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52 Films Directed By Women Vol 1: 56. CHEVALIER (Director: Athina Rachel Tsangari)

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  Of the films directed by women covered by this study, Chevalier co-written (with Efthymis Filippou) and directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari ( Attenberg ) is the first to deal with sports, or more particularly competition. This is the peculiarly male habit of wanting to be the best. Hillary Clinton wants the top job in American politics but she has never proclaimed herself to be the top woman. It is not that women don’t want to be successful. It is just that they are uncomfortable at being the best at the expense of someone else. That said, I spoke recently to Bend it like Beckham director Gurinder Chadha who said that during a meeting to get a gig, she described herself as the most successful director working in British cinema. The claim didn’t work, but it is important to remind people in positions of power of what you have actually achieved. According to Ashley Merriman, the co-author of ‘Top Dog: the Science of Winning and Losing’, there is no such thing as a person who isn’t ...
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52 Films Directed By Women Vol 1: 55. PARCHED (Director: Leena Yadav)

  Set in a remote village in Gujarat, India’s western-most province but filmed in Rajasthan, the somewhat larger province in the north-west of the country on the border with Pakistan, Parched , written and directed by Leena Yadav, is about the intersecting lives of four women who are bound by friendship and common dissatisfaction with their treatment by men. But the film isn’t specifically anti-male – there are at least two sympathetic male characters. Rather the problem is in the values that these men cling to, treating women as property, or acting irresponsibly, abusing them with violence and hanging out with other thugs. Parched is an independently-produced film with some songs. One of the characters is a feisty erotic dancer and prostitute, the so-called Earthquake lady Bijli, played with commanding presence by Surveen Chawla, who lip-synchs during her routines. But it breaks a taboo – Indian films are forbidden to show male and female nudity, for fear of inciting the (male) ...
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52 Films Directed By Women Vol 1: 54. LA BELLE SAISON (SUMMERTIME) (Director: Catherine Corsini)

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  The fifty-fourth film of my study – enough with the numbers – is a beautifully observed romance between two women. La Belle Saison is set the heady year that was 1971, when the United States began its second decade of involvement in Vietnam, Communist forces shelled Phnom Penh in Cambodia for the first time, General Idi Amin seized power in Uganda, Joe Frazier fought Muhammad Ali in Madison Square Garden, President Richard Nixon commenced his secret recordings and Charles Manson was sentenced to death. And that’s just up to April. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Where are the women? Why is the website www.timelines.ws so centred on the fellas? And why haven’t I mentioned that the Ed Sullivan Show was taken off the air? History is written accordingly to the enthusiasms of its chroniclers. I might tell you it is raining in London. You might say you saw a Pokemon there - if you are so addicted to Pokemon Go, using your phone to track down the critters. I haven’t even menti...
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52 Films Directed By Women Vol 1: 53. ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS – THE MOVIE (Director: Mandie Fletcher)

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  The fifty-third film of my study – wait, wasn’t it just supposed to be 52? I started this project on 11 October 2015 and completed it on 8 July 2016 in less than ten months. But who will give me my gold star? We’ve gone to the right in my country so I’m expecting specialist train services to open up, especially for the old and infirm (‘leave your laptop behind’). Not only have I had my freedom of movement curtailed by a misapplication of democracy – the most informed people who understood why Britain benefited from its membership of the European Union weren’t allowed to speak. But last Friday, they forced me out of a different exit to Finsbury Park underground station adding ten minutes to my journey. You’re old and out at eleven o’clock at night – don’t care! If I follow the spirit of the challenge, to watch one film directed by women per week for fifty two weeks, I shouldn’t knowingly give myself two months off for good behaviour, but carry on collecting data until 10 October...
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52 Films Directed By Women Vol 1: 52. HIDE AND SEEK (a.k.a. AMOROUS) (Director: Joanna Coates)

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  The 52 nd (but not final) film of my study is Hide and Seek , an independent, pre-crowd funded film by British co-writer-director Joanna Coates and American producer-co-writer-star Daniel Metz, shot in 2012 but first exhibited in 2014 at the Edinburgh International Film Festival as Amorous . It is about four young people who go to live in a house somewhere in Herefordshire, eat baked beans, burn stuff, enact their own entertainment and flirt with the idea of monogamy. It is like the TV show Big Brother with a much smaller cast – I thought three couples would have been more interesting than two – but where no one gets voted off. There is no Diary Room or self-reflection. The tasks are non-existent. No-one goes shopping. The characters make their own entertainment in a way that doesn’t appropriate from other cultures – there is the American chat show, British theatre and a mock date but no-one raps or yearns for a curry. There are also no logos, either on the film itself (a welco...
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52 Films Directed By Women Vol 1: 51. LOLO (Director: Julie Delpy)

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  Actress Julie Delpy (born December 1969) is excelling at her second career as writer-director. Lolo , in which she stars opposite Dany Boon, France’s answer to [insert contemporary comedy legend here], is her sixth feature film as director. The best known of her films is 2 Days in Paris (2007) in which she starred opposite Adam Goldberg – she directed the sequel 2 Days in New York with Chris Rock, five years later. Although her work behind the camera is broadly comedic, she made one genre film, The Countess (2009), in which she played the blood-sucking Countess Bathory opposite Daniel Brühl. It is a throwback to Hammer horror films – it was a horror all right, sorely lacking in ‘a strong coherent vision and sense of purpose’ (Boyd van Hoeji, Variety); ‘it neither terrifies nor illuminates’ (Kirk Honeycutt, Hollywood Reporter). Having got her first screenwriter credit collaboration on Richard Linklater’s ‘Before’ trilogy – Before Sunrise , Before Sunset , Before The Devil Knows ...
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52 Films Directed By Women Vol 1: 50. ARRÊTE TON CINÉMA (Director: Diane Kurys)

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  Arrête ton cinéma is the third collaboration between actress Sylvie Testud and veteran director Diane Kurys after 2008’s biopic Sagan and 2013’s Pour une Femme (For a Woman). Here, they have collaborated on the screenplay based on Testud’s book, ‘C’est le métier qui rentre’, a title that makes little sense in English: ‘It’s the job that fits’ or ‘it’s the job that returns’ but here more like ‘it’s the job that rebounds’; you take it on and it blows back in your face. Testud plays Sybille, a successful in demand actress with an abiding desire to direct her own autobiographical screenplay about three sisters who discover who their father is whilst in hospital. Sybille signs a contract with JRRP whose initials (in French) stand for ‘I never flop’ – a motto more suited to the treatment for erectile dysfunction rather than a film company. Her agent, Jack (François-Xavier Demaison) tells her to stay away from the two women who run it (‘they’re crazy’) but Sybille climbs the marble ...
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