Tale of solitude, perseverance making some noise
NEW YORK — What’s it like to be an international film festival sensation without hardly leaving your home? Like most things during the pandemic, it’s surreal.
Except for trips to the editing room, director Chloe Zhao has mostly stayed at the Ojai, California, home she shares with three chickens and two dogs, even as her film, “Nomadland,” has won raves around the globe. At the Venice Film Festival, it won the top prize, the Golden Lion. At the Toronto International Film Festival, it was hailed by many critics as the best movie of the year and a leading Oscar contender.
Yet the only in-person feedback Zhao has received was at a drive-in screening in Los Angeles put on by the otherwise canceled Telluride Film Festival. There, beneath ashen skies reddened by nearby forest fires, she took the stage, spaced 6 feet apart from her cast, while people enthusiastically honked their horns and flashed their headlights -— the nearest thing possible this year to a standing ovation.
“You could see the smoke from the fire in the headlights,” Zhao said. “It was like ‘Mad Max’ or something. It was a very fitting experience for the film.”
Fitting because “Nomandland” deals with solitude and community, grief and perseverance. In the film, which Searchlight Pictures will release Dec. 4, Frances Mcdormand stars as Fern, a 60-year-old widow living in her van. She takes to the road after her Nevada town’s very zip code is erased when the gypsum mine that employed most of its inhabitants closed.
Tired of the disappointments of more conventional and materialistic life, Fern meanders the American West while taking odd jobs and meeting fellow wanderers. The film comes from Jessica
So back she went to Gilead, for “The Testaments,” published in 2019 and co-winner of that year’s Booker Prize. But finding her way back into the original novel’s world was complicated; she didn’t want to re-create the voice of Offred, who narrates “The Handmaid”s Tale.“And, because the Hulu series ”The Handmaid's Tale,“on which Atwood is a consulting producer, had already gone beyond the events in the original novel, she needed to be careful not to contradict a story already being told.
The solution was to set the new novel 16 years in the future — the show hadn’t gotten that far yet — and to find new voices to tell it. (Nonetheless, Atwood said, her publisher assigned someone to read both novels and watch every episode, making notes on any discrepancies. “They didn’t find many!” she noted.)
The author settled on a trio of female characters, speaking in alternating chapters: Agnes, a privileged young woman who grew up in Gilead; Daisy, raised in Canada watching Gilead on television but not knowing her connection to it; and Aunt Lydia, familiar to readers of “The Handmaid’s Tale” as one of the cattle-prod-carrying “aunts” who serve as enforcers of the regime.
Atwood said she had been intrigued by the many depictions of Aunt Lydia she had seen over the years in “Handmaid’s Tale” adaptations.
“In all of those versions, she herself was not revealing her own inner life — other people were guessing at it,” she said. She began thinking about Aunt Lydia and her complex relationship to power — “Stalin’s wife, Stalin’s daughter, Hitler’s two girlfriends, women in regimes that don’t favor women. How do they get along?”
We eventually will be seeing more of Aunt Lydia on-screen: “The Testaments” also has been acquired for television. It isn’t entirely clear, Atwood said, whether the book will be the basis of a new show or a continuation of the current “Handmaid’s Tale” series on Hulu. Her own relationship with the show is fairly distant (though she filmed a cameo appearance in the pilot, as an Aunt).
“I have influence but no power. I get to read the scripts and make comments, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” she said.
Outside of scripted television, Atwood’s influence can be seen worldwide, as protestors don the now-familiar handmaid's garments — red cloak, white winged bonnet — to add silent emphasis to their message of demonstrating for women’s rights.
“I made a pretty smart choice,” Atwood said of the look, described long ago in the original book. “It’s instant, it’s visible, it’s colorful, and if what you wish to do is go into a legislative assembly to bear witness, people can’t stop you because you’re not making any noise. They can’t kick you out for being immodestly dressed, because you’re covered up.”
After much travel associated with the new book’s launch, the Booker Prize and her own social and environmental activism, Atwood, 80, has seen her life grow quieter since the pandemic. Speaking engagements are all virtual for the foreseeable future, she said, noting that technology has always intrigued her: In 2004, she was one of the inventors of a robotic device called Longpen that allowed authors to sign books remotely.
“Nobody was doing this and everybody thought we were lunatics!” she said. “At that point, the book industry couldn’t figure it out. They’d like to have it now, but the time has gone.”
The product, she said, has morphed into “a very comprehensive signature company” called Syngrafii.
Between virtual events, which she appreciates because “you don’t have to put on your shoes,” Atwood has kept busy attending to the estate of her late partner Graeme Gibson (a Canadian novelist who died last year; the two had been together since the 1970s) and reading. Recent choices include the 1936 novel “Mephisto” by Klaus Mann (“I was asked to choose a favorite political novel; it seemed appropriate for our time”), “The Decameron,” and “Blood in the Water,” a nonfiction book about a murder in a Nova Scotia fishing community, written by Silver Donald Cameron.
And she recently completed an unusual reading project: rereading both “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “The Testaments,” in order to annotate them for an auction.
“I creeped myself out quite a lot,” she said. In terms of the world today, “they’re just a little bit too accurate.”