Under the covers

My Mirror column:

A chilling new film called The Tale unravels one woman’s narrative of her sexual self, and may help us all grapple more honestly with our own.

‘‘We tell each other stories in order to live,” runs the famous line from the American essayist Joan Didion. The line appears early on in Jennifer Fox’s disturbing new autobiographical film, The Tale, when the central character, who is modelled on Fox and shares her name, says it to a classroom full of documentary film students. The film’s Jenny Fox (played by Laura Dern) is a 48-year-old filmmaker and professor of documentary, and, at one level, the sentence is just about her trying to get her students thinking about how they might think about narrative, how we all use stories to give our lives structure. At another level, the Didion quote cuts straight to the heart of what The Tale is about: how we remember things, or how we choose to forget.




In her 1979 book The White Album, in which the line first appeared, Didion carried on: “We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” The Tale, which came out on US television in May and can be seen on streaming services in India, is about Fox’s adult re-examination of the narrative line she imposed upon her own childhood – or certain events in it.

48-year-old Jenny is on her way back home from shooting a documentary about women in India, when she starts to get distressed messages from her mother Nettie (Ellen Burstyn), who has just discovered and read a ‘story’ that Jenny wrote in school. That ‘story’, which Jenny’s writing teacher apparently accepted as a work of the 13-year-old girl’s highly-developed imagination, was about a sexual relationship she had had with a 40-year-old man, a running coach called Bill Ritter who was the lover of a Mrs G, Jenny’s adored riding instructor.



But what the film really wants to emphasise is that the ‘fiction’ lay less in Jenny telling her teacher that she had ‘made it up’, and more in her belief that what had happened to her was not sexual abuse but a “beautiful” experience: a love affair from which she had withdrawn, leaving the older Bill devastated. The Tale makes terrifying use of the power of cinema, to show us how we might deliberately, or subconsciously, misremember things “in order to live” – as when we watch Jenny’s first meeting with Mrs G and Bill, first played by an adolescent actress, and then (after her mother shows her a picture of how she actually looked at 13), by a much younger, chubbier actress.



One of the many subtexts in the film is the passage of time. We encounter it, of course, in the splicing together of the 13-year-old Jenny and the 48-year-old woman, each as stubborn as the other, with the older one trying somehow to defeat the anti-victimhood narrative that her younger self has cultivated for years. But we also encounter it in the adult Jenny’s repeated shrugging away of what happened as part of a time of sexual liberation: “It was the ’70s”. Mrs G and Bill’s extramarital relationship – and the fact that they confided in Jenny – made her feel special, not just because they were adults she admired, but because they were adults who seemingly rejected the social/sexual rules by which her own parents lived. “You see how miserable people look in their little nuclear units? Monogamy, marriage: it’s just killing people,” pronounces Bill to Jenny at one point.


The Tale might be interestingly read as the flipside of another film about a teenager in a sexual relationship with a much older man: Marielle Heller’s The Diary of a Teenaged Girl (2015). While also based on a personal memoir of a real ’70s childhood – Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic novel set in 1976 San Francisco – The Diary could not be more different. The Diary’s 15-year-old Minnie (Bel Powley) embarks on a sexual affair with her mother’s 35-year-old boyfriend Monroe. But even at its messiest, the sex seems driven by Minnie’s wanting it. And herein lies the rub. Does Minnie misremember?



The Tale does not share Minnie’s or The Diary’s sense of sexual discovery. It is definitely a #MeToo film, in that its existence is enabled by this new moment of sexual politics, when women are finally letting themselves (and each other) speak of abusive, exploitative sexual encounters that have for years been couched as ‘normal’. Instead of The Diary’s joyful (if sometimes confused) sexual abandon, The Tale has the grim feeling of something still being grappled with: how the sexual repression narrative was flipped into a sexual liberation narrative, without women asking enough questions about whose freedoms were actually enabled, and what sorts of things could pass under the radar. As we are finding in India, in our own #MeToo moment, there is no shortage of ‘liberated’ men ‘teaching’ younger women to be free.



It is up to us all to ensure that the sexual freedom we so absolutely need doesn’t end up working, undercover, as yet another form of sexual oppression.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 24 June 2018.

Growing up is hard to do

My Mirror column:

Shlok Sharma's Haraamkhor makes you think about sex and seduction – and about the meaning of adulthood.

In November 2015, I wrote a column called 'The Age of Discovery' about two wonderful films, one British and the other American, in which teenage girls embark on relationships with much older men. I was struck then by the fact that Lone Scherfig's An Education (2009) and Marielle Heller's The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) were both directed by women, and based on real-life accounts. Scherfig drew on Lynn Barber's much-feted memoir, while Heller adapted Phoebe Gloeckner's autobiographical graphic novel.

These youthful female protagonists were remarkable because they were frank sexual beings: their desires launching them on journeys that were joyful and excited, confused and sad in equal measure. I had written of my desire to see Hindi cinema create such a character: “What would be truly remarkable would be to see the world through the eyes of a young girl (and not in the thoroughly exploitative manner of Ram Gopal Varma's Nishabd).”

Shlok Sharma's marvellously assured debut Haraamkhor has fulfilled that wish of mine. Actress Shweta Tripathi, all sweetness and light as the lovely Shalu in Masaan, transforms herself into something much less sunny here. A 15-year-old schoolgirl in a dusty North Indian kasba, Tripathi's Sandhya is a tightly clenched bundle of contradictions, masking childish neediness with prickly displays of self-assurance.

The generalised loneliness of adolescence is deepened here by the absence of a mother (interestingly, Minnie in The Diary had an absent father). Here, Sandhya's father, a police officer who spends a lot of time away from home, guards secrets of his own – he is not forbidding, but he's not exactly a pillar of emotional support.

Rather than boring into his characters' minds to uncover every single thing that motivates them, Sharma chooses a glancing, sideways approach (the one time a character – Nilu Aunty – explains her motivations, the film falters). So Sandhya's immense vulnerability is not really apparent to us, or perhaps even to herself – until she acts. And even then it is not as if the objective facts (of her motherlessness, or her newness in town, or her father's distance) are marshalled to explain her attraction to her tuition teacher, a man who seems not particularly scintillating and often borderline sleazy.

This refusal to explain everything is what makes the film so rich and strange, because, of course, this is how things are in life. We may pretend that everything that happens is straightforward and explicable, but much of the time we have only the faintest idea why the people around us are doing what they're doing. Often that applies to our own behaviour as well.

This state of bafflement is amplified when you're young; the questions in your head are barely articulable. So the teenaged Sandhya's fascination with Shyam, like Minnie's with the 35-year-old Monroe, is at least partly a fascination with sex itself. The rapt gaze Sandhya turns upon Shyam making love to his wife is the radical moment of recognition, where both suddenly see each other as sexual beings. 

The naive child protagonist has been an evocative route into sex and romance, from Leo in LP Hartley's 1953 classic The Go-Between to the child who takes messages between adult lovers in Paresh Kamdar's dreamlike 2008 film Khargosh. But Haraamkhor does something exceptional: it fills the milieu round its central pair with little boys in whom that naivete is mixed in with the ribald humour that apparently stands in for sexuality in the Indian little boy psyche (some Indian men, sadly, never seem to discover another sexual register).

Sharma's non-judgemental approach seems especially important in the case of a character like Shyam, who could so easily have been slotted as pure evil -- the seducing villain, the duplicitous married man, the adult who preys on one someone who is not. Because, of course, he is these things: a person exploiting the power of adulthood. But Haraamkhor insists on showing us his weaknesses, too: his childlike excitement at driving a Luna, his fear of Sandhya's policeman father combined with his unquestioning admiration of his social status, his vacillation in the face of choices he knows to be mistaken.

Nawazuddin Siddiqui's performance alternately elicits laughter and disdain (it is a two-step dance he has done before, for example as the convict Liak in Badlapur). It is a marvellous rendition of masculinity as the constantly fluctuating thing it has to be: boosted by admiration, tempted by lust, cowering in the face of power, lashing out in helpless anger when faced with the possibility of a public shaming -- and sometimes stepping back from selfish instrumentalism to some inner reserve of tenderness. Perhaps in truth the malaise runs wider than masculinity – adulthood, as some wise internet writer recently said, is itself a constant performance, in which we are found wanting more often than we would like.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 15 Jan 2017.

Taking a new direction

Last Sunday's Mirror column:

Watching Mia Madre sets off a train of thought about an unspoken assumption that underpins most cinema.

In Nanni Moretti's superb recent film, Mia Madre (My Mother), a middle-aged film director must grapple simultaneously with the chaos of shooting a film and the impending death of a parent. Things are not aided by the American actor she has cast in the main role.

Stop. Did that "she" surprise you? When I said "a middle-aged film director", did you immediately envisage a man in the role? Well, if you did, you would only be subconsciously reiterating what pretty much every film industry in the world has been doing in practice.

The Celluloid Ceiling, an annual study of women employed behind the scenes in film, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, San Diego State University, found that women comprised only 17 per cent of all directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors, and cinematographers working on the top 250 (domestic) grossing films in 2014. That is exactly the same percentage of women working in these roles in 1998. In the case of women directors, the 2014 figure of 7 per cent is actually lower than the 9 per cent figure recorded in 1998.

Another recent US study, looking at 1,300 top grossing films from 2002 to 2014, found that only 4.1 per cent of all directors were female. Among other findings, it appears that women are fairly well represented in shorts and documentaries, but seem to find it harder to break through when it comes to feature films. And the bigger the budget of the film, the more likely it is that it will go to a male director.

Last week, it made headlines that there were three films directed by women (Patricia Riggen's real-life drama The 33, Jessie Nelson's family comedy Love the Coopers, and Angelina Jolie's By the Sea) running simultaneously in US theatres. One commentator called it a 'Halley's Comet' moment for Hollywood, because of the time it would likely take to occur again.

There are all sorts of reasons why it would be a good thing for there to be more films directed by women. Recently, in this column, I wrote about two very different films, both about teenage girls who embark on affairs with much older men. It is the sort of tendentious subject that could, in the wrong hands, end up being exploitative, sensationalist, or deeply judgemental. But both An Education ( 2009) and The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2014), while recognising that the situations they're dealing with are less than ideal, evoke the excitement and vulnerability of sexual discovery. While starkly different in how much sex they show, both films are astute about young women coming to realise the power of their own sexuality. It seems to me no coincidence that both films are directed by women: An Education was made by Lone Scherfig, a Danish director who first came to international attention with the 2000 hit Italian for Beginners -- a romcom made in the characteristic Dogme style of hand held video cameras and natural lighting -- while The Diary is a powerful directorial debut from actress Marielle Heller.

Given how rare women directors are, however, it isn't surprising that historically, almost all films about film-making have featured male directors. Think of the great European auteurs: Godard's Contempt (1963) cast the famous director Fritz Lang as himself, Antonioni's characteristically elliptical Identification of a Woman(1982) centred on a director's search for the perfect actress (who would also be his lover), Fellini's 8 ½ was an autobiographical part-fantasy ostensibly seeking solutions for the director's existential crises. Right down to the present: think of Noah Baumbach's While We're Young, in which both Ben Stiller's documentary filmmaker character and the New York world of indie filmmaking are a partial evocation of a similar world seen in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanours (1989).

In India, the situation is even more skewed: we can count our women directors on the fingers of one hand. So of course, in any film featuring the film industry -- from Guru Dutt's Kaagaz ke Phool to Mrinal Sen's Aakaler Sandhane, from Shyam Benegal's stellar period piece Bhumika -- right down to last year's marvellously energetic Tamil release Jigarthanda -- the director on screen is always a man.

All of this means that the crisis of creativity has invariably been presented as a masculine problem. Which is why Mia Madre is so refreshing.

The display of masculinity appears in Moretti's film as either wounded or ridiculous. The director in the film (Italian actress Margherita Buy) is already dealing with what she sees as the clingy behaviour of her just-divorced husband, and now must also deal with the particularly masculine demands of her star actor, Barry Huggins (John Turturro in a truly memorable turn), walking a thin line between patronising sexism and hilarity. For instance, when Margherita drops him off at his hotel upon arrival, he says, "Eating alone is so sad. Stay, have dinner." And when she refuses, he says, "Then you stay to sleep with me. What's your name?" She is trying to process this when he adds quickly, "That was a joke."

The film is very much about cinema, but directing a film is allowed to feel like work - rather than necessarily existential. There is, for instance, a film within the film, a serious-looking drama about a workers' strike, but Moretti approaches the whole thing with a lightness of touch. The wonderfully funny scene in which Huggins is supposed to be driving a car, for example, works as a hilarious metaphor for filmmaking. Moretti also uses the power of the cinematic medium to transport us constantly between reality and dream, often tricking us into believing one is the other.

But the real emotional centre of Mia Madre is Margherita's unwillingness, or inability, to accept that her mother is dying. Things will never be the same again, and yet the world remains unchanged. The crisis is not that of cinema, but life itself.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Dec 2015

The Age of Discovery

My Mirror column this week:

Two films based on women's memoirs of their teenage years offer rich, nuanced accounts of sexuality, selfhood and what it means to be grown-up

Among the things that made Masaan's opening sequence so memorable was Richa Chadda's striking depiction of a young woman yearning to begin her sexual life. We watch her hungry eyes as she watches a porn video, and then see her stride purposefully towards the sexual rendezvous that will change her life. Devi has shrugged off the cloak of morality that makes female sexuality a burden, and yet her youthful eagerness comes without coyness or giggles.

 

The frankness of Devi's sexual exploration made Masaan most unusual, especially in the Indian context. But even Masaan focused less on that process of exploration and more on its wider social ramifications. And Devi is a fully grown young woman. What would be truly remarkable would be to see the world through the eyes of a young girl (and not in the thoroughly exploitative manner of Ram Gopal Varma's Nishabd).

 

Marielle Heller's directorial debut The Diary of a Teenage Girl does exactly that, though in San Francisco, circa 1976. Based on an autobiographical graphic novel by Phoebe Gloeckner, Heller's film casts the marvelous Bel Powley as Minnie Goetz, a 15-year-old schoolgirl who embarks on an affair with Monroe, a 35-year-old man who also happens to be her mother's (Kristen Wiig) boyfriend (Alexander Skarsgård).

 

Given the undeniable controversiality of this plot, the film is remarkable for the freedom it gives Minnie. Heller has been very clear, in interviews, that her interest in Gloeckner's book (she has earlier adapted and performed it as a play) arose from the fact that there are so few honest representations of young female desire. “The media has endlessly told teenage girls that boys are the only ones who are going to want sex. Girls are going to be the ones that don’t want it. Girls are going to want to withhold it until they decide that they are willing to give it to the guy,” Heller has said. “What if you’re a teenage girl who wants to have sex?

 

She might be 15 and a virgin when The Diary begins, but it is very clear that Minnie's wanting is at the very centre of this narrative. And what makes the film so powerful is her joyous, unabashed sense of discovery – as well as her unaffected confession of her changing feelings. She might be dreamy-eyed to start with, and confused in the middle, but she is also the one with the sharpest view of things as they unfurl. 

The Diary of a Teenage Girl makes for an interesting companion piece to An Education (2009), another exploration of a relationship between a teenaged girl and a middle-aged man, also based on a real-life autobiographical account (journalist Lynn Barber's bestselling memoir) and directed by a woman: the Danish director Lone Scherfig.

 

Jenny Mellor, the 16-year-old at the centre of An Education, couldn't be more different from Minnie Goetz, at least on the surface. Minnie retains her child-like teariness and her shapeless dungarees, showing no external signs of her sexual awakening (even provoking her mother into suggesting that she might take a greater interest in boys). Jenny's (Carey Mulligan) encounter with the charming David (Peter Sarsgaard), in contrast, soon results in a visible shift to adulthood: she starts to put her hair up and dress in fashionably grown-up clothes, and warns David against baby talk when they have sex for the first time: “Treat me like I'm a grown-up”. In fact Jenny's hunger is really for adulthood itself, rather than sex per se. It is her desire for beautiful things -- classical music concerts, glamorous restaurants and trips to Paris – that draws her to David, and simultaneously allows her to cast a cool, appraising eye at the dullness and poverty of the adult lives she sees around her: her poor, boring, money-grubbing parents, her closed-minded headmistress, even her fiercely hopeful English teacher.

 

Minnie doesn't do well at school, but she knows she is artistically talented. Jenny is the provincial girl with high culture aspirations—her grades might be perfect, but her sense of self is much more halting.

 

But much of the difference in the two narratives is also caused by the difference of social settings: in 1961 Britain, a middle class girl's confession of crisis is met by cups of tea and stern, solid advice; in 1976 San Francisco, it can devolve swiftly into a whirlwind of parties, sex and drugs.

 

Interestingly, in both films, the parents who discover an ongoing relationship between a teenage daughter and a much older man think of marriage as the next step. The difference is that in An Education, Jenny takes it seriously as an option, quick to exchange her dream of an Oxford education for the marital short-cut. In The Diary, set only fifteen years later, Kristen Wiig's angry proposal that Monroe marry Minnie elicits only disdain from the teenager (while the 35-year-old seems relieved, even happy, at this possible resolution).

 

What both films share, in fact, is a portrayal of adulthood as a layered, complex state in which people can continue to be both vulnerable and confused. Whether it is the surface sophistication of a David, which hides a hollow interior, or Monroe's drug-induced confession of neediness, or whether it is the profound gullibility of the parental figures in both films, it is the adults in either film who remain strangely infantile – and Minnie and Jenny who grow up.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29th Nov 2015.