Director: Laetitia Colombani (France, Canada, Italy, Belgium). Year of Release: 2023
Nyamatabad, Northern India. A woman wakes up, and goes outside to pump water from the well into 2 metal buckets. She returns home to heat up the water, and make coffee for herself and her husband. Smita is a Dalit, or Untouchable, and wants her daughter Lalita to have a better future than Smita’s present. This means getting Lalita into school, which is impossible without bribing the head teacher with money which should have been used to pay for Smita’s urgent x-ray.
Puglia, Sicily. A young woman wakes up in a much plusher bed. She enters a kitchen filled with her mother and sisters. They try and ply food on her, but she isn’t hungry. Instead Giulia goes to the wig factory run by her beloved father. After chatting with dad, she starts her shift in the factory. The other women notice that she’s tired, asking who she spent the last night with. “Pavese”, she says, “he’s a Communist, melancholic and killed himself in 1950”.
[Note for fact fans, the left-wing novelist Cesare Pavese did indeed kill himself in 1950]
Montreal, Canada. A woman is woken up in an even more luxurious apartment when her alarm goes off at 5am. Sarah tries to wrangle her family – two indistinguishable 10-year old twins, and the 16-year old Hannah, who is struggling at school from a lack of self-confidence. The kids ask why Sarah can’t take them to school every day, like one of their friend’s mothers. Sarah explains that that mother is a self-employed yoga instructor who can manage her own schedule.
Smita returns home to see that Lalita is already back from school. In tears, the girl explains how the teacher ordered her to take a brush and clean the classroom, as this is what Untouchables do. Smita tells her husband that they must leave the village and get the train down South where Dalits are treated with more respect. But they have no money left after bribing the head teacher. When Smita suggests stealing the money back, her husband forbids her from mentioning it again.
Giulia learns that her father has had a car accident, and is now lying in a coma. While her family go to mass, Giulia visits the hospital to read to dad. At work, the bank rings regularly, as the factory is on the verge of bankruptcy. This means that the women will lose their job and Giulia’s family will lose their house. To add to the problem, Italian women have stopped selling their hair to wig makers. The factory is unable to survive unless it adopts a different business model.
Sarah attends work meetings with companies which want to avoid paying massive fines for failing to respect environmental laws. Sarah’s preferred strategy is to pass off the blame to subcontractors to give her clients plausible deniability. Sarah is presented throughout the film in a purely heroic light, and we are never expected to question the morality of her work. Indeed we are invited to sympathise with her when she is attacked by her male colleagues for going too far.
Smita decides to steal the money from the head teacher, and takes Lalita to the train headed South. She spends nearly all their money on train tickets and Lalita constantly complains of being hungry. When they are forced to change trains, other passengers steal the rest of their belongings. Finally, the weary mother and daughter arrive in a city in Southern India. Unable to afford a simple bus fare, they trudge uphill to the town’s temple to ask God for help.
Giulia falls in love with Kamal, a Sika lad who she first encounters being picked up by the police for not having the correct papers. They meet again in the library where she recommends her favourite book. As Giulia’s family learn of their catastrophic financial situation, her mother mentions that a family she knows will pay off all their debts, if she marries their son Gino – a pretty enough lad, who, Giulia complains, has never read a book in his life. Giulia refuses point blank.
After a visit to the doctor, Sarah learns that she has breast cancer and will have to have a mastectomy. She doesn’t tell anyone, partly because of pride, but mainly because her boss is retiring and considering recommending her as a senior partner. So she tells him that her father is ill and she has to visit him in Florida. She phones dad, and also keeps him in the dark, assuring him that everything is fine. I think we are supposed to find something noble in all this.
Is it possible for a film to be great despite having rotten politics? In theory, sure. If you’ve heard me banging on about On the Waterfront, please excuse the reiteration. That film celebrated scabbing and was used by director Elia Kazan to excuse selling out his colleagues to the McCarthy witch hunt. Nonetheless it is a superb film which contains one of the finest acting performances by Marlon Brando, which is another was of saying one of the finest performances by anyone ever.
Der Zopf does not approach On the Waterfront either in artistic quality or in the depth of its moral turpitude. But something similar is happening here. In the name of standing up for women, the film elides the huge differences in opportunities offered to the women and their family. Hannah has a great crisis because she is unable to stand up in class and read out an essay. Similarly, Lalita’s lack of regular access to food means that she is in borderline danger of starvation.
This is a well-made film which tells three different stories, each of which is interesting and tragic enough to warrant a film of its own. But the way in which this particular film cuts between the 3 protagonists implies an equivalence between the starving cleaner, the Communist boss, and the hotshot lawyer which is just not there. This inferred equality is reinforced by the end credits which read; “for Olivia and all women of courage.”
But Smita’s courage is not the same as Guilia’s which is not the same as Sarah’s. They are not remotely comparable. This is most obvious in the final scene which I can’t explain without plot spoilers. As a sacrifice to God, Smita and Lalita have their heads shaved. Kamal organises to ship the cut-price hair to Sicily – thus saving the factory and Giulia from marrying the dumb Gino. And Sarah has a wig in which she can feel comfortable after her hair falls out post-chemo.
Any suggestion that these are 3 equal stories of “women of courage” is at best badly judged, but better described as being just plain offensive. This is girlboss feminism which is peculiarly blind to the privileges of the richer protagonists, and suggests that these are less important because all the characters are women. It is a pernicious idea which suggests that racist exclusion, unreasonable familial expectations, and breast cancer are all equivalent aspects of patriarchal domination.
And yet for all that, the acting is great, and the film has a lot of charm. We do feel for the women, although at least one of them is contemptible. For most of the film, we do care about what will happen to them. Ultimately, though, it leaves a horrible taste in the mouth which lingers far too long afterwards. I don’t really mind the film’s refusal to consider the real reasons for the women’s problems, but I deeply resent the way in which it tries to make us complicit.
CinePhil 