One thing I have insisted upon when discussing neo noir is the maleness of the genre. Ned Racine is male and could only be male and the many attempts to imitate Body Heat since it first appeared in 1981 have tended to focus on males as well. The major new component in neo noir has been explicit use of erotic elements and these have been very effective in drawing out aspects of the modern male predicament.
But could you do it the other way? Could you use erotic elements to draw out aspects of the modern female predicament? Before we answer that, we should also ask whether you'd want to. Using sexuality to expose male weakness is a natural but, in the west at least, we have tended to deny that women collectively show any moral weakness in their response to sex. And we are, if anything, even more reluctant to go there since feminism.
You can't simply reverse the genders in any of these movies. A typical male neo noir hero, as I have discussed before, tends to want to make up for the past and feels entitled to "make it". Oftentimes this is shown by his obsessive pursuit of the femme fatale. You could not credibly reverse that.
It's not that some women don't do stupid things in the pursuit of sex. When I was at university there was a woman who got obsessed about the idea of having group sex with members of the university's water polo team and made a major fool of herself over it. But no one would think her story made any general point about the moral challenges of being a woman. She is just too individual and would immediately be taken as an exceptional case. A character like Ned Racine is not like most men but lots of us can easily imagine how we might end up like him if they let certain natural traits have their head.
Francois Ozon, a French film director—a male French film director—and Charlotte Rampling are the only people I can think of who have made a truly convincing neo noir with a female lead.
Like other neo noir, the set up is familiar to the point that it risks cliché. An English woman goes to the south of France to work on a mystery novel and runs into a French girl and their attitudes clash. When the English woman, Sarah, says she loathes swimming pools, the French girl, Julie, says, "Yeah, I know what you mean. I prefer the sea too. The ocean. The crushing waves. The feeling of danger that you could be swimming and at at any second be swept away. Pools are boring. There is no excitement, no feeling of infinity, it's just a big bathtub." Sarah replies, "It's more like a cesspool of living bacteria."
This is not unfamiliar territory: for one woman the pool is too safe, for the other it is too dangerous. The actress playing Julie dresses like trash, when she dresses at all and she just might spend more time topless in this movie than she spends fully dressed.
And Sarah dresses much the way an uptight woman "with a broomstick up her butt" as Julie describes her, might.
We see her here mixing artificial sweetener with yoghurt.
She chokes this crap down even though she obviously hates it. When she is offered an aperitif, she takes tea. You know the drill.
Julie, on the other hand, eats very well.
Our first hint that something out of the usual might be about to happen comes from Sarah. She is offered the chance to stay at her publisher's house in France but from the second she arrives she acts a little off. She behaves more like a teenage babysitter voyeuristically looking through the stuff in the house.
And then Julie acts a little too wild, a little too self destructive, a little too much like a character that someone might make up rather than an actual teenage girl. And there is a major porn film vibe about it as the guys she picks as lovers are incongruous just as male porn stars tend to be. As soon as you see them, you think, "She could do better than this.
I don't think that is accidental. Here is the most significant of the male figures:
The photo below is the infamous porn start John Holmes. Tell me if you think the resemblance of the actor above to John Holmes is a coincidence? Or do you think he was picked for the role precisely because of that resemblance?
I won't say anymore because I wouldn't want to spoil this magnificent film for anyone.
One thing you really want to watch for, however, are repeated visual motifs. For example, one of the things that clearly makes Sarah antsy about France is its Catholic heritage. When she finds a cross on the wall of her bedroom, she must peel it off and put it in a drawer.
When Julie shows up a short while later, one of her first actions is to peel the solar cover off the pool that so disgusts Sarah and go skinny dipping. We, seeing it from Sarah's perspective, see Julie coming swimming out from under the cover and do this:
That is only one of a number of recurring evocations of the crucifixion in this movie. Contrary to what is usually the case in artsy movies, there is actually a point to it as there is a death and resurrection theme but who, how and where is something I can't tell you about without spoiling the movie for you.
What is worth talking about a little, I think, is the relationship between the two women. As I said at the top, no one would ever believe a tale about a woman in pursuit of a particular lover says anything about the moral predicament of being a woman the same way that the obsessive pursuit of a particular sort of woman definitely does say something about the moral predicament of being a man. But a woman contemplating a younger, wilder self she might have been does, I think, say something about the larger moral issues of being a woman. Who a woman is and how she became that woman and what she gave up along the way and did she give it up because that was the right choice, the prudent choice, or did she give it up because she was chicken—par délicatesse, j'ai perdu ma vie—is very much to the point.
We get the camera flanneur for full twenty minutes in this movie. Stuff just happens without any seeming story line. And our heroine gets on board the TGV and rides to the south of France. And there she is in the Luberon with the winds coming through and the pine trees and the ruins of the Marquis de Sade's castle. This is familiar territory and familiar territory for the English experience of France thanks to Peter Mayles.
Imagine it's you suddenly cut loose from all your social ties in this far away but familiar exotica. What would you do? What would you fantasize about? More to the point, think of a woman you know and love, aren't you curious about what she might fantasize about or even do in such a situation? And don't you think she herself might wonder what she might be capable of in such a situation?
But could you do it the other way? Could you use erotic elements to draw out aspects of the modern female predicament? Before we answer that, we should also ask whether you'd want to. Using sexuality to expose male weakness is a natural but, in the west at least, we have tended to deny that women collectively show any moral weakness in their response to sex. And we are, if anything, even more reluctant to go there since feminism.
You can't simply reverse the genders in any of these movies. A typical male neo noir hero, as I have discussed before, tends to want to make up for the past and feels entitled to "make it". Oftentimes this is shown by his obsessive pursuit of the femme fatale. You could not credibly reverse that.
It's not that some women don't do stupid things in the pursuit of sex. When I was at university there was a woman who got obsessed about the idea of having group sex with members of the university's water polo team and made a major fool of herself over it. But no one would think her story made any general point about the moral challenges of being a woman. She is just too individual and would immediately be taken as an exceptional case. A character like Ned Racine is not like most men but lots of us can easily imagine how we might end up like him if they let certain natural traits have their head.
Francois Ozon, a French film director—a male French film director—and Charlotte Rampling are the only people I can think of who have made a truly convincing neo noir with a female lead.
Like other neo noir, the set up is familiar to the point that it risks cliché. An English woman goes to the south of France to work on a mystery novel and runs into a French girl and their attitudes clash. When the English woman, Sarah, says she loathes swimming pools, the French girl, Julie, says, "Yeah, I know what you mean. I prefer the sea too. The ocean. The crushing waves. The feeling of danger that you could be swimming and at at any second be swept away. Pools are boring. There is no excitement, no feeling of infinity, it's just a big bathtub." Sarah replies, "It's more like a cesspool of living bacteria."
This is not unfamiliar territory: for one woman the pool is too safe, for the other it is too dangerous. The actress playing Julie dresses like trash, when she dresses at all and she just might spend more time topless in this movie than she spends fully dressed.
And Sarah dresses much the way an uptight woman "with a broomstick up her butt" as Julie describes her, might.
We see her here mixing artificial sweetener with yoghurt.
She chokes this crap down even though she obviously hates it. When she is offered an aperitif, she takes tea. You know the drill.
Julie, on the other hand, eats very well.
Our first hint that something out of the usual might be about to happen comes from Sarah. She is offered the chance to stay at her publisher's house in France but from the second she arrives she acts a little off. She behaves more like a teenage babysitter voyeuristically looking through the stuff in the house.
And then Julie acts a little too wild, a little too self destructive, a little too much like a character that someone might make up rather than an actual teenage girl. And there is a major porn film vibe about it as the guys she picks as lovers are incongruous just as male porn stars tend to be. As soon as you see them, you think, "She could do better than this.
I don't think that is accidental. Here is the most significant of the male figures:
The photo below is the infamous porn start John Holmes. Tell me if you think the resemblance of the actor above to John Holmes is a coincidence? Or do you think he was picked for the role precisely because of that resemblance?
I won't say anymore because I wouldn't want to spoil this magnificent film for anyone.
One thing you really want to watch for, however, are repeated visual motifs. For example, one of the things that clearly makes Sarah antsy about France is its Catholic heritage. When she finds a cross on the wall of her bedroom, she must peel it off and put it in a drawer.
When Julie shows up a short while later, one of her first actions is to peel the solar cover off the pool that so disgusts Sarah and go skinny dipping. We, seeing it from Sarah's perspective, see Julie coming swimming out from under the cover and do this:
That is only one of a number of recurring evocations of the crucifixion in this movie. Contrary to what is usually the case in artsy movies, there is actually a point to it as there is a death and resurrection theme but who, how and where is something I can't tell you about without spoiling the movie for you.
What is worth talking about a little, I think, is the relationship between the two women. As I said at the top, no one would ever believe a tale about a woman in pursuit of a particular lover says anything about the moral predicament of being a woman the same way that the obsessive pursuit of a particular sort of woman definitely does say something about the moral predicament of being a man. But a woman contemplating a younger, wilder self she might have been does, I think, say something about the larger moral issues of being a woman. Who a woman is and how she became that woman and what she gave up along the way and did she give it up because that was the right choice, the prudent choice, or did she give it up because she was chicken—par délicatesse, j'ai perdu ma vie—is very much to the point.
We get the camera flanneur for full twenty minutes in this movie. Stuff just happens without any seeming story line. And our heroine gets on board the TGV and rides to the south of France. And there she is in the Luberon with the winds coming through and the pine trees and the ruins of the Marquis de Sade's castle. This is familiar territory and familiar territory for the English experience of France thanks to Peter Mayles.
Imagine it's you suddenly cut loose from all your social ties in this far away but familiar exotica. What would you do? What would you fantasize about? More to the point, think of a woman you know and love, aren't you curious about what she might fantasize about or even do in such a situation? And don't you think she herself might wonder what she might be capable of in such a situation?
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