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Quarterly Review of Film and Video

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The Difficult Job of Being a Girl: Key Themes and Narratives in Contemporary Western European Art Cinema by Women

Judith Franco

To cite this article: Judith Franco (2018) The Difficult Job of Being a Girl: Key Themes and Narratives in Contemporary Western European Art Cinema by Women, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 35:1, 16-30, DOI: 10.1080/10509208.2017.1347866

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2017.1347866

Published online: 08 Aug 2017.

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The Difficult Job of Being a Girl: Key Themes and Narratives in Contemporary Western European Art Cinema by Women

Judith Franco

Recently a proliferating body of intimate young-girl dramas has emerged in Western European art cinema as a paradigm for first and second female-authored scripts and films that are circulated at film festivals and in art-house theatres. If the coming-of-age drama can be regarded as a quintessentially French format that was re-visioned by women directors since the 1970s as a vehicle to challenge conventional depictions of the young girl and explore issues of both socialization and self-exploration (notably in the work of Diane Kurys and Catherine Breillat), contemporary dramas of young female subjectivity cut across national cinemas and the sheer volume of the work as well as the variety of girl images suggests an intensification in European auteurs’ interrogation of formulaic scenarios of male control and female dependency. In this essay I want to explore how youthful female agency is constructed in contemporary Western European art cinema by women. I adopt a broad interpretation of an “impure” art cinema1 that draws on a wide array of cinematic traditions from classical art cinema and social realism to popular influences, and circulates on art house screens and the festival circuit that confers prestige and thus (market) value on the name of the author while also establishing relationality among women’s films. As a liminal cinematic space supported by an international network of film festivals, and a privileged platform for the representation of marginal subjectivities and artistic innovation, art cinema provides a potentially fertile ground for emerging women directors “to develop and express their own voices and at the same time share a common artistic space without being marginalized as making “women’s films” or engaging with an exclusively feminist form of filmmaking.”2

While the list is not exhaustive, I will be considering the following productions in more or less detail, having selected a broad range of Western European films with shared thematic tendencies and aesthetics that are directed and/or written by women in different national contexts over the past eight years. From France, consideration is given to Water Lilies (Dir. C�eline Sciamma, 2007), Stella (Dir. Sylvie Verheyde, 2008), No and Me (Dir. Zabou Breitman, 2010), Love Like Poison (Dir. Katell Quill�ev�er�e, 2010), 17 Girls (Dirs. Muriel and Delphine Coulin, 2011) and Tomboy (Dir. C�eline Sciamma, 2011); from The Netherlands–Belgium, My Queen Karo (Dir. Doroth�ee Van Den Berghe, 2009), Lena (Dir. Christophe

Judith Franco is lecturer in Film Studies in the School of Media at HKU University of the Arts Utrecht. © 2017 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 2018, VOL. 35, NO. 1, 16–30 https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2017.1347866

Van Rompaey, 2011), and Little Black Spiders (Dir. Patrice Toye, 2012); from the United Kingdom, Fish Tank (Dir. Andrea Arnold, 2009); from Germany Lollipop Monster (Dir. Ziska Riemann, 2011); from Italy, Corpo Celeste (Dir. Alice Rorhwacher, 2012); and finally the Swedish The Girl (Dir. Fredrik Edfeldt, 2009), and She Monkeys (Dir. Lisa Aschan, 2011). These consist primarily of low-budget first and second feature films that stand out in terms of a child-centered perspec- tive (often anchored in self-inscription and marked by a strong focus on the role of lived/embodied experience in girls’ identity formation) and distinctive style that is foregrounded in promotional discourses, potentially opening up a route for women to gain critical and public recognition in the early stages of their career. If the coming-of-age theme can be regarded in part as an analogy for a filmmaker’s debut as pointed out by Carrie Tarr and Tim Palmer in the context of contemporary French cinema (that has nurtured the highest number of women directors), the drama of femininity-in-the-making provides a unique paradigm for aspirant female authors “to explore the subjectivity of their young, (usually) female protagonists at the same time as demonstrating their knowledge of cinema and their own stylistic inventiveness.”3

A characteristic or sensibility that all the aforementioned narratives share is an emphasis on negative affect/bad feeling4 to draw attention to the implicit violence of the female adolescent rite of passage. This focus is highlighted in painful moments of humiliation and shame experienced by the girl or via her mother (abandonment or rejection, sexual objectification or abuse, menstruation in pub- lic) and/or as a more diffuse state of melancholy/emotional distress that high- lights the girls’ awareness of inequality and disempowerment in terms of gender (and class). As Bren�e Brown points out: “shame is often associated with the feel- ing of “not belonging” or being rejected from a valued group or community.”5

Hence, the girl protagonist in this female-authored body of work is marked as a displaced person, an outsider figure, engaged in a tortuous open-ended process of identity formation.

The most hopeful stories are reserved for the youngest heroines whose hybrid/ in-between state is articulated in terms of the girls’ attachments and engagements with animals6 and spatially, as transcendence/flight and movement through liminal or peripheral spaces as a site of self-realization. In foregrounding the physi- cal vitality, energy, and curiosity of the girl-child whose acquisition of knowledge about the adult world provides her with strength and power, these child-centered narratives are often tinged with nostalgia for a pre-adolescent freedom while also calling into question the impact of institutions such as school, family, and church in regulating femininities. Adolescent girlhood is primarily associated with loss, frustration, and self-estrangement in narratives that show young women con- fronted with predatory male sexuality and limited options in their quest to develop a sense of self. Anger, violence and (self-) destructive behavior are the main forms of resistance for adolescent heroines in scenarios of betrayal and transformation that rewrite stereotypes and dominant narratives about femininity and sexuality.

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Collective teenage pregnancy emerges as a post-feminist trope by conjuring a utopian space outside of the structures of male desire, yet aligning discourses of agency, empowerment, and authenticity with the glorified pregnant body.

From late childhood to early adolescence: Rupture and discontinuity

In her study of girls’ development from childhood into young adulthood, Lyn Mikel Brown points out that in the lives of girls at around nine and ten years old, feelings of anxiety and loneliness emerge “because of the need for acceptance and inclusion that deepens the social fissure between private and public, between what you feel and what you can say out loud.”7 Western European women’s cinema depicts the transition from childhood to puberty as an emotionally traumatic expe- rience for girls, thus linking young female selfhood with rupture and discontinuity vis-�a-vis familial/patriarchal ideologies. Narratives that chart the transition from childhood to early adolescence dramatize the young heroine’s alienation and solitude (she is often an only child or allegorical orphan) by positioning her as an outsider who is left to her own devices in the process of negotiating a sense of self in the space between the familial home and the social world when confronted with a major upheaval/dislocation (changing schools, moving house or even to another country) and/or emotional trauma in the home (death of a sibling, separation of parents, abandonment). As studies of childhood in national and independent cinema have shown8 the increase in representations of pre-adolescent children as potential victims of parental failure reflects that “the stability and structure of the nuclear family (is) undone, offering, apparently, both new freedom and new inse- curity at once, a new politics of childhood, a new recognition of the imbrication of children’s lives with the political on a domestic and global scale.”9 In the female child narrative, parental figures are invariably relegated to the background as absent, flawed, or indifferent characters who struggle with problems of their own. Often figured in terms of a crisis of paternal authority, the disintegration of the family leaves the depressed or exhausted mother in a vulnerable position and the children without parental guidance or boundaries, propelling the young girl into the outside world. While this freedom is initially figured as a source of anxiety for the heroine, it also opens up possibilities for growth articulated spatially in the girl’s movement away from the claustrophobic family home, school, or church towards wide open liminal spaces such as stations, motorways, forest, riverbed, or wasteland. Visually this sense of conquering space finds expression in the tracking shot or long take that shows the heroine running or cycling across a vast and desolate landscape.

Transcendence is a recurring motif that conveys the girl–child’s escapist longing from oppressive social institutions, aligning her with an empowering panoramic perspective on the world (as in Corpo Celeste) but it can also be driven by a nostal- gic restorative craving for an idealized paternal bond. In The Girl and My Queen Karo the heroine’s suspended position in a no-man’s land between heaven and

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earth (sitting on a swing or taking off in a hot air balloon) is associated with pater- nal protection, a desire to hang on to the memory of being thrown into the air by the father or sitting on his shoulders. Unlike their “angelic” male counterparts in contemporary British social realist cinema who are allowed “to escape from terres- trial responsibility”10 girls are destined to come crashing down. Hence, the most daunting rite of passage for the youngest heroines is taking a dive from a great height into stagnant and deep water that functions as a medium of transformation associated with death and rebirth.11

A more formal coming-of-age ritual is the confirmation ceremony allowing for a dramatization of the girl’s struggle between sexuality and spirituality (Love Like Poison) or between compliance and resistance to religious orthodoxy/patriarchal authority (Corpo Celeste). Interestingly, both films conclude on the female protago- nist’s rejection of the confirmation rite, articulated in different ways. Anna passes out at the ceremony and embarks on a romance with a choir boy, whereas rebellious Martha is granted more agency in walking away from the church and aligning herself with an angry and frustrated God who is “closer to the wound of her own adolescence than the syrupy image that appears in the illustrations of the catechism,” to put it in the words of Director Alice Rohrwacher.12

Narratives of rescue and recovery and lost childhood

Although female children face violent realities in female-authored texts, their stories stand out as empowering trajectories of young selfhood in formation under- scored by a subjective narration that immerses the spectator in the interior life of deeply alienated yet resilient girls who are not yet inculcated by prescriptive notions of class and gender thus exposing the losses and injuries of female children in a patriarchal and middle-class culture. If the youngest girls in these films are consistently portrayed as survivors, we can identify two strands in this body of work: first, rescue and recovery narratives that open up possibilities through painful experiences; secondly, scenarios of loss/death of childhood, figured as a nostalgic space of safety associated with the nuclear family and more specifically with the idealized father–daughter bond.

Rescue and recovery narratives reveal an awareness of the importance of (re) connecting with the mother and/or female peers and siblings as a condition for girls to develop a healthy sense of self. Stella and No and Me stand out in terms of their foregrounding of protective and affirmative bonds between women and girls and elaborate engagement with the female protagonist’s conflicted feelings through an intimate first person narration. Accidentally assigned to a prestigious Parisian secondary school, Stella’s growing insecurity finds expression in a poignantly lucid voice-over that exposes the widening gap between the working-class girl’s feelings of inadequacy vis-�a-vis desirable middle-class femininity (“beautiful, clean and clever”) and her tough, disaffected attitude. Like Stella, No and Me deploys a simultaneous voice-over to pull the viewer into the tormented inner world of

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13-year-old Lou, revealing the discrepancy between her emotional distress and the brave facade of an intellectually gifted girl who is out of touch with her older class- mates and unable to connect with her grieving parents after the death of her infant sister.

Both films propose female bonding and valorization of class and cultural differ- ence as a therapeutic source of power, pleasure and self-worth in the development of the young protagonists’ sense of self. What saves Stella from giving up on herself is her close friendship with Gladys, a bright Jewish girl who introduces Stella to the liberating power of words by sharing her love of books and music/lyrics. More importantly, the girls connect in mutual appreciation for each other’s social back- ground. Sylvie Verheyde’s autobiographical film is also unique in acknowledging the mother as the primary agent in instilling the girl with a sense of independence and the benefits of an education, thus opening up a space for growth in the film’s open ending that suggests a coming into selfhood built on female bonds and support across class barriers.

In No and Me, based on a popular novel by Delphine de Vigan in 2007,13 female friendship is also constructed as a life-affirming yet temporary form of female connection, subordinated to maternal love. Feeling neglected by her mother who suffers with depression, Lou fills the emotional void by striking up an intense friendship with a 19-year-old homeless girl who functions as a catalyst in the bour- geois family. Wild child “No” becomes a surrogate sister to Lou, opening up the world of the young intellectual heroine to simple pleasures and she brings out maternal affection in both Lou and her mother, paving the way for a restoration of the primary mother-daughter bond. Even though Zabou Breitman’s adaptation remains faithful to the original written work in introducing a young male character to defuse the passionate relationship between the two girls, the film refuses to inscribe its heroine within heterosexual coupling and prioritizes the mother- daughter relationship both on and off screen (the soundtrack for No and Me is written and performed by Anna Chalon, Breitman’s daughter).

In contrast to above narratives of recovery via female/maternal bonds, Tomboy, The Girl, and My Queen Karo are primarily invested in dramatizing the loss of innocence and freedom that comes with a growing awareness of gender roles and the difficult negotiation with femininity for daddy’s girls who lose trust in paternal love. In these narratives, mothers are problematized both as female role models and parental figures, whereas relationships between siblings and with younger peers become a defense against the hostile adult world. Unusual pets (a tadpole, a hedgehog) are a recurrent motif in this body of work as a metaphor for awkward “unfeminine” girls while also functioning as a companion that provides shy and lonely young heroines comfort in times of distress. Lost childhood films provide access to the heroine’s complex emotions, perceptions and bodily/tactile experien- ces (with objects and animals) by adopting the girl’s visual/spatial perspective and through the use of close-ups that foreground the subjectivity (in flux) of child protagonists. Filmic devices such as the close-up and emphasis on the sensory

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have been identified by Emma Wilson as artistic strategies mobilized by engaged contemporary women directors “who have sought to move towards a child- centered and emotionally unsettling view of young female experience’” in an attempt to challenge the scopic regime through which the child has been objecti- fied and idealized in the visual arts.14 The most challenging trajectory is reserved for the nameless 10-year-old protagonist in The Girl (written by Karin Arrhenius) who is brutally disconnected from her family when her parents take the older brother with them on a humanitarian trip to Africa. Traumatized by the parental loss that she keeps to herself like an internalized feeling of shame, the film shows the girl trying to connect in vain with adults and peers, singling out female-related experiences as particularly cruel and alienating. Visually and aurally, the introspec- tive girl–child with her fragile body, blank facial expression, and almost translucent white skin functions throughout the film as a signifier of purity and defense against young and adult femininity figured as abject (associated with excess and a never- ending cycle of betrayal). By contrast, the film engages in an idealization of young masculinity exemplified by the magical apparition of a hot air balloon in the girl’s garden, carrying a handsome male visitor who shows maternal affection for the neglected child. Ultimately, the girl survives the emotional wasteland of puberty but the film leaves us with a bleak image of emotional deprivation and repression in the figure of the silent and pristine heroine who is greeted coldly by her parents, pretending as if nothing has happened over the summer.

Female adolescence: What it feels like for a girl

If narratives of young selfhood in the process of formation are primarily geared towards reparation and a hopeful sense of self, stories of female adolescence tend to be more pessimistic in their focus on the heroine’s struggle to assert control over her body and sexuality in the face of expected femininity. Constructed as way- ward characters who are unable to express their feelings or articulate their position in the world through language, the narrative journeys of female adolescents are mapped primarily by embodied and affective rites of passage that dramatize “the difficult job of being a girl” in a patriarchal culture.15 While not assuming a central position in girls’ lives, loss of virginity and sexual interactions are often portrayed as alienating (highlighting the discrepancy between girls’ desires/fantasies and the disappointing reality of sex and relationships) or ambivalent experiences (in terms of the heroine’s position as object/agent of desire) whereas dance, music, creativity, play and fantasy function as privileged vehicles of self-exploration, escapism and homosocial bonding. A key trope is body image as a source of preoccupation and anxiety for girls by exposing the damaging consequences of the split between inner self and external image in terms of internalized oppression (low self-esteem, self-harm, bodily discipline) and relational aggression.

Narratives that explore individual subjectivity such as Fish Tank, Lena, and Love Like Poison, with its heroine on the cusp of adolescence, engage primarily with the

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construction of young women in and through coercive or abusive relationships with men and boys in the context of antagonistic mother–daughter/same-sex rela- tionships tinged with sexual rivalry. In this body of work, the girl’s sexual awaken- ing is negotiated in two key relationships, with an older man in the home who abuses his paternal position and a young outsider/love interest who provides an escape route for the heroine. The most violent coming-of-age trajectory is reserved for working-class girls in social realist films that invite identification with isolated heroines who are deprived of childhood and “already adult, forced to confront their situation from a mature perspective, but not always equipped to do so.”16 To a certain extent these unappealing working-class heroines are “othered” in terms of their position as social outcast, yet both Lena (written by Mieke de Jong) and Fish Tank stand out in the contemporary social realist landscape by making the female protagonist the emotional center of the film and conveying her feelings and moods in intensely subjective or expressive scenes.

Both films ascribe the heroine’s plight (sexual abuse and emotional betrayal by an older middle-class man as the relationship shifts from paternal to sexual) to maternal neglect and the single-parent family. Fatherless and starved of affection by a sexually active mother who fails to take up the maternal role, the working- class teenage heroine develops an ambivalent attachment to a charming stranger in the home (the mother’s lover or the boyfriend’s father) who offers her emotional and financial support, family intimacy and the trappings of romance. While draw- ing on the conventional initiation narrative of the young girl by a father figure, Fish Tank and Lena rewrite this familiar scenario in function of a critique of male/ middle-class privilege. If they share a similar plot structure that incorporates con- ventions of the revenge drama, there are also clear differences. Even though Lena achieves a sense of self-worth exemplified by her capable maternal presence in the male household, the film’s deterministic logic pushes its heroine towards victimiza- tion in a fatalistic ending. Fish Tank, in contrast, constructs its heroine as a more mobile and unruly subject, allowing for “a radical unsettling of the borders between victimization and agency and the ever-shifting relations between those two categories.”17 Even though Mia’s vengeful kidnapping of Connor’s daughter briefly reduces her to a childlike status (earning her a slap in the face) Fish Tank portrays its angry teenage rebel as fully responsible for her actions and resistant to objectification in terms of her watchful gaze, defiant attitude, and energetic dance moves.

Homosocial narratives and Utopia

It is in films that push male characters and adults out of the picture that we find an exploration of the dynamics of female friendships and/or same-sex attraction, often held in tension with heterosexual fantasies. In ensemble narratives that fore- ground affective and erotic bonds between women, female solidarity is evoked as an alternative avenue to gain a sense of self, although hardly ever treated as a viable

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route to fulfillment for adolescent girls. A case in point is 17 Girls (inspired by a true story based in the United States) that liberates the sexuality of its young pro- tagonists from the ideology of heterosexual romance by proposing a scenario of female rebellion rooted in a collective pregnancy/maternity pact between 17 school friends who decide to raise their children together, only to dismiss the political project of a female community as a naive fantasy in the film’s punitive ending that puts the girls back in their place, under parental control. When Camille, the group’s ringleader, mysteriously disappears having lost her baby after a car accident, a voice-over informs us that the teenage mothers “naturally’” gave up on their dream, accompanied by a shot of the dispassionate girls and their offspring gathering around a merry-go-round. In its glorification of pregnancy as an act of rebellion, 17 Girls draws on a postfeminist discourse of reproduction as individual choice or as writers–directors Delphine and Muriel Coulin explain: “our heroines use their reproductive freedom to have a baby here and now, when they feel like it, unlike their elders who waited as long as possible to get pregnant.”18 If 17 Girls allows its teenage characters reproductive choices outside normative femininity (girls tricking boys into sex in order to get pregnant and behaving in unruly ways during their pregnancy) and creates new intimacies between people not linked by biology or marriage, this alternative route to female agency and fulfillment is ultimately undermined by the film’s essentialist glorification of the (highly anesthe- tized) pregnant body/maternal state and trivialization of the girls’ social project as misguided escapism informed by boredom or peer pressure.

Collective pregnancy as a catalyst for female bonding and rebellion is also at the heart of Patrice Toye’s Little Black Spiders, inspired by the true story of teenage girls forced to live out their (accidental) pregnancies in a hospital attic in 1978 Bel- gium to avoid bringing shame on their Catholic family. The girls’ abrupt loss of agency upon entering the hiding place (signaled by their imposed name change, dress code, restricted mobility, and ignorance about signing away their baby for adoption) is set off against surreal sequences that bring out the characters’ growing empowerment through creative play and intimacy, culminating in a pact between Roxanne and Katharina who vow to stand by each other and raise their children together. While Little Black Spiders demystifies heterosexual romance (Katharina is cured of her romantic delusions when the father of her child, a respectable mar- ried man, openly admits to being ashamed of having her in his life) and envisages the female family as an alternative pathway to fulfillment in the final sequence that shows the two young women escaping from hospital with “their” baby girl, the film closes on a recuperation of homoerotic desire by the mother–daughter relationship and an affirmation of the value of maternal self-sacrifice (drawing heavily on Madonna and Child iconography). An important trope in ensemble narratives is the natural landscape—beach, sea, woods—figured as a utopian site of emotional connection and communion between women. Both 17 Girls and Little Black Spiders juxtapose claustrophobic stills of lonely teenagers confined to their bedroom with idyllic and dynamic scenes of pregnant girls gathering on the beach

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or in the woods as they exchange experiences, make plans for a better future (col- lective parenting, closing the generation gap) or simply merge into the landscape, evoking a mythical bond across time and space that lingers after the girls’ separation.

Female friendship and implicit lesbianism take center stage in Lollipop Mon- ster, a collaborative project between singer/columnist Luci van Org and comic book artist/novelist Ziska Riemann who project their long-term friendship in a fictional version of their adolescence, the only time when they briefly lost sight of each other.19 Engaging in a play on similarity and difference, Lollipop Monster constructs its two female protagonists as a complementary couple, yet divests homoerotic desire of associations with the pathological by celebrating desire between girls in an indirect way, notably through the structuring of its female gazes and the privileging of the intense bond between the two central heroines, in a form analogous to that of Heavenly Creatures (Dir. Peter Jackson, 1994). Contrasting in terms of physical looks, personality, and background, both Oona and Ari are visually coded as social outsiders (a provocative blond Lolita and an artistic dark-haired Goth) who feel alienated in their familial sphere where conflicts, betrayal, and violence are brushed under the carpet. Throughout the film, homoerotic desire and female complicity is represented through a circuit of desiring female gazes that trigger playful and empowering fantasy scenes of young women transforming into predatory animals. The dynamic in the central female pair allows both heroines to grow as self-harming Oona learns to external- ize her anger and promiscuous Ari starts to regain her confidence. Female friend- ship is put to the test in a heterosexual scenario of betrayal that functions as a catalyst in the girls’ growing awareness of their mistreatment by men, culminat- ing in revenge as they batter the culprit to death in a deserted cottage. The final scene shows the two blood spattered heroines walking hand in hand through an Edenic landscape, an image of solidarity and transgression underscored by the music and lyrics of the girls’ favorite (fictional) band “Tier” (Animal): “We are one of a kind, understand us blind, because we are the same. You and I, two carnivores, conspiring since the beginning of time. With you I share my hunting ground, beloved animal, beloved animal!” Lollipop Monster invites the audience to enjoy the heroines’ murderous rage, a pleasure derived from seeing girls break out of stereotypical gender roles that is made palatable by the film’s black humor and parodic treatment of Ari’s cartoon-strip parents who cover up the girls’ carnage in the same way as they glossed over the violence within the family, letting the two heroines get away with murder.

Queer orientations, genre bending and female shame

A detached, almost clinical observation of the ambivalent dynamic of female friendships in She Monkeys and Water Lilies highlights adolescence as a disorien- tating and frustrating experience laced with desire and violence that is explored in

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highly stylized elliptical narratives organized around a series of tense encounters. Clara Bradbury-Rance points out that She Monkeys and Water Lilies belong to a contemporary mode of filmmaking that privileges female adolescence as a site of queer potential through an “interrogation of (their) characters’ sexualities by way of considering the in-between-spaces they occupy as adolescents with desires that are queer because they are not yet named.”20 Both C�eline Sciamma and Lisa Aschan approach their queer take on the coming-of-age story in a self-reflexive way, by subverting archetypal characters borrowed from popular culture and through experimentation with genre conventions (thriller and western elements, codes of American and European adolescent cinema) allowing for a new language to emerge in the act of storytelling.

A self-enclosed, timeless microcosm (swimming pool, riding school) is the arena for sporting cultures, conventionally reserved for girls—synchronized swimming and equestrian vaulting—that are elaborated throughout both She Monkeys and Water Lilies as a metaphor for femininity associated with discipline/control and seduction/desire. Rehearsal and competition scenes illustrate the investment of young women in carefully choreographed routines and precisely executed move- ments (under the critical gaze of ruthless female coaches) in order to make their performance look flawless and effortless, an accomplishment that is only in reach of a handful of conventionally attractive “top girls.” The hermetic and cruel world of competitive female sport (demanding an impossible combination of athleticism, beauty, and elegance) provides a setting that allows for a critique of the oppressive and conflicting nature of ideal femininity in a patriarchal culture and the damaging effects it has on girls in terms of low self-esteem, self-destructive behavior and rela- tional aggression.

She Monkeys draws attention to the primal and damaging affect of female sham- ing in a disturbing scene that shows 7-year-old Sara being scolded in a public swimming pool for not wearing a bikini top, prompting the girl to cover her imaginary breasts and seek refuge behind a plant.21 The incident triggers Sara’s emulation of stereotypical scenarios of seduction (clad in a leopard bikini) that leads to a cycle of embarrassment, frustration, and withdrawal (as she follows the advice of her older sister to toughen up and never speak about her feelings to avoid getting hurt). Body image and female desire as a source of anxiety/shame is also a central theme in Water Lilies demonstrated in scenes that show gangly Marie and chubby Anne worrying about their size, shape, and body odor (“I’m not normal”), self-consciously hiding under a towel in the changing room and keeping each other down with cruel comments. Another symptom of girls’ low self-esteem is their masochistic attraction to conventionally attractive peers in humiliating scenarios of rejection and betrayal.

The competitive and ruthless subculture of female sport also functions as the arena par excellence for the birth of queer desire. At the heart of both She Monkeys and Water Lilies is a homoerotic attraction between teen protagonists (counter- pointed by heterosexual subplots) that is triggered by the gaze and conveyed

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primarily in sensory and gestural dynamics. It is while watching the seductive per- formance of femininity (on horseback or in the water) that the plain, silent and shy outsiders, Emma and Marie, become infatuated with the beautiful confident girl who enjoys a privileged status in the team. In a series of sensual and physi- cal encounters/challenges that shows the ing�enue’s initiation by the more expe- rienced girl, both films explore an erotic dynamism and power struggle that draws either on difference/desire (Water Lilies) or sameness/resemblance (She Monkeys). C�eline Sciamma’s film foregrounds the visual and emotional con- trast/tension between the voluptuous blond “allumeuse” Floriane and dark- haired tomboy Marie who can only get close to her object of desire if she settles for the role of accessory in the heterosexual script, providing Floriane with an alibi to meet boys, protecting her from unwanted sexual encounters, and ulti- mately breaking her hymen to save Floriane the shame of being outed as a vir- gin. Drawing on the trope of the lesbian double, She Monkeys plays out the refusal of the desire/identification dichotomy22 in terms of the resemblance between Emma and Cassandra (almost interchangeable blond nymphs clad in matching clothes and sporting a ponytail) that is heightened by the proximity of bodies in the film frame and simultaneous or complementary body language that hints at the two young women constituting each other’s world of reference. From the outset, the attraction between Cassandra and Emma is infused with a menacing quality emanating from the girls’ compulsive desire for power and control. Emma’s introduction shows her walking through the forest, training her dog with a clicker to condition his behavior whereas Cassandra promptly takes the new recruit under her wing, declaring that “she can teach anyone any- thing.” The more introverted and motherless Emma soon finds herself on the end of physical and psychological challenges orchestrated by Cassandra (includ- ing the robbery and humiliation of an amorous boy) that bring the girls closer together. The power dynamic shifts however during an intimate scene when Cassandra opens up about her feelings and Emma retreats into antagonistic silence in an attempt to (re)gain (self)-control, a strategy that backfires when she is not selected to take part in the vaulting competition because her perfor- mance lacks self-expression/”pr�esence” (or as the coach points out, “it is not just about strength and control”). Through loss and rejection Emma plunges into a state of withdrawal and regression (evoked by the mirror motif and an emblematic shot of Emma huddled in a corner clinging to her dog) but ulti- mately unleashes her repressed anger and aggression, symbolized by her grow- ing obsession with guns. Now taking up an active position, Emma secretly enters Cassandra’s room at night, fondling the girl’s possessions and reaching out for her sleeping body in a near touch that mirrors a previous gesture initi- ated by Cassandra. This chilling scene functions as a prelude to the final con- frontation in the stables where Emma reacts violently to Cassandra’s touch and verbal challenge (“hit me”), delivering a blow to the knee and eliminating her injured rival from the competition. The film’s closing scene echoes the girls’

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first encounter as a triumphant Emma now leads the team and steals the show (in full make-up and sporting a flamboyant outfit) under the watchful eye of Cassandra who maintains the couple’s complicity and interdependence by lying/covering for Emma (claiming her injury was caused by a horse).

If the narratives of Water Lilies and She Monkeys are focalized through the emo- tional turmoil of the queer outsider in (homoerotic and heterosexual) scenarios of rejection and betrayal, both films also challenge the victim/aggressor or empow- ered/mean girl binary that is prevalent in American popular culture23 through a reversal of roles and by providing a context (ritualistic and competitive female sporting cultures) that highlights the connection between girls’ feelings of (internalized) shame/rage and damaging cultural expectations of femininity and female sexuality. Although Water Lilies and She Monkeys grant their heroines short-lived moments of connection and fulfillment, female adolescence is portrayed as a lonely and alienating process of continual transformation and movement in narratives that resist closure, leaving us with a final hopeful image of transfiguration that shows each individual girl owning her own space/element (e.g., floating in water, flying in the air, dancing by herself) in the process of becoming and as such, hinting at an unknown future.

Conclusion

Contemporary Western European films by women foreground the girl as a border- line figure to bring into focus the transformative potential inherent in youthful femininity while also reminding a contemporary audience of the persistence of the process of acculturation for girls. In imagining girlhood as a politically potent arena of development/ movement rather than a static universal state or transitional stage on the road to (heterosexual) femininity/maturity, the young heroines and their struggles become infused with significance and gravitas.

A striking tendency in this female-authored body of work is an intense engage- ment with the interior life and embodied reality of girl protagonists (through voice-over, emphasis on the sensory, mental subjectivity and a girl child’s sense of perspective and space) that provides a challenge to the fetishistic gaze of dominant cinema24 and signals women filmmakers’ desire to experiment with alternative narratives in order to convey the unsettling and often distressing experience of girlhood. A problematic side effect of representing girls’ emotive and embodied lives in their own terms however is the erasure or marginalization of the mother and intergenerational relations between girls and women. Only Stella and My Queen Karo, period films (set in the1970s) that give more narrative and cinematic attention to the mother’s plight and struggle, presented through the daughter’s eyes, provide a political/historical perspective that opens up a space for a reconcili- ation of generational conflicts.

As Patricia White points out, auteurism is a privileged discourse “that has enabled the emergence of young women directors in recent years or that allows

QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 27

commonalities in their work and assessment of its impact to come into view.”25

For Western European women filmmakers and scriptwriters the feminine take on the coming-of-age narrative continues to provide visibility on the festival circuit that is increasingly becoming an active player in the industry and as such provides a vital platform for aspirant auteurs in advancing and sustaining a long-term career.26 There is however also the risk of the coming-of-age narrative functioning as a prescriptive, “gender appropriate” format in the inception and development of female-authored projects as signaled by the considerable proportion of young girl dramas that has earned first time women directors critical acclaim in Variety mag- azine as “European Directors to Watch.”27 Significantly, the only women writers and filmmakers mentioned in this study who have managed to follow up their first or second project with a relatively successful film (Andrea Arnold, Katell Quill�ev�er�e, C�eline Sciamma, Karin Arrhenius and Alice Rohrwacher) have revis- ited the exploration of young female subjectivity at a different age or stage of life.

Notes

1. Galt and Schoonover, “Introduction: The Impurity of Art Cinema,” in Global Art Cinema, pp. 3–27.

2. Mantziari, Women Directors in “Global” Art Cinema: Negotiating Feminism and Represen- tation [Dissertation], pp. 271–272.

3. Tarr, “Introduction: Women’s Film-Making in France 2000–2010,” in Studies in French Cinema, p. 198; Palmer, Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema.

4. Johnson and Moran, The Female Face of Shame. 5. Brown, Women and Shame: Reaching Out, Speaking Truths and Building Connection, p.

113. 6. Kinship between girls and the animal world is also prevalent in female-authored narratives

about adolescence as indicated by the (original) film titles Little Black Spiders, Fish Tank, Naissance des Pieuvres (The Birth of Octopuses) and She Monkeys but often deployed in a more metaphorical way, referring to the potentially disruptive dimension of female desire in patriarchal culture. Homosocial ensemble films rely on the insect paradigm as a model for antiphallic sexuality associated with collectivity and contamination (Braidotti, “Met(r) amorphoses: Becoming Woman/Animal/Insect,” in Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, pp. 117–171).

7. Brown, Girlfighting. Betrayal and Rejection among Girls, p. 69. 8. Powrie, “Unfamiliar Places: ‘Heterospection’ and recent French films on children,” in

Screen; Sutton, “The Bambino Negato or Missing Child of Contemporary Italian Cinema,” in Screen; Wilson, “Children, Emotion and Viewing in Contemporary European Cinema,” in Screen.

9. Wilson, Children, p. 332. 10. Legott, “Like father? Failing parents and angelic children in contemporary British social

realist cinema,” in The Trouble with Men. Masculinities in European and Hollywood Cin- ema, p. 174.

11. Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter; O’Shea-Meddour, “Gaston Bachelard’s L’Eau et les Rêves: Conquering the Feminine Element,” in French Cul- tural Studies, pp. 81–99.

12. Rohrwacher, Corpo Celeste Pressbook, p. 7.

28 J. FRANCO

13. Vigan, No et Moi. 14. Wilson “Women Filming Children,” in Nottingham French Studies. Focalizing the Body in

Contemporary Women’s Writing and Filmmaking in France, p. 118. 15. Soares, “Water Lilies: Q & A with C�eline Sciamma,” in Alt Film Guide. 16. Hockenhull, “Wednesday’s Child. Adolescent Outsiders in Contemporary British Cinema,”

in Lost and Othered Children in Contemporary Cinema, p. 63. 17. Horeck, “A ‘Passion for the Real’: Sex, Affect and Performance in the films of Andrea

Arnold,” The New Extremism in Cinema. From France to Europe, p. 177. 18. Raymond, “Entretien avec Delphine et Muriel Coulin—On n’a pas Choisi la Facilit�e,” in

Tribune de Lyon, March 5, 2012, para 4. 19. Zylka, “Perspektive. Endlich Erwachsen,” in Der Tagesspiegel. 20. Bradbury-Rance, Queer Lesbian Spaces in Contemporary Cinema. 21. Johnson and Moran, Female Face. 22. Jenzen, “Revolting Doubles: Radical Narcissism and the Trope of Lesbian Doppelgangers,”

in Journal of Lesbian Studies, p. 356. 23. Cecil, Dawn K. “From Heathers to Mean Girls: An Examination of Relational Aggression in

Film,” in Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture. 24. Tarr, Carrie and Brigitte Rollet. Cinema and the Second Sex: Women’s Filmmaking in

France in the 1980s and 1990s (Women Make Cinema), (New York, London: Continuum, 2001); Wilson, Emma. Women Filming Children.

25. White, Women’s Cinema, World Cinema. Projecting Contemporary Feminisms, p. 20. 26. Van Hemert, International Acclaim: The Role(s) of the International Film Festival in Sup-

porting Emerging Women’s Cinema [Dissertation]. 27. Since 2010, one in five filmmakers selected and showcased in the Variety Critics’ Choice:

Europe Now!’ section, hosted by the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, is a woman and seven of 10 films by women in this section have a female-centered and/or pro-youth agenda.

ORCID

Judith Franco http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6816-9967

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Braidotti, Rosi. Met(r)amorphoses: Becoming Woman/Animal/Insect. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming [short introduction] (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).

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Galt, Rosalind, and Schoonover, Karl. Introduction: The Impurity of Art Cinema. Global Art Cinema, edited by Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3–27.

Hockenhull, Stella M. Wednesday’s Child: Adolescent Outsiders in Contemporary British Cinema. Lost and Othered Children in Contemporary Cinema, edited by Debbie C. Olson and Andrew Scahill (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012), p 47–66.

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30 J. FRANCO