LIKE CRAZY Paolo Virzì’s Like Crazy is a winning, compassionate, all-too-rare tale of female friendship, enlivened with eccentricity and full bodied humour. Boasting extraordinary performances from Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Micaela Ramazzotti, the film’s leading characters are instantly indelible and accessible despite their many peccadilloes. Beatrice (Tedeschi) is a motor-mouthed fantasist, a self-styled billionaire countess who likes to believe that she’s on intimate terms with world leaders. Donatella (Ramazzotti) is a tattooed introvert, a fragile young woman locked in her own head. They are both patients at a progressive but secure psychiatric clinic. Though totally different, the two women form an unpredictable and moving friendship as they flee the mental institution in search of love and happiness in the big, strange world outside. “Both of them brought great emotion to the film,” director, Paulo Virzi, has said of his leading ladies. “They’re not at all ashamed to put themselves out there, even their more ridiculous sides.” (Releases November 24)
I AM NOT MADAME BOVARY Directed with a bravura sense of high-style by Chinese heavy hitter, Feng Xiaogang (Aftershock), I Am Not Madame Bovary pokes with gleeful abandon into the subject of gender politics in China. At its swirling, visually dynamic centre is Li (wonderfully essayed by Chinese superstar, Fan Bingbing), a provincial café proprietor who is swindled by her truck driver husband when they get a “fake” divorce in order to get an apartment that they desire. But once the divorce goes through, Li is shocked to discover that her husband has moved into the apartment with another woman. Thus begins this feisty, single-minded woman’s mission to have her extant divorce annulled so she can remarry her husband and then divorce him “for real.” It’s pithy, brutally funny stuff, and Feng Xiaogang points out with caustic clarity how damning the forces of bureaucracy can be…especially for a woman in China.
THE SHALLOWS Considering that Jaws famously menaced three blokes, it seemed wholly appropriate that the pulse-pounding shark attack flick, The Shallows, had a female as the bait. Said female is Nancy Adams (Blake Lively), who is mourning the loss of her mother by visiting the beach in Mexico where her mum first discovered that she was pregnant with her. Nancy’s quest for spiritual catharsis is rudely interrupted, however, by a massive shark who mauls and maroons her, leaving her on the temporary safety of a rock that is only above the water during low tide. But the tide is rolling in, the beach is isolated, and the shark is patiently waiting. Cue a totally gripping one-location thriller with a female character driving the action. “It was fun to feel like I could get out there,” Blake Lively told Entertainment Weekly. “It was less about the action star moments and more about the stunts that I had to perform. I feel so clumsy, and then to get out there and do those stunts and be able to pull them off was great.”
GIRL ASLEEP “One day, I just got a call, saying, ‘You’ve got an audition’, so I prepared for it, and tried really hard, because as soon as I heard what it was about, I was very eager,” young actress, Bethany Whitmore, told FilmInk of chasing the lead role in the Aussie coming of age comedy drama, Girl Asleep. “It was my dream role.” Based on the acclaimed stage play, Girl Asleep is a delightfully oddball journey into the absurd, terrifying, and strangely beautiful world of fourteen-year-old Whitmore’s Greta Driscoll, who’s clinging onto her childhood with both hands…and her feet too. But when her parents throw her a surprise 15th birthday party, Greta is flung bodily into the bizarre world of adolescence. Though praise-worthy for the design of its 1970s setting, and its deliriously odd sense of humour, Girl Asleep is most fascinating for the deep sense of understanding of what it means to be a teenage girl.
MUSTANG Proving that life for teenage girls is far more difficult in Turkey than it is for their adolescent counterparts in Australia, Mustang is a heartbreaking meditation on the oppression of youthful bliss by societal conservatism and ingrained sexism. In a village in the north of Turkey, Lale (Gunes Sensoy) and her four sisters (now living with a stern uncle and grandmother after the death of their parents) innocently celebrate the end of the school year at the beach with some boys. The supposed debauchery of their actions tips their guardians over the edge, and their home progressively transforms into a prison, with classes on housework and cooking replacing school, and arranged marriages set into motion. Quietly defiant, the five sisters fight back against the limits imposed upon them. Nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar, and anchored by the sensational performances of its young cast, Mustang is a powerful portrait of female empowerment, and the forces that all too often seek to crush it.
EQUITY Female focused from the ground up, Equity – a clear, cold-eyed look at the women who work in the brutish, male dominated financial world of Wall Street – originated with producer/stars, Sarah Megan Thomas and Alysia Reiner, who brought on writer, Amy Fox, and director Meera Menon, whose feature directorial debut, Farah Goes Bang, enjoyed considerable festival success. Powered by a full-tilt turn from Breaking Bad’s Anna Gunn – whose senior investment banker is threatened by a financial scandal and must untangle a web of corruption – Equity gains instant narrative traction by focusing on the females in such a distinctly male world. “I was just trying to make a really good film that makes sense, engages and entertains people, and makes them think,” Meera Menon said at The Sundance Film Festival. “I just trust the idea and execution of the script. As far as being a woman in film and retaining my voice, I don’t think that it’s a conscious thing.”
THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN “It was so satisfying to feel so challenged, and so stretched, by a role,” Emily Blunt told FilmInk of playing the deeply flawed Rachel in The Girl On The Train. “Yes, it was tiring, and I was pregnant while we were shooting. But it was a very positive experience, because I discovered that I could do things that I hadn’t done before. That’s always a very satisfying feeling.” One of the most aggressively feminist films to come out of Hollywood in years, this successful adaptation of Paula Hawkins’ bestseller not only stretched Emily Blunt (a revelation as a suburban burn-out and hopeless alcoholic implicated in a murder), but provided meaty, eye-catching roles for a whole host of actresses (Haley Bennett, Rebecca Ferguson, Allison Janney, Laura Prepon), and dealt with the female experience in a terse, uncompromising, and ultimately gripping way.
JULIETA “In the last decade, you can count the number of Hollywood dramas that have revolved around women on one hand,” Spanish master, Pedro Almodovar, once said. “The studios have forgotten that women are fascinating.” The genius behind such classics as Volver, Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown, Talk To Her and All About My Mother, however, has never experienced such a lapse in judgement. Women have always been a huge part of his work, and while he’s tilted a little more toward the masculine recently with films like Broken Embraces, I’m So Excited, and The Skin I Live In, Almodovar embraced the feminine fully once again this year with the superb Julieta. It’s a moving, visually stunning mother/daughter tale, played out beautifully by actresses, Emma Suarez and Adriana Ugarte, who play older and younger versions of the same character. With manifest warmth and humour, the film explores how we need each other, and tracks the cycle of life as daughters take the place of ageing mothers, and mothers become dependent in their turn.
THE NEON DEMON “There were really no other choices than Elle Fanning,” Nicolas Winding Refn told FilmInk of his leading lady in The Neon Demon. “I was very lucky that she agreed to do the movie. But I was also like, ‘I want to make a movie about a sixteen-year-old girl, and you’re sixteen and that’s great. I am going to channel, through you, so we need to mutate into one and go on this journey together.” A young actress of prodigious gifts, Elle Fanning (Maleficent, Super 8) is the central force that holds The Neon Demon together, grounding Refn’s bold, dazzling take-down of the fashion industry, and whole bad world of entertainment in its entirety. As the youthful object of desire for those older, desperate, jaded, covetous people around her, Fanning is the hot glow in a dark, ugly film pulsing with the themes of cannibalism, the exploitation of innocence, and vampirism.
ARRIVAL Though a huge, big-picture alien invasion mini-epic in which enormous questions are bravely raised, Arrival is also a strikingly intimate film. Cogently and sensitively directed by Denis Villeneuve (Sicario, Prisoners), this acclaimed drama is also notable not just for having a female character at its centre, but also for having one so richly drawn and highly nuanced. Beautifully played by the brilliant Amy Adams, top-tier linguist, Dr. Louise Banks, is brought in to communicate with the film’s seemingly placid alien visitors, and she’s soon revealed to be a truly fascinating figure. “It was so emotional, and so moving,” Amy Adams told FilmInk of the script for Arrival. “Denis zeroed in on the fact that this was a very emotional story. He wanted it to feel like all of this stuff would be happening, but at the end of the day, it’s a story about a woman, and her child, and the choices that she makes.”
HONORABLE MENTIONS: ELLE, AMERICAN HONEY, THE LADY IN THE VAN, 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE, FLORENCE FOSTER JENKINS, WHISKY TANGO FOXTROT, THE MEDDLER, ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, HELLO, MY NAME IS DORIS, FINDING DORY, MAGGIE’S PLAN, LOVE & FRIENDSHIP, THE FITS, UNDER THE SHADOW, NOCTURNAL ANIMALS, THE HANDMAIDEN, ZOOTOPIA
