DIRECTORS’ CUT
Golden Globe nominees Greta Gerwig and Celine Song are shaking up Hollywood with fun feminism in ‘Barbie’ and deeply personal drama in ‘Past Lives’. Margaret Gardiner catches up with them
As always in January, Hollywood’s who’s who turned out for the first award ceremony of the year, the Golden Globes. This year, the nominations list featured more female directors than usual with Justine Triet, director of Anatomy of a Fall, winning Best Screenplay and Best Non-English-Language Film. Greta Gerwig and Celine Song were both nominated for Best Director, but lost to Christopher Nolan for Oppenheimer.
CAN A WOMAN-CENTRIC FILM WIN BEST PICTURE? GERWIG ON THE SUCCESS OF ‘BARBIE’
Gerwig’s Barbie received the most nominations — nine in total. Now, with the Oscars a few months away, her name is sure to be called again in the director category.
But will the woman-centric film — written, directed and produced by women (star Margot Robbie’s production company funded and conceptualised the idea), with a woman lead, that focuses on issues important to women, be called for Best Picture or take home the trophy in any category in which it’s competing?
Only three women have won an Oscar for Best Director. Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker, Chloé Zhao for Nomadland and Jane Campion for The Power of the Dog. While all three deal with social issues, none is specifically women focused. With its bright sets and influencer-friendly visuals, Barbie, with its singing, dancing and fleshrevealing costumes showing classics from the controversial doll’s archival fashion collection, may make the film a challenging choice for the stodgy Oscar crowd.
Does the “prettiness” of the leads and the costumes dilute the impact of the message? Because, ultimately, Barbie is a movie with a strong message.
One of the reasons it racked up so many Golden Globe nominations is because of its technical prowess. It’s a musical satire with social commentary and influences of 1950s soundstage classics such as Oklahoma.
Billie Eilish delivers haunting lyrics that sum up where women were when Barbie, the doll, was created in 1959: Looked so alive/ turns out I’m not real/ Just something you paid for. The words from the Golden Globe-winning song, What Was I Made For, reflect a time when image was even more important than it is now. The lyrics reflect the price and emptiness of image without substance.
In an exclusive with The Sunday Times, Gerwig highlighted why the film is important beyond the pink plastic pastels.
“I’m hoping it will resonate that movies made by women, featuring women, appeal not just to women, but to men too. The fact that Barbie made more than a billion dollars internationally opens the door that womendriven films are profitable and may enable other films dealing with topics previously considered too challenging to get made because they didn’t resonate with the gatekeepers and decisionmakers.”
Surprisingly, given the perfect proportions and the battering the doll has taken for creating an impossible stereotype for women to emulate, many have hailed Barbie as a fun feminist film (apparently that’s not an oxymoron). Women identified with America Ferrera’s monologue on the contradictory roles women have to simultaneously meet. But this isn’ ta revenge film. The contradictions of being a “real man” are also highlighted.
Ryan Gosling’s Ken wears a sweater emblazoned with the words: “I am Kenough”. Despite not getting the girl and having to acknowledge his occupation as “beach”, he can choose to be what he is and own it, which is the central theme of the film. It encourages dreams in which people “are not the manifestation” of others’ projections.
Barbie meets the creator of the doll and is reminded that her choices are her own. Barbie doesn’t need permission to go after what she wants. No-one controls her. She gets to set her own pursuits not limited by society’s visions of who she should be, but by dealing with the harsh truths of the world and growing to meet them.
These are the themes women directors and writers are bringing to the screen that could shape a new reality for the next generation. No matter the outcome the award shows deliver for Barbie, the billions at the box office ensure that audiences have opened their minds to other ways of doing things, and that is a win.
MINING THE PERSONAL TO MAKE A MOVING DRAMA. SONG AND GRETA LEE ON MAKING ‘PAST LIVES’
Have you ever had a relationship that was easy, made you feel good about yourself, felt like home, and then for reasons that had nothing to do with the relationship, the bonding was interrupted and you lost the connection?
In her debut movie, Past Lives, which she also wrote, Song has crafted a gem that’s been nominated for a Golden Globe in the Best Picture — Drama, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Foreign-Language
Film categories, and also won a nomination for actress Greta Lee in the Best Actress Motion Picture Drama category.
Fans of The Morning Show will recognise Lee as Stella Bak, the president of the fictional UBA in season 3 of the critical and commercial Apple TV+ hit. US-born Lee, 40, has long been part of the ensemble show, but becomes integral to the conclusion in a way that shows her acting chops.
With Past Lives (Prime video), Lee cements her place as a top-notch actress. She plays Nora, who experiences her first love at age 12 in South Korea. The childhood sweethearts lose contact when her family moves to the US. She’s married with a successful career when she sees a name from her past on the internet: it’s her childhood love, Hae Sung, portrayed by Teo Yoo. They renew their friendship through Skype, and he decides to visit.
The dance of familiarity, of being known to your core through your culture, something her American husband can approximate but never reach in the same way, speaks beyond the “love” to both
Nora’s husband and her childhood partner. It’s about rekindled memories, but also discovering the changes in each through the intervening years and the effects of assimilation into a new culture, while retaining the former in your core.
Past Lives is a delicate film in two languages, full of pauses and the tumble of unedited sharing. It’s the clash of cultures, the past and the future, and the possibilities and choices that mould us.
The film is inspired by Song’s own life and a moment in a bar when she acts as the conduit between her American husband and her visiting childhood love. This inspired the pivotal scene in the movie, with Nora interpreting between the two loves of her life (from which each is differently excluded). They’re able to put the awkwardness aside, because both men love her and she loves them.
Song explains how she mined that moment into an award-nominated film. “It started from the subjective feeling I had towards two people who hold different keys to me. I transversed time and space in a moment. Neither could ever know the other person’s key to the part of my identity or selfhood that could only exist in both of those worlds.”
Wrestling with the vulnerability required to create art from reality, Lee says: “I asked myself how I could turn that subjectivity into an object, which became the script. Playing a version of the history of my writer/director.”
Song is a new breed of female directors ploughing their personal lives for art, something male writers and directors have done since the inception of cinema. The love triangle plot isn’t new, but the way this story unfolds makes it fresh.
The South Korean-Canadian director — with a successful footprint as a playwright
— challenges the idea that because the story is personal it’s organic and no artifice is required. “There’s an assumption that because of the style of the movie — the pacing and the tone, the naturalism of the acting, that we were winging it. It was less sexy than that. Surgical — with effort and homework,” says Lee. “We were overly meticulous in preparation.”
Song adds: “It was her decision to chart the emotional arc, beat to beat, like music hitting notes, like fight scene choreography
— the way you think about an action sequence. I charted each scene, each shot, because the story lives and dies on the actor’s face.” The director’s face transforms provocatively. “Part of it was to pressure the actors.” Her eyes crinkle with delight. “I’d let Greta know. ‘The entire movie lives and dies on this part of the scene.’ So. Yeah. Actors must work well under pressure, even using their eyebrows. There’s a lot of eyebrow acting in this movie.”
She returns to the crafting of the script. “So much drama happens when adults behave like children. Adulthood is behaving like adults, knowing there’s a kid inside us; especially the pain of remaining an adult when you feel the past tugging you backwards. The characters, Hae Sung and Nora, are both 12 and also almost 40 in each other’s eyes — simultaneously. That contradiction is the heart of the story. They have to coexist. In different people’s eyes, we are different, with all of our sides capable of being loved.”
That includes Nora’s husband, Arthur Zaturansky, played by John Magaro. “The husband isn’t a villain,” says Song. Again, she exhibits her clinical separation of personal exposure and art. “I spoke to my husband, John, about the character, Arthur, while I was working on the script. We discussed it. He’s proud of the film.”
She restates: “It’s a film about connections and impact, not a traditional love story. Every connection has its own place in a person’s life.” Watching it may prod memories of one’s own past.