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52 Films by Women Vol 6. 1. TOGETHER TOGETHER (Director: Nikole Beckwith)

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  Together Together , written and directed by Nikole Beckwith ( Stockholm, Pennsylvania ), has the sweetness and warmth of the best romantic comedies whilst flipping the conventions of the genre. It charts the relationship between forty-five-year-old San Francisco-based app developer, Matt (Ed Helms) and his twenty-six-year-old gestational surrogate, Anna (Patti Harrison). As far as I can tell, Matt doesn’t work but instead devotes his days to impending fatherhood, firstly by selecting the surrogate then by spending as much time with her as their boundaries will allow, even objecting to her one-night stand, Jacob (Timm Sharp) who flips him the ‘V’ sign. ‘His penis has been near to my baby,’ Matt protests as he stops by Anna’s apartment to present her at the second attempt a pair of clogs to protect her feet, one of a few inappropriate ideas that die on the vine. ‘You do know that your baby isn’t in my vagina,’ responds Anna, who has cashed her $15,000 cheque for the purpose of goi...
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52 Films by Women Vol 5. 52. NEVER GONNA SNOW AGAIN (Directors: Malgorzata Szumowska, Michał Englert)

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  B ack in 2020, when the Polish film Never Gonna Snow Again ( Ś niegu ju ž nigdy nie bedzie ) debuted at film festivals, it resonated differently than it does now. Two years on, its Ukrainian protagonist is classified as belonging to a brave nation willing to defend its values to the point of annihilation against the paranoid ravings of a Russian President. Zhenia (Alec Utgoff, who projects the air of an East European Patrick Swayze, and looks good in a leotard too) is a masseur whose clients belong to a gated community of wealthy but troubled families who live just outside an unnamed city. Zhenia walks from his apartment, with its broken set of blinds, all the way to his place of work, symbolically passing through a traffic barrier. Here lies a community whose children are sent to the É cole Fran ç aise, not because the parents speak French but because they want their children to do so. Every doorbell is classically themed, every door decorated with a wreath. Director Ma ł gor...
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52 Films by Women Vol 5. 51. SIBYL (Director: Justine Triet)

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  What makes a person decide to become an artist? Usually, it is the kick out of showing work to others and receiving adoration in return. One can be funnelled towards writing, painting, composing or the other creative arts as a young person, but essentially the impulse to be an artist is no different from that of being an athlete. There is a high degree of narcissism and false modesty. The worst impulse is to believe that the art you create is meaningful to others and that it performs an important function. Your art can indeed be meaningful, in the sense of illuminating an issue that is little understood. It can undoubtedly give others pleasure. Whether it performs an important function is moot. A set of favourite films will tell you something about the person who chose them – about how they see themselves. ‘Important’ films, those with a strong moral imperative, are rarely on those lists because they tend to look at the darker aspects of humanity, the atrocities we are prepared t...
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52 Films by Women Vol 5. 50. SHIVA BABY (Director: Emma Seligman)

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  When a film begins with the sounds of sexual pleasure, you generally expect everything else to go downhill. Shiva Baby , the debut feature of Toronto-born, New York-based writer-director Emma Seligman, doesn’t disappoint. Danielle (stand-up comedian and co-star of the short-lived sitcom, Call Your Mother , Rachel Sennott) is just bringing Max (Danny Deferrari) to orgasm with a ‘yeah, daddy,’ when her phone starts buzzing. Whether you would leave your phone on in such circumstances is a moot point, but in the 2020s, FOMO takes precedence over ‘oh, oh!’ Danielle’s mother, Debbie (Polly Draper) has called, asking if she’s coming to the funeral today. ‘You said you are, but your dad says you’re not.’ She complains about her husband, Joel (Fred Melamed) who is ‘ten months behind’. ‘He’s still at the gym so who knows if he’ll ever get there. Danielle – your father, useless.’ Draper’s delivery is punchy, cold but matter of fact. Debbie lives in a cloud of scepticism that she does not al...
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52 Films by Women Vol 5. 49. WONDER WOMAN 1984 (Director: Patty Jenkins)

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  How disappointing must it have been for co-writer-director Patty Jenkins not to see her superhero sequel, Wonder Woman 1984 in movie theatres in the summer of 2020? The commercial success and audience love shown to her 2017 movie Wonder Woman inspired her to make a follow-up that asks different questions. Jenkins really pays homage to the television series starring Lynda Carter that ran from 1975 to 1979 but does so on a scale that can only be done in a movie. While other big budget movies were moved to 2021, Jenkins allowed her sequel to be released simultaneously in theatres and on home streaming in December 2020, just before the mass closure of movie theatres across Europe. The audience response to the movie has been mixed – if you trust Rotten Tomatoes. The cinema box office numbers really don’t tell the full story either. According to Box Office Mojo, its current international gross is $118,200,000 , but it hasn’t opened in a number of territories yet, and in the United Stat...
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52 Films by Women Vol 5. 48. QUEEN OF HEARTS (Dronningen) (Director: May el-Toukhy)

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  Again: what sort of woman sleeps with both a  man and his teenage son in the same house? In her second feature, Queen of Hearts ( Dronningen ) co-written by Maren Louise Kaehne, Egyptian-Danish writer-director May el-Toukhy addresses the same question as Eliza Petkova’s film, A Fish Swimming Upside Down with a near identical outcome. Here though the woman in question, Anne (Trine Dyrholm in a fearsomely committed central performance) is a successful lawyer who specialises in defending children. By her own admission, Anne doesn’t have any friends. Her father has died. She doesn’t visit her mother. She is however close to her sister, Lina (Stine Gyldenkerne) who varnishes Anne’s nails and is separated from the father of her young mixed-race son, Lucas (Noel Bouhon Kiertzner). Anne and her doctor husband, Peter (Magnus Krepper) have twin daughters, Frida and Fanny (twin sisters Liv and Silja Esm å r Dannemann). Their family expands when Peter brings his teenage son, Gustav...
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52 Films by Women Vol 5. 47. LOVE ME TENDER (Director: Klaudia Reynicke)

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  We see an open field. A young girl and a young woman run towards each other and collide intentionally. What is going on? For a long time in Swiss-Peruvian filmmaker Klaudia Reynicke’s film, Love Me Tender , that is the last we see of the outside world. The main character, Seconda (Barbara Giordano) is an agoraphobic. She lounges around in the family apartment in her underwear practising dance routines. She appears to be expecting a phone call or at least is excited when the telephone rings, but then her father (Maurizio Tabani) unplugs it. (There are no mobile phones in Seconda’s household.) Seconda hisses at the white-haired cat, Milou, whom she perceives as a competitor for attention – they are both home bodies. It appears to us that Seconda has been traumatised by her sister’s death but, as we discover, this is a girl she did not know. Her sister, she explains later, was crushed by a car. Seconda is the second child and this time her parents are going to protect her. But tha...
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