At screenings for this year’s Boston International Festival of Women’s Cinema, some of my colleagues questioned the need for such an event. Didn’t Hilary Swank win the Best Actress Oscar in 2000 and Hillary Clinton the New York Senate seat? What more do women want? It’s not as if we had a men’s film festival. Anyway, what is a woman’s film?

That there is no satisfactory answer to the last question is reason enough to have such a festival. No matter how women try to create a distinctive cinema or politics, the boys always manage to take over. Any headway in Hollywood or Washington soon proves illusory. Swank may have won last year for the audacious Boys Don’t Cry, but her moment of glory has since dimmed before the enthronement of Pretty Woman Julia Roberts. And though Hillary Clinton may have taken her place in Congress, Laura Bush has taken her place in the White House. When Chocolat is considered cutting-edge and the most audacious examples of feminist filmmaking — Jafar Panahi’s The Circle and Merziyeh Meshkini’s The Day I Became a Woman — are coming from chador-wearing Iran, the need for a women’s film festival seems all the more obvious. Besides, how else could we keep up with Ally Sheedy’s career?

Sheedy’s films have been a kind of festival barometer. In 1998 she played a drug-addicted lesbian photographer in Lisa Cholodenko’s brash and kinky High Art, just one of many edgy standouts in that year’s selection. In 1999 she played a neurotic single woman desperate for a date in Allison Anders’s Sugar Town, which was symptomatic of that year’s less ambitious slate of films. And this year in Adrienne Shelly’s debut feature, I’ll Take You There (1999; Saturday at 5:45 p.m. at the Brattle, with the director present), Sheedy plays, well, a neurotic single woman desperate for a date.

Not much progress there, it would seem. Actually, Shelly, a veteran of independent filmmaker Hal Hartley’s The Unbelievable Truth and Trust, harbors some of Hartley’s nihilist sangfroid beneath her good cheer, and that gives her film an occasional dark and subversive twist. Which it needs given its conventional premise. Bill (a mournful Reg Rogers, who looks like Gabriel Byrne’s American cousin) can’t get over losing wife Rose (Lara Harris). His life is plagued with renditions of their song, “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey?” (which might explain some of the problems in their relationship), and flashbacks to her treachery. To dislodge him from his misery, Bill’s sister Lucy (Shelly) sets him up with Bernice (Sheedy), a painfully needy woman with bad hair whom Bill promptly, brutally insults.

Hell has no fury like a woman called “ordinary,” however, and by means of a handgun, a purple vintage automobile, and a visit to a plucky elderly relative, Bernice pulls off an upbeat variation on Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, teaching Bill not to judge by appearances and to get a life without Rose. Worthy lessons, no doubt, and Sheedy is wonderfully beside herself as she runs the gamut from armed robbery to tuba playing, but the place Shelly is taking us to seems a little familiar.

Not so Suspicious River (2000; Friday at 7:50 p.m., with the director present, and Sunday at 8 p.m., both at the Brattle), though you might find it reminds you of the dankest corners of your worst nightmares. Lynne Stopkewich made an impression with her first feature, Kissed (1996), a love story in which a young necrophilic woman takes a job in a mortuary. Here the heroine works at a motel, where the stiffs are somewhat livelier and thus more dangerous. Leila (Molly Parker, who looks like a cross between a Pre-Raphaelite and an Alex Katz painting) works in a backwater motel. Her husband is mysteriously wasting away, and she has the dazed look of someone with a past. Nonetheless, it’s still a shock when this sweet-faced seeming innocent takes $60 from a customer and gives him a blow job.

As Psycho has demonstrated, ill-gotten money, taboo sex, and seedy motels don’t mix, and like that Hitchcock masterpiece Suspicious River combines blandness and tension with unnerving aplomb. Leila’s only victim, however, is herself, and by the time the film unleashes its final paroxysm, it’s almost a relief.

Paralleling Leila’s plight in Suspicious River is that of a little neighbor girl, and it’s a subplot Stopkewich might have developed further. Among the rewards of these festivals are films about young girls and their relationships. In Anne-Sophie Birot’s first feature, Girls Can’t Swim (2000; Friday at 10 p.m. at the Brattle), 15-year-old Gwen (Isild Le Besco) and Lise (Karen Alyx) are childhood friends. Every year Lise and her family leave Paris to vacation in Brittany, where Gwen’s father is a fisherman. This year, though, it’s different. Something keeps Lise away, and Gwen’s life deteriorates. Her father sells the boat, her self-destructive promiscuity alienates her boyfriend, and when Lise finally does arrive, things only get worse. Birot tells the story from the point of view of each of the girls with a funky authenticity. But when the film nears the heart of the matter — jealousy, sexual ambiguity, incestuous desire — it loses focus. Every crisis seems to end with one of the girls running away in a snit.

Former Chicago Hope star Christine Lahti’s debut feature, My First Mister (2001; Sunday at 6:30 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner, with the director present), likewise sets up a volatile premise but doesn’t follow through. Leelee Sobieski invokes the Winona Ryder of Heathers as alienated goth girl Jennifer, a virgin who writes death-obsessed poetry illustrated with her own blood and sports multiple piercings and tattoos. Compelled to find a job in the mall, she develops an unlikely attraction to Randall (a sardonic but increasingly whiny Albert Brooks), the manager of a stuffy men’s store, and their May/December, punk-rock/Bobby Darin relationship sparks wit and heat. Too much so: to avoid the messy implications of a relationship between a 17-year-old virgin and a 49-year-old divorcé, the film backs down, becoming a mawkish variation on the woeful Autumn in New York.

One woman who doesn’t back down is Emily Watson’s Natalia in Marleen Gorris’s The Luzhin Defence (2000; Thursday at 7:30 p.m., with the director present, and Friday at 3:30 p.m., both at the Brattle), an adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1930 novel The Defence. The scion of a wealthy White Russian family in exile, Natalia has determined to marry eccentric chess grandmaster Alexander Luzhin (John Turturro) despite her mother’s objections and her beloved’s mental instability. Luzhin has fallen for her, as well, but he is in the midst of a world-championship match that brings up memories of a Nabokovian past of obsession, exploitation, and frustrated desire that Gorris relates in inky flashbacks. Watson is superb as the steadfast nurturer, but Turturro’s Luzhin is an embarrassment — this is Rain Man with an endgame — and the film hardly does justice to the metaphors or the madness of the original.

For those so inclined, this year’s festival offers not one but two love scenes with Turturro, the second being in Sally Potter’s ambitious but flawed The Man Who Cried (2000; Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Brattle and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner), a co-presentation of the Jewish Film Festival. The flaws begin with the casting: not just Turturro as Dante, a hammy Italian opera singer, but Christina Ricci as Fegele, a/k/a Suzie, a Russian Jewish girl whose father heads to America in 1927 to find a better life for his family. Their village is torched in a pogrom, and Fegele ends up first in London and then in Paris, where she tries to pursue a career as a singer.

There she meets fellow Russian Lola (the always superb Cate Blanchett) and sullen Gypsy Cesar (the usually fine Johnny Depp, here combining his river rat from Chocolat with his role in Don Juan DeMarco). While Lola takes up with sugar daddy Dante and his fascistic ways, Suzie returns to her roots, and a fiery finale looms. The acting is uneven, the plot erratic, and the grasp of history wispy, but Potter’s musical structure (highlighted by an exquisite soundtrack that includes such gems as Dido’s Lament from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas) achieves climaxes that are genuinely moving.

History is invoked also in Zeinabu irene Davis’s debut feature, Compensation (1999; Saturday at 3:45 p.m. at the Brattle), and the climaxes are mostly silent in what might be the festival’s most inventive and original film. It begins in what looks like an imitation of a Ken Burns documentary as it peruses archival stills of turn-of-the-century black Chicago to introduce the story of Malindy (Michelle A. Banks), a determined young deaf woman romanced by an illiterate migrant (John Earl Jelks). Paralleling their story is that of Maleika (Banks also), a deaf woman in modern-day Chicago in love with a hearing man (Jelks again). Davis interweaves the stories with ingenuity and irony, combining documentary and narrative formats with poignant interludes of silent filmmaking, achieving an impressive if sometimes schematic paean to compassion, pride, and perseverance.

The compensation of what remains behind is the subject of septuagenarian French filmmaker Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners & I (2000; Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Brattle), a petite masterpiece. The “grandmother of the French New Wave” (her 1961 film Cléo from 5 to 7 is one of that movement’s underrated classics) here explores the world of the glaneuses, those permitted by French law to pick up the remnants after the landowners have harvested their fill. Her style, of course, is also a kind of gleaning: bits and pieces of images taken by her prized digital camera of rural and urban indigents and artists who find subsistence and inspiration in what the rest of society has abandoned. A heartwarming look at postmodern bricolage and a witty and eloquent meditation on mortality and rebirth, The Gleaners & I is a tribute to the fertility of women’s cinema.

Issue Date: April 12-19, 2001