Little Women and Portrait of a Lady on Fire are finally doing justice to female artists
In some ways, Greta Gerwig and Céline Sciamma’s films could hardly be more different. But they are both about the struggle to be truly free as an artist when you have been born a woman, writes Alexandra Pollard
Writer-directors Greta Gerwig (left) and Céline Sciamma. Behind them (from left) are Florence Pugh, Saoirse Ronan and Eliza Scanlen in ‘Little Women’, and Noémie Merlant in ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’
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Women, they have minds and they have souls as well as just hearts, and they’ve got ambition and they’ve got talent as well as beauty,” says Jo, the heroine of Little Women. She doesn’t want to marry; she wants to write. “And I’m so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for. I’m so sick of it!” She takes a breath. “But I’m so lonely.”
This speech – spoken by Saoirse Ronan in Greta Gerwig’s vibrant adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel – was taken almost verbatim from Alcott’s writing. Gerwig, though, added those last four words. Said with a mix of yearning and shame, they’re like a fist to the solar-plexus – if not exactly undermining Jo’s fierce position, then certainly complicating it. Gerwig understands that with each decision a woman makes, she makes a sacrifice, too – forgoing freedom for marriage, art for money, love for independence, conviction for convention.
Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Saoirse Ronan and Eliza Scanlen in ‘Little Women’ (AP)
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It is a tension Céline Sciamma also explores in her exceptional new film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which is out early next year. Though in some ways, the two films could hardly be more different – Little Women is lively and hectic, all bickering and boisterousness, while Portrait is slow-burning, with scant dialogue and no score at all – they are both about the struggle to be truly free as an artist when you have been born a woman.
In Gerwig’s film, which is in cinemas now, she, Alcott, Jo and Ronan are in constant conversation – four artists whose thoughts, feelings, intentions and ambitions are in dialogue with one another across the space of 150 years.
“I was interested in making something that honoured this kaleidoscope of authorship,” said Gerwig in a recent interview. “Part of what I wanted to do with the construction was to find the author everywhere – to find the author as Jo, to find the author as me, to find the author as Saoirse. There’s all this doubling of selves. It’s Louisa writing Jo. It’s me writing Louisa writing Jo. It’s Saoirse playing Jo playing Louisa playing my lines. There’s some communication between the four of us.”
That communication began, of course, with Alcott’s quietly radical novel. Neither she nor her male publisher had much faith in the mainstream potential of a work of art so intrinsically feminine – the story of four sisters, Jo, Meg, Beth and Amy March, and their mother growing up in relative poverty in rural Massachusetts, inspired by Alcott’s own childhood. It took them both by surprise when Little Women was a success. Alcott had achieved the unthinkable, and made the lives of girls and women a bestseller. “Jo March had been the heroine of my youth,” said Gerwig. “Louisa was the heroine of my adulthood.”
Little Women (2019) – trailer
Gerwig’s is the latest in a long line of adaptations, the most recent of which was Gillian Armstong’s well-loved 1994 version, a cosier, less spiky affair. In the boldly meta new version, Jo also writes down the story of her childhood. And just like Alcott, she doesn’t have much faith in what she’s written. “Who will be interested in a story of domestic struggles and joys?” she asks Amy. “It doesn’t have any real importance.” “Maybe we don’t see these things as important,” says Amy, “because no one writes about them.” With this, Gerwig makes more explicit what the source material already showed – that the subjugation of women, and the subjugation of their art, are two sides of the same coin. Erase their art and you erase their history.
There’s an exchange in Portrait of a Lady on Fire – a love story between a painter, Marianne (Noémie Merlant), and her subject, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), set in 18th-century Brittany – that prompts similar reflections. Marianne, who has been hired to paint Héloïse for the man she’s being forced to marry, is not allowed to paint male nudes “because I’m a woman”. “Is it a matter of modesty?” asks Héloïse. “It’s mostly to prevent us from doing great art. Without any notion of male anatomy, the major subjects escape us.” What goes unsaid, of course, is that men and their anatomy are only art’s “major subjects” because they themselves have decreed it so.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire trailer
It’s an injustice that Sciamma attempts to rectify throughout her film. In one scene, Marianne paints an abortion – an experience just as worthy of study and reflection as the wooing and wars that dominated 18th-century art, but scarcely seen in celebrated paintings because it was an experience largely out of reach of men. Elsewhere, the servant Sophie (Luàna Bajrami) embroiders a vase of wild flowers. “Embroidery is such an art,” said Sciamma, “and it was reduced to a craft because it was an art that was mastered by women.”
There is a meta-textual element to Sciamma’s film, too. She and Haenel, who starred in her first film Water Lilies in 2007, began a relationship after working together on that film – just as is the case in Portrait, an artist fell in love with the subject of her work. But don’t call Haenel her muse, “which is a nice word that actually hides the participation of women in art history”, says Sciamma. “A muse is this fetishised, silent woman who’s inspiring just because she’s beautiful. Even though for a long time, women’s opportunities were to be models, these models were in the room, they were co-creating, they were one of the brains in the room.”
In Little Women, Amy is also a painter – but she is scuppered by a noble desire to be “great or nothing”. When she travels to Europe and discovers that her talent “isn’t genius, and no amount of energy can make it so”, she decides to give up and marry rich. To her, marriage is an economic proposition to which she is pragmatically resigned.
To Jo and Héloïse, though, it is a prison. Héloïse would rather be back in the convent. At least there’s a library there, and music, she says. And without men, “equality is a pleasant feeling”. Jo, who cannot get over her disappointment at being born a girl, would “rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe”.
The best films of 2019
Show all 20
The best films of 2019
1/20 20. Minding the Gap
One of the year’s biggest cinematic curveballs occurs at the midway point of this stirring documentary. Billed as a film about small-town US skate culture, Bing Liu’s Minding the Gap grows into a haunting depiction of class and masculinity, and how once inseparable groups of friends tend to untangle and diverge as they come of age. Few of 2019’s films cast quite as long a shadow. Adam White
Hulu
2/20 19. The Farewell
The Farewell rips your heart out of your chest. Then it hands it back to you, wrapped gently in cotton wool. Director Lulu Wang loosely adapts a chapter in her own life, as we follow a young woman (Awkwafina) travelling back to China to say goodbye to her terminally ill grandmother. Delving into all the intricacies of immigrant identity and family politics, it’s a comedy of warmth and bracing honesty. Clarisse Loughrey
A24
3/20 18. Us
An opportunity for Jordan Peele to cement his status as one of horror’s modern maestros, Us reels us in with old-fashioned thrills. Then it leaves us with the terrible dread of realising we’ve been looking into a mirror this whole time. Lupita Nyong'o delivers two of this year’s best performances in one film, both as our hero and as her sinister doppelgänger – one of an army of “Tethereds” that emerge from underground seeking vengeance. Clarisse Loughrey
Universal Pictures
4/20 17. Pain & Glory
All of Pedro Almodovar’s films feel autobiographical in one way or another, but Pain & Glory couldn’t be more lived-in if he stepped out in front of the camera to introduce every scene. A lushly romantic ode to cinema, shared history and cruelly interrupted love, it features a career-best performance from Antonio Banderas – Zorro at his most tender and vulnerable. Adam White
Sony Pictures
5/20 16. Vox Lux
Vox Lux is 2019’s most damning filmic portrait of American culture. We begin with a teenage girl (Raffey Cassidy), who survives a school shooting and ends up a pop star. As an adult, she’s played by a breezy, vicious Natalie Portman. Her strut is one part Sia, two parts Lady Gaga. It’s an ugly, despairing film that comes gift-wrapped in sequins, presenting art as the cavernous pit we throw our traumas into. Clarisse Loughrey
Neon
6/20 15. Under the Silver Lake
A paranoid puzzle box of a mystery, Under the Silver Lake is far more interested in the directions down the rabbit hole than allowing star Andrew Garfield to crawl his way out of it. That’s also the most pleasurable aspect of David Robert Mitchell’s film, a sunny LA noir which is sinister, hilarious and (potentially ruinously) male. It’s probably 2019’s most polarising film, adored and reviled in equal measure, but undeniably a work of striking creative autonomy. Adam White
Mubi
7/20 14. High Life
High Life has its silly sub-Barbarella moments (Juliette Binoche testing out the spaceship’s very own orgasmatron machine) and clearly wasn’t made on a Hollywood budget. Nonetheless, veteran French auteur Claire Denis’s first English language film is a typically provocative and subversive affair. Binoche plays Dr Dibs, a scientist on board a ship full of criminals and trying to harvest healthy foetuses. Geoffrey Macnab
A24
8/20 13. Ad Astra
Ad Astra is a space movie with an Oedipal undertow. Brad Pitt gives a fine, understated performance as the introspective astronaut trying to save the world and find his father at the same time. Writer-director James Gray throws in references to Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now. This is a slow-moving but beguiling film with an unexpected emotional kick. Geoffrey Macnab
Fox
9/20 12. Happy as Lazzaro
A bee keeper’s daughter, Italian director Alice Rohrwacher is one of European cinema’s visionary young talents. Happy As Lazzaro, her best film yet, is a magical realist fable that combines hard-hitting social comment about the exploitation of rural workers with flights of astonishing lyricism. The film also has one of the best performances of the year from newcomer Adriano Tardiolo, an 18-year-old economics student who plays the holy innocent, Lazzaro, with an ingenuousness which rekindles memories of Peter Sellers in Being There. Geoffrey Macnab
Simona Pampallona/Netflix
10/20 11. Burning
Based on a Haruki Murakami’s short story, Burning – from South Korean maestro Lee Chang-dong – is a meditation on dealing with isolation and the tricks being alone might play on your memory. Jong-su (Ah-in Yoo) is forced to play detective when Steven Yeun’s affluent bachelor rolls into town – an event that coincides with the disappearance of a schoolfriend. Burning is a searing drama whose central unanswered mystery unnerves long after the credits role. Jacob Stolworthy
Thunderbird Releasing
11/20 10. For Sama
News coverage has hardly been short of harrowing, violent footage of the Syrian Civil War. But too often missing are the human moments inbetween the bombings and the bloodshed. In Waad Al-Kateab’s first person account of the uprising’s aftermath, her camera’s gaze never flinches from the horrors it sees – as she and her husband try to maintain a rebel hospital amid a reign of bombing from President al-Assad – but nor does it stop rolling while she falls in love, has a baby, and jokes around with her friends and neighbours. This is the story of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. It is an important, powerful, astonishing documentary. Alex Pollard
Republic Film Distribution
12/20 9. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
It feels almost blasphemous to be glad of Julianne Moore stepping down from a role, but Lee Israel – the cantankerous, lonely literary forger who found herself the target of an FBI investigation in the Nineties – feels like a part Melissa McCarthy was born to play. Nimbly directed by Marielle Heller (who was shunned by the Oscars in the Best Director category), Can You Ever Forgive Me? is a sharp, funny and deeply compassionate examination of loneliness and self-destruction. Richard E Grant and Dolly Wells give wonderful supporting performances, too. Alex Pollard
AP
13/20 8. Booksmart
As deeply indebted to the teen movie genre as it is formally and narratively rebellious, Booksmart grounds its traditional night-before-graduation plot (teenagers eager to crash a party) in touching character-driven drama. Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever, both instant stars, convey the ever-shifting dynamics and heightened dramas of adolescent best-friendship perfectly. Behind the camera, meanwhile, actor-turned-director Olivia Wilde demonstrates a staggering amount of emotional empathy and technical mastery for someone so green. Adam White
Annapurna Pictures
14/20 7. The Irishman
Comparisons to Martin Scorsese’s previous films (Goodfellas, Casino) are unfounded considering The Irishman is unlike any other gangster film you’ll see. With his three-hour-30-minute-long opus, Scorsese places the harsh spotlight on mortality. Instead of tracking the rise of Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) from regular family man to seasoned hitman with glitzy panache, we see him shamefully confess his crimes as an elderly man ruminating on his past in a nursing home. The result is an unsettlingly moving character study unafraid to ask the big questions.Jacob Stolworthy
Netflix
15/20 6. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
With his ninth feature, Quentin Tarantino took a breath and crafted an unhurried, oddly heartwarming fable, one that came with a career-best performance from Brad Pitt. Its release rolled around with the usual smattering of discourse-steering controversy but, for all the complaints about the director’s depiction of his film star subjects, including the scant usage of Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate, the fact remains that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is one of the filmmaker’s most accomplished films – a free’n’easy sun-soaked delve into Sixties Hollywood, whose much-discussed final 20 minutes provided topics of conversation all summer long. Jacob Stolworthy
Andrew Cooper/Sony-Columbia Pictures via AP
16/20 5. Eighth Grade
For too many years the internet was exclusively evil in movies, something for tech boffins to hack, or used to steal Sandra Bullock’s identity. Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade felt so comparatively real because it felt like the real internet, which has been as toxic and terrifying as it has been helpful to a generation of young people. Elsie Fisher, as a 13-year-old girl chronicling her confidence and anxieties in a vlog, is an adorable delight here, in a film that is devastatingly, heartbreakingly and endearingly human. Adam White
Rex
17/20 4. The Favourite
Yorgos Lanthimos’s delightful, subversive vision has shaken the cobwebs out of costume drama. Set in the 18th century, it follows a trio of women – two cousins, Sarah (Rachel Weisz) and Abigail (Emma Stone), and the ruling Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) – as they vie for power over each other and England. Desire, savagery, and manipulative vulnerability all become weapons in the hands of those who have no choice but to fight dirty. But, then, Colman’s childless, gout-ridden Queen Anne tenderly reveals her shattered soul – it’s an Academy Award-winning performance that brings a slice of tragedy to an otherwise sublime farce. Clarisse Loughrey
AP
18/20 3. If Beale Street Could Talk
The marriage of disparate talents united to ensure If Beale Street Could Talk is worthy of mention alongside Barry Jenkins’ previous film, Moonlight – The Independent’s film of the decade. With his film, Jenkins takes the words of James Baldwin and translates them into visual poetry. From Nicholas Britell’s mesmerising score to Regina King’s towering supporting performance (that Oscar was well deserved), the result is a creative tour de force. Jacob Stolworthy
Photos Annapurna Pictures
19/20 2. Marriage Story
Here is a love story about divorce. Noah Baumbach writes and directs this aching, empathetic depiction of a couple whose marriage has fallen apart. As ruthless divorce lawyers driving a wedge between two people already hanging by a thread, Ray Liotta and Laura Dern are magnificent, while Scarlett Johansson gives her best performance in years as a woman trying to do the right thing without knowing what that is. But the real star is Adam Driver, who – hulking as he is – makes himself seem small and fragile. For his rendition of Sondheim’s “Being Alive” alone, Marriage Story deserves all the awards coming its way. Alex Pollard
Netflix
20/20 1. Little Women
Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel – the story of four Massachusetts sisters coming of age during the American Civil War – may be a period piece, but there is nothing staid or stuffy about it. The girls, played by Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, Emma Watson and Eliza Scanlen, talk and clamber over one another, their hair messy, their dresses scorched, their ambitions unfettered. It is a lively, profound adaptation. Alexandre Desplat provides the exuberant score, and Yorick La Saux’s cinematography is lush and textured. “I didn’t want it to be beautiful at the expense of being real,” said Gerwig. “But I did want it to feel like you wish you can jump inside and live in there or eat it. I remember trying to explain that to the gaffer, who was like, ‘You want what?’ I was like, ‘I want them to want to eat it.’” And how delicious it is. Alex Pollard
Sony Pictures Entertainment
1/20 20. Minding the Gap
One of the year’s biggest cinematic curveballs occurs at the midway point of this stirring documentary. Billed as a film about small-town US skate culture, Bing Liu’s Minding the Gap grows into a haunting depiction of class and masculinity, and how once inseparable groups of friends tend to untangle and diverge as they come of age. Few of 2019’s films cast quite as long a shadow. Adam White
Hulu
2/20 19. The Farewell
The Farewell rips your heart out of your chest. Then it hands it back to you, wrapped gently in cotton wool. Director Lulu Wang loosely adapts a chapter in her own life, as we follow a young woman (Awkwafina) travelling back to China to say goodbye to her terminally ill grandmother. Delving into all the intricacies of immigrant identity and family politics, it’s a comedy of warmth and bracing honesty. Clarisse Loughrey
A24
3/20 18. Us
An opportunity for Jordan Peele to cement his status as one of horror’s modern maestros, Us reels us in with old-fashioned thrills. Then it leaves us with the terrible dread of realising we’ve been looking into a mirror this whole time. Lupita Nyong'o delivers two of this year’s best performances in one film, both as our hero and as her sinister doppelgänger – one of an army of “Tethereds” that emerge from underground seeking vengeance. Clarisse Loughrey
Universal Pictures
4/20 17. Pain & Glory
All of Pedro Almodovar’s films feel autobiographical in one way or another, but Pain & Glory couldn’t be more lived-in if he stepped out in front of the camera to introduce every scene. A lushly romantic ode to cinema, shared history and cruelly interrupted love, it features a career-best performance from Antonio Banderas – Zorro at his most tender and vulnerable. Adam White
Sony Pictures
5/20 16. Vox Lux
Vox Lux is 2019’s most damning filmic portrait of American culture. We begin with a teenage girl (Raffey Cassidy), who survives a school shooting and ends up a pop star. As an adult, she’s played by a breezy, vicious Natalie Portman. Her strut is one part Sia, two parts Lady Gaga. It’s an ugly, despairing film that comes gift-wrapped in sequins, presenting art as the cavernous pit we throw our traumas into. Clarisse Loughrey
Neon
6/20 15. Under the Silver Lake
A paranoid puzzle box of a mystery, Under the Silver Lake is far more interested in the directions down the rabbit hole than allowing star Andrew Garfield to crawl his way out of it. That’s also the most pleasurable aspect of David Robert Mitchell’s film, a sunny LA noir which is sinister, hilarious and (potentially ruinously) male. It’s probably 2019’s most polarising film, adored and reviled in equal measure, but undeniably a work of striking creative autonomy. Adam White
Mubi
7/20 14. High Life
High Life has its silly sub-Barbarella moments (Juliette Binoche testing out the spaceship’s very own orgasmatron machine) and clearly wasn’t made on a Hollywood budget. Nonetheless, veteran French auteur Claire Denis’s first English language film is a typically provocative and subversive affair. Binoche plays Dr Dibs, a scientist on board a ship full of criminals and trying to harvest healthy foetuses. Geoffrey Macnab
A24
8/20 13. Ad Astra
Ad Astra is a space movie with an Oedipal undertow. Brad Pitt gives a fine, understated performance as the introspective astronaut trying to save the world and find his father at the same time. Writer-director James Gray throws in references to Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now. This is a slow-moving but beguiling film with an unexpected emotional kick. Geoffrey Macnab
Fox
9/20 12. Happy as Lazzaro
A bee keeper’s daughter, Italian director Alice Rohrwacher is one of European cinema’s visionary young talents. Happy As Lazzaro, her best film yet, is a magical realist fable that combines hard-hitting social comment about the exploitation of rural workers with flights of astonishing lyricism. The film also has one of the best performances of the year from newcomer Adriano Tardiolo, an 18-year-old economics student who plays the holy innocent, Lazzaro, with an ingenuousness which rekindles memories of Peter Sellers in Being There. Geoffrey Macnab
Simona Pampallona/Netflix
10/20 11. Burning
Based on a Haruki Murakami’s short story, Burning – from South Korean maestro Lee Chang-dong – is a meditation on dealing with isolation and the tricks being alone might play on your memory. Jong-su (Ah-in Yoo) is forced to play detective when Steven Yeun’s affluent bachelor rolls into town – an event that coincides with the disappearance of a schoolfriend. Burning is a searing drama whose central unanswered mystery unnerves long after the credits role. Jacob Stolworthy
Thunderbird Releasing
11/20 10. For Sama
News coverage has hardly been short of harrowing, violent footage of the Syrian Civil War. But too often missing are the human moments inbetween the bombings and the bloodshed. In Waad Al-Kateab’s first person account of the uprising’s aftermath, her camera’s gaze never flinches from the horrors it sees – as she and her husband try to maintain a rebel hospital amid a reign of bombing from President al-Assad – but nor does it stop rolling while she falls in love, has a baby, and jokes around with her friends and neighbours. This is the story of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. It is an important, powerful, astonishing documentary. Alex Pollard
Republic Film Distribution
12/20 9. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
It feels almost blasphemous to be glad of Julianne Moore stepping down from a role, but Lee Israel – the cantankerous, lonely literary forger who found herself the target of an FBI investigation in the Nineties – feels like a part Melissa McCarthy was born to play. Nimbly directed by Marielle Heller (who was shunned by the Oscars in the Best Director category), Can You Ever Forgive Me? is a sharp, funny and deeply compassionate examination of loneliness and self-destruction. Richard E Grant and Dolly Wells give wonderful supporting performances, too. Alex Pollard
AP
13/20 8. Booksmart
As deeply indebted to the teen movie genre as it is formally and narratively rebellious, Booksmart grounds its traditional night-before-graduation plot (teenagers eager to crash a party) in touching character-driven drama. Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever, both instant stars, convey the ever-shifting dynamics and heightened dramas of adolescent best-friendship perfectly. Behind the camera, meanwhile, actor-turned-director Olivia Wilde demonstrates a staggering amount of emotional empathy and technical mastery for someone so green. Adam White
Annapurna Pictures
14/20 7. The Irishman
Comparisons to Martin Scorsese’s previous films (Goodfellas, Casino) are unfounded considering The Irishman is unlike any other gangster film you’ll see. With his three-hour-30-minute-long opus, Scorsese places the harsh spotlight on mortality. Instead of tracking the rise of Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) from regular family man to seasoned hitman with glitzy panache, we see him shamefully confess his crimes as an elderly man ruminating on his past in a nursing home. The result is an unsettlingly moving character study unafraid to ask the big questions.Jacob Stolworthy
Netflix
15/20 6. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
With his ninth feature, Quentin Tarantino took a breath and crafted an unhurried, oddly heartwarming fable, one that came with a career-best performance from Brad Pitt. Its release rolled around with the usual smattering of discourse-steering controversy but, for all the complaints about the director’s depiction of his film star subjects, including the scant usage of Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate, the fact remains that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is one of the filmmaker’s most accomplished films – a free’n’easy sun-soaked delve into Sixties Hollywood, whose much-discussed final 20 minutes provided topics of conversation all summer long. Jacob Stolworthy
Andrew Cooper/Sony-Columbia Pictures via AP
16/20 5. Eighth Grade
For too many years the internet was exclusively evil in movies, something for tech boffins to hack, or used to steal Sandra Bullock’s identity. Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade felt so comparatively real because it felt like the real internet, which has been as toxic and terrifying as it has been helpful to a generation of young people. Elsie Fisher, as a 13-year-old girl chronicling her confidence and anxieties in a vlog, is an adorable delight here, in a film that is devastatingly, heartbreakingly and endearingly human. Adam White
Rex
17/20 4. The Favourite
Yorgos Lanthimos’s delightful, subversive vision has shaken the cobwebs out of costume drama. Set in the 18th century, it follows a trio of women – two cousins, Sarah (Rachel Weisz) and Abigail (Emma Stone), and the ruling Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) – as they vie for power over each other and England. Desire, savagery, and manipulative vulnerability all become weapons in the hands of those who have no choice but to fight dirty. But, then, Colman’s childless, gout-ridden Queen Anne tenderly reveals her shattered soul – it’s an Academy Award-winning performance that brings a slice of tragedy to an otherwise sublime farce. Clarisse Loughrey
AP
18/20 3. If Beale Street Could Talk
The marriage of disparate talents united to ensure If Beale Street Could Talk is worthy of mention alongside Barry Jenkins’ previous film, Moonlight – The Independent’s film of the decade. With his film, Jenkins takes the words of James Baldwin and translates them into visual poetry. From Nicholas Britell’s mesmerising score to Regina King’s towering supporting performance (that Oscar was well deserved), the result is a creative tour de force. Jacob Stolworthy
Photos Annapurna Pictures
19/20 2. Marriage Story
Here is a love story about divorce. Noah Baumbach writes and directs this aching, empathetic depiction of a couple whose marriage has fallen apart. As ruthless divorce lawyers driving a wedge between two people already hanging by a thread, Ray Liotta and Laura Dern are magnificent, while Scarlett Johansson gives her best performance in years as a woman trying to do the right thing without knowing what that is. But the real star is Adam Driver, who – hulking as he is – makes himself seem small and fragile. For his rendition of Sondheim’s “Being Alive” alone, Marriage Story deserves all the awards coming its way. Alex Pollard
Netflix
20/20 1. Little Women
Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel – the story of four Massachusetts sisters coming of age during the American Civil War – may be a period piece, but there is nothing staid or stuffy about it. The girls, played by Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, Emma Watson and Eliza Scanlen, talk and clamber over one another, their hair messy, their dresses scorched, their ambitions unfettered. It is a lively, profound adaptation. Alexandre Desplat provides the exuberant score, and Yorick La Saux’s cinematography is lush and textured. “I didn’t want it to be beautiful at the expense of being real,” said Gerwig. “But I did want it to feel like you wish you can jump inside and live in there or eat it. I remember trying to explain that to the gaffer, who was like, ‘You want what?’ I was like, ‘I want them to want to eat it.’” And how delicious it is. Alex Pollard
Sony Pictures Entertainment
And yet (spoiler alert), Jo does get married. “When the androgyny of childhood disappears,” Sciamma once said in reference to another of her films, Tomboy, “it is such a tragedy, because you lose your freedom.” It’s hard not to apply these words to Jo’s fate, too. Though Alcott wanted to honour her heroine’s (and her own) teenage convictions, she had Jo grow up, give up writing and get hitched to Professor Bhaer – adhering to the literary tradition that women should end up either married or dead.
Gerwig understood this – “She made this economic decision that that’s what she would do, because she had to sell books” – but in her version, she gives Jo what Alcott couldn’t: a published novel. “If I can’t do an ending she would have liked, 150 years later,” she told studio execs, “then we’ve made no progress.”
Little Women Clip – Economic Proposition
Still, progress is frustratingly slow. “We always pretend that women’s opportunity, women’s rights, are this linear progress, and it’s not true,” says Sciamma, who discovered while researching her film that there were hundreds of female artists in 18th-century France, “and they were erased from art history”.
Women’s art is still too often erased from the cultural conversation. Take the fact that France passed up the opportunity to nominate Portrait as its Oscars contender, or that Gerwig’s Little Women has been largely ignored by awards bodies so far. According to producer Amy Pascal, when Sony Pictures hosted screenings for voters around Los Angeles, women outnumbered men by about two to one. “It’s a completely unconscious bias,” she said. “I don’t think it’s anything like a malicious rejection.” But a bias it still is.
“I’m really flummoxed by it,” said Tracy Letts, who plays Jo’s narrow-minded publisher – the male gatekeeper of a woman’s success. “I don’t know what the hell it is. But please tell me it’s not because it’s a movie about women. I just can’t believe we’re still having this f***ing discussion where movies by men, and about men, and for men are considered default movies. And women’s movies fall into this separate and unequal category. It’s absurd.”
Despite being high up in many publications’ films of the year lists (it was number one in ours), Little Women received no SAG nominations, and only two Golden Globe nods – Best Actress for Saoirse Ronan and Best Score for Alexandre Desplat. They were well deserved, but it’s not nearly enough. And no female directors were nominated at all. “In a way it’s sort of vital for something like this to happen,” said Ronan, “because it reminds us of how far we still need to go. She’s a really brilliant filmmaker, and we wouldn’t be here without her.”
If Ronan owes her success to Gerwig, then Gerwig believes she owes hers to Alcott. “What I’m able to do is indebted to what she did,” she said, “because she wrote about the lives of girls and women, and people read it and loved it. It became important because there was an audience for it. Where I am, where we are, what’s possible now, is possible because of all these generations of women.”
Neither Gerwig nor Sciamma are rewriting history. They are simply giving women – and their art – a proper place in it.
Little Women is in UK cinemas now. Portrait of a Lady on Fire is out on 28 February 2020
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Little Women finally does justice to female artists
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Writer-directors Greta Gerwigand Céline Sciamma. Behind themare Florence Pugh, Saoirse Ronan and Eliza Scanlen in ‘Little Women’, and Noémie Merlant in ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’
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Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Saoirse Ronan and Eliza Scanlen in ‘Little Women’
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Independent Premium Comments can be posted by members of our membership scheme, Independent Premium. It allows our most engaged readers to debate the big issues, share their own experiences, discuss real-world solutions, and more. Our journalists will try to respond by joining the threads when they can to create a true meeting of independent Premium. The most insightful comments on all subjects will be published daily in dedicated articles. You can also choose to be emailed when someone replies to your comment.
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