Today I’m going to have to divulge that Poor Things didn’t make the list, but Lanthimos did.

36. In Bruges (Martin McDonagh, 2008, United Kingdom)

It’s in Belgium, as Ray conveniently explains at the end of his narration at the beginning of the movie.

Just so you know, it is a beautiful place with an interesting history, but the movie’s version of it is somewhat rosey. The movie – obviously – dodges the most tourist-looking areas of the town and shoots only the angles where you can’t see the chain stores. They must have even dressed some areas up for the movie from what I remember. I would still recommend it, though.

Ray and Ken are two hired killers, who have been sent to Bruges after a botched killing. At first we don’t really know why, but it turns out that Harry, their boss, sent them there, because Ray broke a rule: he killed a kid and now he has to pay for it. Harry just wanted to give Ray a nice little holiday before his death. It just happens that Ray hates the place with all his heart and is already suicidal for the very same reasons. Except that he he meets a girl, which also gets complicated.

Chloë, the girl, is not your run of the mill pixie dream girl. She might look like one and Ray might want to believe she is one, but after their first date, it turns out that Chloë actually uses her looks and charm to lure men to her apartment, where they are robbed on gunpoint by Chloë’s ex-boyfriend, Eirik. Chloë claims that she did not plan this and it would seem that Eirik actually tried to rob Ray out of jealousy even though Chloë told him not to. Chloë also has a bunch of drugs in her apartment and Ray, not thinking straight… at any point in the movie, just steals them.

On the other hand, when Ray later gets himself arrested, it’s Chloë, who bails him out. She is also much more sophisticated than Ray, which is evidenced by her attempts to explain what’s going on at the movie set she’s dealing on.

I ilke this characterization. She is a complicated person. She isn’t just something for Ray to lust after. We might not see that much of her, but during those few moments she refuses to become any kind of archetypical love interest. What I don’t get is why she is interested in Ray. She decides to call the robbery off after she sees Ray take his anger out on a Canadian tourist and still take Ray back to her place. Why? Ray is just a mess at that time. It seems that she did this just so that the movie could go on.

Can this relationship last, if the two don’t have much in common? Sure, they are both criminals, but there’s a big difference between being a pusher and killing people for money.

The other important female character is Marie, the purveyor of the small hotel Ray and Ken stay at. Marie believes in keeping her life in order. Like when Harry finally comes for Ray, Marie stops him from entering the hotel and as she is pregnant, his code stops him from hurting her. Still, Marie doesn’t know this as she stands up to him, forcing Harry and Ray to come to a different solution to the situation.

Marie doesn’t like to be underestimated. Earlier in the movie, when Harry leaves a message to Ken and Ray, in which he calls her the receptionist, she makes it clear that she is the owner (with her husband, who doesn’t seem to be around).

These are two very different women, but neither of them accepts a subservient role. Marie is even able to set rules. Sure, it is possible that her need for independence is the reason she is working long hours alone at her hotel instead of hiring help.

35. Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal) (Ingmar Bergman, 1957, Sweden)

Antonius Block has just returned from the Holy Land from the Crusades and he has the plague. When he gets back to his homeland, he is greeted by Death, but Block isn’t quite ready to die just yet, so he challenges Death to a game of chess for his life. He thinks its clever, but it isn’t immediately obvious who is playing who, as Block traverses through the country, bringing more and more people with him into their death.

In fact, when Block first notices the Death’s presence, Death says that he has been around for a while. He has been using Block.

Block is a pensive character, who is there mostly to just to guide the people along. A lot of things happen around him as they travel, but he often isn’t involved.

It seems quite obvious, that Death is just having fun here. Block is the only one afforded the game of chess. Everyone else who dies on the way just dies, although Death has his fun with them as well. There is no escaping him and perhaps Block should have realized this as well. There are escape attempts, which lead to humorous situations, where an all-powerful, immortal being teases the dying people.

Bergman himself has said that the movie is about his own fear of death (just like Wild Strawberries, which came out the same year). He lived another 50 years after this, so maybe he learned something. Maybe the idea here was to trivialize death or make it more approachable, because the character of Death is hardly that scary.

Block’s squire’s, Jöns’s, existence seems to revolve around women. When he first speaks, he is singing a blue song about bedding women. A little later he meets someone painting the inside walls of a small church and asks the man why he isn’t painting naked women. Little later, with the same man, they discuss the Crusade and it would almost seem that for Jöns, it was just a different kind of opportunity for hedonism.

At one point he meets a woman, who is being accosted by a man. Jöns saves her and does not rape her, and according to him, this chivalrous act should be enough for her to marry him. Although, he does add that he isn’t quite sure whether his existing wife is still alive, since he has been away for so long. She still joins them. She doesn’t have much of an option. It’s either that or staying alone at an otherwise empty farm.

There’s also a woman, who has been condemned to be burned alive for fornicating with the Devil. She is blamed for the plague, because of course there needs to be someone to blame and of course that needs to be a woman.

Since these two scenes are right after each other (although other way around), so I couldn’t help but notice that the women have one thing in common: they don’t talk. The condemned woman is able to say some gibberish, but that is it, while Jöns’s new “wife” just screams when Jöns is about to kill the man who attacked her. is this deliberate? Is there a point to them not being able to talk?

The women in the movie in general seem to be less developed then the men. They are there to supplement the male characters, when needed, but they don’t really play any real role of their own.

While this is common in movies, this isn’t the way Bergman always worked. Sure, he was a womanizer himself, but he did often make movies from a female perspective, for example Persona, which is probably his best known and most respected movie these days (having surpassed this movie in that regard).

And even this movie, despite the way it portrays women and gives men more agency, is not masculine. Block tries to be aloof and Jöns tries to be rough, but there is a softness to each of them. It might not be always exhibited in the best of ways, but it is there. Perhaps they are just two traumatized from their experiences to maintain that toxic ulterior at all times.

34. La Haine (Hate) (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995, France)

Ah, the France of movies. Having a coffee next to Seine or meeting your loved one under the Eiffel Tower. Then there’s the reality of Asian tourists vomiting, because of how different the real Paris is from the romanticized version. (Google ‘Paris syndrome’ to learn more, but also remember that many of those reports are exaggerated.)

The three young men here, Vinz, Hubert and Said, know the underbelly of this city way too well. They live in the estates, where they are seen as less than human by the police, which led to a excessive use of force, which in turn led to rioting. We start our story the day after, as the three go about their lives in this failed police state of a community. Still, life has to go on. At least for that one day.

The three men represent three minorities: we have a Jew, a black man and a muslim. While we see many small clicks throughout the movie, these three seem to be the only group with such diversity. Most of the estate seem to hang around in their own ethnic groups. On the other hand, they are also friendly towards each other. There isn’t a gang war going on here.

Well, except maybe against the ‘pigs’. The riots started after a friend of our main characters ends up in hospital. Vinz has taken part in the riots wholeheartedly, while Said and Hubert have stood out for their own reasons. Said just says that he doesn’t need the trouble it would cause him, while Hubert is trying to go straight, but the riots, while not directed against him, have destroyed the gym he had been working on for years.

The early movie is largely about the three just hanging around in the estate. They don’t have jobs, so they are just killing time and meeting people, which is not a bad life in some ways.

Things escalate after they leave the estate for… errands. So, the area seen as dangerous by the society around them, is actually more of a safe haven for them, a place where they can trust people to have their backs. In the city, they just run into more and more trouble, often because the people there feel they can act as they like, because the police surveillance is not as constant.

Women don’t have much of a role in the movie. They are targets for sexual conquest, but at the same time they are very protective of those close to them. A common way to get a reaction is to say something about sisters. Fathers don’t seem to be around and the families are matriarchal. It’s the mothers, who end being responsible for the children, even the ones that are old enough to live on their own, but just can’t do it for economical reasons.

Still, the women are all side characters at best. There is a clear segregation between genders. Women wouldn’t fare well in the group, because the attitudes towards them aren’t very healthy. The roles are binary: Madonnas and whores, like the age old trope goes.

The movie is just great in it’s grittiness. The characters feel real and story is believable. Both are interesting. Things that would be trivial in other movies are monumental here. When Vinz finds a gun lost by a ‘pig’, that is big. The lost gun is even reported on in the news. The stakes are very different here, but it works.

33. Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011, USA)

Driver is good at that – driving. He demonstrates this in multiple ways: as a stunt driver, a racecar driver and a getaway driver. His ability to do is is based on his ability to maintain his cool in any situation. This lends itself to other lines of work as well. When he falls in love with his neighbor, things get complicated as the husband of the woman is released from prison.

The one thing everyone should know about this movie is the gorgeous soundtrack. It starts with retroish synthwave before moving into ‘Oh My Love’ by Riz Ortolani and then score music. The first four tracks are just perfect for the movie and work as individual tracks as well.

The clockwork nature of Chromatics’ ‘Tick of the Clock’ is especially revealing of the character. It plays in the opening of the movie where Driver is on the job and it perfectly fits the precision he works with.

Even beyond that, the movie is all about style, but the style is never without substance. For example, the Driver wears white jacket with a gold scorpion on the back. Whenever his dark side appears, the shot is set so that we see that scorpion.

Another thing I like is that things are complicated. It’s not just good guys versus the bad, it’s more like everyone with any kind of agency is bad, but just at different levels. They are often caught in things they have no control over, because someone else wants something or is afraid of something. Driver has no desire to kill anyone, but just can’t avoid it, because someone was greedy and felt the need to protect himself from outside interlopers into his criminal businesses.

Driver is seen as someone easy to manipulate and use, because he is small fry, but at the same time, and I don’t know if this is true, but it seems to be commonly used “fact”, the small scorpions are the most venomous.

Once again, the women don’t have much of a role here. We have Irene, the neighbor, and Blanche, who has been sent with Driver on a heist.

Irene is just a nice person. She seems even somewhat idealized, so perhaps the version we see is how Driver sees her. She is married and a mother, which complicates things, but Driver still sees an opportunity to do something good by helping her. He knows there is no future for them, even if he seems to wish there was, but that does not deter him from trying his best. It just doesn’t lead to anything good.

Blanche is a different kind of a case. She is an oddity in this masculine world of crime. Of course, as a woman, she can be helpful in these situations, because by playing the role of a wife or girlfriend, she can alleviate suspicions before the real heist begins. At the same time, she seems to be a victim of domestic abuse based on how the guy sending her on this mission acts towards her. Even sending her on a heist is that, as she is being put into unnecessary danger.

On the other hand, while I am all for female characters in movies, this movie can be seen as being about toxic masculinity and how it can spiral out of control. If this is the case, these are the roles for women we would need.

32. Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2014, United Kingdom)

Caleb has been selected to join the eccentric CEO of their company, Nathan, in his compound to test out a robot to determine whether the robot is or can be considered intelligent. However, Nathan has his own objectives, and Caleb falls in love with Ava, the robot, which is exactly what Nathan planned to happen. Ava isn’t as helpless as assumed, though. Also, there’s Kyoko, a mere servicebot on surface level.

I think this is one of the more interesting movies on the list from a faminist point of view. There seems to be a popular theory that Ava is somehow an evil manipulator, who just uses Caleb for her own ends. Yes, she did use Caleb to her own ends, but my reading of the situation is different. I think the rest of Alex Garland’s filmography (at least his later directorial efforts, Annihilation and Men) also supports a more feminist point of view.

You see, Caleb had an opportunity to help Kyoko, but chose not to. Ava saw that. If Caleb saw Kyoko as just a household appliance, how could she trust him not to see Ava as an object as well? Kyoko was the closest thing to Ava she had ever met.

Because Kyoko doesn’t speak, she is seen as basically nothing. However, she also clearly has a capability to think. She might be an earlier model than Ava, but she can’t be that different, as Nathan has chosen to keep her around, while he has decommissioned, or murdered from the point of view of Kyoko and Ava, who later learns about this, a number of their kind. Kyoko is aware of those and probably feels a very existential dread.

Nathan also knew Ava would appeal to Caleb, as she was based on whatever data Nathan had available on him, and that included his browser history, if you catch my drfit. Nathan has actually built the bots for sex as well and uses Kyoko in this way. No consent needed. But this isn’t exactly good. No consent in this situation does make me uncomfortable. Was Nathan trying to lead Caleb down a similar path?

Either way, it would seem Nathan uses the female form to make it both more pleasing to himself and easier for Ava to manipulate Caleb. After all, if Caleb is trying to figure out whether Ava is intelligent, her form might be more of a distraction than anything else.

There might also be inherent sexism here. Nathan has taken precautions to keep Ava locked up safely, but Ava outsmarted him. Is Nathan just generally so infatuated with his own intelligence (as certain billionaires seem to be) that he couldn’t believe an AI could figure out how to escape, or was it the female form? He does think Caleb is below him, so Nathan might just think he is too smart to fail. Then again, all the previous models are female. Does Nathan just find it easier to dispose of women?

Yet another point of view is the fact that Ava tells Caleb that she is ‘one’ when asked how old she is. Whatever that means (she doesn’t elaborate, when questioned further), it can’t mean she is very old. Of course, an AI can learn much faster than humans, but considering that she has been kept isolated in a cell in an underground research facility with information she receives very controlled b Nathan, so it would be fair to assume she lacks maturity in many ways. Yet, despite knowing her age (whatever the ‘one’ means), Caleb is not stepping back. He is still infatuated by her.

This is weirdly common in movies. Take Fifth Element or Her (or in some ways Species and Under the Skin, but they are also quite different in this regard, but could fall into the same category when extending this point to the audience). In all cases, the woman is very young, but looks (or sounds) like an adult, so the men feel they are not out of line when being interested in these women. That’s very messed up. It’s almost like a pedophile strategy. They often their victims during the grooming stage that they are so mature for their age.

Of course, Ex Machina has a better approach than these other examples, as the movie is not okay with it in the same way as the other ones.

Final note on Kyoko: She has been modelled to look Asian. I think this is on purpose, as Asians, especially the women, are often seen as submissive. Since the release of this movie, there have been right-wing opinions, who say they value these women, because of this very reason. They believe these women are all they dream of (except for genetics, of course). But again, the movie subverts this. Kyoko just tries to maintain her existence for as long as possible, but in the end she does have true agency.

You could read this differently, though. You could say she is the minority, who has to die for the white woman, but I don’t see this being the case. It’s just not up to me to decide, but you could also see Kyoko as the true hero of the movie.

31. 12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet, 1957, USA)

A young man is accused of murdering his father. While he has pleaded not guilty, the jury is pretty much ready to condemn him… except for one of them (I think he’s juror number 9, so that’s what I’ll call him), who begins a slow process of changing the minds of the others.

It is worth noting that the title is very accurate. There are exactly 12 men in the room. Women weren’t allowed in jurys in those days in many areas of the US, and even if they were, the rules were different for them. Not only is it 12 men, it is clearly 12 white middle-class (and up) men, or at least they play the part with their suits (which might also be a problem, if they feel a need to belong and thus follow the thinking of others). They don’t even seem very young (although that’s partly just perception as some of the actors are in their 30s, I guess people just aged differently).

But the real problem raised in the movie is the racism. After a lot of pressure, one of the members (the final holdout) finally admits that he is more interested in keeping the kid off the streets than justice, because of the color of his skin. This is quite common in the justice system. Skin color or other similar attributes can cause huge variation in the outcomes. And obviously, money rules. A public defender with a huge caseload can’t do the same amount of work for the client as a team of $600 an hour lawyers. The kid just doesn’t have that kind of resources, just like most of us. So, so many trials are avoided, because people would rather take a sentence than go through a trial, even if they are innocent, because this all can be so expensive.

Then there’s working outside of the system. Much of what juror 9 does is actually illegal. A juror can’t go out and do their own detective work, like he did. Sure, he is fixing the problems of the system, as he is bringing up things that the defender should done for the defendant, but if the defender doesn’t have the resources to do even the simplest of checking, it is good that someone does it for them. It just happens that the juror should not be the one doing that as he can easily prejudice himself, which might not lead to a good outcome.

I have actually watched this movie several times recently, because of the techniques used in the film. The space most of the movie happens in is very limited and the camerawork makes it look even smaller as the movie moves along and the tensions rise within. It’s not easy to make natural feeling transitions, when you are in the same room all the time. Usually transitions happen specifically when you move to a new location. So, they often have to do this in various subtler ways, but we can see that things have moved along when the people change places, the camera sort of resets from close-ups and so forth. Of course, sometimes the clock just moves.

This just feels so different from what we usually see in films, which tend to cover a lot of time and area. Visually driven movies often require that, but this movie just goes to a very different direction in this regard.

30. Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (Amélie) (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001, France)

Amélie is a young woman living in Paris still looking for her place in life. After finding a secret cache of a boy’s toys from decades ago in her apartment and delivering that to it’s owner in an overly convoluted way, she finds her calling in doing nice things to other people, but she also does them in her own quirky way with sometimes complicated plans. Yet, doing the nice, quirky, complicated thing for herself, finding love, seems to be out of her reach.

Amélie is just a lovable character, who lives in this weird, but very harmless little world (okay, there’s some quite dangerous things in this world, such as Canadian tourists jumping off buildings, but mostly harmless), which is even more colorful than our own. While she does sort of take matters into her own hands in ways she probably shouldn’t (at least in some cases), she is still clearly trying to do good.

Although the concept or phenomenon hadn’t really been identified yet, in a way Amélie is a subversion of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She kind of acts like one, but at the same time, she exists outside of being a source of inspiration for the guy. She has her own thoughts and desires. She isn’t just a driving force in her own life, but in the lives of everyone around her.

As in all his movies, Jeunet makes the world a little magical, which is underscored by the warm colors used throughout. It actually sort of feels like magical realism, even if that isn’t really the case. Well, depending on whether Amélie is actually able to count all the simultaneous orgasms happening in Paris at will.

Jeunet does have his own feel in his movies that would probably be impossible to replicate. Sometimes it doesn’t really pay off (for example, his Alien movie, but it is possible the producers interfered with his work as he wasn’t really established at the time and Fincher’s Alien wasn’t up to his standards either, so that’s an indication that someone else was stopping them from making good movies), sometimes it does. This is the best example of things going right.

Of course, Audrey Tautou is a large part of why this works. She has a great presence and is part of why this movie does seem so magical. She is quite impish and plays that up with her smile in a very disarming way. She was basically designed for a role like this. I know I’ve seen her outside of her roles in Jeunet movies, but I can’t remember where. (I checked and I had seen her in Dirty Pretty Things and Mood Indigo, the latter of which is a movie by Michel Gondry, so it’s weird I don’t really remember it, because he too has a very strong feel of their on in his movies.)

Gender politics are a little weird here, but in a good way. They work very hard to make sure that the decision to pursue each other, meaning Amélie and her love interest, is mutual. Amélie hesitates at the right (or wrong, depending on how you want to see it) time to make sure we get that moment where she steps outside to find him just to find him there looking for her.

Otherwise, we have a quite common situation here where women are women only because the movie needs them to be. They are love interests to men or work jobs that are usually worked by women or are mothers. This is not very feminist in that sense, but the movie is also quite conservative in the sense that it does sort of long for a time that is long gone by now… or certain people think existed, which just isn’t true.

29. Kynodontas (Dogtooth) (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009, Greece)

Two parents have kept their now adult children ignorant of the world for all their lives. Only the father ever leaves the compound they live in, but the children, especially the oldest daughter, are beginning to act out.

The parents have to be very careful about their lives. They have concocted numerous lies about the world, which they can’t always keep up. They sort of allude to trying to keep the children away from the corrupting influence of modern world, but it also kind of seems obvious that they, especially the father, are more interested in just controlling their children for basically pure sadism. This becomes clear when he punishes the older daughter brutally physically after she steps out of line.

The situation is kind of sickening in many ways. The children sometimes lie to protect themselves, but because they don’t really know how the world works, they stumble on statements their parents know are patently false, because those statements are based on “facts” provided to them by the parents.

There is a regular visitor, though. Christina (who is the only person in the movie to get a name) has been brought in to have sex with the son of the family, as the parents believe his sexual needs are more important than those of the daughters. This doesn’t quite work out and having opened that Pandora’s box, it can’t be closed again.

When the arrangement with Christina falls through after she breaks the rules, the parents just decide that the daughters must then provide that service to their son. The daughters have no say in this, so the plan is to have their son rape them. On the other hand, I would be pretty toxic here, if I didn’t also note that the son is similarly the victim of sexual abuse. He doesn’t know what’s going on either, so the parents and Christina pushing him to participate is in itself rape as well, even if certain conservatives would like to believe otherwise. This is especially true, because, despite his age, the parents have done their best to infantilize their children.

Christina has also been abusing the older daughter sexually at this point, teaching her cunnilingus. Because the daughter doesn’t understand what’s going on, she goes on to teach that to her siblings as well.

The point is that the parents have a very traditional perspective on sexuality, where women’s sexuality is something not to be discussed, while the men have needs that need to be addressed. This attitude has horrific results.

Is the mother in a similar position as the children? We don’t even know how much of a willing participant she is. Has she deliberately imprisoned herself with the kids in the house? Has there been coercion from her husband? I’m reminded of another Greek film with similar themes, Miss Violence. In that movie, the mother finally realizes the extent of the terror her husband has inflicted upon their children. She kills him, but that only seems to lead to her tyrannical rule of the family instead. There are probably aspects to her rule that are better after the killing, but the situation is still dire for the children.

The mother in this movie does participate in punishing the children. At one point she forces the son keep mouthwash in his mouth for an extended period of time and seems to do it gleefully.

Another indication that the parents are only doing this for their own sick sadistic needs, is that they don’t seem to plan for the future of their children. The parents aren’t young anymore, so what will happen when they are no longer around?

The children just play games, make art brute, do chores and live their lives as though they were just children. Their rooms, for example, look like those of children, because they haven’t had the influence needed to grow out of it. Mostly, again, like children, they just try to please their parents.

The constant infantilization has not allowed them to break free from the influence of the parents. They have missed the rebelliousness of their teen years, so they are only now, as adults, finally trying to break free, but they just don’t have the tools.

All of this does remind me of certain conservative fantasies. Conservatives seem to believe they own their children. They want to fully control their offspring, which is the reason homeschooling has become more prominent. At the same time, the children suffer. They lose the opportunity to learn how to form relationships and often homeschooling is academically completely insufficient, because there isn’t any kind of quality control.

At one point, the father visits a kennel, where a dog trainer explains how they mold dogs to behave in a specific way. There must be a reason for the existence of this scene, so the movie is trying to tell us something about how the father wants to approach his children. He owns the kids, so he can do anything he wants with them, including trying to fully control their behavior.

28. La Strada (The Road) (Federico Fellini, 1954, Italy)

Gelsomina is what would be called free-spirited. Perhaps a little too much so, because her mother sells her off to Zampano, a circus performer, because she is seen as useless to her mother. With him, Gelsamino’s existence becomes that of physical, sexual and emotional abuse, as Zampano uses her as he pleases. Gelsamino tries to make the best of the difficult situation, but it isn’t helping. When Gelsamino finds a connection to another performer, known as The Fool, Zampano lashes out.

Funny piece of trivia: Anthony Quinn, who stars in the movie, originally agreed to be in the movie against a part ownership of the proceeds. However, his agent did not like it, as he didn’t think the movie would do well. So, the agent renegotiated the fee to $50k. Quinn later talked about this decision in an interview, noting that it cost him around $5 million (I don’t know the timeframe he was talking about, but with inflation that much be a huge sum of money).

I wonder how many times I’ve used that little anecdote in these? This is the third time this movie is on this list, so probably three times. That amount of money, if true, does also mean that this movie must have been a pretty big hit.

But back to the content of the movie…

Gelsomina feels more like a nature spirit or something than a person. She is sort of a clown even when she isn’t trying to perform as one. She is not really interested in the mundane problems of everyday life, which is why her mother was so eager to get rid of her. She wasn’t contributing at home, so the single mother had to do something.

In a way, the circus is the right place for her. The way we see the place in media in general is almost like it’s a different reality, which is probably why so many movies take part in and around this world. Without any research, I can think of The Last Circus, Nightmare Alley (two versions), Freaks, Big Fish, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and Dumbo. There just always seems to be an abusive element there. Someone taking advantage of the situation, often both the vulnerable people (or animals in case of Dumbo) and the ability to move to a new location if a problem arises.

Zampano is definitely of this ilk, but he also softens during the movie, which is probably the reason this movie has stayed with me rather than the more critically aclaimed movies from Fellini’s filmography. (Not that my personal preferences really coincide with the “canon” or the consensus.) He just doesn’t know how to express this, because he lacks the ability to do so, because he has never had to or had the opportunity to learn it.

Does he deserve sympathy for this? Well, yes. We, as a society, can’t advance unless we are willing to try to take these people along. Yes, it is sad that Gelsamina has to suffer in this situation. I’m not saying we shouldn’t help her as well.

After all, this is an all too common situation: Women locked in a toxic relationship, because they don’t have the economic means to choose otherwise. In this case one party doesn’t even really acknowledge there being a relationship despite him being the sole reason for the relationship even existing. He does try to grow as a person, but because of the context he is trying to do this in, he just can’t do it fast enough.

The movie is named La Strada or The Road for a reason. It’s a metaphor for life. D’uh. The circus is a metaphor for life as well. It’s a world full of wonders with unimagined horrors lurking beneath the surface, for those put into vulnerable positions.

27. Les Diaboliques (Diabolique) (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955, France)

The wife and the lover of a domestic abuser conspire to kill him as perfectly as possible, with no chance of getting caught because of a perfect alibi. Now they just have to keep it together while police do their jobs. However, the body they left to be found in the pool, isn’t there when the police drain it.

Here’s the ugly thing about this movie: the woman playing the wife, Vera Clouzot, was actually the wife of the director, and the point of the movie is to scare the wife to death, when her husband reappears, as even though the husband is the schoolmaster, the wife is the owner of the school they all work in, which the husband and his lover want for themselves. However, Vera Clouzot also had a heart problem similar to her character and she also died of a heart attack only five years after this movie. Yeah, Clouzot was not a nice guy.

Both of the women are very much under the control of the man they plan to murder. His wife could easily just kick him out, but doesn’t because of religious reasons. His lover could actually participate in the murder, but chooses to side with the man who abuses her physically. This is partly, because the society around them is okay with his actions. It is just part of a husband’s job to keep the wife in line and so what if he has a lover. Isn’t that a man’s prerogative in this time and place? And this is what the manosphere wants to bring back… There’s weird excuses for his behavior. At one point he states that she is already a wreck and women, who are wrecks, are indestructible.

In a way the schoolmaster doesn’t see much of a difference between the women and the children in his school. He is abusive towards both groups and is ready to use either as an example. He humiliates his wife in front of everyone just to make a point.

In a way Clouzot seems to be okay with this behavior as well. Sure, the man is seen as doing something wrong here, but the movie isn’t a drama about an abusive relationship. It’s a crime story in the vein of Columbo (to a point, at least). The suffering of the women takes a backseat. Sure, there’s a murder, but the morality of that is not important. It’s the details of the crime that are being paid attention to instead.

On the other hand, this is not a light movie. There’s no-one joking in order to let the audience know this isn’t all that serious. Instead, it’s just intense all the way through.

Clouzot was known to be a tyrant on set. I wonder how much self-reflection he was doing here. Did he see himself in the schoolmaster? It was reported that after Vera died he did fall into depression, but his apparent love for her never stopped him from being a total asshole towards her.

There also seems to be archaic understanding of women’s health. The wife ends up bedridden because of nerves, which is a very sexist way of handling female characters. The whole concept of “nerves” is just based on the idea that women are weak and fragile. Sure, Vera had her heart problems, which did indeed make her fragile, but that is not a female specific health problem in the real world. Actually, at her age, it would be more likely for men to have heart trouble (although in general, women are more likely to die from a heart attack, but they get them much later).

One interesting take here could be the classic stereotype of the Madonna and the Whore. The wife is religious, very kind to the children and very hesitant to do the crime despite having lived for years in a horrific situation. The mistress isn’t her complete opposite. She is stricter with the kids, especially if the headmaster is around, but is still nice to them… but she is an adulterer and that is often seen as the fault of the third party, even if the husband is ultimately responsible.

Of course, there are cultural differences and the movie doesn’t really blame her for being the Whore. That is something to condemn from a religious point of view, but the wife doesn’t despite being the most religious person around. One of the male teachers does, but he has a very unhealthy approach, where he just brings up that he heard screaming from her room during his nightly rounds in the dormitary. He brings this up openly in front of the other teachers. There is no indication that he is going to do anything about this. He just flippantly tells her about it even though he has a jesuit background.

26. The Cook, the Thief, his Wife & her Lover (Peter Greenaway, 1989, United Kingdom)

Albert (the titular thief) is taking over a restaurant forcibly with his gang of thugs. Weirdly enough, this is part of his public relations campaign. Georgina (the titular wife) is dragged along into all of this against her will. She does meet a man (the titular lover), who fits the sophisticated ambiance of the restaurant and begins an affair with him, meeting nightly within the confines of the restaurant, as Albert eats.

Taking over the restaurant is excused by Albert’s (at most) half-hearted attempt to please his trophy wife. In actuality he doesn’t care. He bullies the other patrons and the staff openly, while not finding the experience in itself interesting. The only one above his temper is the chef (you know, the missing member of the title, the cook).

The cook is almost an otherworldly figure. He excudes calm in this chaotic world. He stands up to Albert in a measured and logical way, where pushing against his opinion would make Albert look foolish. The kitchen staff are almost like an extension of him. The way the movie is shot underscores this nicely, as does the choir that often soundtracks the film.

Georgina is definitely a trophy wife. When Albert finds out about the affair, it is not about cheating, it is about someone else having access to Albert’s possession that goes beyond jealousy. Albert needs to see himself as the alpha. He sets the rules of conduct in this context and his dominance is the most important one for him. Georgina having an affair goes against that dominance.

For Georgina, the affair is a small daily reprieve from her existence with Albert. The lover is clearly a sophisticated man. He reads and enjoys the restaurant as a cultural experience. You know, the kind of man the manosphere would call a beta, because they want to see the world in that way, where, according to research, women are interested in “alphas” more than “betas”, but that’s only on the surface. Alphas have some qualities that women tend to find alluring, such as confidence, and others that they find off-putting, such as being dominating. The lover definitely has confidence in that silent, nonchalant way.

If a marine biologist wants to correct me here, go ahead, I will get something wrong here, but there is a group of squids known as pencil squids, who have a very unusual pattern for reproduction for the males. There’s two types of males, who are very different in size. There’s the bigger version, which has a very traditional way of finding mates by being strong. But there’s also a very small version of the male. Their strategy for reproduction is to actually slip in to the mating process and convince the female to take it’s semen instead. This happens while the mating process is going on, but since the smaller version is so small, the larger version doesn’t know this.

So, there are two very different strategies to finding mates. The females, on some level, understand that their progeny might have a better chance of reproducing, if they are of the smaller version and evolution has provided one species with two very different versions of itself, both of which do prosper in their own ways. This is obviously just one case of alternative reproduction tactics. Humans have the ability to make decisions in a way squids can’t (although apparently squids are also quite intelligent). Georgina was not happy with her “alpha male” partner, so she went out to look for something better.

Not that alphas even exist in the way these people think, but that’s another discussion.