Feminism and gender films of 2022

March 4, 2023

Feminism and gender films of 2022

In the past fifteen years, in American films and international films, themes related to gender, sexual identity, and feminism have been quite frequent, even abundant.

In retrospect, and increasingly, the range of these themes has been widening, and we have now a quite large range of such films, from squarely militant to less militant ones,  some of the films even leaning to skepticism and criticism, with several middle-of-the-ground films.

Let us take strong contenders or nominated films of the present Golden Globes and Oscar season.

If we were beginning with the most extreme case of pain and revenge, Where the Crawdads Sing would be a good start. In this story, a woman living mostly alone settles the score with a male who abused her by throwing him down a high observation tower to his death. It is, metaphorically, a measure of the frustrations involved.

Don’t Worry Darling tells the story of a suburban community, drawn directly from the 1950s, quite separated from the outside world, in the American desert, where wives were expected to keep the house nice and clean until the husbands came back from work. As the community evolves, strange things happen, and women become either revolted or depressed, and the future of the community seems to be uncertain at best.

In Blond, a film quite directly focused on the personal and professional life of Marilyn Monroe, the star is pigeonholed into quite specific roles, always limiting her to being beautiful and subservient, with however several moments where she tries, sometimes with success, at breaking away from her assigned position. Her eventual downfall is at the same time an accusation and a cry for help.

In a European context, the French film L’événement (2021) (Happening, in English, 2022), not nominated for prizes in North America, but the overall winner at the Mostra of Venice,  concerns the context of the perilous conditions of women seeking abortion in the early 1960s in France. It is a film that is only mildly militant because it is a measure of the progress since that decade, but it is also a reminder of how fragile those advances have been, especially considering the debates in the United States today.

Middle of the road militant

In the middle of the road category of militancy, stands the film Women Talking, where women in a strongly religious closed community meet to discuss how to deal with the males’ authority, aggressions, rapes, and sometimes murders. The women discuss at length the choice between three options: continue as is, change their community for the better, or leave. The choice is presented here as a group decision, a communal choice, but its more contemporary application could also present itself as a personal one, facing a married woman vis-à-vis her abusive husband: continue as is, bring change, or leave.

More disengaged, more skeptical themes

In some of this year’s films dealing with genre and women, some films seem to suggest that authoritarian attitudes, unjust behavior, favoritism, and unethical behavior are not the monopoly of the male gender.

In TAR, the female orchestra director is as prone as men to erratic and authoritarian behavior, trying to favor potential lovers to perform in her orchestra and trying to cover up past sexually inappropriate activities. A female can be as unethical as her male counterparts, given the opportunity. Actress Cate Blanchet had to defend this unavoidable conclusion as a feature of the film in front of media criticism.

In the same spirit, in Triangles of Sadness, after a luxury cruise encounters problems following a storm, a cleaning lady, because of her special knowledge on surviving on a lost island, transforms herself into an autocratic leader, even grabbing for herself alone the best installations and keeping for herself the most attractive young male survivor for the night.

In a Mexican film of 2021, Sundown, mostly shown in 2022, a female business owner is as tough, or tougher, than her ailing brother, as she directs a meat packing enterprise in Britain and deals autocratically with him, while part of the family is staying at a luxury all included hotel in Mexico.   

The conclusion suggested in these three last films, TAR, Triangles of Sadness, and Sundown is that the position where you stand conditions in large part your behavior. Women can thus be as erratic and authoritarian as men if given the “right” circumstances. For some, this conclusion might seem pessimistic, but for others, it may be more positive in that it suggests that there is nothing inherent or “natural” in the fact that women are often at the losing end of authority relationships.

In conclusion

The films considering genre dynamics and problems,  nominated or considered for The Golden Globes or the Oscars of 2023 (for the films of 2022) reveal, taken as a whole,  a surprisingly nuanced treatment of this theme, from a more militant tone (Where the Crawdads Sing, Don’t Worry Darling), to a slightly less militant one (Blond, Women Talking), and finally to a more nuanced and even more skeptical tone ( TAR, Triangle of Sadness, Sundown).

This may a disappointing conclusion for some, but for others, it may be a sign that the subject of genre films has matured to more nuanced and contextual perspectives, and that may be more potent than a black-and-white perspective.

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