Got the day off (thanks, troops!) and it's way too cold to do any yardwork, so here I am, inside, catching up on my TV backlog. The second season of Lady Dynamite came out last night, and I forgot how much I loved that show until I dove back in today - just brilliant shit, folks - but more on that in a few days or a week or so.
After two episodes of the show, I backed out to the search results for "lady" on Netflix, and this obscenely long title caught my eye. It's been ages since I last watched a movie I knew absolutely nothing about, and this looked simple and harmless enough, so I threw it on in the background while I went off to do some dishes and fold some laundry and write up my thoughts about Nathan for You. With a title this long and specific, I thought it might be a low-budget horror movie, or perhaps a single-location thriller like Phonebooth or Open Water or something. Or, perhaps, a straight-to-Netflix parody of a movie like that.
Nope! Couldn't have been more wrong.
This is a French psychological drama of sorts from 2015, set in the 1960s, itself a remake of a movie from the '70s by the same name I've never heard of. Okay, fine - I'm on board. The subtitles are a bitch, because now I have to watch the screen instead of just listening, but, fine - I'm barely invested in this, it means nothing to me, so even if I only come away understanding ten percent of the plot, I can always Wikipedia in the blanks if I even care.
Turns out, the movie was nothing special - not bad, well-shot and well-paced, and with a solid performance at the center from Freya Mavor and her legs (more on this to come) but with an absolutely ridiculous plot twist involving a - hey, speak of the devil - Nathan for You-level harebrained scheme. It was a fine movie, nothing special, competently made, but not at all memorable. Very stylish, very pretty in a period-appropriate way, but there was really nothing notable about it whatsoever.
Except!
Except for one thing. One huge thing.
You hear a lot about the "male gaze" in movies, in television, in games, in any visual medium created by mean, for men, the idea that when the camera lingers on a woman for a split second too long, or catches her in a certain light, or when the costume she's wearing accentuates certain, uh, assets, that it's small-scale sexual fantasy fulfillment on behalf of the director or meant for the audience. Hell, it's even there in Renaissance artwork - it's always been here and it probably always will be. There's a spectrum of male gaze-iness for sure, and it's usually subtle and non-distracting, and even when it's at its worst and most overt (hi there, enslaved princess Leia on a leash in a metal bikini) it's often easy to dismiss or ignore, especially as a man, especially in a world where we're all so used to it and accustomed to it. But it's a very real thing, and when you know where and how and why to look for it, you see it everywhere. And you see when it isn't there, like in the new Wonder Woman movie, where a female director manages to put Gal Gadot in essentially a corset and bikini briefs and
Anyway, the reason I bring this up is this. Think about just how bad and blatant and shameless a movie would have to be with the male gaze for you to notice, like ten minutes into a psychological crime thriller you know nothing about, that the director is absolutely, ravenously horny for his star actress - and more specifically, for her legs. I present to you now several frames from the movie. Please keep in mind that these are not cropped images, but entire frames.
Alright, nothing egregious so far. Just a beautiful young woman in her underwear. Racy, maybe, sexy - but nothing out of the ordinary. This is standard male gaze, nothing more, you might tell yourself. Okay, but circle back to these when we're done and see if you can't tell that something else is up here.
And, sure, okay, on its own this is nothing out of the ordinary. Women striding around in a tall pair of heels is a common trope, and it's eye-catching, and it's head-turning, and these are some great legs to boot. It's not weird that "the camera" loves them, tracks them, follows them, has no interest in what's going on above her waist in two separate shots as she enters a gas station.
This one might even be a stretch on its own, but maybe you have to understand the context of the scene to understand how weird this shot is. This woman is starting to think she's going crazy, as this little boy tells her there's a body in her trunk. So she exits the car and walks to the back to investigate. This is a moment where, perhaps more than any other in the movie, it'd be nice to see her face, her reaction, her apprehension. But, no - we get that same lithe, confident stride. Am I overthinking it to point out that the boy's head is level with her waist, as if to suggest that the two characters in this scene are the boy and the woman's legs? Probably! But, come on.
She's dancing on the beach here - pardon the blur! And pardon the upskirt-esque camera work. Just had to have this shot of her twirling around in her very '60s miniskirt to expose her extraordinarily long and thin thighs, I guess.
Here we have not one but two separate shots, interrupted by a male character's stare, of the main character putting on a pair of six-inch wedges. Note that we get two completely different angles of foot coverage - arches and toes as she puts on the left shoe, then underneath and behind the right. Note that the director included both of these shots and ask yourself - why? (Come on. Why else?)
Okay, so it's as clear as day by now that "the camera" has a thing for legs and feet. That's fine! I'm not here to kink shame, and I think all of these shots are sexy too! But, Jesus. There's nothing symbolic here. The shoes, the miniskirt - none of them hold any symbolic value to the characters or to the plot. It;s not like she's barefoot when she's scared or shaken, and then strutting confidently when she's not. It's a very abstract movie, sure, more style than substance as I mentioned - but if you think all of these leg shots have any value beyond fetish fuel, I can assure you - they do not!
Last one, a little icing on the cake - if you were in denial before, get a load of this one. No, this is not from the "point of view" of any character hiding or spying or creeping. This is simply the camera, set up all voyeuristically behind a corner, just gobbling this up.
And here's where I think it's important to make two more points. The first is that, while I've shown you all kinds of leg action, I gathered the above dozen frames from trailers and one-minute scenes on YouTube; the rest of the movie is just as loaded with them. The second is that, come to think of it, at no point in the movie is the main character wearing anything that covers anything between her upper thighs and the tops of her feet. Like, she may have been in close-toed heels at one point, I can't remember, but definitely never in pants or even a knee-length skirt or dress. (Return, now, to the second picture, where she's sort of wrapped in the blanket. See what I mean?)
The reason I bring all this leg attention up is, again, to point out just how obvious and unshakable the male gaze was here, even for me, a male with a "gaze" of my own! And with all the terrible reports coming out of Hollywood about directors and sexual proclivities and power imbalances, I have to wonder - this actress, this woman, Freya Mavor - 22 when this came out, probably a year or so younger when it was shot - when she got the script for a remake of a 1970 crime thriller, did she expect that she was signing up for... this? Just fueling her director's masturbation sessions?
I probably wouldn't have even noticed it if the movie kept focusing on, say, her ass. Or her chest. (I mean, this overtly, this often, yeah, sure, I might have.) And I shouldn't assume that Freya Mavor wasn't totally comfortable with this, or maybe even in on it. And I shouldn't even assume that the director - Joann Sfar, a comic book creator - is dirty or skeevy or nefarious whatsoever. Because that is kink-shaming, and that's not me, I swear! Maybe the first day the pair met for shooting, he was just like, "listen, you have gorgeous legs, and I want to get my camera on them as often as possible," and she was okay with it, and all for it, and totally flattered. But I guess my bigger point is, holy smokes, this guy just couldn't help himself. "I was only gonna remake a noir crime thriller thing but hubba hubba, check out the gams on that tomato!" It's distracting as hell, it takes away from the rest of the movie (which, granted, wasn't worth a lot to begin with), and frankly it's just sort of tonally jarring. "This woman is starting to doubt her own mind, and oh by the way, don't you love the shape of her knees?"
I suppose the learning experience I can take form this is that the absurd leg focus here is really no different from, like, making Natalie Portman's space shirt all torn and wet in the second Star Wars movie, or putting Margot Robbie in panties for the entirety of Suicide Squad. Oof. "Red-blooded males" really are disgusting creatures, aren't we?
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