A new British film, Powder Room, released next month, features an all-female five-piece rock band, Fake Club. Which, if you watched a lot of editions of Top of the Pops in the 1970s, is nice. Back then, though female singers existed, no women actually played musical instruments, apart from Suzi Quatro. Though lots of the men had long hair, or wore makeup, presumably in compensation.
That, however, is not the only respect in which Powder Room is notable, gender-wise. It's being described as the British Bridesmaids, since it's a comedy about and for women. But, unlike Bridesmaids, it has no male lead characters – just a couple of tiny walk-on parts. This is not surprising, bearing in mind that nearly all of the action is set in the ladies loo of a nightclub. Yet, at the same time, it's surprising, if not unique. If a feature film with a higher female-to-male on-camera ratio has ever been made, then I'd like to know what it is.
Does it matter, mere critical mass of female presence, regardless of whether the film is any good or not? It most certainly does. A film that barely features a woman at all – Reservoir Dogs, say – isn't remarkable for that fact. One doesn't even notice. But a film that's all about women, well, that's both a marker of how far we have come in the last 50 years or so, and also marker of how very far we have yet to go.
As it happens, Powder Room, by first-time director MJ Delaney, is a good and interesting film, with some caveats. It's a low-budget film, so its necessarily limited. It's based on a play, When Women Wee, by Rachel Hirons, and it shows – it has the feel of a filmed play, not a movie. While the club-lavvy set-up is a solid device, it's hard to believe that the disparate women who feature really would all find themselves on a night out at the same place. But, hey, they do. An excellent cast, including Sheridan Smith, Jamie Winstone and Kate Nash, has the acting ability to smooth out a lot of the film's shortcomings.
The central character is Sam, played by Smith, who meets up at this unlikely venue with a college friend she hasn't been in contact with for a long time. The friend has been living in Paris for some years, where she enjoys a successful career running a fashion website with her sophisticated and beautiful French friend (whom she has somewhat inexplicably chosen to bring to this colourful dive back in the UK). She's about to get married to some marvellous guy who adores her. Sam feels so intimidated by these women, and so inadequate, that she fictitiously claims that she's now working as a lawyer, and about to move in with a lovely boyfriend.
The discomfort of the lies is made even worse when Sam's usual crowd, led by Jamie Winstone's Chanel, all turn up. Sam feels compelled to spend the entire evening making sure that the snotty fashionistas don't get wind of the fact that she even knows the rowdy and attention-seeking group of sensation-hungry hedonists that the pair have decided make such hilariously appalling entertainment.
A great strength of the film is that Sam, in her idle boasts and denial of the women she relies on for friendship, doesn't come across as a shallow hypocrite. She's unhappy and vulnerable, dissatisfied with her life, depressed, desperate for change yet unable to make it – like a lot of people. She's dissastisfied with her friends as well. The cliche is that women are great because they're such supportive mates to each other. In Powder Room, female friendships are portrayed as much more contingent. These women are clinging to each other because each other is the best they can do. Much as Sam despises the pretentious Paris girls, it's their approval and friendship that she craves.
One of the problems that arises out of the paucity of material focused on women and their lives is that when something like Powder Room does come along, the temptation is to see it as universal, a comment on what all women's lives are like, not just a narrative about one bunch of people in a certain place at a certain time. Which, of course, it is. No one, after all, ever started declaring that Reservoir Dogs was really a film about what it is to be a man.
Yet, the portrayal of femininity in Powder Room, humorous and outrageous as it is meant to be, is also disturbing. It will certainly offer comfort to those who like to promote moral panic. The drinking, the drug-taking, the pursuit of uber-casual sex, the Miley Cyrus-style twerking, the petty theft and violence that forms the backdrop of the film speaks of what used to be discussed as "ladette culture" – the idea that feminism has liberated women to behave just as badly as the ghastly lads whose seedy magazines are currently being driven off the shelves of All Good Bookshops.
Powder Room seems to suggest that such behaviour is inspired by feelings of unhappiness, inadequacy and emptiness, which few feminists would altogether deny might motivate men who behave in the same way. Yet, when pictures of half-dressed, vomiting girls appear in the tabloids, the liberal response is to suggest that this is a nasty strategy that seeks to demonise modern women.
Jarvis Cocker, in his celebrated song with Pulp, Common People, described men and women whose lives "slide out of view, who dance and drink and screw, because there's nothing else to do". That observation struck a chord with a lot of people, and Powder Room brought it to the forefront of my mind again. The idea of living for Saturday night, to let off stream and discard inhibitions is well understood. But that desperation is not confined to the unsuccessful. You only have to witness oligarchs in Ibiza throwing parties to buy glamorous guests, or money-men in lapdancing clubs in the City of London, to see that it's a lifestye choice lots of people make.
In Powder Room, everyone is desperately trying to have a good time. They've all come to a place designed expressly for the purpose. But none of them succeed – quite the contrary. Everyone is having a miserable time, and doing their best to keep that a secret from everyone else. The odd, rather terrific thing is that even though – or perhaps because – the film is all about women, it becomes much more about people than a film doing the more usual thing of looking at the relationships between the sexes could ever manage.
What's great is that Powder Room has emotional truth. One suspects that it would be more fun to go to the film with a crowd of friends, then talk about it, than it would be to go to the nightclub. My suspicion is that if there was a great deal more material like this – that looks hard and honestly at what it's like to be a woman in this world and this culture at this time, then we'd also gain a great deal more understanding of what it is to be a human in this world.
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