For ages, Western civilization has been hung up on fathers and sons: Oedipus, Abraham and Isaac, Jesus, George and George W. Maybe it’s time for a change. To celebrate its tenth anniversary of rewarding Boston with some of the world’s most innovative and provoking new movies, the International Festival of Women’s Cinema offers explorations by top female filmmakers into the terra incognita of mother/daughter relationships. We’re not talking Stepmom with Julia Roberts here, or The Joy Luck Club or even Carrie. These films stretch the meaning of that enigmatic, primal bond far beyond any Hollywood clichŽ, and along the way they overturn many received notions about gender, sexuality, identity, and filmmaking itself.
For example, Lovely and Amazing (2001; April 11 at 7:45 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner Theatre and April 12 at 3:15 p.m. at the Brattle Theatre, with the filmmaker present at the Thursday-night screening), Nicole Holofcener’s first feature since her insouciant and shrewd debut, Walking and Talking (1996), takes on female stereotypes and overturns them, sometimes. Jane Marks might have been an easy target of parody: rich and idle, she fills the loneliness of her golden years by adopting an overweight African-American daughter, nudging her grown-up birth daughters into a new awareness of their unhappiness, and undergoing liposuction. Instead, she provides the film’s steadying, humane center, and it doesn’t hurt that she’s played by stalwart Oscar winner Brenda Blethyn. Or that Holofcener, who also wrote the script, couldn’t sustain a stereotype if she wanted to, at least not with female characters.
Catherine Keener is alternately brittle and vulnerable as elder daughter Michelle, an unhappy housewife who makes unsellable art and alienates almost everyone with her self-loathing. Emily Mortimer is cute and sad as the younger daughter, who’s seeking to make it as an actress in Hollywood (a scene in which she bares all to a callow actor played by Dermot Mulroney could have been grotesque but is instead cathartic). Newcomer Raven Goodwin is truculent and lost as the adopted Annie. Why are they special? Not so much because of the performances and the details, which are splendid (Michelle sculpts tiny chairs: "Wouldn’t you love to be small enough to sit in one?" she asks), as because of the unstated, inescapable web of love and loathing, past and present, that connects them.
One thread in that web binds the adopted daughter from another culture and the two generations of women that try to include her in their family. The fascinating documentary Daughter from Danang (2001; April 12 at 8 p.m. and April 13 at 4 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner, plus — on "bonus day" — April 15 at 4:45 p.m. in the Coolidge Corner’s video screening room), from Gail Dolgin and Vivente Franco, follows a similar thread.
In a campaign motivated more by politics than by compassion, the Ford administration in 1975 airlifted 2000 American-Asians from a South Vietnam on the verge of collapse to foster homes in the United States. Many of the children were not orphans at all; their mothers were terrorized into believing their children would be persecuted by the new regime. One such child returns to visit her birth mother 22 years after her exile with the sentimental high hopes of the South Carolina housewife she’s become. The ecstatic reunion fizzles within a week as her old family ask for money and she misses her dishwasher. Which culture is at fault? Or is it just the nature of families and time? Like most of the films in this festival, Daughter from Danang makes you come up with your own answers and questions.
It never rains in first-time New Zealand director Christine Jeffs’s Rain (2001; April 13 at 10 p.m. at the Brattle, with the director present), her adaptation of the Kirsty Gunn novel, but there is a lot of pouring going on as Kate (Sarah Peirse) and Ed (Alistair Browning) party away their dissolving marriage while summering by the seaside in 1972. Occasionally mixing drinks but mostly neglected are their children, 13-year-old Janey (Alicia Fulford-Wierzbicki) and little Jim (Aaron Murphy). Janey gets curious when her mom engages in a sloppy affair with a passing photographer, and her indirect initiation into the world of sexuality and adult despair brings unwonted punishment. Jeffs builds a wispy atmosphere of dread and nascent revelation, and then, for better or worse, justifies it.
As does Rose Troche (Go Fish) in The Safety of Objects (2002; April 12 at 7:15 at the Brattle Theatre and April 13 at 3:30 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner, with the director present Friday), an adaptation of short stories by A.M. Homes that, like Rain, comes down hard on brothers. The central figure in this minuet of four messed-up suburban families is Paul Gold (Joshua Jackson), who’s comatose, hooked up to life support, and tended by his mother, Esther (Glenn Close). A whole community — including sister Julie (Jessica Campbell), next-door neighbor and struggling single mom Annette (Patricia Clarkson), handyman Randy (Timothy Olyphant), and recently jobless lawyer Jim Train (Dermot Mulroney, again) — revolves around his paralysis, drawn by guilt, rage, futility, and fate. With equal measures of melodrama and absurdity, with judicious flashbacks and an exquisite eye for detail, Troche performs a task similar to Robert Altman’s in Short Cuts and Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm but with an ineffable sensibility of her own.
That sensibility perceives narratives four-dimensionally, an interweaving of past and present with individual fates intersecting with ironic serendipity. Jill Sprecher (Clockwatchers) shares that sense in her Thirteen Conversations About One Thing (2001; April 13 at 7:20 p.m. at the Brattle and April 14 at 1 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner, with the director present on Saturday), a film reminiscent of Krzysztof Kieslowski in its startling synchronicities and of Albert Einstein in its manifold bending of the concept of time. Four story lines interweave, featuring members of four "Professions," and in each case the film begins in medias res (charts might be helpful).
Representing "The Attorneys" is Troy (Matthew McConaughey), a hot-shot prosecutor gloating in a gin mill over a recent triumph; we know he’s due for his come-uppance. Gene (Alan Arkin), a "Claims Adjuster," is hunched over a beer nearby. He takes Troy to task with a tale about happiness; he knows it by its absence. Meanwhile, irrepressible optimist Beatrice (Clea Duvall) tries to buck up despondent fellow "Housekeeper" Dorrie (Tia Texada); poor innocent Beatrice is guilty of hubris as well. Finally, dour physics professor Walker (John Turturro) bums out his class with theories of entropy and falling bodies as he sourly tries to find contentment through selfishness.
Only in the Turturro segment does Sprecher stray into Neil LaBute territory. Mostly, the film’s fugue-like rhythms ignite with brilliant ornaments of detail: a figure cowering in an alley seen from high above as scraps of paper fall; a woman carrying a pristine shirt on a hanger through deserted streets until a stray gust carries it, changing everything, or perhaps one thing, forever.
Mothers and daughters are conspicuous by their absence in Thirteen Conversations. Susan Seidelman (Desperately Seeking Susan) brings them back with drastic variations in Gaudi Afternoon (2000; April 14 at 7:45 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner, with the director present). More gaudy than Gaud’-esque, this gender-bending romantic farce almost gets away with its contrivances in the shadow of the master architect’s brilliantly loopy Barcelona buildings. Post-Pollock Marcia Gay Harden plays an Almod—var-ish in-transition male-to-female transsexual who’s in a bitchy custody fight for his spoiled daughter with his lesbian ex-wife (Lili Taylor). Judy Davis, a spinster translator, gets caught in the middle and looks exasperated. Who wouldn’t be?
Gender boundaries blur even further in Harry Dodge’s By Hook or by Crook (2001; April 14 at 3:15 at the Coolidge Corner), though the gut emotions of motherhood and daughterhood remain keen. Shy (Silas Howard), a butch androgyne from the sticks (boy or girl? "Both," he tells some curious kids), heads to San Francisco to rob a bank. But along the way he detours from Bonnie and Clyde to The Wizard of Oz after bumping into Valentine (Dodge), another gender anomaly with twin chin whiskers that make her look like a sardonic catfish. Valentine suffers from a poetic logorrhea and down-and-autism. Despite Shy’s inept intervention and the care of her lover, Billy (Stanya Kahn), she needs to be reunited with her long-lost birth mother and told she’s "all right." This could have been a precious oddity but for Dodge’s gift for verbal, musical, and visual rifts; it’s reminiscent of Gus Van Sant before he headed off to the happy Good Will Hunting ground.
Most extreme in its mother/daughter speculations here, and maybe most entertaining, is Lynn Hershman-Leeson’s Teknolust (2001; April 13 at 6 p.m. and April 14 at 10 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner). Rosetta Stone (yes, it’s that kind of a movie), a mousy researcher, has cloned herself into three color-coordinated individuals: Marine, Olive, and Ruby. She keeps them happily in an isolation chamber in her apartment, except for Ruby, the most advanced, who must venture out into the real world to obtain the sperm the clones need to survive.
The arrangement works fine until the donors are beset by impotence and computer failure, losing their hard drive in both instances. The government investigates, and all could have been quite silly or pontificating had Hershman-Leeson not learned to lighten up since her equally ambitious Conceiving Ada (1997). Of course, having Tilda Swinton playing Rosetta and all three clones allows for considerable suspension of disbelief. The Oscar-nominated take-charge mom in The Deep End and the former man who becomes a woman in Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992) makes quite plausible this genetic shortcut to motherhood — or is it sisterhood? or selfhood? "As easy as baking brownies," she insists, and when you compare the complications in this festival’s other films, who could argue?
