Women and Girls on Screen

Women and Girls on Screen  

Captain Marvel (U.S./Australia https://www.marvel.com/movies/captain-marvel)

Written and directed by the duo of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, this female-led superhero blockbuster is approaching a billion-dollar worldwide box-office, on track to surpass last year’s Wonder Woman, so it must be doing something right.  Credit Brie Larson in the title role as “Vers”, being trained as an extra-terrestrial “Kree” warrior, up against shape-shifting “Skrulls”, and in thrall to a Dr. Wendy Lawson (Annette Bening).  After crashing back to a retro 1990s planet C-53 (aka Earth), and discovering her origins as fighter pilot Carol “Avenger” Danvers, our superheroine learns the truth about the Kree and its “supreme intelligence”.  The Skrulls sure are ugly but maybe not the bad-guy invaders.  If not totally marvelous, there’s more than enough diverting action-hero effects and story twists to keep one engaged.  B 

Woman at War (Iceland/Ukraine/France https://www.womanatwarfilm.com/)

This delightful award-winning feature from director and co-writer Benedikt Erlingsson is one of my favorite films of the year.  Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir is fantastic as a Halla, a middle-aged choir director in Reykjavik who is also a fearless eco-warrior attacking the country’s power grid as part of a climate-change protest against heavy industry.  (Paradoxically, Iceland relies on 100% renewable energy with some of the world’s lowest electricity costs.)  Halla’s exploits are known to a nervous male choir member who is a government official, and she has a rural accomplice with a dog named “woman”.  But notoriously known as the “mountain woman”, she finds amazing ways to escape detection from security forces who keep trapping instead a hapless Spanish tourist.

            Halla’s life is complicated when notified that she has been approved to adopt a little orphan Ukrainian girl, which brings into the picture her identical twin sister Ása (Geirharðsdóttir), a yoga teacher into meditation.  Switching places will later prove key. Adding a humorous and absurdist magic-realist element to Halla’s one-woman crusade is the frequent accompaniment of a musical backdrop—from a trio of male musicians, and a trio of female singers in traditional Ukrainian costumes.  Iceland may have a tiny population but it scores high in cinematic imagination.  Not to be missed.  A

Girl (Belgium/Netherlands)

This searing drama now streaming on Netflix, comes with a warming about graphic content including a disturbing scene of self-harm.  The film was a multiple award winner at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, including the “golden camera” for Flemish Belgian director Lukas Dhont.  The central character is a tall blonde transgender teen “Lara” (Victor Polster), born male, who identifies as female, taking hormone treatment while awaiting gender reassignment surgery.  Lara is fortunate to live with a sympathetic single dad and a much younger little brother Milo.  But with dreams of being a ballet dancer she subjects herself to a torturous training regimen. She suffers as well from unhealthy body-image practices. That and incidents exacerbating already high adolescent anxieties lead to a desperate resort.

            This is not an easy film to watch, and viewer discretion is definitely advised. But it achieves a sensitive portrait in Polster’s brave performance as Lara.  A-