A scene from Angeles Cruz’s NUDO MEXTECO. Photo courtesy of SFFILM
In Nudo Mixteco, we visit an indigenous Mixtec village in Southern Mexico and get three dramas for the price of one. It’s the annual festival, and three long-absent locals return home. One is there for her mom’s funeral. another to intervene in her daughter’s welfare and the third has just decided that’s time to come back home.
Nudo is Spanish for “knot”, and the three stories form a loose braid. As in Kieślowski’s Blue/Red/White, the characters in each plot thread can be spotted in the others.
In each story, the women face constraints of patriarchy and traditional culture. An out lesbian has built a life in the city, but her father in the village cannot accept her sexuality, and even blames it for her mother’s death. Another woman also works in the city, and has left her daughter to be cared for by her sister in the village; reports of the daughter’s behavior trigger concern stemming from the mom’s own childhood sexual abuse.
In the third story, a village man has been working in the US. He had promised his wife that he would be gone six months, but it’s been three years. He expects that he can resume their lives as before, but his wife has moved on. Each feels betrayed by the other, and the village is convened to reach a community decision on a just outcome.
Nudo Mixteco is the debut feature for writer-director Angeles Cruz, who has won Ariels (Mexico’s Oscars) for her short films. Cruz is an accomplished actress, who was nominated for a best actress Ariel in 2018.
I screened Nudo Mixteco at SFFILM, where it won a jury award.
A scene from Angeles Cruz’s NUDO MEXTECO. Photo courtesy of SFFILM
Inna Blokhina’s visually stunning documentary She Is the Ocean explores passion and possibilities. The passion is for celebrating the world’s oceans through science and sport. The possibilities are the great achievements that women can and have achieved in its pursuit.
She Is the Ocean introduces us to a stable of women with astonishing accomplishments, including:
Keala Kennelly, the woman’s pro surfing champ who now competes in men’s pro surfing events.
Andre Moller, who surfs the monster wave Jaws and paddle boards on the open ocean between Hawaiian Islands.
Anna Bader, a championship cliff diver whose highest dive has been from almost eight stories and who trains while pregnant.
Marine biologist Ocean Ramsey, known as the Shark Whisperer.
Teen surf prodigy Coco Ho, who by age twenty has been voted the world’s second most popular female surfer.
Oceanographer Sylvia Earle, still at it 65 years after her first dive, who led the first team of female aquanauts in 1970 and set the record for a single 1000-meter dive.
These women are tied together by their passion. Ramsay says, “I feel more comfortable and more graceful under water. I spend more time with the sharks than my family.“
This Spring, well after She Is the Ocean was completed, Brazilian pro surfer Maya Gabeira conquered a record wave in Portugal, so a woman now holds the Guinness record for surfing the biggest wave ever.
Cinta Hansel in SHE IS THE OCEAN
But the core of She Is the Ocean – and its passion and possibilities – is Balinese Cinta Hansel, the ten-year-old middle daughter of surfer and board shaper Bruce Hansel. Since she was eight, Cinta has aspired to be a world class surfer. Her dad has helped her, and she has become a prodigy. She is absolutely determined, and the joy she feels in the surf is infectious.
Inna Blokhina and her team of cinematographers and editors have created a visual masterpiece in glorious 4K. The underwater and surf shots are stunning. One “money shot” is of Ocean Ramsey getting a tow from a Great White. Another is Andrea Moller standing on her paddle board a few feet from the giant tail of a whale.
You can watch She Is Ocean on October 16 in a virtual screening from the Balboa, the Vogue and the Rafael in the Bay Area.
Prime Suspect, the perfect Labor Day weekend binge, pairs one of cinema’s greatest actresses, Helen Mirren, with one of the most compelling characters ever on episodic television, Detective Jane Tennison. At once a sensational crime show and a high brow character study, the seven seasons of Prime Suspect follow a female protagonist over fifteen years.
Prime Suspect is a set of nine separate stories over 25 hours. Jane Tennison’s career spans from Chief Detective Inspector to Superintendent to Chief Superintendent. The episodes were created between 1991 and 20O5, and Helen Mirren herself ages from 46 to 60 in the role.
The core of Prime Suspect is the character of Jane Tennison, forged by writer Lynda La Plante and Mirren. Jane is a driven woman, in a career that ranges from when women cops were unwelcome novelties to more politically correct times. In the entire span, Jane is, at best, barely tolerated.
Jane gives as well as she gets. She can force her superiors to promote her by using the same heavy-handed methods they use to suppress her.
Indeed, each Prime Suspect story has multiple threads of conflict. There is, of course, Jane against the criminal she is trying to catch. At the same time, Jane is being distracted and hampered by forces inside her own department. And Jane is in a constant battle to hold herself together amid overbearing stress.
Jane Tennison is a solitary figure, alone with her demons. She faces the daily challenges to her career survival and advancement with an ever-prickly demeanor.
Jane is a person of overwhelming ambition. In the very first season, it’s clear that she cannot advance by being pleasant and waiting her turn. She recognizes that sometimes she has to be unpleasant, and she will need to seize advancement at other’s expense; (in season 3, she receives a critical favor from a peer and then swipes his dream job).
Jane Tennison is also a fully sexual Woman of a Certain Age, but career rock stars like Jane can’t have it all. Her obsession with career leaves a trail of relationship carnage. At one point, Jane has fallen in love with the one man who gets her and adores her, but she has learned about herself and about life and…
And there’s always too much stress. Jane smokes too much and drinks too much. In Prime Suspect 3, her jaw is constantly pounding away on nicotine gum. In one later episode, she drops into her neighborhood market to buy four microwaveable frozen dinners and two fifths of whisky.
At first, Jane faces the most open and unapologetic misogyny, which evolves in later episodes into more veiled and insidious sexism. Being a flawed feminist hero is complicated. As the series evolves, Jane herself discriminates against a subordinate who is parenting. And she is betrayed by a female protege and, later, fights being forced out to pasture by a gender-integrated set of bosses.
Prime Suspect is always topical. Besides the ever-present sexism, the stories touch on race, abortion, postpartum depression, AIDS, sex work and pedophilia.
Most of the Prime Suspect plots are serial killer whodunits, and one story turns on whether she got it wrong in solving her breakthrough case. In one story, we know the culprit right away, but Jane is a race against the clock to prevent further victims.
In an astounding performance, Mirren grips us each time she fiercely deflects yet another indignity, as she waves her hand through her hair when she needs a reset from a setback and as her eyes reveal that she is connecting the dots. Her entire body coils in frustration and stiffens in insubordination. It’s a tour de force.
Between seasons of Prime Suspect, Helen Mirren was compiling an imposing body of work: The Madness of King George, Gosford Park and her Oscar-winning Elizabeth II in The Queen.
I believe that Mirren’s Jane ranks, with James Gandolfini’s run as Tony Soprano, as one of the greatest in episodic dramas. I’m guessing that Mirren was on screen for over twenty hours of Prime Suspect and that Gandolfini was on screen as Tony Sopranos for about 35 of The Sopranos‘ 86 hours. Of course, Prime Suspect’s Jane Tennison is distinguished from most episodic protagonists by being female and by aging fifteen years.
This is one of the best and most entertaining episodic series ever on television. All seven series of Prime Suspect can be streamed from Amazon (included with Prime).
The documentary Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blache pulls us out of ignorance about one of the most important pioneers of cinema. Alice Guy was one of the first movie directors, one of the first producers and one of the first studio heads. She was one of the inventors of movie comedy, use of color, special effects and a host of other aspects of filmmaking that we take for granted today. She worked in all three centers of early filmmaking – Paris, Fort Lee, New Jersey and Hollywood. And she was a woman.
Alice Guy had been almost erased from history precisely because – and only because – she was a woman. But if we don’t know about Alice Guy, we are as ignorant as if we didn’t know about the Lumieres and D.W. Griffith. This is essential movie history.
Fortunately, more and more of her films are being rediscovered – found, properly credited and preserved. At the bottom of this post, you can watch one of her films, The Consequences of Feminism. I didn’t even know that the word “feminism” was extant 114 years ago, but the film still has #MeToo topicality. It’s a withering parody of gender roles and male entitlement. In the film, men and women have taken each others’ conventional gender roles. Men perform the thankless household drudgery while the women smoke, drink and play pool. Throughout, the women are outrageously sexually harassing the men, kind of like Mad Men in reverse. Of course, the men finally rebel at all the mistreatment.
Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blache is currently free on WATCH TCM and can be streamed from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Here’s the entire seven minute film from 1906: The Consequences of Feminism:
There’s been a glimmer of feminism in many of the year’s best films. The most overtly feminist is Mustang, a fierce assault on the patriarchy of a traditional culture. But Brooklyn and Carolshare a feminist point of view. It’s no coincidence that the character that revolts in Ex Machinahas a female form. Ex Machina, Mustang and Brooklyn are are on my Best Movies of 2015.
Mad Max: Fury Road, a movie loved by critics (especially the female ones), is a rock ’em, sock’em action movie where women characters flee for their safety from male atrocities and then exact their revenge.
Testament of Youth is a biopic of the pioneering woman who leads a social movement. And from the 19th Century, there was the proto-feminist bodice ripper Far from the Madding Crowd. Chi-raq, Spike Lee’s modern inner city version of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, also has women taking charge of their society.
All of these movies are primarily about women and have female leads.
Even the protagonist’s love interest (usually a thankless and peripheral role) in Creed is accomplished and only interested in embracing the title character on her own terms.
What does this mean? Not that Hollywood is now the paradigm of gender equity. Just that there were some high quality movies this year, some women-centered, with a welcome perspective.
