The Great Summer Bechdel Test Film Fest!

It is high summer in Italy which is great news if you have the time and inclination to lie out in the sun until your skin resembles the colour and texture of a leather school satchel circa 1976 but not so much fun if you are a film fan. Many of the art house and original language venues in the capital are now closed until September as most of the local clientele are at the beach. Some compensation is provided by the outdoor arenas. L'Isola del Cinema, in Rome for example, offers a varied programme in a spectacular setting, while in most local suburbs and towns provide an outdoor screen where you can catch up with the likes of La La Land, Lion and Hidden Figures so long as you don't mind putting up with mosquitos and patrons talking loudly about what they had for dinner. Wherever you are though, summer is not usually a great time if you are looking for stories with interesting female characters. Quality aside, very few summer blockbusters pass the Bechdel Test and even those that do (Wonder Woman or Atomic Blonde) feature warrior women far removed from the daily lives of the female population. The solution then is organise your own Bechtel Test Film Fest utilising some pleasingly diverse titles now available on DVD or via streaming. It's too hot to go out so stay at home on the couch with "The Penguin" inefficiently puffing out cold air and treat yourself to the following exemplary female driven releases.

20th Century Women (Mike Mills)

Greta Gerwig

Is there a more expressive actress working in American cinema today than Annette Bening? Benning's face is a constant joy for the entire two hour running time of 20th Century Women. Like Diane Keaton, Bening knows that her face is her great asset and she has let it age and become more expressive with every line. Apart from a romantic connection to Warren Beatty, both actresses also share the ability to turn from comedy to pathos and back again with a flicker of the eyes and to light up a cinema screen with their radiant smiles. 20th Century Women is Bening's Annie Hall, her crowning achievement. As Dorothea Fields, a fictionalised version of Mike Mills's mother, Bening is so vital and memorable, at once withholding and transparent and making us understand how natural those contradictions are.

Annette Bening & Lucas Jade Zumann

The film is quite wonderful, as witty as it is insightful in the way it explores how some part of our parents will always will be unknowable to us just as aspects of our lives will always be beyond their reach. The wisp of a plot revolves around Dorothea's attempts up to make up for what she sees as the single parent limitations of her son's upbringing by enlisting the help of her twenty something lodger (Greta Gerwig) and teenage neighbour (Dakota Fanning). In these roles Gerwig and Fanning are as equally fine as Bening breaking out from the stereotypes (adorable kook and pretentious teen respectively) that they have played, albeit well, so far. The sad truth that Dorothea must accept is that she IS losing her son simply because he is 15 and from another generation. In her mid-fifties, Dorothea's values come from the depression and the hope for a better life through community but the film is set - very specifically - in 1979 when these values were heading for a crushing defeat. The film includes Jimmy Carter's crisis of confidence speech from 15th July that year - his unheeded warning about the coming wave of self centred Neoliberalism - and the energy and revolution expounded by Punk and New Wave movements on the film's soundtrack will soon be consumed by corporate rock. Even Feminism is moving into the mainstream and at risk of being commodified as DIY psychology. In two of the film's funniest scene a school boy fight breaks out over the topic of "clitoral stimulation" and a dinner party is brought to an abrupt halt by an impromptu pronunciation lesson on menstruation.

Ultimately the film is not just about what makes a mother or a son but what makes a life, with every character given future and past life summations that render the final scenes so moving. Roger Neill's plaintive ambient score further adds to the feeling of something being lost as something else is gained. 20th Century Women is a tender portrait of a specific time and place, of the small details that make up a life and how a partner's ability to stroke your back with one hand while checking off the stocks with the other could be deemed enough to justify a marriage. That detail alone is simultaneously funny, sad and true and the film is full of moments that are equally poignant.

Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt)

Michelle Williams as Gina

Kristen Stewart as Beth 

In some ways, Certain Women is another of Kelly Reichardt's quiet portraits of lives lived on the margins, like the itinerant Lucy form Wendy & Lucy (2008) or the eco-terorist fleeing his own conscience in Night Moves (2013). The certain women in this film are marginalised not only by the harsh landscape and the distances they traverse, but also by the loneliness of being within or without relationships, and the casual sexism and financial precariousness of professional life in the current U.S. economy. The Montana setting is at once beautiful and daunting but its indigenous culture has been all but relegated to cultural displays in the local mall. The film's main indigenous character works relatively happily and productively on the land but it is a solitary life on the fringes of the community. History has been marginalised too with sandstone from the old school house now coveted for a holiday home.

The film comprises of three separate stories coincidentally linked. In the first the magnificent Laura Dern plays Laura, a put upon lawyer saddled with a hopeless case (in both senses of the word). In the film's mid section, a flinty Michelle Williams's Gina is building an authentic Montana house, which will provide the sense of home she fails to get from her husband and daughter. Finally in the film's third, heartbreaking act, a luminous Lily Gladstone plays Jamie, a lonely ranch hand with an unrequited crush on a night school teacher, Beth (an excellently Kristen Stewart) who is too exhausted (from driving between two jobs to service her student debt) to notice her.

Lily Gladstone as Jamie

You keep waiting for some big dramatic moment - the accident, the shouting match, the declarative speech - but it never comes. The lawyer is involved in a  hostage negotiation but this is played for awkward human comedy with weariness and embarrassment replacing the cliched action of blockbuster fare. In another strand, an exhausted driver falls asleep at the wheel but the car drifts safely into a field, leaving the driver with no physical injury just the emotional baggage they set off with. Rather than high drama Reichardt and her wonderful ensemble provide human detail - furtive glances, bitten back rancour and unexpressed longing. The film is about being heard and being seen. Laura finally sees that her client persists with his case because he is lonely and needs something to do but Gina fails to make a connection with the elderly owner of the sandstone beyond the financial transaction. Despite a tender moment when Jamie offers Beth a ride to the diner on her horse, a deeper bond is not established. Without being strident, Reichardt shows how gender, class and age remain barriers to communication.

Certain Women leaves you wanting more not because the film is unsatisfying but because you care about these characters. Now more than a week after my first viewing, I still think of Jamie and hope that she has found someone, someone who sees her, in that remote, remarkable part of Montana.

San Junipero (Owen Harris)

The quiet longing so effectively conveyed in Certain Women is also central to San Junipero which, like 20th Century Women, explores changing sexual mores seen through the nostalgic perspective of the past. This, the fourth episode in the third season of Black Mirror, now produced and streamed by Netflix, was one of the best reviewed hour's of television in 2016 and further proof, if it were needed, of the now permeable distinction between cinema and TV in both delivery format and production quality. In San Junipero, show creator and writer, Charlie Brooker, offers up a wry critique of how technology has encouraged our obsession with nostalgia but wraps it around a heart rending same sex love story that transcends time. Thanks to Spotify and Youtube we can now wallow in the popular culture of the era of your choice everyday, but Brooker takes this idea and imagines a future where the concept is extended for greater psychological good. The film is "set" in 1987 (I won't explain the quotation marks) and viewers of a certain age will relish the old school MTV club get down to Alexander O'Neal's Fake and Belinda Carlisle's Heaven Is A Place On Earth on the closing credits - though both songs also act as sly clues to the story's central twist. When we meet Kelly (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and Yorkie (Mackenzie Davis) for the first time, the former is rocking a brazen crucifix and brocade Madonna/Paisley Park look while the latter is channelling a Molly Ringwood wallflower and we get their types straight away - the confident bisexual and the uneasy novice taking her first tentative steps out of the closet. Beyond the cosplay however, are two eloquent portraits of complex women trying to find future happiness in the wake of past heartbreak - one trying to overcome the pain of losing a long term partner and the other the pain of being denied the chance of ever finding one. The 1987 setting underlines the advances that have been made in LGBT rights in the last 40 years and that it is so much nicer now to return to the world of Robbie Nevil club hits and shoulder pads without the attendant homophobia.

20th Century Women and Certain Women are available now on DVD or on the BFI's streaming service. San Junipero is part of Black Mirror, Season 3 available on Netflix. 

SaveSave