Women shine bright at Venice Film Festival

VENICE:

Despite a paucity of female directors, women were the stars of the Venice Film Festival: from Lady Gaga stealing the red carpet spotlight, to movies about queens, witches and working women with important stories to tell.

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Only one of the 21 movies selected to compete for the Golden Lion was directed by a woman - earning festival organisers a severe backlash. But critics were impressed by strong, unusual female roles and feminist themes, even in films made by men.

An infantilised Queen Anne being courted by two manipulative confidants in The Favourite; the dignified working class women of Alfonso Cuaron’s autobiographical Roma; and a witches’ coven of supernatural power in Suspiria: some of the best movies were almost exclusively about women.

PHOTO: AFP

Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos, who directed Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, Rachel Weisz, said he made The Favourite because he “wasn’t seeing female characters represented in cinema in an interesting, complex way as human beings”.

“They’re usually the housewife or the girlfriend or the object of desire and I just felt when I saw that there’s a real story about these three very complex women ... it was something that I wanted to do,” he told Reuters.

Marta Balaga, a critic at film news agency Cineuropa, loved that Lanthimos did not treat his characters with undue respect: “Those characters are just hilarious, they are funny, they are certainly not perfect in every way, they are quite horrible sometimes, but this is what I would love to see in the cinema.”


Even some of the films that focus on men had things to say about society’s treatment of women. In The Mountain, Jeff Goldblum plays a lobotomist who has a surgical way of dealing with troublesome females, and in German epic Never Look Away, a free-thinking young woman’s fate is sealed by a Nazi doctor.

“There is this theme still going on that men can be threatened by a woman that maybe expresses her opinions ... women who are able to speak out. They still seem to be dangerous to so many people,” Balaga said about the themes of those films, and also witchy horror remake Suspiria.

PHOTO: REUTERS

“We tend to think about genre film-making as a little bit anti-women ... but in this film Luca Guadagnino just loves his actresses and they are allowed to do really silly things and it all makes sense,” she said.

One film directed by a woman, but shown outside the main competition, was Charlie Says the story of the women Charles Manson brainwashed into murder. “That’s a perspective that no one has seen and no one has really focused entirely on: their story or their journey about how they ended up there and why they did the things they did,” director Mary Harron said.

As for The Nightingale, the Golden Lion contender directed by Jennifer Kent, critic Jonathan Romney said it “exudes enough impassioned feminist rage to fuel 10 festivals”.

A new take on the rape-revenge genre, the violent movie was heckled at a press screening where a man yelled out “Shame on you, you’re disgusting!” when Kent’s name appeared on the closing credits.

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Critic Balaga said some audiences would struggle with women making films “that maybe are not exactly pleasant". She concluded, "A reaction like that just shows us that something unexpected was shown that rubbed people the wrong way.”

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