Do nothing. Stay and fight. Leave.
These are the options up for debate in Women Talking. The people debating, the titular women doing the talking, are a self-appointed committee representing all of the women in their isolated Mennonite colony that eschews modern conveniences like electricity and observes a strict patriarchal hierarchy.
The reason for their secret meetings is about as horrifying as you could imagine. It’s come to light that certain men in the colony have been using cow tranquilizers on women and girls in the community in order to rape and abuse them. They know this because one of the victims caught them in the act.
Read more…
“Listen. There's only one woman in the world. One woman with many faces.” Those are the words of Satan, disguised as a guardian angel in the form of a young girl, in Martin Scorsese’s 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ. This is what Satan says to Jesus in order to tempt him to come off the cross and live his life as an ordinary man, so that he can have what he truly desires, a family. In the movie, Mary Magdalene, Jesus’s true love, is dead, but Satan tries to convince Jesus he can still have what he wants, only with a different woman – or many different women – since they’re all the same.
Writer/director Alex Garland has gender swapped that idea for his new film, Men. It’s an intense fever dream of a movie. Using the subgenre of folk horror, Men is an exploration of every disturbing behavior that men perpetrate against women. Gaslighting. Intimidation. Possessiveness. The threat of violence. Actual violence. The picture’s final message, delivered in its last line of dialog, struck me as being a cop-out for why so many men treat women as property. Garland seems to think it’s a misplaced desire to be loved, instead of systemic oppression and culturally accepted subjugation. Still, his movie is startling in both the themes it tackles and its hallucinatory aesthetic.
Read more…
Not since Darren Aronofsky’s mother! in 2017 has a movie so successfully and hauntingly evoked an oneiric state as Charlie Kaufman’s fever dream vision I’m Thinking of Ending Things. If I were a more clever writer, I might invent a Kaufmanesque conversation between the two filmmakers, in which Aronofsky calls to praise Kaufman’s idiosyncratic and disturbing new work of art. Since I’m not that clever, you’ll have to settle for a more standard review in which I praise Kaufman’s unique vision while also wrestling with a few of the picture’s shortcomings.
Read more…
