Pepi, Luci and Bom (1980)

Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón/Pepi, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom/Pepi, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap. Give him a good kicking, but don’t go too far. We don’t want anyone to die. Now is not the time. Pepi (Carmen Maura) a young independent woman living in Madrid, is filling up her Superman sticker album when she receives an unexpected visit from a neighbour policeman (Felix Rotaeta) who has spotted her marijuana plants whilst spying on her via binoculars from his house across the street. Pepi tries to buy his silence with an offer of anal sex, but instead the policeman rapes her. Thirsty for revenge, Pepi arranges for her friend Bom, a teenage punk singer, and her band, Bomitoni (Bom and Toni and also a pun of vomitoni or big puke), to beat up the policeman. Wearing Madrilenian costumes and singing a zarzuela Pepi’s friends give the man a merciless beating one night. However, the next day Pepi realises that they had attacked the policeman’s innocent twin brother by mistake. Undaunted, Pepi decides on a more complex form of revenge. She befriends the policeman’s docile fortysomething wife, Luci (Eva Siva) from Murcia with the excuse of receiving knitting lessons. Pepi’s idea is to corrupt Luci and take her away from the wife-beating policeman. During the first knitting class, Pepi’s teenage punk friend, Bom (Alaska) arrives at the apartment heading for the restroom in order to pee. This leads to the suggestion that, since Luci feels hot, Bom should stand on a chair and urinate over Luci’s face. Bom’s aggressive behaviour satisfies Luci’s masochism and the two women become lovers. Back home, Luci has an argument with her husband in which she complains about what he had done to Pepi. When he threatens to whip and kick her out, with a renewed sense of liberation Luci leaves her husband and her home, moving in with Bom. The three friends, Pepi, Luci and Bom are immersed in Madrid’s youth scene, attending parties, clubs, concerts and meeting outrageous characters. In one of the concerts, Bom sings with her band The Bomitonis a song called Murciana marrana (The slut from Murcia): Luci becomes a proud groupie. The highlight at one of the parties is a penis size contest called Erecciones Generales (General Erections), a competition looking for the biggest, most svelte, most inordinate penis. The winner receives the opportunity to do what he wants, how he wants, with whomever he wants. He selects Luci to give him oral sex, which makes her the most envied woman at the party. Pepi is forced to find work as her father decides to stop her income. She becomes a creative writer for advertising spots designing ads for sweating, menstruating dolls and multipurpose panties that absorb urine and can double as a dildo. Pepi also begins to write a script which will be the story of lesbian lovers Luci and Bom … With so much democracy in this country, where will it end? Those Communists need to be taught a lesson. Leave it to me. The debut of renowned filmmaker Pedro Almodovar, this document of Spain’s punk era, a transitional stage in the wider post-Franco culture known as La Movida Madrilena, is a wild movie about feminism, friendship, machoism, comic books and music. Its disarmingly straightforward presentation, sexual language and overt display of vulgarity verging on offensiveness marked it out. I love you because you’re dirty, Filthy, slutty, and servile, You’re Murcia’s most obscene, And you’re all mine. It can be read as a cry of freedom following decades of political suppression with each woman representing a different aspect of identity – its limitations and possibilities. There is no judgement here, not even with a teenage punk having a sexual relationship with a woman twice her age: their meet cute has to be seen to be believed. I believe that women have to find fulfillment. Lacking in the later sophistication and colour-coded mise en scene that has so defined Almodovar’s signature, the low budget determines the more realistic and tableau presentation of the comic interactions with Maura in a star making role: she make another five films with the director. Almost literally a laugh riot, this outrageous comedy shot in 1978 quickly became a midnight movie on its 1980 release in Spain where many of the figures became mainstream in the Eighties. It remains a cult item to this day. Cinema is not real life. Cinema is falsehood

What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984)

Aka ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto! At first it was fun, but I am too young to be tied down. A Spanish cleaning lady with a chaotic life and a pill addiction, Gloria (Carmen Maura) lives in a Madrid apartment with her cranky husband, Antonio (Angel de Andres-Lopez) ; their two trouble-prone sons, gay Miguel (Miguel Angel Herranz) and drug dealer Toni (Juan Martinez); and Gloria’s ruthless lunatic mother-in-law Abuela (Chus Lampreave) who is addicted to both bottled water and fairy cakes. With little emotional support, apart from call girl neighbour Cristal (Veronica Forque) who likes Gloria to keep her company during bonking sessions, Gloria finds herself at wit’s end and finds out that Antonio has a secret passion on the decadent German singer Ingrid Muller (Katia Moritz) for whom he had worked as driver in Germany. Writer Lucas Villalba (Gonzal Suarez) who’s doing the memoirs of a random dictator tries to convince Antonio to forge letters from Hitler and travels to Germany to meet the singer to invite her to participate in the scheme. She’s in the middle of a suicide attempt and he persuades there’s money in the scheme. Gloria is pushed over the edge when an argument with her husband leads her to hitting him over the head with a hambone causing his accidental death. As Gloria deals with the morbid matter, other eccentric characters including an evil ginger child, a lizard called Dinero and a gay paedophile dentist who Gloria allows adopt Miguel, enter the picture, only adding to the craziness and police inspector Polo (Luis Hostalot) starts to investigate Antonio’s death … Tonight’s client would like a whip. If I don’t take him one, he might leave. One of the unexpected eruptions of the Eighties was rebirth of the Spanish cinema, almost entirely courtesy of writer/director Pedro Almodóvar’s crazy comedies and Gloria is one of his great creations, a female hero like no other.  Women today just won’t stay home! The collaboration of actress and director was such a balm to a country on the verge following Franco’s reign and their crazy vehicles somehow contained the truth of female experience as well as knowing high comedy: love, servitude, lies, housework, melodrama, marriage, motherhood, money, murder (out of Roald Dahl), sex, drugs, prostitution and perversion, the whole gamut. What I wanted was some commonplace scene of elegant, sophisticated sadism, like in French films. This mad farce with its charismatic protagonist and nutty plot is one of the most purely enjoyable and fun satires ever made, a work of seemingly joyous abandon. Maura is never less than magnificent: she is the performer who Almodóvar once said is the actress who has best absorbed and communicated my idea of the female. Maura has said of him, What I liked about his characters was that they were full of vitality, positive, practical, surreal – at least the ones he gave me. They’re characters where the woman is in charge. Such sheerly witty feminism – has it ever been bettered? Tell me who are the romantics and who are the realists?

Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)

I’m sorry I was late but I was busy making a living. Ted Kramer (Dustin Hoffman) is a workaholic ad man who returns home late on the biggest night of his career to find his wife Joanna (Meryl Streep) packing her suitcase claiming she needs to find herself. She deserts him and their young son Billy (Justin Henry) and he has to find a way of taking care of the boy while juggling a busy career. He initially blames their divorced neighbour Margaret (Jane Alexander) for putting Joanna up to it but they become friends as he muddles through cooking, school appointments, playing in the park and working at home late at night while managing life alone with Billy. Then 15 months later Joanna shows up looking for custody and Ted loses his job because he can’t balance his work and life commitments. A court battle looms with the courts already tilted in favour of the mother … I have worked very hard to become a whole human being and I don’t think I should be punished for that.  For film scholar Hannah Hamad this is the Ur-film of Hollywood post-feminist paternal dramas, a mode that has dominated the industry ever since (just watch every movie out of America since 1980, more or less!). It’s also the film that put domestic melodrama back at the forefront of American cinema, garnering most of the principal Academy Awards in its year for something that had it been made in France would have been just another humdrum if moving drama. But it has stars – and is simply brilliantly performed with a naturalism that is breathtaking. Hoffman is great as the guy who has to get to know how to live as a working and caretaking parent. The kitchen scenes between him and Henry doing father-son bonding are fantastic. It’s smart too about the working environment and the boys’ club it engenders; and tough on the idea that any woman would want more from life than catering to the needs of a small child:  when Ted sleeps with office lawyer Phyllis (JoBeth Williams) she leaves early not to go home and give a kid breakfast but to go downtown for a meeting. Writer/director Robert Benton adapted Avery Corman’s novel and exhibits none of the quaint, quirky humour that distinguishes his other films. Slickly done, touching and hot-button on all the social issues of the day:  not just a film, a cultural event. I didn’t know it would happen to me. MM #2800

The Facts of Life (1960)

Am I really going to San Francisco to spend the weekend… with the husband of my best friend? When neighbours Kitty Weaver (Lucille Ball) and Larry Gilbert (Bob Hope) meet it’s irritation at first sight but there’s an undeniable attraction which they eventually act upon during the annual neighbourhood vacation in Acapulco when they’re forced to spend it together. Problem is, they’re both married, she to habitual gambler Jack (Don DeFore), he to perfect homemaker Mary (Ruth Hussey) and they both have two children. They vow to take off together after circumstances and regular encounters at social gatherings mean they keep running into each other but a messed up drunken assignation at a motel makes them rethink. Then things change after Larry finds out that Kitty has written a note to Jack to tell him she’s leaving him when the pair take go to San Francisco for the weekend during the winter vacation … This is my first affair, so please be kind. A breezy but cold-eyed comedy of suburban middle class adultery is not necessarily what you might expect with that cast, but that’s what legendary screenwriting partners Norman Panama and Melvin Frank created and it’s very well played by the leads who of course are both peerless comedy performers and this is the third of the four films they made together. It’s as though Johns Cheever and Updike decided to up sticks and go Hollywood and take all the baggage of midcentury masculinity with them. Panama and Frank are of course great comic screenwriters.  Their first screen credit was on Hope’s 1942 movie My Favorite Blonde and later work with him includes Road to Utopia, Monsieur Beaucaire and an uncredited rewrite of The Princess and the Pirate so they know his strengths (they are his, as it were) and they turn a messy uncomfortable familial disruption into an easily enjoyed romcom whose moral messiness is tidied into great dialogue and barely concealed social anxiety.  This is the essence of comedy and it’s their forte. There are some shockingly barbed exchanges and there are excruciating sequences when the couple discuss the legal and financial ramifications of two divorces and realise when they’re finally alone together that they’re probably mismatched; when they almost get found out by neighbours at San Francisco Airport the tension is horrific.  There’s a notable score by Johnny Mercer and Leigh Harline with the title song performed by Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé and while Frank gets the sole directing credit, it appears Panama co-directed. There’s an unexpectedly conventional titles sequence designed by Saul Bass, putting us right in the mood for the tenor of that era’s comedy style and it all looks beautiful in monochrome thanks to cinematographer Charles Lang. Night-time Los Angeles looks glossy even in black and white.  It’s an interesting one to compare with another film about an extra-marital suburban affair filmed the same year, Strangers When We Meet. Played a beat slower with a fraction less of the leads’ comedy mugging and shot in colour, this could match its melodramatic tone. Are you sure you’re with the right woman?

The Weaker Sex (1948)

I wish I didn’t feel so cut off.   Widowed Martha Dacre (Ursula Jeans) tries to keep house and home together for her two serving daughters Helen (Joan Hopkins) who’s involved with radio officer Nigel (Derek Bond) and Lolly (Lana Morris) who’s going out with sailor Roddy (John Stone);  and servicemen billeted on her in Portsmouth, a naval base during WW2. While son Benjie (Digby Wolfe) is away in the Navy she has chosen to stay at home as a housewife, but when she learns that his ship has been damaged during the D Day landings, she regrets not taking a more active role in the war and works in a canteen and as a fire watcher. The family story moves forward from D-Day to VE-Day, the 1945 general election and on to 1948. Martha eventually re-marries to her late husband’s colleague, naval officer Geoffrey (Cecil Parker) who was one of those billeted on her and has become a father-figure to her son and daughters…  Oh dear, who’d be a mother? This British homefront drama was released three years following the conclusion of hostilities so it has the benefit of victorious hindsight as well as expressing the postwar era when everyone was completely obsessed with the lack of food. Adapted from actress Esther McCracken’s 1944 stage play No Medals by Paul Soskin with additional scenes created by Val Valentine to bring it up to the year of shooting, it’s a witty drama filled with resigned Keep Calm and Carry On messages underscored by dissatisfaction at the dreariness of housework and the plight of women whose life is dictated by the unavailability of food which becomes a thoroughly good running joke:  The housewives’ battle cry – the fishmonger’s got fish! cackles housekeeper Mrs Gaye (Thora Hird). Intended as post-war propaganda, a kind of decent British take on Hollywood’s Mrs Miniver (minus the Nazi in the garden) with added politics, it’s smart, unfussy and fair, yet trenchant and involving.  Jeans is terrific as the middle class woman finding herself rather (class) envious of Harriet Lessing (Marian Spencer) living in a serviced flat and volunteering:  there’s humour to be had in a lovely payoff when Harriet gets her public comeuppance after the war as rationing motivates her to head the local Militant Housewives League and she gets caught up in an unholy scrimmage which fetches up on the front page of the papers. Parker is a great casting choice – the guy not ashamed of being seen decked out in his uniform doing the vacuuming who can say unabashed to Jeans, I never had a genuinely platonic friendship with a woman before. Of course we know where that leads. He digs in and gets creative when he’s sick of being starved of regular food – and milks a goat. I slept and dreamed that life was beauty, I woke and found that life is duty. There is a great sense of warmth in the family relationships and a scene of remarkable tension when Helen and Martha play a card game awaiting a phonecall to find out whether Nigel has survived a bombing.  Jeans tells herself when awaiting more bad news, I mustn’t back down. I must try to be of some use. Parker responds, This language of ours is so completely inadequate. They are expressing the weariness of a nation almost done in yet somehow dragging itself up to cope with the inevitability of ongoing loss. There are occasional dips into newsreel montages to bring a context to the experiences as the story commences in the run up to D Day, through VE Day, the 1945 General Election, Hiroshima and after, but the footage is smoothly integrated and doesn’t disrupt the narrative flow. Hugely successful in its day it’s a really rather spiffing reminder of how and why Britain came through the war, the importance of family and sadly that tragic deaths don’t just occur in wartime. Crisply shot by Erwin Hillier amid exquisite sets by Alex Vetchinsky and this raft of wonderful performances are very well directed by Roy [Ward] Baker. Shabby perhaps, but not yet shoddy

A Simple Favour (2018)

Are you going to Diabolique me?  Perky smalltown single mom and vlogger Stephanie (Anna Kendrick) is swept away by her new friendship with the glorious Emily (Blake Lively) PR director to obnoxious NYC fashion maven Dennis Nylon (Rupert Friend), too busy in her professional life to do anything but show up occasionally to collect her little son from school. While fellow moms inform Stephanie that she’s just a free babysitter she’s convinced she and Emily are best friends because they bond over a daily martini at Emily’s fabulous glass modernist house until one day she gets a call from Emily to look after her kid and Emily doesn’t return. Stephanie’s daily vlogs get increasingly desperate as the days wear on. After five days she can’t take it any more. She gets embroiled in a search along with Emily’s husband, the blocked author Sean Townsend (Henry Golding) for whom she has a bit of a thing until she decides to dress up and play Nancy Drew when she discovers Emily had a very good life insurance policy… She’s an enigma my wife. You can get close to her, but you never quite reach her. She’s like a beautiful ghost.  While the world gets its knickers in a twist about female representation along comes Paul Feig once again with an astonishing showcase for two of the least understood actresses in American cinema and lets them rip in complex roles that are wildly funny, smart and pretty damned vicious.  This adaptation by Jessica Sharzer of Darcey Bell’s novel has more twists and turns than a corkscrew and from the incredible jangly French pop soundtrack – which includes everyone from Bardot & Gainsbourg and Dutronc to Zaz – to the cataclysmic meeting between these two pathological liars this is bound to end up in … murder! Deceit! Treachery! Nutty betrayals! Incredible clothes! Lady parts! Revelations of incest! Everything works here – from jibes about competitive parenting and volunteering, to the fashion business, family, film noir, Gone Girl (a variant of which is tucked in as a sub-plot), heavy drinking, wonderful food, electric cars.  And again, the clothes! Kudos to designer Renee Ehrlich Kalfus who understands how to convey personality and story. Never wear a vintage Hermès scarf with a Gap T-shirt. If you were truly Emily’s friend, you would know that It’s wonderfully lensed by John Schwartzman, one of my favourite cinematographers and the production design and juxtapositions sing. This is an amazing tour of genres which comes together in two performances that are totally persuasive – in another kind of film Kendrick and Lively might have to tell each other You complete me:  the shocking flashbacks to their pasts (which are both truthful and deceitful) illuminate their true characters. This is that utter rarity – a brilliantly complicated, nasty and humorous tale of female friendship that doesn’t fear to tread where few films venture. It’s an epic battle of the moms. Film of the year? I’ll say! I am so glad that this is the basis of my 2,000th post. Brotherfucker!  MM#2000

 

Calendar Girls (2003)

It’s not just jam and Jerusalem you know. Annie (Julie Walters) and Chris (Helen Mirren) are the two bored laggards at their Yorkshire branch of the Women’s Institute. When Annie’s husband dies young from leukaemia they come up with a plan to raise money for a relatives’ seating area in the hospital – but last year’s WI calendar only raised a few hundred quid so inspired by Chris’ son’s porn mag collection they devise a calendar with a difference. It’s a raving success. But Chris’s son goes off the rails, Annie is inundated with mail from her fellow bereaved and a trip to the Jay Leno show in LA brings out the tensions between the two. This real-life inspirational story of middle-class middle-aged countrywomen could have been truly mawkish but the interpretation by Tim Firth and Juliet Towhidi covers timidity, adultery, WI politics and bake-off rivalry amid the joking and stripping. Mirren and Walters are both specific and broad when it’s required. There are great character roles particularly for Penelope Wilton, but also Linda Bassett, Annette Crosbie, Celia Imrie and Geraldine James with Ciaran Hinds, John Alderton and Philip Glenister bringing up the shapely rear. There’s a great moment when the band Anthrax introduce themselves to the infamous ladies. Directed by Nigel Cole.

A Howling in the Woods (1971) (TVM)

This adaptation of Gothic romance queen Velda Johnston’s novel heralded the reunion of I Dream of Jeannie‘s Barbara Eden and Larry Hagman. In truth, Hagman has a glorified cameo as her husband whom she’s divorcing. Her arrival in Lake Tahoe is not welcomed – the police follow her when she hits town and stepmom Vera Miles cannot conceal her annoyance when she walks in the door of her former home. New stepbrother John Rubinstein sees her as seducible fodder but something is up since Pop never seems to be around. She takes up residence in a cabin and soon gets the distinct impression she’s in danger and there’s that dog howling in the woods  …This NBC TVM has pedigree – adapted by Richard De Roy, directed by Daniel Petrie, scored by Dave Grusin, whose work would be so significant to so many big screen features in the coming years. It operates almost completely in the suspense mode and is all the better for it, with little relief coming from the welcome arrival of Tyne Daly down the cast. Eden does very well as the woman in jeopardy. Just a shame it’s not properly available in a decent format, like a lot of early 70s TV movies.

The Thrill of it All (1963)

This has been a sentimental favourite since I was probably ten years old and it should be grist to the mill of card-carrying feminists, but there you go. Doris is the homemaker and mom of two married to ob-gyn James Garner whose stories about her kids’ bathtime make her the ideal shill for Happy Soap – the company grandee is the father-in-law of Garner’s oldest patient, soon to be a first-time mom. Day’s frequent absences from home and her growing stardom cause chaos on the domestic front. Carl Reiner’s screenplay takes potshots at TV, commercials, male-female relationships and everything in between in what is a sight gag- and joke-strewn satire of contemporary life and it proved huge at the box office. Doris is great playing a very comedic role straight and Garner is perfect as the harried confused husband who is victim of a great sequence involving his car and a swimming pool he didn’t know was in his yard. My granddad’s fave rave Zasu Pitts has a funny role as the paranoid housekeeper, Reiner himself plays the hilariously repetitive soap opera roles, Edward Andrews is superb as the oldest father in town and Ross Hunter (and Day’s hubby Martin Melcher) proved he could produce another winning contempo-comedy starring Day, with all the values he’d been putting into Sirk’s marital melodramas and without the kind of formula you might have expected at this stage of their collaborations following the Rock Hudson series. Bright shiny glossy fun! You’ll feel just like you washed with Happy Soap. Directed by Norman Jewison.

Mildred Pierce (1945)

The film that marked Joan Crawford’s comeback after she was unceremoniously dumped by Metro, this is a reworked and condensed adaptation of James M. Cain’s Depression-era novel by Ranald McDougall, with uncredited rewrites by melodrama specialist Catherine Turney. And:  William Faulkner, Albert Maltz, Margaret Gruen, Margaret Buell Wilder, Thames Williamson and Louise Randall Pierson. Director Michael Curtiz didn’t want Crawford – she was the last of a long list that was topped by Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck – and they fought tooth and nail throughout production with producer Jerry Wald acting as go-between. She’s the woman with the straying husband who starts baking cakes and waiting tables to support her daughters – the younger one, Kay, is a smart and funny tomboy, the elder, Veda (Ann Blyth) is a spoiled puss of a musician with a taste for the high life. The action takes place over four years in the Forties as Mildred starts up her own restaurant and builds a chain with the help of her husband’s realtor partner Wally (Jack Carson) but when playboy investor Monte (Zachary Scott) enters the fray, a tangled web of business and adultery leads to murder. Crawford gets to show off her full emotional range in this superb maternal melo mix of independent woman, weepie and film noir, distinguished by Ernest Haller’s deep shadowy photography and Max Steiner’s score. And what about Anton Grot’s sets! Crawford took home the Academy Award for Warner Bros. What a show!