Cinema Club #16 (February, 2024)
This is not your usual February romantic film recommendations.
Veronica’s February Recommendations
TOUGH CROWD: Some films to explore the silver screen’s interpretation of live theater.
ALL ABOUT EVE (1950)
At moments practically meta, at moments tragi-comic, at moments sexually charged (and even homoerotic) despite being a Hays Code-era production, All About Eve is a feat of a film about stardom, theater, and performance. The cunning, slow-burning strife between Anne Baxter’s Eve (the fresh blood in Margo’s tight knit and glamorous theater group) and Bette Davis’ Margo (the well-beloved, now-forty year old theater star), has the potential to appear as petty bickering between superstars. But All About Eve paints a picture of the theater world that highlights its insularity, making sense of the sacrifice, sabotage, and even moments of near hysteria within Eve and Margo’s world in a genuinely one-of-a-kind film.
THE GIRLS (1968)
Directed by Mai Zetterling, the Swedish actress, novelist, and director, The Girls follows three actresses in the midst of a production of Lysistrata. Shifting between their performances on stage and their performances in their personal life, the three women are caught in a collection of distinct, but similarly oppressive and gendeed sexual and romantic binds that soon begin to bleed into the very work they are doing. The Girls can be read as Mai Zetterling’s “fuck you” in response to critical acclaim that came with the caveat that she was so good she practically directed “like a man”. In the midst of this sexist labeling, Zetterling opted to make a film deeply invested in gender politics, womanhood, and the failings of the patriarchal structure.
OPENING NIGHT (1977)
After the beautiful, talented, and troubled Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) is involved in the accidental murder of a fan following one of her shows, her superstar detachment is blown wide open to offer a glimpse at reality — and with it shame, guilt, and morality. A reflection on charisma, fame, and the ineffable, undefeatable quality of “stardom”, Cassavettes’ Opening Night is a gripping character and cultural study.
WAITING FOR GUFFMAN (1996)
In true Christopher Guest fashion, Waiting For Guffman is equal parts devastatingly cringeworthy and radically loving in its telling of a mockumentary-style story of a group of small town oddballs putting on an original show for their town’s 150th anniversary. Performances from the likes of Catherine O’ Hara, Fred Willard, and Parker Posey are a nesting doll of notes on performance — comedy heavy hitters acting like small town folk acting like big time theater folk (or, in the case of Eugene Levy’s dentist-turned-singer character, the dizzy ingenue of the group) acting like they are in a play. Through the skilled improvisational work of the cast and Guest’s magic directorial touch, Guffman offers us a consideration of amateur theater that sits somewhere between funny, unbearable, tragic, and hopeful.
THEATER CAMP (2023)
Most certainly taking notes from Guest’s mockumentary and mostly improvisational directorial style, Theater Camp offers a comedic examination of a monstrous hybrid personality—a collection of humans that are part-rabid cult chipper camp counselor and part-egotistical and forcefully serious theater kids. Best friends Amos (notorious Broadway nepo baby Ben Platt) and Rebecca-Diane (Molly Gordon) are charged with running a summer performance camp when their beloved camp leader, Joan (Amy Sedaris), falls into a coma. Amos, Rebecca-Diane, and their cohorts have the confidence of masters but the skill of high schoolers. With a mix of theater performers and some striking modern names in comedy padding the film—among them Jimmy Tatro, Patti Harrison, and Ayo Edibiri—Theater Camp is light fare, a less nauseatingly cringeworthy (and ultimately less skilled) pastiche of Guest’s Guffman.
Alisha’s February Recommendations
In Disbelief: My recommendations for this month are films in which women aren’t believed. These are films not so much about the more nuanced and nefarious, more tangentially charged, phenomenon of gaslighting, as they are about the flat and simple, uninspired and uninteresting and so unfortunately predictable, act of disbelieving the words coming out of women’s mouths. The disbelievers in these movies are women just as often as they are men, because patriarchy, which has built up a towering history and rationale for not believing women, affects women’s ideological beliefs just as much as it does men. Find below a miasma of disbelief, at the center of which stands one woman, or a few, begging, screaming to be heard. Some of these films don’t deal with the idea of disbelief directly, but I do feel that watching them with this consideration might be illuminating, even if dishearteningly so.
MURDER BY NUMBERS (2002)
This is the film that inspired my thinking on this topic. In this psychological thriller, Sandra Bullock’s Cassie has a history of hitting men. Throughout the film, stories either emerge detailing the fact of her hitting a man, or incidents depict her hitting a man. Cassie is a cop, and so she is surrounded by men who unfailingly get hung up on the “hit,” despite the fact that again and again we see her describing that she did so in self defense. At one point, Ryan Gosling’s Richard is trying to sexually assault her, and she hits him with her car door accidentally, in an attempt to get him to leave her alone. In the scene immediately afterwards, her partner tells her that she will have to see a psychologist about this, because Richard’s father has filed a complaint. Nobody seems to care that Cassie was trying to protect herself, was trying to keep herself alive; rather, she is constantly being punished for this survival. Nobody listens to Cassie, nobody takes her side, she becomes as voiceless, to the world, as the female murder victim whose killers she so passionately pursues.
LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH (1971)
This film in a sense is exhausting, and in yet another sense it is revelatory. It follows Zohra Lampert’s Jessica after she is released from a psychiatric institution. Her husband Duncan and a friend of her husband’s take Jessica to an isolated house outside of New York. Duncan has given up his job as a musician in the New York Philharmonic so that Jessica can recuperate in isolation, surrounded by nature; he makes it evident that he is dismayed by this, keeping Jessica feeling as though she is in his debt. This film is told beautifully through Jessica’s perspective, with her thoughts conveyed in voiceover throughout as they remind Jessica to make sure to seem sane for Duncan, or else he might commit her again. The fear of re-institutionalization is what forces Jessica to not believe her own sight at first. She begins seeing strange things, ghosts, around the farmhouse, and is often relieved when others see what she sees, too. It’s heartbreaking when this happens, because Jessica, through institutional psychiatry, has insinuated patriarchy into her conscience. As matters devolve into violent danger, getting more and more gruesome, Duncan still won’t believe Jessica, using her history of mental unfitness as proof enough of her unreliability. Jessica screams and screams, wanting to keep everyone safe, but nobody believes her, to their own detriment.
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE UNDERNEATH (1972)
“She’s pretty. She’s got a pointless mind.” This is a phrase repeated again and again in this hypnotizing and harrowing, liberating and agitating film by Jane Arden. The film charts a woman’s psyche — she is diagnosed with schizophrenia and committed to a psychiatric facility after a suicide attempt. We see her mind’s wanderings, along with snippets of the group therapy she is made to undergo. The parts that particularly innervate me are the ones in which the psychiatrist appears, played by Arden herself. The psychiatrist is exhausting as she refuses to absorb any of her patients’ words, rather turning every one of her patients’ words, confessions, pleas back to them as questions that force her patients’ psyches to loop helplessly. It’s incredibly unhelpful, and certainly is a critique of certain modes in modern psychotherapy. The questioning leaves the female patients’ minds a mess, apparently revealing to the institutions that be the women’s minds’ apparent pointlessness — watching it, one wants to scream.
IDENTIKIT, OR THE DRIVER’S SEAT (1974)
Elizabeth Taylor is a marvel in this film, playing a character who is a distant star threatening to fade from view. The film follows Taylor’s Lise as she travels to Rome for a vacation she desperately needs. All the while, she seems to be on a mission — she is searching for a man, but she doesn’t know who the man is, what he looks like. Many men fall upon her, attracted by her beauty; some attack her. She says again and again that she is not looking for sex, but none of the men who are interested in her believe her when she says this. Lise’s story is told on two levels: the first is her journey, and spliced throughout it is an investigation, an attempt by local law enforcement to figure out who Lise was looking for. It’s truly a beautiful film for Taylor’s performance — Lise is so strident and assured, loud and vibrant, confident in a trembling sort of way. But the film is heartbreaking, too, because for all of Lise’s loudness, the people around her, though they certainly notice and observe her, seem to not care about her, to not take her seriously, not on her own terms. They watch in a lascivious, extractionary sort of way — taking, but not listening. At least not in any meaningful way, with a kind and loving sort of attention, which I think is something Lise is looking for, in a way.