Change of Direction
by: Tara Pepper
- newsweek
When British director Gurinder Chadha started work on "Bend It Like Beckham," she was determined to prove that a film with an Asian star could be a mainstream commercial success. Now Chadha is taking her inventive melding of East and West a step further: her new film, "Bride and Prejudice," due out next month, features the Bollywood star Aishwarya Rai in her first English-language role, and transplants Jane Austen's 19th-century country-house classic to 21st-century India, Britain and Los Angeles. "I wanted to show that there is an alternative to Hollywood," says Chadha. "I wanted to do a Bollywood-style movie for audiences around the world. I thought because I would be introducing new concepts and styles, it would be best to use a story that people were familiar with." Chadha's confident vision has thus far turned up box-office gold. The bittersweet "Bend It Like Beckham" became a surprise worldwide hit in 2002, grossing more than $30 million. Her next project—a $90 million Hollywood epic billed as a prequel to the 1960s TV comedy "I Dream of Jeannie"—will propel Chadha into an elite class of blockbuster directors. But she'll be one of very few women there. According to "The Celluloid Ceiling," a study released this summer by Martha Lauzen, a communications professor at the University of San Diego, women directed just 6 percent of the top 250 films in 2003—down from 11 percent in 2000. "When you take the longer view, I do not see a pattern for improvement for women directors in film," she says. "I don't think Hollywood is going to change of its own volition."
That doesn't mean there's no hope. As the summer's mindless blockbusters fade into memory, women directors are taking center stage with a spate of more serious, emotionally driven art-house films. Barbara Albert's striking "Free Radicals," which follows a group of people recovering from a car crash, is the highlight of a new series at London's National Film Theatre. Lucrecia Martel's soon-to-be-released tale of a young girl's sexual awakening, "The Holy Girl," won plaudits at Cannes in May. And Anne Fontaine's "Nathalie," currently in theaters, stars Emmanuelle Beart in the unusual role of a hooker hired by a wife to seduce her husband.
In Britain, a new program called Directing Change aims to keep that momentum —going. "There are a lot of emerging young women directors," says Jane Cussons, chief executive of the nonprofit Women in Film and Television. "We've got to root out the talent and create the conditions in which it can flourish." To that end, Directing Change assigns up-and-coming women filmmakers to apprentice on high-profile features. When Stephen Frears starts shooting "Mrs. Henderson Presents" with Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins this week, Scottish director Angela M. Murray will be on the set taking notes. Already, she says, Directing Change has helped her learn to present her own scripts more confidently to potential backers.
And that's key. Though almost equal numbers of men and women graduate from film schools, deep-running prejudices mean directors like Murray are much less likely to get the green light from studios. "A complex web of factors" works against women's films, says Lauzen—chiefly the unproved notion that men won't watch them. In addition, says Cussons, "film financing is high-risk venture capital, and somehow women are considered more risky."
Studios tend to be more adventurous when the stakes are lower, which is why female directors are flourishing in smaller markets from Austria to Argentina. Spanish director Iciar Bollain, who painted a painful, complex portrait of domestic violence in last year's "Take My Eyes," says a decade ago there were perhaps three women directors in Spain; now there are 10 times that number. As in France, government subsidies—which consider a project's artistic merit rather than its marketability—work in women's favor. "The way funding is doled out is more egalitarian," says French film writer Sabrina Poidevin.
That also gives directors more freedom. "I write my own scripts, and everything that interests me has to do with being a woman," says Isabelle Broue, auteur of "Tout le Plaisir pour Moi," a provocative tale of a young Parisian who loses her sex drive. Scottish director Alison Peebles, who was widely praised for her new film "Afterlife," about a family besieged by illness, notes that "the one advantage of working on a low-budget film is that there's less intrusion.
Increasingly, women directors are bringing new subjects and styles to bear on the mainstream. Shona Auerbach's soon-to-be-released "Dear Frankie" received a standing ovation at Cannes this year for its tender depiction of a mother-son relationship. Even in Hollywood, there's hope; Mira Nair's sumptuous "Vanity Fair," based on the classic Thackeray tale of social climbing (see review), just hit screens in the United States. Sony pitched "I Dream of Jeannie" to Chadha partly because of her ability to depict strong female characters. "You'd be surprised how hard it is getting the human emotional arc in a script to work," she says. "Ultimately a director stands and falls by their ability to do that." And if a woman can't capture a film's emotional arc, it's not very likely that a man can, either.
