Female filmmakers are indeed too few in number, but gender bias actually runs deeper. Across cultures, we don’t even know how to respond to female art, as only masculine themes have been deemed worthy of attention. Only in exceptional cases,and often only when a masculine theme is approached from a feminine perspective, as in the recent Raazi, are we able to appreciate female art.
But what about gentler films? In a recent essay, culture critic Lili Loofbourow highlights the difference in how we see male versus female art. Calling it the ‘male glance’, she argues that we have a tendency to dismiss female art while remaining “endlessly receptive to the slightest sign of male genius.” The male glance affects how we respond to films, what we appreciate as significant, and what we simply miss out on.
I thought about this when I saw Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird , a film that doesn’t try to overwhelm you with its truth. Consider the way it ends, which could be seen as abrupt and underwhelming. I would imagine it takes a certain clarity to end a film in this manner. To gesture towards something but not linger to underline it. As if just like its protagonist, the film too is overcome by what she has realised. Centered around a year in the life of a mother and daughter, the film, besides winning the Golden Globe, had five Oscar nominations this year, including one for Gerwig as director, making her only the fifth woman to get one. (The only Oscar trophy for a woman director has been for Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker, again a masculine theme.)
Tender privilege
In an early sequence, a school principal reads Lady Bird’s essay about the city of Sacramento and sees love in her portrayal. When Lady Birddismisses it, saying she was only paying attention, the principal asks, “Do you not think maybe they are the same thing, love and attention?” This is followed by a sequence between Lady Bird and her mother Marion, where she is trying out dresses for the prom. Initially, I thought this was the film’s didactic comment about Marion—that she pays attention and therefore loves her. But soon I realised that it was perhaps the film’s awareness about what it was doing. It summed up how Gerwig narrates the mother-daughter relationship.
For Lady Bird, the protagonist, pays attention to her mother. She knows not just when, but also how she hurts her. Her apology to her mother about wanting a life different than what she had imagined for her is precise — that she is still grateful, that she is sorry for wanting more. She pays attention, even though she is unsure of that one thing we dread to ask about our childhoods — was that love, do you even like me?
The film too pays attention, and in that there is tenderness. We see both sides — Lady Bird’s disappointment that Marion unfairly takes out her frustration on her, but also Marion’s quiet “We missed you” at the end of Thanksgiving Day. The tenderness, though, is one that reflects the privilege of someone looking back and not still living through a messy relationship like Lady Bird is. It is only after she leaves that she has the distance to be thankful.
Much of the delight of the film lies simply in the women being the ones doing the looking, often literally — Lady Bird’s visceral reaction to Danny’s audition or to her best friend’s quiet but intense involvement with the math teacher. It plays around with many generic expectations of the high school coming-of-age drama. Boys are necessary to experience heterosexuality’s rites of passage, but they are also on the periphery, and often disappointing.
Gerwig’s two previous films as a scriptwriter, Frances Ha and Mistress America , directed by Noah Baumbach, are similar in how they construct their characters. While you are dazzled and fascinated by the protagonists, played in both by Gerwig herself, these women are also difficult to sum up using the generic tropes available to us. I have watched Mistress America often to figure out what it makes me feel about its protagonist. Is she someone we are supposed to like, sympathise with, or feel pity for? Or could it be that the film is actually just letting her be. And is that such a rare moment, especially when it comes to female characters, that it leaves us without a language to appreciate it? Towards the end of her essay, Loofbourow writes of a corrective agenda, “Consider this a rational corrective to centuries of dismissive shrugs, then: look for the gorilla. Do what we already automatically do with male art: assume there is something worthy and interesting hiding there. If you find it, admire it. And outline it, so that others will see it too. Once you point it out, we’ll never miss it again.”
Conscious shift
Although far removed from Lady Bird in context, this reminded me of Luck By Chance , Zoya Akhtar’s first film. After that, Akhtar went on to make more popular and, in comparison to her first, easier to slot films. These are a male buddy road film ( Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara ) and a family drama ( Dil Dhadakne Do ). Both are more vocal and explicitly stated, with the last, Dil Dhadakne Do, literally having a voiceover explaining the nuances.
It is not my intention to psychoanalyse Akhtar’s filmography, or demand that she make only one kind of film, but to say that perhaps her shift is indicative of something larger. It seems like she is very conscious of wanting to make films that more people should want to watch (and why not?). Akhtar has often said in interviews that whoever saw Luck By Chance liked it, but hardly anyone saw it, or got it.
That’s a pity, for not only does the film have that watershed moment where a Hindi film heroine expresses discomfort at how we have always seen romantic love being expressed,but also because of the unusual arc of her entire story. Just when you think the film has ended, you realise you haven’t paid enough attention to the journey of Sona, with whom the film began. To the world, Sona might not be as successful as the hero Vikram, for unlike him, she is a television actor and not the filmstar she set out to be. But, as the ending suggests, her journey is just as meaningful and remarkable to her. Sounds like much of female art itself.
When she is not procrastinating, the writer is working on a Ph.D in Film Studies from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.
