Antonia’s
Line won the Oscar for the best foreign language film of 1995, the first
film by a female director ever to accomplish this feat. The woman in question
was the Dutch film-maker, Marleen Gorris, who had sprung to prominence with her
sensational debut film, A Question of
Silence (1982). Under the guise of a thriller about the seemingly
motiveless murder of a male boutique owner by three women previously unknown to
each other, the film was an audacious feminist polemic that stormed the
citadels of oppressive patriarchy. Made almost as a kind of avant-garde movie
which therefore pulled no punches, the film’s uncompromising originality
propelled it into the mainstream, where it became hugely controversial. Rather like the legal figures at the end of
the film who fail to see that the huge explosion of derisive female laughter is
directed at them, hypersensitive male critics missed the film’s mode of black
comedy and were offended by its seeming proposition that the solution to patriarchy
might be murder. (It was not proposing that, any more than cannibalism was
being seriously offered as a solution to poverty and starvation in Jonathan
Swift’s political pamphlet, A Modest
Proposal: both satirists were taking up an extreme position and suggesting
a metaphor that highlighted the horror of a particular social situation in the
hope that the oppressors might feel some guilt and shame.) Possibly goaded by
the angry accusations of an anti-male bias that bordered on hatred, Gorris’s
second film was the even more ferocious Broken
Mirrors (1984), whose main setting is a brothel in a city where a serial
killer is on the loose. 1They’re all
bastards,’ says the proprietor about the
clientele of her Happy House brothel to a new girl, who, significantly, has
become a prostitute out of economic necessity. ‘Even the nice ones aren’t
nice.’ Ironically, the only sympathetic
male character in the film is literally a dirty old man, a harmless, unseen hermit who is befriended by the
brothel-keeper, but who ,to her dismay, is expelled from his hideaway because
he is not ‘normal’, the implication being that the ‘normal’ male is much more
of a threat.
The vehemence of Gorris’s feminism
in her first two films even discomfited some feminists, who accused her of
being not so much provocative as paranoid. (See, for example, Pam Cook’s review
of Broken Mirrors in Monthly Film Bulletin, April, 1985: 114)
Nevertheless, The Last Island (1990)
continued in much the same vein, being a feminine Lord of the Flies for grown-ups, in which a motley group of men and
women are shipwrecked on an island, fall out, turn violent, and where only the
women survive. Still, the characterisation of the men is more complex than
before; and this strain is continued in Antonia’s
Line, which is mellower and even upbeat in effect and allows some males to
exhibit such hitherto unacknowledged characteristics as kindness, unselfishness
and compassion. Here the nice ones stay
nice. Admittedly, the narrative is still unashamedly female-driven and dominated,
and the most sympathetic man is a philosophical recluse who would make even Schopenhauer look cheerful by comparison. Yet
there is a greater generosity of spirit to all humankind, and an exuberant
relish for life’s variety that sweeps up everything in its path. When it was
shown at the Toronto Festival, the film was given a standing ovation.
The story is told in flashback by
Antonia (a superb performance from Willeke
van Ammelrooy), remembering her past on what she has decided is to be
the last day of her life; and also by a narrator who only at the end reveals
herself to be Antonia’s great-granddaughter, Sarah. The point of view is
important, for, whereas at the beginning
it is said of their community that “ men’s noise rode roughshod over {a
woman’s] silence”, the women will
gradually be given a voice; will insist on making themselves heard; and
will assume power over their own lives
and, crucially, their own sexuality. When Antonia and her daughter
Danielle (Els Dottermans) have first
returned to Antonia’s home village just after the war to attend to her dying
mother and take over the family farm, they have walked past a wall which has
the sign ‘Welcome To Our Liberators’ scrawled over it. It no doubt refers to
the Allied soldiers who have liberated the village after the war, but, in
retrospect, it will apply equally to Antonia and Danielle, who will go some way
towards liberating the community from its chauvinism, prejudice and conformity.
Over a number of years Antonia’s
farm will become a kind of benevolent matriarchy, a haven for the misfits and
the maltreated of the village. These
include the retarded Deedee (Marina de Graaf), who, in an early scene
reminiscent of Thomas Hardy, has been offered up for sale by her brutish father.
When she is being sexually abused in a barn by her brother, Pitte, Danielle
leaps to her defence by impaling Pitte with a pitchfork and taking her back to
the farm. Deedee will bond with Loony Lips, who has been taken under her wing
by Antonia when he is being persecuted by the sons of Farmer Bas (Jan Decleir), a relative newcomer
to the village (he has only been there twenty years). Bas will be impressed by
Antonia’s humanity and courage and will propose marriage. ‘The sons need a
mother,’ he says. ‘But I don’t need your sons,’ says Antonia, who will refuse
his offer but will later enter into a relationship with him of deep mutual
affection. In the meantime, the growing Danielle decides she wants a baby. ‘And
what about a husband to go with it?’ asks Antonia. ‘I don’t think so,’ she
replies. Danielle will have a daughter, Therese (Veerle van Overloop), who will
turn out to be a mathematical genius. Danielle herself will become a gifted
painter and fall in love at first sight with Therese’s teacher, a moment signalled
when Danielle, who has always had a vivid imagination, immediately transforms her in her mind’s eye
into a vision of Botticelli’s Venus.
And so it goes on. A friend, who
has helped Antonia find a suitable young man to father Danielle’s child, turns
up at the farm and immediately falls for a curate, who has just left the church because he found
it too constricting for his innate sense of happiness; and together they will
produce twelve children. If all this sounds impossibly idyllic, one should add
that the film is not blind to the darker sides of life. Although a kindly and
much loved tutor to Antonia’s offspring, the hermit Crooked Finger (Mil
Seghers) can never shake himself free from his conviction of the fundamental
cruelty and futility of existence, and he will commit suicide. Loony Lips will
die in an accident and Deedeee will be inconsolable, until reminded that ‘life
wants to live’ and she must carry on. In the most disturbing section of the
film, Deedee’s contemptible brother, Pitte returns to the village and, in
retaliation for Danielle’s attack on him all those years before, pays her back
by raping (offscreen) her daughter, Therese. All out for revenge, Antonia will
arm herself with a shotgun, but, on confronting the rapist, she curses rather
than kills him, saying that killing is not in her nature. Women give life, not
take it; to do the latter would be fighting a monster like him with the very
weapons they deplore. Curiously, though, the curse casts its spell. Later that night, Pitte is to
be beaten up by the sons of Farmer Bas; and when he returns home, he is
murdered by his brother, who has always hated him.
The fulfilment of Antonia’s curse
seems like an element in a fairy-tale, and is an example of the film’s
narrative and stylistic fluidity. Although grounded mainly in earthy
naturalism, paying particular attention to collective enterprise and the women’s
domestic labour on the farm, the film also has whimsical flights of fantasy and
surrealism. Antonia’s mother sits up in her coffin to sing ‘My Blue Heaven’ at
her own funeral ; a statue of Mary suddenly smiles; a stone angel uses its wing
to clobber an unholy priest who has refused the last rites to a man who
sheltered Jews during the war. This rich stew of disparate elements- magical
realism, bucolic revelry, Europeanised gloom- was not to everyone’s taste; and
even an admirer of the film like Robin Wood thought that the film’s Utopian
fantasy, ‘miraculously exempt from the incursions of corporate capitalism’ was
inconsistent with other details of the film, such as the fact that this
village, which seems removed from most of the trappings of modern civilisation,
is nevertheless situated in close proximity to a large modern university. ‘We
need empowering utopian fantasies,’ he wrote, but added that ‘they must take
into account the conditions within which we actually today exist and struggle,
for how can we strive to reach a utopia in which it is impossible to believe?’
(Wood: 316-17) However, it is possible to take the film as essentially as a
folk-tale or matriarchal fable with, in the words of a Sight and Sound review (May, 1997: 59) “all the magic of a Chagall
painting.” Certainly the film is less concerned with social realism and evolution than with the eternal life-cycle of birth and
death. This is nicely conveyed in the
circling camera movement as Therese’s new-born baby girl is handed from
villager to villager in an act of communal blessing; and also suggested in the
narrator’s summation that ‘as this long chronicle draws to a conclusion,
nothing has ended.’
Since Antonia’s Line, Gorris has moved from filming her own original
screenplays and tended to specialise more in heavyweight literary adaptations.
She crafted a fine cinematic interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s feminist
classic, Mrs Dalloway (1997),
starring Vanessa Redgrave; and an interesting version of Vladimir Nabokov’s The Luzhin Project (2000), with John
Turturro and Emily Watson. With Emily Watson again, she also made a compelling
adaptation of Eugenia Ginzburg’s harrowing but ultimately heroic personal memoir
as a literary professor in the Stalinist era sentenced to ten years hard labour
in Siberia , Within the Whirlwind (2009), which has had only a limited worldwide
release. Recently she has directed a television mini-series about the life of
Rembrandt. Antonia’s Line remains her
biggest international success thus far, with audiences relishing its warm
vitality, lusty femininity and gutsy resilience in the face of patriarchal
prejudice and pressure, though, in my view, Robin Wood is right in suggesting that A
Question of Silence still stands as ‘her finest achievement to date’ (Wood:
317) In that film, the women’s laughter
in the courtroom that concludes the trial, undermining the confidence and
certainty of arrogant male authority, is as liberating as Ibsen’s notorious and resonant slammed door
that concludes A Doll’s House. A Question of Suilence alone will ensure
that Gorris remains a permanent icon of feminist film at its most
powerful, provocative and pertinent.
Suggested Reading
Pam Cook ‘Review: Broken Mirrors,’ Monthly Film
Bulletin,
April, 1985,p.114.
Maggie Humm ‘Author/Auteur: Feminist Literary Theory
and Feminist
Film’ in Feminism and Film, Edinburgh University Press,1999, pp.90-111.
Barbara Koenig Quart Women
Directors: The Emergence of a New Cinema,
Neil Sinyard ‘A Question of Gorris’, Dutch Crossing, Winter,1997,
pp.100-116.
Tom Tunney and
Geoffrey McNab ‘Review: Antonia’s Line’, Sight and
Sound, May, 1997,p.59.
Robin Wood Sexual Politics and Narrative Film, Columbia University
1998, pp.315-17.
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