SCREEN QUEENS
Ladies are breaking up Hollywood’s boys club, with more directors hitting it big this season
WOMEN directors kicking ass: It’s the hottest movie trend of the summer.
This week, in Sofia Coppola’s Southern Gothic tale “The Beguiled,” the Civil War-era inhabitants of a mostly abandoned ladies’ seminary in Virginia take in a wounded Union soldier (Colin Farrell), who initially draws them in with his puppy-dog eyes and chivalry. But when he begins playing with their affections, the tables turn — and the seemingly proper Southern women (including Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst
and Elle Fanning) band together against the interloper. It’s a remake of a 1971 Clint Eastwood movie, with a key difference being that this version is told from the females’ perspective.
And in Ana Lily Amirpour’s visually dazzling “The Bad Batch,” out now, a young woman (Suki Waterhouse) in a dystopian wasteland finds herself captured and chained up by cannibals who waste no time amputating her arm and leg. She escapes and makes her way to a cultlike community called Comfort ruled by a creepy leader (Keanu Reeves). There, she joins forces with a cannibal named Miami Man (Jason Momoa) to rescue his young daughter from the compound.
Taken together, there’s a nice metaphor in these indies about not making assumptions about what women are capable of — even when they’re literally, or figuratively, cut off at the knees. It couldn’t come at a more perfect time: This season is shaping up to be the summer of female directors.
The biggest success story of the season is Patty Jenkins, whose “Wonder Woman” made $103.3 million domestically in its first weekend, taking in $228 million globally. It’s the best-ever opening for a female director and a better showing than countless other comic-book movies. “Wonder Woman” drew rave reviews from both critics and audiences, with the smallest second-weekend drop of any modern superhero movie, a BuzzFeed study found.
The reasons why are not complicated: “Wonder Woman” is way better than most of what’s passing for entertainment this season. “Pirates of the Caribbean 5,” “The Mummy,” “Baywatch” and “Snatched” were all actively terrible, while “The Fate of the Furious” and “King Arthur” were only somewhat watchable. “Wonder Woman,” however, was something new: a bold, original take on the superhero genre, with a female director-star team proving that anything the boys could do, they could do better.
The triumph of Jenkins and “Wonder Woman” is a big deal. A major study out earlier this year analyzed the top 100 films from every year dating back to 2007 and found that out of the 1,000 films, a mere 44 were directed by women, which amounted to 23.8 male directors for every female one. Not great.
Unsurprisingly, some signs indicate there’s still an uphill battle: “The Beguiled” is “counterprogramming presumably aimed at a youngish female audience,” sniffed the Hollywood Reporter, despite the fact that Coppola won the best director award at the notoriously phallocentric Cannes Film Festival; she is only the second woman in the festival’s 70-year history to do so.
But “it feels like things might be changing,” Coppola tells The Post. “I remember being on the Cannes jury with Jane Campion and she said to me, ‘Let’s walk with the women directors — they need our support,’ which we need to keep doing.”
Of course, this influx of female directors hasn’t been uniformly triumphant. “Rough Night,” the raunchy dead-stripper comedy from Lucia Aniello, one of the minds behind “Broad City,” was a misfire. “Everything, Everything,” out in May, was a sappy young-adult drama from second-time director Stella Meghie. In an ideal world, this would mean there’s room now for female directors to occasionally churn out mediocre fare just like men do all the time; in reality, getting rehired for a female director is tough, even when you’ve come off directing a megahit (just ask Catherine Hardwicke and Sam Taylor-Johnson how much work they’ve gotten since directing, respectively, “Twilight” and “Fifty Shades of Grey”).
But the sheer diversity in female-directed fare this summer is encouraging. “Megan Leavey,” which stars Kate Mara in a ripped-from-real-life story about a Marine whose combat dog saved lives in Iraq, is Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s follow-up to her documentary “Blackfish,” which generated an ocean of bad press for SeaWorld. And director-writer-star Zoe Lister-Jones’ “Band Aid,” with its story about a couple making art out of arguments, opened last week to positive reviews.
Other female-directed indies are waiting in the wings: “Landline,” director Gillian Robespierre’s follow-up to her brilliant comedy “Obvious Child,” is out July 21; like her last, it stars comedian Jenny Slate. Marti Noxon (“UnREAL”) directed the wrenching semiautobiographical eating disorder drama “To the Bone,” out July 14. “Beach Rats,” out Aug. 25 from director Eliza Hittman, won the directing award at Sundance for its depiction of a Brooklyn teen boy’s grappling with his sexuality.
And then there’s the real heavyhitter in early August: Kathryn Bigelow, Oscar winner for 2009’s “The Hurt Locker,” is back with “Detroit,” a thriller about the titular city’s 1967 race riots. Bigelow has long been a lone icon of action-film success in the misogynist film industry.
But if this summer continues to pay off for female directors, she might not be alone for long. Jenkins wryly pointed to the sheer economic sense of increasing their numbers in a speech to the Forbes Women’s Summit in New York recently: “The world is changing, so if Hollywood wants to get rich, pay attention to this: Women are our biggest audience in the world right now. It would be wise to go after them.”