There was a very thoughtful review on the film which got mostly downvotes, and with which I didn't completely agree, but I thought it said some very interesting things nevertheless.
Where is it? If the poster removed due to peer pressure, I encourage him/her to repost it!
I didn't remove it due to peer pressure. IMDB deleted it! Maybe they automatically delete unpopular reviews; maybe someone complained. I am reposting it, with a few small changes that perhaps will make it more palatable to the thought police. Thanks for your support.
shareGood for you! Shame on those who approve of political censorship, especially the mods.
You could have started with "the director is a radical feminist". Movies with a Marxist agenda tend to flop and are overrated by so-called critics.
Why is she a "radical" feminist (because she is a lesbian, I suppose?), and in what way does this film have a "Marxist agenda"? Or are you merely throwing around terms you don't fully understand? Frankly, even if her feminist views were overtly radical, which is not what I got from this film, it would make a pleasant change from seeing films made me men who are blatantly misogynistic. Do you go on to their boards and criticise those directors for being misogynists? Or do you just not like being on the receiving end of what women have endured for centuries?
share[deleted]
"Celine Sciamma must be a homosexual," I deduced as I left the theater, proud of myself for penetrating the mystery of BANDE DE FILLES."
This is hardly an review ,just an ignorant, homophobic rant.
Yes, that is not a review, that is a line from a much longer string of paragraphs.
It would be more interesting to hear what you have to say on FrostyChud's courageous take on the film, instead of spewing political correctness venom.
Well it's a quote from the "review". Courageous ? I doesn't add anything but a twisted fixation on the director's sexuality.
shareI wrote the review.
Fixation? I'm no more fixated on Sciamma's sexuality than BANDE DE FILLES itself is...
I had no idea Sciamma was a lesbian before I saw the movie. If I highlighted this fact with such insistence in my review, it is because only such an insight allows us to comprehend the many contradictions, inconsistencies and bizarre touches in Sciamma's terrible film. Question: would it be possible to write an honest review of "American Pie 3" that makes no mention of the fact that it is the (stupid) erotic fantasy of a (boring) (bourgeois) male? Seeing as "Bande de Filles" is essentially lesbian softcore porn, how is this any different? Question: what is a film if not the expression of the fantasy life of its director? Is not the sexuality of the director, understood in the broadest possible sense, the single most important factor in the construction of his or her dreams and fantasies, of which presumably the film is one?
To address Spadermail's other point, yes, I said "homosexual" and not "lesbian" in my review for a precise reason: in addition to making fools wince, the astringency of this term highlights the fact - which I doubt any lesbians would deny - that heterosexuals and homosexuals have a fundamentally different vision of the world. I also believe that a good review, like a good film, should polarize. What is soft thinking? It is the refusal to recognize difference, which is the foundation of all thought and speech. Thought without difference is ideology, and that's what BANDE DE FILLES is. Let me be even clearer here: BANDE DE FILLES is a fundamentally racist film, and the facile conflation of the lesbian struggle with the black/immigrant struggle on the part of knee-jerk culture leftists allows Sciamma to get away with something she ought to be called to task for.
I'm not saying your review is not interesting, but it did feel quite homophobic, especially when you say that because "every man in the movie save one is a violent psychopath", she must be a lesbian. What? Do you really believe all lesbians are men-haters? Because they're not (as a lesbian myself, I know what I'm talking about).
Then I don't understand why you say it's a racist movie. In France, it's racist people who dissed this movie, because they didn't like the fact that it had an all-black cast. So I'd really like to understand why you think this film's racist?
And finally, how can you consider this to be "softcore porn"?
Noriarty,
I think that the movie is racist because it does not paint a realistic portrait of life in the African ghettos of Paris. Instead of being treated as Cartesian subjects stuck in Hell -- and the Parisian banlieue is Hell -- Marieme and the other girls are fetishized. Take the Rihanna scene, for example. We are clearly supposed to see this scene as a moment of sublime beauty in the midst of a depressing reality. I believe that this is dishonest of the director. By aestheticizing and eroticizing the characters, we lose sight of their properly ethical dimension. Sciamma is so seduced by their beauty that she neglects to analyze what is really happening here: they are, very unethically, fleeing from reality. Or, to put it more bluntly, Sciamma, like so many whites, likes her blacks best when they are singing and dancing rather than thinking. I found the dance-off scene to be particularly repulsive...one more white director reducing black bodies to congenitally rhythmic hips and bottoms.
I don't think that all lesbians are man-haters. I do, however, recognize in the general mistrust and marginalization of men in BANDE DE FILLES -- a marginalization which I find highly unbelievable -- a specifically lesbian flavor, in the same way that the unbelievable marginalization of women in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA can only be explained by the fact that Lawrence's story is a gay man's fantasy. Were BANDE DE FILLES filmed more realistically, all of these girls would probably be (depressingly) obsessed with men, surrounded by men, infatuated with men. What makes the movie a lesbian fantasy is precisely this scotomization of a dimension that, in reality, is not just present but overwhelming. The men that Marieme "defeats" to liberate herself are cardboard cutouts; real men would have oppressed her much more pitilessly. The drug dealer she pushed in public would have killed her. Sciamma is here projecting her own white, bourgeois experience of liberation on a reality that is much more violent.
But most of all, the film just rang false to me.
Well I've seen the film now and I understand/appreciate your argument more although I was 'seduced' perhaps because I found the film more benign than you.
The dance-off scene was the most discomforting in terms of a white homosexual gaze that fetishises rather than reveals its subject(s). The Rhianna 'shine like a diamond' scene I saw differently. I found the scene poignant in that it was funny but very sad; what Rhianna sings about is but a dream for these girls. I don't see how the viewer forgets the ethics though. They are in stolen garments and we saw Marieme menace a fellow pupil for money earlier. (As an aside on the matter of eroticisation: I was perturbed to find Marieme more beautiful with straightened hair than braided. It's something for me to consider about my view but I wondered if there was something perturbing about the presentation of beauty within the film.)
I agree that the men are marginalised. For Marieme's brother his shadowed absence makes him more feared. The relationship with Abou is not developed in a meaningful way. Marieme's relationship with Ismael was a major disappointment; perhaps another critique of men.
Ultimately I think the film is flawed because it presents something complex in a complicated way. There are competing concerns and to some extent an intelligent viewer can perceive them. Thank you for your interesting review though as it meant I viewed the film in a different way. I like reading what you write and yes writing should confront and create a pause in one's cognitive mastication.
A bird sings and the mountain's silence deepens.share
I think that the movie is racist because it does not paint a realistic portrait of life in the African ghettos of Paris. Instead of being treated as Cartesian subjects stuck in Hell -- and the Parisian banlieue is Hell --
I could be wrong, but I think the point was, who, but a lesbian, would be such a man hater? Not that all lesbians are man haters. I think there's a distinction that might easily be missed.
"Whatever happened to Fay Wray?"
I've read the re-posted review. Although I think you overstate the case quite a bit, I think the sexual subtext you find is absolutely there. The film unquestionably revels in (much better than "fetishizes") the female body, and it does so in a way that is unlike that of a straight male director. Very good insights there.
I think you're smart enough to recognize (as soon as I've pointed it out) that the fact that this bothers you is 100% you and 0% the film. That's the way film works.
The comparison to Hitchcock is whip-smart. The rationale for differentiating the two, not so much.
I think you'll agree that you found the film to be sexually perverse and sociopolitically exploitative. Your Hitchcock bit argues that it is perverse because it is exploitative; if it weren't for the exploitation, it would be art, just like Hitchcock.
Really? You really want us to believe that you sat there in the theater, having a visceral response to the film's sociopolitical failings, and then went home and rationally concluded that the film was sexually perverse as a result?
It's kind of grossly obvious (and maybe you're smart enough to see this, now that I've pointed it out) that the opposite happened. Whether something is perverse or not is almost by definition something you feel viscerally rather than determine rationally. And the opposite is true for sociopolitical failure.
Almost no one regards the sexual subtext as perverse. You did. Almost no one regards the film as sociopolitically insulting. You did. It's pretty clear that the latter conclusion is your post hoc rationale to justify the former. Which, as I said, is your problem. Not the film's.
Now, if you can admit to that, we might have a very interesting conversation about the actual sexual subtext. It's much more nuanced than you describe.
Prepare your minds for a new scale of physical, scientific values, gentlemen.share
Precisely. Even if he is correct, which I would dispute heavily (given the vitriol he appears to hold for the director's sexuality), a film possessing a homosexual female gaze is no more perverse than every film, music video and commercial made by a man that makes women no more than a walking pair of breasts. It's the extent to which he is uncomfortable with this that I find most revealing - he's not talking about gaze, he's talking as lesbianism-as-perversion, which gives him away. Concealing this within pseudo-academic language and arguments doesn't make it any more acceptable to me.
shareMy arguments aren't pseudo-academic. They are academic. The movie is racist. It is propaganda. As such, it is dangerous. Sciamma is a militant ideologue peddling a false vision of society and humanity. If I have so much contempt for her it is because she is a nobody who has opportunistically hitched her wagon to a discourse that is on the ascendancy (Judith Butler-style queer theory) in a bid for fame. Have you ever seen an interview with her? She is a rabid apparatchik who would have flourished in the Soviet Union. The only way to deflate ideology is by exposing the ugly, pathological reasons that lead people to adhere to it in the first place: in Sciamma's case, the fact that she is a lesbian who is using this discourse to preach the gospel of her own narcissism.
shareMy arguments aren't pseudo-academic. They are academic. The movie is racist. It is propaganda. As such, it is dangerous. Sciamma is a militant ideologue peddling a false vision of society and humanity. If I have so much contempt for her it is because she is a nobody who has opportunistically hitched her wagon to a discourse that is on the ascendancy (Judith Butler-style queer theory) in a bid for fame. Have you ever seen an interview with her? She is a rabid apparatchik who would have flourished in the Soviet Union. The only way to deflate ideology is by exposing the ugly, pathological reasons that lead people to adhere to it in the first place: in Sciamma's case, the fact that she is a lesbian who is using this discourse to preach the gospel of her own narcissism.
share(given the vitriol he appears to hold for the director's sexuality), a film possessing a homosexual female gaze ... he's not talking about gaze, he's talking as lesbianism-as-perversion, which gives him awayIsn't frostychud's point about the director's sexuality related to her exploiting her black characters for her sexual pleasure and in doing this concealing the director's racism? He writes about perversion as turning someone aside from a correct belief to a false one. He's not discussing the sexual activities of lesbians as perverse, though he might think that too. Under the banner of lesbianism he is arguing the director uses her female characters in a way that betrays her racism. Rather than revealing their lives she conceals them with her lesbian gaze. Whether or not one agrees with this view is for debate but one has to lay out his argument first before it can be debated. As I read it frostychud is not debating lesbianism; he is debating this particular director's point of view and describing it as racist.
A bird sings and the mountain's silence deepens.share
Thank you...yes, this is my argument. I do not believe that lesbianism is inherently perverse. What is perverse here is the way Sciamma uses a fashionable, politically correct discourse to conceal her own sadistic sexuality - sadistic because its goal is the reduction of the other to a fetish.
shareI am actually completely fed up with movies showing up gay romance and solely for that reason being awarded oscars, or having the honor to show up in Cannes and whatever.
But all you've been arguing about is about a wrong notion of reality you have.
I do not leave in any neighbourhood of the kind represented in the movie, neither am I a girl so to understand their minds and behaviours at their teens, but I feel quiet compelled to believe the movie actually shows the cruel reality of our world.
Yes, Blacks are discriminated in Europe, and yes their behaviours in the movie actually quiet describe what I can see in reality.
The director tries to show how you are actually quiet screwed if you are born in such an environment, how the system fails you (school for example), and how you will be offered little alternatives in a world dominated by men. And Yes, at these neighbourhoods it is owned by men.
If your only intentions are arguing how we live in a beautiful world, without ghettos, without discrimination, you definitely feel frustrated because the movie shows a reality you now are trying to forget.
I am glad though the movie doesnt really go on the homossexual side.
Oh, and if one wants to see a genuine example of perversion as a result of the director's sexuality, have a look at Jeepers Creepers 2 - a repugnant fantasy directed by a sex offender who somehow continued to make films after abusing a young cast member on one of his earliest films. That's what fantasy transferred to film looks like, a film which only exists to titilate the director - this is far from that.
shareYou are wrong. That is exactly how it happened. It is natural to have a visceral response to propaganda and ideology when one has a political conscience. I still can't watch George W. Bush speak for this reason. It fills me with rage. Everything about this movie was a lie. Perversion is a turning-away from the truth (that's the etymology of the word). Yes, I do believe that Sciamma's sexuality is as perverse as her politics. One is the truth of the other and for this reason they must be denounced together.
shareActually his review attempts to deconstruct sexual politics by deconstructing the camera shots as director's gaze psychoanalytically. On an internet site where most reviews say little his voice is a breath of fresh air. This is why the other poster describes him as courageous. I've yet to see this film so will reserve judgement on his review until such time as I do.
A bird sings and the mountain's silence deepens.share
It's politically correct to point out homophobia? Wow.
share"Celine Sciamma must be a homosexual," I deduced as I left the theater, proud of myself for penetrating the mystery of BANDE DE FILLES."
I'm not saying that any sexual orientation is offensive, but is PRIVATE and has NOTHING to do with the director's work in this case. So, of course, if it was reported for "hate speech (sexuality)", it'll be deleted. As simply as that
Actually it's just the beginning of a review. Read the whole thing and you'll see that many valid points are made. However, if your mind is too small to permit any new information then, by all means, skip it.
"Whatever happened to Fay Wray?"