The 20 Best Films Directed by a Woman

Europa, Europa. Agnieszka Holland has not been comfortable lately--_The Secret Garden misses the mysterious formality of that great book; _Total Eclipse seems to describe what had happened to its maker's talent; and her version of Washington Square is so much less credible than The Heiress, made dose to 50 years earlier. This may mean that Holland has been uneasy making pictures with American money and attitudes. After all, she is the child of postwar Poland, and of the urge to treat totalitarian control subversively. Europa, Europa (1991), her most impressive film, is the story of a German Jewish boy who covers up his identity so well that he finds himself in the German army. There's a mix of drama and humor in the film that has deserted Holland subsequently. But then, irony stirs European audiences and produces yawns in America.

Household Saints. Nancy Savoca isn't 40 yet, and she's as tough, passionate and edgy as early Scorsese. Indeed, she has done movies that treat young women the way he does the "guys." To that extent, Savoca asks for no concessions to the fact that she's a woman. You can take your pick out of True Love (1989), Dogfight (1991), Household Saints (1993) and even her two episodes of the HBO movie If These Walls Could Talk (1996). All too often, woman directors are encouraged to be ladylike. Savoca knows how lower-class women think and talk, and she has gotten terrific performances out of Annabella Sciorra, Lili Taylor and even Demi Moore. The best? I think I'd go for Household Saints, if only because of its view of several generations in family life, the great American subject--and the one so many male directors are afraid of. Men make films to escape their families, don't they?

Love Letters. Amy Jones is 45 this year, and I'm not sure what she's doing, or why she's not making more films as good as Love Letters (1983), which involves a young woman (very well played by Jamie Lee Curtis) whose mother has just died. As she sorts through her mother's things, she finds letters from a love affair of which she had no knowledge. This awakening realization coincides with a dawning love affair in the young woman's own life--with a volatile, unsettling married man played by James Keach. I'm not sure that Curtis has ever been better than she is here, and I know this movie showed exceptional promise. In the years since, Jones helped write Mystic Pizza, and she directed the Ally Sheedy picture Maid to Order and The Rich Man's Wife. All of which only shows how hard it is for anyone to pursue a Hollywood career if they believe in stories as small, commonplace and burningly real as that of Love Letters.

Mikey and Nickey. Elaine May is a legend--from her early cabaret and recording partnership with Mike Nichols, from her steadfast resistance to personal publicity, from the fact that she has had a doctoring hand on the scripts of so many worthy films (like Tootsie), and from the blunt truth that she did direct the disastrous Ishtar. She is 66 this year, and probably as unresolved as she was 40 years ago. It is clear that Hollywood fears her as a director, while craving her touch as a writer. But Mikey and Nickey, the film she wrote and directed in 1976 (a box-office failure) may be the best and most unsettling American film made by a woman. Peter Falk and John Cassavetes play long-term pals and small-time crooks who have reached the point where they can't quite trust what they feel.

Mrs. Soffel. Gillian Armstrong is an established international director and she could have several films on this list if I weren't applying a one-each rule. It isn't a question of which are her good films; rather, it's has she ever made a bad one? I'm thinking of My Brilliant Career, High Tide, Little Women and Oscar & Lucinda. But my pick for her work is Mrs. Soffel (1984) for these reasons: it gets period detail so well; it is a haunting evocation of prison life that fixes on doors, cells, locks, keys and bars; it uses Mel Gibson's wicked charm properly; it lets us discover depths in Diane Keaton that she is sometimes too shy to disclose; and it has the crazy bliss of a love affair as well as the certainty of disaster.

Night Games. Mai Zetterling had a fascinating career: she acted in Torment (1944), the first film written by Ingmar Bergman; she was the female lead opposite Danny Kaye in Knock on Wood (1954) and opposite Peter Sellers in _Only Two Can Play (1962); she made documentaries about Eskimos and Gypsies; and, in the 1960s, she directed some of the most erotic and pretentious movies ever made by a feminist--_Loving Couples, Night Games and The Girls. I'll opt for Night Games (1966), if only because it was taken from Zetterling's own novel. It's about a "mature" man who is so repressed that he fails at sex and adult life until he is forced into his own childhood, where we find an overwhelming mother. (Women have as mixed feelings about that role as any men.) All of Zetterling's films are sexy, pungent and dogmatic, and this is no exception--but it so angered male viewers that it was banned from the Venice Film Festival. Made in Sweden, Night Games has fine performances from Ingrid Thulin and Keve Hjelm.

The Night Porter. Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter (1974) has been attacked as creepy, pornographic and sadomasochistic. What else do people want from movies? It's set in Vienna in the late '50s with Dirk Bogarde as the night porter at a small hotel that is a secret haven to ex-Nazis. An innocent visitor to the hotel is Charlotte Rampling, who was once Bogarde's prisoner and lover in a concentration camp. Their erotic past begins to repeat itself. Some people were dismayed at a woman making a film in which feminine passivity was so tied up in sexual ecstasy. But, once seen, The Night Porter is never forgotten. Its mood gets under your skin and settles there, like poison, and all because of the morbid erotics of Bogarde and Rampling.

The Piano. Jane Campion has an eye to match Leni Riefenstahl's. Just look at The Portrait of a Lady--by no means a successful film artistically--to see how majestic she can be in set sequences, in the way the camera moves, feels textures, rhythm, hesitation and psychological angling--the things that are so vital in film. For her best film, I'd pick the most obvious, The Piano (1993), just because its story is the most suited to Campion's brainy romanticism, and because the three people--Hunter, Keitel and Neill--are so uninhibitedly quirky, animal-like. Women are the ones in our world who dean up the shit and vomit and who nurse the dying. As such, they've seen for centuries how pretension, cant and talk fall aside, leaving the "naked, forked animal." You feel that in Campion all the time.

Swept Away. In the late '60s and early 70s, Lina Wertmuller was the epitome of the woman director of art house movies. She was a festival favorite; huge articles were written discussing her; and courses were taught on her nearly diagrammatic movies. For, in truth, she was a political or social scientist illustrating her ideas with films. Talent was not really an issue--and so the pictures have dated badly. Swept Away (1975) is interesting because it's a diagram turned inside out; it's the story of a smart woman and a brutish man who happened to be shipwrecked together. Once on their island, her intelligence falls away while his macho swagger comes to the fore. Wertmuller means it ironically, but irony without talent is a play without character--and today Swept Away looks like the inadvertent dream of a politically correct woman.

Triumph of the Will. People still ask whether Leni Riefenstahl had an affair with Adolf Hitler at the time she made Triumph of the Will (1934). Well, maybe; directors have been known to fuck and be fucked by studio heads. But that's not the point. Far more important, Riefenstahl loved, revered, worshiped Hitler--she believed in him. And that's what shows in the notorious "documentary" rendering of the Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg. Worse, as you watch the movie, you feel the same urge lifting you. That's how talented Riefenstahl was and how deeply she understood the way all films adore power, form, order, movement and authority. She was a true filmmaker, and an empty head, and her masterpiece demonstrates the possibility of making something intensely beautiful, and mindlessly dangerous. That's what so many men have gotten away with for years.

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