Rahil (Yordanos Shiferaw) Ethiopian girl living in Beirut (Capernaum)
Madeline (Martine Chevalier) and Anne, her daughter (Lea Ducker) — (Deux of Two of US is not just about the love of two aging lesbians, but the daughter of one of them)
Heloise (Adèle Haenel), Marianne (Noémie Merlant) and Sophie (Luàna Bajrami) in Portrait of a Lady on Fire (it’s a three-way relationship at its height: wealthy young girl to be sold to a husband, painter, and pregnant maid)
Animals welcome
People tolerated …
Friends and readers,
I’ve just spent four weeks teaching a course where we read two marvelous books by women, Iris Origo’s War in the Val D’Orcia, an Italian war diary, 1943-44, and Christa Wolf’s Cassandra and Four Essays, and want to observe, commemorate, act out Wolf’s argument (proved) in her book that there is a real body of literature by women, separate from men, superior, filled with alternative values, following different genre paradigms, only permitted to thrive in Europe and her cultures since the 18th century and that in marginalized ways, but there and wonderful — deeply anti-war, anti-violence, filled with values of women, a caring, cooperative, preserving, loving ethic. What better day than V- or Valentine’s, better yet against Violence Day, especially when aimed at women. A day yesterday when much of the US in the evening sat down to watched a violent-intense game, interrupted by celebrity posturing, false pretenses at humane attitudes, and glittery commercials (the Superbowl).
Last night I watched Portrait of a Lady on Fire (which I’ve written about already here), and the 6th episode (Home Truths) of the second season of All Creatures Great and Small (ditto), and the fifth episode of the fourth season (Savages) of Outlander, Her-stories (adapted from Diana Gabaldon’s Drums of Autumn)
Anne Madeley as Mrs Hall (housekeeper, and vet)
Helen (Rachel Shelton) and James Herriot (Nicholas Ralph)
Claire (Caitriona Balfe) and Adawehi
I delighted in my evening:
Home truths: shamelessly sentimental and ratcheting up lots of angst, yet nothing but good happens. Why? I’ve decided it’s a show with women in charge — for real. Mrs Herriot gives up James to Helen, Mrs Hall and the woman with the perpetually nearly mortal cows. Mrs Pumphrey is the local central goddess, and Tricky woo, her animal. A new woman came in, an aging gypsy who lives with stray dogs. Parallel to Mrs Pumphrey. I love it.
The men are the Savages: the crazed German settler who thinks the Native Americans are stealing “his water” so when his daughter-in-law and grandchild die of measles, he murders the beautiful healer of the tribe — they retaliate by murdering him and his wife and burning down his house. Claire had been there to help bring the baby into the world. The coming problem that most counts is measles. Jamie and Ian discover they can’t get settlers while the Governor and his tax collectors are taking all the profits from settlers and using it to live in luxury, and Murtagh is re-discovered. Very moving reunion with Jamie and Claire — keeping the estates, feeding animals. She functions as Mrs Hall.
The three women eat, walk, sleep, talk together; the two upper class ones go with their maid to help her abort an unwanted pregnancy among a group of local women meeting regularly to dance, talk, be together where they sit around a fire — here they are preparing food, drink, sewing ….
A brief preface or prologue to two fine women’s films: Capernaum and Two of Us, with some mention of Salaam Bombay and Caramel, ending on Isabelle Huppert as interviewer and Elif Batuman as essayist on women’s film art:
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Zain (Zain Al Rafeea) and Rahil’s baby, Yonas (Boluwatife Treasure Bankole)
One of the courses I’m taking this winter at the same OLLI at Mason where I teach is one recent fine movies, and the first we saw Capernaum directed by Nadine Labarki. She has another remarkably memorable film I saw years ago, Caramel, the stories of five women whose lives intersect in a beauty parlor). She and two other women wrote the screenplay. It’s an indie, in Arabic, set in the slums of Beirut: the title refers to a place on the northern shore of the sea of Galilee and forms part of the Jesus Christ stories. The word also means chaos. It makes Mira Nair’s Saleem Bombay looks into the semi-lark it is: both center on a boy living on the streets of desperately poor area who is cut off from any kind of help from parents. Nair’s film ends in stasis: with the boy on the streets still, having stabbed to death a cruel pimp who preyed on a prostitute who is one of the boy’s friends, and took her small daughter from her.
People write of Capernaum as heart-breaking but most of their comments center on the boy (Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian). It’s done through flashbacks. The gimmick complained about is the boy is suing his parents for bringing him into the world. Basically the boy, Zain, exposes the cruel treatment his parents have meted out to him — real emotional, social and physical abuse too. In fact, Hilary Clinton proposed many protections for children, a couple of which aroused the ire of conservatives because she proposed to give children rights which in effect included complaining about parental abuse. I remember how she was attacked fiercely for her proposals on behalf of children. As eventually passed it was about adoption procedures and administration, whether she succeeded in making the child’s welfare count for real I don’t know
What is seriously relevant is the continual filming of dire poverty and the imprisoning of helpless (stateless) immigrants, refugees with no papers and how the need for papers is used by criminals and some lower base businessman to punish and demand huge sums from these people willing to buy forged documents. Astro, the film’s villain, is trying to take Rahil’s baby from her so he can sell the baby, and we discover at the film’s end he had no good parents and home for the baby, only a transitory prison. Labarki takes the viewer through the jails such people end up in and the conditions there — although this is Beirut, you could easily transfer this to the borders of the US. I find the supposed secondary character, a young single mother end up separated from her child as important as the boy, Zain — the fantasy of the movie is this boy takes real responsibility for the child. We also see how Zain’s sister, Sarah was sold to a man when she was 11 and dies of a pregnancy, how his mother is endlessly pregnant with no way to make any money to feed her family or send anyone to school. We se how desperate circumstances have led the boys’ parents to behave brutally to him and to one another, to in effect sell Zain’s sister, their daughter, Sarah, age 11, who dies in childbirth (too young for pregnancy).
It’s an important movie for our time — Biden is continuing many of Trump’s heartless and cruel policies at the borders — not the separation of families. There is no excuse for this. This movie does have a sudden upbeat happy ending (sort of). See it.
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Then very much a Valentine’s Day film: Two of us, also on this film course’s list.
Nina (Barbara Sukowa) — much in love with Madeline, she has no family around her
Isabelle Huppert more recently (see her in the interviews just below)
Very touching. It’s about two lesbians who have grown old and one is nervous (Madeline), frightened of her two grown children (Anne and Frederick), never ever admitted how she loathed her bullying husband (who made a lot of money if her apartment is any measure). Nina lives across the hall and yes people outside them think they are just friends. But they are deep lovers and as the movie opens, Nina is pressuring Madeline to sell her apartment so they can move to Rome permanently, Rome where they have been so happy.
What happens: Mado has a stroke, and is parallel to a movie so long ago, The Single Man, for which Colin Firth was nominated for an Oscar where two homosexual men have deep true life and one dies (Matthew Goode) and the other (Firth) is closed out by the family. Goode leaves everything to Firth, an English teacher. Goode’s family know about the gay life style and enjoy spitefully excluding Firth and beating back the will. Firth comes near suicide, pulls back, just in time.
Here the women hid, and Nina has to break through a caregiver who loathes her as competition. There is much inexplicable imagery. As the film opens, Nina has a dream of herself as a child saving Madeline as a child. Black birds or crows come and go. Nina becomes violent and axes the daughter’s care to get the caregiver in trouble and fired. Gradually the daughter realizes there is something special here. When she first sees a photo of the two women together in Rome, she is revulsed, and puts her mother in a home where the mother is drugged into compliance. The caregiver and her son come and threaten Nina, and when she is out, destroy her things in her apartment insofar as they can and steal what money she has. My mother had a caregiver just like this desperate hard angry woman. Anne witnesses her mother try to come out of her stasis to reach Nina, and Nina try to run away with her. Anne thinks again, and chases her mother and her mother’s lover back to her mother’s apartment, where they are quietly dancing together. The movie ends with Anne banging frantically on the door, saying she didn’t understand.
There is hope. Anne has brought a kitten for her mother while the mother was with the caregiver. We see it in the hall and may hope Madeline’s money will be enough and they will be left alone again. Such movies do show up the ratcheted up cheer of All Creatures and Small – how much truer to life this. Real anxiety Real trouble. It’s about aging and loneliness. There are as fine reviews of this as The Lost Daughter.
And two thoughtful interviews conducted by Isabelle Huppert (a fine French actress. One with the director, this his first film. The other between Huppert and Sukowa: listen to two actresses talk shop It’s very unusual to talk candidly about the problem of enacting, emulating having sex in front of a camera.
Don’t throw your evening out to become an object sold by one company to another to sell awful products at enormous prices.
I conclude with an excellent essay-review by Elif Batuman of the film-oeuvre of Celine Sciamma. Batuman shows how Sciamma is seeking out and inventing a new grammar of cinema to express a feminist and feminine quest for an authentic existence as a woman experiencing a full life: Now You See Me. I quote from it on The Portrait of a Lady on Fire:
The “female gaze,” a term often invoked by and about Sciamma, is an analogue of the “male gaze,” popularized in the nineteen-seventies to describe the implied perspective of Hollywood movies—the way they encouraged a viewer to see women as desirable objects, often fragmented into legs, bosoms, and other nonautonomous morsels. For Sciamma, the female gaze operates on a cinematographic level, for example in the central sex scene in “Portrait.” Héloïse and Marianne are both in the frame, they seem unconcerned by their own nudity, the camera is stationary—not roving around their bodies—and there isn’t any editing. The goal is to share their intimacy—not to lurk around ogling it, or to collect varied perspectives on it.
Mira Nair (filming A Suitable Boy) and Celinne Sciamma
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Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
How about this for a six week course:
Animal Tales for Adults
I’ve thought of a series of texts I could assign, together with articles on animal rights and present day animal abuse for a 6-8 week course.
Begin with Woolf’s Flush and Frances Power Cobbe’s The confessions of a Lost Dog; go on to Paul Austin’s Timbuctoo and A.N. Wilson’s Stray; switch gears slightly to David Garnett’s Lady into Fox and Goodall’s Ten Years with Chimpanzees; end on Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation and Sy Montgomery’s Walking with Great Apes
I could show or advise Frederick Wisemen’s Primates (only a bit of this as it’s horrifying what academics do to animals and a recent film called Cow by Andrea Arnold
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11548822/
Interesting reviews, Ellen. I am looking forward to season 4 of Outlander as soon as it’s on Netflix. Portrait of a Lady on Fire looks good also.
Only movie I watched lately was the 1939 Wuthering Heights on Valentine’s Day. I fell asleep partway through but woke in time to watch Cathy die in Heathcliff’s arms. Despite the changes from the book, it’s still my favorite film of the story.
Tyle
I’m making efforts to keep the blogs shorter — both for my self and to attract more readership. I might say more interesting or original things (when I get deeper) but to many maybe I’m just tedious. They don’t care about what I care about. I made my points about women’s films and put at least 6 to watch before the reader.
My favorite of the Wuthering Heights films has changed I saw a 1978 one that is just terrific and is the best I think — not well known; what it add is the second half of the book done just as passionately.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuthering_Heights_(1978_TV_serial)
There is book just on Wuthering Heights films and I was chuffed to see this 1978 one commended as one of the best. The 1939 is moving and (again to me) it’s sort of redone in 1992 with Ralph Fiennes and Juliet Binoche, only again (as in 1978) the second part of the book is done justice to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Bront%C3%AB's_Wuthering_Heights
Ellen
Shall I confess I got a Valentine’s present — presents (!): a sturdy book of goods essays on 18th century topics of interest to me, a Nature calendar (lots of flowers, landscapes, animals) and a card. Without my having to prompt him at all.
I’ve omitted Almodovar’s Parallel Women. Here’s Colm Toibin’s excellent review from the NYRB, March 10, 2022:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/03/10/the-secrets-of-others-pedro-almodovar-parallel-mothers/
I meant to send this excellent review to everyone and only remembered just now: it is also about the results of dictatorships (fascistic and otherwise): I remember at the end of Great Gatsby, Gatsby asking Tom, the happy warrior capitalist, but what old boy are we going to do with all these dead bodies …..
When the Spanish parliament enacted an amnesty law in 1977, two years after the death of General Francisco Franco, it seemed to fulfill a demand of prodemocracy groups. After all, one of the main slogans roared out by demonstrators in marches throughout Spain was ¡Amnestía y Libertad! Amnesty was associated with freedom; it meant that political prisoners could be released and many enemies of the old regime could return from exile.
It was an exciting time in Spain. I remember being in a taxi in Barcelona one Saturday night in April 1977 when the driver let out a huge, joyous cry and started to honk the horn in excitement. It felt as though his team had won the soccer championship. Soon I discovered, however, that he was excited because news had just come in that the Communist Party had been legalized in Spain and its candidates would run in the forthcoming elections.
The previous year, the government had grudgingly allowed the Catalans to celebrate their national day. In 1977 an estimated million people marched for Catalan autonomy, some even demanding Catalan independence. At this time, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, led by Felipe González, became the main opposition party and would take power in 1982.
It made sense that no one wanted to talk about the past. The present was too filled with possibility. And politics somehow allowed people to ignore politics. I remember a wild party in Barcelona on the night that Franco died. I remember that no one even mentioned the dead dictator. There was too much else to talk about. Even referring to him and his cohorts in passing would have breached an important code.
It seemed that Spaniards in their late teens and early twenties had shrugged Franco off. They had worked out a way of growing up under a repressive regime without paying much attention to it. Their parents, a generation before, had also worked out a way of surviving. One of the main tools was silence. Again and again, as though it were a kind of alibi, people insisted that the civil war was never mentioned in their houses, even if their parents or grandparents had been involved.
The amnesty law of 1977, approved with an overwhelming majority of both left- and right-wing parties, also covered crimes committed by the Franco government. At the time, no one saw the dangers of this. There was, in any case, no appetite for endless show trials of elderly generals. This would have soaked up energy that was needed to create a civil society in Spain.
A generation was emerging that really had no interest in what happened before they came of age. Once, when a young Spanish poet discovered that I had written a sad novel about the aftermath of the civil war, he shook his head in pity and said, “No one has any interest in the sad aftermath of the civil war.”
Soon after the arrival of democracy, Pedro Almodóvar became the high priest of brash drama, high color, and great excitement in the new Spain. His characters invented themselves and the world around them. They took the sexual revolution as seriously as others did the political changes. In Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom (1980), his first feature film, one character notes the “wave of eroticism sweeping the country.” As if making a declaration of independence, there is a competition called General Erections. When Pepi (Carmen Maura) is raped by a policeman, the revenge she and her friends plan is to discover the strange, secret sexual longings of the policeman’s wife, and thus to undermine his marriage. Rather than going to the authorities or protesting in the streets, they make it sharply personal. When the film was first shown, these images of a policeman’s wife and the sort of sexual excitement she really wanted caused much laughter and were deeply subversive.
Motherhood is one of Almodóvar’s great subjects. In What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984), Gloria (Maura) has to put up with her mother-in-law, as in Matador (1986) Ángel (Antonio Banderas) has to deal with his religious mother. In High Heels (1991) Rebeca (Victoria Abril) is living in the shadow of her mother (Marisa Paredes), a famous singer, having married her mother’s ex-lover. In these films, mothers are not haunting presences or aspects of the past that must be reckoned with, but a sort of nuisance, someone who needs to be pushed out of the way. In later films, however, such as All About My Mother (1999), Almodóvar dramatized motherhood with much greater complexity.
His characters have a habit of brushing aside problems that on their own might seem too obvious. For example, in Law of Desire (1987), in which two characters in a love triangle are gay, they suffer none of the guilt or repression that might be easily imagined. They have other things on their minds, as do characters in his work who are victims. They evade the claims of their victimhood in order to do something more interesting.
In Volver (2006) Almodóvar allows the bygone generation, including a dead mother, to haunt those still alive. Pain and Glory (2019) is elegiac and self-interrogating. One of the characters, a version of the director himself played by Banderas, is solitary, melancholy, uneasy. In both films, Almodóvar, having spent much of his career disrupting the very notion of home, seems ready to deal with the possibility that he and those around him actually have a past, a place they come from that is not just a result of their dreams.
In 2019 Almodóvar was one of the producers of a documentary, The Silence of Others, about the effect of the amnesty law of 1977. Written and directed by Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar, it dealt with the silence and secrecy imposed on Spain after the civil war.
All over the country, to this day, are unmarked mass graves of people executed during the civil war by Franco’s forces. In 2007, with the Socialists in power, the Historical Memory Law was enacted; its aim was
to recognize and broaden the rights favoring those who suffered persecution or violence—for political, ideological, or religious reasons—during the Civil War and the Dictatorship, [and to] promote moral reparation and the recovery of personal and family memory.
The Socialists then began to fund the search for mass graves and to support the exhumation and reburial of the dead. But this was discontinued by Mariano Rajoy’s right-wing government, which held power between 2011 and 2018. Last year, it was announced by the Socialist government, which returned to power in 2018, that grants for exhumations would be resumed.
In The Silence of Others, we see an old woman getting a mouth swab so that her DNA can be checked against that of her father, who may be buried in a mass grave. We see the king and two right-wing prime ministers, including Rajoy, denouncing the idea of revisiting the past. We see another old woman, María Martín, point to a road and declare that it is built on top of a mass grave where her mother, executed in the civil war, is buried.
Almodóvar’s latest film, Parallel Mothers, begins with Janis (Penélope Cruz), a trendy photographer living in Madrid, consulting Arturo (Israel Elejalde), a forensic anthropologist, about the possibility of getting private funding for the opening up of the mass grave in which her great-grandfather is buried. Soon, courtesy of Arturo, she is pregnant and sharing a hospital room with a teenage girl, Ana (Milena Smit), who is also about to give birth.
This new film begins as a story about mothers. Ana’s mother (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) is an actress who is too busy to bother with her. Janis’s mother was a hippie who died of a drug overdose. They are both motherless women venturing uneasily into motherhood. But this is also a film about identity and notions of belonging. When Janis begins to suspect that the child she has taken home from the hospital may not be hers, she swabs her mouth, that of her child, and that of Ana, just as the old woman in search of her father’s remains in The Silence of Others has her mouth swabbed.
Before moving Janis and the film itself into new territory, Almodóvar creates her and the world she inhabits with the sort of flair and zeal we have become used to in his films. Her apartment is like a character, with its ornaments, red furniture, and sense of brazen newness.
Because of the way she dresses and the style of her apartment, because of her friendship with the fashionable Elena (Rossy de Palma) and her line of work, Janis has all the trappings of a classic Almodóvar heroine. Slowly it becomes clear, however, that she has not gained strength from any process of self-invention. She is as fragile as Salvador in Pain and Glory. She never knew her father and has no photographs of him. She has no siblings. Elena, it turns out, is not a friend from the Madrid social world but from their childhood village. There is a moment when Janis, having found out that she is not really the mother of the baby she brought home, appears in shadow, and that seems right. Much of her presence is shadowy.
When Janis realizes that she has the wrong child, her silence, at first, is almost understandable, but then it becomes shameful when we see it from Ana’s point of view. This, in a very subtle and organic way, echoes what happened to the victims of the civil war in the new Spain. It is as though Almodóvar is seeking to show, at the most personal level, how easy it is, how tempting, to conceal the truth.
Parallel Mothers is set in 2016. When Janis asks Arturo for his help finding the grave, he replies that the government has withdrawn all the subsidies for discovering the bodies of the civil war dead. “Prime Minister Rajoy,” he adds, “boasted in an interview that in the state budget there were zero euros for historical memory.” Followers of Almodóvar’s films will notice something new: he has mentioned the name of a prime minister.
It is not, however, as though he has been fully apolitical up to now. Moving sexual strangeness toward the light of normality has been for him a deeply political act. Much of the time, in his own quirky way, Almodóvar has been a moralist opposed to dishonesty and hypocrisy; his characters work toward a recognition of aspects of themselves that were hidden or forbidden.
Despite his fascination with the present moment, in previous films such as Volver and Pain and Glory Almodóvar has dramatized the rituals around death. Volver opens in a cemetery where the local women are cleaning the gravestones. It includes the wake and funeral of an old aunt. In Pain and Glory, there are many scenes between the mother and son that are tender, when all irony has been cast aside. In one of them, the mother (Julieta Serrano) tells her son with some emphasis how she would like to be buried, what she would like to wear on her head, how she would like to have her feet bare and unbound as she goes into her grave.
Janis in Parallel Mothers emerges from shadow most strongly in an argument with Ana when Ana fails to understand why she cares so much about the hidden graves. In her rage, her passionate response, Janis becomes Almodóvar’s version of Antigone. She sees the burial of the dead as a sacred duty.
Of the older generation of her family, all the men are dead; only one woman is still alive, Aunt Brígida (Serrano). As they go back to the village to witness the exhumations, for which they have received private funding, we see Aunt Brígida, who is old and dying, surrounded by her family. There is a wonderful moment when one of her granddaughters says that Brígida, who was four months old when her father—Janis’s great-grandfather—was executed, actually remembers him. Brígida immediately corrects her. She remembers only what her mother told her. She has no interest in mythologizing the past. And like the mother in Pain and Glory, she is clear about how she wishes to be buried. She wants to be interred with her family, and for this she will need her father’s body to be found and exhumed.
Brígida, too, must have her mouth swabbed. In the scene at the mass grave, the workers sift clay to locate small objects such as teeth or buttons, recalling a similar scene from The Silence of Others. In a moment of real dramatic force, the people of the village walk in unison toward the mass grave where the skeletons have been numbered.
The group is led not only by Janis and Ana but also by Elena, who carries a photo of a relative buried there. The image of Rossy de Palma, whom Almodóvar has used in the past for some of his most gorgeously outrageous roles, as a woman from a village seeking justice for the dead gives us some idea of how far he has come.
In Pain and Glory and Parallel Mothers, Almodóvar’s protagonists live alone. They are alert to the power of the past more than they are interested in the present moment. In the earlier film, Banderas plays Salvador as a figure who has become tired and sad, whose appetite for life has waned. Penélope Cruz’s vulnerability and solitude, on the other hand, make her forceful. She has not become sad. At the end of the film, as the graves are opened, we learn that she is pregnant again. What might appear to be Almodóvar’s most political film gently nudges the characters back toward private life, just as some version of harmony or resolution is restored to their broken world.
[…] re-watched The portrait of a Lady on Fire, (with French subtitles). Blogged about it, together with Deux (Two of Us) and Capernaum on my blog tonight. Women’s films. True […]
[…] and Herriot’s books. I also never posted on the second season as a whole, only giving it honorable mention as among a series of fine women’s films for 2022. This third season I’ve gotten to the point that I watch it as appointment TV, Sunday nights […]