It’s time a female direc­tor was giv­en a shot at mak­ing a Star Wars movie

For Leia, Rey and Jyn, reck­on­ing comes in wartime, on sandy shores and amid gun­fire. For Toni, the pro­tag­o­nist of Anna Rose Holmer’s beguil­ing debut fea­ture The Fits, hers comes in an inner-city com­mu­ni­ty cen­tre, where a tight-knit dance team has been gripped by mystery.

Ado­les­cence, par­tic­u­lar­ly as expe­ri­enced by girls, has long been por­trayed as a bat­tle­ground, where well-drawn strate­gies are nec­es­sary to nav­i­gate con­tin­u­ous­ly shift­ing alliances and under­cov­er work is an every­day require­ment. The war is waged in qui­et and shield­ed ways as well as through cut­ting dance bat­tles and audi­tions. Every whis­per and well-placed glare a pierc­ing and scar­ring bul­let. Bat­tle lines are drawn through glances and secret con­ver­sa­tions. Earn­ing a place in the ​‘us’ cat­e­go­ry instead of the ​‘them’ is elusive.

Con­for­mi­ty is a shield, some­thing Toni quick­ly dis­cov­ers. To dis­ap­pear into the crowd, to per­form each move per­fect­ly in time is to dis­ap­pear, to become some­thing else. The team, despite being of var­ied out­ward appear­ances, doesn’t exist as indi­vid­u­als but as a unit. In dance, it’s the key to breath­tak­ing group per­for­mance – the abil­i­ty to no longer look like soloists com­pet­ing for atten­tion, but instead fus­ing togeth­er to become a liv­ing, breath­ing sin­gle organ­ism that becomes fine­ly attuned to the move­ments of its sep­a­rate parts.

They mas­ter steps in an instant while Toni strug­gles at the back. Their sym­bio­sis is so strong that Toni nev­er real­ly does any­thing to be on the outs, but she feels like she is when the team starts being struck down by unex­plained spells of fits, which spreads sud­den­ly and vio­lent­ly. Or is it spread­ing at all, instead just being absorbed and mim­ic­ked by the team as anoth­er performance?

In Novem­ber 2016, Lucas­film boss Kath­leen Kennedy said that it was dif­fi­cult to find female direc­tors with the ​“right” expe­ri­ence to direct Star Wars films, as few had been giv­en the oppor­tu­ni­ty to helm projects on a sim­i­lar scale. The fran­chise has been rou­tine­ly hand­ed over to male direc­tors who got their start in inde­pen­dent film, with Gareth Edwards direct­ing the micro-bud­get sci-fi Mon­sters before jump­ing from 2014’s Godzil­la to pilot­ing Rogue One.

Kennedy’s vision is for a dark­er, more dar­ing Star Wars that ven­tures into the galaxy far, far away through dif­fer­ent gen­res – some­thing high­light­ed by Rogue One’s tale of a young woman’s fight for sur­vival and quest for jus­tice. ​“We want to make sure that when we bring a female direc­tor in to do Star Wars, they’re set up for suc­cess,” stressed Kennedy. ​“They’re gigan­tic films, and you can’t come into them with essen­tial­ly no experience.”

‘Expe­ri­ence’ is gen­er­al­ly seen as the abil­i­ty to shoot action – the sup­posed bedrock of main­stream movie enter­tain­ment – show­ing a pro­fi­cien­cy for kicks, flips and gun­fire. Dis­play­ing a capac­i­ty to cap­ture engag­ing, chore­o­graphed move­ment of both the body and the cam­era is a pre­req­ui­site for any prospec­tive director.

Holmer’s tal­ent at craft­ing action is evi­dent not only in the moments of mys­te­ri­ous ter­ror in her film, cut­ting as the dancers jerk and sway, but in the rehearsal scenes where the teach­ing of chore­og­ra­phy is laden with ten­sion as the group is reassem­bled in var­i­ous for­ma­tions, not unlike an army. Their weapons are the chore­og­ra­phy, things that Toni is still learn­ing to use in order to become part of the unit, and move and feel as the oth­ers do. When they take to the floor, they fight. Move­ment is a defence, a cos­tume in itself.

Com­ing of age has long been a cen­tral theme in Star Wars. Young female pro­tag­o­nists embark­ing on jour­neys of self-dis­cov­ery, reck­on­ing with their pasts and forg­ing alliances has been front and cen­tre since the fran­chise first took flight in 1977, with Princess Leia act­ing as a spy for the Rebel Alliance in A New Hope. The dynam­ics of com­mu­ni­ty, where trust is made and bro­ken, has been at the fore­front too.

But Holmer’s eye for move­ment, used as a weapon to dis­ap­pear into the crowd – to con­form, to per­form – would allow the series to delve into the inner lives of its hero­ines in a more mean­ing­ful way, ful­ly induct­ing us into the com­pli­cat­ed dynam­ics of com­mu­ni­ty life dur­ing wartime.

Con­sid­er the cli­max of The Fits, a scene which puls­es as Toni final­ly moulds into the group, falling to earth in front of her peers. At last, she’s ready for battle.