Putting the Genre in Gender at Sundance
Wednesday, February 3, 2021 at 8:00PM by Jason Adams
A lot of ink, possibly pink, has already been spilled on this year's Sundance marking a flashpoint for female filmmakers. (You can find the same sort of headlines if you look back at last year's fest, which included Eliza Hittman's Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Kirsten Johnson's Dick Johnson is Dead, and Emerald Fennell's Promising Young Woman.) Still, women's voices at this year's fest feel dominant in a way I'm not sure they ever have before, and it strikes me that the ways we're seeing women re-working genre as a tool of dissembling trauma and male-dominance is in particular fascinating, especially as the Trump years come to their ignominious, death-rattling end...
The midnight movies Violation, co-written and co-directed by lead actress Madeleine Sims-Fewer along with Dusty Mancinelli, and Knocking, from director Frida Kempff, each drop their leading women into an ever-tightening noose of claustrophobic tension. The conflict emerges from a past incident we're only able to learn more of as the films each progress toward some glimmer of reconciliation. In the darkly antagonistic Violation (which besides just playing Sundance is hitting Shudder on March 25th) we have two sisters, Miriam (Sims-Fewer) and Greta (Anna Maguire), on a lake-house vacation with their respective partners Caleb (Obi Abili) and Dylan (Jesse LaVercombe). Miriam and Caleb's marriage is clearly on the rocks, while Greta and Dylan are in the full blush of giddy can't-stop-touching love, but before long the film flashes unexpectedly forward to another trip, one where the vibes are decidedly different.
What happens in between isn't much of a mystery -- the film is less about showing us its cards than it is about turning over the whole damn table and daring us to find a game in there. Sims-Fewer and Mancinell give us artful slow-motion shots of the horrors of nature, wolves playing with rabbit carcasses and the like, but it's never apparent who's the predator and who's the prey among their human parallels; there's ferality enough for everybody in this place. Any sense of justice is undone by the twitching lumps of flesh we witness sliding off the bone.
Similarly Kempff's film Knocking batters and bruises its haunted heroine, mentally and physically, on her quest for some kind of peace. When we first meet Molly (Cecilia Milocco) she's coming out of a mental institution, freshly recovered from a nervous breakdown which we slowly decipher came about as a result of the death of her longtime female lover. (Knocking's sly queerness is never mentioned, but vital to its core.) As with Violation the past definitely informs the present, but the "mystery" of what happened to Molly feels like a foregone conclusion from the start -- memories are doled out more as a means of getting us into Molly's headspace than any sort of gotcha revelation.
Because Molly's problem isn't her past, its her present, specifically all the creepy-ass men living on every side of her in the apartment that the state has put her up in post-recovery. On her first night in her new home she hears a knocking -- less the tap-tap-tapping of the raven, more the thunking of the tell-tale heart buried in the floorboards. But not her floorboards. Somebody else's floorboards. Nobody believes the madwoman, of course, and their constant degrading skepticism makes her doubt herself, but Knocking and a very fine Milocco give Molly a backbone of steel; even as everything above it rattles and sloughs away you can feel the film is heartily in her camp. Man-hating lesbianism never felt so right!
If those two movies are about women scratching and biting a way out from underneath their traumas then two other Sundance films seen messing about with genre this year were intent on upending another path we're familiar with from stories told about women by men in the past -- Carlson Young's The Blazing World and Karen Cinorre's Mayday take the girlish daydreams of escaping like Alice into her wondrous frilly Wonderland and re-imagine it for the harder, sharper here and now.
In the gorgeous phantasmagoria of The Blazing World (which Young expanded from a 2018 short film of the same name) the Wonderland parallels feel the most obvious, especially given Young's blonde and baby-doll-dress look in the leading role of Margaret Winter. That said I'll admit I found myself thinking even more of Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth while watching The Blazing World than I did having to go all the way back to original descendant Lewis Carroll -- Pan and Blazing are both, after all, bound up in the sputtering sickened imaginations of what may just be a brain shutting down.
Similar to Del Toro's Ofelia, Margaret here is seen early on sinking beneath the surface of her backyard swimming pool immediately following the witnessing of a familial horror, in this case her father beating her mother. Everything thereafter becomes the stuff of symbolism -- her father (Dermot Mulroney) a glass-smashing beast trapped in the music-blaring menagerie of his manly man den (the words "man cave" are not uttered but man, they're there); her mother a fluttering anti-presence offering sandwiches in the kitchen. And most of all the White Rabbit in the shape of a bug-eyed Udo Kier, beckoning Margaret further down the swirling drain. And speaking of man-sized rabbits The Blazing World would make I think a fine companion to Donnie Darko, with their conjoined realizations of a world outside this one poking in, laying bare the cosmic joke.
Meanwhile Cinorre's Annihilation-esque Mayday feels just as tied to Carroll's little girl falling down that infernal hole of knowledge as does Young's more explicit tie-in, maybe just with a little extra Oz and Peter Pan sprinkled over for good measure. When we first meet Grace Van Patten's Anastasia (Ana for short) I dare you to see anything but Alice's iconic white-and-blue dress there in her blue-and-white waitressing garb. And then before you know it Ana's on the run from the mad hatter of her abusive boss, falling through a portal buried at the back of her restaurant's big stove. (Yes, call up Sylvia Plath for that one.)
What awaits Ana on the other side is a band of kick-ass female freedom fighters living on an isolated Themyscira-adjacent island world where every day is spent Siren-like, luring World War II soldiers to their doom. Led by a furiously magnetic Mia Goth (give it up for the perfectly off-kilter magic of one Mia Goth) the young women send out daily distress signals -- the breathier and more needy-sounding the better -- to sucker in unsuspecting heroes-to-be, turning mankind's gendered ideas of who needs saving against itself. These ladies live for and delight in their slaughtering of men, and the more prostrate the better. Shoot 'em while they're sleeping, dammit!
Mayday, like all of these films I've mentioned, is plenty aware of this fantasy's problematic nature -- of the limitations in adopting masculine ideas of violence and revenge. But unlike something like Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch, which Mayday feels like an explicit rebuke of, there's no fetishization of girls play-acting tough guy roles -- their past wounds don't become level-up Barbie-costumes that wrap their sexual assaults in pleather bustier pseudo-feminist bullshit. These women's fuck-ups feel genuine, earned and experienced -- they've left more emotional marks than they have sexy thigh scars or pretty painted bruises -- while their baggy fatigues just make for a practical place to wipe off dude-gore.
And with flights of fancy like a delightful dance sequence Cinorre, like the other directors mentioned above, complicates the narrative in ways that feel decidedly feminine -- there seems to be a real wrangling happening with the ways in which women have long been framed by genre storytelling, by their unraveling amid or their escape from traumas, that's happening in full force right now. And that's why having more and more and dammit even more female voices isn't just a good headline for a film festival, but good news for everybody -- upend the way we've been telling stories. We need some fresh blood.
Reader Comments (1)
Interesting angle and perspective, Jason - thanks for this. I generally avoid Midnight fare, and the only one of these I saw was Mayday, which I found intriguing but ultimately unfulfilling. Your analysis is spot-on.