LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Atlantic: How Female Directors Could, at Last, Infiltrate Hollywood: Go Indie First

Kathryn Bigelow directs "Zero Dark Thirty."

[Editor’s Note: the full version of the article below appears today on the front page of The Atlantic.]

Half the films at Sundance this year were directed by women, compared with 4.4 percent of studio movies—but those proportions seem set to change.

By Govindini Murty. At the Oscars ceremony this weekend, not only will Kathryn Bigelow’s name not be read out on the list of the nominees for a Best Director Oscar, but for the 81st time in 85 years, no other woman’s will be, either. And while blame for Bigelow’s Oscar snub is being laid on Zero Dark Thirty‘ s perceived controversial politics, the lack of any other women nominees for a directing award exposes a more fundamental problem: the scarcity of women playing major roles both off screen and on screen in Hollywood.

Even though women buy 50 percent of movie tickets and form a majority of the U.S. population, only 4.4 percent of Hollywood’s top 100 studio movies are directed by women in any given year. The disproportionately small number of female directors in Hollywood seems to have a direct impact on the number of women seen on-screen. A 2010 USC Annenberg study led by Stacy L. Smith notes that movies with male directors featured only 29.3 percent female actors, whereas in movies with at least one female director, that number rose to 44.6 percent.

But while this year’s Oscars may reinforce Hollywood’s long-entrenched gender gap, women directors appear to be reaching a critical mass in the independent film world—a development that may soon lead to changes in the mainstream industry.

LFM's Govindini Murty and director Lake Bell at Sundance 2013.

At the recent Sundance Film Festival, a record 50 percent of the films in the U.S. Dramatic Competition were directed by women. Overall, of the 119 films at Sundance this year, 34 percent had female directors. And for the second year in a row, a woman (Jill Soloway) won the Best Director Award in the U.S. Dramatic Competition, following last year’s winner Ava DuVernay.

A new USC Annenberg study co-authored by Stacy L. Smith, Katherine Pieper, and Marc Choueiti confirms that there are more opportunities for women directors in the indie world versus the studio world. Commissioned by the Sundance Institute and Women in Film Los Angeles, the study examined 820 feature films screened at Sundance from 2002 to 2012. The study found that 22.2 percent of the festival’s U.S. narrative-competition films and 41.1 percent of the U.S. documentary-competition films were directed by women.

What accounts for the gap between Sundance and Hollywood when it comes to women? Smith says that ingrained attitudes about female directors and stars play a big role: “In Hollywood, women in front of or behind the camera still seem to be perceived as a risky investment.”

>>>TO READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE  PLEASE VISIT THE ATLANTIC.

Posted on February 21st, 2013 at 8:43am.

LFM Reviews Call Girl @ Film Comment Selects 2013

By Joe Bendel. The 1970’s really were swinging for Sweden, especially for the government. At the time, Olof Palme’s Minister of Justice, Lennart Geijer, was pushing a measure to largely emasculate laws against pedophilia, until he was caught up in the prostitution scandal that would subsequently carry his name. As it happens, under-aged girls were involved. It was a sordid but bipartisan national scandal that makes great fodder for Mikael Marcimain’s real life political thriller Call Girl, which screens as a selection of Film Comment Selects 2013.

Mere days before what is expected to be a close election, an American actress suspiciously resembling Jane Fonda sings the praises of the progressive PM never specifically identified as Palme on television. Meanwhile, crusading vice cop John Sandberg types his report with a purpose. At every step, the state security service has interfered with his investigation, as viewers soon learn via flashback.

Iris Dahl is too much for her mother to handle, assuming she ever tried. Fortunately, in liberal Sweden she can simply deposit her problem child in a juvenile home that looks more like a hippy commune. Sneaking out is a snap, especially when her cousin Sonja Hansson arrives to mutually reinforce their delinquency. Unfortunately, in the course of their partying, they encounter Dagmar Glans. A madam with a powerful clientele, Glans recruits the fourteen year-old girls for her stable.

At first, the cousins are seduced by the easy money and flashy lifestyle Glans provides. Inevitably though, the work takes a toll on them, physically and emotionally. Any ideas they might have about quitting are quickly dispelled by the procurer and her enforcer, Glenn. After all, the girls could recognize some rather powerful politicians. Initially, Sandberg is oblivious to Glans’ young working girls and the notoriety of her clients. He is simply trying to bust a vice queen with apparent connections. However, when his wiretaps come in with conspicuous gaps, Sandberg and his hours-from-retirement partner start to suspect the scope of the conspiracy afoot.

Call Girl resembles a 1970’s film in more ways than just soundtrack and décor. In an icily detached manner, it presents a deeply cynical view of the Swedish government, definitely including St. Olof’s administration. Nor does it take leering pleasure from Glans’ dirty business. Marcimain leaves little doubt Dahl and Hansson are grossly exploited by just about everyone – and the state social welfare establishment simply looked the other way, for fear of “stigmatizing” them. We even witness a strategy session for Geijer’s proposal to effectively normalize sexual relations with minors.

With credits including television miniseries and second unit work on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Marcimain was well prepared to tell an intricately plotted, richly detailed, multi-character tale of intrigue. Despite the very specifically Swedish circumstances, it is always easy to follow. Somehow he also clearly conveys the unsavory acts the cousins are forced to participate in, without reveling in the luridness.

Frighteningly seductive in a weird, matronly way, Pernilla August’s Glans vividly shows how the devious exploit others and insinuate themselves with the powerful. It is a big, bravura portrayal of a user. As the used, Sofia Karemyr is shockingly powerful portraying Dahl’s wilted innocence. Risking type-casting (having appeared as Machiavellian game-players in A Royal Affair and Tinker Tailor), Danish-Swedish actor David Dencik again turns up as government fixer, Aspen Thorin.

Call Girl is a great period production that never romanticizes its era. Smart, tense, and unexpectedly pointed in its critique of the Swedish justice system, Call Girl is highly recommended for fans of complex political drama. It screens this today (2/20) and tomorrow (2/21) at the Howard Gilman Theater as part of Film Comment Selects 2013.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on February 20th, 2013 at 1:17pm.

Syrian Hospitality: LFM Reviews Inescapable

By Joe Bendel. Assad’s Syria is not exactly a family friendly tourist spot. Unfortunately, a former secret policeman’s reticence only intrigued his grown daughter. When she disappears in Damascus under mysterious circumstances, he must temporarily return to his former homeland and life of deception in Ruba Nadda’s Inescapable, which opens this Friday in New York at the IFC Center.

While the Assads are never mentioned by name, their portraits are everywhere in Inescapable’s Damascus. The current civil war never intrudes into the narrative, but the oppressive atmosphere is unmistakable. Once a promising young operative, Adib Abdel Kareem had to leave Syria in a hurry, for reasons he and his ex-comrade Sayid Abd Al-Aziz understand only too well. That is why the senior intelligence officer is slightly surprised when Kareem shows up in his office, demanding he help the convicted traitor find his daughter.

Kareem already has the reluctant help of Fatima, the former teammate and lover Kareem was forced to abandon, for whom Al-Aziz has long carried a torch. While the desperate father checks in with the Canadian embassy simply so his presence in Syria will be officially recorded, he soon discovers that the smarmy consular officer Paul Ridge is actually well acquainted with his daughter. It will become a rather tricky affair, involving a high ranking pedophile in the Syrian government and Kareem’s old Soviet spymaster colleague.

Born in Canada, the half-Syrian Nadda obviously has an affinity for the country’s culture and people, but no affection for the current government. As in the unusually elegant Cairo Time, she sets the mood well. Unfortunately, she is not a master of grabby thriller pacing. As much as viewers will want to embrace Inescapable as an art-house Taken, there is simply too much back-tracking and narrative down time. Frankly, Nadda’s screenplay probably would have benefited from some input from a genre hack. The power struggles going on in the upper echelons of power are potentially juicy stuff, but the film tends to lose momentum in rather workaday sequences.

Alexander Siddig is a charismatic screen presence, who does a credible slow burn as Kareem. In contrast, Marisa Tomei’s Fatima just does not have the right edginess for a femme fatale or the purposefulness of woman conspiring against a despotic regime. In truth, it is not really clear what she is there for, besides picking up Kareem at the border. However, Israeli Oded Fehr (a veteran of the Israeli Navy, El-Al security, and The Mummy franchise) brings some roguish style points to the film as Al-Aziz.

Largely shot in South Africa instead of Syria and its neighbors, for obvious reasons, Nadda and cinematographer Luc Montpellier still make it feels like it was filmed in the bazaars and back alleys of Damascus. Indeed, the look and vibe of the picture are right on target, but the tension is sometimes lacking. Still, Inescapable is certainly topical, earning Nadda credit for essentially scooping Hollywood. For those hungry for Middle East intrigue, Inescapable opens this Friday (2/22) in New York at the IFC Center.

LFM GRADE: C+

Posted on February 20th, 2013 at 1:15pm.

LFM Reviews Dormant Beauty @ Film Comment Selects 2013

From "Dormant Beauty."

By Joe Bendel. Don’t call Eluana Englaro the Italian Terri Schiavo.  The latter case was scandalously misreported by the drive-by media, as civil libertarian Nat Hentoff passionately decried at the time. At least Englaro’s medical decisions were made by a loved one with no conflicts of interest. That certainly did not stop Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi from getting involved, thereby guaranteeing considerable drama. Director-co-writer Marco Bellocchio portrays the resulting media feeding frenzy through the eyes of three sets of fictional characters in Dormant Beauty (trailer here), which screens as a selection of Film Comment Selects 2013.

After a prolonged legal battle, Englaro’s father has transferred her to a private clinic in Udine, where her feeding will be discontinued. She really is in a persistent vegetative state. Berlusconi is not taking this lying down. Legislation has been introduced to save Englaro. Senator Uliano Beffardi intends to buck his party and vote against it. His reasons are personal. He once had to make a similar choice for his late wife, but his relationship with his pro-life daughter Maria has been strained ever since.

The Englaro case also hits close to home for the retired actress known simply as “Divine Mother.” She has preserved her beloved comatose daughter for years in hopes she will eventually wake-up. Meanwhile, Dr. Padillo is not following the case nearly as closely as his colleagues, but he is determined to prevent a recently admitted drug addict from killing herself.

Bellocchio applies a dramatic fairness doctrine to partisans on both sides, except the former PM. Did he really say Englaro looks healthy enough to “give birth to a son?” Afraid so. Look, say what you will about Berlusconi, but the man is never dull. Frankly, if Bellocchio had anything nice to say about him, he would probably be drummed out of every directors’ guild. In contrast, his depiction of the senator and his daughter is far from simplistic.

In fact, Maria is a wholly sympathetic character, who strikes up an unlikely romance with Roberto, the long-suffering brother of a wildly unstable pro-euthanasia demonstrator. Their bipartisan connection is one of the most appealing courtships seen on film in years. Likewise, her relationship with her father evolves in ways that are mature, believable, and satisfying.

From "Dormant Beauty."

Unfortunately, the other two story arcs are not nearly as rewarding. Divine Mother mainly seems to be in the film to compensate for Roberto’s creepy brother. Granted, she is played by the film’s biggest star, Isabelle Huppert, and valid reasons are established for cartoonish Catholicism. Nonetheless, the deck is clearly stacked against her. While her sequences are a tonal mishmash, they still most closely approach the operatic sweep of Bellocchio’s kind of awesome Vincere.

Considerably more engaging, the scenes shared by the doctor and his suicidal patient are well acted (by Bellocchio’s brother Pier Gregorio and Maya Sansa) and ring with honesty. They just feel like they were spliced in to further obscure Bellocchio’s personal position. That is a worthy impulse, but it would be unnecessary had he just focused on the Beffardis, whom most viewers will consider the primary subjects anyway.

Toni Servillo is absolutely fantastic as Beffardi, a decent man totally befuddled by the modest importance bestowed on him late in life. He never plays the part as a mouthpiece for a certain position, but as a world weary widower father. By the same token, Alba Rohrwacher demonstrates perfect pitch as the rebelliously devout Maria. She develops some palpable opposites-attract chemistry with Michele Riondino’s Roberto and gives the audience hope we can all grow and develop.

Dormant Beauty is sometimes a great film. There is some wickedly funny satire of the Italian senators that does not necessarily skew left or right, simply skewering the political class instead. Arguably, this is a case where less would have been more. Recommended for Servillo, Rohrwacher, and the compelling vibe of the Udine protests, Dormant Beauty is recommended for fans of Italian cinema and political drama when it screens today (2/20), Friday (2/22), and Sunday (2/24) at the Howard Gilman Theater as part of Film Comment Selects 2013.

LFM GRADE: B-

Posted on February 20th, 2013 at 1:14pm.

LFM Reviews China Concerto @ MoMA’s 2013 Documentary Fortnight

By Joe Bendel. Something as profoundly traumatic as the Cultural Revolution cannot simply be papered over. It hangs over the national psyche, like a malevolent ghost. As much as present day China embraces globalism and crony capitalism, the excesses of the Mao years still have a bearing on it. Indeed, it is part of the internal contradictions Bo Wang analyzes in his documentary-essay China Concerto, which screens as part of MoMA’s 2013 Documentary Fortnight.

A film of observation and rumination, Concerto has a pseudo-epistolary structure, featuring a woman’s disembodied voice reading a man’s dispatches from China. The writer is not a passive viewer, having trained himself to dissect imagery and look for the telling details nobody is supposed to notice. He is in the right place for it. Aside from the movie clips and newscast excerpts incorporated for illustrative purposes, Concerto was almost entirely shot in Chongqing, the China’s version of Chicago. While Bo Wang was shooting, Bo Xilai’s neo-Maoist “Red Culture” campaign was in full swing, but the Chongqing party secretary would soon be removed after the Wang Lijun scandal brought international media attention to rumors of extensive corruption.

He certainly captured images that are both striking and ironic. Perhaps his richest vein of material is the park where viewers witness couples dancing under a model of Mount Rushmore and an elderly man reclining near a Statue of Liberty. Yet, tucked away, there is also a cemetery dedicated exclusively to Red Guards that remains padlocked and shunned. According to the woman’s tantalizingly vague narration, it seems many of those interned were involved in an incident of cannibalism, which has since been consigned to the memory hole. One suspects this park could easily be the subject of an entire documentary feature.

It is absolutely fascinating to watch Concerto apply the techniques of deconstruction to official state propaganda. The stand-in for the filmmaker’s stand-in explicitly argues that China’s obsession with spectacle is intended to mask and empower it Communist rulers. It also offers trenchant analysis of the capitalism promoted by the state, a mutation described as “collective capitalism,” in contrast to the western individualistic variety. The implications for the individual in Chinese society are obvious. That is one reason the correspondent always focuses on a single individual when watching sprawling propaganda pageants.

Indeed, Concerto’s concern for the overwhelmed individual is rather noble, in a genuinely subversive way. As if its indie bona fides needed more burnishing, China Concerto holds the distinction of being a selection of the 2012 Beijing Independent Film Festival, which was shutdown not once, but three times by the government. This is a film that simply encourages audiences to think, but some might find that threatening. Highly recommended for sophisticated viewers, China Concerto screens during MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight this Wednesday (2/20) and Thursday (2/21), with the director present for Q&A both nights. For Georgians, it also screens March 27th at Kennesaw State and March 28th at Emory, as part of the well curated Independent Chinese Film Series.

LFM GRADE: A

Posted on February 18th, 2013 at 2:48pm.

LFM Reviews Tzvetanka @ MoMA’s 2013 Documentary Fortnight

By Joe Bendel. Tzvetanka Gosheva was an oncology specialist forbidden to tell her patients they had cancer. This is how medicine was practiced in Bulgaria during the Soviet era. It wasn’t pretty. Gosheva endured the horrors of war and subsequent absurdities of Communist oppression, living to tell the tale to her filmmaker grandson Youlian Tabakov in Tzvetanka, which screens again today as a selection of MoMA’s 2013 Documentary Fortnight.

Born in 1926 to a prosperous shop-owner, Gosheva’s family would carry the “Bourgeoisie” label like an albatross during the Communist years. While she recalls vivid memories of the bombings, her real experiences with terror began post-war when her father was picked up for a “brief interrogation.” Despite eventually having both parents branded class enemies and sentenced to labor camps, Gosheva somehow was admitted to university. She wanted medical studies but was initially accepted as an English student, which seems doubly ironic given her suspect background, but that was how the Socialist system worked.

Gosheva passed away in the late 2000’s, but she obviously left behind an extensive oral history and some surprisingly playful footage (sometime bordering on the surreal). Tabakov does not take a traditional talking head approach. Instead, he creates impressionistic imagery to accompany his grandmother’s recollections. Sometimes they are rather whimsical, but probably the most striking visual is the blood droplets turning into a crimson rain (not unlike the original Shining trailer) that perfectly fit her discussion of the post-war purges and show trials her parents were caught up in.

At times, Tabakov really pushes the hipster envelope with his post-modern visual style. However, he always gives Gosheva her full say, which ultimately keeps the film grounded in reality. Viewers quickly learn to appreciate her resiliency and keen powers of observation. She makes no secret of her contempt for the so-called “former Communists,” whom she calls out for deliberately undermining Bulgarian democracy. Bulgaria will miss her, even if most of her countrymen do not realize it.

At least Tabakov has preserved her memory and her spirit. His Tzvetanka might be a bit eccentric as eulogies go, but avoiding the maudlin seems perfectly in keeping with its subject. Recommended for students of the Soviet era as well as those fascinated by intensely personal family histories, Tzvetanka screens again this afternoon (2/18) as part of MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on February 18th, 2013 at 2:47pm.