Labor pains

The working girl takes a bow at the Boston Women's Film Festival

by Peter Keough

THE SIXTH ANNUAL BOSTON INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF WOMEN'S CINEMA, At the Brattle Theatre, May 8 through 14.

A woman's work is never done -- and that's a good thing according to many of the films in this year's Boston International Cinema of Women's Cinema. Craftsmanship, artistic vision and struggle, originality and independence are not only the hallmarks of most of the features selected but their subjects as well. The need to express oneself through one's labor (other than the reproductive kind) -- and not through one's relationships with men, other women, or a patriarchically repressive society (though these key themes are addressed directly in some of the festival's most powerful offerings) -- distinguishes a line-up of movies that is one of the festival's most accomplished to date.

That despite the fact that many are by first-time directors. Lisa Chodolenko's debut feature, High Art (1998; screens May 8 at 7 p.m., with the director and producer Dolly Hall), confronts the complex and interrelated issues surrounding the title concept. Syd (Radha Mitchell), a very young, squeaky-clean assistant editor at a chi-chi Manhattan photography magazine, finds her background in deconstructionist theoreticians such as Lacan and Barthes less than helpful in dealing with the incorrigibly human side of art, as represented by her neighbor and soon-to-be client and lover Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy), or with the smugly inhuman side, as represented by her parasitic employers, who are eager to suck up whatever 15 minutes of fame Lucy, a punkish photography phenom of two decades before, can rekindle.

Chodolenko deftly re-creates the slick environs of the contemporary art market and the dissolution and anarchy of the bohemian demi-monde that is its seedbed. Cropped somewhat by the cut-and-dried pathos of its ending, High Art nearly attains its aspirations with a boost from its cast. Mitchell conveys the appropriate canny innocence as Syd. And as Lucy -- especially in scenes with Patricia Clarkson as her hopelessly addicted actress lover, a '70s revenant reminiscent of Nico by way of Fassbinder -- Sheedy astonishes with one of the great screen performances of the year.

Of course, the obstacles women face in today's workplace pale before those of the past. Lynn Hershman Leeson's Conceiving Ada (1997; May 12 at 9:45 p.m.) attempts to link the plights of women past and present through computer technology. Emmy Coer (Francesca Faridany) has invented a program by which she can communicate with famous figures of history. She selects Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace (Tilda Swinton), daughter of the famous romantic poet and the originator, along with Charles Babbage (John O'Keefe), of the prototype of current computer languages.

Emmy sees parallels between her own situation -- should she go through with her pregnancy with her wimpy boyfriend at the risk of her career? -- and that of her subject, whose own genius was cut short by children, designing and envious men, a sexist society, and a forbidding mother (Karen Black, who also portrays Emmy's niggling mum). Swinton's performance, reminiscent of her epic, gender-reversing role in Orlando, is incandescent, though it overshadows the weaker efforts by the rest of the cast. Leeson's virtual time-traveling concept is alternately ingenious and contrived; it allows for some beguiling computer-generated images, a cameo performance by Timothy Leary, and a brilliant, verbal play on the title, but in general it seems more artificial than intelligent.

French director Agnès Merlet takes a more conventional approach to her historical subject in Artemisia (1997; May 8 at 7 p.m.). The 17-year-old daughter of the 17th-century Italian painter Orazio Gentileschi, Artemisia (Valentina Cervi), also desires to be an artist but is constrained by the chauvinism of the day and a papal edict forbidding women from using male models ("How can I become a great artist if I can't draw naked men?" is one of Artemisia's more leaden lines).

When celebrated master and well-known debauchee Agostino Tassi (Miki Manojlovic) collaborates with her father on a fresco, he sets Artemisia's hormones and artistic ambitions boiling. It ends with a passionate affair, Artemisia's establishing herself as one of the West's first female artists by painting Judith and Holofernes, and a rape charge brought against Tassi by Artemisia's father. Historically controversial (feminists may not like Merlet's spin here), Artemisia does do justice to its murk of motives and consequences, and it frames everything in imagery reminiscent of Artemisia's contemporary Caravaggio -- before succumbing to standard bodice-ripping histrionics.

A different kind of period picture is Susan Skoog's Whatever (1998; May 9 at 9:30 p.m., with the director present). Set in the early 1980s, it's the story of Anna Stockard (a moodily engaging Liza Weil), a student in a New Jersey high school who dreams of attending art school in New York. Such ideas amount to little, however, in a community that is the dark side of Richard Linklater's Dazed & Confused. The film begins with Anna's freewheeling best friend Brenda (Chad Morgan) getting wasted and gang-raped in the bushes.

Encouraged by her art teacher (Frederic Forrest in the film's most stereotypical performance), Anna nonetheless perseveres, and so does Skoog. Despite the occasional lapses into a schematic agenda (the usual male suspects -- the abusive stepfather, the slimebag boyfriend, the petty, officious teacher -- are on exhibit) and the rare distracting anachronism (isn't "whatever" a buzzword of the '90s?) Skoog slyly undermines expectations and unflinchingly depicts her world.

Not all women, past or present, want to be artists; some just want the satisfaction of a job well done and recognized as such. That's the case of the four temps -- Iris (Toni Collette), Margaret (Parker Posey), Paula (Lisa Kudrow), and Jane (Alanna Ubach) -- in debut director Jill Sprecher's blithely comic, insidiously poignant Clockwatchers (1997; May 13 at 7:30 p.m., with the director and co-writer Karen Sprecher present). One step beyond slackers, these underachievers and corporate outsiders make an all-too-temporary alliance in a skewed variation of the age-old conflict between individuality and the ruthless idiocies of the established system. Told with a hilarious eye for detail (a throwaway scene of a mailboy with an expanding file folder is priceless) and buoyed by impeccable ensemble performances (though as the anarchic, loose cannon of the group, Parker Posey verges on self-parody), Clockwatchers is the much hipper, much more incisive Working Girl of the '90s.

Sometimes, too, a woman is content merely to let the man be successful. A documentary of Woody Allen's 1996 European tour with his Dixieland Jazz band, Oscar-winning filmmaker Barbara Kopple's Wild Man Blues (1997; May 14 at 7:15 p.m., with the director) offers a behind-the-scenes look at the much lauded and loathed icon that is its subject -- but what really fascinates is its glimpse of "the notorious Soon-Yi Previn," as Allen himself introduces his 21-year-old wife and stepdaughter of former lover Mia Farrow. Their relationship seems an odd case of role reversal, with Soon-Yi a chiding, nurturing mother figure and Allen the needy, wisecracking neurotic of his films. Going a long way toward restoring Allen's image after his recent, scandalous court ordeals, Wild Man Blues also explains that image -- a concluding lunch back home with the folks is not to be missed.

Australian director Samantha Lang's debut, The Well (1997; May 9 at 7:30 p.m.), examines another troubling, seemingly twisted co-dependent relationship, this time between a younger and an older woman. Based on a novel by Elizabeth Jolley, it takes place in an Outback made bleaker by Lang's relentless blue tinting. Hobbled by a stunted foot, a dotty old father, and the responsibilities of a sprawling ranch, Esther (Pamela Rabe) hires ex-con Katherine (Miranda Otto, again, as in Love Serenade, playing half of a Down Under odd couple) to help out. Chaotic, vulnerable, and perversely innocent, Katherine beguiles Esther, tapping into her repressed passion. The old man dies; Esther sells the ranch and with the nest egg bankrolls good times for the two of them.

The party ends when Esther lets Katherine drive her pick-up and she runs down a man in the road. Esther dumps the body down a well, and no sooner than you can say "fruit cellar" than their relationship takes on a Psycho-like turn, culminating in a purging storm and deluge. Related with taut restraint and exquisite detailing, The Well brims over with its stunning lead performances -- the concluding shots of both Rabe and Otto haunt with their mystery, folly, and nobility.

Such a performance also emerges from British director Carine Adler's lacerating Under the Skin (1997; May 11 at 7:45 p.m.). Samantha Morton (who starred as Harriet Smith in an A&E Emma and as Jane in last year's A&E Jane Eyre) tries literally to get under her own skin as working-class Iris, who's first seen naked in bed inscribing childish scrawls on her body with a felt-tipped pen. She and her staid, pregnant, married sister, Rose (Claire Rushbrook), respond with varying trauma to the death of their mother (a touching cameo by Rita Tushingham, a British cinema icon since Tony Richardson's A Taste of Honey in 1961). Rose grows distant and treacherous; the madcap Iris sinks into an inferno of sexual excess and debasement.

Donning her mother's wig and clothing, Iris rebounds from one boozy, unwise encounter to the next. Although her rake's journey at times seems a little programmed and resolves patly, Morton strips off with excruciating honesty layers of artifice and dissembling to uncover her character's bleeding and triumphant essence. Such self-revelation is the ultimate labor, and it embodies this film festival at its finest.