/ 8 November 1996

Good week for women’s films

CINEMA: Andrew Worsdale

IN The First Wives Club Goldie Hawn as a ditzy, sexy screen star on the slippery slope of character parts pleads with her reluctant plastic surgeon for lips like Mick Jagger’s. She’s got to be more glamorous because, ”there are only three ages of women in Hollywood – babe, district attorney and Driving Miss Daisy”.

A great bit of dialogue in a picture positively bursting with genuinely witty one-liners and also a fairly accurate reflection on the state of womanhood in mainstream American cinema – ladies take a glamorously supportive back-seat to the Stallones and Schwarzeneggers.

In the film Hawn, Diane Keaton and Bette Midler merrily flaunt the stereotypes that made them movie stars – neurotic wasp, sexy bimbo, and overpowering yenta – as a group of women who decide to exact revenge on the husbands who dumped them for younger women.

The story sees all men as bastards, but unlike Waiting To Exhale, the film’s keen sense of humour and intelligent scripting ensure it doesn’t feel like an uptight male bash-a-thon.

Although Hollywood is male-dominated, there are some notable exceptions like Dawn Steel, studio boss and possibly the most powerful female showbiz figure in America. And there are some actresses – like Jodie Foster and Sharon Stone – who have significant sway in La-La land.

By and large however, women have been side- lined in the mainstream – compare the $12- million Demi Moore got for displaying her boobs in Striptease to Jim Carrey’s $20- million for playing an obnoxious psycho in The Cable Guy.

In the independent film sector women, especially directors, are really making their mark. Directors like Allison Anders (Gas, Food, Lodging), Amy Heckerling (Clueless), Jane Campion (The Piano and the upcoming Portrait of a Lady) and Gillian Armstrong (Little Women) are all increasingly major players in contemporary cinema and can wield as much creative power as a Scorsese or a Coppola.

First Wives Club aside, two other films specific to women’s issues open this week. A Couch In New York is directed by celebrated Belgian art-house film-maker Chantal Akerman. Although a lesbian who focuses many of her films on female sexuality and feminism, she refuses to be associated with either, once even pulling a film of hers from the New York Gay Film Festival on the grounds that she refused to be ghettoised. In the book Images in the Dark she is quoted as saying, ”I won’t say that I’m a feminist film-maker … I’m not making women’s films, I’m making Chantal Akerman films.” Unfortunately, unlike her extraordinary Jeanne Dielman (1975), her latest effort is not a very good Chantal Akerman film.

The tale of a worn-out, uptight psychoanalyst (a dour William Hurt) who exchanges his flashy New York apartment for free-spirited dancer Juliette Binoche’s Parisian garret, it attempts to be a romantic comedy. But its insistence on psychobabble in the place of the kind of witty dialogue a Woody Allen could concoct leaves the film lurching from one pretentious, dull moment to the next. A Variety review commented that it has a script that only the screenwriter’s mother could admire. It also boasts one of the worst performances of the year in the stilted delivery of British actress Stephanie Buttle. It’s not all her fault though, anyone would have trouble bringing even an ounce of belief to the dialogue she has to deliver.

More interesting is Gazon Maudit, written and directed by and starring feisty French actress Josiane Balasko. It’s is a typically Gallic take on marriage, sexuality and gender. The plot involves an unfaithful husband (Alain Chabat) and his seemingly complacent wife (Victoria Abril) and is both subversive and commercial in the way only French movies can be.

But my vote for the best ”wimmin’s” movie of the week goes to the unabashedly mainstream The First Wives Club. Any comedy that begins with a suicide has got something serious to say and that it does this with verve, spectacular humour and a neat sense of cynicism amidst the schlock is noteworthy. The only set-back is the sappy ending.