Women in biopics, or: A Tale of Frustration

[selenak]

Another film I've recently watched in the cinema was Coco avant Chanel - "Coco before Chanel" - starring Audrey Tautou as Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel. Tautou was great, but the film itself reminded me of the ongoing frustration dodging many a biopic (or film based on a true story, if you like) centred on a woman, as opposed to films portraying a male

Comments

[vilakins]

[rolls eyes] I go out of my way to avoid romance story lines and I'm not interested in smut. My favourite films are comedies or interesting films like "Apollo 13", "The Right Stuff", or "Wargames" which I watched tonight, but I know I'm hardly typical. I just don't get shipping, but it's so pervasive that most fanfic memes centre round it. But I've always been out on a limb with a minor fandom, so why not compaound it?

I hate to think what they're going to do with the Hypatia film.

[selenak]

It's not that I'm completely against romance. I do like a few romantic relationships. But it's just not my main focus, and when I watch a film supposedly about a woman whom we remember because of her art, or rulership, then I want to the main focus on what made this particular woman so remarkable in her field. I want to see her passion for music/art/literature, or her skills at politics. I'm just not that interested in whom she snogged.

Hypatia: well, the trailer already shows we have a male pov character...

[vilakins]

I have occasionally written pairings, but they're not the main focus of the story; just an aside.

I shall definitely give it a miss, then.

Last week I found a detective series (just what I wanted for relaxation) with as main character a plain and prickly woman in her 50s, who retired to a small English village after selling her PR firm. I liked her. Plain, originally from a poor background with drunken parents whom she rose above, but what does she do in both of the first two books? Pursue male characters in a shameless way, at first funny, then just bloody annoying and demeaning to the character who's otherwise a strong, capable woman. And yes, it was written by a woman. Sigh. I might read more because I liked the rest of her: plain-spoken, often downright rude (unless it's a guy she fancies).

[abigail_n]

There's an upcoming biopic of Amelia Earheart (also directed by a woman, Mira Nair) that I've been completely ignoring for exactly the reason you note here - because biographical films about women are almost always about their love lives.

[selenak]

It's the difference between "a film about a pilot" or "a film about a woman in love who happens to be a pilot". It would be great if it was the former, but the odds are overwhelmingly in favour of it being the later...

[violaswamp]

If it's by Mira Nair, I might give it a go anyway. I trust her--she's done good movies before. I saw Mississippi Masala, which has a romantic main plot, and yet manages to mostly be about the history of African-Americans and Indian immigrants in America and how that history shapes their children's lives, without overdoing the romance, IIRC.

[jo_lasalle]

I would normally share your frustrations with the focus on romance as the most interesting thing about female historical figures who had all sorts of other more interesting things going on. But I have to disagree strongly with the link to fannish shipping you're making here.

Also, fandom hasn't changed much in a century or more. And of course directors and scriptwriters, be they male or female, are aware of this.This whole argument reads to me like fandom is to blame for female characters not getting interesting plotlines and we're just getting things like Laura Roslin's narrative demise because we asked for it

[selenak]

It's not a question of blame - every writer (script, novel, whatever) is responsible for the story he or she tells, not the readers/viewers/watchers. (Nobody gets to say "the devil the fans made me do it".) But I do think that tv productions pay a certain degree of attention as to what storylines get the most responses in forums, for example. What characters are popular, and what characters are hated. Now the conclusions they draw from this are up to them. But I'm not into Supernatural and I still heard that quote of Misha what's his name about how one of the scriptwriters/producers, Sera Gamble, told him not to worry, his character Castiel would be loved as opposed to the female characters they tried to add in the past who were hated "because they were women". She could be slandering the SPN fans there, but apparantly that is the production team's impression based on whatever fannish reactions they've been exposed to. And check out any newsletter of any fandom, whether it's BSG, Heroes, Doctor Who, Star Trek - what the absolute

[jo_lasalle]

And check out any newsletter of any fandom, whether it's BSG, Heroes, Doctor Who, Star Trek - what the absolute majority of stories and discussions are about are romances.

So? That still doesn't mean those fans want their female (or any) characters to be all about the romance in canon, or they wouldn't be writing and discussing in BSG, Heroes, Doctor Who and Star Trek but in Bridget Jones's Diary. There's nothing wrong with enjoying romance in a universe that isn't all about the romance, or -- to go back to your Alcott example, which I meant to but forgot -- enjoying make-believe (fanfic) about the girl who got to do all sorts of cool stuff also getting the cute nice guy/girl/shapeshifter/Battlestar commander.

[selenak]

To repeat myself for the second time: I didn't say there was anything wrong about it to begin with. And I most certainly did NOT say the fans shipping wanted to see nothing but romance. What I did say, see above and above, was that the interest in romance in particular, above other storylines, is perceivable. Which might or might not have anything to do with the focus on romance in biopics, but I certainly am allowed to notice both.

[blpurdom]

I was really hoping that I could dig into my memories and come up with a biopic about a woman that wasn't chiefly about her romances, but I can't. Grrr. And looking up at my biography shelf, which is just above my desk, the women's biographies I see, some of which have seen film and some not, I can't imagine any of them that haven't been filmed getting a film treatment that didn't dwell excessively on romance. Now, two are autobiographies by Lauren Bacall (By Myself, a title that does NOT imply that she thinks her story is all about Bogie) and Katharine Hepburn (Me, which goes into the Spencer Tracey affair a good deal but is also not the focus of her entire long life), and stories about actresses do tend to focus on love-lives. But others are not about actresses and I still fear that their biopics would push aside most things other than the romance. In fact, I know that's already happened in regard to Georgia O'Keefe (a biography by Roxana Robinson). There's also Ingrid Bergman's autobiography, and I think that a film of that (

[selenak]

I've read both the Lauren Bacall and the Katharine Hepburn memoirs, and I agree, while both regard Bogie and Spencer Tracey respectively obviously as very important to their lives, neither of them writes as if these relationships were everything that was to said lives.

You know what also irked me in a great many of these biopics about women, including the Chanel one which set me of? The sometimes subtextual and sometimes textual implication that loss of romantic love is directly connected to them becoming successful in what makes them great.

The Hours based on Michael Cunningham's novel which in itself is among other things fictional meta on Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf manages to portray Virginia Woolf without the implication that she was all about Leonard. (Though you could make an argument for the reverse being true.) But it's not a biopic in the traditional sense, and the Woolf plot thread is just one of three.

[veritykindle]

Wow, they really made the story of Artemisia Gentileschi all about a passionate love affair with her real-life rapist?! That's... you are right, revolting is a good word for it. Wow. That is a really disturbing trend!

And now that I think about it, the preview I recently saw of the Amelia Earhart biopic sure makes it sound like they've made it all about her romances, as well.

I've been trying to remember if I'd seen a biographical movie about women that hadn't focused on romance as the absolute focus of those women's lives, and I just realized that I *have* seen one, just recently - Julie and Julia, about Julie Powell and Julia Child. In the movie, both Julie and Julia are happily married, to wonderful supportive husbands. And there were some scenes that highlighted their relationships to their husbands. But really, the husbands' roles in both stories were not about some sort of Great Romance, but about supporting their wives' dreams, with the focus being on those dreams, not on them. Julia Child is all about food and cooking and

[selenak]

Artemesia: More about that film versus facts. .

I was looking forward to Julie and Julia anyway, and now even more so!

[veritykindle]

Wow, that link is disturbing! I knew some of her history, but not to such detail. To take that story and change it into a romance is just perverse!

(Although I also found it disturbing the way they kept repeatedly blanking out the words "rape" and "rapist". I don't think I've ever seen anyone do that before. Does blanking out the word somehow make it more acceptable to talk about it?)

And now I'm worried about spoiling the movie for you. I'm sorry about that!

[selenak]

Not to worry, I read a review in the NY Times which contained roughly the same information, minus the fact that the husbands are supporting but not the main focus *g*.

The blanking out of the word "rape": haven't seen it elsewhere, either, but I'm not completely clear on the rules for blanking out in English anyway - some people seem to write G-d instead of "God", which appears particularly pointless (just one letter missing!), I've also seen "f_" and "s_t", but it all seems to be a bit random.