Notes From The Program Director | Week of March 3rd, 2023

Hello, friends!

This week, the Oscar-nominated Animated shorts continue, and Emily, that sumptuous big-screen delight, continues to grace our screens. We’re also, at long last, able to offer you two films I’ve been eager to bring here the moment I first laid eyes on them: Women Talking and EO, two Oscar-nominated films that again indicate the Academy, at least sometimes, gets it right. 

Women Talking: Actor-Writer-Director Sarah Polley, who knocked her first three feature films -- Away from Her, Stories We Tell, and Take This Waltz -- out of the park, offers us even more of her impressive range in this newest film. All of her four films have dealt with gender, relationships, marriage, families, and patriarchy but each in such radically different ways that she's truly an exciting director to watch. She brings an actor's sensibilities to all her films, eliciting magnificent performances from every cast member; a sensitivity to prismatic storytelling and the skill to create a full-bodied narrative; and a background in political activism to lend deep complexity to even the most intimate of human situations. 

Of her four features, Women Talking is perhaps the film where the politics are most in the foreground, as the narrative centers on women in a rigidly structured, patriarchal, religious community who seize a moment when all the men of the community are absent in order to address the series of sexual assaults the women have suffered; their situation, they believe, offers them three choices: leave the community, stay and fight, or do nothing.  It’s a narrative that wears its metaphor of gender politics on its sleeve. But Polley’s skill is such that the film is so far from didacticism and so open to complication and to the messiness of what it means to be human that it's impossible to say with any honesty that this is just another "MeToo" film (if there is such a thing). The film is grounded in the various personalities, viewpoints, and experiences of its disparate women characters, fleshed out in brilliant performances from Claire Foy, Jesse Buckley, Rooney Mara, Frances McDormand, and many others, and part of the joy of the film is that the characters have the space to argue with each other, often with fierce rage, about the best way to handle the horrible thing that they have all experienced.  The "Women" of the title can thus never be shoved into one category or one generic group, and the solution they arrive at presents itself as one solution among others, not The Answer. Watching this film means facing real women as individuals, rather than as stereotypes, and it is part of the wonderful nuance of the story that audience members will certainly find themselves agreeing or disagreeing with different characters -- while also understanding where each of the others is coming from. It’s an extraordinary film from an extraordinary director and well-deserving of its Best Picture nomination. 

EO: Somehow, 2022 was the year of the cinematic donkey, but happily, unlike The Banshees of Inisherin or Triangle of Sadness, no donkeys are killed in the service of this story, and unlike the other two films, the donkey here is not a side character but our protagonist, making his sturdy way through an alternately loving, cruel, and indifferent world. The film, nominated for Best International Feature Film, directed by renowned Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, co-written by Skolimowski and his wife Ewa Piaskowska, is a riveting homage to the great Robert Bresson and his 1966 film Au Hasard Balthazar. EO brings the same sensitivity and clear-eyed compassionate vision of the suffering of a humble innocent that the earlier Bresson film does, while also being a wholly unique cinematic experience, fully grounded in our modern world. It offers a new perspective as well as often quite radically different and beautiful formal choices. The color in this film, for example, is as important as Bresson's black and white cinematography is to his film, and there’s a particularly marvelous interlude in a forest setting that evokes the surreal beauty of a hallucinatory but peaceful dream.  

Skolimowski and Piaskowska's deep love for EO, the titular donkey (played by six donkeys, whom Skolimowski has often in interviews expressed the deepest of affection for), shines in every scene although the filmmakers are not naive in presuming to present a narrative that can plumb the donkey's thoughts and feelings. It's a deeply sympathetic film but does not fall into the sentimental trap of anthropomorphism. It's a film that's fully and movingly immersed in the donkey's particular experience of the world while also pointing to keen insights into the human world -- human compassion as much as human ignorance and cruelty.  Even at a tight 88 minutes, it's the kind of film that leaves an impression, and I think it will be hard for viewers to walk out of the theater without seeing things, at least for a while, through EO's eyes.

Also, this week, for Women’s History Month, our Tanaka Kinuyo series continues, with The Moon Has Risen on Saturday, March 4, and Forever a Woman on International Women’s Day, Wednesday, March 8, the latter co-sponsored by CASCADIA International Women’s Film Festival.  Each of these films will be introduced by Jeff Purdue, Cinema East curator and Teaching, Learning, and Media Librarian at WWU. After a brilliant start to our series with Tanaka’s directorial debut, Love Letter, on March 1, I am eager to continue this journey of discovery into Tanaka’s work, work that, as a reminder, is not available in any home viewing format and, until the last year, was not available at all. What a joy we get to celebrate a brilliant auteur like Tanaka, seeing her film on the big screen, right here in Bellingham. 

See you at the movies, friends!  

Melissa