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      These Talkies Star Complicated Women You Might Well Recognize

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      A MoMA series puts the spotlight on a Hollywood era when actresses broke free of stereotypes that would later dominate movies for decades.In that all-too-brief period in Hollywood between the silent era and the summer of 1934, when the puritanical Production Code Administration began to put a stranglehold on the industry, the women of the silver screen came into their own.Sure, this was the stretch of time that saw the rise of legendary leading ladies like Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer and Marlene Dietrich. But female star power in pre-Code Hollywood went far beyond these big names.Take it from “Dames, Janes, Dolls and Canaries,” a fine series starting Tuesday at the Museum of Modern Art that offers a small but rich sampling of pre-Code titles, several rarely screened. This selection, programmed by the writer and film historian Farran Smith Nehme, showcases the abundance of actresses whose singular presences helped stake out complex understandings of womanhood in unexpectedly modern ways.Pre-Code films have a reputation for being salacious. That was not exactly a product of progressive ideals but a business tactic meant to draw in Depression-era audiences with sheer titillation.Hobart Henley’s mesmerizing 1932 ensemble film, “Night World,” is filled with leggy chorus girls, broom-closet makeouts, scandal and murder, while King Vidor’s “Bird of Paradise” from the same year, an adventure romance with a deliriously racist understanding of Pacific native culture, features an extended underwater scene in which a nude Dolores del Río swims away from her white beau.Yet in “Night World,” Mae Clarke, who plays a dancer with a knack for nursing drunkards back to health, cuts through the hedonism and anarchy with her grounded intelligence and low-key charm. And del Río — a Mexican actress regularly handed the role of forcefully sexual foreigner during her time in Hollywood — brings to her island princess a vibrancy and solemn romanticism that deepens an otherwise two-dimensional part.Dolores del Río with Joel McCrea in “Night World.”via The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills ArchivePre-Code actresses no longer played merely vamps or ingénues, those twin feminine archetypes that dominated the silent era. And without the kind of Production Code meddling that would eventually regulate and censor, among other things, the expression of female desire and sexuality, their characters were often ahead of their time, undermining the notion that American movies have gotten progressively more open-minded since then. The women of pre-Code Hollywood were not only more sexually liberated than their Code-bound successors, they were also unapologetically independent and skeptical or outright dismissive of norms and institutions like marriage in ways that went unpunished.Frank Borzage’s 1931 drama “Bad Girl,” for instance, opens with a bait and switch. We see Dorothy (Sally Eilers) in a white gown, nervously clutching a bouquet as a wedding march swells in the distance. But as the procession makes its way through a bustling dining room, we realize Dorothy’s not a jittery bride but a first-time model selling the fantasy of matrimony to an audience of starry-eyed gals and leering bachelors.“The law makes us a bunch of puppets on strings, like Punch and Judy,” says Ruth (Mae Clarke again) in James Whale’s 1932 “The Impatient Maiden.” Ruth is an assistant to a divorce lawyer who regularly witnesses marriages fraught with abuse, abandonment and betrayal. (This is in no small part because of the country’s economic precarity, a reality that factors into a number of films in this series.)A practical gal nevertheless filled with quiet yearning, Ruth suggests a reasonable course of action when she falls for Lew Ayres’s Dr. Brown: wait to tie the knot until his medical practice takes off. Scandal and hardship ensue when Dr. Brown rejects Ruth’s proposition, yet we sense that the root of the lovers’ problems lies not in a woman’s apprehension about marriage, but in the inert ideals that cloud the minds of men.Other films in the series take marriage lightly, to self-affirming and playfully joyous effect.In “One Hour With You” (1932), a musical comedy directed by Ernst Lubitsch with the assistance of George Cukor, the stars Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald play a married couple, Andre and Colette, who are first seen canoodling in a park — a place regularly reserved for illicit lovers. Colette’s bestie, a bona fide homewrecker named Mitzi (a delightfully lusty Genevieve Tobin), takes a liking to Andre, prompting a night of infidelity from both sides that is conclusively brushed under the rug when the couple decide they love each other too much to let such trivial pursuits ruin them. As for Mitzi, she responds to her own husband’s divorce request with suave nonchalance, driving off with a risqué self-portrait in tow.Particularly touching are the moments in these films when women stand up for each other in the face of gendered moralizing.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Review: In ‘Intimate Apparel,’ Letting the Seamstress Sing

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      Lynn Nottage’s play about a Black woman in 1905 becomes an opera, with music by Ricky Ian Gordon, that forefronts voices ignored by history.We begin with joyful ragtime, that musical theater fallback for telling Black stories of the early 20th century.But the sound is muffled, distorted. The party is elsewhere in the boardinghouse where our heroine, Esther, a shy, plain woman of 35, sits in her room sewing corsets and camisoles for socialites and streetwalkers. She is too serious and too ambitious to descend to the parlor and cakewalk with the revelers.So is “Intimate Apparel.” In musicalizing Lynn Nottage’s play of the same title, Ricky Ian Gordon, working with a text by Nottage herself, wants more for Esther than a quick dance and a slick tune. A woman so bent on betterment in an age that makes it almost impossible deserves the most serious and ambitious musical treatment available — and gets it in the knockout Lincoln Center Theater production, directed by Bartlett Sher, that opened at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater on Monday.That the play was excellent to begin with was no guarantee of a viable libretto. But looking back on its 2004 Roundabout Theater Company premiere, starring Viola Davis as Esther, you can see that “Intimate Apparel” already had the necessary ingredients for a powerful opera: spine, scope and poetry.The spine remains neatly articulated. The first scene quickly establishes that Esther (Kearstin Piper Brown) has the discipline and drive to make a career of her handiwork; with the savings she sews into the lining of her crazy quilt she plans one day to open a beauty salon. The scene also establishes her pride, as she rejects the last-chance men who come to the parties given by her landlady, Mrs. Dickson.“Pride’ll leave you lonely,” Mrs. Dickson (Adrienne Danrich) warns.We next meet two of her clients, whose lives express in contrasting ways the limitations Esther hopes to escape. Mrs. Van Buren (Naomi Louisa O’Connell) has every luxury a white woman of privilege could want, including the pink silk crepe de chine corset that Esther brings to her boudoir for a fitting. But Mrs. Van Buren, trained only to be a wealthy man’s wife, has no options when her husband loses interest.Though poor and Black, Mayme (Krysty Swann) is likewise at men’s mercy for her few luxuries — which, amusingly, include the same corset as Mrs. Van Buren’s. (“What she got, you want,/What you got, she want,” Esther comments.) Instead of an absent husband Mayme has johns who are often vile or violent, yet she is closer to Mrs. Van Buren than either might like to think.Brown and Arnold Livingston Geis as Mr. Marks, a fabric salesman, in the opera at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesEsther’s friendship with the women is more than professional but nevertheless circumscribed by class and race. (She has never entered Mrs. Van Buren’s house through the front door, and presumably never entered a brothel at all.) Her third professional friendship is even more delicate. Mr. Marks (Arnold Livingston Geis) sells fabric on Orchard Street, saving the most beautiful bolts for her. Though he is the only man ever to recognize and encourage her gift, he is literally untouchable: an Orthodox Jew.But he is not the only man to flirt with her. Esther is surprised — and then, almost against her will, gratified — to receive a letter from a Barbadian laborer working on the Panama Canal. It seems that George Armstrong (Justin Austin) is looking for a pen pal to counter, with beautiful words, the filth and harshness of his job. As Esther can neither read nor write, she depends on Mrs. Dickson to tell her what George is saying; and then on Mrs. Van Buren and Mayme to forge suitably Cyrano-like replies.I will say no more about the plot except that at the end of Act I Armstrong arrives in New York to marry Esther, who wears an exquisite dress made with fabric she bought from Mr. Marks. If she is not what might have been expected from their correspondence, neither, she gradually realizes, is he. In Act II we learn why.Many plays sewn so tightly unravel completely as they stretch toward their crisis. Not “Intimate Apparel”; with its eye on the big picture, it maintains both its integrity and its tension to the end. Never stinting on detail — or, apparently, period research — Nottage forces the audience to keep sight of the larger pressures pushing all her characters into situations they must eventually escape more explosively.I focus on the story because it is usually the problem with opera, as books are with musicals. Nottage has cut perhaps half of her play to make room for Gordon’s music, and in doing so has made the smart if painful choice to retain only what is most narrowly tailored to the plot and yet most allusive. What we call poetry in opera is not really the verse (though Nottage’s libretto is lightly rhymed where necessary) but the rich texture of everything doing double duty.Courtship by mail: Brown and Justin Austin as George Armstrong.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSo too with Gordon’s lush yet intricate score, which soars into the timeless atmosphere of operatic writing (though he calls his hybrid works “operacals”) while always regrounding us in the specifics of period and character. In numbers like “No One Does It for Us,” repeated choruses do more than ram home lovely melodies; they underline the similarities between Esther and Mayme, who sing it. And it is not for nothing that George’s letter arias from Panama are typically accompanied by a ghostly chorus of other men, as if to question their strange intimacy.None of these smart choices would matter if the performers could not make hay of them, but Sher has assembled and tuned an unusually fine cast of opera singers who can actually act. Brown is especially heartbreaking as Esther — and astonishingly tireless in a huge role. (Chabrelle Williams takes over for the Wednesday and Sunday matinees.) Her scenes with Geis as Mr. Marks are so gentle and rich in subtext you don’t want them to end. But all six leads are terrific, and the ensemble of eight other singers performs dozens of roles, each quickly and perfectly etched.Sher’s staging in the 299-seat Newhouse, on a simple turntable set by Michael Yeargan, is a marvel of constant movement that never feels busy, and the costumes by Catherine Zuber are exquisite even when plain. As always, it is a joy to hear an opera in an intimate space with acoustics so clear and natural — the sound is by Marc Salzberg — that the captions projected on the walls of the set are rarely needed. And though the voices are prioritized in Gordon’s orchestration for two pianos, the presence of the instruments, on platforms above the stage, is not incidental. As played on Friday evening by Nathaniel LaNasa and Brent Funderburk, they seemed to have dramatic roles of their own, representing not only the need of women, especially Black women, for emotional independence, but also the world of 1905 that forbids it.In that sense “Intimate Apparel” — even more as an opera than as a play — is an act of rescue. When Esther tells Mrs. Van Buren, as they write the first letter to George, “My life ain’t really worthy of words,” she means that she isn’t special enough to be made permanent on paper. That isn’t true; as Nottage and now Gordon have shown, she is worthy of even more. She is worthy of music that is finally worthy of her.Intimate ApparelThrough March 6 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      in Television

      Amy Schneider on Her Whirlwind ‘Jeopardy!’ Run

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      She seemed unstoppable, but on Wednesday, it happened. After 40 wins, Amy Schneider, the “Jeopardy!” champion whose information recall often seemed faster than a search engine, was defeated.Schneider ended with the second longest streak in the history of the game and $1.4 million in total winnings. She was beat by Rhone Talsma, a 29-year-old librarian from Chicago, who answered the Final Jeopardy clue correctly when Schneider did not. His face after his win was one of absolute shock. (He said in an interview Wednesday that he had thought defeat was inevitable because of Schneider’s record.)Schneider, 42, an engineering manager who lives in Oakland, Calif., has been through a whirlwind couple of months, fulfilling a longtime dream of being on the show and contending with becoming a public figure as she rocketed to game-show fame.As a transgender woman, she dealt with bigotry online, responding to it graciously on social media; she also received a stream of encouragement and affirmation from those thrilled to see a transgender person succeed so mightily on television.In an interview on Wednesday, she spoke about her final game and what her run on “Jeopardy!” has meant to her. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Do you have one overwhelming emotion right now, or is it a mix of them?It’s definitely a mix. A lot of it is emotions that I had at the time, but the one that’s really different is that my fans on Twitter and everything are going to be sad. And it bums me out.Take me back to the beginning of this game. Do you remember how you were feeling?You know, I had a feeling about that day, some reason. You wouldn’t really think so from looking at the scores of the last week, but once I passed Matt Amodio, there was this like motivation — I could feel it slip. You know, Ken’s record still seems so far away. And the fatigue of this taping was really starting to add up. I couldn’t explain it even to myself, but I just could feel that something was slipping a little bit, however much I tried to fight it.Read More About ‘Jeopardy!’A New Legend: Her dazzling 40-game run is over, but Amy Schneider reached historic milestones for money won and consecutive victories.On a Roll: Schneider’s long streak is not a one-off: The show has seen an unusual trend of big winners lately. But why?Hosting Duo: Ken Jennings and Mayim Bialik are sharing the role this season, putting an end to the speculation around the job — for now.A Rattled TV Institution: Replacing the late Alex Trebek has been an ongoing saga for the show. Here’s how the messy succession unfolded.How many games had you played that day?This was the third. It was right after lunch. And another thing I did kind of have a feeling about was Rhone. Ken would often say how, when he was eventually defeated, it was the person who was just friendly and wanted to hang out, wasn’t intimidated by him. That was definitely true of Rhone. And he was also really a fun guy to hang out with. And I was like, well, if it had to be someone, I’m glad it was him.What was the turning point of that game?There was one clue that both of us knew the answer to, and he beat me on the buzzer and then that gave him the Daily Double. And he — I think quite correctly — made the bold move and bet everything to really go for the win and it paid off for him. And once he had gotten that Daily Double, I knew that, at the very least, it was going to come down to Final Jeopardy.Walk me through that Final Jeopardy. How are you feeling about the category (Countries of the World)?I felt great about the category. Geography has always been a strong subject of mine. And then the clue came up, and it just wasn’t coming to me. And it was very frustrating.[The clue: The only nation in the world whose name in English ends in an “H,” it’s also one of the 10 most populous.]I remember my mind, as it was hopping through the world. I was like, “India; no. Pakistan; no. Nepal; no.” And then it just moved on and I was right there by Bangladesh and I didn’t get it.A lot of times during this run you’ve been totally secure going into Final Jeopardy. So this was kind of unusual, right?Yeah, it had happened a few times before, but not anytime recently. And so I’d sort of forgotten what that fear was like and that kind of pressure.How did it feel sinking in that it was over?I mean, it was tough. Playing “Jeopardy!” has been the most fun I’ve ever had and I didn’t want it to end. I knew it would some time, but it was tough to realize that the moment was finally there. That said, there was some relief as well. One of the first thoughts I had was, well, I don’t have to come up with any more anecdotes. And it had been a lot, going out of town every week, and it was just nice to be like, OK, I can just get back to my normal life with Genevieve [Schneider’s girlfriend].I can only imagine how mentally and emotionally taxing it was. Describe how you felt after a day taping five games.Just done. I would call Genevieve and let her know what happened and then go back either to the hotel room or the airport, depending what day it was, and just like sit there, lie there and just do nothing. Not think, not read on my phone, just like nothing for like an hour every time.What did you learn from this experience, first in terms of trivia, and then in terms of your life and who you are?Well, definitely Bangladesh. I can tell you that. It’s mainly around some of the stuff I missed. Like the Field Museum the other day [the correct response to Final Jeopardy] — that was frustrating.And in terms of your life more broadly?I think the main thing that I got out of this was being OK with myself, how I look, how I present to the world. I’ve been openly trans for a little under five years now, and there’s still definitely lingering worry and dysphoria and things like that.Just to get so much positive feedback, so much support and so much acceptance, it enabled me — by the end of it — to look at myself on TV and be like, “Oh, you know, she’s pretty, she’s fun, what a likable person.” And I’ve never been able to see myself that way before.What kind of feedback have you heard from transgender “Jeopardy!” fans or just transgender people in general who have reached out to you?Just a ton of support. That’s been really great and really meaningful. I think that just as great, just as meaningful, has been hearing from parents, grandparents, loved ones of trans people and hearing either that they understand their trans loved ones better, or, a lot of times too, that I’ve eased their fears for their trans loved ones, seeing that trans people can succeed and they’re not going to be as limited as maybe they feared that they would be. More

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      ‘The Conductor’ Review: Seizing the Baton

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      In this biographical documentary, Marin Alsop recounts how she became the first woman to lead a major American orchestra.When Marin Alsop became the music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 2007, she was the first woman to lead a major orchestra in the United States. Alsop, who concluded her tenure in that position last year, recounts her life in classical music in the documentary “The Conductor,” directed by Bernadette Wegenstein. Alsop’s biography is a story of continually challenging a field in which the sexist idea that women can’t conduct persists.The only child of a cellist and a violinist, Alsop recalls being a young girl and seeing Leonard Bernstein conduct; she saw his remarks to the audience as being directed straight at her. Alsop would eventually work under the mentorship of Bernstein (shown looking animated and, frankly, oblivious to the boundaries of personal space in old video) at the Tanglewood Music Center. But much of her career required taking initiative when opportunities were denied to her.She formed an all-female, mostly string swing band. (She speaks of how the demands of the genre ran counter to the perfection classical musicians aspire to.) After being rejected from Juilliard’s conducting program (she says a teacher told her she would never conduct), she founded her own orchestra. And in Baltimore, where her selection for the job originally rankled musicians, she started a music program for children.As filmmaking, “The Conductor” takes a fairly standard approach. The most engaging portions involve music-making itself. Alsop explains her ideas about Mahler. (“There’s a reason why Mahler put every single note in the piece,” she says in voice-over, as the movie shows her on a boat in Switzerland, where she likens a mist to the opening of a Mahler symphony; her job, she continues, is to understand his motivations.) Elsewhere, musicians and pupils describe Alsop’s encouraging approach.The ConductorNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Television

      At Sundance, Two Films Look at Abortion and the Jane Collective

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      In the years leading up to Roe v. Wade, a Chicago group helped thousands of women obtain the procedure safely. A documentary and a feature tell their story.Judith Arcana was 27 and recently separated from her husband when she began driving women surreptitiously for safe — but illegal — abortions. The year was 1970, she was an out-of-work teacher on the South Side of Chicago, and she was spending her days counseling women in need.“I don’t think we were crazy,” said Arcana, now 78. “I don’t think we were stupid. I think that we had found something that was so important, so useful in the lives of women and girls.”“We were radicalized in the arena of women’s bodies,” she said. “We knew that what we were doing was good work in the world. And we knew that it was illegal.”Arcana was part of the Jane Collective, a disparate, rotating group of women who ensured safe abortions for thousands of women in Chicago between 1968 and 1973. Despite the law, women were still getting abortions. But they were often performing them on themselves and winding up in the hospital, or paying the mob with no guarantee of survival.During these years, because of Arcana and other women, if you lived in Chicago and needed help, you could call a number and talk with a woman who would offer a safer alternative. Members of the collective provided counseling and arranged the procedures, which they eventually administered — 11,000 all told during that period. But then in 1972, Arcana and six other members of the group were arrested, each charged with 11 counts of abortion or conspiracy to commit an abortion with a possible 10-year sentence for each charge. Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision issued in 1973, saved them all.Mugshots of members of the Jane Collective who were arrested in 1972. HBONow, close to 50 years later, members of the collective are sharing their stories in a pair of movies at the Sundance Film Festival, which begins Thursday: the HBO documentary “The Janes”; and a fictionalized account titled “Call Jane,” starring Elizabeth Banks and Sigourney Weaver, and looking for distribution.The movies are debuting at a particularly crucial time for abortion rights. The Supreme Court heard arguments in December over the legality of a Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks; it is expected to issue a decision this summer. Should the court uphold the law, the ruling would be at odds with Roe v. Wade, which declared abortion a constitutional right and forbade states from banning the procedure before fetal viability (23 weeks). The Sundance filmmakers make no secret that they support abortion rights but say they want their work to show the complexity of the subject.In “Call Jane,” Banks plays Joy, a mother and housewife who seeks out an illegal abortion after learning that her pregnancy is life-threatening — her attempt to secure one legally having been denied by an all-male hospital board. The movie’s director, Phyllis Nagy (whose credits include the screenplay for “Carol”), said she wished she could show it to the Supreme Court’s conservative justices. “I would sit there and say, ‘Now, talk to me,’ and it wouldn’t make any difference, probably,” she said. “But artists need to start having the kinds of political conversations with society that aren’t didactic,” she added. “Nothing else has worked.”Elizabeth Banks in “Call Jane,” about a woman trying to terminate a life-threatening pregnancy. Wilson Webb, via Sundance InstituteThe makers of “The Janes” hope those with differing views will allow themselves a look at life before Roe v. Wade. “This is a glimpse at history; I don’t think it’s an advocacy film,” said Tia Lessin, who directed with Emma Pildes, whose father used to be married to Arcana. Arcana’s son, Daniel, and Pildes are producers on the film. Lessin added, “It’s a real life story about what happened and the lengths that women went to to have abortions and to enable other women to have abortions.”“Do I hope that people’s takeaway will be ‘let’s not go back there’? Sure. But I really hope it moves people to engage in conversation. Love the film, hate the film,” she said before Pildes jumped in: “Talk about the issue.”And there is plenty to discuss.The Jane Collective was formed when a college student, Heather Booth, now 76, received a desperate call from a friend looking for an abortion. Booth, active in the civil rights movement, found a doctor willing to help and passed along the information. “I made what I thought was a one-time arrangement,” she said in an interview. Soon another woman called. Then another. Booth found herself negotiating fees and learning the intricacies of the procedure so she could counsel women. After a few years, Booth, by then a mother working on her graduate degree at the University of Chicago, recruited others to fulfill the growing need.“I was working full time. The number of calls were increasing. It was certainly too much for one person,” she added.Marie Leaner, now 80, was raised Roman Catholic and taught to believe that abortion was a sin. At a community center on the West Side of Chicago, she ran a program for teenage mothers. “I just thought it was atrocious that these women didn’t want to carry the babies but they felt this was their punishment for being in love or being sexually involved with someone,” she recalled. “I decided I wanted to do something about it.”She offered up her apartment for the procedures and occasionally held the hands of the women who came through. As one of the few Black women in the group, she said, “I knew that Black and brown people wouldn’t partake of the service if they couldn’t see themselves involved in it.”The State of Abortion in the U.S.Card 1 of 5Abortion at the Supreme Court. More

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      Erika Lust's Alternative Porn Vision

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      The Swedish moviemaker thinks pornography can create a society that sees sexuality as myriad and joyful, and where women’s pleasure matters.BARCELONA, Spain — When Billie Eilish called pornography “a disgrace” in a recent radio interview, the quote made headlines. The Grammy-winning musician said she had started watching at around age 11, to learn how to have sex, and that she was now angry about the way she felt porn misrepresented women.When people talk about pornography, they’re often referring, like Eilish, to its commercial, heterosexual variety, which is what most of the free porn online tends to be. On those sites, you’d be forgiven for thinking it all looks the same. But depending on the sexual politics and vision of its creator, porn can look wildly different.Take, for example, the work of the Swedish filmmaker Erika Lust. She has built her production company, Erika Lust Films, into an art-house pornography behemoth by offering something outside the porn mainstream. Most viewers watch Lust’s stylish, highly produced films by subscribing to her websites, where she also distributes videos by other like-minded directors. But her own films have also been screened in regular movie theaters in Berlin, London, Paris, Los Angeles and New York.“There’s not just one type of porn,” Lust said in an interview at her office in Barcelona, where she has lived since 2000. “People see it as one monolithic entity, but it’s not.”In the films Lust makes, she said her goal was for the female performers to have real orgasms. “When women watch porn, they need to see that women are being stimulated,” she said. “If there is a scene with penetrative sex, viewers need to see a woman using her hand or a vibrator at the same time — because that’s what works for most women.”Lust, 44, added that she had spoken with many young women who told her, “‘Something’s wrong with my body, I can’t reach an orgasm with a man,’ because they’re reproducing what they learn from online porn.”In Eilish’s radio interview, she said that the damage inflicted on her by online pornography went deeper still: In her view, it had “destroyed” her brain. The philosopher Amia Srinivasan has also recently considered porn’s effect on the mind, reviving feminist debates from the 1970s and ’80s.In “The Right to Sex,” Srinivasan’s 2021 best-selling essay collection, she argues that, “While filmed sex seemingly opens up a world of sexual possibility, all too often it shuts down the sexual imagination, making it weak, dependent, lazy, codified. The sexual imagination is transformed into a mimesis-machine, incapable of generating its own novelty.” (Srinivasan declined to be interviewed for this article.)Although in her book she argues against censoring explicit material — a move that often unfairly targets women and sexual minorities, she writes — the Oxford University academic advises young people to lay off porn if they want their sex lives to be “more joyful, more equal, freer.”“Perhaps then the sexual imagination could be coaxed, even briefly, to recall its lost power,” Srinivasan writes.“Sex is such a huge part of who we are,” Lust said, “and there are so many more stories to tell.”Monica FiguerasYet Lust said it was film’s capacity to excite the erotic imagination that first drew her to pornography. While studying political science at Lund University in Sweden, she said she read “Hard Core,” a book by Linda Williams that is regarded as a classic of feminist film criticism, and that argues that pornography is a way of communicating ideas about gender and sex.Feminist thinking led Lust to realize that porn, like many other cultural products, was mostly made by men, for men and from a narrow perspective: that of “middle-aged, heterosexual, white men,” she said. This male view of sexuality was “often misogynistic, in which women were reduced to tools for men’s orgasm,” she added. A lot of commercial porn is shot from a disembodied male perspective, and often the only part of a male performer that’s visible onscreen is his penis, Lust said.The films she directs and produces, on the other hand, show women with sexual agency, who stimulate their own clitorises and whose facial expressions communicate their emotional and psychological states. Lust’s performers have a natural, everyday look and include people of “different sexualities, skin colors and body shapes,” she said.Her films are also heavy on plot lines. Lust’s best-known series, “XConfessions,” are filmed depictions of her viewers’ real fantasies. Anyone can “confess” their imagined or real-life sex stories through the XConfessions website. If she likes the idea, she turns it into a film. The stories include classic and kinky fantasies and are sometimes made by guest directors, such as the Canadian cult queer filmmaker Bruce LaBruce. One of his “XConfessions” movies, “Valentin, Pierre and Catalina,” is a remake of François Truffaut’s classic movie “Jules and Jim,” a three-way polyamorous love story between a woman and two men.LaBruce, who just wrapped up a feature-length parody porn movie for Lust set in the fashion industry, said in a phone interview that he was not surprised by the recent resurgence of negative attitudes toward porn. “The idea that porn is a male way of controlling women — that used to be the provenance of the Christian right,” he said. “Now, the left and the right have kind of flipped.”The anthropologist Gayle Rubin, who was on the “pro-sex” feminist side of the 1970s and ’80s “sex wars,” opposing calls for censorship, said by phone that pornography was “easy to pick on” because, historically, it had been marginalized socially and legally.“You know in movies when you think the monster is dead, but it just keeps coming back?” she said. “These assumptions about porn just keep resurfacing, going back more than four decades.“Many people just don’t think as rigorously about porn as they do other topics. Porn is a special case in how it’s treated intellectually, which is badly — even among philosophers and others who should know better,” Rubin said.While the porn industry is not known for critical reflection, there are, however, events like the Berlin Porn Film Festival, an annual gathering that seeks to provide new perspectives on the genre — artistic, social and even philosophical. Paulita Pappel, a porn performer and director who is one of the event’s curators, said that porn was often “a mirror of wider problems in society.” She added that, “The more we scapegoat and stigmatize it, the less space there will be for porn to be diverse, and the less chance we have to change the bigger issues.”When Lust screened her first feature-length movie, “The Intern,” to a sold-out audience at the festival in October, many in the audience — men, women and gender nonconforming people, mostly in their 20 and 30s — said that they came to see the film in search of an alternative to traditional porn.“I’m here because my friend recommended Erika Lust, because she doesn’t make heteronormative porn,” said Levent Ekemen, 28, a graduate student. “Her films show sensuality, and they’re extremely erotic.”Lust, center, on the set of “The Intern,” her first feature-length movie, which had its premiere at the Berlin Porn Film Festival in 2021.Adriana EskenaziLust said she hoped that the movies on her websites can have an “expansive” effect on people’s sense of the erotic. “With some of LaBruce’s films with male interaction,” she said, “men tell me, ‘Erika, I’ve never watched this before, but it was on your site, and it was hot!’ People are opening up their sexual visions outside of what they might be used to seeing.”She added that she wanted to help create a society that sees sexuality as myriad and joyful, and where women’s pleasure matters. “The value filmmaking has when it comes to empathizing with other people is incredible,” she said. “Sex is such a huge part of who we are, and there are so many more stories to tell.”“I have a right to tell them,” she added. “And no one can stop me.” More

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      in Television

      Middle Age Doesn’t Happen ‘Just Like That’

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      Why is the “Sex and the City” reboot populated by adults who seem perplexed by everything from politics to their own bodies?Have you heard? There’s a TV show featuring 50-somethings on HBO, right now. “And Just Like That,” the reboot of “Sex and the City,” has resurrected the old gang (Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte — minus Samantha) in present-day New York City, 17 years after the last episode aired. Yes, it turns out that people — even women-people — can actually keep existing beyond the age of 38. Incredible!Or at least that appears to be the perspective of AJLT, which depicts a world of middle-aged characters suspended in perpetual astonishment and discomfort about everything they encounter, from commonplace political and social phenomena to their own bodies. (Warning: spoilers ahead.)“It’s as if its characters must have been asleep for 20 years and awakened utterly gob-smacked to find themselves encountering such things as Black professors, nonbinary children and queer longings,” said Joy Castro, 54, a writer and professor of English and ethnic studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.The characters do seem Rip Van Winkle-like, as they stumble upon and blink in amazement at very unsurprising things. “Wow! Instagram? Podcasts?” marvels Miranda at some of Carrie’s latest endeavors, as if these were edgy new enterprises.Some of the “Van Winkle-iest” moments involve Miranda’s foot-in-mouth disease when interacting with Nya Wallace, the Black professor in her new human rights law graduate program. Charlotte, too, evinces a weird awkwardness as she cultivates a new friendship with the glamorous Lisa Todd Wexley, a wealthy, stylish Black woman she meets through her daughters’ private school.Sarah Jessica Parker as a podcasting Carrie Bradshaw.Craig Blankenhorn/HBO Max“The show now is trying to be woke without succeeding,” said Cheryl Packwood, 60, an attorney and retired diplomat. “I never liked the show to begin with; it was just so white and shallow. It’s not at 55 that you suddenly try so hard to have a Black friend.”But beyond the external factors of race and politics, the protagonists seem most ill at ease with their own bodies and ages, which they refer to frequently, unnaturally and, often, loudly.Examples abound:Over brunch, a discussion about Miranda’s decision to go gray devolves into a barbed exchange about the ethics of hair color. For Miranda, Carrie’s trademark blond highlights pass muster since they are “obvious” — clearly artificial, hence not trying to deceive anyone. But Charlotte’s preference to maintain a more natural brown does not meet Miranda’s ethical standards.Charlotte is “trying to pass” as younger, says Miranda with disapproval. “There are more important issues in the world than trying to look young,” she scolds. Women do talk about hair and aging, but they generally do not turn salon choices into grounds for moral condemnation over omelets.The ‘Sex and the City’ UniverseThe sprawling franchise revolutionized how women were portrayed on the screen. And the show isn’t over yet. A New Series: Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte return for another strut down the premium cable runway in “And Just Like That,” streaming on HBO. Off Broadway: Candace Bushnell, whose writing gave birth to the “Sex and the City” universe, stars in her one-woman show based on her life. In Carrie’s Footsteps: “Sex and the City” painted a seductive vision of Manhattan, inspiring many young women to move to the city. The Origins: For the show’s 20th anniversary in 2018, Bushnell shared how a collection of essays turned into a pathbreaking series.Stuck waiting in a long ladies’ room line in a theater, Miranda blurts out loudly before a crowd: “I’m 55 and I have to pee,” before heading to the (empty) men’s room. Props to her for feeling free enough to step out of the ladies’ room line. But no midlife people I know think about and announce their own ages like this, as if they’d only just learned how old they were.Miranda Hobbes, right, mid-awkward encounter with her professor, Nya Wallace.Craig Blankenhorn / HBO MaxThe display of age-shock often feels cheap and a little undignified. In another bathroom scene, Charlotte’s husband, Harry, stands at the commode, urinating for an inordinately long (and loud) interlude. When Charlotte expresses dismay, Harry extols his urological health, invoking his own advanced years: “A lotta men my age can’t pull off a stream like this.” We are further reminded of Harry’s age (and excretory systems) when Charlotte loudly books his colonoscopy appointment over her cellphone — in a cafe, and mentions it several more times later.It’s true that people over 50 get colonoscopies, and you could even mine this for some meaningful comedy or human drama. But merely name-checking “colonoscopy” as if it were itself a punchline turns it into another item on a laundry list of clichéd “middle-aged woes.”Continuing the potty humor, after Carrie’s hip surgery (which offers occasion for much more “old lady” and “senior citizen” commentary), an extended sequence involves Charlotte awkwardly maneuvering her on and off a hospital toilet and monitoring Carrie’s urine flow.That scene cuts directly to a discussion between Miranda and her new love interest, the nonbinary Che (Carrie’s podcast boss) about the latter’s diverticulosis. (Even Che, hipper and a decade younger than the others, is not exempted from plumbing problems.)Rather than illuminate the texture and richness of midlife, AJLT seems intent upon merely pointing at it from a noncomprehending, slightly mocking distance. And for a show that built its reputation on the frank discussion of physical taboos, why is there no mention of the universal challenges of menopause — or its male counterpart, andropause?Sarah Jessica Parker and Cynthia Nixon.Craig Blankenhorn/HBO MaxOne of the highlights of SATC was the characters’ longstanding friendship, their deep bonds and history. This could easily provide a wealth of material for the remake, and at times it does — as in scenes where Miranda lovingly comforts a grief-stricken Carrie.At other times, though, the peculiar “age-othering” impedes more natural exchanges. When Miranda spots Carrie seated outdoors on the Columbia campus, for example, she calls out: “I see you! You’re the only 55-year-old on the university steps!” — an odd, age-fetishizing way to describe your best friend of decades. (Also, universities have plenty of older people.)When Harry greets Miranda’s husband Steve with “What’s new?” the once-boyish and playful bartender, now sort of blank and inexpressive, can only come up with: “I got hearing aids. I’m an old timer now.” Miranda then helpfully chimes in with specific medical details.Old friends do not greet each other like this. And while middle-aged men often experience hearing loss, they tend not to announce this fact before saying “hello” or to define themselves with this physical ailment.Overall, such interactions offer a cartoonish view of middle-age, which pushes it all the way to old age (and a stereotypical view of that as well). “The show depicts 50-something people as if they were actually old already, not middle-aged,” said Jamy Buchanan Madeja, 60, an environmental law practitioner and adjunct professor at Northeastern University School of Law.The series does try to grapple with the many issues of getting older: loss, death, strained marriages, changing sexual appetites and an unease with new social mores. This aspect of AJLT can be highly relatable: “I do identify with the questioning around what you need from a long-term relationship,” said Jennifer Brinkman, chief of staff to the mayor of Lincoln, Neb. “I myself am going through a divorce at age 50.”And, she added: “I have definitely experienced awkward moments, like those of Miranda and Charlotte, that reveal how I don’t have the ease of language my children and co-workers have related to our society’s evolving gender and sexuality spectrum. But I want to!”From left, Cathy Ang, Kristin Davis and Alexa Swinton. Charlotte Goldenblatt is navigating her child’s gender identity issues in the SATC reboot.Craig Blankenhorn/HBO Max, via Associated PressYet so much more could be done with this group of older best friends and their beloved hometown. “Sex and the City” resonated with audiences because, whatever its flaws, it valued and found delectation in women’s adventurous spirit — whether channeled into the thrills of love and sex, friendship, fashion and beauty, or the sheer pleasure of New York City itself. AJLT could easily find age-adapted equivalents of these for the group to enjoy.There are real benefits that attend this stage of life: enhanced self-confidence; knowing your own mind; the soul-nourishing connection and, yes, uproarious fun and laughter to be found in relationships (with friends, lovers, family) that have deepened with time. Midlife can also be prime years for professional success and achievement.But in the first several episodes, AJLT shows vanishingly few of these perks, focusing instead on the characters’ decline, confusion and cultural estrangement. And very little seems to remain of any of the group’s careers.What’s more, for all the focus on growing physically old, the show’s protagonists often behave with curious immaturity. Many viewers have been perplexed, for example, by Carrie’s reaction upon discovering Big slumped over, but still conscious, after his heart attack. Rather than call the paramedics or fetch his medication, Carrie falls to the floor, half-smothering Big with her hair.As Ms. Castro said: “If one finds one’s husband collapsed but still alive, does one not call 911 immediately? Carrie’s behavior was so baffling to me.” Baffling, and weirdly passive and ineffectual — almost like a child’s. Charlotte, too, seems less than adult, crying so theatrically while helping plan Big’s funeral that Carrie sends her home in a taxi.“One still hopes, even on television, that women with a certain influence would be playing a more powerful role in their own circumstances. I can’t imagine the same stagnation for men,” said Hollis Robbins, 58, the dean of arts and humanities at Sonoma State University.Sara Ramirez, as Che, and Cynthia Nixon.Craig Blankenhorn/HBO MaxAnd why does Miranda choose to launch her new erotic relationship with Che — orgasming at the top of her lungs — in Carrie’s kitchen, with Carrie in the next room? Isn’t loud, thoughtless sex within earshot of others precisely what her teen son Brady is guilty of? (And what about Miranda’s historic disapproval of adultery, back when husband Steve was the offending party?) It all feels discordantly adolescent.Stagnation in time is actually a core problem in AJLT. When Carrie finds herself too upset to stay in her empty home after Big’s death, she decamps to her former apartment, which she leaves the next morning dressed in something likely unearthed in her old closet: a floor-length white tulle tutu. Devotees of SATC will find this skirt familiar — it resembles very closely the one Carrie wore in the original SATC series finale, when Big follows her to Paris to commit to her, finally.A big, poofy white tutu is the antithesis of widow’s weeds. It visually resituates our heroine back in her glory days. (She wore a shorter white tutu in the original show’s opening credits.) We understand why Carrie might want to wear it now, as a sartorial antidote to the loss of Big. At the same time, though, the tutu looks a bit “off” on her — age-inappropriate and out of fashion. We see people staring at it on the street.Carrie Bradshaw is back in a tutu.Craig Blankenhorn/HBO MaxIt feels as though the show’s creators are still grasping for ways to develop their now-older characters in believable, interesting ways — to “dress” them appropriately for their time and place. And so, like Carrie in her throwback tutu, they wind up reminding us all too starkly of the passage of time, in an incongruous, off-kilter way.Given that the last images we have of this gang date back to 2004, rediscovering them after 17 years would always have brought an initial pang of rueful surprise. It’s natural to feel a little startled or uncomfortable running into a friend you haven’t seen in decades.But it is not natural to feel this kind of shock or discomfort about oneself, one’s environment and the people one sees every day — and to keep feeling it over and over. Because there is nothing shocking about being over 50, or being any age really, since one has necessarily already passed through all the preceding ages. Aging is just another word for “living,” after all — and we all do it in tiny increments, day by day. If only the characters in AJLT were given the same possibility. More

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      in Music

      A Conductor Considers Her Future

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      Susanna Mälkki is at the top of her field as major American orchestras search for their next music directors.HELSINKI, Finland — It was late morning recently, not long after sunrise, as members of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra unwrapped their scarves, unpacked their instruments and settled in for rehearsal at the Musiikkitalo concert hall here.The orchestra’s chief conductor, Susanna Mälkki, walked in from the wings, stopping to banter with players as she made her way to the podium. Once there, she removed her medical mask with a feigned look of relief and raised a baton. With no words and barely a pause, a Lamborghini going from zero to 60 in the blink of an eye, the orchestra launched into the galloping grandeur of Szymanowski’s Concert Overture.Mälkki’s rehearsals tend to unfold like this, with seamless shifts between cordiality and efficiency. A former orchestral cellist, she understands the value of concision in a conductor and precisely articulates what she wants. With results: Her performances often strike a remarkable balance of clarity and urgency, whether shepherding a premiere or reinvigorating a classic.The classical music field has taken notice. At 52, Mälkki is one of the world’s top conductors, widely sought between her appearances in Helsinki and with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, of which she is the principal guest conductor. And with openings on the horizon at major American orchestras — especially the New York Philharmonic, which she leads at Carnegie Hall on Jan. 6, and which is searching for a music director to succeed Jaap van Zweden in 2024 — her name is on leading wish lists.“I’m counting my blessings, that I get to work with all these orchestras,” Mälkki said during a series of interviews this fall. “Any speculation — there’s no need for that.”She is aware of the eyes on her, and of the pressure to appoint women in the United States, where there are currently no female music directors among the largest 25 orchestras. (Nathalie Stutzmann takes the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s podium next year.)“My standpoint has always been that since I do not wish that my gender is something that is held against me, I also shall not use it to benefit from it,” Mälkki said, adding, “Music, with the capital M, remains its own independent entity — and that, for me, is the best part.”Her work, she said, should speak for itself. And it does: “Susanna has to be at the top of anyone’s list,” said Chad Smith, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s chief executive.Mälkki leading the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, where she is the chief conductor, in early December.Maarit KytöharjuBorn in Helsinki in 1969, Mälkki has almost always led a life that revolved around music. She played multiple instruments as a child but settled on the cello, rising to become the principal cellist of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra in her mid-20s. But she also studied conducting and longed to move into that field, which would have been virtually unthinkable for a woman when she was growing up.Among the first major conductors to see Mälkki wield a baton was her compatriot Esa-Pekka Salonen, at a workshop in Stockholm. “He came to me afterward,” she recalled, “and, unbelievably, he said, ‘You look like you’re in the right place.’ So, if you get rotten tomatoes thrown to you later, you can still think, ‘Well, you know, maybe I’m doing something right.’”In 1998, she made the leap to full-time conducting and gave up her post in Gothenburg, where the orchestra’s manager told her, “I’m sure you’re very talented; it’s just a pity that you can never become anything.”Mälkki said the remark was so hurtful that “for years I couldn’t even tell people about it. But again, it comes back to the music, because I was not thinking of myself; I was thinking of all the things I wanted to do with the music.”She first made a name for herself in contemporary repertory, and moved to Paris to serve from 2006 until 2013 as the director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the group founded by Pierre Boulez. (She still lives there, while also keeping an apartment near the Helsinki waterfront, where she likes to go for restorative walks.)“Those years of all those world premieres — it was an incredible school,” she said. “My brain was overheated many times, but it was actually a really fantastic way to learn the craft, because you have to be able to read your score and organize the rehearsals so that the musicians understand what their part is in the big context.”From left, the singer Fiona McGown, the composer Kaija Saariaho and Mälkki preparing Saariaho’s opera “Innocence” in France.Jean-Louis FernamdezIn 2016, Mälkki became the first female chief conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic. She had made guest appearances with the orchestra before, but this was a homecoming that felt, she said, “like the chance to make a contribution to Finnish music life after the fantastic education I had received.”Her players now included old classmates from the nearby Sibelius Academy, the prestigious school that has produced other conducting luminaries, such as Salonen, as well as emerging talents like Santtu-Matias Rouvali and Klaus Mäkelä.That same year, Mälkki was named the principal guest conductor in Los Angeles, at an orchestra she had first led in 2010. The ensemble had not had a principal guest since Michael Tilson Thomas and Simon Rattle, then rising stars, in the 1980s. But the players liked her, and she was invited back repeatedly after her debut.At the time, the orchestra was run by Deborah Borda, who is now the New York Philharmonic’s chief executive. Mälkki had made an impression with her “very deep connection to the music,” Borda recalled recently.“She’s very passionate, but it’s a quiet passion, a quiet charisma,” Borda added. “It’s stunning: More than an outward manifestation, this is like a flower that opens.”During a rehearsal in Los Angeles in October, Mälkki was, as in Helsinki, amiable and assertive. Carolyn Hove, the Philharmonic’s English horn player, described Mälkki as “100 percent prepared” by the time she arrives at the podium, and that “when a conductor is really efficient, it just makes our jobs so much more fun.”While running through Scriabin’s “Le Poème de l’Extase,” Mälkki gestured to sections of the ensemble but also let her gaze shift upward. (“Some people listen with their eyes closed,” she said, “and I guess my way of looking up is the same, that I want to free my ears.”) All the while, she kept notes in her head that she rattled off as soon as the playing stopped.Those notes were thorough, and crucial, as the orchestra rehearsed for the American premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s “Vista,” a piece dedicated to Mälkki, who is a leading navigator of Saariaho’s idiosyncratic sound world. “I always trusted her, and she understands my music,” Saariaho said in June, shortly before Mälkki conducted the world premiere of her opera “Innocence” at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France.Over the past two decades, their relationship has developed to the point where, Saariaho said, “we don’t need to verbalize very much.” When “L’Amour de Loin” arrived at the Metropolitan Opera in 2016, Saariaho insisted that Mälkki conduct it. (She will return to the Met to conduct Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress” this spring.)Mälkki’s specialty in living composers like Saariaho is one of the reasons she was brought to Los Angeles, Smith said. “The other part,” he added, “was just the way she thinks about programming, which is unique.” He used that October concert as an example: opening with “Vista,” followed by Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto and the “Poème.”Mälkki rehearsing a program of works by Saariaho, Tchaikovsky and Scriabin with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in October.Chantal Anderson for The New York Times“On paper those things are not related to each other, but there’s this remarkable thread that goes from the Kaija through the Scriabin,” Smith said. “You experience it as a listener, as a musician. It informs the way each piece is played.”Mälkki continues to learn new works — “little by little,” she said. “Some young people want to do the Mahler right away, and we know many of those, whilst I actually waited quite a long time because I wanted to make sure that I had all my tools.”Some composers, she added, demand maturity — like Bruckner, whose symphonies she is studying now. And, experienced in 21st-century operas by Saariaho and Unsuk Chin, she is looking back toward Wagner.“It’s just quite extraordinary to think that there’s all this repertoire,” she said, “and I could actually just keep exploring that endlessly.”The question is what comes next. The Helsinki Philharmonic recently announced that Mälkki would step down in summer 2023 and become the orchestra’s chief conductor emeritus. A mix of symphonic and opera appearances will follow. Where or whether a music directorship fits into that is anyone’s guess.Borda, the chief executive of the New York Philharmonic, said that a list of candidates for her orchestra’s opening is “always going” in her head. But, she added, “you cannot rush one of these searches,” and at any rate she is more focused at the moment on the renovation of David Geffen Hall, which is set to be completed by fall 2022.Though the orchestra has never had a female music director, Borda added that she is “not striving to demonstrate a social agenda in this appointment.”“We are striving to make the right choice,” she said. “It’s a chemical equation. There has to be combustion, no matter what. Even if you have social goals and aims, you have to, in working with the musicians and the board, make sure that it’s the best person for the job.”There’s also the matter of whether Mälkki would want it.“I think this is a question that will be carefully thought about if it comes up,” she said with diplomatic care. After a pause, Mälkki continued: “There are all sorts of things to be considered, and it would be wrong to choose something just for the prestige of it. It’s ultimately a choice of artistic fulfillment. We’ll see.” More