Women on the Verge

The movie also makes the most of the weird, stylized aesthetic of synchronized swimming teams, which the director portrays as a sort of feminine army. She shoots the girls in their regimented routines wearing stiff smiles, nose plugs, and too much makeup, while below the waterline, their legs flail away, frantically working to keep them afloat. It’s a great metaphor for the effort that goes into the impression of feminine grace. “For me, the film is about what a tough job it is to be a girl,” said Sciamma. “It’s a woman’s perspective from inside.”

Another young actress tackles a difficult role in xxy, a first feature from Argentina by Lucía Puenzo that also explores awakening desire in a teenager. This time the metaphor is biological. Alex, the main character, was born with “genital ambiguity”; she’s both male and female. In order to keep her secret, her family has moved to a remote Uruguayan shoreline. But when friends come to visit, they bring their teenage son, and the inevitable happens. Alex ends up having to confront her sexuality — both sides of it. The film treats Alex’s multitasking body as a biological expression of the sexual confusion and body fears many adolescents experience when they worry about where their true desires might lead them.

Needless to say, it takes rock-solid acting to make an audience comfortable with a story like this. Although xxy is forced in places — the fact that Alex’s father is a marine biologist studying an endangered species is laying it on a bit thick — the main actress, Inés Efron, becomes the director’s strongest ally. Efron’s androgynous beauty, her cautious eyes, and her hunched shoulders speak volumes.

But there was no gender ambiguity in the lineup of internationally famous directors who contributed to To Each His Own Cinema. Commissioned for the sixtieth anniversary of Cannes, the film is an anthology of thirty-three three-minute films. On opening night, there they were on stage, the designated maestros of world cinema — about thirty men and one woman, Jane Campion, director of The Piano, who seemed to have been rendered almost inarticulate by her status as the lone woman. Her contribution to the film was The Lady Bug, an eccentric, angry piece in which a woman dressed as an insect with transparent wings performs an antic dance inside a movie theatre until a giant male shoe comes into the frame and crushes her.

I also saw signs that more directors are moving away from the aggressive editing style of the classic Hollywood film to something closer to real time, shot with real people, in real places. A gorgeous example of this is Silent Light, a long, slow, rewarding film by Mexican director Carlos Reygadas. It opens with a six-minute time-lapse shot of a starry night slowly — slowly — lightening into daybreak and stays with the natural rhythms of rural northern Mexico, where members of a local Mennonite community play themselves — another acting first. A middle-aged, married farmer struggles with an unexpected problem: he has fallen in love with a woman who is not his wife. He’s not clear which woman God intends him to live with or what to do about this. At two-and-a-half hours, the film is aggressive about imposing its own pace, but in the end it casts a dreamlike spell.

Then one afternoon, I took a break from a string of fine films with sombre subjects to watch a documentary about Marlon Brando. It helped explain how filmmaking has tilted in favour of the performer and away from the director. Brando is a 165-minute film in which actors such as Johnny Depp, Al Pacino, and Sean Penn explain the impact the star had on the movies. “Before Brando, actors acted,” said Penn. “After him, they behaved.” Pacino talked about watching Brando act in A Streetcar Named Desire and thinking “Whoa, Marlon, whaddaya doing, there are people watching you.” The truth of his presence onstage and on film made mere technique look soulless. Brando brought all of himself to his best roles, which helped create the cult of the celebrity and, in the end, made it possible for actresses to fully occupy the centre of a film. Brando might not even mind being called the first modern actress.