AWARDS SEASON
2020THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 8 JANUARY 2020 AWARDS 1
Illustration by Yelena BryksenkovaFemale Artists and the
‘Club of Geniuses’
With Little Women, one of two films capturing artistic gender bias onscreen
(the other being Portrait of a Lady on Fire), Greta Gerwig, ‘like Louisa May Alcott
before her, seeks to expand our notions of which stories deserve to be told’THE RACE | INKOO KANG
T
his year, like last year, and eight of the
10 years before that, no women were
nominated for the best director Oscar.
Despite recent (and controversial) attempts by
the Academy to diversify its membership, the
status quo remains: Only one female film-
maker, Kathryn Bigelow for 2009’s The Hurt
Locker, has ever been deemed any given year’s
most inspired visionary. What’s different this
awards season is that one of those snubbed
women directors has made a high-profile film
that illustrates the many hurdles female artists
have to overcome: first to prove that they’ve got
talent (and should be compensated fairly for it),
then to have their own ideas about what consti-
tutes great art recognized by male gatekeepers.
Serendipitously, Greta Gerwig’s Little Women,
based on author Louisa May Alcott’s original
work, is joined in this important endeavor by
Céline Sciamma’s critical darling Portrait of a
Lady on Fire. Together, the two period dramas
remind us, rather movingly, that biases against
women artists and artworks coded as feminine
are deeply ingrained in our culture, and that
it’s not just individual writers, painters and
filmmakers who suffer when we confine our
conceptions of greatness to masculine subjects
but audiences and art itself, too.Sony’s Little Women is an ambivalent
romance at best: Alcott declines to pair her
writer protagonist, Jo (played in the film by
Saoirse Ronan), with her childhood sweetheart,
Laurie (Timothée Chalamet), then muddies up
the expected happy ending she’s to have with
Professor Bhaer (Louis Garrel). In Gerwig’s
film, Jo’s lifelong love affair is with her liter-
ary ambitions, after all, and the film is so
extraordinarily affecting because we see how
everything in Jo’s life prepares her to write the
autobiographical novel that will become her
biggest triumph. Dying Beth (Eliza Scanlen) is
her original inspiration, family-focused Meg
(Emma Watson) is her cautionary tale, and
secretly wise Amy (Florence Pugh) assures a
skeptical Jo that a book about the March sisters’
“little life,” with its “domestic struggles and
joys,” is as worthy of putting ink to paper as
the “gory,” “scandalous” tales that the bud-
ding writer had been selling to magazines but
unwilling to attach her name to. Jo’s boorish
editor (Tracy Letts), who initially demands
that her female characters end up “married by
the end, or dead,” doesn’t get the appeal of her
novel, but his daughters can’t get enough. Little
Women is exciting not just because it’s about
a group of creative women discovering who
they want to become but because Gerwig, like
Alcott before her, seeks to expand our notions
of which stories deserve to be told.Clearly, that project of expansion has far
to go. This awards season brought reports of
male Academy voters and audiences at large
refusing to watch a supposedly girlie movie
like Little Women — a common prejudice that
may have contributed to Gerwig’s absence
from the director nominees. Unsurprisingly,
it’s such viewers who most need to hear the
film’s critiques of what kind of art gets to be
made and championed — and what doesn’t.
“What women are allowed into the club
of geniuses any way?” protests Amy. “The
Brontës,” comes Laurie’s dispiriting answer
— dispiriting not because the Brontës weren’t
geniuses but because women’s experiences
shouldn’t have to be grim, harrowing or even
romantic to be worth telling.
In Neon’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Sciamma
supercharges many of these same ideas. The
French drama — which wasn’t its coun-
try’s submission for the international film
Oscar — tells of a female portraitist named
Marianne (Noémie Merlant), commissioned
to paint the visage of an unwilling subject,
the unhappily betrothed Héloïse (Adèle
Haenel). As the women get to know each
other, they fall in love and enjoy a brief oasis
when they have Héloïse’s mother’s seaside
home to themselves.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire doesn’t shy away
from the discrimination that Marianne faces
as a female painter in the 18th century: She
sells her work under her father’s name and is
forbidden from painting men in the nude. But
the film is so thrilling because it explores the
niches that women artists have historically
carved out for themselves and taken hidden
comfort in. Marianne can do her work only
because Héloïse doesn’t suspect her new
companion of being an artist. And although,
like Jo, Marianne is beholden to the rules of
the marketplace, her subversions of prevailing
artistic ideals are meaningful, even innova-
tive — though they might not be recognized
as such for another two centuries. Watching
Héloïse’s maid, Sophie (Luana Bajrami),
undergo a secret abortion at a midwife’s cot-
tage, Marianne sketches for herself an image
of the scene — a situation that a male artist
likely wouldn’t have had access to, let alone
considered worthy of memorialization.
The sparsely worded, visually ravishing
Portrait of a Lady on Fire won the best screen-
play award at Cannes — recognition for a
film’s script generally being a kind of consola-
tion prize for films that don’t quite match the
narrow conceptions of great cinema. Gerwig
and Sciamma have expertly diagnosed the
problem. The question is when voters and
viewers will accept the solution.INKOO KANG is a television critic at
The Hollywood Reporter.