I have always found that the Chicago International Film Festival is a formidable venue for riveting, empathetic tales about women and girls. Last year, “Paradise is Burning” was my favorite film of the fest, and one of my top five for the year. This year, I was glad to view more incredible narrative features that centered diverse stories of women and girls, as well as a couple of fantastic documentaries. All of the films I watched unearthed and investigated gendered taboos, female shame, and the wealth of ways by which we choose to navigate it.
“Mistress Dispeller,” an fantastic documentary out of China, was my first watch of the fest (and the winner of the festival’s highest documentary prize). Desperate to save her marriage from the consequences of her husband’s adulterous relationship with a much younger woman, a woman hires a personal relationship vigilante of sorts: a private service in which a woman inserts herself, undercover, in their life in order to break up the affair.
When the documentary begins, we are met with an almost instant disclaimer that all parties – wife, husband, and mistress – consented to the documentary, even as their understanding of the mistress dispeller came to light. Immediately, this sets up an ethos that gives the film’s impact more punch and humanity. It contributes to the intimacy that director Elizabeth Lo establishes so well over the course of the film.
With a tight runtime, “Mistress Dispeller” keeps us invested, and always does so without passing judgment. Between the wife and the mistress, there is no balancing scales of right and wrong. Rather, the documentary is a look at love’s expectations and practices across the ages. Lo empathizes with the wife’s insecurity, shame, and anger as much as the mistress’s yearning, love, and selfishness. As even as both women are on the receiving end of a half-in, half-out partner, each woman is shamelessly loyal to herself. They enforce their needs and stand up for themselves, rather than falling into piteous expectations of “the other woman.”
The dispeller herself functions almost as a couple’s coach, even as her allegiances are biased and her methods aren’t exactly to the book. Yet through the amalgamation of conversations that occur over the course of the film, “Mistress Dispeller” is a testament to the way patriarchal society struggles to rectify its conflicting feelings about desirability, comfort, and age.
In Mike Leigh’s newest, “Hard Truths,” we also bear witness to a household in disarray. When Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), comedically named in opposition to her demeanor, is introduced, it is through her waking with shotgun velocity out of what must have been a horrific nightmare. She ventures out of bed and down the stairs, diligently spraying and wiping clean the leather couch in her barely furnished living room. The house itself is sparse and plain, containing little more than its walls and floors. Pansy’s husband, professional mover Curtley (David Webber), and her timid son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), tip toe around this clinical landscape, as if there’s only a small budget for the amount of energy permitted in the home, and when Pansy speaks for the first time, we come to understand that she monopolizes that allowance.
Plainly put, she’s crotchety: a complainer extraordinaire who fails to find joy or contentment in any interaction. Neither dentists nor supermarket patrons or furniture store employees are immune from her fervent, high-volume ramblings. Pansy sees the world as a cesspool of inconvenience, irritation, and ridicule. With long-winded monologues of qualms, objections, and criticisms, Jean-Baptiste is incredulously hilarious. It’s the hinted at history and whisper of sadness beneath the sharpness of her tone that keeps “Hard Truths” from falling flat.
The only person willing to push against Pansy’s stonewalling is her sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin), a witty, no-BS hair stylist who sidesteps Pansy’s defensive jabs and avoidance with a firm hand. She’s the only one who contains the energy and desire to chisel away at Pansy’s rigidity, and by proxy, “Hard Truths” becomes not only a character study but a moving tale of sisterhood.
Leigh’s script takes its time in revealing to us the conditions of the depressive wound that festers and motivates her facade, but Jean-Baptiste’s performance compels and teases a latent identity that leaves us thirsting for more. Contextually, archetypes of the angry Black woman are subverted by the empathetic tedium of Leigh’s open arms. “Hard Truths” demands that we be patient with Pansy, that we take her in for who she is and see her pain, regardless of how it manifests, before attempting to dismiss her behavior on account of society’s definitions of palatable hurt.
Spanish actress Paz Vega’s directorial debut, “Rita,” centers a central, flawed marriage, but does so with higher stakes, and mainly through the eyes of its seven year old, titular protagonist (played with anachronistic maturity by Sofía Allepuz). Rita and her five year old brother, Lolo (Alejandro Escamilla), live with their tender, nurturing mother, Mari (played by Vega), and their father (Roberto Álamo), a brash man with a hair-trigger temper.
The film’s premise is nothing more than following the family through their quotidian goings on over the course of the summer. As a portrait of a household, it’s painted poignantly with the brushes of Rita and Lolo’s experiences. Vega’s film inserts the viewer into the headspace of a child, with much of the film being directly from Rita’s perspective, whether playing pinball with Lolo or watching her mother tense in her father’s presence. “Rita” gives stunning, devastating credence to the emotional intelligence of children whilst unpacking the ways gender dynamics are inflicted upon young childhood.
Though Rita is not much older than Lolo, she is expected to help with household tasks, like preparing breakfast and cleaning while he plays with his toys. She picks up on her mother’s discomfort on the bus with a man who is standing a little too close, and puts herself between them. When her mother’s needs are undermined and disrespected, she offers what children can, cuddles of comfort. In times when their father berates and humiliates their mother, filling the home with slamming drawers and yells, Lolo runs to curl up in his bed, and she snuggles behind them, delivering comforting dreamish soliloquies about what life would be like if they were cowboys.
This sibling relationship is the beating heart of “Rita,”” and Allepuz and Escamilla deliver gentle, touching performances. Handling complex situations and emotions with dextrous hands, their young age factors in only to impress.
Vega’s film depicts the maturity young girls glean from witnessing misogynistic, patriarchal subjugation (on both small and large scales) and the hopes of mothers that the world will be more forgiving for them once they age.
Where Vega’s “Rita” approached gendered violence with moving restraint, Iranian filmmaker Farahnaz Sharifi powerfully relays the explicit subjugation of women with unflinching plainness in her documentary “My Stolen Planet.” Composed primarily of archival footage and images, Sharifi outlines the oppressive misogyny of the Islamic Revolution in Iran by directly relating it to the radical act of recordkeeping.
“My Stolen Planet” threads notable historic moments, from Homa Darabi’s self-immolation (in protest of mandatory hijabs) to the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan (during a protest of the country’s conservative presidential elect) together with personal archives and found footage of women before the revolution. As we peek into the personal histories of these anonymous women and their families, Sharifi constructs a moving tale of Iranian womanhood through dichotomous circumstances. To see a dancing woman with coiffed amber hair and a black party dress grooving and smiling, and then shift to street protests soundtracked by citizens’ chants and government gunfire is poignantly jarring for the viewer, enhancing the empathy of what it must have been like for Iranians at the time.
Little girls dancing in their mother’s heels, women performing at parties, and a young Sharifi, maybe 11 or 12, standing outside her home with her book bag: these stunning, nostalgic images should feel innocuous and innocent. But as Sharifi reminds us, none of these people, including her, are in Iran anymore.
As much as the film is a historical dossier, it is also a personal memoir of sorts: a diary of Sharifi’s love affair with filmmaking. Her affinity for it began just as the violent suppression of it started to flourish, and through “My Stolen Planet” she enforces the power of images for means of accountability and historical preservation. She discusses the women who have died, or been shot at or beaten for holding up a camera, and by compiling dozens of sources of archival footage, including her own, she plants her feet in proud rebellion.
