Two of the biggest movies around at the moment, both directed and starring strong-willed women, are “Wuthering Heights” (Emerald Fennell) and The Bride! (Maggie Gylennhaal) .
The first title comes with quotation marks, the second is rounded off with an exclamation point.
What can we deduce from these very deliberate uses of punctuation?
The scare quotes on the first comes as a warning that Emily Brontë’s 19th century tale of love and lust on the Yorkshire Moors is used only as a rough guide to the plot of film. There is no pretense that the original setting and storyline will be faithfully rendered. The boddice ripping frenzy captures the spirit of the novel but rides roughshod over the more nuanced details. Authenticity can go hang.
This movie is promoted as a comedy but I can’t say I saw much to laugh about. It’s not a heavy, soul-searching drama but, at the same time, it pulls no punches in the representation of adult sexual themes.
As a straight, white cis guy (he/him!) my knowledge of BDSM is confined to what I read about or see on screen. Typically, therefore, I have been conditioned to regard bondage, discipline and sado-masochism as the stuff of fantasy and/or perversion. In contrast, dominance and submission have a lighter, more playful character and the basis for innuendoes about pegging or women on top. Certainly, the majority of allusions to these practices in movies are commonly associated with cruelty and/or criminality.
For this reason, what goes on in Pillion is genuinely eye-opening and educational. It doesn’t leave much to the imagination and is far from being a conventional love story. It’s certainly not a romcom nor is it what co-star Alexander Skarsgård has casually referred to as a ‘Dom-Com’.
The above two film stills are from Performance directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg. In the first Chas (James Fox), is in a bathroom and the mirror image he sees is of a hard man, a tough guy. Chas looks too much like the person he is : a gangster on the run. He is not pursued by the police but by the violent mob he has worked for. A loaded gun won’t set him free. His only hope of escape is to change his physical appearance. In the second image he is bewigged and feminized so that he resembles the woman in the hand mirror who is witnessing his transformation.
These scenes take place while Chas is hiding out in a seedy basement flat in North London. His unconventional landlords are bohemian dropouts Turner (Mick Jagger) and Pherber (Anita Pallenberg). At its heart, Performance is a clash of two subcultures: the criminal underclass and the post-hippy subculture.
Studios were uncertain about how to pitch this hybrid film and nervous about the controversy it seemed destined to cause. As a result, its release was delayed for two years. When it did finally reach cinemas in 1970, the promotional posters reflected ambiguities towards the content: “This film is about madness. And sanity. Fantasy. And reality. Death. And life. Vice. And versa.” As this slogan suggests, Performance defies easy categorization.
Although Donald Cammell is credited as co-director, Performance is Nicolas Roeg’s cinematic vision and features his signature cut-up style editing technique. This creates a sense of menace and nervous energy by jumbling up the linear flow of the narrative.
Neil Marshall’s debut feature film – Dog Soldiers (2002) – was set in the Scottish Highlands and followed the (mis)fortunes of six trainee British soldiers battling in vain against rabid werewolves. These men ended up barracaded in a woodland cottage alongside a lone female – Megan, a zoologist. In true Night of the Living Dead style they are picked off one by one .
Perhaps conscious of the strident macho vibe of this film, Marshall’s follow up – The Descent – flips the gender to follow the (mis)fortunes of six women who are into extreme sports. The opening scene shows these lasses braving rapids in a dinghy.
The lone man in this story doesn’t last long. One could say he drew the short straw or, more accurately the long metals poles, since these are the sharp objects he is impaled upon in a freak car accident while driving his wife, Sara (Shauna Macdonald) home. The couple’s young daughter dies in the same accident. Moments before the crash, Sara says to him “You seem distant” and it transpires that this fatal distraction was all due to a clandestine fling he was having with another of the female adventurers, Juno (Natalie Mendoza).
One year on, Juno has organized a group reunion with a planned caving trip in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina (although the film was shot in Hertfordshire, England and Scotland). The claustrophobia of this ill-fated underground adventure proves the perfect setting for a horror film. When you’re down a hole the escape options are severely limited. In haunted houses there is at least the possibility of making a run for it although, as we well know, this rarely ends well.
The six chicks (picks not shown)
In the first half of the film, we follow the ‘chicks with picks’ who, almost inevitably, find themselves trapped in a tunnel system without a map to guide them. Juno breaks the news to the other five that this particular cave is previously unexplored. Thanks for the warning!
Things go from bad to worse when the women realise they are not alone. The other cave-dwellers are pale-skinned creatures in human form that are billed as ‘crawlers’ on the credits. Appearance-wise they are a mix between Gollum and alien life forms. Behaviour-wise they are rabid monsters who feed on human flesh.
THE EMPUSIUM : A HEALTH RESORT HORROR STORY by Olga Tokarcsuk (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) – Riverhead Books, 2024
The Empusium is the story of sick men bad-mouthing women.
The main title is an invented portmanteau linking together two Greek words: symposium (a drink-fuelled philosophical debate) and empusa (a female shape-shifter).
If, from the book’s subtitle, you are tempted to visualize crazed serial killers or scary monsters , change the thought. There is one mysterious death near the beginning but little that could be conventionally defined as a ‘horror story’.
In an interview with Literary Hub, Tokarcsuk says “the choice of the horror genre makes sense because the main theme of this book is essentially a horror story—of patriarchal horror, protracted in historical time, embedded within culture, with all its traditional features, such as rivalry, a black-and-white, binary view of the world, and misogyny.”
I wish I had known this before starting the novel. It might have made my reading experience less of a slog.
This is not a plot-driven story. It is slow, repetitive and frankly often rather dull. I suppose the prose is intended to replicate the tedium of the prescribed routines in a health resort but I can’t help feeling it could have been edited down and/or spiced up substantially.
