Hallelujah!

[oursin]

Have just been to see The Edge of Love: and it's not a film about Dylan Thomas and hyz wynmmynz - it's about the friendship between Caitlin (DT's wife) and Vera (his first girlfriend from adolescence, remet during the Blitz).

And Caitlin and Vera are young married women with small children! And there is story! (admittedly the story is driven by the menfolk, but as it impacts the women.)

(Okay, there were a few films about female friendship in the 1970s - one of them was Julia, which, whatever Hellman's veracity in the original narrative, is a damn fine story about female friends - and I discover that Diane Kurys' Coupe de Foudre, which also had young mothers bonding as friends, was actually 1983 - but it's not exactly a common theme.)

It does, true, have that episode which I could make a case is definitely a narrative trope for devoted friendship between heterosexual women, which is where one assists the other in procuring an abortion (but this may have actually happened, since film is based on fact?).

But otherwise, yay!

Also, I now want the director and scriptwriter to make a movie about Laura Riding and Robert Graves! Because that would be really cool too.

Comments

[wychwood]

Huzzah! :)

The review in the Telegraph magazine last Sunday was deeply scathing about the film and specifically criticised the quantity of changes made to the history in service of narrative, but the reviewer clearly disliked the film and may have been biased by that, I don't know. Still: female friendship! Onscreen! In a film which isn't purely a chick-flick! *is impressed*

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I suspect he may have wanted it to be more about The Great Poet...

from the Telegraph review, because I was curious

[cija.livejournal.com]

"The makers of The Edge of Love, however, do not appear to be particularly brave, and so they have balked at conveying the Thomases' story at full catastrophic pelt. Instead, John Maybury's film has smudged and glossed it to create an artfully picturesque tale that can act as a convenient historical vehicle for two modern beauties: Keira Knightley and Sienna Miller.

I have been suspicious of the double-billing of female stars ever since the insipid offering of The Other Boleyn Girl, which perched the pairing of Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson on a very shaky historical premise indeed. As it turns out, I was right."

(written by a woman, not that it makes any difference. Made my jaw drop at how direct and undisguised her objections were to any movie about two women rather than a woman and a man, though.)

So yeah, a movie about tempestuous heterosexual lovers requires bravery to make, while a serious movie about two women friends is the kind of easy, fluffy waste of time any coward can pull off. This, presumably, is why we see so very many of them.

Re: from the Telegraph review, because I was curious

[oursin.livejournal.com]

No doubt there is an excellent movie to be made about the Dylan-Caitlin relationship, the booze, the multiple infidelities, the fights in pubs etc (am now trying to think who I would cast as Augustus John in cameo flashback role): but that wasn't the movie that was being made here, sigh.

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

I read poor reviews, too.

Aside from the subject matter, did it work as a film?

One of the reviews I - well, saw, since it was Late Review - said that the friendship between Caitlin and Vera didn't make sense within the context of the film - that they were just giggly, without an explanation of how their friendship grew.

I can't help thinking the lack of women-focused films reflects those who literally control the focus - the directors and producers (being largely though not exclusively men). But I guess you wouldn't need me to tell you that.

(BTW I got here via lamentables...)

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Because of course when film-makers depict heterosexual relationships, they always show the way it develops, as opposed to the lovers walking hand in hand on the beach and splashing each other in the waves, etc....

There were some rather tricksy artsty-wartsy bits in the direction, and possibly some undue concealment of certain things in order to explode them as 'surprise revelation'; plus perhaps a bit too much loving-recreation-of-period-detail in parts, but on the whole I thought it worked.

[boxofdelights]

Yay! Chloe liked Olivia!

[livinglaurel.livejournal.com]

//grins

[ironed_orchid]

sounds lovely. I will look out for it.

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

typo poetry: a cup full of lightning...

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Ooops!

[smellingbottle.livejournal.com]

This is virtually the first account of it I've read that didn't suggest it was entirely awful - admittedly, I've been being irked by the very airbrushed, lipsticky posters. Maybe I should see it, as I approve of films in which Famous Man is sidelined in favour of female friendship. The Laura Riding film should certainly be made. And do tell who you'd cast as the AJ flashback.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I'm very tempted to cast Sir Ian, given that John was getting on a bit at the time.

[livinglaurel.livejournal.com]

Wow! I will definitely look for that.

Also, I now want the director and scriptwriter to make a movie about Laura Riding and Robert Graves!

OH yes, altho probably Laura would wind up demonized anyway. I love their story.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Oh, they were such a Carlyle-avatar couple to start with, except that as far as I can see they didn't just make one another miserable (if poetically productive), but everyone else around them got caught in the slipstream.

[livinglaurel.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I don't think Graves really made her happy (else whyever take up Schuyler Jackson?) and she made him sort of ecstatically miserable, and they sort of ground everyone else into dust. Utterly fascinating, tho.

(Why has noone written a biography of Beryl Graves? Boo.)

[madam-silvertip.livejournal.com]

I still love "Julia", the story and the film, though it's almost certainly Muriel Gardiner fanfic. (And as such it is fascinating. A wymynz wrote fanfic about her admiration of another wymynz.)

[madam-silvertip.livejournal.com]

If that were Lilly's only lie, I could forgive her, though it must have been dead scary for Muriel Gardiner. LH's romancing about Hammett and House Unamerican is much more skeezy--not inspired by as sympathetic a motive, to be sure.