Moving Images

She’s supermodeled, posed nude, and criticized the Pope; her albums of breathy pop have sold thousands of copies; ex-lovers include Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, and a former prime minister. Carla Bruni, France’s smoky-eyed first lady, is certainly no cookie-cutter politician’s wife. Rather than act the invisible accomplice to her husband’s efforts, Bruni’s refusal to paper over her colorful past and insistence on taking on ambitious social projects in the present have made her the scandal du jour around many a wine cooler. Yet poll results suggest the tides are turning. Bruni’s insistence on maintaining her self-identity has grudgingly won over the nation’s citizens—90 percent now deem her “elegant and modern.”

Hence the cognitive dissonance at hearing a clip from Bruni’s song “Quelqu’un m’a dit” accompanying a scene in the recently released “(500) Days of Summer.” The movie, a fluffy Joseph Gordon-Levitt vehicle, takes off from an interesting premise: A pretty female protagonist rejects the labels of a straightforward relationship. For all its pretenses at innovation in the form of jump-cuts and non-linear narrative, though, the final product makes no attempt at exploring the motivations behind that stance at all. The inner struggles through which the main character, or women like Bruni, must have suffered to achieve their levels of self-assuredness remain opaque; the movie in which Bruni’s track plays ultimately serves to subvert her own successes.

“(500) Days of Summer” is essentially a chick flick, and it may be unfair to approach it expecting anything like depth. But the idea of looking for an articulate female self-consciousness in the movies isn’t irrational. Indeed, it’s in cinema—a very 20th-century development—that many of the most nuanced, sensitive portrayals of women over the last century can be found. The medium offers a liberating escape from the tired mini-skirt/power-suit dilemma over how to represent oneself outwardly as a woman. A film can instead represent a woman’s interiority, combining effects in ways that literature or a painting cannot.

Take a shot of a woman walking down a street: We hear the click of her heels, see men’s heads turn, and at the same time know through her facial expression or a voiceover what’s going through her mind. Films like Yasujirõ Ozu’s Noriko trilogy of the ’40s, New Wave features starring Monica Vitti and Anna Karina, or the defiant ’80s flick “Thelma and Louise” prove that it’s possible to represent the inner life of a woman with complexity and grace. Gazing at her reflection in the window of a Chinese restaurant, the protagonist of Agnès Varda’s 1962 film “Cléo de 5 à 7” despairs: “My unchanging doll’s face… this ridiculous hat… I can’t see my own fears. I thought everyone looked at me. I only look at myself. It wears me out.” It’s the poignancy of this visual, combined with Cléo’s private anxiety over her own youthful good looks, that makes her so real to the audience she’ll never see.

That’s what makes certain aspects of the last decade of moviemaking seem so disappointing. With a few exceptions, attempts at depicting the interior life of a woman have been put on the backburner. Nouvelle gamine figures like “Amélie” star Audrey Tautou tap into the rich inheritance of the ’60s and ’70s but retain all the cuteness without the introspection. Those recent films that do present well-defined female characters—“Whale Rider,” “Thirteen,” “Juno”—generally center on adolescence, a morass of complexities that tends to subsume any secondary themes. Once they graduate high school, women tend to disappear from the screen in any meaningful way entirely, fading away as stock types, or arm candy, or background characters.

True, the work of a crop of female directors at this year’s Toronto Film Festival leaves the door open for progress (even if the event was exceptional enough to merit a New York Times article). But it’s time for America to take up the slack, too. The writer Bill Bryson once compared Canada to a sophisticated, black-turtleneck-clad woman in her mid-30s and America to a chubby preteen boy. Though he was being flippant, there’s a kernel of truth to that generalization. In America, 90 percent of directors are male—not an inherent disqualification for trying to understand the mental processes of women, but an added complication to moving beyond the crash-bang pictures that fill our cineplexes today.

In the political sphere, women like the French first lady are still forced into a position of defiance rather than productive reflection. Multi-faceted artistic representations of the female mind—in film, on TV, in books—may be just what’s needed to help spur a conceptual shift in the way we think about how women think. After all, the issue is not just about how to make an interesting movie. It’s about how a society represents half of its population to itself.


Jessica A. Sequeira ’11, a Crimson associate editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House.