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The arrival of Jane Campion's Bright Star, a luminous story about the love between John Keats and his neighbour, Fanny Brawne, has ushered back one of my favourite debates: Is there such a thing as a woman's picture, and if so, can men enjoy it (truly enjoy, that is, without the application of hot coals to the soles of the feet)? I'd say the answers are yes, of course, and yes, sort of.
Critics (including male critics) have praised Bright Star for its beauty and nuanced storytelling, but when I talk to men about it, what I hear is a lot of grumbling: “dull,” “conventional,” and in one fellow's words, “a lot of people looking out the window moaning.” Yeah, well, that's what you did in the 19th century, at least until the consumption came along, and then you sat looking out the window and coughing.
I loved the movie, but then I'm the target demographic: I could watch asphyxiated passion for years, and I was actually enthralled by Fanny's innovative double pleats (no one else in Hampstead village was so neat with a stitch!) Is this because I'm a woman, or a sap?
Now, before anybody gets hoppity, let me say that of course there are movies that bind the sexes in popcorn-eating solidarity, that don't cause Netflix riots in the house, that can be enjoyed by both partners without one fuming in silence for two hours. Yes, there are men who enjoyed Sex and the City and women who love the Three Stooges (don't ask me how many times I've seen The Road Warrior. Okay, about 40. And today at the festival I was gripped by the violent, macho world of prison feuding in Jacques Audiard's Un Prophet.)
Yet there are movies that speak to women's lives, for whatever reason, and Bright Star, with its attention to domestic life and its beady-eyed observation of 19th-century social protocol, is heaven. And, of course, you can't overrate the erotic frisson provided by twenty layers of boiled wool, with only two fingertips touching.
Then there are movies that seem, on the surface, to have more appeal for women, and yet are just as powerful for men, and one of them is The Red Shoes. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1948 fable about passion and its manifestations – does she dance or does she love? Ah, the agony! – is so beautiful, so red in colour and purple in tone, that it seems, classically, a “woman's picture.”
But look at the directors it's influenced: Coppola, de Palma, Spielberg and of course Martin Scorsese, who introduced a newly restored print of the film in
Earlier in the day, while discussing his World Cinema Foundation project to restore disintegrating films from around the world, Scorsese talked about how his father had taken him to see the film in New York when he was eight years old, and how profoundly the film had affected him ever since. There's a reason, if you needed one, to take your kids to the movies today. You might have a little Scorsese or Schoonmaker on your hands
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