Joyless Street: What's with Women? Strong Directors, Masochistic Characters

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Previews

Published on Sunday, 22 April 2012 11:42

Written by Marjorie Rosen

This may be the brave new era of Hollywood’s The Hunger Games, the hugely successful saga honoring a young woman’s courage and nobility in the face of death. Still, it’s worth noting that two modest and fascinating 2012 New Directors/New Films selections, written and directed by women, deal not with outsized dystopian adventure or female bravery, but with heroines who choose to act out a discomforting sexual masochism within the framework of their own emotionally impoverished lives.

First is the Russian movie, Twilight Portrait, which marks the directing debut of Angelina Nikonova, who also co-wrote and co-produced it. The title refers to a setting on a still camera, but it also allegorizes Russian society and signifies the twilight of civility in the former Soviet Union. Against the background of a brutal and brutalized post-Cold-War Moscow, where apathy is superseded only by thuggishness among its men, and especially the police, Marina, a young middle-class woman of remarkable grace and beauty, struggles to find connection in her life.

As embodied by the actress Olga Dihovichnaya (who is also its co-screenwriter and co-producer), Marina is a social worker who feels less and less for her clients, and whose well-to-do father supplements her comfortable lifestyle with a relatively luxe apartment. She lives a reasonably good life, albeit with an attentive but ineffectual husband and an inattentive but indifferent lover, who also happens to be her best friend’s husband.

One afternoon, after leaving him, she is walking through a working-class neighborhood when the heel of her shoe breaks; hobbling along the road in search of a taxi, she is assaulted by punks who steal her handbag. When she tries to get help from a trio of thick, ignorant policemen, they pull her into the car, drive into the woods and rape and abandon her. Marina manages to get back to town, and in subsequent days, she locates and begins stalking Andrei (Sergei Borisov), the most attractive of the three lawmen.

At first she seems intent on wreaking revenge, but ultimately decides to embark on a wildly different path: oral sex. The next day she returns to "pleasure" Andrei again. The pair stumbles into an uneasy sexual relationship, which they play out in the dark, grimy flat that the cop shares with his ailing, demented father and younger hoodlum brother. Marina moves in for a week, telling her husband that she is off to visit her mother. 

When she is not scrubbing the filthy bathtub or feeding the doddering old dad, she is whispering sweet nothings to her abuser. Her words make him see red; each tender “I love you” is repaid with a beating. But the slaps and slugs do not encourage her to stop. They only increase her ardor.

The scenes in which Andrei treats Marina like a punching bag inspired both gasps of horror and laughter at the screening I attended. Watching Marina’s insistent and almost comical declarations of love in the face of abuse is so exaggerated as to bring to mind an SNL sketch or, more aptly, the deadly serious 1974 Lilliana Cavani movie, The Night Porter, in which Charlotte Rampling plays a concentration camp survivor who runs into her long-ago Nazi tormentor (Dirk Bogarde), now the night porter at a Vienna hotel. The pair replay their original relationship, only perhaps more savagely -- and consensually.

Some have dubbed such behavior the Stockholm Syndrome, after a 1973 incident in which bank robbers held four Swedes captive in a vault for six days, during which the prisoners developed psychological attachments to their captors. Watching this dynamic play itself out in Twilight Portrait was, I found, unnerving, repellent and riveting. Think Patti Hearst, or “Tanya” as she was known to her captors in the Symbionese Liberation Army.

Director Nikonova, who should be commended for refusing to compromise her insistently bleak vision, sustains the mood with the help of the brilliant cinematographer Eben Bull and production designer Elena Afanasyeva, who paint a crepuscular world of emotional, physical and moral decay. I wish Nikonova had offered up more motives for the behavioral choices Marina makes and painted a more convincing portrait of this enigmatic woman.

Still, in the end, the movie sneaks up on the viewer, creating an unpleasant tone poem, a vivid picture of an alienated, corrupt and violent society, and finally a eulogy for the death of civilized behavior.

The ND/NF entry Hemel, from the Netherlands, also explores the world of an alienated, masochistic woman. Directed by Sacha Polak and written by Helena van der Meulen, it stars a compelling and uninhibited young actress, Hannah Hoekstra, as Hemel. The name means “heaven” in Dutch, though in no way does this heroine lead anything close to a heavenly existence.

Hemel is a beautiful, sexually lost creature who indulges in disappointing dalliances with an endless array of men. What unites them is their lack of feeling toward each other. She allows one partner, whose tastes run to prepubescent girls, to shave her nether regions; she asks another to leave immediately after she has been sexually satisfied; she chooses a third who turns out to be a sadist and beats her up.

At the same time, Hemel enjoys a relationship with her father, Gijs (Hans Dagelet), which is both eroticized and infantilized. Although they don’t actually have sex, in one revealing yet enigmatic scene, he carries her to the toilet in the middle of the night and sits with her, lovingly stroking her hair. He is clearly the only man she has feelings for. But when Gijs tells her he has fallen in love with a colleague with whom he plans to live, the news sends Hemel into an emotional tailspin. She is not used to sharing Daddy’s heart. Nor is she used to taking adult responsibility for herself, to say nothing of her track record of self-nurturance.

Although it doesn’t carry Twilight Portrait's depth of social and political allegory, Hemel, with strong visuals capturing a streamlined and appealing Amsterdam, offers up a powerful, unapologetic portrait of a young woman imprisoned by her lack of feeling, a woman stunted by her immaturity.

To be sure, female directors are not alone in testing female masochism these days. Their male counterparts are going strong, as they have been for years.

Witness the recent Terence Davies remake of Terence Rattigan’s 1974 play, The Deep Blue Sea. In it, suicidal heroine Lady Collier (Rachel Weitz) moons about, rejecting her wealthy and adoring, if none too pretty, husband (Simon Russell Beale) for former World War II hero Freddie (Tom Hiddleston). Lover boy tells her in no uncertain terms that he cares far less for her than she, him. The more alcohol-soaked Freddie pushes her away, the more Lady Collier despairs and pursues him. Finally, he flies off to an ostensibly better life in Argentina, and she is left to pick up the pieces of her obsession. What could be more masochistic than such insistent adoration in the face of a man’s cruelty and indifference?

Interestingly, at the same time that these movies have arrived on our shores, so has an erotic trilogy of novels about a young woman’s sado-masochistic relationship with a wealthy older man. Titled Fifty Shades of Grey, this British import by E.L. James seems to have fired up readers’ curiosity, and now it occupies first, second and fourth place on The New York Times’ best-seller list. In fact, a Hollywood producer has just paid $5 for the rights to the novels, gambling that spike-edged sex will sell on today´s screen, although it notoriously failed to do so with such infamous S&M bombs as The Story of O in 1974 and 9 ½ Weeks in 1986. (More successful and, significantly, more playful, was Lina Wertmuller’s Swept Away in 1974, a comic exploration of the issue within an emphatic political context.)

Let’s face it, though, S&M is part of our zeitgeist and has been imbedded in our pop culture currency for years. After all, music videos and female music stars have been flirting with S&M imagery since Madonna came on the scene, and specifically since she published her 1992 book Sex. She is as responsible as any nameless porn star for bequeathing leather, chains and bondage to New York’s bridge-and-tunnel crowd, to the Midwest’s cornfed teens and also to a parade of hip rock divas such as Rihanna and Lady Gaga.

Indeed, a pair of prominent media articles seem to have ignited the current conversation. First, The New York Times’ esteemed cultural observer, Maureen Dowd, wrote about Fifty Shades of Grey in an April 1 column aptly called, "She’s Fit to Be Tied." Dowd concentrated on James’s runaway hits but eventually dissed and dismissed them by noting that the author not only offers little that’s new about bondage, but “cleaves to hoary conventions out of Harlequin.” Days later, journalist Katie Roiphe, under the editorship of Tina Brown wrote the Newsweek cover story, “The Fantasy Life of Working Women: Why Surrender Is A Feminist Dream” (April 23 and 30), about masochistic reveries among today’s smart, powerful, overachieving women. As proof of a trend, she pointed to both the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy and Lena Dunham’s oh-so-with-it HBO series, Girls, in which Hannah, Dunham’s character, trysts with a guy who off-handedly offers to make her his sex slave.

Dunham, who also happens to be the series' writer and director, has created in Hannah a recent college grad with vague writing ambitions but no sense of self. In the first four episodes, she repeatedly seeks out demoralizing, mechanical sex with Adam, usually by showing up at his doorstep. Immune to his indifference, she deludes herself into thinking that he is her boy friend and pliantly accepts his sadistic sexual directives. She takes no visible pleasure or release.

Come to think of it, this echoes how Dunham defines most of her heroines. In her 2010 debut feature, Tiny Furniture, her protagonist –- and dramatic stand-in -- Ora (again, played by Dunham) is a virtual twin to Hannah – a woebegone girl, recently out of college, who pursues empty sex. This time it is in that most romantic of places –- a big open pipe in a New York City park on a chilly winter day -– with a restaurant co-worker who also happens to be living with someone else. Here, in a scene emblematic of the “girls” who inhabit Dunham’s HBO universe, Ora allows him to screw her, detached and doggy-style. Similarly, Hannah and her bffs, whether cool or nerdy, choose sex lacking passion and climax, sex that is simply and overwhelmingly humiliating.

Is this the reality for 20-somethings in today’s overly sexualized world? If not, what is Dunham’s point? The girls’ predecessors in Sex and the City may have been shallow glam creatures preoccupied with sassy shoes and seduction, but at least they had fun in the sack. And we had fun watching them have fun.

So is it that women want to control? Or do they want to be controlled? James, the plump, married Fifty Shades of Grey author, giggled with embarrassment as she tried to explain to a Today interviewer why this S&M fantasy has gripped female readers on both sides of the Atlantic. “You’re in charge of yourself, your house, your children…,” she noted feebly. “It would be nice for someone else to be in charge for a while.” When a random sampling of women were asked why the steamy bondage fantasies appealed to them, they stammered and flumfered.

And, again, the question is, Why now? It has often been suggested that powerful political men visit dominatrixes in order to be beaten down to size, to be divested of their own guilt and to relinquish the burden of their power. Is that what women who are players are doing? Are female directors and writers who have climbed the wobbly ladder of success and earned their own powerful turf working out their own guilt and throwing off their own burdens? Or are S&M fantasies simply a part of most people’s imaginary life, a way of trying on naughty adventures they do not actually want to engage in?

As for the current heroine of the moment – Catniss of The Hunger Games – perhaps it is possible to argue that while taking her sister’s place in the hunt may be a brave and noble gesture, Catniss also willingly and eagerly puts herself in danger of extreme torture and near-certain extinction. In the end, is that not the be-all and end-all, masochistically speaking?

Marjorie Rosen, an associate professor of film and journalism at Lehman College-CUNY, is the author of Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies, & the American Dream.