2 November/3 November 2019 ★ FT Weekend 17Arts
I
n October 2017, Australian writer-
director Mirrah Foulkes’sfirst film
was going into production. Titled
Judy and Punch, it was to be a femi-
nist revenge story with the charac-
ters of Punch and Judy reimagined as
married puppeteers and withMia
Wasikowska cast as a wronged, wrathful
Judy. The setting was historical but non-
specific, the better for Foulkes to tell a
timeless story of male violence.At that
moment, women began coming forward
to accuse producer Harvey Weinstein of
serialsexual assault.
Two years later, Foulkes is in London,
surrounded by lunching tourists in the
Covent Garden Hotel. Her film is now to
be released in the UK. It began life as a
fictionalised origin story of the puppet
show that for centuriesentertained
children with scenes of domestic abuse
and endangered babies. “The more I
thought about it,” Foulkes says, “the
weirder the things it said about our psy-
chology. I had to ask, ‘Where the hell did
this come from?’ ”
She also notes the striking timing of
her debut reaching screens after two
years of convulsive soul-searching from
a film industry that made Weinstein a
king. “The shift that has happened since
2017 has been way too late, but it’s been
real and profound and intense. It’s quite
a moment to be landing.”
While her story is fantastical, the real-
life past never feels far away. And much
as recent British films such asLady Mac-
beth nda Gwen npicked gender politicsu
in the guise of a period piece, now udyJ
and Puncharrives at a time of radicalRevenge tales
pack a punch
Film In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein affair,|
two female directors take on gender politics —
with very different results. ByDanny Leigh
Aisling Franciosi
stars as an Irish
convict in 1820s
Tasmania in
Jennifer Kent’s
new film ‘The
Nightingale’and verbal protests at this year’s Sydney
Film Festival.“We have to respect that
some people found those scenes too
much,” Ceyton says, “but when you look
at the history, you realise what we
showed only scratched the surface.
“The [media] coverage felt very sen-
sational,” she adds. “If you hadn’t been
there, you would have thought we’d exe-
cuted the audience.”
For Foulkes, audience is at the heart of
the conversation about gender.Judy and
Punch s as much about the way crowdsi
respond to misogyny as it is about
misogyny itself. On screen, rackety
mobs of both men and women watch thepuppet show, cheering ever louder the
more “smashy” Punch becomes. “It
becomes very meta. I’ve watched audi-
ences for the film watching the audi-
ences ni he film, starting to laugh a bitt
uneasily.” Tonally, the film is a high-wire
act, flipping between riotous comedy
and scenes of violence that stop the
hilarity dead. “It’s asking a lot of an
audience, I know,” she says. Though less
confrontational thanThe Nightingale,
her film has, she says,still provoked
anger from some older male viewers.
Foulkes called her small-town loca-
tion Seaside, intending it to be an inter-
national “anyplace”. But for Kent, thespecifics of time and place meant that
The Nightingale nfolded not only as au
story about violence against women,
but the trauma of colonialism too. Ini-
tially as racist as the British colonisers,
Clare arrives at a bloodied kinship with
indigenous guide Billy — played by
breakthrough actor Baykali Ganambarr
— whose people suffered genocide in the
so-called “black war” of the 1820s. Cey-
ton says the two stories were insepar-
able. “What I hope the last couple of
years have reminded us is that gender,
race and class are interconnected. The
issues are systemic.”
For Foulkes, a similar humanism lay
behind the camp of exiles she situated
outside Seaside, driven out of town by
various bigotries. “The divide in the film
was never just a gender divide. It was an
Other divide.” She pauses. “WheneverI’m talking about this, I do always want
to say that a lot of my mentors and dear-
est friends in the industry are middle-
aged white men. That needs to be
acknowledged too.”
Although #MeToo remains unfin-
ished business, Foulkes is optimistic
about the changesin motion, as she is
that thedurable legacy of the past two
years may prove the demise of the awful
“great man” embodied by Weinstein
and by her Punch — their monstrous
behaviour unchecked when accomp-
anied by supposed creative genius or the
ability to make careers.
Now Foulkes sees a different kind of
greatness emerging — and on a bigger
scale than filmmaking. “Generationally,
something is happening. Young people
have so much to deal with now, so by
necessity they’re more socially aware.”
Looking out at the Covent Garden where
Punch once wreaked havoc, Foulkes
wonders aloud how many young men
are now growing up awed by the exam-
ple of Greta Thunberg. “I reckon within a
decade, every teenage boy will have this
huge, inclusive new set of role models.
We just need to be patient.”‘Judy and Punch’ is on release
on November 22; ‘The Nightingale’
is on release on November 29‘Some people found those
scenes too much, but in
reality what we showed
only scratched the surface’
change alongside another historical nar-
rative from Australia, he NightingaleT ,
directed by Jennifer Kent, whose last
film was the maternal horror storyThe
Babadook. The two new films are very
different —The Nightingale tark ands
brutal,Judy and Punch aroque and dar-b
ingly comic. Yet here are rhymes smallt
and large, underpinned by a portrait of
the male ego as a constant, feral menace.
The likeness is heightened by the dual
presence of Damon Herriman, the fine-
tuned actor who, having twice played
Charles Manson this year in Netflix
seriesMindhunter nd Quentin Taran-a
tino’sOnce Upon A Time In Hollywood,
now appears in another hall of mirrors
double-bill, starring both as Punch and
as a savage British soldier, Ruse, in heT
Nightingale. In each film, his character
thrives in a power structure built to let
men act terribly — Punch a celebrity
indulged by sycophantic fans, Ruse
given licence by military adventure.
As the Weinstein allegations broke,
The Nightingalewas already being shotin
Tasmania. Speaking via Skype, producer
Kristina Ceyton says she and Kent felt a
sudden urgency: “We said to each other,
‘I wish this could come out right now.’”
While Foulkes had made her historical
backdrop a mish-mash of eras, Kent was
rooted in the particular: her film is set in
the 1820s, the heroine an Irish convict,
Clare (Aisling Franciosi), whose family
are killed by a British officer amid colo-
nial efforts to “civilise” what was then
called Van Diemen’s Land.
It also includes brief but harrowing
scenes of rape that prompted walkoutsNOVEMBER 2 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 10/201931/ - 17:04 User:paul.gould Page Name:WKD17, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 17, 1