Losing Ground

Kathleen Collin’s Losing Ground (1982) was her first feature-length film and it is not perfect. Collins herself describes how her background in film studies and love of editing did not easily translate into film production. Not despite the structural imperfections, the film is terrific and so alive, just as one of her students describes Sara, a philosophy professor and the film’s protagonist, before he interjects, “your husband must appreciate you.” “My husband?” Sara can’t understand what her husband has to do with a class she teaches on logic.

Sara’s husband, Victor, is her opposite; an abstract painter floating on a cloud of ecstasy. He is sick of trying to be pure and painting only what is in his head, yearning to be visually stimulated. He finds his inspiration in a lush town upstate where Puerto Rican women lounge on the steps of old Victorian houses and convinces Sara to spend the summer with him despite her request to be near a decent library.

Victor walks around the town flirting, salsa dancing, and sketching women as they yell, “Ay Ay Ay!” from their balconies. Like a play, the characters are a bit over the top. Sara’s character is very much the black female intellectual, as demonstrated in a scene where she sits at the typewriter and philosophizes about religious ecstasy, nodding her head yes and shaking her head no as she types to a mismatched voiceover. They casually joke about the mulatto crisis throughout the film and we are first introduced to Victor painting and listening to a radio broadcast on the black artist. He tells Sara to bring over a tray of champagne to celebrate his selling his Landscapes in Blue, “Your husband is a genuine black... success,” stressing the word “black” and murmuring the word “success” as a joke. Because we are not concerned with the believability of the characters, the realness or subtleness of the characters, in a way, we are better able to appreciate the film’s ideas and Collin’s humor. Not unlike the films of Charles Burnett, Losing Ground is so engrossed in blackness that you almost forget about blackness all together.

During their summer upstate, Victor takes a lover, a Puerto Rican woman named Celia who’s English is only slightly better than his Spanish and who also poses for him. Sara, sick of the racket the lovers make as they blast music and quarrel theatrically like a good artist and muse, decides to spend some time back in the city and agrees to act and dance in the senior thesis of one of her student admirers. There she meets Duke, with whom she had previously chatted in the library, a handsome, charming actor who she ends up kissing in front of the camera. When she brings him back to the house upstate, Victor acts out in a fit of jealousy. He doesn’t know and cannot understand this side of her, this whimsical, unpredictable side. He only knows and depends on her stability, her cold logic. He can take lightly and poke fun at what he understands to be her frigidity, but this? Dancing in a tiny leotard for her caricature of a film student with a man who wears a cape and top hat? This is a serious threat. Her desires make her complex. She is in fact not a martyr of the black female intellectual.

After a wild night ending with Sara, Duke, Celia, Victor, and his artist friend sleeping together under the stars in the backyard, Victor tops off his grotesqueness by trying to molest Celia in front of everyone. Sara screams for the first time in the film.

Sara: There you go taking your thing our in front of me. It’s uncalled for, for you to sling your little private ecstasies in my face.

Victor: This is not one of your classes, don’t lecture to me.

Sara: Don’t fuck around then! Don’t you take your dick out like it was artistic – like it’s some goddamn paint brush. Maybe that’s what’s uneven – that I got nothing to take out.

Watching this post Me-Too, I am embarrassingly shocked at how much Victor gets away with. In a scene from the previous night, Victor grabs Celia and Sara from their wastes and pulls them by their arms trying to take them away from their dance partners even while they are clearly angry and saying “no” repeatedly. Even his not-so-silent muse gives him a piece of her mind and scolds his behavior. But Sara isn’t concerned about the carnal. She isn’t bothered by the sex. She is focused on the hypocrisy of it all, on the fraudulence of artists trying to elevate their base sexual desires, displaying their ecstasy as if it is something to behold. She sometimes feels deficient, like she’s missing out, like she thinks too much. She asks a fortune teller what it feels like when she sees the future. The fortune teller doesn’t understand what she wants from her. “This is ridiculous” Sara storms off.

The film ends with the last scene of the student film. Sara’s character raises a gun to Duke’s character and his new lover. At the last minute, Victor runs up behind the director and witnesses the scene. Tears stream down Sara’s face as she shoots at her lover [Duke]. It is unclear whether her crying is simply acting for the camera, or if she feels Duke’s character is a stand in for Victor, or perhaps shooting Duke symbolizes for her giving up on trying to experience ecstasy. Perhaps it is not one or the other, just a human moment and the film had to end somewhere. 

If you are the outsider, if you are the sinner, you are by definition extraordinary, meaning you are either super good or you are super evil. You are super sexual or you are super ascetic. You cannot arrive at normality because that is the one thing that has been denied you… If you look very carefully at the history of black literature, to a large extent, up to and including writers like Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, with few exceptions it is the history of creating mythological or mythical black people.

- Kathleen Collins (Master Class at Howard University 1984)

Unfortunately, reading a black character in a film as human and not as mythological was not something white audiences were willing to do when the film came out on 1982. Collins recalls how the distributors at her screening said that they didn’t know any black people or black women like the ones in Losing Ground. The film didn’t get distribution, Collins died of breast cancer in 1988, and the film wasn’t released theatrically until it was revived in 2015 at Lincoln Center. “No one is going to mythologize my life.”

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Adéle Haenel, who plays Héloïse in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, claps her hands and yells, “Bravo, pedophilia!” after walking out in protest of the César awards naming Roman Polanski best director. She is the star, alongside Noémie Merlant, who plays Marianne, in Céline Sciamma’s film about two women who fall in love on an island in 18th-century France. The film has been praised for abandoning the male gaze and creating, instead, a lesbian one, full of subtle looks and attention to small details, like the curve of an ear, or the placement of one’s hands. The visual language, composed of many close-up shots of their faces and ethereal tracking shots of the women walking on the isolated beach, their lips and mouths but not ears veiled by sheer cloth, apparently meant to protect them from the wind, doesn’t seem to depart fully from what Scianna says is ninety percent of cinema [the male gaze]. This does not mean that Scianna has failed to create a certain kind of lesbian gaze, but perhaps, that a lesbian gaze is sometimes not very different from an objectifying male gaze.

Héloïse was a nun who enjoyed the feeling of equality and the library at the convent until she was pulled out by her mother to marry a Milanese man she has never met. She refuses the marriage by refusing to pose for a portrait that, if approved by the gentleman, would settle the arrangement. Marianne is a painter with no plans to marry. She was hired to paint Héloïse in secret, who thinks she is a companion for walks. When the women fall in love, Héloïse decides to let Marianne paint her, giving herself o Marianne and at the same time sealing her fate to be given away.

In one scene, Héloïse is posing for Marianne when she calls her over. The sexual tension seems more palpable from the actors themselves than from the characters, as they stand extremely close to one another, quivering. They point out each other's small gestures, such as Marianne breathing through her mouth when she is troubled. The scene calls upon the one from Bergman's Cries and Whispers, where a man stands behind his wife in the mirror and describes the small details of her face while critiquing her person, although the audience is meant to believe that Héloïse and Marianne only love each other's gestures. The problem for me was that if sometimes we saw Marianne through Héloïse's perspective, I didn't always love of all of her gestures.

Marianne: I’ll remember when you fell asleep in the kitchen.

Héloïse: I’ll remember your dark look when I beat you at cards.

Marianne: I’ll remember the first time you laughed.

Héloïse: You took your time being funny.

It is understandable that the women don’t have much to say about each other at the end of their five-day honeymoon, but if there was a chance we were to believe in a hidden depth to these moments we all witnessed, it was subsequently strangled by the self-reference. I don’t remember Marianne ever being funny. This happens again at the end of the film when, in a National Treasuresque moment, Marianne rips through a crowd to witness another portrait of her ex-lover and child, slyly flashing the pg. 28 of Héloïse’s book where Marianne had sketched a sexy self-portrait as a keep-sake.

The love-story of Marianne and Héloïse is a retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, that Héloïse reads to Marianne and the maid, Sophie, in the middle of the film. In order to bring his lover back to life, Orpheus must lead her out of the underworld but without looking back at her, which he does the moment before they reach the surface, banishing her to the underworld forever. Marianne thinks that Orpheus made the poet’s choice over the lover’s choice, choosing the everlasting memory of their love rather than Eurydice herself. Héloïse offers that perhaps it was Eurydice that told him to do so. This is the choice that both Marianne, by painting, and Héloïse, by allowing herself to be painted, make in the film, a love preserved through art and representation rather than the lover herself. By positioning the women as the ones telling, looking, painting, Scianna is feminizing the poet. It is not just men, then, that can choose the imaginary woman over the actual woman, his dream over her reality. When Sophie is recuperating from getting an abortion that morning, Héloïse drags her out of bed, lays her down on a mattress near the fire, and poses as the abortionist; “We are going to paint.” Marianne’s eyes light up, she is inspired.

Sophie is the strongest, most subtle character in the film. She barely cries when the herbalist’s baby grabs her face in the middle of the abortion, and you don’t pity but respect her. It is only characters like hers that remain uncorrupted by art made about her.

Lady Bird

The New York Time’s A.O. Scott calls it “big-screen perfection” and writes what an accomplishment it “is to infuse one of the most convention-bound, rose colored genres in American cinema with freshness and surprise… None of them are caricatures, though, and while everyone is mocked, nobody is treated with cruelty or contempt, at least by Ms. Gerwig.” Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird feels like an affirmation of an over-analyzed and often criticized white, suburban adolescence. It’s a prayer, I mean ode to the convention-bound, rose colored person who may put on extra eyeliner or get a short Splat-doused bob to feel radical but probably is more accurately described as alternative.

            Sacramento, where Lady Bird is set, is apparently the thirty-fifth largest city in the country, the fasted-growing big city in the state, and known for its diversity, but you wouldn’t know it from the film. Gerwig’s Sacramento is described by Christine McPherson, who goes by the nickname Lady Bird, as the Midwest of California. Quiet streets are lined with luxurious homes that Lady Bird and her mom often tour as false potential buyers (their favorite Sunday activity) before returning to their quaint, less-affluent neighborhood sprinkled with dingy small businesses and populated by regular, moderately depressed, working and middle-class folk and next to an alleged train track that, if it even existed, was probably too ugly to make the cut. Lady Bird jokes that she is from the wrong side of the tracks, which hurts her mother and father who struggle to make enough money to support Lady’s Bird’s lifestyle including tuition for her private Catholic school or a road trip to visit more affordable California colleges. The film begins on one of these trips during which the Grapes of Wrath audiotape nearly brings mother and daughter to tears just before they get into an argument and Lady Bird throws herself out of the car and breaks her arm. You know, just a typical American teenager.

            After Lady Bird plays a prank on a nun to gain popularity at school, Sister Sarah isn’t angry but rather has a sense of humor about it (I believe we are meant to be surprised when a character is made out to be human). She remarks how Lady Bird’s college essay about Sacramento - which Lady Bird criticizes throughout the film as kids do their hometowns - shows how much she in fact loves Sacramento. “I guess I pay attention,” Lady Bird responds coyly. A.O. Scott describes this remark as Lady Bird not wanting to be contrary, but he is also being coy - what teenager would be so unwittingly insightful? Gerwig wants us to know that Lady Bird is paying attention, and if love is anything, it is that. She is telling us that no matter what, we love our hometowns, and we love our moms and our Catholic, middle-class upbringing and we are sorry for not appreciating it and saying all those nasty things. Watching Lady Bird feels like forgetting that not everyone grew up somewhere like Gerwig’s Sacramento and learned to appreciate having been forced to go to Sunday school, in fact many people in this country may not identify with what A.O. Scott too eagerly describes as the “typical American teenager.” I did grow up somewhere like that, and I can see how “Lady Bird” is seductive to others who did as well. However, there are a lot of people excluded from this definition of a typical American teenager, including Lady Bird’s brother Miguel, a person of color who wears a lot of black and has a lot of facial piercings and who dates Shelly, who looks exactly the same.

            Miguel serves not only as the diversity-box checking POC character in a predominantly white film, but also someone who Lady Bird, or perhaps Gerwig, can bounce off unsavory opinions while feeling secure in the unconditional love of a character they love/have invented. A.O. Scott writes, “Her (Gerwig’s) affection envelopes them like a secular form of grace: not uncritically, but unconditionally”. When Lady Bird is upset that she didn’t get into better colleges, she tells Miguel that he wouldn’t understand because he filled a diversity quota. Miguel tells her that her statement is racist, and that he didn’t put his race on the applications, to which Lady Bird replies that his name was obviously a giveaway. She then angrily leaves the room, not before telling Miguel that he and Shelly will never get jobs with all their facial piercings. There is a little affirmation in Miguel’s condemnation. He looks shocked, like nobody in his life has told him this before and that he has just come to a profound realization, and the next time we see him he is has his hair pulled back on his way to a job interview and all the piercings gone. Was Lady Bird right then? Does Miguel inherently have an advantage over her because he is a person of color applying for college? Can white, teenage girls growing up in Sacramento have it bad too? In the end, can’t everyone with radical beliefs just temporary take them out like piercings and put them aside to be a part of society and achieve success, I mean happiness? Through Lady Bird’s volatile, teenage mouth, we are invited to scratch an itch burrowed deep down inside – a muffled little racist thought - but what about me, don’t I matter? She makes us feel like we aren’t the only ones.

            The film ends with Lady Bird heading off for college in New York City, going to a party, and asking a guy if he believes in God. He says he doesn’t, she asks why, and he says because it is ridiculous. She replies, “People go by the names their parents give them, but they don’t believe in God.” The line is supposed to be profound, but I feel it’s obvious that believing in God and having a name is just not the same thing. Most of us who don’t believe in God also don’t believe that our names created us or have too much power over us. She makes out with the guy anyway and ends up getting too drunk and going to the hospital. She wakes up hungover and alone, and checks out of the hospital to wander around the city, finding her way to a church. She listens to the church choir, a heavenly moment, and then steps outside to call her mom and tell her how much she appreciates Sacramento and having had grown up there. For Lady Bird, New York is cold, disconnected, full of radical, Godless people who never had a Sacramento or have abandoned it for the false sense of pride and superiority. She is not from New York, and probably won’t stay there, and that’s fine.