make it look so good. (And yet I can guarantee that if Marie’s teal-colored dress ever comes up for sale, I am whipping out whatever one of my credit cards has a really high credit limit.) Reasons to watch this film: 1) Lambert Wilson (mmmm), and 2) great visuals. Otherwise: I’m left strangely unmoved. I should have fallen in love with someone in this film; I’m left feeling meh. Sigh.

“South Riding” (2011), in which the feminism goes down easy

Have I ever mentioned how much I hate films about teachers and students? Barf. It’s not just that the genre is so clichéd, and so designed to make its audiences weep a few joyful tears when that student finally figures it out and the self-sacrificing teacher looks on with pride. (One time on a plane I refused to buy the headset to listen to/watch Mr. Holland’s Opus [1995], yet found myself crying just at the muted images. Gawd.)

So why does that storyline in the BBC miniseries South Riding, based on the Depression-era novel by Winifred Holtby, seem inoffensive to me? Two reasons: because the feminism is taken for granted (and coated with a bit of sugar), and because the leads — Anna Maxwell Martin as the new school headmistress and David Morrissey as the dour local gentleman farmer who’s losing his financial and personal battles — are just so utterly wonderful to watch. Set in a poor seaside area of Yorkshire during 1934, this 3-hour series is so appealing that even my anti-costume drama partner watched the entire thing with me.

I’ve had my eye on Maxwell Martin ever since Bleak House (2005) and her small  but very neat part as Bessy Higgins in North and South (2004). Her face makes me want to be her friend; her quick tongue makes her acting shine in these roles, even as she speaks with a distinctive lisp. And who does handsome, tortured, and yearning better than Morrissey? Remember him as the traumatized, crazed Bradley Headstone in Our Mutual Friend (1998), and more recently as Maurice Jobson in Red Riding: The Year of Our Lord 1980 (2009) — two parts among his many terrific performances.

My greatest regret is that South Riding feels rushed. It’s just a crime that so many miniseries now get crammed into the shortest amount of time possible, given the costs of filming — budgets seem now to dictate such abbreviated, hustled-along tales. (It also seems that screenwriter Andrew Davies seems to have given a little less love to this adaptation than he usually does.) So it’s a good thing that Maxwell Martin, as the brash, attractive, feminist headmistress, hits the small town with so much verve and so many new ideas about educating girls to think for themselves, and to think beyond the gender expectations placed on them by the old generation.

She feels that imperative so strongly because, some 16 years earlier, she lost her fiancé during the Great War. Even as she thereafter transformed herself into a professional educator, his death left bullet holes in her personal life, a fact that she dishes out to keep the kindly Scottish-brogued, Marxist Joe Anstell (Douglas Henshall) at a comfortable arm’s length. She’s stunningly frank about the fact that she’s been with men since, but insists her dead fiancé was the love of her life.

This makes her educational philosophy all the more poignant, as she lays it out in her interview:

Sarah: I want my girls to know that they can do anything. That they don’t have to repeat the mistakes the previous generation made.

Interviewer, bristling a bit: Specifically?

Sarah: Blindly sending their sons off to be killed in the millions, without thought, without question. I’m determined that the girls I teach will not be the wives and mothers of the next generation of cannon fodder.

…

Sanctimonious interviewer: Miss Burton, wouldn’t you agree that the greatest calling for any young woman is to become a wife and mother?

Sarah: No! I would not! [catches herself] Not necessarily. But I do know that the wives and mothers of today and tomorrow are going to have to know as much as they possibly can about the world they’re living in. I mean, this is 1934! The world’s changing! And the future is going to be very different, and it’s our responsibility to prepare these girls to meet it. Well, that’s what I think, anyway.

She directs that feminist ethic not just at the (predictably) brilliant, impoverished Lydia (Charlie Clark, above), whose family lives in The Shacks in squalor, but also at Morrissey’s neurotic daughter Midge (Katherine McGolpin) who may or may not have inherited some of her mother’s tendency to madness. The girls’ lives are given only a truncated treatment in the series — the show seems eager to hustle along a romance between Maxwell Martin and Morrissey, and who’s complaining? — and are the most regrettably clichéd of all.

Look, it’s winter break time — we’re all slowing down during these darkest days of the year, when some of us (hem hem) find ourselves spluttering about workplace injustices and brewing enduring resentments. What we all need is a femi-tastic, fem-alicious period drama in which whatever strident feminism and socialism may have appeared in the original novel have been coated in a lovely cotton-candy costume miniseries. This is the medicine we need now, and by we I mean me.

But let’s also note that next on my list are the resolutely anti-heroic Charlize Theron in Young Adult and Rooney Mara kicking men from here to kingdom come in Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. The feminism might go down easy here, but just wait.

 

Here be dragons, and that way lie monsters

Here’s my question: when presented with spectacular levels of cognitive dissonance, how will you respond?

I’m starting to think the only way for me is either madness or depression.

I’d like to suggest that there’s no way to take into account the utter unfairness, the lies and deceptions, the selfishness and obtuseness, without developing a noticeable facial twitch and/or getting institutionalized.

Yup, just like they used to write on old maps, in those vast stretches of unexplored ocean: “here be dragons.” Or, “here dog-headed beings are born.”

Let’s just take as an example what I’ve been witness to in the last semester, which include the most astoundingly feckless treatment of graduate students and the most resoundingly nonsensical tenure decisions.

Yet as I look around at the responses of my peers and colleagues, I don’t see much madness or depression. As a result I’ve come to realize there are a range of psychological types which allow those individuals to somehow take all this information in stride rather than lock arms with Nurse Ratched. Let me delineate:

1. The narcissist. “If this information does not help or hurt me personally, I can remain completely unaffected by it.”
2. The truther. “If that person was denied tenure (and/or if that grad student was treated like shit by his/her advisor), there must be a good reason.”
3. The Pangloss. “Everything the university does must necessarily be the best thing it can do.” Unsaid: “If I cannot believe this, everything will fall apart. Therefore, yay, university!”
4. The house of cards fraidy cat. “I cannot do or say anything because the university might hurt me on my own way to promotion.”
5. The psychopath. “My spectacularly unqualified friend/partner got tenure, therefore I will post numerous congratulatory messages about it on Facebook. It does not occur to me that this might hurt my Facebook friends and close colleagues whose tenure was unfairly denied, because I am incapable of empathy.”
6. The hermit. “I will not think about this, lest I feel things I can’t absorb right now. Instead I will return to my office and hide my head under the sand.”
7. The choose-your-battles fantasist. “Rather than oppose such manifest unfairness, I will believe that I am building my strength for the next battle over something even more outrageously unfair.”

This way lie monsters, friends. Believe me, madness and/or depression are preferable.

And they say that being a professor is all about the intellectual freedom. Har har. See ya at the madhouse, compadres.

Female masculinities-en-scène

A little trans love for today.

Katharine Hepburn, always reliably mannish

Josephine Baker, dontcha know.

Gladys Bentley

Marlene Dietrich, who I could look at all day

Garbo as the eminently queer Queen Christina

Some days just call for women in suits. And why not a day when I hear all manner of nonsense from/about my former university. To use spelling shamelessly lifted from Comradde PhysioProffe (whom I secretly want to marry in spite of my obvious trans love and because of his excellent spelling, accuracy on sports issues, and cooking panache) in order to express my utter outrage at all things university/administration/department bullshitte:

fucke you too, with your goddamn motherfucken sanctimonious displays of “importance” shitte. The only thing you goddamn fucken white motherfuckers do is stabbe people in their backs, even better if they’re helpless grad student shittes. I know you do this bullshitte because you are fucken afraidde all the fucken time and that you have sought out the easiest motherfucken targets. In the meantime congrats on your displays of power, assholes. I can only trust in karma.

“This is for all the fat girls”

Here’s what got me started on this post: the fact that Jonah Hill gets a lot of work as an actor. Don’t get me wrong: I have no particular problem with Hill, and I’m encouraged by the fact that directors are starting to cast him in interesting parts (Cyrus, Moneyball) that don’t demand 1) a fat guy, or 2) broad comedy. He can use those huge eyes and unusual, cupid-bow lips to enigmatic, sphinx-like effect. But his ubiquity at the box office just points out to me that the fat girls are not getting the same “luck.”

Let’s be clear here: Jonah Hill is fundamentally a comedian who’s getting very lucky with good parts because audiences seem to like seeing fat men on screen on a regular basis. In contrast, audiences hate seeing fat actresses, so directors keep them limited to comedy. It has been a very long time since 1998 when Camryn Manheim won an Emmy for her work in the TV series The Practice and held the statuette aloft in the air, proclaiming, “This is for all the fat girls!” Ah, 1998, you were so, so long ago. In the years since, Manheim has lost a lot of weight.

Fat actresses are permitted a very small share of parts. Back in 2005 Showtime offered us a series called Fat Actress, a satirical fictionalized version of the life of Kirstie Alley (left), but it was cancelled after 7 episodes. Like Alley, our current non-svelte actresses are comediennes. With all of Queen Latifah’s many talents — and she was so terrific in Chicago (2002) — no one can say she’s getting interesting roles. Likewise Melissa McCarthy, who had a sweetly goofy role in Gilmore Girls (2000-07) and displayed great broad comic genius in Bridesmaids (2011); currently her sitcom Mike and Molly (2010-present) is struggling with the network, critics, etc., despite the fact that McCarthy won the 2011 Best Actress Emmy for her work. In a now-infamous blog essay entitled “Should ‘Fatties’ Get a Room? (Even on TV?)” on the Marie Claire website, writer Maura Kelly held that she’d be “grossed out if I had to watch two characters with rolls and rolls of fat kissing each other … because I’d be grossed out if I had to watch them doing anything.” Lovely. Her essay was so objectionable that the magazine received 28,000 complaint emails and the writer penned one of those fake apologies, saying, “I sorely regret that it upset people so much.” Wow, thanks, Kelly! Problem solved!

The only fat actress I can think of who’s gotten interesting roles is Gabourey Sidibe, whose astonishing turn as Precious (2009) won her piles of Best Actress awards and nominations. But let’s be frank: since appearing in that film her roles have paled in comparison. She has a supporting part in Laura Linney’s serio-comic series, The Big C (2011-present), and has a small part in the Ben Stiller project, Tower Heist (2011). What’s most interesting to me is that she resists being typecast as a comedienne — meaning that although she might struggle to find roles, she’s left the door open to doing more compelling work than “sassy fat Black woman.”

I don’t mind it that so many fat actresses appear in comedies. I just think that Jonah Hill’s example is a good one: being funny isn’t the only thing these women can do. The fact is that big bodies can do very interesting things in a scene, allowing an actor to make unexpected choices about a role. Their very mass appearing in film, alongside the great majority of actors who look like little slips of human beings, can convey such a range of emotion and motivation that a smart director can make great use of.

Of course, alongside my posts calling for more real noses, unusual mouths, and real female athletes’ bodies, this one is hopelessly idealistic. But who knows? Maybe in another year or two another fat actress will be holding her statuette in the air, and I’ll be crying with joy at the sight.

The gender gap in academic salaries

Women academics earn 81% of what their male colleagues earn, according to data supplied by the US Department of Education.

This data aggregates all full-time faculty positions, so some of the difference in salary can be explained by rank: there are many more men than women in full professor positions, i.e. the most highly-paid of all academic ranks.

But important differences in pay exist within ranks as well. As this study shows, the average salary for men at the rank of full professor was $109,466. For women full professors the average pay was $96,886. Thus, women full professors earned, on average, only 88 percent of male full professors.

There’s a lot to be said about disparities between how male and female faculty experience their jobs. But the fundamental facts — serious differences in pay, by gender — are illuminating as to how those disparities get sustained over years, decades. These differences speak to differentials in how male and female faculty are valued.

Saturday popcorn theater: “Yes, Madam!” (1985)

All I needed to hear about this movie was that it was Michelle Yeoh’s second film and that she stars as a kick-ass Hong Kong police detective who teams up with American B-movie action star Cynthia Rothrock to take down the bad guys. Yes, Madam!

Things to love about this movie:

1. Squeal-worthy slicked-back 1980s haircuts and brightly colored jumpsuits. Said jumpsuits should put the kibosh on 1980s fashion nostalgia once and for all.
2. This film also goes by the titles Police Assassin, Police Assassin 2 (yes, you read that correctly!), In the Line of Duty 2, and Super Cops.
3. Awesome martial arts sequences that also involve guns, knives, and parasols (yes, you read that correctly!).
4. Excellent bad guy/corrupt businessman (?) with, yes, an evil laugh — he’s not afraid to laugh evilly in every single scene.
5. Incomprehensible and needlessly convoluted storyline about a bit of microfilm.

Things to regret:

1. Not nearly enough Yeoh/Rothrock face time.
2. Long boring sequences of incompetent men being comic relief.
3. Not nearly enough Yeoh/Rothrock face time.
4. Weirdly abrupt ending.
5. Not nearly enough Yeoh/Rothrock face time.

So yeah, this isn’t going to be one of those films you finish up and say to yourself, “If only there had been a Yes, Madam! sequel!” But if you’re wandering around on Netflix thinking to yourself, “If only I could find a kick-ass duo of women doing great martial arts stunts!” you may want to put it on your queue. After all, one can’t really get enough Michelle Yeoh.

The radicalism of a real nose

When I was a kid my sister and I spent hours combing through, and listening obsessively to, my mother’s small record collection. Somewhere in there was an album of Barbra Streisand’s that looked something like this (I can’t remember if this was actually the one): 

In other words, everything about the image told the viewer, I have a big nose, and I’m proud of it. Even as a child, without knowing the specific dynamics of antisemitism and cruel views of women’s bodies, I understood that she was making a radical statement. (And who could have been more radically glamorous during the ’60s and ’70s than Streisand?)

Yet in the decades since, a good nose has been hard to find. Cinema is a particularly disappointing place for us nose aficionados who want to find a nice range on actresses. I even found myself coming up with some slightly embarrassing Google searches, mostly for naught. I’d venture to say that Barbra’s was the last truly beautiful, authentic big nose onscreen; in the decades earlier, the only one I can think of was Margaret Hamilton’s (and she was cast as The Wicked Witch of the West):

It’s a sorry state of affairs. A few months ago I wrote about the eternal beauty of a mouth with character, but I think having a real nose is even more radical. (Shall I be hyperbolic? There’s a genocide of real noses in film!) I even became confused because I remembered certain actresses having slightly more distinctive noses than they really do — only to find websites alleging that these women have had very clever and subtle plastic surgery. Where are the women with beautiful, distinctive noses like tennis player Steffi Graf’s (a woman I still think of as one of the most beautiful women ever to play tennis?

I think of a big nose as impossibly sexy and sensuous; as far as I’m concerned noses can be very effective tools in the sack, functioning as extra appendages, and I’m not just talking about their capacity for sniffing. Can it possibly be true that the beautiful and waif-like Claire Danes, with her Steffi Graf-like Germanic face, had the size of her nose reduced? It’s so depressing. One website accuses Penelope Cruz, Anne Hathaway, and Jennifer Aniston of having big noses — absurd! — but one can see that with claims like that floating around, it’s no wonder women are so eager to have work done. No wonder the genocide is underway when plastic surgery is so easily obtained.

The same isn’t true for for male actors. Just think of a couple of my personal favorites, Adrien Brody and Owen Wilson, who get piles and piles of work:

In fact, one of the funniest little bits of cultural referencing in recent film was Matt Damon’s disguise in Oceans’s 13, in which to seduce the gamine Ellen Barkin he donned a prosthetic nose he called The Brody:

If one digs deeper, one can find a few good noses. Vicki Lewis doesn’t get nearly enough work if you ask me, but she was great as the manic secretary on the old NewsRadio series and even more distinctive in the dramatic role in Pushing Tin (1999):

I’m telling ya, friends, it’s a sorry state of affairs. It’s bad enough that actresses have all manner of work done all the time — to make their breasts just a bit bigger, their butts a bit more luscious, their stomachs teeny. But we’ve been engaging in a war on great noses. No wonder we have epidemics of anorexia and plastic surgery among girls starting at age 11. You know what Barbra would say? I do:

Bring back the real nose. It’s a radical statement of identity and self-determination, not to mention ethnic pride and/or a willingness to see past superficial standards for female beauty. Wear your schnozz with pride.

Give Klea Scott more work

When you first see her in the Canadian TV series Intelligence (2005-07), you see her through someone else’s eyes, and he hates her. Klea Scott plays the steely, ambitious head (pictured here) of an federal intelligence unit in Vancouver.

The gender politics of the office are fascinating to watch, particularly during the show’s first season, when the writers permitted a high degree of subtlety to infuse the intra-office battles. The show — like all other shows, it seems — was weighted heavily toward its male characters, Scott only got about one-third of the most major face time, at best. No other woman on the show was permitted character development like she was (although I’d also like to put in a plug for Ona Grauer, whose portrayal of a high-rent Russian madame running a stable of Slavic prostitutes; I’d watch Grauer in anything, too).

Scott is riveting to watch with her low, soft voice, those unusually wide-set eyes, and crazy long jaw — and with that hair that looks like it’s in a snood, you’d be forgiven for thinking she’s tailor-made for 19th-century period dramas; actually, I’d love to see her go for a Wide Sargasso Sea kind of role. If the TV show didn’t allow her to display a lot of emotional range, her unusual, era-bending looks made her role in Intelligence all the more unexpected. All I can say is, let’s give this woman more work and see what else she can master.

6th earthquake in 4 days recorded in Oklahoma: 5 versions

Via my Buddhist sense of humor:

The earth moves,
Plains dwellers rock and roll on their feet.
The ground gods laugh: ha!

In messages, from a young Oklahoman to her followers via Twitter:

Girl: Just made mean comments at gov. of oklahoma for causing earthquakes and told him he sucked, in person #heblowssohardtheearthshakes.

Governor’s office: demands apology, makes Girl’s school principal harangue her for an hour about social civility. Insists that the Governor did not cause earthquakes, and that it is probably impossible for a human to cause earthquakes, but as the Governor does not believe in science or evolution, he’s not ruling it out completely.

Girl: Saying that the governor is no good and is a blowhard is core protected speech. Besides, I had 61 followers before, now I have more than 9000, so tell that governor to keep blowing so hard.

Governor’s office: increasingly embarrassed it got so huffy about an 18-year-old’s tweets, or that it took seriously the charge that the Governor caused earthquakes.

The public: laughs at Governor.

Governor: apologizes to Girl. Makes public announcement that he did not cause earthquakes.

From poll-driven fearmongerers:

Joint public announcement from Saudi Arabia and abstinence-only sex educators:

Increased earthquake activity in Oklahoma will cause more women to have sex, just like learning how to drive or learning about sexually-transmitted diseases.

From the oh-so-scientific, oh-so-just-the-facts NY Times: 

SPARKS, Okla. (AP) — Another small earthquake has been reported in Oklahoma.

The U.S. Geological Survey says a 3.2 magnitude quake struck just before 6 a.m. Sunday about 27 miles northeast of Oklahoma City. The Logan County Sheriff’s Office says no damage was reported.

On Saturday, a 2.4 magnitude tremor was recorded at about 7 a.m. about 50 miles northeast of Oklahoma City near Sparks.

Sunday’s earthquake is the sixth in the area since Thursday, when a 3.7 magnitude quake was recorded near Prague. Three more were recorded Friday.

A 5.6 magnitude quake, the strongest ever recorded in Oklahoma, shook the state Nov. 5. That quake damaged dozens of homes, buckled a highway and caused other damage.

Geologists say earthquakes with magnitudes of 2.5 to 3.0 are generally the smallest felt by humans.