November 17, 2006
Another Poor Little Rich Girl
I checked out The Queen the other night after hearing that it does much better than Marie Antoinette at depicting an isolated, oblivious monarch upon whom the real world intrudes. And it’s true, it gets right what Sofia got wrong. It intersperses scenes of her isolated existence in London and on the breathtakingly gorgeous grounds of Balmoral Castle with crowd scenes of the people voicing their growing displeasure. We get to see what all the fuss is about, and at the same time we see how isolated and out of touch the queen is. This is where Sofia fails. We never get to see the crowd or have any idea of what they are so angry about. And I completely understand that that is her intent, to show how isolated she was, but just because the character is isolated and oblivious does not mean the film should be. That is a mistake. To show none of it whatsoever, and to stop the film before we see any of her hardship, means the film sides fully with the Queen and makes the starving peasants’ anger out to be much ado about nothing. You end up with a film that says nothing more than “It’s great fun to be a rich, beautiful teenager!”
The Queen, however, is much more satisfying because we get plenty of evidence that what she is doing is wrong. And we watch her eventually realize this. And the film still remains a compassionate portrayal of an oblivious character who in some ways remains oblivious to the end. She ultimately gives in and acknowledges the real world, but also says in the end “I don’t think I will ever understand what happened this week.” And that’s fine. We don’t hate her for that, we understand.
But while I thoroughly enjoyed The Queen, it’s no work of art. It does not aspire to art. It’s just a very good story, a well-written and wonderfully acted drama. Sofia’s film, I must admit, aspires to art. And for that reason I can’t completely dismiss her. She hasn’t got it quite right in this film, but I do expect that with age and experience she may produce something brilliant one day. Once she acknowledges the real world.
(Note that the links above for each film show approval ratings–98% for The Queen, clearly a crowd- (plebe-?) pleaser, and 52% for the highly polarizing Marie Antoinette. An acquired taste, obviously, like caviar.)
Filed by cynthia rockwell at 11:10 am under Just Movies
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That about sums it up. I saw Marie Antoinette and was irritated by her presentation of Madame du Barry, King Louis XV’s mistress, who came from the poorest of the poor and is portrayed as a crude, obnoxious, social-climbing bitch. She burps. She makes out with the king at the dinner table. She wears darkly- and brightly-colored clothing, that period’s version of “trampy.” And, though the real du Barry was blonde and blue-eyed, Coppola has cast the dark and very Italian-looking Asia Argento as the beast. All others at court are fair and light-haired (well, most wear those ridiculous gray wigs so sometimes it’s hard to tell, but no one is in the least ethnic-looking save du Barry). So once again in Coppola’s world, anyone not born rich and anyone who looks different is ridiculed, made a cheap stereotype. I’m not so much offended any more by her obliviousness to her own classism as I am disappointed by the lack of imagination. She so often falls back on cheap over-used jokes and stereotypes that you’d think a Yale graduate could come up with something more subtle and textured than that.
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…I watched the film I was most interested to see, 
Perhaps it says something about my tastes or my interests that all of the films I’ve seen so far at Silverdocs offer extreme views of womanhood. Last night’s highlight was The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief, a fascinating film about male “Host Clubs” in Japan. There are apparently hundreds of these clubs all over Japan, and the concept is brilliant: men are the product here, women the consumers, and what the men are selling, they say, are “dreams”. Romantic dreams, to be specific. What the women are paying for isn’t sex, but attention. Flirting, touching, snuggling, romantic gestures. The host’s job is to get the girls to fall in love and therefore become repeat customers. They have it down to a science. Women are very “demanding” they say. They need a lot of superficial compliments. But the most fascinating observation they make is that once they reel the women in with compliments, they switch to scolding. And that’s when the women fall in love. We see a host asking a girl why she does such meaningless things, why she lives her life so frivolously, and the girl is completely rapt. And afterward gushes to the camera about how much she loves him. It is a truth that I as a woman was very uncomfortable witnessing. The entire film was uncomfortable to watch, probably moreso for women than for the men in the audience, who seemed to find much of it to be hilarious. I didn’t see many women laughing.
Much easier for women to watch is the story of Leila Khaled: Hijacker. Her world couldn’t have been more different than that of the love-starved women in Osaka. Khaled, who hijacked 3 planes in the 1960s and 70s, had no need for something like a host club, she was too busy being a freedom fighter (terrorist?) for the Palestinian cause and actually altering her beautiful face to avoid capture. And after she was captured, she was insulted when reporters asked her if she had a boyfriend, asked her if she were in love. These things were irrelevant to her. She is now married with children, and encouraged the female director of the film to make babies, but is still every bit the unrepentant soldier. Or terrorist, depending on your view. That’s one of the questions the film poses: what’s the difference between being a terrorist and a freedom fighter? Is the difference simply whether you win or lose?
1800s and may have killed more than 50 people (mostly men) in Indiana as part of insurance scams. They found the skeletons of 40 of her victims buried on the grounds of her farm, and eventually just stopped digging–so there may be countless more. She killed several husbands, as well as several of her adopted children, and became a very rich woman after collecting their life insurance policies. And like Khaled, she got away with it all. Like the love theives in Japan’s host clubs, she sold romantic dreams to lonely men, only they paid for it with their lives as well as their money. It was an incredibly creepy film–especially the visit to the site of Belle’s farm, where the family that now lives there keeps finding bones in the ground around the house and the youngest child speaks to several ghosts. The film was a bit heavy-handed with the creepiness, though, which threatened to make it almost cartoonish.
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I was most disappointed to have to miss 
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As for the rest of the screenings–I’d still say 
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One of the most hyped films in the festival was 
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And finally, I went to the podcasting panel, mostly to see the makers of the