This article originally appeared in T&S Issue 34, Winter 1996/97.
Joan Scanlon reviews Antonia’s Line, the latest film by Marleen Gorris, director of A Question of Silence.
A Question of Silence (1983), the first film by Dutch filmmaker Marleen Gorris to be distributed abroad, is one of the few films feminists agree about. This response seems not to depend at all on how much of the detail of the film they have remembered; it comes down to a shared recognition which matches the apparent intention of the film in that it scarcely needs articulating. We all recognise and identify with the experience of the women in the film; we all laugh with those women at the total incomprehension of men, within and outside of the film, who are struggling to find a motive for the murder. The victim is a shopkeeper who ‘just happens’ to be a man, a man who just happens to be exercising his petty power over one of these three otherwise unconnected women.
Broken Mirrors, a later film by Gorris, was even more uncompromising in its treatment of men. Set largely in a brothel in Amsterdam, the film leaves no single male character free of suspicion; none of them survive this chilling cinematic treatment of male violence without being implicated in a culture which condones the torture, abuse and sexual exploitation of women. Initiating a newcomer into the harsh wisdom of the brothel, a more experienced prostitute warns: ‘Even the nice ones are nasty’. The central male character has been stalking a woman who he abducts as she leaves her children in the school playground; for the rest of the film he keeps her hostage, visiting constantly to take photographs of her. We see the back of his head as he drives along, listening as news coverage of her disappearance is broadcast on the radio; we see his hands tidying the pencils on his desk at work, straightening the knives and forks as he waits for his wife to serve his dinner. We never see his face: he is your boss, the man next door, the man in your own home — in short, he is Everyman.
Great expectations
No wonder then that we heard with amazement that Marleen Gorris’s latest film, Antonia’s Line, had won an Oscar for the best foreign language film of the year. Our expectations grew as we heard that she had held a women-only showing at the Cannes film festival (followed by a women-only dinner) to the intense vexation of male journalists and critics. It was intriguing that, in spite of all this, she had won an award for a film which was being previewed as a feminist film about male violence and women’s resistance. According to the early reviews, Antonia’s Line was a film about four generations of women who had constructed a life in opposition to the hypocrisy and brutality of their village community. Critical acclaim for the film might have led feminists to wonder if Marleen Gorris had adopted a slightly more liberal approach; we had notice of the fact that (to the evident relief of the critics) there were at least two nice (if slightly ridiculous) men, which demonstrated that some of the species were redeemable.
The choice of a Belgian rural setting might also have given us grounds for concern. It is hard to think of any acclaimed foreign language film in this pastoral genre which does not deal with the great cliches of sex, death and reproduction or which fails to place the human drama within the framework of the natural cycle of life as it manages, however violently, to renew itself with miraculous determination. Marleen Gorris seemed therefore to have set herself a particularly cumbersome and obstinate set of conventions to overturn this time.
Searching for the politics
What is baffling and dispiriting is that, search as we might, there is no evidence in Antonia’s Line that the filmmaker had any real intention of dismantling these conventions or the values they embody. Certainly, male violence is continuously present — and condemned — but the implications for the women who are abused are never pursued. They seem either to take this level of violence for granted, or to get over it remarkably quickly, and go on to have sex and reproduce as if their fulfillment depended on it. In so far as one can identify any politics in the film at all, they seem to lie in the belief that women’s ‘power’ resides in their reproductive capacity, although this in turn depends on their ability to harness male sexuality to that end.
The cast of female characters encompasses Antonia herself, a robust Matriarch who struts about on a cart-horse instilling reverence (or lust) in the male villagers; her daughter Danielle, an artist who hires a James Dean look-alike to impregnate her and then becomes inanely infatuated with Lara, her daughter Therese’s school-teacher; the ‘Mad Madonna’, insane with frustrated desire, who howls at the moon; the ‘simple’ Dede, child of an abusive and violent family, disturbingly presented both as victim and comic character; Therese, Danielle’s daughter, a mathematician who is ridiculed for having no maternal instinct…. The list of female cameos goes on, reflecting in their weaknesses and idiosyncracies, Antonia’s omnipotence.
In fact, the only character it is remotely possible to identify (or sympathise) with as the plot moves inexorably from one generation to the next is Crooked Finger, a disaffected, despairing and rather grubby old man who finally gives up on the whole enterprise and commits suicide, having no meaningful place in Antonia’s world of ploughing and mating.
The other ‘nice man’ in the film, a widowed farmer, lusts after Antonia and wants her as a mother for his five sons. She offers him companionship instead, in a rather edifying display of self-reliance, but this neo-feminist moment is forfeited when his devotion finally pays off and she agrees to having sex with him once a week in a purpose built shed. Even this is supposed to demonstrate Antonia’s strength, since the contract is made on her own terms, but it graphically underlines the way in which men are necessary to all the women in the film, even Antonia herself. For we are told, in a voice over, that at this point: ‘Love broke out everywhere’, and we are subject to a (thankfully brief) collage of various heterosexual couples fucking, (with a rather chaste image of Lara and Danielle kissing thrown in for the sake of inclusiveness).
Pointless tableau
This is just one example of how the insistent and authoritative narrative voice repeatedly deludes us into thinking that somewhere, at some point, we will be able to make sense of this otherwise pointless tableau of mating with its unexplained background of rape, violence and death. At one point, when Dede and Loony Lips (‘the village idiot’) pair off, the narrative voice announces: ‘And so, Antonia drew like to like’. Their wedding is then presented as a kind of parody, a PG Tips advert in which the characters are seen to imitate the social rituals of ‘normal’ people. Later, when the focus is on the childhood of Antonia’s granddaughter, we are informed: ‘Even in these enlightened times, Therese was raped.’ What on earth do either of these statements mean? They are presented with such solemn certainty that we cannot help but wonder what the hell has happened to the director of A Question of Silence and Broken Mirrors in the intervening years. Do we live in world where rape is any less frequent? Are we supposed to find disability hilarious? Are we supposed to be celebrating marriage? God knows.
It may be that Marleen Gorris is here intending to present us with a strong, humane (and essentially ‘female’) response to the brutality of everyday life in a rural community. It may also be that she intends to demonstrate the gendered nature of that brutality and pose us with a moral dilemma: At great length and at gunpoint Antonia curses the man who raped both Dede and Therese, but it is the village men (those who are in her thrall) who beat him to a pulp, and it is his own brother who drowns him. Yet, throughout, she glosses over the incidents of male violence that she has chosen to portray; all of them serve one purpose — to demonstrate the power and influence of Antonia. Moreover, these episodes are often the pretext for humour. In no single case are we offered the perspective of the woman who has been violated. So, after the rape by her brother, presumably not for the first time, Dede is seen smiling in Antonia’s pew in church, wearing a new pair of bright blue spectacles, while her abuser winces with his bandaged hands and crotch (Danielle impaled him on a pitchfork when she discovered the rape). And later, after the village priest is caught abusing a woman (visibly distressed) in the confessional box, the film moves straight to a scene where the priest from his pulpit is forced to admit (through a parable) that he too is now at Antonia’s mercy.
The only sense I can make of all this is that male violence is understood to be so ubiquitous and inevitable that it is not worth commenting on, and we should focus instead on women’s strength and autonomy. Even in this perspective, however, it is hard to find any of the extraordinary, uncompromising clarity that made Marleen Gorris’s earlier films so exhilarating.
Note:
This review is largely based on conversations with Dianne Butterworth, Debbie Cameron, Louise Donald and Jane Taubman.