By Christine Westwood
Equity knows what it wants to say, and how to say it. Tagged as the “first female driven movie about Wall Street”, it is the creation of Sarah Megan Thomas and Alysia Reiner. In order to execute their vision, they brought on writer Amy Fox and director Meera Menon, whose feature directorial debut, Farah Goes Bang, premiered at The Tribeca Film Festival in 2013. Menon, who grew up in the South Asian film industry, was awarded The Nora Ephron Prize by Tribeca and Vogue as a groundbreaking female filmmaker. She has since been selected as a fellow at 20th Century Fox’s Global Directors Initiative. Menon has also worked as a curator for contemporary film and video art festivals in Paris, Miami, and New York.
Given the struggle that many women have to make it in the film world, and in the world of big business, as depicted in Equity, FilmInk asked Menon how she retains her individual voice. “From my point of view, I was just trying to make a really good film that makes sense, engages and entertains people, and makes them think,” the director replies. “I’m looking at the mechanics, and 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. I’m a woman of a certain ethnicity, with my own perspective. I don’t necessarily know any other way to do it. I don’t think that my experiences are that different from men, and any filmmaker should be looking at the most common emotional experience that you can be displaying.
“Me and Amy were brought on board Equity by Sarah and Alysia. They were the producers and stars of the film. They developed the concept and put it all together and really started this company, Broadstreet Pictures, with the mandate to provide opportunities for women behind the camera. Amy had a film [Heights] at Sundance ten years ago. She’s a brilliant writer, a great playwright. I had one feature, Farah Goes Bang, coming out of Tribeca in 2013. It was different in tone to Equity and a much smaller budget. It’s a comedy with a strong female protagonist. When I read the script for Equity, I understood the concept immediately. I pitched my take on it and they brought me on. The process has been collaborative between the four of us ever since. For the visual tone, we had a couple of comparable films that we were looking at to accomplish this feeling of a contemporary film noir. One was Michael Clayton, another was The Social Network. We talked about that film for the visuals and I ended up using it as a touchstone for the aesthetic of the score with the composer. Going back further we looked at some of the 70s thrillers, like The Conversation by Coppola, and how it accomplished an increasing sense of paranoia and tension. Then there was All the Presidents Men. You’ll see our direct homage – there’s a menacing scene in an underground car park.”
The film is gritty in tone, with no soothing touches. Early on, we see a female executive struggling with her pregnancy, a shameful handicap in the man’s world definition of success, and in the film a metaphor of the total rejection of female values. The women have to be men to succeed, and what it does to them is not pretty. They dress in the obligatory corporate way that is a mixture of pseudo male and escort. We feel their physical discomfort in restrictive clothes and high shoes. They use their sexuality but it’s compromised. There seems little pleasure, and no honesty, and everything is given to power and ambition, to winning.
The film follows Naomi Bishop (Breaking Bad’s Anna Gunn), a high-flying investment banker blocked from rising to a global position by her male superior on the basis of a single underperforming investment portfolio. The ripple down effect is that Naomi’s frustrated deputy, Erin (Sarah Megan Thomas), is denied a promotion for the second year running. The goal posts in this sector are set incredibly high and with fierce competition in the scramble to the top. The most apparently successful woman in the narrative is Samantha (Alysia Reiner), the prosecutor for the U.S. attorney’s office. She is in a lesbian relationship, but she strategically uses seduction in the most cutthroat manner. In some ways, the relationships between the women are the most distressing. Samantha was a friend of Naomi, but now it’s her job to play detective on her. And in this environment, how can there be support and trust? In the world of Equity, the women are like a colonised people trying to adapt to rules that are destructive to them, and turning on each other to get ahead.
Sony Pictures Classics acquired the movie as soon as it touched down in Sundance. The subject matter alone is a strong marketing hook. Gunn, an Emmy winner for her role as Skylar White in Breaking Bad, is compelling in the lead role, and all the support characters are played and directed with a conviction that drives the film’s theme of ruthless business to a powerful finish. And this is no lip service to women’s influence in the movie world. The female characters may struggle against male oppression, but in the making of Equity, women call the shots on both sides of the camera.
Equity is released in cinemas on September 29.
