Address­ing gen­der trou­ble at the 2017 BFI Lon­don Film Festival

As the 61^st BFI Lon­don Film Fes­ti­val rolled out across the UK capital’s cin­e­mas, many of us found it hard to turn away from our Twit­ter feeds, where the biggest Hol­ly­wood sex­u­al abuse scan­dal in liv­ing mem­o­ry was explod­ing on a scale impos­si­ble to keep up with.

On 5 Octo­ber, the day after the fes­ti­val opened, The New York Times pub­lished an expose of sex­u­al harass­ment alle­ga­tions against Har­vey Wein­stein stretch­ing back three decades. There fol­lowed on 10 Octo­ber an inves­tiga­tive piece in The New York­er, the result of a 10 month long inves­ti­ga­tion, in which Asia Argen­to, Mira Sorvi­no, Rosan­na Arquette, Lucia Evans, Sophie Dix, Emi­ly Nestor, Ambra Bat­ti­lana Gutier­rez, Emma De Caunes and Jes­si­ca Barth told sto­ries of rape and sex­u­al assault at the hands of Wein­stein. Blood-cur­dling audio (obtained by Gutier­rez dur­ing a police sting) was includ­ed in the piece. Mean­while 16 for­mer and cur­rent employ­ees at Weinstein’s com­pa­nies described ​“a cul­ture of com­plic­i­ty” in which women Wein­stein desired would be tricked into find­ing them­selves alone in his hotel room.

From here, the flood­gates opened. Actress­es and indus­try fig­ures took to social media to tell of their own Wein­stein expe­ri­ences, per­haps none more vocal­ly than Rose McGowan. Weinstein’s treat­ment of women – as dif­fer­ent flavoured sweets in his own pri­vate can­dy store – is not a cul­tur­al anom­aly. French actress Léa Seydoux’s account for The Guardian makes it clear that dodg­ing lech­er­ous men is part of the job, while in a Twit­ter state­ment Claire For­lani revealed she had been treat­ed like ​“prey” since she was 14. Fig­ures in the music indus­try have begun speak­ing out and, at time of pub­li­ca­tion, every­day women have begun shar­ing their sto­ries of assault and harass­ment under the hash­tag #MeToo.

The time for deny­ing the pain caused to women by the gen­der imbal­ances in this world are over. As rot­ten as the indus­try may be, cin­e­ma still pos­sess­es the pow­er to make us do bet­ter. With this in mind, we want­ed to high­light the films we saw at this year’s LFF which deal with dynam­ic shifts and strug­gles between men and women in intrigu­ing ways.

Imag­ine if the way to deal with trou­ble­some men was to kill them. This is a propo­si­tion under­ly­ing Cory Finlay’s debut, a movie billed as Anton Yelchin’s final film but which belongs to its female stars. Prep­py Lily (Anya Tay­lor-Joy) and pari­ah Aman­da (Olivia Cooke) are teens from wealthy fam­i­lies who become friends through lack of social alter­na­tives. Their inter­ac­tions are marked by a tone so dead­pan that behav­iour­al norms even­tu­al­ly fall off the map and a dif­fer­ent type of uni­verse is con­jured – one in which mur­der is sim­ply a prac­ti­cal solu­tion to a flesh and blood prob­lem, and noth­ing you wouldn’t do a for a friend. The mis­deeds of the marked man, Lily’s step-father, Ray, are every­day. But as we see his impact on Lily and feel her fury, what he does comes to mean less than the shad­ow he casts across our antiheroines.

Nick (Adam Horowitz) is a fortysome­thing archivist who hires Nao­mi (Emi­ly Brown­ing), a beau­ti­ful 25-year-old to be his assis­tant for a New York sum­mer. This is not the first time he’s enlist­ed the ser­vices of some­one like Nao­mi, as is made clear by the hor­ri­fied reac­tion from his wife Alyssa (a heavy­weight per­for­mance from Chloë Sevi­gny as some­one whose doubts and unhap­pi­ness have drained all plea­sure from her life). Direc­tor Alex Ross Per­ry doesn’t have one sweep­ing point to make about gen­der rela­tions, he has many tiny ones focus­ing on the con­nec­tive tis­sues between us. Peo­ple exploit the pow­ers they have in dif­fer­ent ways, some do so clum­si­ly and hurt­ful­ly; some do it can­ni­ly and man­age to do less harm; and some don’t have any pow­er and suf­fer deeply as a result.

It is a coin­ci­dence that Angela Robinson’s labour of love is hit­ting fes­ti­vals in the wake of Gal Gadot smash hit Won­der Woman. Unfold­ing between the 1920s-40s, this his­tor­i­cal biopic about the polyamorous rela­tion­ship between Har­vard pro­fes­sor William Marston (Luke Evans), his wife Eliz­a­beth (Rebec­ca Hall) and their stu­dent-turned-life­long-lover Olive (Bel­la Heath­cote) involved eight years of research as well as con­sul­ta­tions with the S&M community.

The result­ing film tran­scends its func­tion as an explain­er of WW (although it does this too) to be a com­pelling sto­ry of queer love, life and cre­ativ­i­ty, show­ing the graft and inge­nu­ity required to sur­vive as a sub­ver­sive with­in a con­ser­v­a­tive soci­ety. Robinson’s script is a joy, espe­cial­ly when her lines are spo­ken by Rebec­ca Hall, whose char­ac­ter is described with due respect as a ​“bitch”. Her bristling, dom­i­nat­ing, no-bull­shit per­for­mance is an inspi­ra­tion to any­one bored by more con­ven­tion­al fem­i­nine depic­tions, yet – as with all lay­ered char­ac­ters – this per­sona masks deep fears and weaknesses.

There is a telling scene in which Bob­bi Jene – the dancer sub­ject of this doc – has a sit down dis­cus­sion with the actress Lau­ra Dern and explains that she defeat­ed her eat­ing dis­or­der by throw­ing so much ener­gy into her work that indulging after­wards was nec­es­sary for bal­ance. ​“Now you tell me,” laughs Dern, ​“after all this ther­a­py”. It’s both sad and won­der­ful to com­pre­hend the sen­su­al work of Bob­bi Jene, who per­forms nude and even cli­max­es on stage, as a mea­sure need­ed for the per­former to be okay with her female appetites.

This doc by Swedish film­mak­er Elvia Lind checks in with the Amer­i­can born dancer at a time when every­thing is about to change. She is on the cusp of 30 and plan­ning to move home – leav­ing Israel where her boyfriend, men­tor and entire his­to­ry as a dancer exist. At this time of great upheaval when less­er folks would just be try­ing to get by, Bob­bi turns her­self inside out, let­ting the art of vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty be the lan­guage that she uses to com­mu­ni­cate with the world. In a cli­mate in which male aggres­sion still dom­i­nates, observ­ing a dif­fer­ent mode of being is a source of hope which made this writer think of Juli­ette Binoche on the sub­ject.

“I don’t want to be reborn as a woman, not all over again,” moans one char­ac­ter after a painful oper­a­tion to restore her hymen in the wake of a rape. This line is the most overt com­plaint about the gen­dered sex­u­al vio­lence that takes place in Angels Wear White, the sec­ond fea­ture from Vivian Qu. Set in a small Chi­nese sea­side town, over­looked by a giant stat­ue of Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe, this con­tem­po­rary noir wears its fury with cold grace. A pow­er­ful man buys the vir­gin­i­ty of two under­age girls. They are tak­en in a hotel where Mia (Wen Qi) works. She records evi­dence but she does not have a social ID card and is more con­cerned with per­son­al sur­vival than mar­tyring her­self for a cause.

Metic­u­lous block by metic­u­lous block, Qu builds a pic­ture of a soci­ety in which there’s always some­thing more impor­tant than secur­ing jus­tice for abused women and chil­dren. In one scene, the par­ents of a raped girl pro­duce an iPhone bought for them by the daughter’s rapist with a sort of, ​‘Hey, at least we got this swag’ shrug. This is a bleak film but also a potent one with a per­spec­tive that could not be rel­e­vant in the midst of the news sto­ry that has engulfed our indus­try. And it’s not entire­ly bereft of hope. While most char­ac­ters have no will or capac­i­ty to chal­lenge the way of their world, some have a bold­ness that lights the way forward.