Deepa Mehta | Fire / 1996

how to see what you can’t

by Douglas Messerli

 

Deepa Mehta (screenwriter and director) Fire / 1996

 

Put simply, Deepa Mehta’s 1996 film Fire is arguably the most profound cinematic representation of Indian lesbianism to date. Unquestionably it has had the most profound effect on the subcontinent’s LGBTQ community of its day, particularly when one recalls that India did not fully embrace lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgender rights until 2018.

     As Dipanita Nath wrote in The Indian Express in 2016 “Nearly 20 years ago, unaided by Twitter and Facebook, a film went viral in India. Fire was the first in mainstream Indian cinema to explore homosexual love. It introduced a taboo subject to the audience of the world’s largest film-producing and film-viewing nation. Off screen, it was the target of vandals, spawned a civil society movement, led to adjournments in Parliament and exposed men’s underwear as agitprop. In the year of its 20th anniversary, Fire retains its position as a relevant reference for films on gender relationships in India. Last year, the British Film Institute selected Fire as one of its top 10 feminist films.”

    The plot of Mehta’s movie is quite straightforward, expressed clearly so that no one watching it might confuse its sympathies. The work begins with the marriage, by arrangement, of the beautiful woman Sita (Nandita Das) to Jatin (Javed Jaffrey). Already on the third day of their honeymoon, on a visit to the Taj Mahal in Agra, Jatin makes it quite apparent that he does not love his bride.

     Soon after he takes her to his family home where, in the traditional marital arrangement, she will reside with his elder brother Ashok (Kulbhushan Kharbanda), his wife Radha (Shabana Azmi), their paralyzed mother Biji (Kushal Rekhi), and their servant Mundu (Ranjit Chowdhry). From her downstairs kitchen, Radha runs a street-side food service, while in an adjacent space Ashok and Jatin operate a business that rents videotapes, many of them, apparently without Ashok’s knowledge, pornographic in nature. Indeed, Ashok, having come under the influence of Swamiji (Ram Gopal Bajaj), who preaches celibacy and related abstentions, spends most of his nights away listening to the pronouncements of this cult-like leader which last long into the night.

     Although little is outwardly expressed about their relationship, Mehta makes it clear that it is parallel to Jatin’s obsession with his Chinese lover Julie (Alice Poon), who has refused to marry him because of his demand that she live in the traditional marital situation in which Sita now finds herself. Jatin too spends most of his nights with Julie, and the director makes the connection between the two brothers’ objects of affection by pausing over the kiss of respect that Ashok places on Swamiji’s foot before quickly shifting to a scene in which Jatin continues to kiss Julie’s feet. Ashok also provides his Swamiji with regular payments to help cover expenses for his medicine to ease the mentor’s hydrocele condition resulting in the swelling and enlargement of the testicles, while Jatin pays regularly for Julie’s expenses. In short, both these brothers prefer the company of others than the two women with whom they have wedded.

      Is it any wonder that, even without even knowing all of these facts, Sita, after meeting the family, rushes into her bedroom to remove her sari and put on a pair of blue jeans to dance in celebratory memory of her youthful modernity? She has been suddenly dropped into a paternalistic world which is almost utterly foreign to her. Biji rings her bell in anger when she sees Sita out of her traditional dress. And throughout Mehta’s subtle interweaving of images and sound that reveal a far greater profundity than the plot, bells are used to remind the characters that they have stepped beyond the traditional values.

      Radha, we soon discover, has long been living in a situation quite similar to the one with Sita is now suddenly faced, for it was when she discovered that she was infertile that her husband took up with the religious prophet who insists sexual contact should be permitted only as a means of procreation. Accordingly, Ashok, in his attempts to qualm desire, has not slept with his wife for 13 years, putting his commitment to celibacy to the test by lying next to Radha for long hours while completely motionless. For Radha marriage if not just symbolically a living death, but represents an actual stasis, a paralysis that has stricken her as surely as it has her mother-in-law.

      Now joining Radha in her cooking duties and in her caring for Biji, Sita represents almost constant motion, particularly their hands and arms as they flip over their frying samosas, pakoras, and other fast-food items. For these women the body is less a shrine than a sensual force that provides sustenance and caring. Besides their constant cooking which pays for their survival, there is Biji’s body to be washed and lifted into bed, their own hair to be cleaned and combed.

      Similarly, while Ashok and Jatin almost passively adore the embodiments of their loves, Mandu sees his own body as something to be pleasured, sneaking Jatin’s porno tapes into the family apartment and, while pretending to watch Biji’s favorite Bollywood renditions of Hindu myths, jacking off, while the old woman endlessly rings her bell in frustrated disdain.

       It is no accident that Radha and Sita, particularly given their desolate estate with regard to their connubial lives, begin to take notice of one another. If their relationship starts with a simple admiration of each other’s fortitude and honesty, it quickly transforms into their recognition of each other as a beautiful being, moving quickly to gentle touches, momentary episodes of hand-holding, and with the younger girl’s lead, to kisses—transporting the two women soon after into each other’s empty bed.

      Some US critics complained that the love scenes between the women were hidden in the shadows or, to quote San Francisco Chronicle critic Peter Stack, that the movie “is lacking a sense of fire.” Roger Ebert, who has long been diffident about LGBTQ movies, even felt the film “is all but stolen by Chowdry, as the servant who lurks constantly in the background providing, with his very body language, a comic running commentary detailing the situations....” I have no comprehension of how the villain of this work might be seen as more important than the love of these two beautiful women—who Mehta does show kissing, stroking one another’s breasts, and embracing in bed—might be of lesser interest than the sculking masturbator who, again out of paternalistic concern, reveals the lovemaking of Radha and Sita to Ashok. Perhaps men simply want a clearer picture of lesbian lovemaking so that, as Mandu seeks, it might sexually excite them. But then Mehta’s film is not really about “lesbianism” as much it is about two women coming to love one another enough to determine to leave their husbands and live the rest of their lives together, willing to forever leave behind the walking dead. I might remind those who wanted to see more hot action, moreover, that Radha’s mother long ago successfully taught her: “You just have see what you can’t see.”

       The fact that in order to accomplish this Radha actually has to endure a real fire like the ancient goddess Sita of myth—which her husband once again passively observes as her headdress bursts into flames—speaks of the literalness of his gender. If in that act she symbolically proves the sacredness of her love for the contemporary Sita, it hardly matters since she has already long ago proven it in her actions, like Nora of A Doll’s House opening the door and slamming it behind her.

      Although Fire passed the Indian censor board, predictably it immediately created a storm in the press, popular politics, and parliament. It first screened to full houses in November 1998.*

      On December 2nd, however, over 200 Shiv Sena members (India’s right-wing Marathi regional political party, which grew out of a Mumbai support of nativist movements) attacked a Cinemax theater in the Mumbai suburbs, smashing its windows, burning theater posters, and shouting slogans. A day later a Regal theater in Delhi was also stormed, one of their spokesmen arguing “"If women's physical needs get fulfilled through lesbian acts, the institution of marriage will collapse, reproduction of human beings will stop."

      In Rajpalace and Rajmahal crowds scared off audiences, setting some theaters screening the film on fire. Theaters elsewhere soon closed down. But in Calcutta, when attackers appeared, the audience and theater ushers fought back keeping the film rolling. But Chief Minister of Maharashtra Manohar Joshi, a Shiv Sena supporter announced, “I congratulate them for what they have done. The film’s theme is alien to our culture.” Shiv Sena founder Bal Thackeray compared lesbianism to "a sort of a social AIDS" which might "spread like an epidemic."

      By December 5th a coalition of free speech activists, including Mehta, Indian movie star Dilip Kumar, and director Mahesh Bhatt, submitted a 17-page petition to the Indian Supreme Court, demanding that “a sense of security” needed to be provided to movie-goers as well as basic protection for the screening of the film. Mehta herself led a candlelit protest in New Delhi two days later, with the support of 32 different organizations including CALERI (The Campaign for Lesbian Rights) against theater withdrawals of the movie.

      In reaction, approximately 60 Shiv Sena supporters stripped down to their underwear, squatting outside of actor Kumar’s house in protest of his support of Fire. 22 of the protestors were arrested and Kumar and others involved with the film were put under police security. Cinemax reopened screenings of Mehta’s film on December 18th, but despite the assurance of protection, some theater posters were destroyed. Although the film had been sent back to the Censor Board, in February 1999, Fire was re-released with no cuts, and openings proceeded without incident.

      Rather perversely several Feminists also wrote out against Fire’s portrayal of women and gender relations as being too simplistic. Noted Indian feminists, Mary E. John and Tejaswini Niranjana, wrote that the movie reduced patriarchy to the denial and control of female sexuality, continuing, [in summary]:

 

“Control of female sexuality is surely one of the ideological planks on which patriarchy rests. But by taking this idea literally, the film imprisons itself in the very ideology it seeks to fight, its own version of authentic reality being nothing but a mirror image of patriarchal discourse. Fire ends up arguing that the successful assertion of sexual choice is not only a necessary but also a sufficient condition—indeed, the sole criterion—for the emancipation of women. Thus the patriarchal ideology of ‘control’ is first reduced to pure denial—as though such control did not also involve the production and amplification of sexuality—and is later simply inverted to produce the film's own vision of women's liberation as free sexual ‘choice.’

     Whatever subversive potential Fire might have had (as a film that makes visible the ‘naturalised’ hegemony of heterosexuality in contemporary culture, for example) is nullified by its largely masculinist assumption that men should not neglect the sexual needs of their wives, lest they turn lesbian.”

    

      I see no assertion in this film whatsoever that sexual choice is the sole and certainly the only condition of the emancipation of women. Indeed, these two women were emancipated long before they met one another, only giving into the traditions and rituals of their married lives, as Shita puts it quite early in the film, because they have been so conditioned to obey them. “Someone just has to press my button and I start acting like a trained monkey,” she laments as the women suffer without food or water a day of religious significance.

      I don’t see them having determined to leave their husbands, moreover, simply because they have fallen in love and sexually chosen to involve themselves in a lesbian relationship. Nor have they chosen to involve themselves in a sexual relationship with one another because they are maltreated by their husbands. The way I perceive it that these women having simply lived lives closed off from such close female bonds had never before the opportunity to explore their sexualities. Their love for one another was not simply out of their husband’s maltreatment, but rather arose with their observation and appreciation of one another’s personalities and bodies.

    And, most importantly, they did not leave their husbands because they had found love with another, but strengthened by one another through their love, determined they could finally make the break from the binding traditions that had held them in patriarchal obedience. Radha, in particular, stayed behind for precisely the opportunity of expressing to her husband not just the fact that he had ignored and maltreated her, but to force him perhaps to face up to the fact that in his obsession with Swamiji, he himself had a queer, possibly even chaste homosexual relationship with his so-called teacher, just as Sita might have helped her husband realize, had she known his full history, that his relationship with Julie was based on a kind of self-hatred and attraction to the other, an exotic outsider whom he might also desire to be. These women liberated themselves not just out of their displeasure with the way their husbands had treated them, but out of their recognition that almost all patriarchal notions were based on a sham, including a failure to recognize the essence of one’s own sexual desires.

      Sita and Radha did not slam the door out of their newfound love for one other, but out of their recognition that the system in which they had defined their lives no longer had any meaning, surely at the heart of all feminist assertions. Like the mythical Sita, Radha had long before come to know herself well enough that she felt she was safe from any male demand of a trial by fire. And surely the contemporary Sita would have eventually left her husband even if she had never met her sister-in-law.

      Mightn’t a lesbian, I would finally ask, find female liberation in her variant sexual choice? In finally recognizing myself as a gay man I equally came to perceive just how ridiculous all the paternalistic values of the normative society in which I had been raised had been. Sex can often be a window that reveals alternate views of religion, culture, and society in general. It’s never been an issue of one or the other. Just as a shift in sexual orientation does not necessarily mean that one has abandoned paternalistic values, so too does the fact the shifting the focus of one’s sexual desires does not preclude the recognition that paternalistic values are a danger for oneself and the society. Clearly, these women are not at all simplistic but have come to recognize both who they are sexually and how the values they previously subscribed to helped to delimit their lives.

      Ultimately, it’s not Mehta’s film or her characters which are simplistic, but the arguments against her powerful character’s simultaneous discoveries of themselves and each other. Radha learned from her mother how to see the ocean by looking through her fingers.

    

*The information was gleaned from Wikipedia and several Indian newspapers.

 

Los Angeles, January 9, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (January 2021).

 

Peter Tyler Boullata and Jean-François Monette | Anatomy of Desire / 1995

what makes a homosexual queer?

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Wilson (screenplay), Peter Tyler Boullata and Jean-François Monette (directors) Anatomy of Desire / 1995

 

Today we take a great deal of pride in defining and openly expressing our sexuality, particularly LGBTQ individuals. We are proud for being lesbians, gay men, transsexual or transgender individuals. And often we define ourselves in the world very strongly through our relationships to our sexuality and gender.

     But as Anne Fausto-Sterling (author of Myths of Gender),, in the short Canadian documentary film, Anatomy of Desire, directed by Peter Tyler Boullata and Jean-François Monette points out, the notion of being a “homosexual” or a “transgender woman,” etc. occurred only in the 20th century. Before that there were simply “homosexual” acts that were part of one’s larger sexuality. One had heterosexual sex or committed sodomy not as a certain kind being but as desire dictated. As esteemed critic Martin Duberman adds, in near recent and ancient times a great number of men might be defined today as adjusted heterosexuals who went to bed on a regular basis with young boys. When speaking of homosexuals are we accounting for those men (we know less of women historically, he argues) who behaved in such a bisexual manner as being homosexual?

      The definition of homosexuals matters, of course, in determining whether or not it can be defined by the brain. Can something in the brain then be detected to describe this historically sexual behavior, to define such forms of bisexuality?

     These are important issues in what has seemed to boil down to the central issue that is discussed in this film, whether same-sex behavior is a production of our genes, something of nature, or of our psychological development, an issue of nurture.

   The film begins with a brief discussion with neurologist Simon LeVay, who at the time this documentary was made (1995), had developed the thesis that within the hypothalamus of the brain he found homosexuals to have smaller gatherings of cell clusters than heterosexual men.

     And for many gay men and women of the day—and one might add many still today—the idea that their sexuality was defined at birth is an important issue in establishing that their behavior is not controllable or changeable, which might encourage others to realize that their behavior is not “inverted” or “perverted” or different much like one’s gender or the color of one’s skin. Certainly, at the time before the abandonment of laws against homosexuality and at a time when gays were still unable to marry, this seemed like a step forward for recognition of their equality just as women and blacks had fought for their rights. In other words, for many it became a political matter.

   And as June Reinisch, from the Kinsey Institute, argues, we still don’t know what causes heterosexual behavior. If we were to knew that, then it would far easier to demonstrate what is behind homosexual actions.

      Indeed, the film goes on to interestingly explore the cycles of scientific research since the Age of Reason which might almost be said to alternate between the nature/nurture debate. The film focuses, for example of the early 20th century studies of German Magnus Hirschfeld, who was definitely on the side of nature, arguing similarly to LeVay’s current belief in a “third sex”— actually Hirschfeld argued for a array of sexes, which the movie does not explore—and attempted to study these sexualities as “difference,” arguing that since sexuality as inborn it made no sense to apply special penalties to what was described as deviant behavior. But, of course, his studies where interrupted and destroyed by another force, Nazism, which also saw homosexuality as something inborn, but defined that “otherness,” as they did also for Jews, as a natural aberration, as a perversion of human nature that needed to be destroyed, filling their murderous concentration camps with Jews, homosexuals, and gypsies. How the Nazis used the notion of inborn homosexuality and racial differentiation should give us pause for any celebration we might have over studies such as the one briefly outlined in 1995 by LeVay. Scientific concepts can be used in various way.

      Certainly, the post-World War II reaction against Hirschfeld’s notions further prove that point. An entire new generation of psychotherapists grew up after the way, many of the theorists having escaped from Germany to the US, developing an entirely opposite view of homosexual behavior that was based on how we developed as children and young adults. Using some of the concepts of Freud’s theories about absent father and domineering mothers, psychologists now argued not only that homosexuality was a disease, but was a curable one, if one really wanted to change and was willing to pay a psychiatrist to help him or her make that change. Accordingly, homosexuality continued to be listed by the medical establishment as an unnatural disease.

      It was startling to hear Duberman describe how all the young gay well-educated men with whom he was connected believed to a man that they had some sort of characterological disorder, were basically unhappy with their “condition” and sought out psychiatrists. He relates how at one point as part of the therapy he was forced to abandon his lover, given the view that homosexual “acting out” (the way sex was described) was to relieve the anxiety. The only to get to the root of that anxiety was to give up “the acting out,” when tension would develop and the patient would be forced to face it and resolve the problem.

     The film goes on to mention even more horrific forms of educative methods such as shock therapy and neurological operations. All of these forms, in the long run, have been shown to be ineffective, and that any changes in the patient who often attained only in an attempt to please the physiologist or with significant psychological damage, resulting in depression or worse. There is no evidence that such treatments can change one’s sexual orientation, argues one commentator.

      Duberman goes on the mention that there were a very few psychoanalysts who disagreed with these theories of homosexuality, but no research was done and they were considered primarily as mavericks.

      Growing up near end of this era in 1950s and early 1960s, I myself begin to explore psychological reasons for my own still-hidden sexual urges, creating what were clearly fictional explanations about my father and mother to explain my desires. There seemed to be no other way in which one could explore one’s feelings since we had no history of other explanations at that time.

      As the picture expresses it, however, “then something happened to shatter the complacency of American society.” Alfred Kinsey’s reports suddenly showed us, regarding male sexuality, that a very large percentage of self-defined heterosexual males had had, at least one time in their lives, sex with other men, and that a large portion of those individuals who described as being homosexual had had sex with a woman. Moreover, there were high percentages of both heterosexual and homosexual individuals who had had same experiences far more often. In short, Kinsey returned us, in his real-life studies as opposed to those theoretically-based, that there are a large range of sexual experiences of all sorts in which individuals fell. There were, in fact, relatively few individuals who were simply one or the other, just as we now are discovering about gender. What had been wrong about our thinking is that we had not accounted for the very diversity of human experience when it comes to sexuality.

      Kinsey’s revelations as well as the increasing political rise of the young through the 1960s eventually brought about the far more engaged and committed homosexual and transgender communities which finally forced the police to stop the raids of gay and lesbian bars through Stonewall, and begin the long, very long voyage the LGBTQ+ community has made since then.

     The narrator suggests that scientists once more began to explore a biological explanation, focusing on how our genes affect us not only with regard to gender but to sex as well. But as Reinisch again reminds us the either/or paradigm disregards the fact that environment and nature are completely intertwined, that growing up in a certain environment affects the biology of any growing being. She argues that it is 100% environment and 100% nature simultaneously. Richard Green (The Sissy Syndrome) points to other facts; for example, that children are simply not all the same, some being more aggressive and assertive than others, while some are more aesthetic and passive. If you have a boy who’s more passive and interesting in doll-playing than aggressive, that boy’s relationship with his mother and father will be different than another’s as well as connections to his siblings and peer group. It may then become a kind of socialization tract that as a boy gets on that helps to define his behavior and also influences his later sexual orientation.

      Richard Pittard points to another fascinating experiment. Ken Zucker took pictures of effeminately behaving boys, who Pittard argues, we know will in a larger proportion turn out to be gay men. He mixed in with these pictures of others, typical masculine-behaving boys, and showed them to judges, asking them to pick which ones were the “cutest, prettiest, or handsomest.” The selectors chose almost exclusively the effeminate-behaving boys. What this suggests is not at all clear. Are there other genetic factors that make gay boys into prettier or more handsome men? We have all heard women say, why are all the most beautiful men gay? Of course, much of this depends upon what societally we learn to perceive as beauty and, obviously, upon who these selectors were and how they were chosen. In short, when one enters into the world of homosexuality, one enters a maze of confusing contradictions.

     Reinisch takes us back to reality, moreover, by reminding us that homosexuals come in all types, that there is no one defining characterization that can be applied to the range of men or women who define that sexual definition.

     Paula A. Treichler argues against the notion that any definition of feminine or masculine, male or female, sex or gender has anything to tell us about sexual orientation. Any attempt to define homosexuality, insists another commentator, is not in order to understand it but to either incriminate it or excuse it. Accordingly, the whole medical attempt to define sexuality is basically dangerous in that we have to ask what the different forces are going to do with our understanding.

         This film, produced in a time when the rewards of the political efforts were not yet known, accordingly becomes an important summation of the various pushes and pulls of the scientific community regarding these important matters up until the mid-1990s. But finally, this film argues that the scientific community will not provide those answers, that it is the political struggle that truly matters whether or not there is tolerance and understanding of the many differences we have learned human beings express.

         What this work and others like it continue to make clear to me is precisely why it is so difficult in several films, coded and otherwise, to point clearly to an individual and explain why I perceive him or her to be of LGBTQ interest. As Kinsey intimated, human beings themselves are normal only in their very queerness. What we describe as normal is simply a manner of behavior that the society has agreed to aspire to as opposed it its real everyday actions.

 

Los Angeles, March 5, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).

Agnieszka Holland | Total Eclipse / 1995

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Mitch McCabe | Playing the Part / 1995

charmed

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mitch McCabe (director) Playing the Part / 1995 [documentary]

 

In this early lesbian autobiographical-documentary, director Mitch McCabe performs as her own self as she proceeds to move back and forth between her university dorm in Harvard and her family home in the wealthy community of Grosse Pointe, Michigan.

     As the director, she quickly summarizes her family history before beginning what might have been a somewhat frightening odyssey between the two worlds had McCabe not been able to perceive her own experience as a anything other than a comedy gone wrong.

     Mitch is currently dating someone, which would be good news to share with her family, but as McCabe puts it, “she’s a she, and I don’t know how I’m going to tell my parents.”

     The situation is made more complex by the fact that both women are seniors, and Cat, her girlfriend, is from England without a visa to stay on beyond June, so their future is itself uncertain. So too, it appears are Mitch’s feelings about her sexuality and everything connected to it, as she heads home for Thanksgiving, determined to tell her parents.

      There we meet her affable businessman father, with whom she has a fairly good relationship, and her mother, an interior decorator who has carefully designed every room in their comfortable home, has notions of how her daughter should dress and behave, and has a determined perspective about what she expects of Mitch’s future life. Obviously, the two do not get on.

      Yet there is love there, or perhaps in Mitch’s case, a sense of order and privilege in being the daughter of such an organized and controlling woman. If nothing else she falls under the charm of her mother’s presence, as if her mother represented a kind of tropical breeze under whose spell one cannot free oneself, falling into a sort of fevered trance.

     The film takes us through three major encounters with the family, one at Thanksgiving, one in Cambridge when the parents go East for a visit, and the final meeting at Christmas holiday, each time McCabe becoming more determined to finally tell her parents the truth, which by the end of this film she failed to do.

       In between, she photographs herself as her stylish mother, endures a Christmas ritual party in which she is forced to dress up in Christmas finery and entertain the male guests, and basically reassesses the good life which she is now willing, but not quite able, to abandon should her parents adamantly react to the truth of her sexuality.

        McCabe’s work, in fact, might have been the first lesbian coming out movie, before even the later gay-boy movies such as Hettie Macdonald’s Beautiful Thing (1996), or the films I’ve most often mentioned with regard to “B” version of this genre, Simon Shore’s Get Real and David Moreton’s Edge of Seventeen both of 1998.

        But, in the end, her film only reveals how she avoids the act and its significance not necessarily out of fear, but from a kind of lassitude, a feeling within the director’s soul that forces her instead to focus on the tensions she has in her own life between the charmed world of the American dream—which the family has long ago obtained and which has permitted her education at Harvard and even allowed her to freely explore new ideas and her own sexuality—and the queer cold world of after-college that is suddenly facing her without her having a clue of what it will bring. It is the child in the narrator, not the adult lesbian self, who is still in control of her being and one might even say of the rhythm of this movie, which permits its comic tonality. Surely things can’t be as serious as they threaten to be if she can’t exert the effort to actually speak the truth.

       Ultimately, of course, in “playing the part,” in pretending to be the same girl her parents knew from her childhood on, Mitch McCabe is a kind tragic figure, albeit one who isn’t unaware of that irony. She will most certainly lose her girlfriend, Cat, as she is sucked up into a future vortex that McCabe has not yet allowed herself to fully step into. Although she creates a chaos of her own room, hoping that her mother’s eventual anger will break her out of her trance, it doesn’t succeed as her mother growls but basically permits the status quo, perhaps sensing an unpleasant reality, McCabe returning to Boston yet again without the confrontation.

       By film’s end the narrator/director is planning her “coming out” for graduation, when her family will be arriving again in Cambridge, admitting that it has to happen then because, frankly, she’s getting tired of playing the role. But then, many play such roles throughout most of their lives. It takes courage to tell others who you really are, just as it takes courage to make such an honest film.

 

Los Angeles, April 8, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).