My Favorite Movies 2025 Edition, part 6 – 25-17

Where else can you find a list with a movie by Spielberg just a couple of movies after one by two Swedish directors who have only ever made this one feature.

25. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006, USA)

It has been ages (over 18 years) since a child has been born in the world. This has lead to unrest among those who still care and complacency among those who can’t anymore. Suicide drugs are readily available straight from the government (but ganja is still illegal as notes one character, played by Michael Caine in a very uncharacteristic role for him). Theo is among those who used to care, but has now largely given up. One day, his former partner, Julian, recruits him to escort a woman out of the country. Stakes get higher, when the woman tells him she’s pregnant.

I do like this movie very much (it is on my list of favorite movies and quite high at that), but you could also argue that this movie is kind of messed up in a very bad way: One would assume that this kind of story would focus on the woman, but it is still a Hero’s Journey for Theo. The pregnant woman, Kee, isn’t even listed on the first page of roles on IMDb, even though she is the key to this whole thing.

I doubt the screenwriters specifically planned this, but if so, you can argue that the male point of view has been allowed to become the default in a very insidious way. You just write like that because everything since New Hope has been written like that. Its just the norm. Even the name of the movie specifically says men.

This does seem to be one of those movies, where women are only roles where you specifically need women. Julian is a woman, so that she can have a romantic history with Theo, Miriam is a woman, because she was a midwife and they are usually women, and obviously Kee is a woman, because she is pregnant (and yes, I know I’m taking a very cis-centric point of view here, sorry trans- and NB-folk, I don’t mean to erase you, I’m just talking about how the movie seems to see the world).

This is especially egregious considering the theme of the movie, which is very female-centric. I wonder if this problem is just from the book this is based on (which I haven’t read) or whether it was inserted by the screenwriters.

And I’m not saying a global inability to procreate wouldn’t have an effect on men, but we often see women as the more caring gender (Finland being the only country in the world, where fathers spend more time with their children than the mothers). Often even the legal systems consider mothers’ rights to be more important than those of the fathers’, even if the mother in question has shown herself not to be worthy of that kind of trust.

While, again, I haven’t read the book, according to that the reason for the infertility is the rapid decrease in male sperm counts. Okay, if we think about such a situation from practical point of view, not from the perspective of masculine ego, we would soon realize that this would not be a problem for a very long time, because we could easily store enough for hundreds of years. You just freeze it. Under the right conditions it does not degrade. The book was written by a woman, so I might be reaching here. And obviously, there wouldn’t be much of a story, if the problem would be just brushed aside easily.

I wonder whether conservative minds would be blown here. Kee has clearly had sex, even without the goal of procreation, because she did not know she could get pregnant. So, people are just getting it on, so to say, just for the fun of it. Although, it is still a good idea to use protection, as STDs do still exist.

But moving back to the movie itself, the thing I really enjoy in this movie, the thing that keeps popping up when I think about this movie, is the way people react to the child. The child comes to most of them as a complete surprise, because it was kept a close secret by a small group of people. For everyone else, they just suddenly realize there is hope, which is something they hadn’t had in 18 years. Something is awakened in these people in a way they didn’t was possible.

That beats all the technical proficiency in the movie by quite a bit.

24. Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) (Robert Wiene, 1920, Germany)

Franzis has been through a lot. He recounts his story of murder and kidnapping, where the culprit was a somnambulist (person with a sleeping sickness) controlled by the nefarious Dr. Caligari… maybe.

This movie is now 105 years old and still holds up. Not many movies from that period do. This is the oldest movie on this list and only one of three from the 20s. The second oldest is from 1927 (Metropolis). This is also the highest positioned German expressionist movie on the list, a genre I have special fondness for. In some ways, it is a fairly clumsy genre. You should be able to communicate how the characters feel without having to rely on such obvious tools as stark shadows and black makeup, but, at the time, moviemaking techniques were not as refined as they are now, often due to the relatively primitive technology and the newly born film language that wasn’t very refined at the time, so this is what they had. And I for one love it.

This whole aesthetic is very enticing to me. A world of stark differences between light and dark pushing a complicated grey world of ethics into simplified good and evil. Now, obviously, I wouldn’t want everything in movies to be like this, but sometimes that kind of clarity is just fun. Although I don’t think that was exactly what they were going for. It’s just my modern lense. I mean, honestly, the storyline would be considered schlock these days.

Not that I’m trying to put the movie down. There is also a sort imagination that you don’t see anymore. They used a phenomemon they didn’t quite understand and made a horror movie out of it. That is very relatable. We still do this, even though now we understand better that while doing this we are often not really dealing with our fears, but pointing a finger to a member of a minority instead. Justice for somnambulists.

When I was writing this (almost two years ago), I was playing around with ChatGPT and decided to ask it to give me a feminist analysis of this film. I would just copy-paste the answer here, except that this being quite a specific question, it could have easily plagiarized it’s answer from somewhere, so I won’t just put it all here. Instead, I will tell you the points it raised.

There were actually three: Jane (Franzis’s fiancee and the only major female character) is a passive victim of patriarchical control, Dr. Caligari is an embodiment of medical control over women’s bodies and, finally, Jane is being dehumanized into a simple object to be desired. I think I would have come up with the first and the last points, but the middle one I probably would have missed, even though I am somewhat familiar with this topic.

That point is not nearly as obivous as the other ones either. Sure, Caligari is a man of medicine, but you don’t necessarily think of him as one throughout most of the movie, as he is there with his freakshow carnival attraction (which just happens to be his weapons as well). At the same time, that medical control of women’s bodies is still topical today and I will get back to that topic later on in this list as well.

However, we should not forget Cesare, the somnambulist, who is just used as a tool by Caligari. No-one objects to him being in that position. Quite the opposite. Caligari is given official permission to display him by the town clerk (who is then promptly also killed by Cesare on behest of Caligari as petty vengeance for being rude to him).

Of course, it is hard to say what is real and what is not, as Franzis is not exactly a reliable narrator. He seems to give the woman he supposedly loves as much agency as Caligari in his story, so even if it was all true, is he any better as a person than Caligari?

23. C'era una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West) (Sergio Leone, 1968, Italy)

Various characters arrive in a small town around the same time. We have Frank, who is being paid to take over a farm in the area, we have Jill McBain, the new owner of the farm, who arrives there just after her new family she just married into has been murdered and inherits the place, and we have the duo of Harmonica and Cheyenne trying to fight Frank and the interests behind him. Cheyenne seems to be in it mostly for fun, but Harmonica has other motivations.

Of all the Leone westerns, this is the only one with a major female character. (Of course, Once Upon a Time in America has important female characters, but that is not a western.) Even so, Mrs. McBain is mostly at the mercy of the men around her. She doesn’t have the opportunity to fight for herself as she is largely there just as something to fight over. What she can do is manipulate others and that is the way she protects herself from Frank, who sees himself as the boss (even going so far as to kill his actual boss), but is still easily controlled by her.

As so many westerns before this (and after), the large theme behind the story is the takeover of the frontier by capitalistic forces. It’s just that both or all sides are working for their capitalist ends. Some with bigger plans than others, surely, but still, they are just trying to make money out of owning a specific piece of land found by someone else, who did most of the work as well as endured the real hardships.

Now, someone else is just going to waltz in and reap the benefits. Sure, this will be beneficial for the whole town, but not based on their work, but rather based on ownership.

And Mrs. McBain is in a pretty good position here. She can (apparently) actually own property, which wasn’t a given during this period in history. It wasn’t actually until 1900 that women could hold property and were allowed to keep their wages in all states in the US. Although, it might be that her status as a widow was what allowed this, as the law was generally that in a marriage a man and a woman were one unit, which held the property and the man was the controller of it. So, perhaps that was her route to owning land (or maybe the writers just never thought about this problem as Leone cared notoriously little about the actual realities of the West despite being a major influence on how we now imagine the era).

But hey, of course this discussion is not the reason I like the movie. For many, this is the culmination of the revisionist Western Leone had been making at that point in his career (which was the majority of his directing career anyhwo). The ethics are questionable. There is no clear white or black hats here. Maybe one, but he seems more interested in causing mayhem than anything else. Henry Fonda, who was known for playing good guys, as stars often were back in the day, actually wanted to hide his blue eyes for his role, but Leone specifically wanted him to use his looks, because the audience would expect him to be the good guy, when he was the worst of the bunch.

Cheyenne is a career criminal, who has just escaped prison, and Mrs. McBain is assumed to be there to turn a new leaf in her life after a checkered past (although, this is because of assumptions that she was a sex worker, which we shouldn’t hold against her).

Harmonica, for most of the movie, is just there. He is more like a witness to everything than an actual protagonist, which is weird as he was the actor Leone had wanted to work with for a long time.

22. Ah-ga-ssi (The Handmaiden) (Park Chan-wook, 2016, South Korea)

Count Fujiwara has a plan: He wishes to marry a rich, young, orphaned woman living with her uncle for her money, but he needs help. So, he hires Sook-Hee to join the woman, Lady Hideko, as her servant in order for Sook-Hee to help him manipulate the situation. However, not everything is how it looks. There are many layers of secrets here.

Korea’s history under Japanese rule is also on display here. Hideko’s uncle, who is the real bad guy here, is part of that. This happens around 1930s, so as I understand the history of Korea, independence had been declared a while ago, and the Japanese have attempted to stamp that out completely.

The Japanese rule was brutal. They were extremely racist and while this was before the war crimes of Unit 731 (think twice before googling that up and most of those victims were Chinese with some Mongolians, Russians, Koreans and POWs thrown in), those attitudes were already present.

The uncle is a japanophile (if that is a word) as well as an anglophile (although that is less important). He sees Korea as soft and wants to become a naturalized Japanese citizen. This is partly how the Count can gain such an easy access to the house.

However, this is more about gender politics. The men see Lady Hideko as a way to gain a fortune. Sook-Hee is a tool for this purpose and Count Fujiwara is planning to throw her to the wolves. Lady Hideko switches sides and the women come together here to win out.

One thing Count Fujiwara fails to take into account, even though he knows about it, is that Sook-Hee has a strong support network. While she might be an orphan, the orphanage stands behind her and come to her rescue when needed. Sure, there’s financial motivations there, but the movie doesn’t make it feel that’s the real reason behind their help.

Even though both the Count and Sook-Hee’s makeshift family are criminals, there is an understanding within Sook-Hee’s family that the support network has it’s own value. This is how they win in the end. They are willing to do this even though they ultimately lose Sook-Hee, who flees the country with her newly found partner, Lady Hideko.

At one point, the Count rapes Lady Hideko. He has the stupidest possible excuse for this: Women enjoy sex the most, when it is forced on them. This does echo a sentiment that has been around for a long while in movies. How many sex scenes in early Bond movies started exactly like this? Not that this movie excuses it in the same way as those Bond movies do. Here, it’s just the character, not the movie excusing the action.

The uncle does find out and captures the Count in order to torture and question the Count about this incident. The uncle isn’t really angry, but more like envious that someone else experienced that before he did the same thing himself.

It should be noted that while there are plenty of opportunities for male-gaze, the movie avoids that. At least for most of it’s runtime. This does make the women feel more characters and less just plot conveniences, which is important in making the movie as good as it is.

There is a point where the male-gaze does come in. Was this planned by Park Chan-wook? “This is what you wanted, right? So, here it is!” I really don’t know. I didn’t even find it that jarring on first view, but now I can’t help but think about the decision.

21. Sound of Noise (Ola Simonsson, Johannes Stjärne Nilsson, 2010, Sweden)

Sanna and her five drummer friends have a plan: They are going to play their music with whatever they can use on site wherever they feel like doing it in a series of elaborate performances. This is essentially harmless besides the chaos and property damage, but is seen as a form of terrorism by the police. Amadeus Warnering, a black sheep son of a musical family become detective, is put on the case.

The drummers seem to have an agenda, but it is not explained very well at any point. They seem to be anti-capitalist and are definitely bored of the banality of life and what is considered music in the eyes of the public, but is there more to it? I think it is possible that the writer-directors of the movie did have a specific ideology behind this thing, but I’m not sure. It might just be that they were just trying to expand on their previously made short Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers. Maybe I shouldn’t try to put too much thought into this… but we all know I’m going to.

Although, the authors are definitely sympathetic to the drummers, they don’t really paint the detective in a negative light either. He is quite competent, as these movie detectives tend to be, but not on any kind of Sherlock Holmes levels of competence. He just does the legwork needed to do this kind of a job. He finds the culprits mostly by serendipity.

Is this ACAB then? Hard to say. You can’t even really say who is the protagonist here as it seems to constantly shift, which in general would be bad storytelling, but because of the irreverent nature of the movie, this doesn’t really matter. In some ways the detective is just filling time between the performances, which are the more fun part of the movie.

On the other hand, it is quite common these days that the protagonist is somewhat boring and the fun is brought by the villain. See The Dark Knight, Black Panther. One could still see the drummers as just anti-establishment artists (which they definitely are) and the detective trying to stop them. So, I guess it’s up to the viewer which way they feel, but I do also think that most of the people willing to seek out a fairly obscure movie such as this are going to sympathize more with the artist than the cop.

Then there’s Warnering’s family. His brother is a conductor, so in a sense he is the epitomy of the kind of culture our drummers are railing against. Amadeus doesn’t really like or relate to him either. The brother is very condescending in his approach to Amadeus, which is telling about how the authors feel about classical music and how we put it on a pedestal as an artform separate from popular music.

Women are scarse here. Sanna is basically the only female character of any importance. So, obviously she has to have romantic tension with Warnering. Part of the reason for this might have been the previous short, where they used the same exact six people for the band. This is somewhat emblematic of what is going on in the music world. While women are making a lot of great music, many of the roles behind the scenes are men, so it would probably even be hard to find enough women for the band, unless you are very well connected. Considering that shorts are usually made with friends, it just might be that this is not the fault of the people behind this movie, but a more systematic problem.

20. Akira (Katsuhiro Ôtomo, 1988, Japan)

This is one of those movies, which is set in the future, but that future would now be the past (2019 to be precise). We follow a teenaged biker gang, who seem to be in an endless war with a number of other biker gangs, except their competition seems to be adults. One of the gang members, who is looked down upon by the others, is exposed to an unknown substance. This is a problem, because that very same substance, which has a will of it’s own, was the cause of the nuclear detonation that was set off in the city some 30 years earlier. So, the kids need to save the world with the help of a group of psychic children.

While none of the animated movies on this list are specifically made for children, this has a very different reason to keep it away from the younger audience. This is a very violent movie. There is an escalation of violence and the only way you can prove your worth is by meeting others in battle and besting them. There doesn’t seem to be any other reason for the gang wars. They are not fighting for territory or to protect a criminal enterprise. They just are and they are very resentful.

The army is ever worse. They stop protests very violently and when the city officials try to stop their attempts to stop Akira, they just take over. Who’s going to stop them? Apparently no-one. The capacity for violence just trumps everything else.

The titular Aikra, which is the name given to the substance, that takes over Tetsuo, is itself mysterious enough to have caused a doomsday religious movement around it. It seems to be just bent on destruction. Is it any wonder that such a being would exist in this world? It is just a next evolutionary step where violence is everything. It clearly adapts to that quite fast.

This also makes the world very masculine. There are women around, but they are not treated very well, partly by the movie, partly by the characters within the movie. Each gangmember has a girlfriend, but they are more accessories than anything else for most of them. The leader, Kaneda, is ready to abandon his immediately when he meets another woman he finds more interesting, even though that other woman is much older than him.

This other woman, Kei, is part of a resistance movement and Kaneda is way over his head, when he gets involved, but he is there, because of course he believes that Kei will be a prize for him at the end of the road. This despite Kei not showing any interest in him.

Kaori, Tetsuo’s girlfriend, is there to be a victim. As Akira starts to take over Tetsuo, he leaves school with Kaori. They get attacked and Kaori is sexually assaulted. Later on, she tries to implore Tetsuo to stop the rampage, but is just sucked into the mass Akira is gathering.

The psychic kids also have a girl. She seems unable to move on her own… well except by flying, but the kids don’t really seem to follow very well-set rules. They just do things. They know things they don’t divulge. And why would they. They know how this world works. It’s better for them to stay away from everything, because otherwise they would be used as weapons, because, again, that’s what this world revolves around. They are being studied, but their powers just haven’t been reined in yet.

It should be noted that while the world revolves around violence, that violence is also destroying them. Akira seems to be some kind of an avatar of the pain and turmoil of the city. What is happening now is a culmination of everything that has happened during the last three decades in this city.

It is also a warning against the cyclical nature of history. It might have taken 80 years to get to this point, but as I’m writing this, there are numerous wars all over the world and many more seem to be flaring up. Even in historically stable areas, right-wing rhetoric and ideas have been gaining ground. Even quote by Hitler have been slipping through with little or no pushback.

19. Schindler's List (Steven Spielberg, 1993, USA)

Oskar Schindler is trying to navigate the corporatist business environment of Nazi-Germany. While doing this, he meets Itzhak Stern, a Jewish community leader, from whom Shcindler learns of the dire situation the jews of Poland are living in. Schindler, with the help of Stern, decides to do his best to help them by taking as many of them in to work in his factory, while trying to keep Göth, the commandant of the concentration camp, happy with the situation.

Part of me wonders how much of my love for this movie comes from seeing it at the right time. I was just 16 and had not seen that many dramas at that point and this was a nice entrypoint into that world. It still works. I’m not trying to deny that. As of this writing, it’s the sixth best film ever according to IMDb, so I’m not alone on this and it did win seven Oscars, although it is also one of those movies, that get all the aclaim, but not for the actors, because neither Neeson or Fiennes won in their respective categories (not that they should have, but I do find it interesting and part of me would like to go through all Oscar nominated Spielberg movies to figure out whether this is normal for his movies – you know, emphasis on technical considerations instead of performances).

Of course, just knowing that this really happened does make it more gut-wrenching and Spielberg knows how to milk it. The best example being the girl in a red coat in an otherwise black and white movie. She forces us not to distance ourselves from the tragedy. Paraphrasing Stalin (of all people): one death is a tragedy, million deaths is a statistic. That trick is kind of cheap, but it does work. We see both the industrial level genocide, which required new techniques of logistics and process management only so that they could pull of the worst crime in human history (probably, I didn’t list those), and the individual for whom we do feel sympathy.

Does that one individual earn any more sympathy than any of the other millions and millions of others that died? No, but that’s how our minds work. Those millions are unfathomable to us. Seeing someone we can easily relate to a daughter or a sister is whole different thing.

So, yeah, the actual main character of the movie is one of the less interesting things about the movie. Schindler is there, but the movie rightly has long sections of the ghetto and what happens there and on the way to the camps.

Also, as so often happens, the villain is more compelling than the hero. Of course, in this case this is problematic, as Amon Göth was a real war criminal, who was executed for homicide as well as ordering the torture and extermination of an unknown number of people. He was actually so terrible that the SS dismissed him and charged him, although those charges were dismissed as there were more important things going on in the country. Göth actually ended up in a mental institution, so his execution might have been questionable, but I doubt anyone will cry any tears over this.

Once again, women are pushed to the side in this movie. There’s some featured women, like Schindler’s wife, Helen, the girl in the red coat and then there’s the jewish woman, who Göth is infatuated with. This last one is the most interesting case. She is put into a very precarious situation. On one hand, she has a little bit of extra security in this situation, as she is trusted by Göth and as his personal servant, the guards can’t really touch her, but on the other hand, Göth is quite unpredictable, so his bad mood might easily end up in her death.

Of course, the other jews in the camp live in a very similar situation, but she gives a face to this. You are always very close to death. You might die, because you seem like you might be sick, or someone just feels like killing you, or the nutrition isn’t enough, or maybe another jew just wants your food. You can never know.

One additional thing about women in concentration camps: Jews were not competely helpless in these places. There were uprisings and at times they started from the women’s camps. They weren’t just complacently waiting for death. So, I sort of feel the movie does disservice to the women, who were in actuality actively trying to survive as much as the men.

It is also somewhat weird that the movie is a sort of white savior story, even though Spielberg is jewish himself.

18. Batoru Rowaiaru (Battle Royale) (Kinji Fukasaku, 2000, Japan)

A class of students is sent to an island to fight amongst themselves in an elaborate setup until only one is left. The teenagers take this as an opportunity to both rebel against the rules by strengthening their ties and air grievances as they rampage through the island killing everyone they can.

There are two versions of this and I’m not going to claim one of them is better than the other, except perhaps that for the purposes of this list and it’s theme, let’s go with the director’s cut, which gives us a lot more information regarding the background of the students, which was largely cut out of the original release.

Speaking of the theme, the students here are highly gendered, because of the school uniforms. In many situations they also just take the female role. Like they are responsible for the domestic work, when some of the students attempt to form their own little community in defiance of the game.

Then there’s Mitsuko, easily the most memorable of all the characters, way more so than the so-called main characters, Shuya and Noriko. For example, Mitsuko is the only one who has a picture on the Wikipedia page for the characters in this franchise (although it is from the manga) as of this writing. While some of the other students kill out of desperation and the sicker ones out of vengeance, Mitsuko is actually good at this. She uses whatever it takes to kill the others, including her sexuality to lure in the teenage boys. She is the most deadly of all of “contestants” except for one of the ringers that were brought in (two older kids, who had won the game previously).

However, the director’s cut also tells us that she is a loner, who never felt part of the class. There was also an incident early in her life, where she killed a man in self-defense, after her mother tried to pimp her out to him. This leaves her quite different from the character in the regular version, who is just this super badass and quickly learns to kill. All this just makes her so much more sympathetic.

However, it does also tell us a lot about how we approach different genders. Would I or we consider a male student who kills six or seven (I forget) of her classmates, especially those of opposing sex, a ‘badass’? How would our feelings change, if the kid who was abused was a boy? We are complicated and that complication is partly brought on by pure stupidity and an inability to separate our feelings from how we should actually see the world. (And just as an additional note, the people who often claim to hold facts over feelings, are often much worse at this than the rest of us. See Shapiro, Ben.)

In a way Mitsuko is the victim of authors. If you had to come up with a bunch of characters for a story like this, would you not arrive at this character at some point? You know, after you already have the boring main couple, the generic group of girls, the hacker nerd, the opportunistic male killer and so forth. But, why is that we can have a male killer, while the female one needs this tragic background? This is just our prejudices. Girls are nice, boys are boys, so if a girl steps out of line, we feel as if there needs to be an explanation.

In this sense the original release is more equitable. There the movie doesn’t distinguish between the different killers in this way. The main differences are in they way they conduct themselves and thus compete differently. They are just sick fucks. No further explanation given or needed.

The weird thing is that this is the way they are expected to act. Society actually pushes them into this. The explanation for the whole battle royale is that students don’t act properly anymore, so it was decided that a class would be chosen annually to do this. I don’t know why the convoluted reasons behind this whole thing are even needed. They do come into play a little bit, but not a lot.

The problem is that it doesn’t make sense. What they are actually doing is training the worst sociopaths into killers. Out of the 30 or 40 children in a given class, only one survives and that one is the one who is often going to be the one most willing to kill. What then? That student returns home with the trauma and his newly acquired skills. Is this good for the society? I doubt it.

17. Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) (Céline Sciamma, 2019, France)

In the 1700s, Marianne has been contracted to paint a picture of Héloïse for the purposes of her parents to be able to show prospective husbands what she looks like. There’s a catch though: Marianne can’t let her subject know this. Instead, she is supposed to observe Héloïse while having walks with her and then paint in secret. Although this does present some initial tension, it isn’t an important plot element over the full length of the movie, as Marianne tells Héloïse why she’s there.

The two fall in love and while they are alone in the manorhouse (with a servant around), they are free to explore this at least for a while. At the same time, Héloïse is obligated to marry and Marianne doesn’t have the freedom to stay with her, so there is a deadline on this relationship.

Marianne is a curiosity for the age. She is a painter in a world, where female painters were rare. She even uses her father’s name on occasion for this reason (and historically, there are works of art we don’t know the true creator of, because if there was a question, they were attributed to the closest possible man). Life was tough for them, as finding customers was difficult and as there wasn’t really an art market, they were very reliant on commissioned work, which was hard to compete for in a patriarchical world, where upperclass only saw women as burdens and child-making machines. The ones that did work in art were often apprenticed to men, who would take advantage of the situation. Marianne still seems to be content in her situation. At least she isn’t just someone’s wife, but has a degree of freedom most women just couldn’t achieve.

Héloïse on the other hand is in a very typical situation for the nobility. She has accepted her position, but is still looking to use the little freedom she is afforded. This includes exploring lesbianism, but also simple things like going for a stroll outside. These will be gone after she is married.

While our main concern is these two, we also have the servant. When the three are left alone, the boundaries between the classes disappear. They do things together. This is understandable. While being rich does have its benefits, the hierarchical nature of society is also the cause of all their problems, so why would they stick to that hierarchy when they don’t have to?

They also help the maid with her abortion. I wonder what the attitude towards this was at the time? The Bible does give instructions on how to do it, so perhaps it was seen as acceptable. They figure out how to do it quite easily and it doesn’t seem to be a big deal either.

As the movie is directed by a woman, the movie manages to avoid male gaze or actually even works against it, trying to put forward a new approach. If you are unaware of the concept, it is exactly what it sounds like. Most movies are shot from a male point of view, which often means that females are portrayed in a way males would look at them. Often this means focusing on body parts rather than a person, using different angles or shots for women and so forth. The most eggregious example from recent past I can remember is from Spielberg’s West Side Story, in which Maria and Tony are both kneeled upon an altar, but Maria is shot in such a way that we see her whole torso, including her ass, while Tony is shot only shoulders up, even though this is kind of awkward, as Rachel Zegler is over a foot shorter than Ansel Elgort.

We have a lot of nudity, but it doesn’t feel sleazy. The bodies are just not presented as sexual, but natural instead. The two lovers do enjoy each other physically, but the movie doesn’t use it as cheap titillation. The two don’t pose for us. They are just… are.

Sight & Sound called Sciamma a “prominent figurehead in contemporary women’s cinema” (sorry, I couldn’t find the author, as for some reason their website doesn’t list it). While I can’t really judge whether this is true (as a cis man), based on the work of her’s I’ve seen, this is very much applicable to her. Based on my limited experience (as sometimes movies are hard to find here in Finland), she is working through the whole life of a women, movie by movie.

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