The 20 Best Films Directed by a Woman

Vagabond. Agnes Varda was married to Jacques Demy--yet her artistic personality is as cool as his was warm. She has always been drawn to documentaries and the real, and she has worked slowly over the years. But at least three of her pictures are special--_Cleo From 5 to 7_ (1962), about a young woman waiting to get a doctor's report; Le Bonheur _(1965), a strange celebration of extramarital love; and--her best, I think--_Vagabond (1985), in which Sandrine Bonnaire plays an intransigent young wanderer who takes to the life of the road and suffers all the consequences of being free. By instinct, Varda always stays very detached from her characters, observing them like a documentarian; and sometimes that scans like coldness. But here the method only inspires the ferocious commitment of Bonnaire.

Wanda. Barbara Loden was the second wife of director Elia Kazan. She was an actress (she plays Warren Beatty's wild sister in Splendor in the Grass, and she created the lead role in Arthur Miller's After the Fall--a part based on Marilyn Monroe). In 1971, she directed her one and only film, Wanda, about a divorced woman in a Pennsylvania mining town who becomes the inept companion to a petty crook. Loden played the central part, without glamour or any need to be loved by audiences. It's unlikely that any man (Kazan included) could have presented a woman who is so unremarkable, so slow on the uptake, such a drab loser. But, of course, the attitude that gives us women as sweethearts or whores (and always lovely) is a projection of the male romanticism that has always dominated moviemaking.

Yentl. I hope never to have to see The Prince of Tides or The Mirror Has Two Faces again. They show the marvelous Barbra Streisand at her worst--solemn and sated with humorless self-regard; fatuously confident that her therapy is art for the rest of us. But a thin line may separate the grotesque and the beautiful. Her first film, Yentl (1983) is, it seems to me, a piece of magic. How can that be? Well, the Isaac Bashevis Singer story is strong enough to contain her narcissism without making it hysterical. The period setting is attractive and funny. And the circumstances of a musical--plus the lush, long lines of the songs by Alan and Marilyn Bergman and Michel Legrand--allow Barbra to be a good actress. Just like Frank Sinatra, her acting needs song. Talking and thinking are Barbra's weak points. Yentl's camera soars and swoops, like the songs, and the star's sense of self is effortlessly merged with the self-discovery of her character.

You and I. Larissa Shepitko was a beautiful young woman--people were always supposing she wanted to be an actress instead of a director. A student of Alexander Dovzhenko, one of the giants of Soviet silent film, she helped his widow complete his last movie. She made her own name with Heat (1963), filmed in the hottest parts of Central Asia. You and I _(1971) is the film I'd pick. Shot in Siberia, it's about a brain surgeon's crisis of faith, constructed in a series of flashbacks. Like Dovzhenko, Shepitko had a lyrical eye for peasant faces and nature. But she was a modern woman, too. You and I shows the intelligence of her social criticism. She might have flowered in the age of glasnost, but in 1979, while she was considering an offer to work in the U.S., she was killed in a car crash (she was only 40). Her husband, Elem Klimov, completed her last film, _Farewell (1981).

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David Thomson is the author of Rosebud; the Story of Orson Welles and Beneath Mullholland: Thoughts on Hollywood and Its Ghosts, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

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