Female FIlmmaker Project: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014)

Taken on it's own "A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night" is a very striking title. It conjures up real world horror of being a woman and existing after the sun is down. However, the film belies any notion of investigation into those very words and the complex dangers of being a woman. Instead of delving deep into feminist text or analyzing the horror of violence against women it brandishes itself as vampiric cinema, and tends to have more in common with conventional boy meets girl romance despite it's interest in terror. If anything this is closer to quirky cinema, and wouldn't make a bad double feature with Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive considering both films follow similar narrative structures, but A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night feels like the first chapters of a budding relationship between two loners instead of the stagnant problems of eternal life.

The first thing one would notice about this movie is the stylization of the image. Night time cinematography gives way to dusty digital black and white in what has to be one of the first usages of B&W digital to grand effect. Lights feel hazey and street lamps decorate streets row upon row as far as the eye can see creating a sense of almost suburban trappings meets the old west. Amirpour's intentions of making the picture feel like a western aren't lost on her sensibilities to reach back to cinema of the past to give weight to some of her ideas. The urban streets traveled by no one except a cloaked girl aren't entirely separate from wanderers of the old west like Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter. The old drunk trope is replaced by an elderly relative stricken by grief and hooked on heroin. These are tropes certainly, but Amirpour works well within them, and her knowledge of cinema past increases the effectiveness of her concrete wasteland. Aside from those western locales there is an intense interest in interior design with each room signifying the attitudes of specific characters. Her first victim lives a chic lifestyle that is coded by tacky animal print everywhere. The Vampire lives in a basement with paintings of Madonna on her wall, and the rest of her room seems to be corroding around her. The insertion of character dynamics via interior design and cinematography that doesn't feel watery like other BW Digital work (Frances Ha) are some of the more impressive feats here.

 Scenes of violence tend to forgo the western and dip back into horror, and occasionally feminist horror. The black and white of Abel Ferrara's The Addiction is handled with much more chaotic-frenzied-brutality than this picture, but The Addiction came to mind specifically in feeding sequences while I was watching this. Lily Taylor's vampire intellectual and Shelia Vand's vampire, misandrist, queen both have no predisposition towards softness, and their killings often revel in the sensuality of the feast. Vand's vampire specifically only attacks men, and I think that codes this with some feminist text, even though the picture refuses to analyze these things much deeper than her only killing males (though the way she does kill the first man in this picture is reminiscent of Teeth). It can be read that she is cleansing the streets, but that's only the case until she falls for a boy dressed as dracula.

The romantic angle often gets bogged down by the male character's problem life at home or his persistent blandness, but Amirpour manages to wrangle their story into something cohesive by the end. The meet-cute (meet-fang?) of their first time spent together is very sweet. Dracula finds someone he can relate to, and she finds a boy she doesn't want to kill...yet. They end up heading back to her place on a skateboard she just stole from a boy who consistently behaved badly in the neighbourhood. They don't have a ton in common, but they enjoy each other's silence and there is a level of comfort between the two. The grandest scene of the entire movie comes just a little bit later with the two of them back at her apartment. The vampire stands to the far right, a disco ball twirls in the room sprinkling light all over, and as the boy approaches her as music washes in and out in ever quiet waves she stares into his eyes, and then his throat. We know that she is a vampire so the precedence of this scene has viewers asking Will she kill him or kiss him? She eventually puts her head on his shoulder, and it's the finest scene in the entire picture. A moment where Amirpour's rough, but often interesting vision coalesces into a purely perfect moment.

 Amirpour's horror picture isn't the groundbreaking feminist picture it's title implies, but it doesn't need to be. There are some ideas about patriarchal violence, and images that back up the strength of a female figure daring to push back at this, but this is mostly a gorgeous amalgamation of ideas she struggles to tie together. There's enough here though to warrant further explorations into the future work of Amirpour and plenty talent on display to be excited about what her next movies may look like.

Female Filmmaker Project: Kristina Talking Pictures (Yvonne Rainer, 1976)

Virgina Woolf's To the Lighthouse comes to mind when viewing Yvonne Rainer's Kristina Talking Pictures. Woolf is even mentioned, along with Jean Luc Godard, in the films opening segment. Woolf's prose in that text focuses on specific ideas about aging, depression, sexuality, and womanhood and the story of the novel is delivered in a 24 hour time span in complete stream of consciousness thought. Yvonne Rainer isn't a direct descendent of Woolf, but Woolf is definitely present in her work. She is present in the specific sequences that focus on aging, make-up and the deterioration of the body.  She is also a descendent of Woolf in how radical she pokes holes in the formal qualities of her art form. Woolf wrote a book completely in stream of consciousness, Rainer completely dismissed any notions of cinematic form.

Then there's Godard. Godard was early in his puncturing of the idea of "What can a film do?" at this point, but Rainer seems to be on a similar wavelength. Her filmmaking style brings up the avant-garde, but even moreso how it intersects with feminist thought. Feminism in the 1970s was going through what we would now call the second wave. Women's Liberation was at the forefront, and Rainer considered herself a staunch feminist. This comes through in her picture's allegory of Lion Taming to conjure an idea of capturing masculinity and using it for your own benefit. This falls in line with second wave thinking as well, when that movement so expressly wanted women to enter the workforce and take on more masculine professions. Women can do any and all of these things, as well as in cinema as anyone else. As well as Godard.

The transgressive nature of the picture's creation is most apparent in how it's structured. There are many sequences of characters sitting and talking, followed by more characters sitting and talking, but none of this is ever in support of a significant plot. One would perhaps even call Rainer's picture plotless. IMDB would tell you the plot is that "a woman who is a lion tamer wants to become a choreographer", but that isn't expressed significantly throughout the film. Instead, the picture focuses on ideas, theories, and discussion. Rainer's thesis is about oppression and how it effects one another. The ideas of post-war-Vietnam come up often, and characters will often spout statements about art not capturing the climate of Vietnam or wartime situations. Art is softening the events to sell entertainemt. This is something Godard would grapple with his entire career, especially in pictures like Histoire(s) Du Cinema. Art should have a reflective, aggressive effect in capturing something of livelihood, but has always failed to stop war. How can art stop war? How can art stop oppression? What is the power of art? Artists like Rainer struggle to unearth these questions, and in a filmic context she only asks these questions, never answers them. That's all we can do.

The Avant Garde is expressly present in every frame. Those frames are filled with negative space. Rainer shooting away from characters. Flinching at their very existence. Dialogue careens from somewhere, but Rainer is focused on a note on the floor or underwear sitting on a bed. It's almost as if she's negating her very characters in favour of something more elemental with her focus on objects. That very same dialogue comes and goes as well. When a record skips you lose a moment in the song, and the voices in this movie do the same. Audio pops and hisses, these theories characters are discussing about war, art, abortion, aging, bodies. Are they even that important if Rainer is willing to slice words out of their speech in favour of formal experimentation? Rainer coined the No Manifesto in dance which sought to purify movement and devalue the cliche. She attempts to do the same here, but in cinema. Cinema is a visual form, but Rainer seems to have little interest in creating image. She manipulates the voices of her characters, and tears away at everything that makes cinema what it is. A new definition, a statement, a level of bluntness is what she's aiming for, and occasionally she succeeds like when she completely abandons her own film to produce still frames of a woman posing or when people lie in a pile in the floor. These are dualities, and while her images often run from any expressive meaning the notions of life and death come through here perfectly.

I do wonder though what kind of use this film has for the majority of people. If Rainer is so beholden to completely eradicate form then the content of her cinema, becomes more elusive. Cinema cannot have a widespread changing effect if you limit your audience to the same people who would buy into your philosophy in the first place, and I think that makes the feminism or social ideas of this picture muted in a way that only strokes one's ego. It's gloriously rebellious, but at the cost of an audience who would otherwise see this picture. The difficulties of being transgressive to the art form and finding an audience are not questions I or anyone else has any answers for, but one wonders if Rainer's simplicity and pureness of the No Manifesto she aimed for in her dance are lost in the over-complications of her experimental cinema. Either way, Kristina is very fascinating, politically inclined, and thought provoking to those willing to grapple with it's complexities.

Female Filmmaker Project: Jupiter Ascending (Lana and Andy Wachowski, 2015)

*Two things of note before I begin this entry. I am including Jupiter Ascending in the female filmmaker project despite one half the directing crew being male. I find it important to take a look at films made by a diverse group of women and Lana Wachowski is the only Transgender Woman filmmaker on my original list. If you know of more women who are trans making movies please let me know. The second thing to note is this entry will have a lack of screencaptures, because the film is still in cinemas. 

Science Fiction has a big problem with it's treatment of women. Often times Women are either completely ignored or simply play a love interest. You'd be hard pressed to find a science fiction film before Alien where women were the focal point. Alien is an amazing film, and should be praised for being such, but it should also be noted the kind of effect it had on the writing of women in science fiction pictures left a lot to be desired. Alien created a ripple effect with the emergence of Sigourney Weaver's Ripley that gave many blossoming writers a blueprint to write women in their space pictures. This isn't necessarily a problem in and of itself, but the majority of these writers left out a lot of the intuition, empathy, backstory, and human emotion that made audiences of all genders connect with Ripley. Instead what became a current trend was coined as the strong female character, and it became all encompassing as the idea of women's places in these movies was strictly linked to their ability to kick ass. Women like that should exist, but not at the expense of every other type of woman who may be written in science fiction or even action pictures.

Along comes Jupiter Ascending. A science fiction film so expressly for women that it's baffling just how poorly it went over with audiences and critics. It's a transgressive picture in just how expressly it levels it's themes in women's interests, and wears it's encompassing dorkiness on it's sleeve. You see, this picture has more in common with Dune and Young Adult Literature than it does any science fiction totem. The Wachowskis did not go out of their way to make a film about a male power fantasy or state violence, but instead focused on one girl who wishes for something more in life. In that way it also has more in common with fairy tales than your typical dystopian science fiction parable. The film doesn't ignore science fiction in the least, but it's just as much young adult and fairy tale as it is space opera.

The Earth along with other planets are being harvested by the elite. Their residents are gathered and their essence drained to create a youth serum so the privileged may stay perfect forever. After the death of the matriarch of the House of Abrasax passes away her riches must be given away to her family. Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) is a resident on Earth who bears a strikingly real resemblance to this ruler mother so she becomes the rightful owner of Earth. Because she is such an important figure to the hierarchy of this universe she is a target for those who wish to kill her to become next in line of possession of this planet. Jupiter doesn't know anything of her claimed royalty until she comes into contact with a protector, a fallen angel of sorts, named Caine Wise (Channing Tatum). She eventually comes to know about her possession of the earth, and the problems that come in the bureaucracy of the rich, and the evil that comes at the price of that level of class privilege.

What makes Jupiter Jones such a fascinating hero is the fact that she doesn't pick up a gun or a sword to defend herself, and she firmly doesn't kick any ass until the final moments. It is her complete empathy towards the denizens of earth that colour her heroism, and that is completely refreshing. She is not a character with an intensely depressing backstory, and she doesn't brood or struggle with the difficulties of having bought into levels of violence. Her father died at the hands of thieves when she was still a fetus, and the last thing she seems to want to do is fight. Many have claimed that this makes her a damsel in distress, but that would negate the fact that her strength doesn't lie in the physical, but her heart.

This doesn't negate the films problems. Eddie Redmayne is astoundingly awful, and cannot grasp his character whatsoever. The action is often messy when it opens up it's scope outside of close quarters combat, and many plot threads are just dropped without much of an interest in fleshing them out (whether this is a budgetary or scripting issue is another issue). The Wachowskis try their best to wrangle in a world that is honestly too big for this one picture. It makes the film jumbled, but not in a way that necessarily detracts from the stronger aspects, but it does render some of its impact mute. One would wonder if some of these ideas and this would be better suited to a trilogy. All these smaller problems are minimal in the grand scope of just how imaginative this picture is though, and those action sequences while struggling on occasion still have that trademark Wachowski flair. The usage of slo-mo is so overdone in cinema, but there is joy in seeing those who made it popular come back to it. Seeing Channing Tatum skirt through fire as vehicles explode behind him is elegant. Elegant is in fact the word that I think of most when recalling this picture's final moments, and seeing Tatum fly off on his newly minted wings with Jupiter gives me joy and hope that few of these pictures do. It's an unabashed happy ending, and with the increasing cynicism of big budget filmmaking I'm more than okay with flying off into the sunset with the Wachowskis being as dorky as possible.

February 2015 in Cinema: Or Goddammit Takashi Miike Quit Hogging the Spotlight

The past month was characterized by three significant choices in my viewing habits. The first of which was my continual efforts to both shed light on films directed by women this year, and keep the number of movies I watch this year balanced on a gender spectrum. The other choices were motivated by adorable couple decisions you do when you're in a cinephile relationship. My boyfriend and I attended the digital film festival being held at the local cineplex this year which showed older films in DCP (yeah, yeah, I know actual film prints are better, but that is a privilege not granted to us because of the area we live in), and we ended up rewatching a handful of great films like Blade Runner, Alien, Aliens, Darkman & Kill Bill. The second change of my viewing habits was present in the latter half of the month after we decided to forgo the difficulty of actually selecting a movie for pure change. We tore off 15 pieces of paper and scribbled titles on each parchment and drew movies out of a hat, and it has been excellent. It should be noted we had to ban Takashi Miike from the hat, because he hexed it, and we only drew his films at the beginning. Takashi Miike is a very bad man for cheating.

Best of February
Waitress (Adrienne Shelly, 2007)
No Fear, No Die (Claire Denis, 1990)
Dead or Alive 2 (Takashi Miike, 2000)
The Day I Became a Woman (Marziyeh Meshkini, 2000)
Big Bang Love (Takashi Miike, 2006)
Goodbye First Love (Mia Hansen-Love, 2012)
Life Without Principle (Johnnie To, 2011)
Summer Interlude (Ingmar Bergman, 1951)
Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City (Takashi Miike, 2010)
Friends With Love (Nicole Holofcener, 2006)
Le Pont Du Nord (Jacques Rivette, 1981)

Best Rewatches
Kill Bill (Quentin Tarantino, 2003/4)
Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)
Aliens (James Cameron, 1986)
Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
Darkman (Sam Raimi, 1990)
Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2013)
F For Fake (Orson Welles, 1973)
Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills    (Joe Berlinger, Bruce Sinofsky, 1996)

Gender Tally for 2015
First Time Viewings Only
Women: 22
Men: 24

Female Filmmaker Project: The Day I Became a Woman (Marziyeh Meshkini, 2000)

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”
- Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir's words come to mind when viewing The Day I Became a Woman. Their philosophies are inherently linked, and while de Beauvoir's words can mean different things to different women, especially in regards to trans women, I think the root of it's radicalism is in how it analyzes socialization in a world driven by patriarchy. Meshkini's film The Day I Became a Woman is also about expectations brought upon women by simply being, and it lies in the intersection of women living in the middle east, which is a narrative that isn't as common in wider feminist film discussion.

The film is broken up into three vignettes, following three different women, and chronicling all three at varying ages. It's within this linear storytelling that you get a sense for how women in the middle east have to navigate the seas of patriarchy through different stages of life, and it begins from the onset of birth, because simply being a girl you're expected to live life in a very specific way. The beauty of this film is that these girls and women have to live within these expectations, but they strive and fight for what they want. What's even greater about this is that Meshkini never loses grasp of the complexities of Iranian Women's lives in her realist lens. It's her narratives of how these women negotiate agency through oppression that truly make the film's feminist intentions important, because the film never forgoes their struggles for an easier happy ending, but it does show how they live through these difficulties.

The first vignette is about a young girl named Hava. She spends most of her days playing with a local boy her same age, eating ice cream, and digging through sand on the seaside, but upon her ninth birthday she must give all of this up. Her mother and grandmother profess that she is a woman and she must put those things aside. She must cover herself and stop interacting with boys, because she's too old for these things now. Hava understands the complicated situation she is about to enter into, but she uses the last hour before her birthday to do what she always does. This segment of the picture is minimalist realism as it's subdued tone, nature and imagery are showing just how regular Hava's life is at this point. The moment she shares a final piece of candy with her best friend while they make goofy faces at each other is especially joyful. Both of them carry a childlike innocence, and for Hava that's about to end simply because she is a girl. The image of Hava being framed around what look like prison bars is the only moment where this vignette goes beyond it's subtleties into something more blatantly political, and it's one of the stronger images in the film. The stories final moments of her ditching her chador so other boys can build a sail for their homemade ship is perhaps an allegory for her rejecting the kind of role she's expected to engage in, but it's all just vague enough that Hava could have simply done this because she's good natured and willing to help out her friends, and by making it vague Meshkini implies that those women who do accept the chador are not inferior.

The next woman (Ahoo) featured in this movie is in much more dire straits as she's being followed by the men in her family on horseback. She has entered into a bicycle race with other women, and her husband forbids it. He follows her (filmed in Meshkini's dazzling tracking shots) and shouts back at her that the devil has control of her. Meshkini frames Ahoo's determined face as she ignores her husband, and actress Shabnam Toloui's stoic, exhausted expressions spell a narrative of draining sexism. This bicycle race is allegorical to her running away from those constrictions of her marriage and family, and it's even more striking that this is specifically a woman's race so while she snakes in and out of competitors the image is framed by these women in chador's barreling forward towards something. Maybe freedom. Maybe just a sense of having completed the race. This story is the most accomplished of the three from a visual standpoint as Meshkini works in long shots, longer takes, aerial work, close ups and tracking shots to get as much as she can both out of this race and the movement of this multitude of cycling women. The segment ends with the men of her family running her down and taking her bicycle from her as shouting can be hard in the distance. The image moves further and further away from them and the question of whether she finished the race is left completely up in the air. 

The final entry focuses on an elderly woman and her desires to finally acquire the material possessions she always wanted in her life. It is in this narrative that the film lets go of it's burdening realism and goes into the fantastical, and for this woman it's a kind of happy ending she always desired. Once she purchases all of her items (a fridge, a dresser, a bed, a television) she settles on a beach and treats the sand as home. The boys who helped carry all of her items there play with everything she purchased including makeup and dresses, and it's all very rogue in the face of middle eastern gender roles. If anything the films mission statement would see those freedoms to be of utmost priority, and the focus of happiness those lessening burdens of gendered law have on these people. The film eventually wraps around back to the first girl. Hava sees this older woman getting what she wants and as she sets off for see Hava, cloaked, stares at her. It's a beautiful moment of realization for one girl who has just become a woman in the eyes of the society she is growing up in, and the freedoms expressed by this older woman, even if they are simply material, are something she can gravitate towards. 

The notion of the feminist film is often bastardized to mean anything featuring women in significant roles, and while I agree that representation matters I think for a film to be feminist it has to have the intentions of unsettling something in culture through art. The Day I Became a Woman is truly feminist in these regards. Meshkini never damns the women in her picture for the sake of saying one way of life is better than another, and her lens simply exists to give these three women's stories a place to be told. The film is expressly political in it's intentions, but more than just being about a woman's place in society it's about life as a woman. Often the film veers off from this trajectory to linger on a moment. Hava shares candy, Ahoo looks into the eyes of another competitor in the bicycle race and shares an understanding, the elderly woman talks about the twist ties on her hands. The film is fiercely political and stridently feminist, but it's also an empathetic, and marvelous look at women. That's the film's greatest achievement.

Female FIlmmaker Project: No Fear, No Die (Claire Denis, 1990)

Denis creates a cinema of either utmost beauty or total effecting horror, and often these modes are interchangeable in her visual language. In Beau Travail the male body is a canvas, but the film becomes increasingly suffocating as characters go further and further down a rabbit hole of increasingly difficult regimens in the sculpting of those bodies. In Bastards the sensual style that she created around lingering bodies, and intimacy was turned inward into something horrifying as it dealt specifically with sexual assault. Denis is no doubt a filmmaker of bodies, but her films often explore themes around how those bodies navigate a world that isn't exactly fair to them. In No Fear, No Die she goes back to the well of established ideas in her debut Chocolat in oppression through colonialism. While Chocolat's ideas are presented in an autobiographical narrative (Denis grew up in South Africa), No Fear, No Die places the camera distinctly on the lives of those most intensely effected by a white supremacist world.

Dah (Isaach De Bankole') and Jocelyn (Alex Descas) are trying to make their way in France as cockfighters. It's a quick way to earn a buck, and they are skilled at training their birds in combat. Jocelyn struggles with this task as he shows saturating love for the birds he is sending to their deaths, and as the film goes on he has a harder time adhering to his superior's requests to up the violence of the cockfights by including weaponry not natural to a chicken. They are struggling for cash so they succumb to their bosses demands, and this seems to send Jocelyn into a depression.

What's so remarkable about Denis' work in No Fear, No Die is how effortlessly she seems to navigate through these ideas of being owned while still capturing an eerie beauty of the process of loving & raising one of these rooster's in the art of combat. Jocelyn sincerely cares about the fate of his birds, and while it's silly of him to care this much about these animals & be in this profession he gives them love and care. Denis shoots these scenes similarly with compassion. Jocelyn will hold his birds close to his chest and pet them for significant amounts of time while Denis gives us close up of his hands. These scenes are also often presented in a softer, richer light than the dingy underground of the cock fighting world. It isn't a leap to think the metaphor of the cockfighting can be seen as pitting black men against one another while white men profit from their work. The metaphor for this is backed up by how she shoots the cockfighting. It's almost as if these chickens know they are tangled metaphors. She shoots in extreme close up on their bodies, emphasizing their quick jumping movements as well as the claws they use to destroy each other (no animals were hurt in the making of this movie, but it's still extremely difficult to watch). At the end of the day these chickens are sentenced to death before they even entered this arena, and one can't help but feel Denis feels a similar empathy to those who enter life with the deck stacked against them, much like Jocelyn and Dah.

There's a sense of fatigue in this movie. Denis shoots these grimy underworlds in constricted spaces. Ceilings hang low, hallways are tight, and small rooms are filled to the brim with men smoking, drinking, and cheering on this destruction. Bankole's eyes speak volumes in the films final moments as he watches his friend stumble further into the destruction of this sickening profession. He stands with his back next to a red painted wall, it's intensely foreboding to his friends fate, and the blood on their hands for the creatures they raised to die for a quick buck. It's an incredible moment of acting and direction coinciding for a brilliant visual moment sold by an actor's face.

No Fear, No Die is a mournful picture, coloured by past history & shrouded in death. The world is broken for these men, and Denis captures this in her emotional painting. Chickens spill blood, Humans spill blood. In this film the cost is all the same. Money stands in the way of peacefulness. It always has.

Female Filmmaker Project: Waitress (Adrienne Shelly, 2007)

Waitress came into my life a few years ago when I became fast friends with Sara Freeman. I discussed very lightly with her some of my favourite movies over an email once and she brought this movie up. I was curious to view it someday, and I finally got around to that recently. I couldn't have fallen more head over heels in love. There are a lot of reasons why I adore this movie, but the signature reason is it's unbridled love for women, their struggles, the place they carve out in the world, and the reliance and support they give one another in times of need while still loving each other enough to disagree. The centrality of women in this picture is more than just refreshing, it's invigoratingly pure in what it can represent for women in cinema. 

 

The film is framed around the struggles of one normal, American woman in the deep South whose one true passion is making pies. Jenna (Keri Russell) deals with an abusive husband and an unexpected pregnancy, and while her life seems to be in a rut she's always reaching towards breaking free from her bad marriage and constricting day to day existence. She dreams of romance, as we all do, and shortly after becoming pregnant she meets a doctor (Nathan Fillion) who she gives her something resembling compassion and love. On paper this seems like a typical cliche romantic comedy, but director Adrienne Shelly isn't interested in men in this picture, and she doesn't give you the ending of a prince charming running away and saving Jena's life. That would be far too rote for a picture of this magnitude in the place of Women's Cinema. 

 

Waitress is about one woman above all else, and the choices she makes along the way to save her own life. She's an artist first and foremost, and she has modest dreams of opening her own pie shop. The film beautifully gives Jenna a "happy place" of imagining the creation of pies whenever she is dealing with her oftentimes difficult life. She's friendly with everyone around her by making them unique pies to suit the specific situation, and overall she just seems like a genuinely good person. When Jenna becomes pregnant it actually gives her life the push she needed to break way from her husband who is anything, but loving in the way she is. He is destructive, smothering, and needy above all else. Her friends are with her along the way as they guide her and give her emotional support even with their own life problems. The back and forth they have is rich, and filled with compassion towards one another, and feels accurate to the back and forth in day to day friendships between women. 

 

Jenna has no connection with the fetus inside of her, but she begins to formulate plans to get away. In the triumphant final moments of the picture she finally takes complete control of her life, and flatly tells her husband she's leaving him. She's taking her daughter and going very far away, and if he ever comes back into her life there would be consequences. Fuck yeah. Importantly though, Jenna also doesn't want anything else to do with the man she had been sleeping with during the pregnancy as both of these men are blurred out in one of the best images in the film with a clear focus on Jenna and her newborn daughter Lulu. She eventually rides out of the hospital with her two best girlfriends beside her, and her newborn daughter. 

 

The epilogue is what cements the movie as a personal favourite though, as it showed the type of love she had for her piemaking with her daughter. When Jenna discussed her childhood earlier in the film she talked about making pies with her mother, and remarked on it being the happiest times of her life. She wanted to do the same for her daughter, and there's a wonderful callback that shows Lulu and Jenna creating pies in her kitchen in the new restaurant she opened. Which she lovlingly dubbed "Lulu's Pies". Jenna did it, she carved out a place for the life she wanted. It's meager, and modest, but it's hers. She's an artist with a venue, she has all the people in her life she needed, and all the love in her life was filled up by a daughter. It's a feel good ending for sure, but it feels completely earned, because of Jenna's struggles. Good things should happen to good people.

Waitress more than anything else represents the kind of optimism that should be able to be found in Cinema. It's pleasant cinema, but it completely accomplishes it's goals of creating investment around Jenna's journey to self realization by showing just how hard she fought to get where she is at today. It also subverts a few of the romantic comedy trappings that befall the genre by having her choose herself in what feels closer to a Broadcast News kind of ending rather than your run of the mill love triangle narrative. There needs to be more movies like this, and there needs to be more of a place in cinema for women to hone their craft, because the world needs more films like Waitress. Cinema needs films with this much humanity. We need an Adrienne Shelly. 

 

I'd like to take a moment now to bring up the Adrienne Shelly foundation. Before this movie was released in cinema Shelly was tragically murdered, and cinema lost a vibrant, important young voice. That tragedy will never be erased, but you can honour her memory by donating or supporting the foundation that was created in the aftermath of that senseless crime. The foundation's goal of supporting Women in film is one that I greatly agree with, as this blogs entire goal this year is to bring to light films directed by women. So please check out the Adrienne Shelly Foundation, her movies, and more films directed by women.