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Women of a Certain Vintage Take Over the Screen

Vancouver International Film Festival celebrates older women in front of and behind the camera.

Dorothy Woodend 28 Sep 2017TheTyee.ca

Dorothy Woodend writes about film every other week for The Tyee. Find her previous articles here.

Dotard.

The word shot to the top of search engines around the globe when a certain dictatorial man called another even bigger dictatorial man this name.

If you have had it up to the eyeballs with men yapping, you’re in luck. At the Vancouver International Film Festival, Sept. 28 to Oct.13, it’s the time for older women to have a say. Films made by and featuring women of a certain vintage are leading the charge towards change, reinvention, rebirth even. It is a grand and glorious thing.

The Festival’s opening film, Mina Shum’s Meditation Park, is most emblematic of this idea, but there are films aplenty sprinkled throughout that celebrate the strength and power of older women.

None more powerful than Louise Lacavalier, the dreadlocked, blonde daredevil who came to fame hurtling through the air with the Canadian dance company La La La Human Steps. At the age of 58, Lacavalier is still dancing and choreographing. Director Raymond St-Jean’s camera is often hard-pressed to keep up with her, as she runs, leaps, twitches and scampers through a movement vocabulary that would strain much younger performers. Often the camera is content to simply stand still, catching the fullest scope of the performances in all their frenetic power. Lacavalier is mesmerizing to look at, even when she is sitting under a blanket, watching a movie and eating popcorn with her two teenage daughters.

The woman came late to dance, thinking that the world of ballet and traditional female roles held little for her. It wasn’t until Lacavalier met Èdouard Locke at the tender age of 21 that she found a place for herself. She became synonymous with La La La’s brutally beautiful choreographic work for 15 years. Archival footage of Lacavalier at her rocket-powered peak is both simultaneously terrifying and thrilling. But even in the latter part of her career, the woman is fearless. As one interviewee notes, she has only two speeds, “Fast and super fast.” Quieter moments with friends and family, former lovers and old partners are juxtaposed against footage of the dancer in rehearsal and performance. But nothing is quite as riveting as Lacavalier alone in the studio, pushing her body to the absolute limit. Age falls away and all that remains is art.

A similar quality imbues French filmmaker Agnès Varda’s newest documentary. Age seems irrelevant in the face of her skill and ability. The legendary Varda is 89 years of age, but still going strong, very strong, in fact. In Faces Places (Visages, Villages in the original French title) she pairs up with photographer JR and the duo hit the road, detailing the lives and faces of people in villages and towns across France. JR is known for his huge photographic prints that are affixed to the walls of the places where the subjects of his imagery live and work. In the context of rural France, this work takes on particular, often political, resonance. Varda and JR make an interesting, almost quixotic pair, as physically dissimilar as Laurel and Hardy, trading repartee back and forth, while tootling about in a van that is kitted up as a giant photo studio. The result is a film that is a wonderful addition to Varda’s extraordinary career. The timing is also perfect, as Varda is set to receive the first honorary Oscar ever given to a female filmmaker. Better late than never, I suppose, and also about damn time!

Our People Will Be Healed is Alanis Obomsawin’s 50th film. At age 85, she is the grand dame of Canadian cinema, but this latest film is both light on its feet and filled with spring-like air of hope and renewal. The effect is decidedly cumulative. It begins with an immersion in the life and culture of Norway House, a First Nations community located some 725 kilometres north of Winnipeg. The local school caters to children from preschool through grade 12, offering classes in First Nations history and language, as well as math, gym and the rest of the standard curriculum.

The school’s emphasis on culture, particularly music, offers students and teachers an additional means to come together. The film brings this home, with scenes of a sweet and often hilarious jamboree where a packed house fiddles their way through escalating rounds of folk standards. As the camera pans over the faces of the performers — some intently focused, with only the piercing concentration that an eight-year-old can muster, and others laughing and joshing each other — an almost palpable sense of belonging hits home. It is a quality that continues to grow throughout the film as Obomsawin follows the various people who grew up in Norway House. The stories are filled with shifting, variegated shades of darkness and light. Women recount stories of having to leave to attend high school and of boarding with white families who were reimbursed for hosting First Nations children. Racism was endemic and widely practised. One of the women interviewed recalls being taught from a textbook that describes First Nations people as savages. “I remember being taken to the principal’s office many a time, because I refused to sit in this classroom. We weren’t the savages, we thought they were the savages,” she laughs.

The film does not shy away from the horrors of Canada’s colonialist history, nor the ongoing violence perpetrated against First Nations women. The story of Helen Betty Osborne’s murder in 1971 is shocking still. Darlene Osborne remembers Helen as a sweet young woman, full of ambition and hope for the future. But out of this tragedy has come something remarkable. Norway House named the school after Helen Betty Osborne, and her smiling portrait watches over the hallway, where kids and teenagers roam easily about.

The film is filled with beautifully captured scenes of canoe trips, weddings, dances and finally the Sundance ritual, which ends with so many tears and hugs that it is impossible not to feel a profound sense of joy surging right through the centre of your own body. The final message of the film, delivered in the filmmaker’s own voice, is a resounding statement of endurance, family and love.

Not all elderly ladies are charming. Occasionally, they’re just as annoying as anyone else. Sofia Bohdanowicz’s Maison du Bonheur follows an aging French woman named Juliane. Depending on your tolerance for preciousness, you might find the film, lovely and exquisite, or it might drive you slightly insane. At the age of 77, Juliane’s life is a carefully controlled existence. She has lived in the same apartment in Montmartre for more than 50 years, and accumulated a lifetime’s worth of clothes, shoes and photo albums. The film details her daily life — trips to the market, visits to the hairdresser, coffee and croissants in the neighbourhood café — with delicacy and precision. It is an interesting cinematic portrait, even, if by the end of it, you’re a bit worn out by Juliane’s self-absorption.

On the other side of the world, and a universe away from Parisian gentility, is Kathleen Hepburn’s feature film Never Steady, Never Still. Based on Hepburn’s short film of the same title, it is almost insanely Canadian in its inflections and nuances. This takes a while to grow on you, and at first I thought, here is another first feature, full of bleak Canadiana — pain, death, suffering and goddamn redneck assholery. But, the characters fill out and expand past the narrative tropes until they feel lived in and genuine. None more so than Shirley Henderson, firing on all cylinders as a woman battling the effects of Parkinson’s disease. It is a remarkable portrayal and a reminder of what women can do at the peak of their powers.

If you need any more indication of what women are capable of as they ascend in the latter part of their lives, you need only take a peek at Isabelle Huppert in Michael Haneke’s Happy End, and Hong Sang-soo’s Claire’s Camera. Bohdan Sláma's Ice Mother and Jacquelyn Miller’s In the Waves, a film that follows the filmmaker’s 80-year-old grandmother as she contends with the life’s many beauties and heartbreaks, are also strong.

Finally, if just want to witness a powerful woman silence an overly talkative man, get tickets to Where You’re Meant to Be. Paul Fegan’s film follows singer/songwriter Aidan Moffat (formerly of the band Arab Strap) as he tours about Scotland performing folk standards, and trying to convince legendary folk singer Sheila Stewart that his new interpretations of the songs she brought to fame are valid. Stewart is having none of it, and the scenes of the pair duking it out on long car trips through the Scottish countryside are deeply funny.

Moffat has some musical chops, but his running narration throughout the film takes mansplaining to some strange new territory. After a time, one some simply wishes he would stop running his mouth. Hence, the film’s stunning climax and its singularly satisfying resolution. A woman sings, and man finally shuts up.

Thank God for that.  [Tyee]

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