The audacious ideologies of indie cinema’s female… | Little White Lies

Women In Film

The auda­cious ide­olo­gies of indie cinema’s female saviours

24 Jan 2017

Words by Kate Jackson

Three women examining lingerie display in a shop, focused on the mannequin.
Three women examining lingerie display in a shop, focused on the mannequin.
Tal­ent­ed film­mak­ers like Desiree Akha­van and Ingrid Junger­mann are mak­ing their voic­es heard.

The dom­i­nant voice of indie cin­e­ma is chang­ing, thanks to numer­ous female direc­tors who are dar­ing to reset the tedious, well-trod­den nar­ra­tive path of boy meets girl. The expe­ri­ences of a quar­ter-life cri­sis are the beat­ing core of their work: twen­tysome­things stum­bling, or per­haps more accu­rate­ly bull­doz­ing, their way through the begin­nings of adult­hood, which seems to be occur­ring at an increas­ing­ly lat­er age.

These films aren’t a far cry from the sac­cha­rine rom-coms of the ear­ly 2000s, a peri­od that saw a spate of films pri­mar­i­ly con­cerned with job woes, love and friend­ship. Nev­er­the­less, sur­re­al awk­ward­ness pre­vails, with humour so dry it could be described as arid, awak­en­ing a nuanced form of com­e­dy that involves the com­bi­na­tion of utter indif­fer­ence and apa­thy with sun­ny opti­mism. Char­ac­ters are Woody Allen-inspired car­i­ca­tures of them­selves (take the neu­rot­ic Shoshan­na in Girls, for exam­ple). They speak undi­lut­ed truths, often stum­bling into the murky waters of inap­pro­pri­ate­ness with lines that sound designed to be post­ed in 140 char­ac­ters or less, typ­i­cal­ly deliv­ered with a dead­pan drone. Sub­tle­ty is cer­tain­ly not lack­ing but we applaud them for it.

The orig­i­na­tors of this mod­ern arche­type are gen­er­al­ly con­sid­ered to be Lena Dun­ham and Jen­ni Kon­ner, both of whom arguably set the bar in terms of var­i­ous recur­ring sen­ti­ments and sen­si­bil­i­ties, includ­ing unashamed nudi­ty and quick quips. For all its foibles, Girls – the final sea­son of which begins on 12 Feb­ru­ary – con­tin­ues to be rev­o­lu­tion­ary in its direc­tion and storytelling.

But while Dunham’s work only reach­es so far in terms of relata­bil­i­ty, often crit­i­cised for its lack of diver­si­ty, Issa Rae is anoth­er writer/​director who has helped shift the style into a wider sphere. The cre­ator of the cult YouTube show The Mis­ad­ven­tures of Awk­ward Black Girl, based upon pro­tag­o­nist J’s stream-of-con­scious­ness micro-anx­i­eties, Rae employs many famil­iar com­po­nents into her work – includ­ing the hilar­i­ous lack of social graces and refresh­ing­ly pal­pa­ble exis­ten­tial­ist angst – but with­out the under­cur­rents of entitlement.

Her recent HBO series, apt­ly titled Inse­cure, doc­u­ments the every­day tribu­la­tions of best friends Issa and Mol­ly. It fol­lows a sim­i­lar dia­logue to its pre­de­ces­sors, with the calami­ties of ear­ly adult­hood at the core, how­ev­er with whip smart quips wor­thy of Lar­ry David (“being aggres­sive­ly pas­sive is what I do best”), Rae’s work brings the genre into a whole dif­fer­ent league.

A smiling Black woman with short curly hair wearing a patterned jacket and a t-shirt against a chalkboard background.

Anoth­er sig­nif­i­cant con­trib­u­tor to this reshap­ing of the indie cin­e­ma land­scape is Desiree Akha­van, who in 2014 debuted her beau­ti­ful­ly per­sua­sive com­e­dy Appro­pri­ate Behav­iour, a semi-auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal film about an Iran­ian-Amer­i­can bisex­u­al woman in the throes of a messy break-up. Not only is her writ­ing super sharp, with instant­ly mem­o­rable lines such as John’s spear­head­ing a cam­paign to bridge the gaps of gen­tri­fi­ca­tion in Brook­lyn through mass kom­bucha brew­ing,” but she has a dis­tinc­tive direc­to­r­i­al style, too.

Her upcom­ing project, The Mise­d­u­ca­tion of Cameron Post (star­ring Chloë Grace Moretz and Amer­i­can Hon­eys Sasha Lane) is a com­ing-of-age dra­ma fol­low­ing the sto­ry of a girl who is forced into a gay con­ver­sion ther­a­py cen­tre after get­ting caught with a prom queen. Akha­van has already proven that she has no prob­lem court­ing con­tro­ver­sy with mea­sured thought­ful­ness, with Appro­pri­ate Behav­iour occa­sion­al­ly tee­ter­ing pre­car­i­ous­ly close to the edge but always sav­ing itself from top­pling into the realm of poor taste.

Akhavan’s ear­li­er project, The Slope, saw her col­lab­o­rate with cre­ative part­ner Ingrid Junger­mann, a key fig­ure hov­er­ing on the radar of Indie cin­e­ma. Lying out­side the vein of cis­gen­der norms, her Homoeu­rot­ic’ web series F To 7th sees the lead char­ac­ter (also called Ingrid) attempt to nav­i­gate Brook­lyn as a gay woman, in a land­scape where gen­der and sex­u­al­i­ty have left her anti­quat­ed ideas of les­bian­ism in limbo.

In 2016 Junger­mann released her direc­to­r­i­al debut Women Who Kill, a queer themed black com­e­dy about a com­mit­ment pho­bic woman who is cre­at­ing a true crime pod­cast with her ex-girl­friend. Her sen­si­bil­i­ties pack the same punch as her con­tem­po­raries but, like Rae and Akha­van, she is mov­ing the style in the right direc­tion when it comes to enrich­ing acces­si­bil­i­ty for audi­ences. With a few short films already under her belt and the nom­i­na­tion of the 2017 Inde­pen­dent Spir­it Some­one to Watch’ Award, Junger­mann is a direc­tor with an excit­ing career ahead of her.

As sto­ries about the female expe­ri­ence become ever more vital in a world of con­flict­ed, con­stant­ly shift­ing ide­olo­gies, the auda­cious­ness of these tal­ent­ed direc­tors is cre­at­ing a new strand of cin­e­ma. By striv­ing to cre­ate films that pass the Bechdel test and con­tin­u­ing to write com­plex, intel­li­gent roles for women, we are start­ing to see less boy meets girl and more woman meets world.

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