Munich Film Festival I
Greetings from heatwave-ridden Munich (not much fun if you don't have AC and live under the roof, let me tell you), where this year's Munich Film Festival has started; yesterday was the first day. I went to a talk between director Emily Atef and journalist Katja Eichinger titled "The Female Gaze", and two movies - "Insumisas" (Cuban-Swiss, directed by Fernando Perez and Laura Cazador) and "Continuer" (Belgian-French, directed by Joachim Lafosse). Impressions:
"The Female Gaze": the only film I'd already seen directed by Emily Atef was "Three Days in Quiberon" , focusing on Romy Schneider, which was in the cinema earlier this year, but now I'll make sure to check out her other work, too. She came across as smart, funny and confident; if I have one criticism about the presentation, then that Katja Eichinger interpreted too much (some of her questions were mini-reviews of the movies and scenes under debate), but I know how one can get carried away by enthusiasm for someone's work. Emily Atef who has an Iranian father, a French mother, was born in Berlin and grew up there as well as Los Angeles and France adressed all sorts of aspects in film making, including this one: "When I was a girl I loved watching The Jungle Book, both because Mowgli grew up with animals and, well, he looked like me! Hardly any other child hero did. And no girls. There was an Indian girl in that movie, too, standing around briefly (she makes the Nameste hand gesture), but where were the girls who had panthers as friends and danced with bears? They weren't in other movies, either."
She'd started out as an actress and lived in Britain for a few years during which she realised what she really wanted to do was to direct, so she went back to Berlin and attend the film school there. Her big breakout movie was "Das Fremde in mir" ("The Stranger in me") about a mother suffering from post natal depression and being unable to feel the love she was expecting to feel for her child. Emily Atef said this was still a taboo subject, with mothers who don't feel instant love for their children being scorned and demonized when it was often a medical condition, and the mothers deserved support and treatment, not reviling. The producers wanted her to cast an actress who was supposed to be as mousy, tiny and sweetness-projecting as possible because they were afraid the central character would be hated anyway for not being a good mother, but she wanted the tall and power-projecting Susanne Wolff, both because she liked her as an actress and because she said that was part of the point - post natal depression can happen to anyone, no matter how "strong" you are before this. In the end, she got to use the actress of her choice.
She and Katja Eichinger also talked about female nudity versus male nudity and the audience effects; female nudity being so very present and most women having no problem with it, but male nudity, especially if the men in question are presented as the object of desire and it wasn't a gay film festival, still making a sizable part of the male audience nervous. "And you know, I find the male body beautiful, including the penis. I don't do this ridulous cover-ups if someone has to get out of bed, either. Deal with it", said Ms Atef. Mind you, in Three Days in Quiberon the photographer is the only man who gets nearly nude (and he keeps his underwear on), but, she says, that's because the real life original of the guy in question insisted to her he never had sex with Romy Schneider; in the scene in question, she asks him to come into bed with her and hold her, but she's too drunk and wrecked to give consent to more, so the underwear is meant to signal the photographer, who's an old friend, really does no more than just that. The actor, btw, has a normal, middle-aged body complete with paunch.
Insumisas (Defiant Souls), directed by both a female new director (Laura Cazador) and a male veteran director (Fernando Pérez) is a historical movie about the first female surgeon to live in an Latin American country, who was Enrique(ta) Faber, originally from France in rl, from French Switzerland in the movie, coming to Baracoa (the first colonial settlement in Cuba) after the Napoleonic wars in male disguise. Her husband, a doctor, had been part of Napoleon's army and died, and she'd lost her child (in the movie, because the baby was taken away from her by her husband's family, which is her original reason for coming to Cuba), but the main action all takes place in (and was filmed on) Cuba, where Dr. Enrique Faber through sheer competence quickly becomes one of the most respected citizens, but also invokes distrust with "his" progressive ideas (including being anti slavery). "He" bonds with, woes and marries another outcast, Juana de Leon (who was an outcast due to having been raped). They're happy for a few years Enrique calls out the local worthies on their hypocrisies once too often, and discovery is imminent...
Now, googling the historical precedent after watching the movie told me the scriptwriters and directors changed several things - the length of Enrique(ta)'s relationship with Juana, the nature of the discovery, and, very importantly, the way everyone responds. (Which is far more brutal in the movie). Mind you, within movie world, some of that is not mutually exclusive, because there's enormous pressure on Juana to deny she ever had sex with Enrique or knew the truth ("because if you were deceived, it makes sense that we all were deceived"), and the type of community Boracoa is presented as would rewrite history to make themselves look better in terms of not using physical violence. Moreover, given the brutality and violence LGTB people face (not jiust) in Latin American countries today, I can see the directors' reasoning. But still, it was storytelling a choice. (Though in both rl and in the movie, Enrique(ta) survives. The beating up and rape sequence is shot through Juana's perspective, i.e. she watches, horrified, and the audience sees what's being done to her husband/wife in her eyes. It's not an exploitative scene but a brutal one.)
A word about pronouns and representation: Enrique as presented here has built a male identity simply because as a woman, she would not be able to work as a doctor, hence my earlier writing "he" with quotation markes - she's not played as transgender. Otoh, she's also presented, refreshingly, as unapologetically and unquestioningly bisexual, i.e. she loved her dead husband (they were young revolutionaries together), she loves Juana in the present, neither relationship is presented as better than the other. The actress, Sylvie Testud, has a low, but imo unquestionably female voice, so I had to suspend some disbelief there; otoh, she does look androgynous enough in male clothing (and compelling, too; she has an interesting, imperfect face that draws you in). The character is given multiple relationships, not just the romance with Juana; the first family she befriends includes a daughter whom she mentors a bit and is inspired by her, and said daughter and her mother are the sole two white people still pro-Dr. Faber after the reveal as opposed to the husband.
One "yes, but" reaction the movie evoked in me was how it dealt with slavery. Our heroine is strictly against it, when given two slaves by the family she befriends frees them (one leaves, one stays to work for her on a voluntary basis), helps runaways and teaches several of the local black people to read and write. This attitude of hers and her feud if the local richest slave dealer is a key factor in her downfall (the thugs working for the slaver are the ones who out her and brutalize her. But: we see this strictly from her pov. The slaves, freed slaves and runaways are not given povs or personalities. The closest the movie gets to a poc with personality is the servant who stays, Placido, who later reveals he's figured out the truth about Enrique(ta) ages ago and it doesn't matter to him, but he has no attribute beyond "loyal to our heroine", either. In a movie where the injustice of slavery and the way it was woven into the every lives of everyone is a really important subject, choosing to give one of the black characters the kind of fleshing out which, say, the Garrido family receives might have been better.
All in all a captivating, if flawed, movie about an interesting woman I hadn't known about before. ( This article was the most detailed thing I could find in a language I speak on the internet .)
Continuer, directed by Joachim Lafosse, takes place in Kyrgystan, and is essentially a two people movie about a mother-son-relationship. It’s a road movie without a road and a plot of prairie instead, on horseback, because Sybille, played by Virginia Efira, has decided to deal with the problem of her troubled and estranged teenage son Samuel (Kacey Mottet-Klein, looking somewhat too old for the role to me, but google tells me he‘s only 21, and at any rate good in the part) beating up his teacher and otherwise acting out by crossing the the plains of Kyrgystan with him. We only find out where the estrangement comes from, that Samuel isn‘t the sole one troubled and with a temper, and why Sybille picked this method to achieve both mother-son reconciliation and saving her kid from becoming a violent man bit by bit during the film, which has a leisurely pace yet never feels slow. It‘s an intense character study.
The landscape and the people Sybille and Sam very occasionally meet reminded me a lot of my journey through Mongolia, which makes geographic sense. Though since I can‘t ride, I wasn‘t on horseback. The horses are essential to the story; that Sam is very tender and good with them is early on the sole sign there‘s more than teenage jerkness in him, and everyone who encounters our duo is crazy about the (admittedly gorgeous) horses they ride, which again reminded me of every Mongol I ever encountered. What I really appreciated is that Sybille‘s backstory which she reveals to the audience and Sam alike piece by piece for once does not contain rape (gasp, a female character with a backstory wound that wasn‘t caused by sexual violence?), and that while she does want to reach her son, she has emotional troubles of her own, which also means the role of caretaker keeps switching.
At some point I wondered whether this kind of story would work out the same or differently if it were an estranged father and son tale, and decided that while some of the arguments might be the same, others would not, and also the way our main characters grow closer and how they respond to each other would likely not happen if Sybille were a man. Mother-and-son stories being still rare in Western fiction, I appreciated this one as complex and good, even if I can‘t make up my mind about the ending. And the landscape is epic.
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1345890.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
"The Female Gaze": the only film I'd already seen directed by Emily Atef was "Three Days in Quiberon" , focusing on Romy Schneider, which was in the cinema earlier this year, but now I'll make sure to check out her other work, too. She came across as smart, funny and confident; if I have one criticism about the presentation, then that Katja Eichinger interpreted too much (some of her questions were mini-reviews of the movies and scenes under debate), but I know how one can get carried away by enthusiasm for someone's work. Emily Atef who has an Iranian father, a French mother, was born in Berlin and grew up there as well as Los Angeles and France adressed all sorts of aspects in film making, including this one: "When I was a girl I loved watching The Jungle Book, both because Mowgli grew up with animals and, well, he looked like me! Hardly any other child hero did. And no girls. There was an Indian girl in that movie, too, standing around briefly (she makes the Nameste hand gesture), but where were the girls who had panthers as friends and danced with bears? They weren't in other movies, either."
She'd started out as an actress and lived in Britain for a few years during which she realised what she really wanted to do was to direct, so she went back to Berlin and attend the film school there. Her big breakout movie was "Das Fremde in mir" ("The Stranger in me") about a mother suffering from post natal depression and being unable to feel the love she was expecting to feel for her child. Emily Atef said this was still a taboo subject, with mothers who don't feel instant love for their children being scorned and demonized when it was often a medical condition, and the mothers deserved support and treatment, not reviling. The producers wanted her to cast an actress who was supposed to be as mousy, tiny and sweetness-projecting as possible because they were afraid the central character would be hated anyway for not being a good mother, but she wanted the tall and power-projecting Susanne Wolff, both because she liked her as an actress and because she said that was part of the point - post natal depression can happen to anyone, no matter how "strong" you are before this. In the end, she got to use the actress of her choice.
She and Katja Eichinger also talked about female nudity versus male nudity and the audience effects; female nudity being so very present and most women having no problem with it, but male nudity, especially if the men in question are presented as the object of desire and it wasn't a gay film festival, still making a sizable part of the male audience nervous. "And you know, I find the male body beautiful, including the penis. I don't do this ridulous cover-ups if someone has to get out of bed, either. Deal with it", said Ms Atef. Mind you, in Three Days in Quiberon the photographer is the only man who gets nearly nude (and he keeps his underwear on), but, she says, that's because the real life original of the guy in question insisted to her he never had sex with Romy Schneider; in the scene in question, she asks him to come into bed with her and hold her, but she's too drunk and wrecked to give consent to more, so the underwear is meant to signal the photographer, who's an old friend, really does no more than just that. The actor, btw, has a normal, middle-aged body complete with paunch.
Insumisas (Defiant Souls), directed by both a female new director (Laura Cazador) and a male veteran director (Fernando Pérez) is a historical movie about the first female surgeon to live in an Latin American country, who was Enrique(ta) Faber, originally from France in rl, from French Switzerland in the movie, coming to Baracoa (the first colonial settlement in Cuba) after the Napoleonic wars in male disguise. Her husband, a doctor, had been part of Napoleon's army and died, and she'd lost her child (in the movie, because the baby was taken away from her by her husband's family, which is her original reason for coming to Cuba), but the main action all takes place in (and was filmed on) Cuba, where Dr. Enrique Faber through sheer competence quickly becomes one of the most respected citizens, but also invokes distrust with "his" progressive ideas (including being anti slavery). "He" bonds with, woes and marries another outcast, Juana de Leon (who was an outcast due to having been raped). They're happy for a few years Enrique calls out the local worthies on their hypocrisies once too often, and discovery is imminent...
Now, googling the historical precedent after watching the movie told me the scriptwriters and directors changed several things - the length of Enrique(ta)'s relationship with Juana, the nature of the discovery, and, very importantly, the way everyone responds. (Which is far more brutal in the movie). Mind you, within movie world, some of that is not mutually exclusive, because there's enormous pressure on Juana to deny she ever had sex with Enrique or knew the truth ("because if you were deceived, it makes sense that we all were deceived"), and the type of community Boracoa is presented as would rewrite history to make themselves look better in terms of not using physical violence. Moreover, given the brutality and violence LGTB people face (not jiust) in Latin American countries today, I can see the directors' reasoning. But still, it was storytelling a choice. (Though in both rl and in the movie, Enrique(ta) survives. The beating up and rape sequence is shot through Juana's perspective, i.e. she watches, horrified, and the audience sees what's being done to her husband/wife in her eyes. It's not an exploitative scene but a brutal one.)
A word about pronouns and representation: Enrique as presented here has built a male identity simply because as a woman, she would not be able to work as a doctor, hence my earlier writing "he" with quotation markes - she's not played as transgender. Otoh, she's also presented, refreshingly, as unapologetically and unquestioningly bisexual, i.e. she loved her dead husband (they were young revolutionaries together), she loves Juana in the present, neither relationship is presented as better than the other. The actress, Sylvie Testud, has a low, but imo unquestionably female voice, so I had to suspend some disbelief there; otoh, she does look androgynous enough in male clothing (and compelling, too; she has an interesting, imperfect face that draws you in). The character is given multiple relationships, not just the romance with Juana; the first family she befriends includes a daughter whom she mentors a bit and is inspired by her, and said daughter and her mother are the sole two white people still pro-Dr. Faber after the reveal as opposed to the husband.
One "yes, but" reaction the movie evoked in me was how it dealt with slavery. Our heroine is strictly against it, when given two slaves by the family she befriends frees them (one leaves, one stays to work for her on a voluntary basis), helps runaways and teaches several of the local black people to read and write. This attitude of hers and her feud if the local richest slave dealer is a key factor in her downfall (the thugs working for the slaver are the ones who out her and brutalize her. But: we see this strictly from her pov. The slaves, freed slaves and runaways are not given povs or personalities. The closest the movie gets to a poc with personality is the servant who stays, Placido, who later reveals he's figured out the truth about Enrique(ta) ages ago and it doesn't matter to him, but he has no attribute beyond "loyal to our heroine", either. In a movie where the injustice of slavery and the way it was woven into the every lives of everyone is a really important subject, choosing to give one of the black characters the kind of fleshing out which, say, the Garrido family receives might have been better.
All in all a captivating, if flawed, movie about an interesting woman I hadn't known about before. ( This article was the most detailed thing I could find in a language I speak on the internet .)
Continuer, directed by Joachim Lafosse, takes place in Kyrgystan, and is essentially a two people movie about a mother-son-relationship. It’s a road movie without a road and a plot of prairie instead, on horseback, because Sybille, played by Virginia Efira, has decided to deal with the problem of her troubled and estranged teenage son Samuel (Kacey Mottet-Klein, looking somewhat too old for the role to me, but google tells me he‘s only 21, and at any rate good in the part) beating up his teacher and otherwise acting out by crossing the the plains of Kyrgystan with him. We only find out where the estrangement comes from, that Samuel isn‘t the sole one troubled and with a temper, and why Sybille picked this method to achieve both mother-son reconciliation and saving her kid from becoming a violent man bit by bit during the film, which has a leisurely pace yet never feels slow. It‘s an intense character study.
The landscape and the people Sybille and Sam very occasionally meet reminded me a lot of my journey through Mongolia, which makes geographic sense. Though since I can‘t ride, I wasn‘t on horseback. The horses are essential to the story; that Sam is very tender and good with them is early on the sole sign there‘s more than teenage jerkness in him, and everyone who encounters our duo is crazy about the (admittedly gorgeous) horses they ride, which again reminded me of every Mongol I ever encountered. What I really appreciated is that Sybille‘s backstory which she reveals to the audience and Sam alike piece by piece for once does not contain rape (gasp, a female character with a backstory wound that wasn‘t caused by sexual violence?), and that while she does want to reach her son, she has emotional troubles of her own, which also means the role of caretaker keeps switching.
At some point I wondered whether this kind of story would work out the same or differently if it were an estranged father and son tale, and decided that while some of the arguments might be the same, others would not, and also the way our main characters grow closer and how they respond to each other would likely not happen if Sybille were a man. Mother-and-son stories being still rare in Western fiction, I appreciated this one as complex and good, even if I can‘t make up my mind about the ending. And the landscape is epic.
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1345890.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.