All-Female Protagonist Film Recommendations, Weekly Reel #28
It won’t surprise you by now that my pick of the week is a European film, 2021’s “Bergman Island,” which went along nicely with the other female-dominated films.
News of the Week: in case you’ve been avoiding the reviews because you haven’t seen the films, need not worry, because I don’t spoil anything beyond the first act—every so often stepping halfway into act two, if necessary. I designed this iteration of the Weekly Reel as list of viewing recommendations for everyone, whether they’ve seen the film or not.
Watch Now
Bergman Island is Mia Hansen-Løve’s seventh feature film and, as will become clearer later, the first film she shot after separating from her longtime partner, Olivier Assayas, a director who I’ve written about on her before. In this semi-autobiographical film, a filmmaker couple vacations on Fårö, the tiny Swedish island known for being the former home of filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. Although heavily referencing Bergman throughout the film, Hansen-Løve made sure to keep it accessible and hers, rather than a Bergman meditative rip-off. The biggest connection, besides from Bergman’s living quarters and community, is the couple’s strained relationship—which first appeared after Chris (Vicky Krieps) complained to her husband, Tony (Tim Roth), about Bergman not making any light films in his early career. The island’s film community invited Tony to premiere his latest film and do a Bergman-inspired residency. Chris is working through a story treatment—an extended plot summary before becoming a screenplay—which she’s struggling to complete in the calmness of the Swedish island serenity. The couple begins to drift away, which isn’t easy on a small island. Chris goes on a local tour with a film student native of the island while Tony goes on a “Bergman Safari” tour bus. In the second act, Chris is telling Tony her story, in detail, which then becomes dramatized on screen for an extended period.
The best part of the film, which is a point to which all films should strive towards, was when it sucked me into the story within the story. Hansen-Løve tells it so convincingly—that of a young woman going to the same island for a wedding with her longtime, on again off again partner—that it became the film. And when it went back to the main story of Chris and Tony, it was as if a hypnotist snapped their fingers. Both stories have noticeable measures of longing and heartbreak that might come from Hansen-Løve’s partnership with Assayas, considering the number of similarities: filmmaking partners, the man is twenty years older, they have one child, and these details are just what are Wikipediable. Also, Hansen-Løve and Assayas separated the year before she filmed Bergman Island. This personal angle is what gives the story masterful and confident writing and direction. It never dips into pity or gives you that one pitiful oscarbait moment. You might laugh, you might cry, but you’ll definitely feel the unconscious bubbling out.
For Americans, you can find Bergman Island on Hulu. For those of you in Germany, it’s available on Prime Video. And if you happen to be in Iraq, it’s on TOD.
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4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (4 luni, 3 săptămâni și 2 zile) is a 2007 Romanian film by Cristian Mungiu that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. The film takes place at the end of the Communist Romanian era, which experienced a period of intense, top-down anti-abortion control. Nicolae Ceaușescu, longtime leader of Romania, inherited a country that had legalized abortion in 1957 and was experiencing a declining birth rate by the time he entered office in 1965. That, mixed with his conservative upbringing and a similar USSR strategy, led to a strict ban on abortion—snitching and all. Abortion wouldn’t become legal again until after the Romanian Revolution in 1989. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days takes place during that era, where a young lady and her university roommate are trying to arrange an illegal abortion. They have problems getting a room at a hotel, the “doctor” performing the abortion isn’t in it for the goodwill of the women, and the procedure takes a toll on not just the one that became pregnant. The plot is sparse on details regarding the who’s and the what’s. It favors the hyper-intensity of dealing with the dirty arrangements of the abortion and its cleanup. We follow the story from the perspective of the helping roommate, who experiences a harsher reality in the anti-abortion society—she gets fucked in more ways than one.
Like in the recent French film Happening, another European period piece showing the struggle that most people like to think away, the procedure is an unnecessary cruelty against one sex. Even though the Romanian abortion ban was a measure of control over its citizens, power also corrupted the abortion procedure itself—I’ve never seen hotel receptionists with so much power seeped into their heads. The centerpiece of the film is the interaction with the man performing the procedure, who can equally offend both pro-choice and pro-lifers. The film is great for its nerve-racking moments and steady vibe of uncertainty throughout. I had to manually blink because my eyes had become glued open. This was a near Watch Now recommendation, but given the film’s timely, sensitive topic, it’s certainly not for everyone right now. If you’re not a subscriber to AMC+, DirecTV, or the Criterion Channel, you can find it for free on Kanopy.
Emily the Criminal is the kind of Aubrey Plaza vehicle we’ve all been waiting for, meaning, she doesn’t just play a quirky, supporting weirdo and finally acts. In this indie crime drama, Emily (Plaza) has the dangerous combination of tens of thousands in student debt and a felony record—for assaulting a past boyfriend. She barely retains a gig economy position as a food caterer while her childhood and fellow art school friend works at a prominent design company. One of Emily’s colleagues offers her the chance to work another, much more low-key, gig, which involves using a fraudulent credit card to buy a massive TV. She earned a quick two hundred dollars but is reluctant to do the more profitable—more dangerous and illegal—operations. At least not until all her other options run amok.
The film itself is okay. We’ve all seen a hundred film already about descending into the Los Angeles criminal life. But I like that it took on the gig economy and unavailability of options with a history of student debt and felony record. For many people, this life is an unfortunate prison to live in, due to societal forces—based on corrupted economic practices and harshness of the criminal system—outside of her control. Emily becomes our hero by fighting against a system that demeans people for cynical, individualist gain, which one doesn’t need to be a socialist to see. The biggest problem is that Emily holds this tenaciousness throughout the film, rather than allowing it to be the character arc the film is missing. The supporting actor, who plays her handler, has more of an arc than her, which no decently written film should allow. Emily’s change comes from how much further she descends into the cynicism and corruption of the world she’s forced into, but that wasn’t enough for me. Although the film is in theaters, you might just want to wait until it’s streaming.
Bodies Bodies Bodies is an early entry into the Gen Z horror sub-genre. Bee (Maria Bakalova), a young Eastern European woman, tags along with her new girlfriend, Sophie (Amandla Stenberg), to a hurricane party at her super-wealthy friend’s house. Sophie, clearly not expected to have shown up, has a difficult history with everyone there, five others, because of her history with substance abuse and rehab. Early conflicts arise, especially between the two males, David (Kim K-era Pete Davidson) and Greg (Lee Pace). They play the murder-mystery game Bodie Bodies Bodies to pass the time, which involves a secretly designated murder tagging a victim, and then they yell the game’s name and investigate. Since it’s a horror movie, you can already guess that one of them ends up dying for real, which sets up a series of events that would be to spoilery to talk more about. A24 picked up the script by Kristen Roupenian—known for the viral short story "Cat Person" from The New Yorker—which at times is funny. It’s an R-rated whodunnit infused with enough early twenties socio-cultural angst and dialect to teach all of us a few new phrases.
I wasn’t the best audience member going into the movie because of my general aversion to horror, especially comedic horror, it’s more difficult-to-execute cousin. The strength of the movies is in its dissection of popular culture and the deadly misinterpretation of problems through narcissism, drug cocktails, online-culture, and langue des jeunes. Especially regarding the social problems, the characters have a fundamental problem in being able to communicate face-to-face, which at times feels straining. It doesn’t lean too far into exploiting the younger-person-handwringing, which is good, but still doesn’t feel stable enough support the story. Because it’s stuck in the horror genre, all moments need to adhere to that, even as the film is making strong points about youth culture. It doesn’t undercut the overall message, which is aimless for most of the film until the coup de grâce in the last couple minutes.
Unlike with Emily the Criminal, a theatrical viewing with a packed, preferably younger audience, is necessary for the best moments of the movie to stand out. Aim for a Friday or Saturday evening viewing, if possible, at a theater near you.
Suspiria (2018) is a remake of Dario Argento's 1977 Italian film of the same name by Luca Guadagnino, which he shot only four months after his masterpiece, Call My by Your Name. But Suspiria is much different from the gay rendezvous in Italy, and even a departure from Argento’s original. A young Mennonite Ohioan woman, Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson, yes, I’m binging her films, but not “those big naked movies”), travels to 1977 West Berlin to audition at a prestigious dance school ruled by the infamous Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton). She arrives right when the lead dancer mysteriously disappears, either due to psychological issues or political radicalism—this being the Baader–Meinhof era. Susie’s audition lands her the lead part. But right away, the atmosphere presses into suspicion when Susie’s dance the next day coincides with the actions of another dancer—one that had just accused the dance instructors of making the former lead disappear—who is brutally and unnaturally twisted like a pretzel until dead. The instructors find her later and carry her body away with large meat hooks. Then, the instructors, while using telepathy, elect one matron over Madame Blanc to be the leader as well as planning to use Susie as her host body. Thus ends act one.
Needless to say, and because it’s based on an Argento film, there comes a lot more blood and psychological fuckery later. Another character unmentioned, the former lead dancer’s psychologist, is trying to warn the others about the suspicions surrounding the instructors being witches, which people ignore for most of the film. The psychologist, who may or may not be Swinton under thirty pounds of prosthetics, also has his own story about finding his long-lost wife, who he hasn’t seen since the war. This sub-story lifts the overall picture into the effects of psycho-sexual trauma, but also trauma more generally as a function of remembrance and escapism. Suspiria is the historical supernatural body horror cousin of Black Swan. But even calling Suspiria a kind of horror film doesn’t give it the credit it deserves. It’s constantly forcing us to follow the end of the Red Army Faction and the generational effects of Nazism, also while telling the story of witches trying to possess the body of a resilient young American woman. And the best part is that it all works.
Pass
I didn’t see anything to pass on this week.
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