Examples of culturally and artistically meaningful cinema by and about women have been infrequent. The career of Penny Marshall—the first woman to direct a film that grossed $100 million in 1988 but who wasn’t prolific—along with two current movies illlustrate what women filmmakers access in ourselves that is otherwise neglected.
Penny Marshall was known primarily as the first-named character in the classic TV series, Laverne and Shirley, where she performed a remarkably expressive comedic star turn. But Marshall was also a movie director of note for her originality and humanity. Her three best-known films were Big (1988; one of cinema’s great titles, about a boy who magically becomes an adult), Awakenings (1990; about a man suddenly roused from a years-long coma), and A League of Their Own (1992; about a women’s professional baseball team). All of these films focus on underdogs, people ordinarily not in control of their lives who suddenly find themselves empowered. It’s hard to avoid seeing that the director’s insight on this subject is one especially accessible to a woman. And, in this regard, we can be troubled by Marshall’s short-lived career as a director.
Turning to contemporary cinema, we find the Venice Film Festival award-winning Capernaum (Chaos), a stunning film by Lebanese Director Nadine Labaki. The film stars an underfed 12-year-old boy taking care of a toddler on the chaotic streets of Beirut. The film is organized around the 12-year-old’s suing his parents for throwing him into this world. Just imagining filming in this environment and directing the two leads defies imagination.
In an interview with The New York Times, Labaki describes her motivation in making the film (her third feature) while she was having a child and running for city council in Beirut:
I want this film to go beyond the borders of just being a film. This is what I want to work on for the next year — not only promoting the film but also trying to work with the government, at least in Lebanon, to work on the structure that deals with [neglected] children. I want to try to change things. I might never get anywhere, but at least I want to try.
Fictional theatrical films do not usually intend to improve society’s handling of children so directly as Labaki describes herself wishing to do here. Is it her empathy as a woman that moves her?
If this makes all women sound like saints, let me turn now to the (fairly) light-hearted documentary, Lots of Kids, a Monkey and a Castle, directed by Spanish film actor Gustavo Salmerón. The film is about Gustavo’s mother, Julita, who had three dreams—having lots of kids, owning a monkey, and living in a castle—all of which occurred for her.
Julita is, dare I say, a piece of work—indomitable, opinionated (she rules the roost), and grandly obese. Now 81, her eating, weight, and health are primary topics for the family, including her six children, grandchildren, and (thin) husband. Indeed, her impending death (although she appears active and in fine health) is a recurrent theme of the movie. Julita has a theory: Many people are buried alive. So she is constantly warning her family to poke her in the forehead with a knitting needle when she is about to be interred so she will scream out and avoid such a fate. Her preparations include a dress rehearsal with her tolerant family that caused me to burst into laughter, one of many times I did so during the film.
But the film is not entirely a laugh-fest. The family is losing its castle (they are millions of dollars in debt), and much of the film is about liquidating Julita’s endlessly hoarded possessions, including Old Master paintings and a medieval suit of armor, along with much else.
Although loving and considerate of one another (the director/son shows happy childhood clips of the family), the clan isn’t well organized. The film spends a great deal of time in their chaotic moving process. And yet the narrative never flags, and good humor and happiness are always evident.
Julita complains at one point that her husband no longer pursues her sexually. Then, in a scene that can stand for every human being’s mortality and longing, she reveals how, every night in her bedroom, she lights a shrine (a photo of her youthful husband) that returns her to the feelings she had when the photo was taken.
A surprisingly great film about a seemingly unlikely topic—a woman devoted to her family and to living—which, along with Penny Marshall’s oeuvre and Capernaum, makes clear why we need more films by and about women, along with classics like Vertigo and The Searchers, great films where women appear solely in relation to men. In those films, Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford ask, “What do men’s preoccupations over women drive them to do, both good and harmful?” In films where we examine the world via women’s experiences, we instead confront the question, “How should human beings deal with their feelings for one another?” This balancing of perspectives offers us a more complete vision of both art and life.