Female Film Critics 24/375
Film adaptations of Henrik Ibsens Hedda Gabler are many but none has been as inspired as Nia DaCosta’s, in which Hedda is a Black woman and Ejlert Lövborg becomes Eileen, thereby doubly altering the storys power dynamics through racial and sexual transformations.
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Filmmaker Nia DaCosta’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler imagines a woman who refuses to stay buried emotionally, socially, or even existentially. She comes back to life over and over, every time someone tries to define her, contain her, or silence her. This Hedda, played with combustible grace and glacial poise by Tessa Thompson, is not just alive: she’s dangerous.
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Director Nia DaCosta doesn’t deliver the easy, beautiful, genteel world of manners audiences have come to expect from a period piece. Rather, Hedda plunges into the raw, electric undercurrents of desire, resentment, and power struggles that define its heroine. DaCosta reimagines Henrik Ibsen’s canonical play not by transposing it to a contemporary setting, but by situating it in an undefined modern world—a realm of opulence, racial and sexual diversity, and persistent social unease. This ambiguity of time and place allows the film to explore timeless themes of female repression, alienation, and identity within a visually sumptuous yet psychologically claustrophobic environment.
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This year, the 63rd annual New York Film Festival boasted an impressive roster of women-produced and women-prominent features, spanning across a variety of different genres. In general, this year’s more anticipated, big-ticket films turned out to be less remarkable than some of the quieter releases, as we’ll address in this roundup. The festival opener, for example, Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, while an apt showcase for Julia Roberts, was a coolly received treatise on cancel culture told from within the confines of the ivory tower of academia. Other films in the Main Slate, like Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind and Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, while more understated features, received greater praise from audiences and critics alike.
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Cate Blanchett delivers a powerhouse performance as an acclaimed concert conductor/composer in Todd Fields’ revelatory Tar. Our first glimpse of Lydia Tar (Blanchett) is a tall, slim, confident woman, stylishly dressed in a black suit and crisp white shirt, luxuriating in her celebrity while preparing to take the stage in Manhattan for a New Yorker talk with writer Adam Gropnik (as himself).
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Writer/director Todd Field’s captivating TÁR opens with real “New Yorker” writer Adam Gopnik in an extended Manhattan stage interview with the fictional Lydia Tár. This establishes her career highlights as well as her emphatically egotistical persona, anticipating what follows in Lydia’s personal and professional life as the first conductor for the prestigious Berlin Philharmonic preparing to record Mahler’s fifth symphony.
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Cate Blanchett IS Lydia Tár. The Oscar winning actress gives a masterclass interpretation of a masterclass musician. A devious bully that beats to her own metronome. Blanchett, who switches from English to German flawlessly, not only learned to play several instruments for the role, but she did her own conducting, twirling the orchestra baton like a musical majorette. Blanchett is better than the movie, though.
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Over Labor Day weekend, the 49th Telluride Film Festival presented thought-provoking films to its full complement of attendees, a nice rebound from the all-mask 2021 event. As always, no one could come close to seeing all the enticing films on offer, so tough choices and constant second guessing rules. This year women directed and dominated exceptionally strong selections that tell stories of quite different time periods and subjects. Intelligently and insightfully observing internal and external struggles, revealing the specificity of contemporary and historical pressures (so remarkably relevant today), the fest’s films reached out and inspired as they informed. We are, indeed, a global community.
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In TÁR, writer, director and producer Todd Field (In The Bedroom) provides us with the character study of a brilliant, pretentious, cruel genius who gets no redemption by the time the credits roll. Is the filmmaker making a point about the nature of art, talent and creativity? Is he showing us a successful woman who just so happens to be a horrible person and asking us if we’d judge her as harshly if she were a man? Or is he turning the tables on us, showing us that a sexual predator – which is arguably who Lydia Tár eventually turns out to be – doesn’t always look like what we’d expect them to be?
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My Little Sister, Switzerland’s entry for the foreign language Oscar category, ostensibly lets audiences peek inside the complex relationship between fraternal twins as one struggles with cancer. While that’s a poignant part of this tender drama, the film’s underlying story is more about how much the titular sister gives to everyone but herself.
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