Woody Allen’s Women

There is so much gossip surrounding Woody Allen’s real life relationships with women that any discussion of the portrayal of women in his films tends to be lost amid speculation about his affairs. Although his female characters have changed for the worst in recent years, I think his golden period films (1970’s and 80’s) contain strong, vibrant presentations of women. These women wear practical, albeit often very stylish outfits – cleavage and legs were not (until Matchpoint) characters in Allen’s films. The objects of Allen’s affections in films like Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters are (with the exception of Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan) not particularly young, they are beautiful, but not in a screen-siren way, and tend to move awkwardly. They are highly educated, they have careers and apartments. They are somewhat neurotic and prone to have unhealthy relationships, but only as much as are the men.

For me, Allen’s female characters are at their best in Hannah and Her Sisters, and their personalities are beautifully reflected in their appearances. Hannah in her shapeless, oversized dresses, Holly with her costume jewellery and shawls, and Leigh in jeans and woollen sweaters. There is a beautiful shot of Leigh, curled up on her bed reading, wearing a man style shirt, jeans, and a pair of thick bed socks. Rarely do we see women wearing socks in films, and strange details like this give Hannah and Her Sisters a warm feeling of familiarity and everydayness. These women breathe, and despite their exceptional beauty, are never shot as objects presented for our scopophilic pleasure.

What seems to be happening in this film is a wonderful equality between the sexes. The men and women are equally intelligent, they are equally messed up, and as a whole, they relate as equals. (Frederick treats Leigh like a child and is psychologically abusive, but he treats other men in the same way. He feels superior to everyone, not just women.) While there is sense of the men trying to find their place amongst these intelligent, self sufficient women – Elliot in particular feels useless beside his capable wife – the women are also trying to work out how they fit in the world. Despite her desire for a relationship with the arrogant playboy David, Holly just as deeply wants to find career success, and a place where her creative drive can be satisfied. Micky wants a rewarding relationship just as strongly as Holly and Leigh. It seems to me that the characters are all developed as people, rather than men and women, and this presentation of equality, makes Hannah and Her Sisters a rather feminist piece of work.

There are of course arguments against Hannah and Her Sisters as a feminist film. I’ll leave those for you to post in the comments.

Lust, Caution

I saw Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution twice this week – it’s a film so overflowing with subtle nuances that after the first viewing I was at a loss – I really had no idea what I thought of it. On the second viewing I had a realisation: for me, what makes Ang Lee an interesting director is his use of close-ups, and his careful construction of intimate details. Lee shoots terrific close ups – ones which allow the characters to come to life through their gestures, the details of their clothing and jewellery, and the subtle changes in their facial expressions.

Toward the start of the film, after the successful opening night of their patriotic theatre performance, Wong (Wei Tang) and her friends get on a bus, and after drawing her first cigarette, Wong moves to a seat alone and leans out of the window. Here, the film shifts into slow motion, the soft rain drops gently onto Wong’s hand as she reaches out into the night, her tongue licking the corner of her mouth in a sensual gesture she later repeats in moments of passion. It is a romantic and somewhat clichéd image (young, unspoiled girl on the precipice of becoming a less young and slightly spoiled woman), but despite this, the shot’s detail perfectly captures Wong’s spirit and self possession, and the sense that she is somehow apart from the rest of the group. The tiny gestures, like Wong’s tongue, the lipstick she leaves on the crockery, her slow, striding walk, and her constantly shifting facial expressions, are what this film left with me.

This discovery of Lee’s close ups delights me, because it explains why I have sometimes found myself with ambivalent feelings toward Lee’s visual style. My favourite films tend to be the ones that use a lot of wide shots and long takes from fixed camera positions – two recent exponents of this style are Tsai Ming Liang and Nuri Bilge Ceylan – films where the characters inner life is projected onto the landscapes that, often quite literally, overwhelm them. Lee however, is an intimate filmmaker – even his wide and long shots feel close. The characters are larger than their surroundings, their internal world reflected in their actions rather than displaced onto the visual landscape. This is not to say that Lust, Caution is not a visually striking film – the visuality is just concentrated into the details and their relationships to one another, rather than into the presentation of images with a classical, painterly sense of composition.

This focus on the small allows Lee to work at making the characters unique. All the official’s wives who play mah-jong with Yee Tai Tai (Joan Chen) have differences as well as similarities, where in other films their characters might easily be merged into a type. The way each one places her mah-jong tiles, their speech, the differences in their jewellery and clothes are emphasised through the swiftly moving close ups that dominate the mah-jong sequences. Similarly, even as the friends attempt to unite in a common cause, their reasons for being part of Kuang’s (Lee-Hom Wang) mission are clearly all different.

This brings me to the incredible depth of Wong’s character. The multitude of possibilities as to why she joins Kuang and to the motivations behind each of her actions mean that like any real person, she refuses to be pinned down to any specific, conclusive desire, but is instead the fascinating result of a series of conflicting needs and wants.