Women in Crisis

It hasn't been an easy year for the ladies here at Cannes. I don't mean real women, of course, though I'm sure they've had their share of difficulties, too.

 

(Quick tangent: A recurring image from Cannes this year is women wearing gowns and high heels running at breakneck speed down the Croisette, toward lavish parties or movie premieres at the Lumiere Theatre. Defying gravity and numerous other physical properties, they move with grace and speed, like gazelles, and never, ever slip or fall. It's like watching something on "Animal Planet." Meanwhile, I can't get out of bed without bruising something. Ladies, what is in your DNA!?)

 

Now back to the women on-screen here at Cannes. A running motif for films this year is women from all over the globe in crisis. The first few days, the festival presented incarcerated mothers ("Lion's Den"), oppressed housewives ("Tokyo Sonata," "Three Monkeys"), cancer victims ("A Christmas Tale"), three ladies romanced by Javier Bardem ("Vicky Cristina Barcelona"), women forced to do unspeakable acts to provide food ("Blindness"), a woman who was stalked and raped ("4 Nights With Anna") and, perhaps most tragically, a wasted comeback by a sorely missed Karen Allen in "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull."

 

Things haven't gotten easier the last few days. In Amat Escalante's "The Bastards" -- a nihilistic film packed with long, creepy-bordering-on-comic static shots and pending dread and social/human debasement that Michael Haneke ("Funny Games," "Caché") would admire (and therefore, so did I) -- a crack-puffing suburban mom waits in her house to be killed by two Mexican immigrants hired by her ex-lover. In "The Headless Woman," the latest from Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, an upper-class socialite runs over something on the way home and suffers a concussion as a result. She spends the remainder of the film wandering in a daze, emotionally affected by her action but publicly unscathed because of her status.