Trailer Premiere: In Her Skin
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In Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), a flighty pop singer (Corinne Marchand) wanders the streets of Paris early one summer evening while she waits for the results of a biopsy. Twenty-four years ago, Molly Haskell called Cléo “an enduring portrait of a woman’s evolution from a shallow and superstitious child-woman to a person who can feel and express shock and anguish and finally empathy.” Haskell also noted that Varda’s second feature “dazzled when it opened, and looks even more timely today in its tackling of the fashionable subject of female identity as a function of how women see and are seen by the world.”
The subject remains fashionable. Starting Friday, New York’s Metrograph will present In Her Skin, a series of six films “which endeavor to create a visual language for their female protagonists’ stories that renders these women as subjects rather than objects.” Setting the oldest selection, Cléo, next to the newest, Audrey Diwan’s Happening (2021), makes for an intriguing contrast in that both films are set in France in the early 1960s.
Diwan does not set out to dazzle. Abortion would not be decriminalized in France until 1975, and Diwan’s adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s semi-autobiographical 2000 novel opens with a high school student, Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei), discovering that she’s pregnant. Over the course of several weeks, Anne grows increasingly desperate in her search for help from anyone willing to risk offering it. At the Film Stage, Mitchell Beaupre notes that there is “a vérité style to Diwan’s approach that places us right up against Anne for the majority of the film—a tight, boxed aspect ratio leads to the feeling of the walls closing in, her panic setting in just underneath the surface, observed in oft-used closeups of Vartolomei’s expressive face.”
I Am Not a Witch (2017) is another story of a young female character—very young, in this case—subjected to the demands, steeped in tradition, of the patriarchal order. “A defiantly uncategorizable mix of superstition, satire, and social anthropology, it tells the story of a small Zambian girl who is denounced as a witch and exiled to a witch camp, where she is alternately exploited and embraced,” wrote Jessica Kiang for Variety when Rungano Nyoni’s first feature premiered in Cannes. “Singular as that story might be, what makes I Am Not a Witch unique, however, is Nyoni’s abundant, maybe even overabundant directorial confidence. It’s rare and exhilarating that a new filmmaker arrives on the scene so sure of herself and so willing to take bold, counter-intuitive chances.” Nyoni won an Un Certain Regard award for Best Director in Cannes this year for her follow-up, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, which will screen next week at the New York Film Festival.
Earlier in 2017, Kiang wrote for the Playlist about Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman when it premiered in Berlin, where it won not only a Silver Bear for Best Screenplay but also a Teddy Award for Best Feature, a prize that proudly wears its status as “the oldest and most important queer film award in the world.” Daniela Vega plays a trans woman butting heads with the family of her late lover. Kiang found that “the superb Vega’s steady, liquid, fathomless gaze is so direct that we come to understand that behind it, behind the barricade of defenses she’s built up against an unfriendly world, she is no enigma at all: she is completely known to herself.”
This past weekend, the New Yorker’s Doreen St. Félix revisited Jane Campion’s “most ghettoized picture,” In the Cut (2003), starring Meg Ryan as Frannie, an English professor “whose erotic revitalization is ignited by her attraction to a cop” played by Mark Ruffalo. “Objections to the movie ranged from aesthetic to moral,” writes St. Félix, who notes that over the past twenty years, critical consensus has been coming around. “Where does the masterpiece allocation get us?” she asks. In the Cut “gets in our skin because of its imperfection . . . Frannie’s descent into paranoia and fear is our descent; her desire is our desire. In the Cut wants to remain kind of lost, as adrift from film canonization as its protagonist is from her own wants and needs.”
In January, Beatrice Loayza wrote an essential essay accompanying our release of a set of films Chantal Akerman made between 1968 and 1978. Je tu il elle (1975), Akerman’s first feature, “is divided into three parts and is based on one of Akerman’s first mental breakdowns,” writes Loayza. “The director immerses us in the present tense of these ordeals: a depressive episode unfolds silently, showing a woman (played by Akerman) lying around, writing, and eating sugar by the spoonful; later, a scene of a sexual encounter extends past ten minutes. These tests of endurance, without words, create the sustained intimacy of a stream-of-consciousness narrative.”
Loayza will introduce the October 11 screening of Je tu il elle, and we’re delighted to premiere the trailer for the series:
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