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    How ‘Her Story,’ a Feminist Comedy, Came to Rule China’s Box Office

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    “Her Story” touches on sensitive topics in China, like censorship and gender inequality. But its humorous, nonconfrontational approach may have helped it pass censors.The movie calls out stigmas against female sexuality and stereotypes about single mothers. It name-drops feminist scholars, features a woman recalling domestic violence and laments Chinese censorship.This is not some indie film, streamed secretly by viewers circumventing China’s internet firewall. It is China’s biggest movie right now — and has even garnered praise from the ruling Communist Party’s mouthpiece.The success of “Her Story,” a comedy that topped China’s box office for the last three weeks, is in some ways unexpected, at a time when the government has cracked down on feminist activism, encouraged women to embrace marriage and childbearing and severely limited independent speech. The film’s reception reflects the unpredictable nature of censorship in the country, as well as the growing appetite for female-centered stories. Discussion of women’s issues is generally allowed so long as it does not morph into calls for rights. “Her Story,” which some have called China’s answer to “Barbie,” cushions many of its social critiques with jokes.The director of “Her Story,” Shao Yihui, has emphasized at public appearances that she is not interested in provoking “gender antagonism,” an accusation that official media has sometimes lobbed against feminists.At a time of sluggish growth and anemic ticket sales, movie producers — and perhaps government regulators — have been eager to attract female audience members, an increasingly important consumer base. Other recent hit movies have also been directed by and starred women, including the year’s top box office performer, “YOLO.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Why the Year’s Best Performances Are From Actresses Who Say Very Little

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      Films like “Conclave” and “Bird” provide a stark contrast to the recent succession of films about women finding their voices.IN A TENSE moment midway through Edward Berger’s recent movie “Conclave,” a pulpy thriller about the process of selecting a new pope, Isabella Rossellini, playing a nun named Sister Agnes, enters a room full of cardinals from around the world. A series of uncovered secrets and shifting alliances have turned this initially serene council into a rat’s nest of backstabbing, grandstanding, explaining, interrupting men. After asking permission to speak, Sister Agnes discreetly delivers a piece of information that will upend the papal election and expose some of the most powerful figures in the Roman Catholic Church to public, career-ending humiliation. Her short speech concluded, she bobs at the waist ever so slightly, giving a tiny curtsy whose performance of feminine deference is a put-down in itself. For the rest of the film, Sister Agnes never says another word.Her sly protest recalls another time when a quietly rebellious woman confounded a council of would-be holy men: Renée Jeanne Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 classic “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” long considered one of the towering performances of cinema history. Shot almost entirely in tight close-up, Falconetti’s Joan is doubly mute: first, of course, because the film itself is silent but, more pointedly, because the sparse script, based on records of Joan’s 1431 trial, puts nearly all the words in the mouths of her captors. As her male inquisitors grill her about the angelic visions that she claims have told her to dress in men’s clothing and lead the French army into battle, it’s Joan’s refusal to answer or even acknowledge their questions that most enrages them. When one questioner quizzes her about the length of the Archangel Michael’s hair, Joan’s wry response — “Why would he have cut it?” — is a forerunner of Sister Agnes’s ironic bob: a gesture of malicious compliance that serves to expose the hypocrisy of her inquisitors.For much of film history, women spoke less than men simply because their characters were seldom the story’s focus. The “strong, silent type” of westerns and detective stories was made strong by his silence, while female characters were typically weakened by theirs. When women in classic Hollywood films stepped outside the role of helpmeet, it was to personify the so-called mouthy dame (a type that, at its best, includes Barbara Stanwyck’s Sugarpuss O’Shea in 1941’s “Ball of Fire” and Bette Davis’s Margo Channing in 1950’s “All About Eve”). But however sparkling, brash or bitchy their banter, for decades dialogue written for female characters — often by male screenwriters — existed mainly to establish the fact that a woman was, for some reason, talking.“Women Talking,” the 2022 film by the writer-director Sarah Polley, won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay, a category befitting both its title and its subject: A movie about a Mennonite community of horrifically abused women claiming the right to speak, whose every frame overflows with expressive, persuasive, angry and anguished language, was recognized specifically for its words. That acknowledgment provided some catharsis in the wake of countless #MeToo scandals. But in the years since, along with a spate of acclaimed movies about women finding their voices (2022’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once”; last year’s “Poor Things” and “Barbie”), a new space has opened up onscreen for women pointedly not talking. Several films released this year — including Nora Fingscheidt’s “The Outrun,” Erica Tremblay’s “Fancy Dance” and Andrea Arnold’s “Bird” — have featured performances by female protagonists whose silence is neither a mark of trauma nor a state of oppression to be overcome but a deliberate strategy, whether for the purposes of introspection, self-preservation or self-discovery.Nobuyoshi Araki’s “Erotos” (1993).© Nobuyoshi Araki, courtesy of Taka Ishii GalleryWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      Two Boxing Rivals Are Ready for a Rematch. Hold the Trash Talk.

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      Fierce rivalries are a cornerstone of boxing. But Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano, who will fight for a championship title on Netflix on Friday, are going about it differently.When Katie Taylor defeated Amanda Serrano at Madison Square Garden two years ago in what was billed as the biggest women’s boxing match in history, the calls for a rematch started before the sweat and blood even had a chance to dry.A new rivalry was born. Fans and pundits wanted more. But the trash talk that is synonymous with boxing was largely absent.That was April 2022. On Friday night, Taylor and Serrano are finally set for a rematch on an even bigger stage — Netflix — and under even bigger headline names: Mike Tyson and Jake Paul.And yet the trash talking has been scarce — at least as far as Taylor and Serrano are concerned.“It’s definitely business, I respect all of my opponents,” Serrano, 36, said in a recent interview. “I respect any woman that does this sport, that goes into the ring and gets punched in the face. The sport isn’t easy.”“We have mutual respect,” Taylor, 38, said, “because I know how much courage it takes to step into the ring.”Fierce rivalries are a cornerstone of boxing. Mutual hatred builds a story line around a match that is maintained and encouraged by promoters and the media.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Shenseea’s Dancehall Music Makes Women ‘Feel Free’

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      While touring the Bob Marley Museum in Kingston, Jamaica, on a Saturday in late September, Shenseea, the dancehall pop singer, paused at a glass case. Inside was the Grammy lifetime achievement award that Mr. Marley received posthumously in 2001.“Haffi get one,” she said in Jamaican Patois of her desire to win a Grammy of her own.Shenseea, 28, who was wearing a cropped turquoise halter top, a matching flowy skirt and Louis Vuitton slides, has already come closer than many. In 2022, she was up for album of the year for her work as a collaborator on Ye’s album “Donda.”The museum occupies Mr. Marley’s former home in the Jamaican capital, where Shenseea also has a residence. Though she was raised mostly in Kingston and grew up listening to Mr. Marley’s reggae music, she had never been to the museum before.“He made it so cool to be a rasta,” Shenseea said, referring to Mr. Marley’s association with the Jamaican spiritual movement Rastafarianism. She had left the museum and was sitting in the back seat of a white Mercedes-Benz, playing a string of breezy new songs she has yet to release. Mr. Marley, Shenseea continued, “showed the people that it’s OK to live your life the way you want to, even though it’s different.”The same could be said for Shenseea. Dancehall, a musical genre known for its suggestive lyrics and provocative visual style, was not a feature of her upbringing in a Christian household. “I wasn’t allowed to listen to dancehall music when I was young,” Shenseea said. “When I was in high school, that’s when I fell in love with it.”She is now among the brightest young stars of the genre, which blossomed in the 1970s in Kingston and is named for the dance halls that held parties in the city.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Prickly Martha Stewart Makes for a Bracing Netflix Documentary

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      “Martha,” from R.J. Cutler, argues that she was ahead of her time. But though she sits for a lengthy interview, this isn’t hagiography.The re-evaluation of maligned celebrities — especially women who reached the height of fame in the 1990s — has become its own mini-genre of pop culture. Often the story tells a bigger tale: a culture bent on taking down successful women, or beautiful ones, or just ones who accidentally strayed into the spotlight.So I wasn’t surprised to see a documentary about Martha Stewart on Netflix’s docket. Titled “Martha” — from that one name, you know instantly who it’s about — and directed by R.J. Cutler, it makes a simple enough case: that Martha Stewart was in nearly every way ahead of her time. She was a stockbroker in the late 1960s, then started a catering company that became the impetus for her books about entertaining and homemaking. Eventually she became a media mogul, considered both the first self-made female billionaire and the original influencer. Then, the movie argues, she was also unfairly prosecuted as a result of her fame and the prosecutors’ need to make a name for themselves. But look, “Martha” says: her road back to influence in recent years on TV and on social media has been remarkable.All of this follows the traditional arc: success, fall from grace, eventual salvation. What I didn’t expect, though, was how Cutler would go about filling in the details. Stewart, who is 83, sat down for a lengthy interview — often an indicator of a pure public relations piece, only telling the story the subject wants told. Usually those are surface-level and hagiographical takes, just part of the overall brand-building package.That’s definitely present in “Martha,” which in its final section chronicles the past decade of Stewart’s life in very rosy terms, beginning with her participation in a 2015 Comedy Central roast of Justin Bieber, which began both her “cool grandma” era and her unlikely friendship with Snoop Dogg.But for most of the film, there’s more fruitful tension than blind celebration. Stewart makes for a prickly interviewee, especially when she’s talking about something she’s not interested in discussing in depth — her first marriage, for instance, or the subject of feelings in relationships. She argues a bit with Cutler. He occasionally lets a statement hang in the air or keeps the camera running, giving us a glimpse of something that feels not totally intended on her part.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Lynda Obst, Producer, Dies at 74; Championed Women in Hollywood

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      She helped make films like “Sleepless in Seattle” and “Contact.” She also wrote widely about the industry, for The Times and other publications.Lynda Obst, a New York journalist turned Hollywood producer who promoted women in films like “Sleepless in Seattle” and “Contact” while writing incisive dispatches from Tinseltown for outlets like The Atlantic and The New York Times, died on Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 74.Her brother Rick Rosen said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.Known for her booming, raspy laugh and her startling candor, Ms. Obst was a colorful character even by the standards of a colorful industry.Even more unusual for Hollywood, she was at times an outspoken critic of the movie industry, especially its treatment of women.As a producer, she excelled at both frothy romantic comedies and serious science fiction dramas. She helped shepherd Nora Ephron’s seminal “Sleepless in Seattle” as an executive producer in 1993 and the box-office hit “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” as a producer in 2003. But she also produced Robert Zemeckis’s “Contact” in 1997 and Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” in 2014.She was an advocate for stories focused on women, and often made by women, at a time when there weren’t many. She pushed, for example, for Jodie Foster to star as an astronomer in “Contact” when it was unusual for a major science fiction movie to have a female lead. An acolyte and admirer of Ms. Ephron, she produced her directorial debut, “This Is My Life” (1992).Ms. Obst excelled at both frothy romantic comedies and serious science fiction dramas. She was an executive producer of the hit Nora Ephron comedy “Sleepless in Seattle” (1993), which starred Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, seen here with Ross Malinger.TriStar PicturesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Lynda Carter Never Played Wonder Woman: ‘I Was Always Just Diana’

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      The actress and singer talks about mom jokes, Muppets, making music and marching for women’s rights.When Lynda Carter released the pop single “Pink Slip Lollipop” over the summer, she saw it as a way to give men who ghost and gaslight a candy-coated boot.“I just thought it was funny,” she said in a video call from her home outside Washington, D.C.Carter may forever be known as Wonder Woman from her 1970s TV series, but she started out as a musician, singing in clubs in Arizona when she was only 14. After winning the 1972 Miss World USA pageant, she took off for Los Angeles to stir up a record deal or an acting break, eventually landing the role that made her a feminist icon — even as a lot of men didn’t get her.“They don’t understand women — they never get it,” Carter said.“We understand why we get Wonder Woman,” she said, adding, “And how determined and how worthy our minds, our bodies are.” Tapping her chest, she also said: “We understand the 2,878 things we have in here at all times.” In her case, that’s the Muppets, Patty Jenkins’s “Wonder Woman” and the planned Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Mom JokesGet to know me just a little bit, and what you’ll find out is that I think I have a very good sense of humor. My kids do not. I would be onstage and I’d say the same silly joke and people would crack up. My children would look at each other and go, “Ugh.”TurtlesI like land turtles. I like sea turtles. I like all kinds of turtles. I just think that they are fascinating. I have a place in Florida where sea turtles nest and it’s pretty exciting to see them. And we’ve got turtles that live in a little pond here, but I don’t disturb them.Guest-Starring on ‘The Muppet Show’ in 1980My Muppet experience — so great. Jim Henson was alive and there. “Orange Colored Sky” was an old ’50s song and they picked it for me. And then I did “Rubberband Man” with the band. A fantastic show to be on.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      The Viral Choreographer Changing the Way Women Move

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      In February 2023, Rihanna took the field during the Super Bowl LVII halftime show for her first performance in five years. As the opening notes of “Rude Boy” played, a group of dancers in identical puffy white suits and sunglasses gathered in the middle of the stage, moving with forceful precision, gathering speed as the […] More

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      in Music

      Sean Combs’s Arrest Has the Music World Asking: Is Our #MeToo Here?

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      Activists and survivors are hopeful for change after the industry, which has a pervasive party culture, largely avoided the accountability that swept Hollywood and politics.The arrest of Sean Combs last week, on charges including sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy, represents a stunning reversal of fortune for the hip-hop impresario, who as recently as a year ago was feted as an industry visionary before a sudden series of sexual assault accusations.The indictment against Mr. Combs accuses him of running a criminal enterprise centered on abusing women, and of using bribery, arson, kidnapping and threats of violence to intimidate and silence victims. He has denied the allegations and pleaded not guilty to the charges.But Mr. Combs’s arrest has also stirred the hopes of activists and survivors of sexual violence that his case may finally lead to lasting change in the music industry. Though long seen as inhospitable to women, the business has largely avoided the scrutiny and accountability that swept Hollywood, politics and much of the media world at the peak of the #MeToo movement in the late 2010s.There is no single explanation for why music dodged a similar reckoning. Some point to the industry’s decentralized power structure, its pervasive party culture and a history of deference to artists and top executives.“Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, the looseness with sexuality — that is baked into the culture of the music industry,” said Caroline Heldman, a professor at Occidental College and a longtime activist. “Unfortunately, that means that rape culture is baked into it, because there aren’t mechanisms of accountability.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More