Never After: a few thoughts

[kelkyag]

Sunday I saw Never After. It's cute and bouncy. Much of the music is fun; the orchestra was excellent. It pushed at my definition of 'fairy tale' -- I think it isn't quite one, to me, but instead belongs over in whatever one calls the space Gilbert and Sullivan operettas are in

Comments

[kelkyag]

I had not considered how it would come across, to have her playing damsel-in-distress; I was thinking of it as an extension of her glee at deceiving Camembert with her "feminine wiles" - utilizing instead of being entrapped by sexism.

I wasn't fond of her using "feminine wiles" against Camembert, either, but that at least felt desperate, clumsy, and forced by circumstances rather than planned. That sort of manipulation is a learned skill, but she's presented as having spent her childhood dodging lessons in traditional feminine skills (be those embroidery or seduction) in favor of climbing trees and playing at swordsmanship with Hans. That she has those skills or is willing to use them to me undercuts her character as a tomboy and forwards the notion that manipulation of that sort is inherent in being female rather than learned skill used by the sex with less overt power.

Also, she just acquired the combat training she's been wanting her whole life. Why is she not itching to put that to use?

I'd like to think it's more balanced and nuanced in the full version

I will read the movie script when I am back in town. Meanwhile, I can only react to the play as I saw it staged.

Two scenes? do you mean the kiss and the song as separate scenes?

I mean the scene with Camembert, in which she proactively fends off an expected but unwelcome kiss, and the scene with Robinson.

She lies, waiting, to be kissed - in the same way that Les was put in a tower with the expectation that she would thereby attract attention on a "well-traveled princely route".

And Les was put in that situation against her will, and made it quite clear that she did not wish to be kissed. Why does she not at least consider that Somnia might have a similar opinion? The trope requires that she kiss Somnia to wake her up, but Les would, to me, be a more sympathetic character (if a less realistic clueless teenager) if she took a moment to empathize with Somnia and ask herself what the options are and what Somnia-the-person would want, rather than pursuing Somnia, the prize which will prove Les equal to a prince, with a moment for her inner ten-year-old boy to make a face about kissing. Les is a girl who doesn't want to be forced into "girly things" -- it does her no credit to assume the other women she encounters fit the stereotype she rejects.

I feel that Mathilde forsaking her noblewoman's life, and women and men learning to fight together against dragons (with Abeline in particular talking and singing about how her boundaries have changed), are both relevant.

See above various threads above. Mathilde has been waiting patiently at home for her missing love, and does just what he suggests as soon as he suggests it. That's a passive female part -- she's not changing the boundaries of gender roles. She may be challenging class roles in abandoning her life as a noblewoman -- but this is a fairy tale, wherein going into the woods is usually a step along the path rather than the end of the story. Either Robinson has just won his princess, or Mathilde is still in the middle of her (or their) story, and I don't know how that tale ends.

The peasantry learning to fight dragons, and Abeline and Matthew's egalitarian marriage, feel more to me like they're pushing against gender roles, but I saw the push against class roles as higher profile and more important to the story. Idle, protected women are not something the peasantry can afford anyway; armed, trained peasants aren't something the nobility can allow. (Abeline was in a little danger of falling into the stereotype of the ineffective radical protester / screechy female, railing against the dragons for the sake of having protested, which undercut her character a bit in my eyes. That's not likely to be a common read, though. She also appeared to be prepared to bend to the demands she expected from a knight, however distasteful she found them -- or perhaps she had a dagger up her sleeve against that possibility?)

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