A Film a Week - Johanna Dohnal - Visionary of Feminism / Die Dohnal

previously published on Cineuropa

It seems that, with the current state of things in global economics and politics, some of the heroes of the past are being systematically forgotten, and some of the rights and liberties they worked so hard to attain for the people have to be defended – or even fought for – again and again. One of these heroes was late Austrian politician Johanna Dohnal, a socialist and a feminist whose work in the fields of women's and labour rights stretched beyond a strictly national context. The documentary Johanna Dohnal - Visionary of Feminism, directed by Sabine Derflinger (known for docs such as One Out of 8 and Hot Spot, as well as the fiction features Day and Night and Anna Fucking Molnar), which puts the iconic politician firmly in the spotlight, recently premiered at the Viennale.

The strictly Austrian scope of the documentary offers little chance of a wider international release, even though a number of parallels can be drawn with contemporary trends and social issues in the whole of Europe. However, its TV-friendliness and the clarity of Derflinger's storytelling might pave the way for a decent performance in this kind of market.

From 1979-1995, Dohnal occupied two different offices within the Austrian government: first as State Secretary for Women's Rights and Issues, and from 1990, as Minister for Women. During that period, she fought for the redefinition of gender roles (striving to offer other career options for women as well as introducing parental leave for men), granting maternity leave and guaranteeing pension rights for female farmers, establishing shelters for women and children who had been victims of domestic abuse, and making marital rape legally equivalent to extra-marital rape. She fought hard for gender quotas and saw them as a tool to enable women to be represented in a political landscape dominated by male representatives and officials, rather than as a goal, per se. Aside from being a feminist, she was also a committed socialist who came from a working-class background and knew the life of working women only too well. In her politics, labour rights were tightly connected to women's issues, and she saw economic dependence as one of the principal tools of oppression.

Derflinger examines Dohnal's influence on her immediate environment, portrayed through the testimonies of her widow/domestic partner Annemarie Aufreiter, her daughter Ingrid Dohnal, her granddaughter Johanna-Helen Dohnal, public figures (such as various artists, performers, journalists and contemporary feminists) and society as a whole. The filmmaker also tracks the politician's career, covering its rise during the times of Bruno Kreisky's tenure and its fall during the era of Franz Vranitzky, when Dohnal fell victim to different political pressures and to the global adoption of the neo-liberal model, even within the ranks of leftist political parties.

Over the course of the movie, Derflinger makes use of the usual, tried-and-tested methods from the arsenal of documentary filmmaking, such as talking-heads interviews with the subjects conducted in their home or work environments, and archive TV material in which Dohnal has to defend her political agenda, which she does eloquently and passionately. The most poignant moments are the excerpts from Dohnal's personal diary, with which Derflinger opens and closes the film. The steady camerawork by Christine A Maier and Eva Testor and the precise editing courtesy of Niki Mossböck suit the material well, which makes Johanna Dohnal - Visionary of Feminism easy to watch and to follow – and this is very necessary for such an informative and socially charged documentary.

A Film a Week - Holiday

Dealing with some topics and tropes can be touchy nowadays. Let us say rape or any form of violence against women, if done by a male filmmaker will always have, rightfully so, a shadow of the doubt about his intentions. Are they purely noble? Inquisitive? Political? Some form of activism? How about attention grabbing? Or simply voyeuristic, maybe even sadistic and misogynistic? Luckily, the director of Holiday, a film that has a brutal rape scene at its very centre, is a woman. The debutant in feature length format, Isabella Eklöf, also co-wrote the script together with Johanne Algren. The new set of rules applies, the film can even be regarded as subversive and therefore a perfect companion piece to a French feminist rape and revenge thriller simply called Revenge, directed by Coralie Fargeat.

It might seem like a long shot, having in mind that Revenge is pretty fast and furious, yet stylishly done action flick with more than a hint of bloodshed, while Holiday is a slow-burning gangster drama constructed around a love triangle with only one murder very late in it (and that murder is purely accidental). However, there are a lot of things in common on the surface level as well as in deeper character analysis to bring the two films together.

The list of similarities starts with the leading characters, even their physical appearance (both are lean, petite blondes) and the girly-girl style (or the lack of style to speak of). When we first see Revenge’s Jenny, she seems to be a stupid girl chasing some instant fame and falling for a good-looking sleazeball that is her boyfriend. Later on we can assume that she is an archetypical female in the male world, pretending to be anything the men around her want her to be, thinking that she would profit from that kind of behaviour. Holiday’s Sascha (played unapologetically and in stunning fashion by Victoria Carmen Sonne) is also a stupid girl of sorts, a gangster’s girlfriend so materialistic that she easily gets addicted to attention, gifts and the luxurious lifestyle without having any real clue what is actually going on. Only in the end, after the crucial rape scene (and due to it), we as the viewers can ask ourselves whether she is an intelligent, calculating psychopath in development.

The case for Sascha’s stupidity is a strong one in the beginning. Having spent all her money, she tries to seduce her boyfriend’s boss, a Danish mafia kingpin residing in Turkish resort town of Bodrum, she was supposed to give message to. She fails the loyalty test and also as a seductress and even gets slapped a couple of times for trying to climb up the ladder too fast. However, when her boyfriend Michael (Lai Yde) comes and covers her with attention and gifts, everything seems fine and she fits well in the gangster “family” (which actually seems like an extended family together with girlfriends / wives and children of different ages) occupying a hillside villa overlooking the bay. Michael might call her “princess”, but there is something cold and threatening about him, so Sascha starts hanging around a friendly-looking and kind-hearted Dutch man named Thomas (Thijs Römer) she has accidentally met at the ice cream shop. But her luck is about to change…

The good thing Eklöf does is leaving most of the circumstances clouded by mystery. It was a gamble, but it paid of. What are they doing in Bodrum except for enjoying the sea and the sun? It is some kind of business, but we do not get to know the details. We do not need them anyway. Also, the moment Michael gets bored with Sascha and turns abusive to her is hard to pinpoint, as well as his motive for such behavior. Did his boss tell him of his encounter with her? Did he find out about her relationship with Thomas and get jealous? Did he get angry about something work-related (there is a scene of roughing-up an associate that messed something up, also unexplained)? Did he just get bored for no reason? Was he planning the whole act all along as a psychopath would do?

Eklöf got lucky or, more probably, played it really clever and cool with another bluff: the structure of the film. The whole first half serves as the exposition filled with low-intensity events and glimpses into the group dynamics. So all the chips came down to the disturbing prolonged rape scene spiced up by forced oral sex, staged and filmed in one frame with such confidence that no veteran director would be ashamed of. And it worked perfectly, adding layers to characters, especially Sascha and shifting motivation, while keeping the deliberately moderate pace, making Holiday completely fresh in the terms gangster films done from a distinctively female point of view, more interested in psychology than in action.

A Film a Week - The Divine Order / Die göttliche Ordung

Did you know that Switzerland, known for its political and military neutrality, long-standing peace, social well-being, cheeses, products of precise mechanics and banks, was one of the last countries to introduce women’s right to vote? On the confederal level, it happened in 1971, that means after the whole sexual revolution thing, and it took another 20 years for the last canton to incorporate it into its constitution. The reason for that can be a combination of factors including less stressful life than in the rest of Europe in the first half of the 20^th century and a strong influence of tradition and Christian religion (Catholic and Calvinist, no real difference) keeping “the divine order” in which a women is subdued to her man and both of them to God.

The Divine Order, written for the screen and directed by Petra Volpe (of Dreamland fame), is a fictionous account on women’s fight for the voting right set in the microcosm of a small mountain town. During its course we shall see the transformation of its heroine from a submissive anti-feminist housewife to a jeans-wearing revolutionary, her gradual acceptance of her own sexual needs, the transformation of other women from silent and obedient wives to a community capable of reaching its political goals and also the transformation of town’s men from boorish chauvinists to civilized, understanding husbands.

The trajectory of the story is somewhat predictable, but there are some surprises, insightful and comedic moments along the way. The writing is precise, the directing is more than competent, there is a plenty of visual polish with all the early 70’s look, the editing is spot-on, and the format of 96 minutes is very audience-friendly. On the other hand, subtlety is not the name of the game here.

We meet our heroine through the voice-over narration about all the nice and exciting things as Woodstock, sexual revolution and human rights movement far away over the seas and all of that bypassing Switzerland, especially its rural regions. Her name is Nora and she is played with grace by German actress Marie Leuenberger. The choice of the name is not accidental – her start is not dissimilar to the title heroine of Henrik Ibsen’s play. Our Nora is married to Hans (Maximilian Simonischek, son of Peter), a boyishly good-looking soon to be entry-level manager in the local factory, takes care of their two sons and her father-in-law and she seems content doing so. But when she sees the injustice her brother-in-law does to his wife Theresa (Rachel Braunschweig) and especially daughter Hanna (Ella Rumpf, known for her part in Raw), she gets interested in the whole referendum thing. With the help of a former innkeeper Vroni (Sibyle Brunner) and an Italian divorcee Graziella (Marta Zoffoli), she is ready to fight for her rights.

Volpe usually succeeds in blending the serious activist drama with a small-town comedic undertones. That is not so strange since the whole premise is a bit absurd: the future of women’s voting rights will be decided by men only and maybe not the meanest, but the most eloquent antagonist of the film is actually a woman working on a high position for whom the social status is more important than basic human right. The films hits its emotional peaks through the interaction between the large women during the Lysistrata-like strike subplot, and the cerebral ones in the moments of satisfaction that grown men can also learn that the times are changing and that doing housework will not kill them or make them gay.

However, linking the whole thing with the echoes of sexual liberation falls flat down somewhere around the midpoint – aiming for easy laughs about middle-to-old-aged women learning a thing or two about there vaginas, orgasms and sex in general during a visit to a protest in Zurich, it gets more than a bit unpleasant in the scene with a Swedish new-age therapist of sorts. There is no doubt that political and sexual revelation are connected in more than one way, but here it simply does not work neither as a statement nor as a running joke comic relief. Still, as a political and social drama with some nice absurdist touches, The Divine Order is quite alright.

A Film a Week - Raw / Grave

People vomiting. People fainting. People leaving the theatre, not being able to handle the film. At the festival, of all places. For a horror film genre niche, that is a kind of advertisement and it usually implies either excessive gore (what would be more excessive regarding gore in the time of ISIS videos floating freely on the internet, it is hard to tell) or taking on a taboo. More often than not, a film cannot rise to the standards of the hype it is creating, but Raw is not just another unimaginative, lazy and underwhelming genre piece. On the contrary, it is a rare gem: a completely successful parable of coming of age and sexual awakening of its female protagonist through nothing less shocking than cannibalism.

Justine (played by a relatively unknown Garance Marillier) comes from a family of militant vegetarians and is about to start her studies at the prestigious vet school in French countryside, which is also a family tradition. It is her first week at the college and she is about to be exposed to brutal, military-style hazing rituals that include driving the freshmen to an abandoned school facility, a mandatory practice of addressing senior students as “elders” or “the great ones”, to obey their commands and allow to be covered in blood and paint. Although Justine’s sister Alexia (Swiss actress Ella Rumpf) is an “elder”, a campus goth, sex goddess and an “alpha”, but even she cannot or would not save her from the initiation ritual: eating a raw rabbit kidney.

A strong allergic reaction is just a start of Justine’s trouble. Tasting the raw meat will leave her craving for more, and just plain chicken will not cut the deal. Nobody is safe, not even her gay roommate Adrien (Rabah Nait Outfella). In her fantasy, he is attractive enough to turn into a juicy steak.

The opening scene of a traffic accident shot from afar in the way that leaves us uncertain who is to blame, is starting to make sense now, and the relationship between sisters is kind of mentor-like but not idyllic as it would be expected. Contrary to the vamp Alexia, virginal Justine is not handling that well the change of her body and psyche. Be prepared for a stream of nasty little details like bikini waxing gone wrong, fingers cut off, bloody bites and self-mutilation. Just to be sure where we are, animals do not fare that well either, so there will be dead dogs, constipated cows and horses operated by somewhat primitive instruments.

Aided by the cinematographer Ruben Impens whose unpleasant close-ups are altering with static, beautifully composed wide takes in cold bluish palette, aided by Ben Wheatley’s composer Jim Williams inspiring score and music choices, and her perfectly casted acting ensemble (with the army of extras), Julia Ducournau pays attention to every detail in this deliberately paced, perfectly rhythmic and very intense multi-layered film. Clearly, it is all about female sexual awakening and carnal pleasures, but also there is an angle about family, school and medicine not being able to understand nor to explain the mysteries of a body in the changing process. There is a lot of sex and meat to devour, there are brutality and sibling rivalry, but the humour is no less important : one of the most memorable scenes includes a pissing contest between the sisters. Ducournau never loses control until the clean-cut ending.

Julia Ducournau is a first-timer which almost comes as a surprise after having watched the film. Of course, Raw is so frank, raw and insightful about a woman’s body and mind that it seems logical it was made by a female director. But the level of skill, the scope of perspective, the number of layers and juggling with all of them would rarely fit the description of a young, first-time director. Ducournau takes her clues from the masters, so we can see the echoes of Polanski’s Repulsion, Zulawski’s psychology of characters, De Palma’s obsession with female adolescence and repressions (Carrie, aswell as Sisters) and Cronenberg’s body horror taken to another level of gore, but she remains true to herself, original and fresh. Raw has all the indications that we can expect big from Julia Ducournau.