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BIG ISSUES PLUS NATIONAL STEREOTYPES
There are global issues that increasingly are attracting writers and directors from various parts of the world. Feminism infuses the British film Elizabeth (1998), the Canadian-Indian film Fire (1997), and the Dutch film Antonia's Line (1995). Each treats the national stereotypes about men and women through a feminist filter.
The challenge to the dominance of the male is the focus in the British The Full Monty (1996), the Japanese Shall We Dance (1996), and the French French Twist (1996). Each screen story plays with the national stereotype and bends it. In this chapter we will look at these films and others to test a premise about contemporary success in the international market. That premise is that you take big issues plus national stereotypes, explore them, expose them, and the result is international success.
The stereotypes we will look at in this chapter are ideas about the roles of men and women in specific cultures. We are not looking to ridicule those stereotypes but rather to examine how filmmakers who use and challenge those powerful stereotypes have in turn created powerful and accessible narratives for an international audience.
What is important to say about this phenomenon is that the filmmakers in every case have chosen realistic genres for their narratives: the melodrama and the situation comedy or a mixture of both. To choose this narrative route, the writers and directors are looking to make their films accessible to the largest possible audience, for these are the two most popular genres, the genres that understandably dominate television. Both genres are dominated by their character layer, although they can have a plot as well. And both genres have characters who are believable, for they echo recognizable people in human proportions as well as recognizable situations. As we look at each of these films, then, we will examine how the filmmaker humanizes or makes accessible the character, and then look at the dramatic arc and how it bends national stereotypes.
THE CASE OF ELIZABETH
Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth (1997) is the story of Elizabeth I, whose fifty-year reign as Queen of England was a golden age. But the film focuses on the period prior to her becoming queen, and on those early years when her crown was anything but secure. The plot layer of the film follows this arc. At the outset she may be killed by her sister Queen Mary who is Catholic. If she ascends the throne, the monarchy will shift to Protestant control, and so those who oppose her within her court and outside Spain and France are Catholic. The plot layer ends when the plotters are put down and she is secure on the throne.
It is the character layer of the narrative that pivots on the feminist issue and consequently resonates for an international audience. Elizabeth is a monarch and a woman. A monarch is a powerful figure, but a woman in a male-dominated society is powerless. And so we have the arc of the melodrama. A woman who is powerless because of her gender aspires to be the monarch, a powerful position. But the men, whether they be kings, dukes, noblemen, advisers, or lovers, all attempt to manipulate her because she is a woman. The issue for Elizabeth is that it is increasingly clear that you cannot be both a woman and a monarch, and that she must make a choice. If she chooses to be a woman she will be controlled by her lover or her advisors, who recommend a marriage with a prince of France (a Catholic). There is also no guarantee that this choice will secure her crown. The alternative, the choice that Elizabeth finally makes, is to set aside the lover and her traditional advisors. She sides with one advisor, Walsingham, against all others. But to be a monarch is to renounce her womanhood. As she puts it, “I will be married to England.” Thus by choosing the monarchy she gives up her feminine side and becomes “The Virgin Queen.” This choice marks the conclusion of the narrative.
England in the Renaissance was not simply a society that was male-dominated in its monarchy. Henry VIII, father of Elizabeth, had moved through numerous wives, beheading the out-of-favor in order to have a male heir. He dissolved the relationship with the Catholic Church and established the Church of England in order to secure a marriage that might enable him to sire a male. Such was the view of woman as potential monarch. Elizabeth's half-sister, Mary, was the first Queen of England, and Elizabeth was the second. This only happened because Henry's sole male heir died in adolescence. I mention all this to contextualize the narrative of Elizabeth. But the history only provides a picture of what Elizabeth faces as she ascended to the throne. The story of Elizabeth has been the subject of numerous narratives. Bette Davis alone played Elizabeth at least twice. She is a character in a dozen films, and each takes a reading on her character and on her relationships that is different. But no reading has been as specifically feminist as the Kapur film.
Granted, the writer, Michael Hirst, wanted to make the story modern; granted, the activity around the Royals today; and granted, the Protestant-Catholic rift is as powerful as it was and lives on in Northern Ireland. But the most critical element is the feminist frame of his narrative. In North America the sexual revolution brought forward a litany of stresses and strains between men and women. The adjustment is not so much power sharing, as it is a constant tug of war for economic, social, and political equality. In Europe, issues of equity, first addressed in Eastern Europe, are a powerful force that is growing. And in Asia, the sleeping tigress is beginning to stir. This feminist nerve is in the public consciousness, and so the Hirst-Kapur reading in Elizabeth is a modern reading of a Renaissance story. That reading makes this story available and meaningful to today's international audience.
THE CASE OF FIRE
Deepa Mehta's Fire (1996) is set in modern Delhi, in an educated middle-class family. There are two main characters, both women. The film opens with Sita, the younger of the two women, marrying into the family. The second, Raga, has been married for some time to the older brother. They live together with the son's mother and a servant in an apartment over a prosperous food and video business.
Both women have a problem with their husbands. Sita's problem is that her husband didn't really want to marry her. He did so under pressure from his older brother. Since the older brother was not going to have children, the future of the family depended upon the younger brother. In fact, the younger brother has a mistress whom he loves but who didn't want to marry. He maintains the mistress even after the marriage. His devotion to her becomes more intense in proportion to his resentment toward his young wife. Sita is baffled and hurt.
The problem for the older woman is even more complex. Her husband follows a guru who requires support, money, and a belief that abstinence from sex will purify the person. There will be no children in this marriage because there is no means.
In Act I, then, we have the portrait of two modern, attractive women trapped in the institution of marriage in a society that is male-dominated in an exceedingly selfish fashion. These two men care for themselves and for the concept of family, but they are indifferent and even cruel to the women, their wives who must serve them.
Deepa Mehta's exploration of this contemporary dilemma for women takes a surprising turn at the end of Act I. Sita, instead of crying because she hates the marriage, cries because she loves Raga. She confesses her love. Act II then becomes an exploration for each woman of their relationship with one another versus the relationship each has with her husband. Act II ends with the choice. For Sita, the choice is clear, to leave her husband. She proposes to leave with Raga. For Raga the decision is more difficult. But in the end the two women meet at the appointed place to go off and begin a new life. Throughout Act III there is an air of violence in the anger of the two men and we anticipate tragedy. This is the reverberation of the freedom of action the men have exercised vis à vis their wives in the earlier portion of the narrative.
However we interpret this narrative—two women looking for passion in their lives; passion absent in each of their marriages; and passion only available within the narrow confines of the family unit—the story focuses on the powerless finding a solution that is available. Mehta creates great empathy for each woman by making the men unappealing in their selfishness and immaturity. Then she proposes the solution of lesbian love as a positive solution.
Understandably, Deepa Mehta has generated great controversy in India with this story. India is a deeply conservative, religious society. Elsewhere, however, in Europe and in North America, the narrative has struck a cord. What makes this film work so strongly is that it offers a modern solution to an old problem in a traditional society. Because of its modernity, it is a threatening and dangerous solution—it challenges tradition. It challenges the national stereotype of women, and it challenges the national stereotype of men. It argues for dropping the double standard. Why should only a man be allowed to follow his desire, any desire, inside and outside of marriage? And it accepts love, gender-blind love, as a basically good thing for the two people who were victims of marriage. This positive take on love regardless of gender, and the notion that they deserve love, is the radical idea that has helped Fire travel so well around the world.
THE CASE OF ANTONIA'S LINE
Marlene Gorris' Antonia's Line (1995) is even more assertively feminist in its position on the relationship between men and women. Antonia's Line is a lifecycle story of four generations of Dutch women. The line begins with Antonia's mother and stretches to her great-granddaughter Sarah.
The narrative begins on the day of Antonia's dying and will return at the end to her death, surrounded by the people she loves and who love her. In between, the story of the four generations is narrated by the great-granddaughter.
The chronicle begins when Antonia and her daughter return to her village for the funeral of her mother. The time is the end of World War II. Not to her surprise, Antonia finds her mother not quite dead, spewing venom about her dead abusive husband. This sets up an ongoing theme, that men are useful for procreation, but not good for much else. After her mother does die, Antonia decides to settle in the village. She has a number of friends, male and female, but for the most part she recognizes the anti-female behavior in most of the men of the town. There is one man, the farmer Bas, a widower with five sons, who offers to marry her. She tells him she doesn't need what he offers, but she invites him to lunch on the farm in return for practical help on her farm. These lunches form a leitmotif, a continuum through the balance of the narrative. They represent stability and a collective solidarity for the participants.
The story then proceeds along two arcs, the communal behavior of Antonia and her daughter toward the rejected, the limited, and the outcasts of the community. Indeed, they make these outcasts part of their family. Antonia punishes a boy who is cruel to a mentally retarded male worker. The man, Loony, joins her. Antonia's daughter Danielle rescues a retarded woman being raped by her brother. The woman, Dee Dee, joins the family, and in short order she and Loony marry and become a subset of Antonia's family. When Danielle announces that she wants to have a baby, her mother takes her to the city where they meet Lette, who is at a hostel. She volunteers her brother to service Danielle, and Danielle becomes pregnant. She gives birth to Thérèse. Eventually Lette will arrive, two children in tow, also joining the growing family. Eventually Theresa will give birth to Sarah. At all times Antonia stands for female solidarity. She accepts Danielle's female lover. She accepts Therese's special gifts intellectually and her limitations as a mother emotionally. She is aggressive and menacing when the local bully rapesThérèse. Antonia represents in every sense an idealization of female strength, independence, and nurturance.
The second narrative arc has to do with men. They are cruel, like Pitte, the bully who rapes his sister and later Thérèse. They are hypocritical and cruel toward women, as in the case of the town priest. Or they are passive and depressed, as in the case of Antonia's friend, Crooked Finger. But the portrait is not entirely grim. They are useful in having babies, as in the case of Lette's brother for Danielle and Simon for Thérèse. And they are useful as an occasional companion, as Bas is for Antonia. But the portrait of men here is definitely in the category of temporary usefulness.
By using a chronicle of women over four generations, and by presenting it from a position of choice, Marlene Gorris is making a powerful statement about the relations between men and women. These women are strong, not victimized by social position and family organization as in Deepa Mehta's Fire. Nor are they hampered by the politics of male-female relationships and the nonsharing of power between men and women in Elizabeth. The women in the Gorris film are the opposite of the weaker sex. As Antonia says late in the film, “Life wants to live.” She sees women as the life force. This is not so much about which sex is smarter or better or more powerful. Antonia's Line is a portrait in which women choose to take power from the male power structure. There is no question that they succeed.
THE CASE OF ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER
Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother (1999) is a feminist narrative about family, about the roles of men and women, and about the question of gender identity and gender blurring. This story comes out of a culture with very powerful notions about masculinity. This is a country of demonstrable masculinity—bull-fighting, heated and rivalrous notions about regionalism, and about hierarchy. But the hierarchy is always established in verifiable and conflictual terms. Testosterone rather than diplomacy is the national masculine stereotypical behavior in Spain. This is the context in which to consider the radical reordering of the importance of men and women in Almodóvar's story.
Since we discussed the narrative itself in Chapter 12, “The Search for New Forms,” we can now turn to how Almodovar plays with national stereotypes, as well as how this play transforms All About My Mother into a meditation on men and women and the recasting of their roles in a broader definition than the constraints of the national stereotypes allow. I suggest that it is this recasting that has transformed All About My Mother from a Spanish film into an international phenomenon.
Just as women proved to be best for other women in Gorris' Antonia's Line, the same is true in All About My Mother. Almodovar has the main character, who has lost her son in a hit-and-run accident in Madrid, return home to Barcelona. There she searches for the boy's father, an actor, who has now become a transvestite— in effect a man with breasts. As her companion to live with, she chooses her close friend, an actor who has become a woman and therefore is now an actress. Thus we have two men who have been transformed into women. To flesh out the family, the main character essentially adopts a pregnant nun, a woman of privilege, whose conventional family has acted all too conventionally and rejected her. The blame is cast against the father (an untransformed man). He is ungenerous and aggressive. When the nun dies in childbirth, the main character and her companion (the man who became a woman) have a family again. It's as if the baby is a replacement for the son she so tragically lost.
In All About My Mother, the only good man is a man who has become a woman. Those men who remain men are not terribly useful to children or to the creation of a positive, emotionally nurturing family life. This is a long way from the national stereotype. Almodovar is suggesting that transformation can only take place when the man is literally transformed into a woman. Almodóvar's position is not very far from Gorris' in Antonias Line.
THE CASE OF FRENCH TWIST
Josiane Balasko's French Twist (1997) works with a particular dimension of the national stereotype, that Frenchmen are notorious lovers and serially unfaithful in their devotion to lovemaking. This aspect of the French male, when contextualized in marriage, means at the very least a mistress. But in the case of French Twist it means a husband out of control. He is consistently and unambiguously devoted to as many daily conquests as possible. In French Twist, he is married to a Spanish woman who is passionate and beautiful. In this situation comedy her nature is supposed to suggest to us that he is also somewhat foolish.
The main character in French Twist is the Spanish wife, Loli. She is not un-happy, but she is frustrated by the “busyness” of her husband. His excuse is business, but we know otherwise. He is devoted to validating his masculinity. The twist of the title is the arrival of a woman, Marijo, whose van breaks down in front of the house of the principals. Loli, being welcoming, invites Marijo in, and before too long the guest has made advances to Loli. Although Loli is heterosexual, she is flattered by the attention. She is certainly not getting attention from her husband. Before long attention has become affection, and affection turns to sex. The choice is now a male husband or a female lover, an inattentive partner or a partner overflowing with passion.
Once the husband learns that he is being thrown over for a lesbian, he is crazed. His masculinity has been insulted. First he tries to be indifferent to his competitor, and then he turns violent in his jealousy. To no avail. In the end, Loli does take the husband back, but not before he has been seriously humiliated and chastened. He must give up his wandering ways and be devoted to his wife. In the end the oversexed sex hound turns into an obedient puppy. This is the transformation for the French male in French Twist.
Balasko has attacked stereotypes about French men, Spanish women, and about lesbians. Her goal is to poke fun in order to lessen the hostility to same-gender love by illustrating how cross-gender love can be very demeaning to the woman involved. Since the position taken is framed in a situation comedy the situation is enabling for the character, and Balasko hopes it will be for her audience as well. Her work echoes earlier gender narratives such as Doris Dorrie's Men (1985) and Maggie Greenwald's The Ballad of Little Jo (1992). All are narratives that try to promote tolerance toward gays and/or lesbians. Films such as Mike Nichols' The Birdcage (an American remake of Edouard Molinaro's La Cage aux Folks [1978]) set in Miami, attempts to do the same. But rather than simply dealing with the gender issue, the Balasko film uses powerful national stereotypes in order to heighten the power of the narrative.
THE CASE OF SHALL WE DANCE
Masayuki Suo's Shall We Dance (1996) is a situation comedy focusing on the behavior of Japanese men and women and upon the difficulty of showing affection or feeling toward one another in public. There are no samurai or aggressive business types here, just a repressed, hard-working Japanese man. This is a man who is responsible at home with his wife and daughter, and responsible as the head of the accounting department at the large company that employs him and holds his mortgage. His wife suggests to his daughter that he's depressed, but actually he's a man looking to break out.
One evening coming home from work via the subway, the train is stopped. Mr. Sugiyama looks up and he sees on the second floor a school of ballroom dance, at the window, Mai, a beautiful woman. He sees Mai again the next night. At home he reads about dance, but he hides the book from his daughter. The next time he gets off the train; he is not confident or expressive, but he commits to begin dancing lessons. Whether the subtext is to blossom or to pursue this dream woman-dance instructor, or both, is the balance of the story.
In fact, most of the characters, men and women, in Shall We Dance are stymied about their comfort with themselves. They're unhappy, and each turns to the dance floor to rise above their life problems. The main character's colleague from work dons a wig and becomes John Travolta on the dance floor. At work he is eccentric, unappealing to his colleagues, a sad balding man. Another man taking lessons is overweight and unappealing to women. A fourth is short and so on. The men presented here are not comfortable in their skins.
The women are no more expressive. An inappropriately expressive woman works four jobs in the daytime to make the money for lessons. Although she has a daughter, she's lonely. For her the dance is about being appealing rather than dour. Even Mai, the dream woman, the lithe instructor who becomes the love object for the main character, is depressed. A championship ballroom dancer at Blackpool, the international competition, she fell during the semifinals. She blamed her partner and returned to Japan depressed and no longer hopeful. For all these characters, the dance is more than a hobby. It's a way of transcending cultural or personal inhibitions and to experience joy, grace and a liveliness absent in their everyday lives.
The plot is simple. Mr. Sugiyama begins not to come home until late each Wednesday. He is taking dance lessons. His wife, Masako, thinks he is having an affair. She hires a private detective who begins to follow the main character and discovers he's taking dance lessons. The private detective evolves into a marriage counselor and a dance fan. He suggests to the wife he's not having an affair and maybe the dance lessons are a good outlet for a personal unhappiness. Mother and daughter as well as the detective and an associate attend a dance contest where the main character is competing. The detective by now is a real dance enthusiast. Masako, however, feels left out, even rather abandoned. Mr. Sugiyama, when he sees his wife and daughter, trips over his dance partner. He quits dance as a result, but the daughter plays peacemaker and asks that the parents dance together for her. The wife not only accepts his dancing, she encourages him to attend a going away party for the dance instructor. (She has recovered her will to dance after training the main character and seeing his joy and his entering into a real, supportive partnership with his dance partner.) There he dances with Mai. Their grace and happiness conclude the narrative.
Shall We Dance is strongly character-driven. Just as the main character cannot be himself in regular life, so too the other characters. Only on the dance floor do they shed their cultural inhibitions and experience a wider band of feeling and joy. They overcome their sense of shame about expression. In a sense this triumph of feeling over reticence and restraint challenges the national stereotypes about the public behavior of men and women in Japanese society. This is Suo's goal in Shall We Dance. By making the challenge to national patterns of behavior his goal, Suo has moved the story from the nation-specific to the universal. Many cultures are conservative in their expectations of public behavior. Shall We Dance conveys the message, Lighten up—a message wrapped in the pleasure of dance. The message travels well across national boundaries.
THE CASE OF THE FULL MONTY
Peter Cattaneo's The Full Monty (1977) works with national stereotypes about men and women in contemporary British society. One of the points I'm trying to make in this chapter is that it isn't enough simply to refer to national stereotypes. Success lies in challenging, deflating, and reversing those stereotypes. But it does begin with putting those national stereotypes front and center in the narrative. The stereotypes being put up in The Full Monty are as follows: British men are the breadwinners in the family. British men are repressed, unexpressive, and most of the time, downright deceptive. Because of all these qualities, they are self-defeating, and certainly a disappointment when it comes to being fathers or husbands. As for British women, they are more pragmatic—as mothers or breadwinners. They'll be strippers if they have to, to support their families, but if they are, it's a practical decision rather than an issue of desire. So British women are practical whereas the men are not. It's beginning to sound like the makings of a screwball comedy—which is precisely the basis for the narrative of The Full Monty.
The setting is Sheffield in the industrial north of England. Unemployment is high. The problem for Gaz, the main character, is that his ex-wife wants to diminish his access to his son. Gaz is a bad influence. And since he is so behind in his child support, he is clearly an irresponsible father. His wife sues for sole support. The pressure then on Gaz is not only financial, it's also about his sense of self as a father.
Before I go into the plot, what's important to reiterate is that the critical moment suggests that men are no longer the breadwinners, the women are. The catalytic event is the observation that women in the town pay to see men strip (the implication is that in past times when men worked, men paid to see women strip). The notion of Gaz's friend is, why don't we do the same? The economic situation is dire, and so the enabling plot for a main character whose goal is to be a father to his son and therefore a man, is to form a group of male strippers. If Gaz can organize such a local group, he and his colleagues will be fathers, husbands, and earners, men who have recovered their dignity as men because they are making money. The irony here, and the source of the humor, is that they have to do what women have always had to do when faced with economic hardship— view their bodies as a commodity and sell it. For Gaz, if he and his colleagues can succeed by emulating women, he will be able to remain a father to his son, and he will be able to regain the dignity he has lost since Sheffield's steel industry went down the tubes.
The team that Gaz assembles is a cross-section of dispossessed men. They include labor and management, heterosexual and gay, white and black, lean and stout. This is a truly representative cross-section. Cattaneo and writer Simon Beaufoy make sure that we have a background story for each of these characters so that they are not simply stereotypes. It should be said, however, that since the narrative is plot-driven, the characterizations hover closer to stereotypes than is typical in British films. The diversity of the men and their focus on a shared goal, however, make the impact of the story far more about men in general than it would have been experienced if the focus had remained on the main character. Because it is a diverse group of six men, The Full Monty becomes far more about challenging to the stereotypes about men and women. As in the case of Shall We Dance and French Twist, the situation comedy story form provides not only a positive outcome, but the more overt position that challenging national stereotypes about men and women is the core purpose of the narrative. And as in those other films, The Full Monty wants to change those stereotypes about men and women.
The idea of this chapter has been to look at recent films that have challenged national stereotypes about men and women and how that idea has led to narratives that not only travel well across national borders but, because of the centrality of the relations between men and women in modern life, have also achieved international success. In essence, each of these films reminds us of the kinds of stories that speak to audiences around the world. In the next chapter, we elaborate on the issue of searching for subject matter that is global.