Tag: Women Directors

  • Helter Skelter (2012)

    Director- Mika Ninagawa (Japanese- Ninagawa Mika)

    Writers- Kyôko Okazaki (source material by), Arisa Kaneko

    Ninagawa Mika’s Helter Skelter (2012) had me at its first loud shriek of 1970s German opera punk. Its opening is a stunningly brash experience introducing the film’s key themes: unattainable beauty standards, feminine fascination, bio-commerce futures, cosmetic surgery, fragmented femininity, and capitalist patriarchy. All packaged up in intentionally feminist aesthetics. Set in the Shinjuku high fashion district of Tokyo, life goes by in a blur of camera flashes, screens, and fickle teen dreams. 

    Helter Skelter revels in excess and artifice, opening with an assault of cinematic technique and swirling references to Kusama Yayoi, Okazaki Kyôko’s original Manga (1995-6), and Ninagawa’s own personal style and photography. This is all accompanied by the histrionic vocals of the ‘Godmother of German Punk’ Nina Hagen (and band) and their 1978 track ‘Naturträne’ .Here we find J-idol Lilico (Erika Sawajiri) swathed in theatrical bandages and shot in a series of body-parts close-ups. She is revealed in cut scenes reminiscent of the graphic pop-art production design of Obayashi Nobuhiko’s Hausu (1977), the mirror installations of Kusama, and the dreamscapes of Dalí’s work on Spellbound (Hitchcock,1945). It’s a lot and I loved it (but maybe it didn’t need to go on for over 2 hours, I appreciate a tightly edited/short-ass movie).  

    Opening with a montage of teenagers navigating overstimulating beauty products and giggling about their nails and lashes, whilst the film is universal, Ninagawa creates a strong critique of beauty culture in Japan specifically.

    Lilico is a superstar model who is revealed to have had full body plastic surgery; her youthful appearance is maintained with regular procedures. As her agent (Momoi Kaori) proudly explains, “only her eyeballs, her ears, her fingernails, and her pussy are real.” She is fragmented into pieces, a ghost in a shell whose body is an assemblage of replaceable, rejuvenatable parts that can be removed, improved and sold. Skin, muscles, and fluids are grafted, inserted, and injected into Lilico (and other women like her) to attain bodily perfection. But she is the (monstrous, Frankenstein-style) product of a collaboration between her agent ‘mama’ (momager), and Dr Waku (Mieko Harada). Lilico was ‘discovered’ on the streets of a small town working as a prostitute and then reimagined and managed as a star.  

    Lilico’s hyper-sexy but saccharine J-idol persona is quickly shattered in the first behind-the-scenes seqeunce where the bratty ego-centric diva spits water into the face of her long-suffering assistant Hada (Shinobu Terajima). Hada is a 35-old year woman who is seemingly obsessed with her young (?) charge and given her own introduction through cross-cut scenes with her scrounging, drip-of-a-boyfriend Shin (Ayano Gô). He is too easily seduced by Lilico as Hada watches powerless. Lilico uses her manufactured beauty and fame to dominate people both sexually and professionally.  

    In Helter Skelter, women are victims and villains but more often a complex mix of both. Lilico is victim of rampant commercialism and the greed of women like ‘mama’, but she also rapes her assistant – forcing Hada to cunnilingue her and participate in drug-fueled threesomes. Hada and Shin are also coerced into vitriolage when Lilico orders them to disfigure her affluent heir boyfriend’s fiancé with acid and cut open her rival, Kozue’s (Kiko Mizuhara) face. Both of these women are defined by their naturalness: the apparently ugly but wealthy fiancé and the natural beauty of the misanthropic Kozue who acknowledges her own transient position in the J-idol industry. 

    ‘We will be forgotten; we are machines for the processing of desires… desire does not care; it just keeps on with another name and another face’ – Kozue (Kiko Mizuhara)  

    The movie’s subplot is an investigation led by Detective Asada (Nao Ōmori) that reveals that the Waku’s cosmetic clinic is harvesting its injectables and implantables from black market babies and children’s bodies. The detective pursues Lilico in connection to a series of suicides related to transformative surgeries performed at the clinic she attends. Asada refers to Lilico by the double-meaning nickname ‘Tiger Lily’ highlighting her wild unpredictability that is obscured by the delicate petals of her beautiful exterior*. In order for the women modified at the clinic to retain their perfected exterior they must keep returning for top-up surgeries and DNA altering injectables. Failure to keep up with payments leads to a reversal of effects, patches of necrosis, hair loss, and mental disassociation and deterioration.  

    In the pursuit of the ‘perfection’ these women literally consume children. The raw materials are revealed to be made from trafficked, kidnapped babies as modern day witchcraft meets modern slavery. Child organ trafficking was once an urban legend but as demand for organs rises the most vulnerable become the target of criminals looking to profit off selling organs. Currently, 150,000 transplants are performed annually worldwide; this meets less than 10 per cent of the global demand. By adding in imagined medical/cosmetic procedures that use tissue, cells, and organs from the young, Helter Skelter forces attention on the issue of consent and the ethics surrounding viewing people (through the extreme of children) as a resource.  

     Furthermore, the film uses child parts to represent strongly paedophilic elements of beauty standards. In conjunction with the montage opening, teenage girls (children) are posited in a liminal position between their youth and societally and industrially enforced adultification.

    In another bio-commerce movie I’ve looked at previously, Danisha Esterhazy’s Level 16 (2018, Canada), young women are raised to be donors. They are not spare-parts-humans like the clones in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go (2005) or illicitly procured as we see in Helter Skelter, but rather carefully cultivated skins sold to the wives of the wealthy. But where Level 16 positioned men as a driving force of female mutilation and impossible youth, Helter Skelter focuses on the women who have internalised the patriarchy. Women who literally absorb the life force of children to maintain their youth and power . They are presented as successful women who have reached their positions of power by using, consuming, and abusing other women.  

    The film is fascinated by these women, and the director positions herself – as a commercial fashion photographer – as part of the problem. Ninagawa Mika/MikaNina is a prolific visual artist producing commercial, fashion and art photography, gallery installations and exhibitions, films, and music videos. Her work is often explicitly self-referential and she inserts herself into Helter Skelter in several cameos aggressively photographing Lilico. Ninagawa proudly asserts her role as the creator and director, usurping her actual cinematographer (Sōma Daisuke) through the literal presentation of herself holding and controlling the camera and thus the gaze over Lilico. 

    In stark contrast to many of the women I look at as part of the #WomenMakeSF project, and even more so as a Japanese woman artist, Ninagawa actively engages in discussions of a gendered gaze and the woman’s perspective in her work. Ninagawa was a key figure in the 1990s, reductively termed by critics, onna no ko shashin (‘girly’/girls’ photography) that challenged the status quo of male-dominated photography with intimate images of domestic life and women’s portraits. Helter Skelter is explicitly presented as ‘A Mika Ninagawa Film’ and the focuses on the woman’s perspective and desires even when the’re repulsive.  

    Mika Ninagawa’s fashion photography- sourced from Pinterest

    Ninagawa produces a pretty faithful adaptation of mangaka Okazaki Kyōko’s Helter Skelter (1995-96). Herself a key figure in Josei manga (marketed at adult women), Okazaki made her debut in Manga Burikko, a hentai anthology magazine. Explicit sexual content, avante garde imagery, and biting social critique are entwined across her work. Just before the Bubble Economy burst, Okazaki published Pink (1989) about a Tokyo office girl called Yumiko who moonlights as a call girl to care for her pet crocodile, Croc. Helter Skelter (1995) is her most famous work and encapsulated the economic anxieties and disillusionment felt by the Lost Generation.  

    In an era of increasing accessibility to weight-loss drugs, ever-advancing plastic surgery procedures and new obsessions with ‘clean girls’ and rigorous daily routines, Helter Skelter has found a new audience. But like its protagonist,  the film is most notorious once it is cut into pieces; it has gained most of its Western notoriety from TikTok, Instagram and Pinterest. As the Lipstick Index is rising, women seek out snippets of luxury and beauty amongst the depression. 

    Extreme cosmetic surgery is, in part(s), presented as a form of mutilation in Helter Skelter where the body is sometimes literally broken up and reformed. It questions what it is to be authentic, to be human in the face of such opportunity and pressure to look a particular way. As a surgical process, Lilico’s cosmetic procedures have made her a profitable object for others selling not only her image but also an array of products and experiences. But it is only through an act of self-mutilation that Lilico is finally able to be free – in a press conference responding to the revelation that she is fully modified she stabs herself in the eye thus withdrawing from the public eye. Is she dead and gone? It’s a mystery until in the final scenes, where Kozue is seen visiting an underground club following another successful campaign shoot to discover that the queen of underground burlesque club is Liliko. Staring directly into the camera lens with one eye she looks back at the audience, now controlling the gaze that once controlled her.  

    * It is not, as I was trying to retrofit, a reference to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Similarly, the film’s title has nothing to do with the British fairground ride but the original meaning of the phrase: disorderly haste and confusion. 

    Editors Note-

    For another excellent body horror from Japan, I personally recommend Junji Ito’s influential manga Tomie. Following a mysterious succubus who compels men to murder her through mysterious psychological powers, the comparisons between Tomie and Lilico are evident.

  • Welcome II the Terrordome (1995)

    Welcome II the Terrordome (1995)

    Director: Ngozi Onwurah

    Writer: Ngozi Onwurah

    Country: UK

    Language: English

    Women in the production team: 

    Co-Producer: Valentine Nonyela

    Editor: Liz Webber

    Assistant Camera: Simone Horrocks

    Production Designers: Miraphora Mina, Lindi Pankiv

    Makeup Artist: Lindsay Swift

    Costume Designers: Claire Ditchburn, Fennella Magnus, Sarah Wiltshire

    Script Supervisor: Sarah Lane

    Available to rent, stream, or buy: Watch online for free on Youtube

    This review contains **SPOILERS**

    Review:

    Welcome II the Terrordome was Nigerian-born and British-raised Ngozi Onwurah’s debut feature and the first feature-length film directed by a Black British woman. I first saw Welcome II the Terrordome on film as part of the Celebrating Women In Global Cinema season at HOME in 2019; I had chosen for the film to be screened as part of my course Women in Science Fiction without seeing it, in part because it was the only woman-directed movie we could get the rights to screen. But I discovered that it is a raw and challenging piece of indie cinema that has been shamefully overlooked. Seventeen years after its completion, Welcome II the Terrordome’s stark and unrelenting relevance continues to make it a shocking and thought-provoking film that is worth your time and your money.

    This speculative fiction imagines the worst future extrapolated from what Ngozi Onwurah describes as the ‘pure anger of a 24-year-old black woman in Britain’ in the 1990s. Terrordome is, in her words, ‘super ambitious, super dense, with tons of things put into it: African storytellers, Hip Hop, I have lots of stories’. With its title taken from the 1990 Public Enemy track ‘Welcome to the Terrodome’, the soundtrack and score acts as a hip-hop greek tragedy chorus providing foreshadowing and commentary on events as they unfold. As a post-LA Riots political allegory it forges links between near-mythical pasts and imagined futures to provoke purposely uncomfortable questions about contemporary race relations, police brutality, and the limits of ‘progress’.

    You say it was the future, it was the future 20 years ago, and actually it was the future. I think what’s happening in retrospect is that the world is 10 times worse than Terrordome, who would have thought we would be where we are now.

    – Ngozi Onwurah (2019)*

    Very much on the edges of what might be considered science fiction, Terrordome is a visibly ultra-low-budget movie that has a grainy style that is distracting at first but ultimately gives the film a powerful poverty-inflected political realism. It captures the zeitgeist and the perspective of a British-raised young black woman in the 1990s and although it might not be mainstream SF, it is a clear example of Afrofuturism.

    As Ytasha Womack (2013: 9) explains, Afrofuturism ‘combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western beliefs. In some cases, it’s a total revisioning of the past and speculation about the future rife with cultural critiques.’ This merging of past, present, and future is central to Terrordome and its continuing power, as it not only presents but challenges notions of peaceful protests and self-preservation.

    The future dystopia of the Transdean ghetto, known locally as the Terrordome, sees black British characters essentially imprisoned and segregated from ‘whitesville’. Although the film is narrated by a man (Black Rad/Felix Joseph) it is a distinctly woman-led story – it is about Angela (actress/activist Suzette Llewellyn) and the white interloper Jodie (Saffron Burrows), their children, and the complex intersections of race and gender politics in the ghetto.

    Angela’s son Hector (Ben Wynter) is killed: pushed from a window after witnessing a brutal attack on a heavily pregnant Jodie. Angela goes on a rage-fuelled almost video-game-style killing spree: a magical-realist sequence where she makes almost impossible shots at police officers with an old, poorly maintained handgun. Jodie, pregnant by Angela’s brother Spike (Valentine Nonyela) following an escape from her abusive skinhead boyfriend Jason (Jason Traynor), is attacked by her former lover.

    The attack on Jodie is so savage that she miscarries her biracial child, and in a shocking sequence she is left to deliver and mourn her child alone. Prior to this, Angela and Spike’s sister Chrissie (Sian Martin) attempts to rescue Jodie and the unborn child by taking her to their unsubtly-named grandmother Rosa Parkson (Cynthia Powell). But Rosa rejects Jodie and her unborn great-grandchild. Chrissie defends Jodie explaining that it was white men who attacked her because of her relationship with Spike. But Rosa coldly and calmly responds:

    So, are we supposed to be grateful? Are we supposed to raise up our hands? And say: thank you, Missy. Thank you very much for getting your hands dirty. For 60 years, I have sat by and taken their shit, her people’s shit. Do you hear me? No more Chrissie, no more. Enough is enough.

    WELCOME II THE TERRORDOME, Saffron Burrows, 1995, © Metro Tartan Distribution


    The sequences of a distraught Jodie in labour and cradling her stillborn baby are intercut with scenes of Angela in police custody being stripped of her rights, her dignity, and finally her life. The white woman who transgresses the boundary is left to mourn her child alone, but she is ‘free’. The black woman’s only path to freedom seems to be death.

    Welcome II the Terrordome is fascinatingly bookended by references to the Ibo landing myth. Like a twisted version of the film world of Wizard of Oz (1939) the same actors are used in both past and future with slaves later appearing as the inhabitants of the Terrodome ghetto and their white captors as their oppressors, showing essentially how little has changed in race relations. The opening prologue reproduces the Ibo landing myth – after enacting mutiny, drowning the slave traders, and overthrowing and grounding a slave ship, rather than becoming slaves 75 Nigerian Ibo (or Igbo) women, men, and children chose to commit collective suicide by walking out into the marsh. It is considered by some African-Americans and in Gullah folklore as the first American freedom march, and in this opening sequence of Terrordome it appears as a dignified choice and a powerful story of resistance.

    Coffee Coloured Children (1998)

    Yet, at the end of Terrordome we return to this mythic space – but past and future merge as the industrial setting of the Terrordome ghetto is the background to a powerful image of Suzette Llewellyn as both (?) Angela and the Ibo woman breaking her chains. She is dead – sacrificed in order to be saved from slavery and symbolically hanged by white police, seemingly without trial. As with her son in a previous scene, the actress is seen back in the waters of the coast of the American south, but this time she and her tribe are emerging from the water. Onwurah’s ending is quite ambiguous – does it suggest that the Ibo (and by extension dead Terrordome inhabitants) have emerged on ‘the other side’ now free from their lives of inevitable suffering, or does it reject the notion of noble sacrifice? Perhaps it is a call to action rather than a peaceful acceptance of what cannot be changed.

    Terrordome was described by a white male critic in a 1995 Variety review as an ‘angry first feature‘. But for Onwurah, despite connotations concerning the stereotype of the angry black woman, anger is something that audiences should be confronted with. She argued in the HOME interview that our news is sanitised and fleeting but that Terrordome was intentionally desanitising, angry, and direct. She was aware of the critiques of Terrordome at its release and suggests that it is perhaps because the film does not conclude with a neat ending with the ‘space for everybody at the end’ that is expected by white audiences (and reviewers).

    As an Afrofuturist intervention Welcome II the Terrordome centres black stories into a predominantly white British cinema. But like her characters of both past and future, Ngozi Onwurah does not settle for a storyworld that ends hopefully or one than even resolves. Onwurah has no time for your discomfort, and why should she.

    #WomenMakeSF

    Listen below to our podcast episode Defining SF is Hard where we discuss Welcome II the Terrordome, Tank Girl (1995) and Évolution (2015).

    What to watch next from Ngozi Onwurah:
    Coffee Colored Children (1988, 17 min.) – Rent on BFI Player
    The Body Beautiful (1991, 23 min.) – Free on BFI Player
    Flight of the Swan (1992, 12 min.) – Free on BFI Player
    White Men Are Cracking Up (1994, 20 min.) – Free on BFI Player
    And Still I Rise (1993, 30 min.) – Buy on DVD

    Only four black women working in the UK have had their films theatrically released – Ngozi Onwurah, Amma Asante, debbie tucker green, and Destiny Ekaragha. Their work is wide-ranging including popular films like Gone Too Far! (Ekaragha, 2013), Second Coming (green, 2015), and A United Kingdom (Asante, 2018).

    Further reading:
    Varaidzo (2017). Ngozi Onwurah: The forgotten pioneer of black British film. Gal-dem [online]. 20 June. URL: https://gal-dem.com/ngozi-onwurah-the-forgotten-pioneer-of-black-british-film/

    Emilie Herbert (2018). Black British Women Filmmakers in the Digital Era: New Production Strategies and Re-Presentations of Black Womanhood. Open Cultural Studies 2(1): 191–202. Available open access.

    Women Make Movies director profile for Ngozi Onwurah.

    *Interview with Rachel Hayward for the HOME podcast: In Conversation: Director Ngozi Onwurah, HOME Podcast, Friday 8 Feb 2019. https://homemcr.org/media/in-conversation-director-ngozi-onwurah/

    Category: #WMSF
    Afrofuturism, Film, Gender and SF, Politics, Race and SF, Science Fiction, Welcome II the Terrordome, WMSF-Review, Women Directors, Women Make SF, , , , , , , ,
  • Tank Girl (1995)

    Tank Girl (1995)

    Director: Rachel Talalay

    Writer: Tedi Sarafian (screenplay) and Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett (comic strip)

    Women in the production team: 

    Production Design: Catherine Hardwicke

    Set Decorator: Cindy Carr

    Costume Designer: Arianne Phillips

    Casting: Pam Dixon

    also across art, animation, special/visual effects, make-up/hair, wardrobe, sound departments.

    Available to stream, or buy: Apple TV or purchase DVD

    This review contains SPOILERS

    Review:

    Twenty five years ago Tank Girl was ambitiously adapted for the screen by director Rachel Talalay. Restricted by the expectations and fears of the nineties studio system, Tank Girl might not be an ‘accurate’ adaptation of the irreverent RiotGrrl inspired (but male written) source comics, but does that mean that it deserves its reputation as ‘a frenzied mess that’s dull in the extreme’? Rewatching for the first time since I was a teen, it’s an exhilarating watch that constantly bombards the viewer with layered textual references, a perfect nineties soundtrack, and an oft-confusing visual aesthetic that blends comic-book animation with the stylised action sequences and a no f****s given approach to narrative verisimilitude. And then come the occasional oddly traditional shootout fight sequences, which often took me out of the pop cult-ure, pomo, riot grrrl reality that makes up the majority of Tank Girl.

    “Obviously Tank Girl was [a passion project] – I had to make the ultimate Grrrrl Movie, until the studio intervened… Tank Girl [was my favourite film to direct], until the studio intervened in their useless wisdom about the ‘morality of America.’” – Rachel Talalay

    Tank Girl is set in a dystopic, resource-starved Australian desert in 2033. In terms of plot – which frankly isn’t that important (but I’ll give it a go) – it doesn’t rain on Earth anymore after a catastrophic event (comet) that disrupted the weather patterns (ignore the ‘science’), water becomes scarce, valuable, and controlled by an evil corporation called ‘Water & Power’ run by Kesslee (a super campy Malcom McDowell). Our anti-hero Rebecca Buck/Tank Girl (Lori Petty) is an outlaw who scavenges for water and supplies for her commune, until the Water & Power goons find and burn her hideout, kidnap some orphaned kids, and kill her then-boyfriend (he’s fridged – the first of several disruptions to misogynistic comic book tropes). Tank Girl escapes from Kesslee with the help of Jet Girl (Naomi Watts) a W&P jet engineer (#WomenInSTEM) who had all but given up on escaping the company. With the help of military-experiments-gone-wrong animal-human-hybrid ex-soldiers called Rippers (because, of course), Tank and Jet Girl plan to save the children (yeah, I forgot about them too) and take down the corrupt system.

    Honestly, this doesn’t cover even half of what happens to the audience in Tank Girl. But the plot really wasn’t that important to me as I whole-heartedly bought into the characters, chaotic world-building, and general tone of the whole experience. This explanation of Tank Girl, posted by director Rachel Talalay, from alternative bi-weekly newspaper Portland Mercury sums it up pretty perfectly:

    Screen Shot 2020-06-04 at 22.18.30

    I think my recent (and probably ongoing) obsession with Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (Cathy Yan, 2019) and my current binge on the women-led, women written, directed, and created (from a woman written comic) TV show Vagrant Queen (2020- ) makes me far more open and excited about women-led comic book entertainment and their disruption of the limited expectations. Both Birds of Prey and Vagrant Queen play around with genre and characters that don’t fit into comic book women tropes, their highly choreographed and playfully filmed fight sequences (Vagrant Queen uses bullet time) are part of what make these examples so vibrant and fun.

    Less focussed on action violence, these recent examples alongside other women-led action films like Wonder Woman (Patty Jenkins, 2017) and Captain Marvel (Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, 2019) are indebted to the visual and narrative styling of Tank Girl. As one IMDB user review neatly suggests, Vagrant Queen is best understood as ‘Tank Girl meets Killjoys’. Notably, Killjoys also has a woman creator, executive producer, and showrunner: Michelle Lovretta.

    tenor (1)
    Slo-mo, bullet time fight scenes are a recurrent and joyous stylistic choice in Vagrant Queen (“In A Sticky Spot”, episode 4, season 1, director: Danishka Esterhazy, writer: Mariko Tamaki)

    Violence is not the focus in the majority of Tank Girl’s action sequences. For example, the grisly demise of the movie’s villain Kesslee is shown through an animation and references to The Wizard of Oz’s melting Wicked Witch of the West, as his partially digitised and prosthetic body dies away. But when the film does fall into the more traditional shoot outs – more at home in trad male-led action movies – I did start to lose focus.

    Fight scenes are key sites of spectacle and spectacularised masculinity in traditional action movies – think of the bullet time fights in 1999’s The Matrix (now parodied by Vagrant Queen) that dissected the power and control of Neo (Kenau Reeves), or the hard bodied John McClane (Bruce Willis) in Die Hard (1988) where he survives falls, explosions, and shoots outs and almost single-handedly subverts the plans of foreign-terrorists.

    Traditionally, women are positioned to the side of the spectacle, but in Tank Girl the titular character is right in the middle of the action, improbably surviving. Yes, both Ellen Ripley (Alien, 1989) and Sarah Connor (Terminator 2, 1991) had been there before – but in very clearly defined narratives fighting for survival not fun. Tank Girl explores the gap between the idea and image of what women are expected to do, and what they actually can do. It exposes the artificiality of gender and patriarchal power structures that surround this both on screen and in society.

    Tank Girl’s fights are not really about showcasing physical power, but rather feminine ingenuity and characters unafraid to use their sexuality and the limited expectations their enemies have of them to succeed. The movie actively and perhaps problematically promotes the sexualisation of power, but I would argue that many of anti-feminist stereotypes about women that are presented are used to make satirical points about their absurdity. Tank Girl pseudo-seduces a W&P henchman so she can pull his grenade pins, Tank and Jet kiss to cause a distraction, and there’s a literal song and dance routine in a brothel as part of their surreal rescue plan.

    Tank Girl’s parched post-apocalyptic setting, lengthy action sequences, and lead woman character mark it as a funny, feminist forebearer to Mad Max: Fury Road. Even if you’re not sold on the movie, you can’t deny the visual impact that Tank Girl has had on US pop culture. Look at contemporary Riot Grrls like Imperator Furiosa and [the Robbie/Yan] Harley Quinn. Talking of Harley Quinn, or rather Margot Robbie… her production company – LuckyChap Entertainment – have optioned the rights for Tank Girl from MGM. I would be totally sold on a Margot Robbie Tank Girl – especially as it would be more likely get a woman director.

    Making Tank Girl in the post-Wonder Woman era (now) would be an entirely different experience to Hollywood in 1994. Watching Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman battle her way through No Man’s Land (both literally and metaphorically) brought me to tears in the cinema. As the first woman to direct either a Marvel or DC franchise movie, Patty Jenkins had to deal with countless tone-deaf articles that suggested she and Wonder Woman were huge gambles for Warner Brothers. Even after the film proved to be a critical and financial success, reviews and reporting continued to question the wisdom of a woman director. Director Rachel Talalay has spoken out about the misogyny of the industry and the difficulties she experienced in making the Tank Girl she wanted to make – more than twenty years prior to Jenkins’ success.

    tom lowe photo,

    “It’s not a meritocracy. It’s a business, and it’s an art form. If you aren’t talking about it, and you aren’t pushing to give women opportunities, how are they ever going to show that they can do it?” – Rachel Talalay

    But Jenkins was levied with the burden of representing not only herself but the hope of every woman filmmaker and future woman-led genre movie projects. Her perceived failure, as with Talalay’s Tank Girl and the Halle Berry-led Catwoman (Pitof, 2004), could have been used to justify not making women-led movies or working with women filmmakers. Jenkins quit as the director of Thor: Dark World saying there were “creative differences”, but has since stated she didn’t want to make a movie she didn’t believe in (it is the least critically well-received Marvel movie), and have its poor reception explained away as the sole fault of its director being a woman.

    Talalay did survive what she calls “the dark ages” of the 2000s, post-Catwoman, but did not become the movie directing maven she should have been. Tank Girl was Talalay’s third feature, a follow up to the 1993 Ghost in the Machine (which I’ll be watching at some point as part of the #WomenMakeSF project). Her career is impressive and she has worked on lots of my favourite genre TV shows  over the years, but Tank Girl should not have been the end but the start of Talalay’s movie directing career. Male directors are just allowed to fail in a way that women directors are not.

    Is Tank Girl a messy movie? Yes. Is it a messy movie that 1990s Hollywood just wasn’t ready for? Also, yes. I really wish I could see the movie that Talalay had wanted to make. Tank Girl is a revolutionary bit of cinema, just twenty five years ahead of its time.

    Listen below to our podcast episode Defining SF is Hard where we discuss Welcome II the Terrordome (1995), Tank Girl  and Évolution (2015).

    #WomenMakeSF

    What to watch next from Rachel Talalay:
    Ghost in the Machine (1993) 

    Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)

    Doctor Who (2014-2017) – 8 episodes. Highlights: ‘Dark Water’ (8:11) where the true identity of ‘Missy is revealed, and ‘Death in Heaven’ (8:12) where Missy resurrects the dead as an army of cyborgs.

    Talalay was also a producer on John Waters’ Cry Baby (1990) and Hairspray (1988)

    Further reading:
    SYFY FanGrrls [Carly Lane], (2018). 60 Thoughts We Had While Watching Tank Girl. Syfy.com. 31 March. https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/60-thoughts-we-had-while-watching-tank-girl

    Amy Nicholson (2018). Goddesses of the Galaxy: Women Directors Take Over the Blockbuster Universe. The Guardian. 11 May. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/may/11/goddesses-of-the-galaxy-women-directors-take-over-the-blockbuster-universe

    Kayti Burt (2019). Rachel Talalay & The Long Way Round. Den of Geek. 27 March. https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/rachel-talalay-the-long-way-round/

    Emma Elizabeth Davidson (2020). Tank Girl: The Wild Feminist Anti-hero with a Massive Influence on Fashion [interview with costume designer Arianne Phillips]. Dazed Digital. 20 February. https://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/48034/1/tank-girl-post-feminist-cult-comic-deadline-fashion-rick-owens-arianne-phillips 

  • Sea Fever (2020)

    Sea Fever (2020)

    Director: Neasa Hardiman

    Writer: Neasa Hardiman

    Country: Ireland

    Language: English

    Women in the crew: 

    Co-Producer: Orla Bleahen-Melvin

    Costume Design: Maeve Paterson

    Props Buyer: Marion Picard

    Makeup Dept: Steph Smith (hair/makeup design)and Frances Murphy (makeup trainee)

    Assistant Director: Tanya Rosen (second AD)

    Floor Runner: Galéna Murray

    Lead Modelmaker: Eleonora McNamara

    Underwater Camera Operator: Christina Karliczek

    Script Supervisor: Eva Kelly

    Post-Prod. Coordinator: Noreen Donohoe

    Available to stream/rent/buy: 

    This review contains **SPOILERS**

    Review:

    In Neasa Hardiman’s Sea Fever we get a woman scientist, representations of science, science fiction, discussion of science and superstition, and it’s all topped off with a woman director AND writer! It is a bit of a dream movie for this science and screen studies scholar. This, of course, all made me very nervous that I wouldn’t like the film. This was especially highlighted after the director Neasa Hardiman, who has a film studies PhD, kindly responded to my DMs and sent me a video intro for the screening event. Thankfully, I genuinely loved the movie and the way it engaged with all the parts of my research that marvellously converge in Sea Fever.

    Set in contemporary Ireland (ROI), Sea Fever follows marine-biologist/microbiologist Siobhán (Hermione Corfield- left) who is introduced as an icy and antisocial scientist (she refuses birthday cake – surely she is a monster!). As part of her PhD research on oceanic faunal behavioral patterns Siobhán books a berth on a fishing trawler called Niamh Cinn Óir, expecting to endure a miserable week with its close-knit crew of six: skipper Gerard (Dougray Scott), his wife Freya (Connie Nielsen), ship’s engineer Omid (Ardalan Esmaili), Johnny (Jack Hickey), Ciara (Olwen Fouéré), and Sudi (Elie Bouakaze). The skipper navigates the trawler into an exclusion zone far out into the Atlantic Ocean, eager to illegally increase his catch, but instead the ship and crew become ensnared in the tendrils of an alien/undiscovered creature. The crew become infected and die off one by one after making contact with the creature’s parasitic goo. Siobhán has to gain the trust of the superstitious crew, quarantine the infected, and try to stop the contagion reaching the mainland before all is lost at sea.  

    Since Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: A World Tour Underwater (1872) there has been a flow of science fiction with a nautical focus. The sea merges myth and science –  both a source of deep fear (and thus myth) and massive rewards (and thus science). It offers a fluid storytelling space that holds many contradictions as it can be local, safe, bountiful, and homely, and/or alien, perilous, barren, and unwelcoming. Its danger and its beauty are often intertwined. Calm waters can hide dangerous undercurrents, and as Verne correctly guessed, a storm raging at the surface of an ocean lies over an eerie calm in the depths.  

    Women are also a site of superstition at sea, with their hidden depths that are beyond male experience. Siobhán is red-headed and identified as an omen on the ship as soon as she boards. The trawler is named for Niamh Cinn-Óir – the flaxen haired Irish folklore character who comes to Ireland from the sea on a white steed, and falls in love with and takes her lover Oisín to the otherworldly realm of Tír na nÓg (Land of Youth). He returns to Ireland, with the promise to Niamh not to touch the land. But of course he does; so he ages and dies, never to see Niamh again. Always follow the women’s instructions on avoiding sudden death (see also: Ripley in Alien and Siobhán in Sea Fever).

    EV5R02SWkAAEc89
    “Alien is a movie where nobody listens to the smart woman, and then they all die except for the smart woman and her cat” – @AdamShaftoe’s wife [artist: http://gennykattattoos.com]

    Maritime myths have been used to help people understand seafaring tragedies – people are lost at sea, their bodies never recovered, and so warnings are woven into myths that make the sea a creature to be tamed and feared. Mermaids, the Kraken, Davy Jones’ locker… Stories about the sea are an early form of maritime science communication as sailors (and their wives) pass on their wisdom through fiction, thus explaining ‘science’ (knowledge) in a memorable and accurate/believable way (as understood at the time). 

    My favourite scene in Sea Fever is a conversation between Freya and Siobhán as they watch the blue glow of the ocean. Whereas Siobhán marvels at the wonder of science and identifies the glow as bioluminescent phytoplankton, Freya sees the golden glowing hair of Niamh and recalls the Irish myth that the trawler is named for. Rather than a moment of conflict between science and myth (faith/religion) there is a calm acknowledgement of each other’s perspective and the acceptance of beauty regardless of its source or reason. The sea is a space that can be explained by both science and storytelling as we imagine futures, explore the oceanic frontier, and try to understand what can be explained and what cannot.   

    Screen Shot 2020-08-06 at 18.06.16
    The artistic bioluminescence of marine dinoflagellates or the tendrils of Niamh Cinn-Óir [photographs by Iyvone Khoo, 2016. (L-R) Blue Noctorne,Millions of Photons; Flow; and Cosmic Island.

    Sea Fever makes reference to and was repeatedly linked in our live tweet to other stories of unknown depth and creatures such as Jaws, The Thing, and The Abyss, all of which see characters underestimating the sea and its hidden depths and creatures. For the crew of the Niamh Cinn-Óir, the calm of the glowing sea soon shifts as the trawler strays into the exclusion zone and the grasp of a huge and unknown sea creature. After blue goo (don’t lick the science!) starts to enter the ship, Siobhán , as the only person on board who can dive (see: sailors who don’t swim), discovers that the hull of the ship is surrounded by glowing tendrils of a deep-sea creature that remains unseen and whose scale is unknown.

    Sea Fever (2020) vs The Abyss (1989) promo posters- both films feature similar incandescent eldritch sea monsters.

    But the creature and its creepy Upside-Down-Demogorgon-style tentacles infect the gorgeous underwater photography, recalling the ethereality of Mikael Salomon’s underwater photography in The Abyss (note similarities in the promotional images with the backlit diver) and the Cousteau-esque beauty achieved in Évolution. Beauty and danger (beasts), and myth and science are closely entwined throughout Sea Fever. In stories where mythical creatures like mermaids are the cause of shipwrecks, storms, and drownings as they lure men to their deaths, their beauty is what makes them particularly deadly.   

    It is impossible not to connect Sea Fever  to the current pandemic and how its use of quarantine and isolation are so central to the characters’ experiences. Despite the visual power and vast presence of (parts of) the creature in the underwater sequences the real danger is microscopic and unseen. The mysterious blue goo oozing into the ship and its water system is full of parasitic larvae that infects human hosts, driving them to madness and death. 

    The intentionally groan-worthy romance plotline that emerges early on – a classic way to make a woman scientist character easier for audiences (she must be a sister, mother, or lover) – is soon cast aside after Siobhán’s male love interest dies. We don’t remember his name, and we’re not supposed to. It’s Siobhán and sea beastie’s story. Her attempts to quarantine and save the remaining members of the crew is not a motherly action – but rather one of ‘science’ with her concern being isolating the infection from the mainland. Notably she does not see the creature as a monster; it is an animal that belongs there, the ship is out of its depths and invading its space. Perhaps the exclusion area is not just in place to protect fish stocks…

    There are so many contemporary narratives that can be read into Neasa Hardiman’s debut feature film Sea Fever. It’s an eco-fiction (is this a consequence of the anthropocene? Have changed sea temperatures and ecology led this creature to the surface?), it’s horror, and it’s science fiction. But instead of saving humanity we are left with a young woman scientist essentially donating her body to the creature (rather than science). She sacrifices herself and hopefully stops the infection reaching Ireland, but she also doesn’t want the creature to suffer.   

    SeaFeverend
    Siobhán (marine biologist) gives herself to the creature

    Although Sea Fever deserves to be seen at the cinema – it’s so beautiful – the global pandemic gives the film an eerie relevance. A relevance that I hope gets people to rent or buy (or both in my case – nerd alert) Sea Fever – an indie production that has been released straight to VOD while big budget movies can hide in their shells.  

    As the saying goes, I feel all at sea at the moment. But, hey, at least I’m not on that boat.

    Editor Contribution by Ursula Cuckston-Fenn– The title ‘Sea Fever’ may come from Irish poet John Masefield. The infamous poem was adapted into musical form in 1913 and has since become one of Ireland’s defining 20th century folk ballads. The lyrics speak of a cosmic pull towards the sea- Masefield wrote extensively about his love for being at sea, making it a space for infinite freedom from the political, spiritual and physical restraints of land-living. Feminine monstrosity in Hardiman’s Sea Fever juxtaposes the traditionally masculinist sublimity of the sea which is purveyed in Romanticist art.

    ‘I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,

    To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;

    And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,

    And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

    Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer Above the Sea’, (1818)

    If the masculine voice in the original poem can be read as an inherent yearning for freedom from the male perspective, Hardiman codes the sea itself as a feminine entity. The self-sacrificial trajectory reaches outside of the state of yearning for the sea as an ‘other’ but rather for full realisation of the self. Siobhán is not just ‘drawn’ to the sea’s feminine power- she is the embodiment of it, reclaiming her power that is demeaned at the start of the narrative by the judgmental anti-intellectualism of her colleagues and in turn recentering romantic oceanic narratives.

    Further reading on women, the sea and folklore.

    Listen to our WMSF Podcast episode on Sea Fever, ‘Ladies of the Lakes’ below.

    #WomenMakeSF

    aoabp5c

    What to watch next from Neasa Hardiman:
    This is Hardiman‘s first feature film, but she has directed episodes on major shows including: Jessica Jones; Inhumans; Z: The Beginning of Everything; and popular British drama Happy Valley

    Further reading:
    Neasa Hardiman’s website: neasahardiman.com

    Neasa Hardiman onTwitter: @NeasaHardiman

    Interview with Neasa Hardiman about Sea Fever and Sailor Superstitions for Hey You Guys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt7O4rHz_Pw

    Marina Antunes (2020). Neasa Hardiman Talks Sea Fever. Alliance of  Women Film Journalists. URL: https://awfj.org/blog/2020/04/10/neasa-hardiman-talks-sea-fever-marina-antunes-interviews/

    Camryn Garrett (2019). TIFF 2019 Women Directors: Meet Neasa Hardiman – “Sea Fever”. Women and Hollywood. URL: https://womenandhollywood.com/tiff-2019-women-directors-meet-neasa-hardiman-sea-fever/

    Natalia Keogan (2020). Sea Fever Gains Depth from COVID Anxieties. Paste Magazine. URL: https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/neasa-hardiman/sea-fever-review/

  • Real Genius (1985)

    Real Genius (1985)

    Director: Martha Coolidge

    Writer/s: Neal Israel and Pat Proft

    Country: USA

    Language: English

    Women in the crew: 

    Casting: Janet Hirshenson, Jane Jenkins

    Costume Designer: Marla Schlom

    Hair Designer: Edie Panda

    Set Design: Erin Cummins

    Sound Editing: Anna Boorstin, Virginia Cook, Roxanne Jones, Christy Richmond

    Assistant Editors: Deborah Cichocki, Alex Leviloff

    Music Supervisor: Becky Mancuso

    Script Supervisor: Joanie Blum

    Available to stream/rent/buy: rent on Amazon Prime UK, Google Play, and Youtube

    This review contains SPOILERS

    Review:

    From the opening credits I was sold on Real Genius’ approach to the history of science and technology. The opening credits take us through science history from the arrowhead to nuclear weapons – a hark back to my own history as an A-Level student studying the history of weapons technology. Martha Coolidge’s research into the science behind the film surprised me because of the film’s comedic and light 1980s blockbuster framing.

    Real Genius is about a group of oddball teenage geniuses who are working on developing a high-powered laser for a university project (oof, after Évolution I am pleased for a high-concept movie). When it is revealed that their professor has been funded by the military with the intention of turning their work into a space-based military weapon, they decide to humiliate him and ruin those plans. The story follows Mitch (Gabriel Jarret), a 15-year old freshman at Pacific University (a thinly veiled reference to CalTech), and his interactions with the undergraduate research team developing the laser, and in particular the zany antics of Chris Knight (Val Kilmer).

    Brian [Grazer]’s original goal, and mine, was to make a film that focused on nerds as heroes. It was ahead of its time

    – Martha Coolidge 

    Premiering in the blockbusting summer of 1985, Real Genius was released within three days of two other science-based teen movies: Weird Science and My Science Project. This summer also saw the release of SF classic Back to the Future and the Ethan Hawke/River Phoenix SF Explorers that was rushed to release and directed by Joe Dante. Dante’s earlier hit Gremlins was also re-released that summer alongside Ghostbusters and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. Real Genius was reviewed positively at the time and was distinct from its contemporaries as Coolidge worked with scholars at MIT and the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) to create an accurate set and feeling for the movie. Real Genius brought military, weapons development, and university experts into the production a fair few years before science advisors became a more common part of the pre-production process.

    My_Science_Project_1985
    Dennis Hopper in My Science Project (1985)

    As fun as Real Genius is as a comedy, it also manages to cover some pretty deep ethical issues concerning the politics of science. In particular it considers how science and technology produced by scientists might be used – knowingly or otherwise –  within the military or by a government who are also often the source of science research funding. Although Prof. Jerry Hathaway (William Atherton) is presented as a greedy but undoubtedly naive fool, the challenges and ethics of research funding are actually covered in quite a nuanced way. Academics are all about jumping those hoops. 

    Real Genius is ahead of its time as it promotes the need for STEAM, an extension on the acronym STEM, which stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The added ‘A’ is for the arts – and the clarion call that scientists need arts training.

    It is the combination of humor, the truth of the story and the real science in this picture that has made it successful for so long and has influenced many people to go into the sciences.

    – Martha Coolidge

    Chris explains to Mitch that it is important to find a work/life or rather study/party balance. He says that ‘all science, no philosophy’ is the reason that the reclusive graduate Lazlo (Jon Gries) – who of course lives in the steam tunnels – cracked. After working for a chemicals company Lazlo found out his research was being used to kill people. He had not thought  through the ethical implications – the history, politics, philosophy – of how science can be used and politicised. As Chris concludes: ‘when you’re smart people need you, [but] you can use your mind creatively.’ 

    In my reviews so far I haven’t really discussed the way a woman director represents or under-represents women characters. The lead characters are women in both Tank Girl and Welcome II the Terrordome – Tank Girl and Angela – and they are not the only women named, speaking, and featured as active parts of the narrative. After watching only women-directed and -written science fiction (film and TV) recently, I think my expectations for women characters in SF has shifted somewhat.

    Real Genius has a women problem. There is only really one fully fleshed out woman character – 19 year old Jordan (Michelle Meyrink) – and the other two named women are presented as blonde stereotypes: a seductress (Shelly – Patti D’Arbanville) and the half-dressed proof of a man’s (Susan – Deborah Foreman) ethical failures. The women don’t talk to each other and most of Jordan’s storyline is about her (awkwardly, of course) seducing a 15 year old boy.

    For much of the live-tweet Lyle and I talked about Jordan’s (note: gender neutral name) characterisation as a “manic pixie dream genius woman” (Skains, 2020) and whether she would be seen doing science in the lab with the men. Alas, by the halfway point the lack of women and the limited range of people of colour (all men, so women of colour get lost in the intersection, again) was really frustrating. We couldn’t even apply the Bechdel Test because there weren’t any scenes with multiple talking women (other women are used as sexy window dressing in party scenes).

    I was excited that there was going to be a woman engineer (#WomenInTech) in this week’s film – and that she is presented initially as equal to the men. But sadly Jordan is pretty much on her own. One of my issues with the way women in STEM are often presented in popular culture is that they are so often on their own as anomalies rather than part of a community of smart agentic women. Annihilation is one of the few films that actually manages to have women scientists working together within a wider world populated with women across the hierarchy.

    Screen Shot 2020-06-24 at 23.11.34
    No girls allowed.

    Real Genius was a clear reference point for The Big Bang Theory (Kent’s dickie is a delight, just as Wolowitz’s is). But it transposed the representational issues with women appearing as blonde eye-candy (poor Penny remained without a surname until she married Leonard) or as women scientists characters who are included as a quirky afterthought and a nod to diversity. In both Big Bang Theory and Real Genius the physics/engineering labs with their lasers and dangerous ‘toys’ are almost exclusively male spaces – women interfere and occasionally assist. In The Big Bang Theory the physical sciences were left almost entirely up to the men in the show and when women scientist characters were added as regulars, they were both so-called ‘soft’ bioscientists.

    Amy and Bernadette (serious manic pixie genius woman vibes) were added into the cast a few seasons into the show, and the only woman physicist, the glorious Leslie Winkle, never made it as a regular. The Big Bang Theory was unusual in its incorporation of women scientists, but these women were undermined by the goals of the comedy format to entertain while reinforcing the status quo.  Real Genius did the same thing. The comedy is fairly conservative in its balance with the science commentary about nefarious military funding and ‘evil’ uses of the students’ creative science genius. It maintains a status quo where women are anomalous in the hard sciences and that they must be oddballs even if they conform to expected beauty standards.

    Real Genius is ahead of its time with: its woman director especially in the 1980s male-dominated genres of science fiction and comedy, and its approaches to science communication and scientific believability, but it remains part of the pack with its token woman in STEM. Quirky, smart, Jordan is ultimately alone.* 

    #WomenMakeSF

    *especially once she remembers Mitch is ONLY 15. EW.

    What to watch next from Martha Coolidge:
    Valley Girls (1983)
    Joy of Sex (1984) – woman co-writer: Kathleen Rowell
    Rambling Rose (1991)

    Further reading:
    Back to the 80s: Interview with director mMartha CoolidgeL Kickin’ it Old School. Reposted from oldschool.tblog [obselete]. Martha Coolidge [official website]. URL: http://officialmarthacoolidge.com/2014/08/04/back-to-the-80s-interview-with-director-martha-coolidge-kickin-it-old-school/

    Emmet Asher-Perrin (2015). 30 Years Later, Real Genius is Still the Geek Solidarity Film That Nerd Culture Deserves. Tor.com. URL: https://www.tor.com/2015/05/21/30-years-later-real-genius-is-still-the-geek-solidarity-film-that-nerd-culture-deserves/

    Sheila O’Malley (2020). Present Tense: Martha Coolidge. Film Comment. March 4. URL: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/present-tense-martha-coolidge/

  • Paradise Hills (2019)

    Paradise Hills (2019)

    Director: Alice Waddington

    Writers: Brian DeLeeuw and Nacho Vigalondo (screenwriters) with Sofía Cuenca and Alice Waddington (original story)

    Countries: USA/Spain

    Language: English

    Women in the crew: 

    Producers: Marta Sánchez and Núria Valls

    Casting: Anna González

    Production Design: Laia Colet

    Assistant Directors: Inés Lugo (2nd AD); Angela Puig-Pey and Carla Altimir (trainee ADs); Marta Juls (3rd AD)

    Production Management: Laia Gómez

    Also across art, make-up, visual effects, and sound departments

    Available to stream: https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/paradise-hills 

    This review contains SPOILERS

    Review:

    Netflix’s hottest movie is: Paradise Hills. Fascist boarding school owner The Duchess has built a fantasy world that answers the question: “huh?!?” This place HAS EVERYTHING: a cast of diverse zeitgeist girls, gag worthy interior design, generic pretty boy man servants, giant decorative illuminated jellyfish, characters serving ‘fashion’ around every corner, and a merry-go-round brainwashing machine room. 

    Sorry, what?

    Even with the spectacularly WTF ending and the fact that I can’t explain what happened there, I really enjoyed Paradise Hills and it holds up to repeat viewings. It’s an original concept movie, which is hard to get funding for and even more so for a woman making her debut as a feature film maker. 

    Paradise Hills opens with an opulent wedding and a stunning overhead kaleidoscopic shot of high-end fashion future-bridal-look Uma (Emma Roberts). Guests comment on the apparent socialite’s improved attitude, and her new husband Son (Arnaud Valois) remarks on her obedience. Flashback to two months earlier and a delightfully scruffy Uma wakes up on the island of Paradise – a facility where high-class wealthy families send their wayward daughters to become perfect versions of themselves. Uma befriends her roommates Chloe (Danielle Macdonald) and Yu (Awkwafina), and is betrayed by/crushes on/is saved by pop star Amarna (Eiza González). 

    I really wanted to create something addressing the use that my 12- or 13-year-old cousins made of their social networks. I felt that we had put in their hands a window to the world that insisted they would never be beautiful, or popular enough – perfect, really. I wanted to tell my cousins that their personal fears and anxieties were valid, how it was adults that had created and fed them… through an entertaining feature.– Alice Waddington for Cinema Femme

    All of the women have been sent to Paradise Hills to correct perceived un-feminine deficiencies such as fatness (Chloe), rejecting tradition (Yu), queerness (Amarna – they bury their gay), and disobedience (Uma refuses her mother-approved groom Son, who is somehow responsible for her father’s death). Uma begins to adjust to the strict yet seemingly innocuous routine of Paradise Hills with its lady-appropriate activities, micro-meals, and teacups of mystery milk. The girls undergo Clockwork Orange-inspired behavioural therapy where they are strapped to a carousel horse, precariously hoisted into the air, and forced to watch footage of what their lives should be (positive reinforcement) or what they should want to forget (aversion therapy) – for Uma it’s either rose-waving Son enacting scenes from cheesy rom-coms or traumatic images related to her father’s death. 

    Amarna ‘graduates’ early from the facility and gifts Uma a hidden rowboat and the knowledge that the milk contains a powerful sedative. Uma observes the night activities of the facility – after she spits out her milk – where girls are taken away for, we assume, further adjustment. Uma, Chloe and Yu (rescued from her final ‘treatment’: euthanasia) decide/manage to escape. But discover a control room where they learn that their therapy has not been to rehabilitate them, but to replicate them. Each woman has a replicant – a woman from the lower classes who has sold herself to the facility, undergone extensive surgeries, and studied the women so they can become the physically and mentally obedient girls their families desire. 

    Then comes the last sequence. Yu dies of her injuries and Chloe and Uma make their way through a cave overgrown with vines where they find the bodies of former Paradise girls including Amarna. Then BAM!:

    Iddy biddy tonal shift: Chloe and Uma also discover that The Duchess (Milla Jovovich) who oversees the facility (Aunt Lydia-style) is a gothic, vampire, part-Triffid, cannibal, flower monster woman with some telepathic abilities. Huh? What? Why? Chloe gets entwined in the vine and killed, replicant-Uma (named Ana) distracts The Duchess so that real-Uma can stab her with a scalpel, and they escape together in Amarna’s rowboat. Ana has nothing to go back to, so the Umas hatch a plan to kill Son, give real-Uma her freedom, and make replicant-Uma/Ana a rich widow.   

    The ending here is possibly layered with intended meaning concerning women internalising patriarchal ideas and consuming (literally here) the advances made by other women, but it is just such a heavy-handed departure from the aesthetic SF dystopia that Paradise Hills presents up to that point. These are also ideas that have already been woven into the film. Is the entire facility a production line for The Duchess’s specialised diet? I don’t know and I don’t really care. From now on I choose to ignore that 5 minute foray into full farce fantasy. Skip from ‘Chloe and Uma make their way through a cave’ to killing The Duchess to ‘the Umas hatch a plan’. Still works. 

    BUT the production design and costuming is sumptuous and meticulous. A movie can make up for a lot of failings for me if the production design is on point. As we’ve discussed in the podcast, I like visual world building in SF – Blade Runner (1982) isn’t easy to follow plotwise (especially on your first watch), but it looks so good and generates lots of ideas; it’s an experience and a game. High Rise split opinion when I saw it with friends, those of us totally buying into the gorgeous world of the movie and those trying to cling to a narrative thread. Sometimes you just have to go with it, and enjoy the visual pleasures as they come.

    In Paradise Hills the mise-en-scène is a mix of future, past, and present fashions in both attire and architecture, with a multitude of intertextual references. The costuming is a little bit Wonderland Red Queen (paint the roses red), a little bit Elizabethan (ruffs! puff sleeves!), a little bit Regency era, a little bit Vivienne Westwood punk bondage chic. 

    High Rise and Paradise Hills use similar colour palettes and a mix of heritage and future aesthetics.

    The fashion and style is part of the fabric of Paradise Hills. Visually, it reminds me of the past/present/future design of Ben Wheatley‘s adaptation of High Rise (2015) and specifically the walled garden penthouse of the Architect (Jeremy Irons), his aristocracy-obsessed wife (Keeley Hawes), and their horse. I can also see references to Blade Runner in obvious ways (replicants) but also in the use of past fashions filtered through a contemporary lens. Similarly, the design of the world here in Paradise is essential, the plot however is somewhat  secondary.

    Like the painted roses in the Red Queen’s garden, the Paradise girls have had their natural uniqueness painted over to make them palatable to other people’s expectations and desires. The individuating elements of fashion are removed and all of the women at this enforced finishing school are dressed identically. But rather than the practical costuming of control in A Handmaid’s Tale, or even the bland blend-in uniformed dystopias of THX1138 (1971),1984 (1984),GATTACA (1997), and Equals (2015), the Paradise girls are coiffed, corseted, and trapped in the trappings of femininity. Like paper dolls they’re roughly cut out of their lives, placed in a controlled environment – the dollhouse is simultaneously closed and exposed – and played with until their personalities are captured and they are discarded.

    Alice Waddington has worked her way up to directing as a fashion photographer, camera department intern, assistant editor, and costume designer. And it shows: her visual depth of design makes every shot a delicious puzzle (an excessive scenography). We regularly happen upon Milla Jovavich just hanging out mid-Vogue shoot (surely, Annie Lebowitz is just out of shot) in her lavish couture dresses and bonnets. She is the woman who rises to power in the patriarchy, internalises it, benefits from it, and enacts her frustrations on other women who have refused to play their part within the system. The casting of Jovavich aligns with Waddington’s pre-production pitch that teased an intended gamer girl audience. From the playful/able Leeloo in Fifth Element (1997) to the replayable Alice from the Resident Evil franchise (2002-2016), Jovavich is a supermodel action movie icon whose contemporary stardom is rooted in SF video game adaptations and films that have been adapted into games.

    Alice Waddington sold her movie to the investors with the untapped and often forgotten woman gamer market as a potential audience, and a meticulously planned out storyworld with a design built around existing architectural spaces in Spain and the Canary Islands. She also promised to create her vision within a confined budget. What she achieves is a visual feast, while imperfect in its delivery, the effort and attention to detail must be applauded.

    Listen to our WMSF Podcast episode on Paradise Hills and Level 16 (2018) Finishing Schools of Fear, below.



    #WomenMakeSF

    Further Reading:
    Q&A with Alice Waddington (2019). LA Film School. URL: https://www.lafilm.edu/blog/paradise-hills-qa-with-alice-waddington/ 

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    Katherine Connell (2019). The Price of Perfection in Alice Waddington’s Paradise Hills. Tor. URL: https://www.tor.com/2019/12/02/the-price-of-perfection-in-alice-waddingtons-paradise-hills/

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    Kristy Puchko (2019). Paradise Hills Director Alice Waddington on Representation and the Dangers of Instagram. SyFy Fan Grrls. URL: https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/paradise-hills-director-alice-waddington-on-representation-and-the-dangers-of-instagram

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    Jennifer Verzuh (2019). Alice Waddington on Creating an Inclusive, Original Fantasy with ‘Paradise Hills’. Screen Queens. URL: https://screen-queens.com/2019/11/14/interview-alice-waddington-paradise-hills/

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    George Edelman (2019). How Alice Waddington Designed Her Future in Paradise Hills. No Film School. URL: https://nofilmschool.com/Alice-Waddington-Sundance-Paradise-Hills

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  • Making Mr Right (1987)

    Making Mr Right (1987)

    Director: Susan Seidelman

    Writers: Laurie Frank and Floyd Byars

    Country: USA

    Language: English

    Women in the crew: 

    Producers: Susan Seidelman and Lynn Hendee

    Casting Dept: Risa Bramon Garcia, Jill M. Berman, Lynn Hendee, Heidi Levitt, and Lisa Peterson

    Production Design: Barbara Ling

    Costume and Makeup Depts: Adelle Lutz (costume design),Linda Benedict-Pierce (wardrobe supervisor), Janet Flora (makeup artist) and Lyndell Quiyou (hair stylist)

    Art Dept: Hilda Stark (storyboard artist); Caryn Wolf (art department assistant)

    Sound and Music Depts: Laurie Mullen, Rose Rosenblatt, and Brunilda Torres (assistant sound editors), Kate Lardner, Amy Lumet (apprentice sound editors) Lyn Geller and Kathryn Schenker (music supervisors)

    VFX: Betsy Baker and Adele Solomon

    Video Assistant: Sarah Faura

    Script Supervisor: Susana Preston

    Production Assistants: Valerie Casuso, Marjorie Farber, Zara Metcalfe, Ruth Mullen, Celia Randolph, and Cynthia Streit

    Available to stream: No. Can be purchased on DVD.

    This review contains **SPOILERS**

    Review:

    Tonally Making Mr Right is of a very different style of SF to the rest of the films that come under the Women Make SF banner. It’s a romcom. I love romcoms. It is also science fiction. I love science fiction. Do I love them together? I mean the romance in Jupiter Ascending was funny/disturbing. But can I get on board with a John Malkovich (of Being John Malkovich fame, as the DVD blurb helpfully informed me) as a romantic lead in a potentially fluffy 80s romcom that few people have even heard of…

    Director, Susan Seidelman is best known for her second feature film Desperately Seeking Susan that featured Madonna in her first movie role. It was reviewed in 1985 by The Washington Post  as ‘a banner for feminism’. Her first film Smithereens (1982) was the earliest North American independent feature to be screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival and became a cult 1980s punk film. Seidelman was one of only six women in her class at NYU film school (out of thirty-five) and both of her first features – Smithereens and Desperately Seeking Susan – focus on downtown punk-rock Manhattan and women protagonists who control not only the narrative but the ways of looking (disrupting if not entirely rejecting the cinematic tendency to replicate/reinforce the straight white male gaze). Making Mr Right is a very different style of film to Seidelman’s previous movies as she moved more explicitly into the mainstream: is this move to apparent industry stability a gilded cage that clipped her rebellious creativity? Can we read this SF-romcom as feminist in line with Seidelman’s earlier films? Does the romance device (traditionally associated with women) challenge the conventions of the often male-orientated science fiction genre?

    Susan-Seidelman-on-the-set-of-Desperately-Seeking-Susan-2

    “Hollywood makes fewer and fewer movies and the budgets go up and up, [and] they don’t give those to women, or very few, if any.”
    Susan Seidelman

    As much as I enjoyed unpicking the narratives of Jupiter Ascending and Évolution, I do appreciate a high concept offering (see also: Real Genius [Martha Coolidge, 1985]). Public relations and image consultant Frankie Stone (Ann Magnuson*) is hired by Chemtech to work with an android called Ulysses (John Malkovich) who is destined for deep space exploration. She is employed to make him palatable to the public and financial sponsors in Congress to ensure continued funding for space missions. Chemtech’s chief robotic engineer Dr Jeff Peters (also John Malkovich) created the “Ulysses Robot” in his own image (good job, tech bro #PlayingGod) as he believes everyone else is his intellectual inferior. A robot is deemed necessary for the mission due to the impact extended periods of isolation from social interaction would have on a human astronaut. Frankie is brought in to ‘humanise’ the robot, but in her interactions with Ulysses ‘he’ develops better social skills than the ‘real’ scientist and Frankie and Ulysses fall in love (or a simulation of that chemical reaction anyway). Ultimately Peters realises that he is the best pilot for the mission, fulfilling his own dreams of space exploration following the realisation that he will not suffer from the isolation that the now emotionally-developed Ulysses no doubt would. 

    Making Mr Right is not a particularly well known film, as evidenced by the relative access restrictions (it can’t be streamed and only available on DVD). Although beloved by my colleagues who study AI through a cultural studies/STS lens, this film hasn’t received a huge amount of interest in the years following its release (happy to receive more, give me ALL the Making Mr Right scholarship). It plays with conventions and tropes from both the SF and romcom genres as their crossovers produce moments of humour (and horror)—including a botched seduction where Frankie’s roommate Trish (Glenne Headly) is surely traumatised when Ulysses ‘flies out of control’ fembot-style during sex with Trish and ends up twisted up on the kitchen floor.

    As we totally missed in our discussion of Making Mr Right and I’m Your Man on the Women Make SF podcast (Robot Boyfriends episode with Dr Scott Midson), Frankie Stone is a reference to Frankenstein. Her role as a PR maven is interesting as a reference to the rise of promotional culture in the 1980s and as a critique of the image consultant who remakes a person for public consumption (it wasn’t new in the 1980s—Hollywood had been treating stars as images/objects for decades—but the powerful PR woman as character type was**). At the beginning of the film Frankie is seen ending her professional and personal relationship with politician and Congressional candidate Steve Marcus (Ben Masters). His carefully managed personality is a lie, with crude attempts to secure the latinx vote and the revelation that he has cheated on Frankie. In some respects, as Frankie is his image consultant, Steve is a man/monster of Frankie’s own making. But in this opening sequence she gets to, metaphorically at least, chuck him (a life-size campaign cutout) out of a window and have him run over. The film’s title appears over the discarded cutout with a tire track across its chest. Bye, Steve.

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    In managing Steve, Frankie tried to make herself the perfect, successful man but he wasn’t the right man for her. But with Ulysses she is making Mr Right from scratch and the (apparently) un-human baseline of Jeff Peters. It is more than managing an existing person but rather making one that entirely centres her and her desires (there are interesting parallels here with I’m Your Man). There are also shades of Pygmalion as she is challenged with making the literally robotic Ulysses pass for human/emotional in a way that the actual human Jeff does not. Ulysses is childlike and naive and Frankie has to train him to do everything from walking to making a cup of tea. Though he looks like a thirty-something year old man (?), it’s hard to see him as anything more than a child—he lacks the life experience/programming. I had that same icky feeling that comes with watching the romance storyline in Big (Penny Marshall, 1988) as an adult, where 13-year old Josh (Tom Hanks/David Moscow)—now in an adult body—has a sexual relationship with 30-year old Susan (Elizabeth Perkins). Of course, neither of these films were intended to be read this way (as pedophilic), but this framing of the adult-human presenting robot as sexual always make me uncomfortable. 

    Like the creature in Frankenstein, Ulysses is framed as a child to the creator (Jeff Peters) but the de facto mother figure (Frankie) that raises him becomes his lover. Make of that (urgh, Freudian reading) what you will. Frankie even states at one point that “I’ve always thought of you as a child”—which is seemingly forgotten in literally the next scene where she sees Ulysses naked and discovers that he is anatomically complete rather than like a Ken doll. “That, uh… thing”, as she explains Ulysses’ penis, changes her relationship to the android from mother to lover. Why has a robot that is designed for isolation been endowed with genitals? Like the synths in Humans, the robot has seemingly been designed with an adult mode. Is Ulysses the man version of many of the women robots of science fiction, where being of service to humans is always intended to involve sex? Jeff created a copy of himself, penis and all. Despite the intended use of much technology, users don’t always follow the instructions including the intended use. 

    As one bad take review suggests, Making Mr Right is a “fake feminist” film as it proposes that “men are so inadequate they have to be manufactured by women”. I would argue that the positioning of the woman in science-based narrative as one with such power is actually pretty feminist, and to be fair the men in the film are still successful and powerful scientists and politicians and Frankie’s power is still contingent upon male talent. On one hand the positioning of the woman as the protagonist in an SF film with expertise/power is (still) unusual, but on the other Making Mr Right falls into a neat hetreronormative ending. The film is utopian in its outlook of this final coupling but also the imagined futures of cyborg-human relations and posthuman love affairs. So, can we read the film as a comment on the need for women’s insight into the sciences that often reinforce and replicate the patriarchy/male power? Can we fix the Broken Machine of the tech industries with more diverse scientists? Those are pretty big questions for a late-1980s romcom. 

    Listen to our WMSF Podcast episode on Making Mr Right (1987), Robot Boyfriends (featuring Scott Midson) below.

    #WomenMakeSF

    Screenshot 2022-07-15 at 19.03.31

    *Unexpected crossover: Ann Magnuson (uncredited) played ‘The Madam’ of the Liquid Silver brothel in Women Make SF favourite Tank Girl (1995)! 

    **Seidelman also directed the pilot episode of Sex and the City introducing, amongst others, PR executive Samantha Jones [Kim Cattrall]

    What to watch next from Susan Seidelman:
    Making Mr Right was Seidelman’s third feature but is her only science fiction film to date. 
    Smithereens (1982)
    Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)
    Episode 1, Season 1 of Sex and the City (1998) – fascinating comparison in the presentation of women in Manhattan to the director’s earlier Manhattan movies 

    Further reading:
    Carol Colatrella (2006). Feminist Narratives of Science and Technology: Artificial Life and True Love in Eve of Destruction and Making Mr Right. IN: Mary Frank Fox, Deborah G. Johnson, Sue Rosser (eds.). Women, Gender, and Technology. University of Illinois Press, pp.157-173.

    Jackie Stacey (1987). Desperately Seeking Difference: Desire between Women in Narrative Cinema. Screen 28(1): 48-61.

    Kate Erbland (2016). Susan Seidelman Looks Back: How ‘Smithereens’ Defined Her Career – Girl Talk. IndieWire.

    Sarah Sharma (2020). A Manifesto for the Broken Machine. Camera Obscura 35(2): 171-178. 

    Julie Wosk (2015). My Fair Ladies: Female Robots, Androids, and Other Artificial Eves. Rutgers UP.

  • Little Joe (2019)

    Little Joe (2019)

    Director: Jessica Hausner

    Writer: Jessica Hausner and Géraldine Bajard

    Country: UK

    Language: English

    Women in the crew: 

    Producers: Mary Burke, Rose Garnett, and Marina Perales Gerardine O’Flynn and Jessica Hausner

    Editor: Karina Ressler

    Casting: Jessie Frost and Jina Jay

    Art Dept: Katharina Wöppermann (production design) Francesca Massariol (art direction), Nicola Wake (set decorator), Tanja Hausner (costume design)

    Production Manager: Deborah Aston

    Assistant Director: Heidi Gower

    Make Up Design: Kerstin

    Stunt Coordinator: Gaecklein Elaine Ford

    also across art, visual effects, and sound departments.

    Available to stream/rent/buy: https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/little-joe 

    This review contains SPOILERS
    WARNING:     THE DOG DIES

    Review:

    The growing #WomenMakeSF movie watch list is a broad one with major mainstream action SF to indie arthouse SF. Jessica Hausner’s Little Joe is definitely the latter. It is an evocative mood piece like Évolution, but it has a clear(ish) narrative, unlike Évolution. These arthouse SFs provoke feelings and discussion rather than offering the excitement and narrative clarity of a more mainstream SF action adventure. Indeed, the lack of closure in films like Little Joe is both a frustration and something I actually rather enjoy (sorry, Lyle [Lyle’s response: It’s not the lack of closure I mind – it’s the lazy frakking writing just to be “arty”. Plenty of things lack closure but are still good stories.] – that’s me told). 

    Horticultural horror science fiction Little Joe follows single mother and workaholic scientist Alice Woodard (Emily Beecham). Alice is employed as a part of a team of botanists on a top-secret project to genetically engineer a plant that will release a microbial scent that will make people happy. Her colleague Bella (Kerry Fox) has an at-work support dog called Bello who starts behaving oddly following contact with the plant’s pollen (he can’t wear the PPE); claiming it is no longer her Bello she has him euthanised (the unnecessary animal death was not a great start to this movie). Alice starts breaking the project’s rules and expedites the plant’s development. She takes (steals) one of the plants to give to and name after her human child Joe (Kit Connor), but Alice begins to see her own child’s behaviour slowly alter. He seems happy, but is it a performance? People who come into contact with the plants are just a little bit off, like a Stepford wife or a pod person from Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (a key reference point for the filmmaker). This little red spiky plant is having an effect on people, but what kind of effect?

    Little Joe could be read as an antidepressant metaphor – a moral panic over the use of psychiatric drugs to treat depression (read: unhappiness), seen as a quick route to wellbeing without having to do the work. But does the film actually critique Western reliance on pharmaceuticals? I think Little Joe does comment on our current cultural obsession with chasing idealised versions of personal wellbeing (with the elusive and individual notion of happiness as a goal), but I think it is far more critical of the state and companies that ‘sell’ it and use it to sell us things, rather than the individual per se (both medic and patient). 

    Little Joe is about a top-secret developmental lab, and in the film’s eerie conclusion (it plateaus rather than peaks) we learn that the plant will be distributed as part of government and NHS initiative to classrooms and offices across the UK (and there are hints at wide-scale international interest). But those who inhale Little Joe’s pollen aren’t happy; they are instead placid, flat, and devoted to proliferating the spread of Little Joe’s effect. The film presents the emptiness that many depressives describe when explaining what depression feels like – an incapacity to feel, an internal emptiness, often leading to a carefully curated façade of happiness (smiling depression).  

    Little Joe aims to make its audience uncomfortable, from the unnecessary euthanasia of a support animal (Bello, Bella’s dog) to the moments of human interaction (awkward British dating and divorced parents discussing their child) to the aggressive and affective soundtrack. 

    The soundtrack is taken from the score for Watermill (1972) by the late Japanese composer Teiji Ito (1935-1982). Watermill was written as a score for New York Ballet in 1971, which is described as “a meditative work that explores the transformative nature of time”. As Jerome Robbins, the choreographer, notes: “the score of Watermill stems mainly from the religious and theatrical music of Asia… [and] the majority of these musical-religious works are contemplative evocations of nature and the seasons.” Although I haven’t found evidence of Hausner referencing the heritage of the soundtrack, I think that its roots in narratives of nature, time, and devotion are relevant. 

    The high pitched drones, disembodied dog barks (I imagine this is particularly disquieting in cinema surround sound), and airplane sounds are all part of Ito’s original Watermill. Sounds from across time and nature, with airplane recordings clashing against bamboo flutes (used in the 13th century by Zen Buddhist priests) are what drew Jessica Hausner to the work. She acquired the rights for this unique score, so when storyboarding the film Hausner already knew what the sound design would be like. As the writer/director explains: “some of the scenes are really designed to go with that music. The music is also very strange, it adds to the colors of the strangeness of the situation which is also what I liked about it”. 

    Hausner’s holistic filmmaking approach makes every element of the film a contributor to Little Joe’s themes of artificiality, nature and time, and dismantling the cult[ure] of happiness. The gorgeous colour palette and costuming makes distinguishing between what is natural and unnatural a challenge and an aesthetic pleasure. For example, the women who speak with (plain-clothed) red-haired Alice wear bold floral prints made of synthetic fabrics and artistic impressions of natural flora. It highlights her disconnection from other people in her home life, but also her connection to the natural in her work life.

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    Alice and her psychotherapist played by Lindsay Duncan

    Alice’s psychotherapist, most notably, is bright and floral in her attire surrounded by a lush velvet furnished office, but her delivery is stern and (professionally) detached. To attain happiness (if that is the purpose of treatment) – doing the work – there is a need for emotional detachment, a person who is not invested in or initially not part of your life outside of their office. But in Little Joe, Alice’s most developed relationship is with her therapist – the other people are subject to awkward delivery: things unsaid and emotions unexpressed. It’s all terribly British.  

    The Western world is caught up in a culture of happiness. But it is a relatively late addition to our ideas of a fulfilling worthwhile existence. It’s an almost impossible goal that was introduced in the 18th century Enlightenment. But it’s a slippery term: what is happy? Why do we want it all the time? Are we ‘less than’ if and when we can’t manage that state of apparent completeness? It’s that question of emotion that has been central to so many dystopian cold-future fictions including Brave New World, THX 1138 (1971), Blade Runner (especially in Philip K. Dick’s novel), Equilibrium (2002) and The Matrix (1999).


    As my #WomenMakeSFPod co-host Lyle says when she‘s not convinced by a movie: “well, that happened”. Little Joe happens to you and at you. I’m not sure if that made me happy but it did make me think.  

    #WomenMakeSF

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    Emily Beecham with Jessica Hausner at the 72nd Cannes Film Festival.

    What to watch next from Jessica Hausner:
    Amour Fou (2014)
    Lourdes (2009)
    Jessica Hausner on IMDb


    Further reading:
    Catherine Wheatley (2020). Little Joe review: Jessica Hausner’s floral Frankenstein horror. BFI. URL: https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/reviews-recommendations/little-joe-jessica-hausner-emily-beecham-ben-whishaw-flower-horror 

    Nick Chen (2020). Stop Making Scents: Jessica Hausner On Botanical Thriller ‘Little Joe’. The Quietus. URL: https://thequietus.com/articles/27858-little-joe-jessica-hausner-interview 

    Shannon McGrew (2019). [Interview] Co-Writer/Director Jessica Hausner for LITTLE JOE. Nightmarish Conjuring. URL: https://www.nightmarishconjurings.com/2019/12/06/interview-co-writer-director-jessica-hausner-for-little-joe/ 

    Tasha Robinson (2016). Why are writers so obsessed with scary emotionless futures? The Verge. URL: https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/19/12221264/equals-movie-review-equilibrium-thx-1138 

  • Level 16 (2018)

    Level 16 (2018)

    Director: Danishka Esterhazy

    Writer: Danishka Esterhazy

    Country: Canada

    Language: English

    Women in the crew: 

    Producers: Stephanie Chapelle, Judy Holm (exec. producer); Sarah Jackson (line producer)

    Production Design: Diana Magnus

    Set Decorator: Thea Hollatz (set decorator)

    Costume, Hair and Makeup: Jennifer Stroud (costume designer); Kayla Dobilas (key make up); Justine Sly (key hair design)

    Assistant Director: Aurèle Gaudet

    also across art, visual effects, and sound departments

    Available to stream/rent/buy: Netflix and Amazon Prime UK https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/level-16

    This review contains **SPOILERS**

    Review:LEVEL_16_AMAZON-1

    Welcome back to #WomenMakeSF! Our unplanned pandemic hiatus is hopefully over.

    It was back in September 2020 that I/we first watched Level 16, writer/director Danishka Esterhazy’s exploration of youth, femininity, and patriarchal values in a near-future dystopia where young women are preserved and prepared to be the future faces of their wealthy ‘sponsors’. Literally.

     We talked about the film alongside Alice Waddington’s Paradise Hills in episode 6 of the podcast: Finishing Schools of Fear. It was interesting to have had several films that presented futures where young women were being educated and cared for as a front for their eventual death. In Paradise the women are copied, replaced, and the originals consumed by Mila Jocavich’s telepathic flower monster woman (obvs). Level 16 takes a far grittier gulag approach to this imagined future of replaceable or upgradable women.

    Gone is the lavish candy-coloured fantasy that engulfed the girls in Paradise. Level 16 has no such pretence that this will end well for the class of ‘students’ we are introduced to. They are named for stars of the classical Hollywood era — Vivien, Greta, Sofia, Rita, Ava — a superficially glamorous themed naming system that positions these young women as helpless animals in a pound rather than privileged youth in private education. Like the women of classical Hollywood, their pasts and true identities are suppressed (or perhaps even non-existent — were they bred for this life?) to make them easier to sell.

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    “They put a strong emphasis on teaching us to fit in and know our place and, especially for young women, to accept a certain amount of second-class citizenship. That made me very angry as a teenager, and I haven’t forgotten that. I wanted to tap into those feelings” – Danishka Esterhazy

    The ‘school’ in Level 16 is called Vestalis Academy, Vestalis meaning pertaining to Vesta, goddess of hearth and home. Interestingly/terrifyingly, Amazon have reached the “late-prototype stage” for their home robot called Vesta — another turn towards the gendering of AI and an apparent desire for smart wives to replace or at best support women who reject a “tradwife” lifestyle.. At the Academy the girls are practicing the virtues of perfect femininity so that they can be chosen. But for what? As the girls, symbolically named after controlled and contracted 1940s starlets, grow at the school they progress through the different levels. Each level purposely sounds like a school year but it is a literal ascension from subterranean levels to the surface where, if they are deemed sufficiently perfect as they have been trained to be, they will be chosen. 

    They will be chosen to be drugged, laid out like Victorian dolls (or a serial killer’s victims?) and presented to wealthy onlookers in a creepy AF showroom. Only the most pure are chosen — for adoption, surrogacy, sex? None of the above. This is an elaborate processing plant for fresh fleshy faces — young undamaged skin —  that will be transplanted onto wealthy — and notably only — women. Their subterranean existence is part of the preservation — no sun or pollutant damage to skin that is ritualistically cleaned and cared for by girls and their carers/jailors Dr Miro (Peter Outerbridge) and Miss Brixil (Sara Canning). 

    Forced illiteracy and strict draconian rules that the girls repeat like commandments make the world of Level 16 align with the contemporary adaptation of Handmaid’s Tale. Like the handmaids, the Vestalis girls are framed by a transparently false care narrative intended only to make them more attractive objects to be used/reused. Miss Brixill makes for a far more glamorous keeper than Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd), but where Lydia believes in the law of Gilead and the sacred reproductive purpose (child-bearing slavery) of the women trapped inside its borders, Miss Brixill is a polished saleswoman whose approach to her charges is more than a little Miss Trunchball (she even has a iron maiden/chokey). 

    Immaculately presented and visually reminiscent of Veronica Lake with her blonde waves and coquettish glances, Miss Brixill is the face of the operation. But it is not clear if the face she presents has always been hers, until the girls try to work out what is happening to them and tie up Brixil and force the truth from her. A telling scar on the back of Brixil’s neck proves that she is a sample of the cosmetic procedure as much as a sales manager. Inspired by recent(ish) advances in facial reconstruction and face transplants, Level 16 asks when, where, or how does this currently experimental medical procedure become cosmetic? Is Brixil more than a saleswoman and product manager? Is she trapped in the system as a subject of experimentation too?

    Vivien (Katie Douglas) is the head girl in this film. She shows intelligence in her rejection of the rules and her willingness to listen to the fears of other girls about their daily vitamins (don’t drink the milk, don’t eat the apple) and what will happen to them. Restricted by lack of education and experience, Vivien can only think of one way to be saved from being flayed: self-mutilation. Although Miro suggests that she isn’t like the other girls, she knows that she is because her value to him is only skin deep. Vivien can and does defy him and escape her fate through cutting into her face because then ‘they won’t want me if I’m not beautiful.’ 

    Most women can’t mutilate or modify their bodies enough to be left alone. We talk about women’s responsibility for their own safety and in so doing shift the blame from the abuser to the abused. To be safe women are told not to make themselves visible or distracting, but even with keys between their fingers and every precaution taken they are not safe. It isn’t what they look like (‘beautiful’), how old they are, or who they are with (‘belong’ to) and there is not much more women can do to ensure their safety. Maybe we teach our men and society as a whole that women are strong as hell and worthy of respect because their value extends far beyond appearance and their capacity to be good women.

    Some reviews of Level 16 criticised the film for its heavy-handed messaging, but I would argue that its excessiveness made it more effective. Level 16 pulls together many of the fears women have — ageing, beauty, being abused, being raped, purity, being ‘enough’… Esterhazy’s film is heavy-handed to ensure that feeling of enslavement and entrapment. A feeling that (all) women and other marginalised identities often feel both inside and outside of the places where they should be safe.

    Listen to our WMSF Podcast episode on Level 16 and Paradise Hills (2019), Finishing Schools of Fear, below.

    #WomenMakeSF

    VQ_Esterhazy

    What to watch next from Danishka Esterhazy:
    I Was Lorena Bobbitt (2020)
    The Banana Splits Movie (2019)
    H & G     (2013)
    Black Field (2009) – also starring Sarah Canning

    Esterhazy has also directed episodes from Women Make SF favourite Vagrant Queen!

    Further reading:
    Chloe Leeson (2019). ‘A Dystopian Take on the Commodification of Women’s Bodies’ – Level 16 [Film Review]. Vulture Hound. https://vulturehound.co.uk/2019/05/a-dystopian-take-on-the-commodification-of-womens-bodies-level-16-film-review/ 

    Seana Stevenson (2019). Level 16 Interview: Danishka Esterhazy. Medium. https://medium.com/the-muff-society/level-16-interview-danishka-esterhazy-ac8919cabb10 

    Level 16 Press Pack https://rdvcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/gravity_forms/7-b153bacda73dd76449b4941ad8241bc4/2018/12/LEVEL-16_Press-Kit.pdf

  • Jupiter Ascending (2015)

    Jupiter Ascending (2015)

    Director: Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski (as The Wachowskis)

    Writer: Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski (as The Wachowskis)

    Women in the crew: 

    Casting: Lora Kennedy

    Costume and Makeup: Kym Barrett (costumes), Karen Lynn Accattato (key makeup artist)

    Production: Demetra Diamantopoulos (production manager); Marianne Jenkins (post production executive)

    Assistant Directors: Kim Whittaker (second assistant director); Emma Horton (key second assistant director); Ayesha Corn (additional second assistant director); Emma Gunnery (crowd assistant director); Irene Díaz (crowd assistant director); Katharina Hofmann (second assistant director: crowd); Beatrice Manning (second assistant director: second unit); Patricia Ordás (third assistant director)

    Also across art, make-up, VFX, sound, and production departments, and additional crew.

    This review contains SPOILERS

    Review:

    The major issue with Jupiter Ascending was that it needed to be at least a trilogy of films, if not a long running TV series (#6SeasonsAndAMovie). There just wasn’t enough space or time to really explore the Wachowski sisters’ phenomenal cosmic narrative world in a movie’s itty bitty runtime. It has the same zany, glorious incomprehensibility that made films like Tank Girl (Talalay, 1995), Barbarella (Vadim, 1968), Dune (Lynch, 1984), and Labyrinth (Henson, 1986) such cult classics. Once you accept that you can’t follow all of the narratives on your first watch of the film you just get to enjoy it. When I have taught classes on Barbarella (and Blade Runner too to be honest) I tell students to focus on the world and not the narratives at play. For Jupiter Ascending instead play spot the reference or cameo, and marvel at the production design. It’s made – like many epic space operas – to be watched more than once. 

    To be honest I think Jupiter Ascending works better if you actually read the spoilers first. Part of the remit of the #WomenMakeSF project is to make a record of these women-directed SF films, so I’ll have a go at giving some of the plot (corrections welcome[ish] in the comments…). Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) is the genetic reincarnation of and heir to Queen Seraphi Abrasax who was killed by her son Balem [a major plot point I totally missed the first time I saw the film and still enjoyed it. It shows how accepting I am of incomplete narratives in visually stunning SF…]. The antagonists are a trio of siblings who fight over the inheritance of their mother Seraphi’s assets: Balem Abrasax (Eddie Redmayne), Kalique Abrasax (Tuppence Middleton), and Titus Abrasax (Douglas Booth). Jupiter is an undocumented Russian immigrant living in poverty in Chicago and working with her mother Aleksa Bolotnikovas (Orphan Black’s Maria Doyle Kennedy) as a maid cleaning rich people’s houses (mostly toilets) and hating her life. Her father Maximilian Jones (James D’Arcy) is fridged in the opening scene, before she was even born and after which her mother fled to the US. Jupiter ascends from being a Dreamer (without citizenship, literally born between nations) to becoming the protector and proprietor of the entire planet Earth. In short, people try to fuck/marry/kill Jupiter for her inheritance. She’s the heir to an intergalactic industry that makes a youth serum that is actually made from people (Soylent Green is PEOPLE) and in the end she chooses not to be queen and returns to her life on Earth (cleaning toilets). 

    In the world of Jupiter Ascending genetics determine the destiny of individuals as well as entire planets’-worth of people. The Abrasax intergalactic space dynasty (Abrasax Industries) have essentially made themselves immortal with a youth serum called RegeneX. ‘The Entitled’ class use RegeneX to extend their lifespans, but it is revealed to be the result of harvesting entire human populations (Jupiter only finds this out much later in the film). Earth is just one of many human colonies set up for this purpose. Once Jupiter is recognised as the heir, Balem sends assassins disguised as medics to kill her (there’s a subplot with her uncle selling her eggs at a fertility clinic) but as part of his plan to marry (his mother reincarnated, ick) and then murder Jupiter for her claim to the throne, Titus sends Caine Wise (Channing Tatum) the half-dog, half-man bounty hunter to rescue her. They escape but must hide from Balem’s agents at Stinger Apini’s (Sean Bean) farm, a half-human, half-honeybee exiled-soldier and the Aegis’ (intergalactic police force) Earth Marshal. Stinger recognises that Jupiter is royalty (because bees can tell) and calls for police back-up. But more bounty hunters arrive (including Bae Doona as Razo) who take Jupiter to Kalique’s palace on the planet Cerise in exchange for youth serum. Kalique shows Jupiter the amazing effects of the youth serum (not revealing how it is made), her only concern being maintaining access to RegeneX. The Aegis arrive and transport Jupiter to the planet Orous so she can be formally recognised as Serephi’s ‘reoccurence’. Titus kidnaps Jupiter and proposes marriage. 

    Many of the characters in the film are non-human or genetic chimera (splices) and a hierarchy is created between ‘pure’ humans – split into immortals who can buy RenegeneX and those who can’t –  and those created in labs spliced together with a variety of different species including canines and lizards and bees (oh my). Again there is a hierarchy with the Saurosapiens (sentient flying lizards/dragons) as the most powerful, but they are all under the control of Balem. Caine was bred for combat, but errors in the lab lead to genetic ‘imperfections’ that make him difficult to control (bad dog); he is expelled from the Legion for attacking an Entitled and stripped of his military-issued cybernetic wings. He is therefore forced to wear rocket rollerblades instead – the shame. Caine becomes a bounty hunter working for Titus. Once Caine finds out who Jupiter is (queen), he believes that Titus just wants to marry her and honorably help her to dismantle Abrasax Industries as his mother wished (before she was killed). When Caine is told that the plan is actually to kill Jupiter, he becomes her protector (good dog). Caine is literally shot out into space at this point so that Titus can marry Jupiter. Caine survives after being saved by the Aegis (space police) ship under the command(ing presence) of the excellent Captain Tsing (Nikki Amuka-Bird), and rocket-boots back to fetch Jupiter and stop the wedding. 

    The Aegis take Jupiter back to Earth, but when she gets there Balem’s minions are waiting with news that her family are being held for ransom at the Jupiter Refinery in the Red Spot of Jupiter (the planet). She has to go with them or her family dies. She does. But the Aegis and Caine follow them to the heavily guarded refinery and use a secret portal to transport in and out just before the refinery is destroyed. Jupiter goes back to her old life working with her mother as a maid – she rejects the materialism of the Abrasax family for a simple life with her family, even though she is still the rightful owner of Earth. 

    So, I scraped the surface of that plot. There are so many subplots and characters and backstory for everything, and it all gets delivered at a blink-and-you-miss-it speed. There is a wiki you can work your way through that goes on for eons should you so wish. 

    Jupiter Ascending explodes onto the screen, a space opera in the truest sense, but one that is not embedded into an existing franchise or adapted from a recognisable object (not even a theme park ride). This originality is something that aligns it with the majority of the #WomenMakeSF films I’ve found so far (always on the lookout for more). It is – like Paradise Hills, Sea Fever, Level 16, Little Joe… – an original concept movie. Rarely trusted with huge franchise films, women are forced to write, pitch, (self)-fund, and produce their own imaginative storyworlds. Women are seen as a risk. Of course, the Wachowskis were not unknown at the time of Jupiter Ascending; where other women, however, needed to show originality to get the freedom to work in genre fiction, the Wachowskis’ success allowed them the freedom to create stories beyond the confines of the male-dominated (in production and reception – although we were more of an unspoken audience) expectations of SF. 

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    Jupiter Ascending took the road less traveled, into the wish-fulfilment of prepubescent girls… Every woman who ever wrote herself into her favorite universe via fanfic, every girl who created an amnesiac elven vampire princess and role-played in a chat room, every chick who ever wanted a blaster by her side and a submissive werewolf boyfriend at her back, every one of them whispered, “Finally. It is our time.”

    Donna Dickens, JA review 2015

    The not-made-by-white-men movie worlds that we are seeing in #WomenMakeSF offers something different from the heroes’ journey and the ‘chosen one’ narratives that sustain man-made SF. Jupiter rejects her status as ‘the chosen one’ and the burden of being Seraphi’s recurrence. This is a science fiction made for women (or rather not for straight white man audiences)  – a neon tinted, teenage fever dream of intergalactic (yet sadly unconvincing) romance between a genetic reincarnation of an alien queen and a half-man half-dog shirtless Channing Tatum. Not only does Jupiter Ascending not have a male protagonist, it is an SF film where there are lots of roles and speaking roles for women across the movie. The women characters are complex, even Kalique shows nuance as her desire for RegeneX is not to stay young and beautiful (she has, as Titus creepily puts it a ‘fetish’ for wrinkles) but to live forever in her carefully cultivated palace planet. But her (literally belonging to her) perfect world comes at the cost of others’; a sacrifice she is willing to make. She’s not a goodie, she just has layers (‘everybody likes parfait’). Instead of mocking or ignoring them, Jupiter Ascending celebrates and recognises its non-cismale audience and their SF fantasies.

    Screenshot 2021-06-10 at 15.46.40
    THE CHOSEN ONES (who just happen to mostly men): Luke Skywalker (Star Wars), Paul Atreides (Dune) and Jupiter Jones in Jupiter Ascending

    But Jupiter Ascending wasn’t reviewed in the space opera spirit of its creation, or as a subversion of genre, or even as a messy postmodern (sorry) layering of references to the Wachowskis’ love of science fiction. The film becomes (as Lyle and I have previously theorised in reference to Scott Pilgrim) a form of interactive gameplay (enhanced by Jupiter Ascending’s video gameplay aesthetic) where pleasure for the intended fan audience is drawn from spotting, collecting, and discussing those exuberant intertextual moments. But as a follow up to the genre-defining and mind-bending films of The Matrix films and Cloud Atlas, Jupiter Ascending didn’t seem to register with critics as a joyously operatic intergalactic SF pastiche. 

    Perhaps Speed Racer could be ignored as a contractual blip, but Jupiter Ascending was heralded as the siblings’ new era following Lana’s transition and public coming out. It was judged unfairly especially when compared to films like Kingsman: The Secret Service released in the same season that was critiqued as ‘boisterous hoodie-Bond fantasia’ rather than being reviewed as a serious intervention into pure cinema. It was reviewed as harmless fun (poor representation of women, but the director kingmansplains it as actually celebrating women). Some of the issue here is that many of the major publications sent male critics to review Jupiter Ascending, critics who perhaps expected to be able to read the film along the same masculine, ‘chosen one’ lines as The Matrix (which has since been revealed as a trans allegory). It’s a fun romp, and that’s fiiine. 

    Do I wish it didn’t have such a forced heteronormative ending? Yes. Do I enjoy watching two hot Hollywood stars fail to be a convincing couple? Also yes. The romance is my least favourite part (I ship Kalique with Jupiter), and yet the awkwardness of the dialogue kinda makes me love it. Would I have preferred to have cut that part of the film? Hard yes. 

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    Yes, the thing with the bees is odd, and the bit where Jupiter’s rejection of the ‘chosen one’ narrative means she goes back to working as a maid despite literally owning the Earth and then goes on a date with a winged lycantant-splice (dog-human/ChanningTatum) is weird and awkward. But I am not here to argue that Jupiter Ascending is a Blade Runner-style misunderstood masterpiece because I don’t think that this was what the Wachowski sisters were trying to do. It shows that there is and should be more space in the SF market for original but silly, fun, and exuberant movies that don’t solely rely on a man’s journey and a woman’s rescue (although I admit JJ gets rescued A LOT – Caine, fetch!), lazy stereotypes and misogyny masquerading as humour. This is a storyworld dying for a redux but this time we want at least 6 seasons and a movie.

    #WomenMakeSF


    What to watch next from Lana and Lilly Wachowski [The Wachowskis]:
    Sense8 (14 episodes, 2015-2018)
    Cloud Atlas (2012)
    Speed Racer (2008) – honestly it’s fun
    The Matrix Revolutions (2003)
    The Matrix Reloaded (2003)
    The Matrix (1999)
    Bound (1996)

    Lilly is also a key figure in the documentary Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen (Sam Feder, 2020), which is brilliant and available on Netflix

    Further reading:
    Obviously you should listen the accompanying #WomenMakeSFPod episode with the brilliant Cheryl Morgan talk about Trans Representation in SF.

    Cheryl Morgan (2010). Changing Images of Trans People in Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature. https://www.cheryl-morgan.com/?page_id=9294 

    Carly Lane (2019). Next Cult Classic: JUPITER ASCENDING should be recognized as royalty. SYFY Wire https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/next-cult-classic-jupiter-ascending-should-be-recognized-as-royalty 

    Marissa Ballard (2015). Femininity and Toughness: The Women of the Wachowskis’ Filmography. https://ballardwachowskiproject.wordpress.com/2015/12/10/femininity-and-toughness-the-women-of-the-wachowskis-filmography/ 

    Aaron Berry (2019). Defending JUPITER ASCENDING: The Matrix As A Coming-Out Party. Film Inquiry https://www.filminquiry.com/jupiter-ascending-coming-out/ 

    Donna Dickens (2014).  ‘Jupiter Ascending’ is the Sci-Fi movie women were waiting for.’ Uproxx https://uproxx.com/hitfix/jupiter-ascending-is-the-sci-fi-movie-women-were-waiting-for/ 

    Emily VanDerWerff (2019). How The Matrix universalized a trans experience — and helped me accept my own. Vox https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/3/30/18286436/the-matrix-wachowskis-trans-experience-redpill 

    Reiss Smith (2020). 6 eye-opening ways The Matrix is a powerful metaphor for the trans experience. Pink News https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2020/08/07/the-matrix-trans-trangender-metaphor-allegory-explained-lilly-wachowski-lana/ 

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