The coming week brings deluxe treatments of larger-than-life archetypes: The bloodied noble warrior in Gladiator II, an updated fairy-tale princess fantasy in Wicked (both opening Fri/22), then the glam histrionics of the tragic grande dame as Angelina Jolie plays Callas in Maria, which launches in theaters Wed/27 before going to Netflix Dec. 11.
Further down the fictive ladder of social hierarchies, however, several newly arriving movies offer more complexly adventurous takes on the pitfalls of traditional gender roles. In particular, most address the status of women, which historically has almost always been distantly secondary. And let’s face it, in our reactionary current moment the immediate future does not look bright for further progress on that front.
These lesser-sung films range from the realistic to the phantasmagorical, from archival excavations to the latest on streaming platforms. They span much of the globe—Central and South America, the Middle East, India, the UK. But the issues portrayed have universal application, no matter how idiosyncratic the telling.
Most high-profile among them in terms of awards-season push is Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light, which offers a different perspective on life in Mumbai than the usual teeming-metropolis seen onscreen. Its three principal figures are all nurses employed at a city hospital, their workplace pressures unalleviated by variably problematic lives after hours. Fortyish Prabha (Kani Kusruti) is in an awkward holding pattern, wooed by a doctor but still tied legally to her husband by arranged marriage. The latter left to work in Germany years ago and has ceased to communicate, let alone clarify whether they have any future together.
A new hire who’s also Prabha’s new flatmate, Anu (Diya Prabha) is giddy and somewhat reckless in her love for boyfriend Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), as they sneak around the city trying to find places to make out. This is dangerous, not only because such behavior could cause a scandal at work, but because the cultural/religious gaps between their respective Hindu and Muslim families might make marriage impossible. Meanwhile senior staff member Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) faces possible eviction from her home of over two decades, because she lacks the residency papers to fight developers who want to raze it and build yet another high-rise.
Though they have each other, these women are to a large extent isolated by custom, bureaucracy, and other factors—professional status does not necessarily bestow much power over their own fates. Each somewhat lonely even within the crowded city, the trio enjoy a rare stretch of sustained companionship when Kapadia’s script takes them into the country, helping Parvaty move back to her village of origin. At that point, the poetic lyricism Light has found space for even in hectic urbanity takes center stage. While I wasn’t as impressed by this writer-director’s second feature (following 2021’s A Night of Knowing Nothing) as some rapt viewers, it’s nonetheless a thoughtful and distinctive tale that’s as far-flung as possible from flashy Bollywood commercialism. It opens this Friday at SF’s Roxie, the Smith Rafael Film Center in Marin, and the Cine Lounge in Fremont.
Miles apart stylistically is a very different take on women in an institution setting. “Inspired by true events”—a lethal 2017 fire at a Guatemalan juvenile lockdown facility that exposed copious corruption and abuse—Rita is anything but a bleakly realistic reenactment. Its 13-year-old titular protagonist (Giuliana Santa Cruz) finds herself thrown into a ginormous governmental “fortress on a hill” after fleeing domestic violence. She tells us that at age seven she’d already “stopped believing in fairy tales.” Yet Jayro Bustamante’s film takes the surface form of one, combining the tone of a juvenile empowerment fantasy like The Hunger Games with some Dickensian elements of cartoonish villainy.
Rita finds the orphans and otherwise unwanted girls she’s imprisoned with have organized themselves into flamboyantly costumed creature “packs”—bunnies, princesses, dogs, fairies, angels—each with their own rules and rivalries. But they’re all more or less united against the adult would-be minders, who are more like exploiters. When staff get overpowered in a planned riot, the consequences are grim (and Grimm) indeed.
Departing from the relative naturalism of his impressive prior features (Ixcanul, Temblores, La Llorona), even as he extends their systemic indictment, Bustamante goes way out on a limb here. The elaborate production design, costumes and surreal/grandiose imagery are unquestionably striking, the whole enterprise impressively scaled. Yet the child actors are overburdened having to posture like avenging wee superheroes, and the fantastical presentation of a real-life horror story struck me as a pretentious, counterproductive gimmick.
If you thought Pan’s Labyrinth a profound allegorical treatment of fascism, you might well love this genre-fied, “dark” dream take on real-world cruelties as well. But in both cases I found the approach a sugar-coating of truth less impactful than a more straightforward depiction would have been. Rita debuts on streaming platform Shudder this Fri/22.
More successful as pure allegory is the recently restored 1974 Iranian film The Stranger and the Fog, which plays BAMPFA this Sat/23 only (more info here). Considered a disappointing overreach after Bahram Beyzaie’s acclaimed first feature Downpour, it was not an initial success, then got banned after the 1979 revolution, disappearing almost entirely. Newly restored, it can be appreciated at last as a unique, strikingly ambitious epic more redolent of 1970s Kurosawa or Herzog than most cinema from its part of the world in that same era.
The “stranger” is Ayat (Khosrow Shojazadeh), who’s found bloodied and unconscious in a boat that drifts to the shores of a remote fishing village in an unspecified epoch. He remembers nothing of how he got there—or so he claims. Nonetheless, the locals are fearful of any outsider, especially one who might herald or be fleeing outside conflict. He’s put through a hazing of sorts to gain the acceptance that most in the community don’t want to extend him. That could be fast-tracked if he marries, but prospective bride Rana (Parvaneh Massoumi) has her own ambivalent status to worry about. Like Prabha in Light above, she has an MIA husband—though he disappeared over a year ago and is now presumed drowned, she remains tethered by the possibility of his return.
The past soon turns up to haunt Ayat, in the form of mysterious black-cloaked entities (for a while we’re not sure if they are men, or ghosts, or what) who demand he come “home” with them to face consequences for crimes he insists he doesn’t remember. These stern forces of justice only seem to want him. Yet they are treated as an invading army by the villagers in a bizarre, prolonged climax of battle with primitive weapons. To the end, Ayat’s guilt or innocence remains a mystery—his foreign pursuers may in fact be the real victims here—while it is Rana whose dearth of options in a patriarchal society commands unalloyed sympathy.
This arresting two-and-a-half-hour tale from Beyzaie (who after increasing subsequent censorship struggles finally left Iran, and has taught at Stanford since 2010) is a major rediscovery.
Another artist who navigated around hostile political environs is Narcisa Hirsch, who passed away earlier this year at age 96. She and her mother left their native Germany for Argentina in the late 1930s, the child expatriate growing into an adult avant-gardist in painting, sculpture, performance and film. The idiosyncratic and personal nature of her art generally managed to elude the dictatorship’s perilous attentions. But by the same token, it failed to get much recognition until recent years.
Thus SF Cinemathque’s program at the Lab this Thurs/21 of “Philosophy Is A Useless Passion: Films Of Narcisa Hirsch” offers a fairly rare opportunity to sample the screen ouevre of a prolific if under-radar experimentalist. The six shorts here run a gamut from 1969’s Manzanas, a record of an artistic provocation on the streets of downtown Buenos Aires, to the minimalist abstractions of Canciones Napolitana (1971) and Workshop (1973). Later films included are more transparently diaristic or otherwise autobiographical, culminating in the 26-minute 1989 A Dios, dedicated to “Jung and all the men who helped me to live.” Its panoply of images both borrowed and original encompass unquestionable demonstrations of “the female gaze”—her camera lingers on presumed past lovers with evident pleasure, a feeling they palpably return. For more info, go to here.
Likewise mining an audiovisual library for purposes of self-exploration is Witches by Elizabeth Sankey, of late UK indie-pop band Summer Camp. This is her second personal essay-slash-compilation feature, following Romantic Comedy five years ago. While that film measured real life against the tropes of the romcom genre, this one utilizes a wider range of clips—Gothic melodramas, horror-movie sorceresses, idyllic advertising images of motherhood—as counterpoint to her own experience of severe distress after giving birth for the first time.
While the eventual diagnostic explanation isn’t entirely clear (postpartum psychosis?), the anxiety, depression and paranoia were such that she was institutionalized for a while… with her baby, at a facility designed to build bonding between newborns and mothers. It is noted that similar cases have turned out tragically without appropriate interpretation or action; even she was initially told her alarming feelings were nothing but typical new-parent “jitters.”
Interviews with other women who helped one another through similar crises enlarges a scope that sometimes can seem a little too self-indulgent, with the director and her story claiming primacy of onscreen space. Most engaging are those segments wholly compromised of archival materials, from Haxan (1922) to movies a century later. They’re used to llustrate how popular fears have linked women’s power, knowledge, or mental instability to the supernatural. Perhaps because they threatened male authority, female healers numbered disproportionately among the estimated 50,000 women killed in Europe and colonial America as “witches.”
Of course female “hysteria” has long been trivialized, penalized, and/or ignored. But Sankey doesn’t fully manage to tie together the various ideas on tap here, which range from the indicting to the celebratory, from first-person to historical-analytical. Ultimately Witches feels like a somewhat disorganized mix of vanity project and cineaste entertainment value, orbiting serious issues without quite delivering a cogent thesis. Still, any film with room to present excerpts from titles as delicious and diverse as The Snake Pit, Possession, and Hagazussa is bound to offer a good ride, however vague its destination. The documentary begins streaming on MUBI this Fri/22.
