Little women

Teen spirit reigns in the International Festival of Women's Cinema

by Peter Keough

THE SEVENTH ANNUAL BOSTON INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF WOMEN'S CINEMA, At the Brattle Theatre April 15 through 19.

In the wake of Titanic, Hollywood has been cashing in on the adolescent-female market with such recent fodder as Cruel Intentions, 10 Things I Hate About You, Never Been Kissed, and the more upscale Go. Independent women filmmakers have also been picking up on the trend, as evidenced by the selections in this year's International Festival of Women's Cinema at the Brattle Theatre. Perhaps weary of beating their heads against the glass ceiling imposed on women once they reach majority, many of the directors here have returned to the source, the formative teen and pre-teen period when cultural limitations are first established. Since the child is the mother to the woman, these films suggest, the key to understanding and liberating women may lie in confronting the child within.

One of the more fascinating entries is in fact by a young woman not much out of childhood herself. We progressive Westerners may be chastened to learn that what could well be the first feature film directed by a teenage girl comes from the patriarchally strictured theocracy of Iran. Eighteen-year-old Samira Makhmalbaf's fresh and accomplished The Apple (1998; April 17 at 5:30 p.m.) is based on a real-life story that sparked controversy in the Iranian media. Twin girls, 11 years old, were discovered locked in a Teheran apartment; unwashed, barely capable of speech, they had been kept from the outside world by their aged, infirm parents. Casting the actual family in her film, Makhmalbaf spins this tabloid oddity into a gently subversive fable about moribund tradition and inevitable change.

A petition from concerned neighbors brings the welfare department to the Naderi household. The father, a doddering scarecrow in Coke-bottle glasses, explains that he was just following the adage that "daughters are like flowers . . . they wither in the sun" when he decided to lock the twins away. The no-nonsense welfare woman nonetheless sets them free, and the gawky, feral pair roam the streets, stealing ice cream, playing hopscotch, and making friends, their bewilderment graced by an otherworldly bemusement like that of Bruno S. in Werner Herzog's The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser.

Like many Iranian films about children, The Apple combines sophistication with limpid simplicity (Samira is, yes, the daughter of Mohsen Makhmalbaf, director of Gabbeh and The Mirror, who wrote the screenplay for this film). But The Apple shows its adolescent hand with its touches of earnest symbolism; the last image of the twins' blind mother, who's entirely covered by a chador, and taunted by an apple on a string, beguiles with its ingenuousness and aptness.

Initiation into life proves more traumatic in other parts of the world. In her debut feature, Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl (1998; April 18 at 7:45 p.m.), actress Joan Chen takes an unrelenting look at the fate of a schoolgirl during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Sent to the Mongolian frontier from the big city, ostensibly to participate in a woman's cavalry brigade, Xiu Xiu is soon abandoned. A kindly tribesman -- a warrior castrated in a tribal altercation -- befriends her. But she longs to return home, and to do so she has to pander her favors to venal local functionaries, underscoring her host's impotence and her own. Tragic and visually gorgeous, Xiu Xiu offers little hope for the survival of innocence.

More optimistic, though no less brutal, is Deepa Mehta's Earth (1998; April 17 at 7:30 p.m.). Eight-year-old Lenny enjoys privileged circumstances in 1948 Lahore as India achieves independence. Although stricken with polio in a country about to boil over with the internecine Muslim-Hindu warfare of the partition, she is a member of a wealthy, neutral Parsee family and seemingly above the fray. Her beloved nanny Shanta, though, is a Hindu whose beauty spurs the passion of two charismatic Muslim men.

When the carnage breaks out, Lenny gets to see the horror of partition first-hand in a jolting scene of violence; through the misfortunes of Shanta she learns the dark recesses of love and hatred, and the frailty of the individual before the forces of history. Although it starts out like a creaky Merchant-Ivory costumer, Mehta's film gathers momentum and gravity. The second in a trilogy beginning with Fire, Earth is far more elemental than its predecessor.

The divisiveness in Belgian director Patrice Toye's debut feature, Rosie: The Devil in My Head (1998; April 15 at 9:30 p.m. and April 19 at 2 p.m.), is more familial and psychological than political, but the consequences, though internalized, are as devastating. The title heroine, tough and cynical at 13, is processed into a youth-detention center for some undisclosed crime. Flashbacks unfold the mystery with tantalizing sleight of hand and crusty working-class detail, circa 1980. Her unmarried mother, Irene, pretends that Rosie is her sister -- she had Rosie when she was only 14 -- so she can attract a husband. Further undermining their bond is the unwelcome appearance of Irene's brother Michel, who tries to act as Rosie's father. Alienated, Rosie finds solace in her "white knight," Jimi, and the two set off on a peripatetic adventure involving a purloined baby. Although overlong, Rosie packs some sly surprises that illuminate as well as startle.

Full of twists that are more contrived than enlightening is Cauleen Smith's first feature, Drylongso (1999; April 18 at 5:30 p.m.). Pica is a young African-American woman whose photography-class project is to take Polaroid snapshots of all the young men in the neighborhood. Black males, she argues with convincing statistics, are an endangered species -- especially since a serial killer has been taking a toll of them in her Oakland neighborhood. One of the men Pica photographs turns out to be a woman -- Tobe, who dresses like a boy because she's tired of being pushed around as a woman. An intriguing exploration of sexism, violence, and classism in the black community, Drylongso has a lot going on in it for its 82-minute length, and by the third serial-killer attack it's gotten in over its head.

Overambitious also is Lisanne Skyler's Getting To Know You (1999; April 16 at 7:45 p.m.), a wooden adaptation of a Joyce Carol Oates short-story collection. Like Rosie, 16-year-old Judith (Heather Matarazzo of Welcome to the Dollhouse, in a sophomore slump) has a mother who doesn't like to be reminded of her maternal status. Mom is in the nuthouse now, and Judith and her older, standoffish brother Wesley have just paid her a visit and are waiting for the bus home. Like Laura Dern in the earlier Oates adaptation Smooth Talk, Judith is accosted by a mysterious and disturbed young man.

Jimmy likes to hang around the bus station and observe people, picking up their stories and insinuating himself into their lives. Perhaps because Wesley is so charmless, Judith is drawn to the stranger, unloading her own tale of family woe -- broken dreams, alcoholism, domestic violence -- before getting Jimmy to disclose his secrets. Executed in a clumsy, after-school-special style with leaden flashbacks and inert performances, Getting To Know You re-creates the experience of two hours spent waiting in a bus station all too accurately.

Had Jimmy been one of the subjects of Maggie Hadleigh-West's camera in War Zone (1998; April 18 at 2 p.m.), he would undoubtedly have been denounced as a sexual harasser and potential rapist. The film's premise is stimulating -- record the macho abuse endured by a woman who's just walking down the street and confront the perpetrators with their actions -- and the issue of sexual violence itself is certainly urgent and grave. But Hadleigh-West's approach -- crude, self-righteous, manipulative, and downright narcissistic -- tends to make the feckless pigs she interviews seem more sympathetic than she herself. Neither does the preponderance of minority and blue-collar men among her targets help her argument -- the issues of class and race are never confronted, though the filmmaker does trot out her African-American boyfriend as a model male.

Hadleigh-West should take heed of the restraint, clarity, irony, and wit shown by Kim Longinotto and Ziba Mir-Hosseini in Divorce Iranian Style (1998; April 18 at 3:45). In a country where street sexual harassment is limited because women are required to cover themselves from head to toe, the prospect of getting fair treatment in a divorce court are pretty minimal. Given the abject state of patriarchal tyranny and sexual injustice, the temptation for a strident piece of propaganda à la War Zone in making this documentary about a Teheran family court must have been high.

Fortunately, the filmmakers allow the facts to speak for themselves, and they are surprisingly complex and ambiguous, however ultimately damning. The women suing for divorce give as good as they get, berating their spouses for their negligence, inadequacies (sexual, in one eye-opening segment), and deception before the stoic cleric/judge. But then, they have to be tough, as their rights under Islamic law are shockingly restricted.

Their spirit and tenacity is remarkable given their paltry means and the draconian decisions of the otherwise compassionate judge. In one wrenching scene he takes a four-year-old girl away from her heartbroken mother and puts her in the custody of her callous father. That the little girl earlier had been sitting at the judge's bench, pretending to preside over the court, underscores the hope ventured here and in The Apple that the seeds of future liberation lies in the nurturing of the children within and among us.