The reviews for the Jessica Chastain-starring _A Doll's House_ have
been uniformly ecstatic, but at least two of them hedge their bet
by questioning the relevance of the play, set in 1891, to the U.S.
contemporary society. I think they are wrong; the kind of role
playing dynamics in families and banking frauds (very much in the
news these days) make the play painfully fresh. There is a reason
this is an eternal classic. Chastain herself quotes Ibsen's view
on her twitter account:

"A woman cannot be herself in modern society, with laws made by
men and with prosecutors and judges who assess female conduct
from a male standpoint."

You wonder why no one asks the same question of _Women Talking_,
set in modern times but is based on a novel about a reclusive, ultra-conservative Mennoite community in Bolivia where women
are mostly illiterate. The novel is in turn based on real
life events. The monolithic women bloc have been drugged and
raped, and the monolithic male bloc have gone to town to post
bail for the arrested rapists. The former try to reach a
party-line decision regarding whether to stay or leave the
colony. Claire Foy is not bad in it, Jessie Buckley betrays
her limited range as an actress, and Frances McDormand is her
typical, supremely entitled self.

This is not your Jessica Chastain style of individualist,
heroic feminism, where the protagonist goes out into the world
find herself. Neither is it _Suffragette_, one of the best
films of last decade, where women organize themselves to fight
for the right to vote and to engage with society on an equal
footing -- displaying extraordinary courage, empathy, and
endurance in the process. _Women Talking_ is about trolling
for victimhood. How is this film in the least relevant to
the present-day U.S., or Western society? (Or even America
in past tense.) American men had never tolerated others raping
their wives, not because they were warm/fuzzy feminists but
due to their egotism and possessiveness. Writer-director
Sarah Polley, like so many "progressives," cherry-picks the
most extreme victimizing story to stick it to patriarchy.
It is a film without a hint of humor or heart; it out-Jane
Campions Jane Campion. It is little more than a straw-man
scold, good for scoring political points and winning awards
and little else. (The far right manufactures outrage by
pointing to far left extremists too -- for their purpose
it might be someone as misguided as Polley -- but then I
don't follow their films and news outlets.)

But the fix was in, and the film won its Oscar. (Polley
probably got the victimhood=gold playbook from _Promising
Young Woman_.) Unlike the sad case of _Suffragete_, no one
plays the dirty trick of questioning the lack of non-white
characters. I am against quotas, but surely it is pretty
extreme to cast all white actors in a story originating from
Bolivia (with only 5% whites, according to Wikipedia)? But
Polley is one of the critics' darlings and can get away with
this. I also suspect she makes the villains (husbands) all
white males to sustain tribal animosity. I have no huge love
for straight white males, but this whole business seems so
dishonest. Early in "The West Wing" (it might even have
been the pilot episode), the Sam Seaborn character unknowingly
sleeps with a prostitute and his allies want to play a dirty
trick to kill that story. The Josh Liman character axes it,
saying something like, we (the Democrats) are supposed to be
the good guys. We are better than this. At that time I
thought it was a bit on the nose. Now I wish there were an
Aaron Sorkin around to keep us honest.

-----------------------------------------------------

_Full Time_ cannot be more timely or relevant -- I saw it
during another paralyzing strike in Paris. (They really like
to go on strike there.) Laure Calamy's Julie tries to hold
on to her job (head maid in a 5-star hotel in Paris) despite
the impossible travel needed to get to work from the suburb
during RER train strikes. She also has to juggle single-parent
responsibility for her two hyper-active preteens, a deadbeat
ex-husband behind on alimony and doesn't answer his phone,
job interviews that take her across town at staggering taxi
fares, and hostile bosses and coworkers. She is as desperate
and resourceful as Rosetta in the Dardennes film, constantly
in motion. Eric Gravel's film also begs comparison with
Benoit Jacquot's _A Single Girl_, with the perspectives
inverted; here it focuses on the head maid character that
is Virginie Ledoyen's nemesis in the Jacquot film. Julie
even gets a new maid fired without a lot of scruples, so
desperate is her plight. One questions her parenting
skills, her lying to the children and cuddling their whims
(in fact she infantilizes her fellow adults too). _A Single
Girl_ ends with the Ledoyen character's pregnancy, while
_Full Time_ could be the sequel 10 years later. Gravel's
camera work is far more documentary-like than Jacquot's
brilliant WWI trench warfare depiction of hotel corridors.
Laure Calamy is a far more nuanced actress than Ledoyen,
of course.

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