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?)
  

Female curiosity and “Bluebeard” (2009)

When I was about three or four, my best friend told me that if a man asked you to marry him, you had to do it.  It seemed barbaric but believable, and I spent a couple of years terrified that some strange, horrible man would approach me on a sidewalk and abruptly demand that I marry him.  Do we all believe this stuff when we’re kids?

Ever since seeing Catherine Breillat’s retelling of the Bluebeard tale (“Le Barbe Bleue”), in which the husband hands his new wife a tiny golden key and tells her, “Whatever you do, don’t use this to open the door at the end of the hall,” I’ve been trying to remember what I made of fairy tales as a kid.  While 20th-century children’s books urged us to explore (Curious George, Harold and the Purple Crayon, Harriet the Spy, even Little House on the Prairie…), fairy tales demonized curiosity, the most human of all tendencies.  Fairy tales were opaque, mysterious — so much so that I wonder if Charles Perrault felt the same way back in the 17th century when he adopted the nostalgic title for his volume Histoires ou contes du temps passé (Stories or Tales of the Past, which included Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and Little Red Riding Hood as well as Bluebeard).  Was it the gore, the bizarre morality, or the novelty of these tales that kept my attention?

The director Catherine Breillat seems to wonder this as well, as this is the second of Perrault’s stories she’s made into a feature-length film (and her next will be Sleeping Beauty).  Here she inserts a version of herself into the tale, as a fearless little girl in pink gingham reading it aloud to her more timid older sister, while they explore a forbidden cluttered attic.  On the whole, however, the film takes us deep into the medieval past to tell an expanded version of Bluebeard’s new child-wife, Marie-Catherine (Lola Créton), a girl who actually quite likes her hulking husband, even though she has long heard the rumors of his missing earlier wives.  If Perrault’s tale was spare, Breillat fleshes it out to show that marriage to the wealthy landowner is a kind of solution to Marie-Catherine’s problems — her family’s poverty, her plainness compared with her sister’s beauty, her loneliness.  In fact, it’s because she is such a curious, odd child that the mysterious Bluebeard suits her.  My absolute favorite thing about this film is that it makes this girl’s motives (as well as her personal charm) more clear while retaining the weirdly fantastic and unknowable element of the fairy tale genre.  Frequent scenes of their eating dinner — gnawing together on an enormous leg of mutton, or eating eggs that match their disparate sizes, as above — emphasize the unexpected equipoise between them.  Bluebeard (Dominique Thomas) even appears uxorious, giving her full run of the castle and permitting her to dominate him in ways that are both surprizing and believable.  In one scene, she sneaks down the hallway toward his bedroom and cracks open the door to watch him remove his clothes at night:  he sits at the foot of the bed peeling shirts off his enormous chest, staring glumly into space.  When she closes the door and clatters back down the hall with a childlike exhiliration, he slowly turns his head toward the noise with a kind of tragic self-defeat.  Does he choose his wives because of their irrepressable curiosity — because they inevitably give him the chance to murder them — or does he hope each time that the new one will finally obey his wishes?

Fairy tales build strangeness upon strangeness, creating their own internal logic — and this is a genre that Breillat understands at a cellular level.  (One blogger has even used the psychoanalyst scholar Lacan to explain her work.)  Inasmuch as she fleshes out Marie-Catherine’s personality, she does so in a way that still holds the viewer at arm’s length; her shots appear so staged as to look almost like a puppet theater.  This is not the kind of film or set of characters that prompt affection and empathy; it reminds you throughout that you are looking at it.  In one scene, the little girl races up a circular staircase in the castle, followed by the lumbering Bluebeard; Breillat offers this as a series of takes from exactly the same point on the staircase, spliced together to look like she’s running upstairs; yet it’s so transparently off that you get distracted by the odd feint.  It skips abruptly over transitions that would give the film better continuity, but it’s those abrupt jumps that make it feel so similar to the original.

That unknowability lasts till the end.  We are left in that same odd place:  wondering what the moral is, as it is in no way obvious.  This isn’t a film for those of us who need to like a film’s characters or who get allergic to films that draw attention to its film-ness.  But I can guarantee that you’ll think back to those odd things you thought about as a child — the mystery of marriage, the possibility that a wolf might eat a child, the presence of fairies and demons and sleeping potions.