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      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

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      in Movies

      Maggie Gyllenhaal Has Dangerous Ideas About Directing

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      Maggie Gyllenhaal has never shied away from difficult roles. The actress has been pushing boundaries for years with performances of complicated characters like an assistant playing sadomasochistic games with her boss (“Secretary”), the daughter of an arms dealer caught up in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (“The Honorable Woman”) and a sex worker in 1970s New York (“The Deuce”).But it’s the job of director and screenwriter of “The Lost Daughter,” an adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s novel of the same title, that may be her riskiest role yet.The film, set on a sun-drenched Greek island, stars Olivia Colman as Leda, a middle-aged literature professor on a solo working vacation who gets entangled with a young mother, Nina, played by Dakota Johnson. As she becomes more involved with Nina and her sprawling family, Leda’s past and the decisions she made as a younger woman seep into the present, with strange and at times deeply disturbing results.Like the novel, the film (which begins streaming Dec. 31 on Netflix) confronts complicated questions that women face at different stages of their lives. At its center is the intensely fraught push and pull of motherhood, but it also touches on ambition, sacrifice, aging and art.Already, the film, which won best screenplay at the Venice Film Festival, has attracted awards-season attention, including a raft of nominations from critics’ groups and others. Last month the film won four Gotham Awards, including best feature. Over a long lunch in the West Village, Gyllenhaal — dressed in various shades of appropriately Aegean blue — talked about being a female director today, taboos around motherhood and what it means to translate Ferrante to film. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Dakota Johnson, left, and Olivia Colman in “The Lost Daughter.”Yannis Drakoulidis/NetflixWhat drew you to Ferrante?I started with the Neapolitan novels. She was talking about things I had almost never heard expressed before. Oh my God, this woman is so messed up, and then within 10 seconds of that, thinking I really relate to her, and so am I so messed up or is this something that many people feel but that we’re not talking about? I found it ultimately both disturbing but also really comforting because if someone else has written it down, you think, oh, I’m not alone in what I thought was a secret anxiety or terror, or even the other side of the spectrum, the intensity of joy and connection.Then I read “The Lost Daughter” and I thought, what if instead of all of us having that experience of feeling alone in our rooms, what if I could create a situation where it was communal, where these things were actually spoken out loud?The film shows the joy of being a mother but also the frustrations. Why do you think it’s so rare to see that tension onscreen?I think it’s a combination of two things. Partly there hasn’t been a lot of space for women to express themselves, so an honest feminine expression is unusual. But there’s also a kind of cultural agreement not to talk about these things because we all have mothers. We’re all like, I don’t want my mother to have been ambivalent.I just tried to be as honest as I possibly could be. This is about normalizing a massive spectrum of feelings. I think especially for young Leda and for Nina, their desire — their massive intellectual desire, artistic desire, physical desire — it’s bigger than what they’ve been told they’re allowed to have or need, and I definitely relate to that.The scenes with the young children are so powerful. How did they relate to your own relationship with your children?Bianca, one of the daughters of young Leda, she’s like a mind matched for her mother. My children are like that, too. They are the most beautiful challenge to me. Like, wow. I can’t believe you understood that and saw that.Movies don’t often explore the frustrations of motherhood,  Gyllenhaal said, because “we’re all like, I don’t want my mother to have been ambivalent.”Daniel Arnold for The New York TimesThe film can be seen in many ways as a horror film. Was that a choice?I wanted it to be a thriller. The book is not really a thriller, but I amped that up because I thought it would ultimately give me more artistic freedom. I wanted to even dare myself to move it into horror, a horror movie about the internal workings of her mind. She’s not bad, she’s like you. And I liked the idea of having a classic structure to hang my hat on. I have found in the past that I get the most freedom of expression as an actress when there is really clear structure.I’m not sure I’ll do that next time. I was on the jury at Cannes this year, probably two or three weeks after I finished my final mix. Looking at some really, really interesting films, I realized, oh, you can do whatever you want if you’re following something truthful and I don’t think I knew that.What was the hardest part about adapting?I found that adapting actually used a similar muscle to the one that I have used as an actress in terms of taking a text, whether it’s excellent or has got problems, and figuring out the essence of this piece of material. There are some things that are literal, but they’re so strange. Like the line, “I’m an unnatural mother.” That’s just 100 percent Ferrante, a straight lift, but a lot of people told me, take that line out. I also really did do what [Ferrante permitted] and changed many, many things but I really believe that the script and the film are really in conversation with the book.Leda is a writer, and showing her ambition in her early years is a big part of the movie. Did you see “Bergman Island” this year? Both movies wrestle with the question of whether you can fully be a woman and an artist at the same time.I do believe there’s such a thing as women’s writing and women’s filmmaking. There are really interesting feminist women who do not agree with me. I think that when women express themselves honestly, it looks differently than when men express themselves honestly. This is really dangerous to talk about. When I am let loose, given a little bit of money and space to tell the story I want to tell, it’s about motherhood. It is about the domestic, and it does include a lot of scenes in the kitchen. Can stories about the domestic really be seen as high art? Because to me it’s an opera. I do not come from women whose apron strings were tied to the kitchen. My mom is a professional person [Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal is a screenwriter and director], my grandmother was a pediatrician in the ’40s and my great-aunt was a lawyer. I’m educated and I’ve got a professional life, and yet my identification as a mother is a massive part of me.What was it like to work with Olivia Colman?Olivia really didn’t like to talk about much. I wonder, actually, if it’s because it was relatively recently that she got power as an actress, if she feels similarly to the way I feel as an actress, which is it’s very rare that somebody values my ideas. They will say they do, but people are irritated by actresses with a lot of ideas. I’m not an idiot, and so I mostly keep them to myself. I remember asking Olivia if she likes to rehearse, and she said, I don’t, actually, and I totally relate to that.Gyllenhaal on the set of “The Lost Daughter.” She said that as an actress, she found it “very rare that somebody values my ideas.”Yannis Drakoulidis/NetflixWho inspires you as a director?Fellini and Lucrecia Martel, who is also not ever literal. I love Claire Denis, I’ve talked a lot about Jane Campion, and David Lynch. And then I didn’t really work with him, but I did a weeklong reading of a play with Mike Nichols. He loved his actors, and he taught me. I remember reading [in the recent biography “Mike Nichols: A Life”] about him saying, I’m so sorry if you don’t want to shoot “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” in black and white. Then you should find another director. I’m going to leave. There were a couple of times with this film where I had to say this is wrong. We were going to shoot in New Jersey, but that was wrong. I’m like, I don’t know what to tell you.The theme of translation is obviously important to the characters. Leda translates Italian literature, but also, you’re translating Ferrante. What does the role of translator mean to you?There’s this little section in Rachel Cusk’s book “Kudos,” which I’ve pulled up a few times because I’ve been thinking about adaptation in general. Here is the quote: “I translated it carefully and with great caution as if it were something fragile that I might mistakenly break or kill.” I loved that. She’s saying when I read your book something was communicated to me that was so valuable that I had never heard spoken out loud before that electrified me, that made me understand something about myself, and I had to hold this idea in my hands and carefully bring it over to the other side. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Pariah’ at 10: When Black Lesbian Characters Had the Spotlight

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      The Dee Rees drama made waves but studios largely returned to business as usual. A new crop of filmmakers sees signs of hope.At the shimmering pink Catnip Lounge, a Brooklyn teenager, Alike, stands face to face with a dancer sliding head first down a pole. The pleasure manifesto “My Neck, My Back” from the rapper Khia booms from the speakers. Transfixed by the power of her desire, Alike discovers a physical place outside herself that can hold it. Finally.This is the bold opening of “Pariah,” the coming-of-age drama from the writer-director Dee Rees. Ten years ago it premiered to critical acclaim, first at the Sundance Film Festival, then in theaters with a limited release that December, a herculean effort for an independent film starring a then unknown Adepero Oduye as Alike (pronounced ah-LEE-kay) and made on a shoestring budget of less than $500,000.“Pariah” (available to stream on HBO Max) was the first movie about a Black queer woman to be released in theaters nationwide by a Hollywood studio. As Nelson George wrote in The Times in 2011, “No film made by a Black lesbian about being a Black lesbian has ever received the kind of attention showered on Ms. Rees’s film.” At the same time, George pointed out, “Pariah” was also part of a crop of films that pushed the boundaries of “what ‘Black film’ can be.” How Hollywood responded, then and now, has been telling.Rees tells Alike’s story with an uncompromising specificity that has etched its place in great American cinema. (This year the movie was added to the Criterion Collection.) This unflinching sensibility harks back to the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s. By opening with the unfettered eroticism of the lesbian club and showing us scenes — like Alike’s awkwardly endearing dildo try-on — without explanation or apology, Rees followed in the footsteps of a group of filmmakers who refused to sanitize images of queer life to appease straight audiences. Think Cheryl Dunye’s “The Watermelon Woman” (1996), the first narrative feature film about an out Black lesbian protagonist made by an out Black lesbian. Cheryl Dunye directed herself and Guinevere Turner, left, in “The Watermelon Woman.”First Run Features“Pariah” began making waves in 2007 when Rees released the short that would become the basis for the 2011 feature. Kebo Drew of the San Francisco film training nonprofit Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project remembers the reaction in her community of friends and colleagues. “The Blackness was just saturated, coming from the roots,” Drew recalled.After hearing word-of-mouth about the short, a screening at Outfest in Los Angeles touched the filmmaker Angela Robinson. “I felt like it was kind of opening a door that I hoped would stay open,” said Robinson. “It was such a personal story and a singular vision.”The writer-director Numa Perrier credits Rees and “Pariah” as an inspiration for her 2019 film “Jezebel.” She remembered, “The softness of how vulnerable that coming-of-age story was, I hadn’t seen that before.”Yet this fresh perspective did not lead Hollywood to greenlight more films about Black lesbians. There have been supporting characters like the passionate teacher Ms. Rain (Paula Patton) in “Precious” (2009) and the serene boxing coach Buddhakan (Sheila Atim) in Halle Berry’s directorial debut this year, “Bruised.” But over the last 10 years, not a single feature focused on Black lesbians has made it through mainstream pipelines.At the same time L.G.B.T. characters overall have become far more visible on the big and small screens. Yet according to a University of Southern California report looking at the top 100 films of 2019 (the most recent year for which figures were available), nearly 80 percent of all such characters were male-identified and 77 percent were white. The report doesn’t provide statistics on queer women of color, as a group distinct from the category “female-identified.”“It’s almost like the stars have to align before we get another Black lesbian movie,” Drew said. “But that’s a structural issue. So there has to be a more systematic approach for encouraging stories.”So “Pariah” was singular not just in its self-assurance, but in whose story it told, too: Alike and her best friend, Laura (Pernell Walker), two Black, gay and masculine-of-center best friends from working-class neighborhoods in Brooklyn circa the early 2000s. Through the refuge of their friendship, they carve out space to be themselves.Sara Foster, left, Meagan Good, Devon Aoki and Jill Ritchie in “D.E.B.S.”Bruce Birmelin/Samuel Goldwyn FilmsAt a “Pariah” screening at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2018, Rees told the audience, “There shouldn’t be two or three or 10. To me there should be like 200.” She added, “There’s room for so many more stories.” (Rees declined a request to be interviewed for this article.)When Black lesbian stories, and the filmmakers with the lived experience to tell them, are shut out of the larger film world, the result is systemic erasure that is by definition hard to measure.About 100 feature films have been directed by Black women since 1922, almost a third of whom are lesbians, the researcher and filmmaker Yvonne Welbon wrote in the 2018 anthology “Sisters in the Life: A History of Out African American Lesbian Media-Making.”But the work of Black lesbian filmmakers has almost exclusively been made outside the Hollywood system and often not seen outside the film festival circuit, academia or grassroots distribution networks. Rees’s predecessors — filmmakers like Dunye, Michelle Parkerson (“A Litany for Survival”) and others — didn’t have assurances that a larger audience would even see their work; they simply made films that mattered to them, stories they wanted to see that didn’t yet exist in a film world that barely acknowledged their existence.That “Pariah” earned distribution, made back its budget and even received a glowing shout-out from Meryl Streep during her acceptance speech for “The Iron Lady” at the 2012 Golden Globes, was all monumental, even if the film didn’t garner much attention inside Hollywood.This is something the filmmaker Tina Mabry well understands, having tried, and failed, to get a theatrical release for her critically acclaimed debut feature, “Mississippi Damned,” a few years before “Pariah” came out. After seeing the short version of “Pariah,” Mabry asked Rees for an introduction to the film’s then up-and-coming cinematographer Bradford Young and hired him to shoot “Mississippi Damned.”Tessa Thompson in “Mississippi Damned.” The director, Tina Mabry, turned to the cinematographer Bradford Young after seeing his work on the “Pariah” short.Array ReleasingA coming-of-age tale starring Tessa Thompson and based on Mabry’s experience growing up in a Black working-class family in Tupelo, Miss., the movie won awards on the festival circuit, and aired on cable. Mabry said that she was told repeatedly that the movie was too similar to “Precious” and that “the market can’t handle two Black dramas.” For some distributors that focus on L.G.B.T. audiences, the movie was also perceived as not being gay enough despite a Black lesbian main character.“The distribution model failed us. The people did not,” Mabry said. She also gives a nod to Ava DuVernay, who eventually got the film released on Netflix in 2015 through the film distribution arm she founded, Array. That year Mabry also got her first television directing job (“Queen Sugar,” another DuVernay assist) and Mabry — much like Rees after “Pariah” was released — has worked steadily in Hollywood ever since.Indeed, there are signs of potential change. Mabry said she currently has feature film projects in development at four Hollywood studios, some of which center on Black queer women protagonists, although none of them are a done deal yet.Back when Robinson made her first feature, “D.E.B.S.,” a 2004 lesbian teen spy movie that has since become a cult classic, “there was still the attitude in town that if you played a lesbian, it could ruin your career,” she remembered.After Nina Jacobson, then a Disney studio executive, saw “D.E.B.S.” at the Sundance Film Festival, she hired Robinson to direct “Herbie Reloaded,” starring Lindsay Lohan. With ticket sales of $144 million, Robinson became the first Black woman director to draw at least $100 million at the box office. But despite her gratitude to Jacobson and the crew, the experience left her feeling isolated.“It was me and 200 white men,” Robinson said.That was when she pivoted to cable, accepting an offer from the showrunner Ilene Chaiken to direct episodes of the third season of “The L Word,” the groundbreaking show about the lives of high-powered lesbians in Los Angeles. Robinson hasn’t made another studio-backed film since. (Her 2017 feature “Professor Marston & the Wonder Women” was an indie.)But now, more than 15 years later, she has an all-female action movie in the works at Warner Bros., and her desire to cast women of color in the leads was met not with pushback, but enthusiasm, she said.“Warner Bros. called back and they were like, ‘Yes, we think you should make it more women of color and more queer,” Robinson said. “You have no idea how many years I have been waiting for somebody to say that.”And Robinson is more hopeful than ever. She has a lucrative television production deal with Warner Bros. and several other projects in the pipeline, including a DC Comics series, “Madame X,” and a film remake of “The Hunger.”“It’s always a tenuous time, but things have changed. I don’t feel like I have to Trojan-horse it anymore,” Robinson said, adding that it seems as if “I can just walk in the front door and say, ‘This is what I want to do.’ And I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity to do it.” More

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      in Theater

      What Three Broadway Shows Tell Us About Racial Progress

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      The female protagonists in “Trouble in Mind,” “Caroline, or Change” and “Clyde’s” show the richness that comes from having a multitude of Black voices onstage.Now that Broadway has returned and made it through the fall, and as it deals with a raft of cancellations because of the resurgent pandemic, I’ve been thinking a lot about the meaning of progress. Promoted, in large part, by the racial reckoning of 2020, the theater industry has responded to criticisms about its systemic racism by featuring an impressive number of plays by Black writers or with Black leads.In the last few weeks, I’ve seen a handful of these shows: “Trouble in Mind,” “Caroline, or Change” and “Clyde’s.” Individually, their plots and period settings offer great insight into how far we’ve really come. But taken together, they reveal a full range of aesthetic and racial possibilities that exist for their African American characters once the white gaze is diminished or fully removed.My feelings largely align with the points Alice Childress makes in her 1955 play, “Trouble in Mind,” a comedy-drama about a veteran Black actress named Wiletta Mayer who, while preparing to stage an anti-lynching play called “Chaos in Belleville” for Broadway, begins to challenge the racial paternalism through which its white playwright and director insist on depicting Black Southern life. More specifically, the plot follows Wiletta’s mounting frustrations about her role as a mother who does not protect her Black son from a white mob after he tries to vote. It’s an act that seems inconceivable to Wiletta.“Trouble in Mind,” which was originally produced in Greenwich Village, did not make it to Broadway in 1957 after its white producers insisted that Childress provide a more conciliatory ending for her Black and white characters, and she refused. Now, Charles Randolph-Wright, a Black director, is overseeing the Roundabout Theater Company’s Broadway production of the show at the American Airlines Theater.In the play, Wiletta (portrayed brilliantly by LaChanze) initially accepts her character’s subservience and exaggerated Southern drawl, and the problematic messaging about civil rights in “Chaos in Belleville,” as the price she must pay in order to have one of the few parts offered to Black actors at the time. Set backstage, as Wiletta and her fellow cast members begin rehearsing with the director, Al Manners (Michael Zegen), we follow Wiletta’s progression from a woman trying to school a younger Black actor on how to ingratiate himself to white people, like Manners, who can make or break his career to a woman threatening to leave the production if her role continues to traffic in such offensive and absurd racial stereotypes.As she evolves, the audience is exposed to multiple gazes: the intimate conversations that Black performers have with one another beyond the purview of white people; the figurative masks that Black actors wear in front of their white peers and theater power brokers as a matter of professional survival; and the white gaze that Al and the other white characters don throughout the rehearsals in which they slip back and forth between declarations of how liberal they are and their racist insults.These three perspectives collide when Wiletta fully exposes Al’s racism, a climax that not only puts her career at risk but jeopardizes the future of the play. However, in Childress’s deft hands, this potential loss is not a tragedy, but rather a reversal of fortunes for Wiletta: Once Al is no longer able to determine her fate, she is able to give the performance of a lifetime — and live out her dignity in its fullness onstage.Sharon D Clarke, far left, with Nasia Thomas, Harper Miles and Nya in the musical “Caroline, or Change” at Studio 54.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesI thought a lot about Wiletta’s limited theatrical options — a mammy, a maid, an emotionally repressed Southern mother — while watching Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s musical, “Caroline, or Change,” which first appeared on Broadway in 2004, and now is also being produced by the Roundabout Theater on Broadway, at Studio 54. Set in Louisiana in 1963, eight years after “Trouble in Mind” made its debut and when the civil rights movement was reaching full bloom, the musical does not focus on the major events affecting the nation at the time — the assassination of Medgar Evers, the March on Washington, or the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala.Instead, “Caroline, or Change” is a semi-autobiographical exploration of how the country’s racial dynamics affected an 8-year-old boy named Noah Gellman, his middle-class Jewish American Southern family, their 39-year-old Black housekeeper Caroline Thibodeaux (played by the breathtaking Sharon D Clarke), and her three children.When we first meet Caroline, she is doing laundry in the Gellman’s basement. Physically alone, her world seems to come alive when the radio (Nasia Thomas, Nya and Harper Miles), the washing machine (Arica Jackson), and the dryer (Kevin S. McAllister) become characters onstage and provide Caroline with a sense of camaraderie and comfort that she does not share with her white employers.Public spaces are even more segregated so she finds community in the moon (N’Kenge) and the bus (McAllister again), who speak to her as well. The richness of Caroline’s life, however, is always illusory: The gaze through which we understand her story is never hers, but rather that of Noah’s as he reminisces on his childhood and his family’s (especially his stepmother Rose’s) fraught relationship with her during this turbulent time in American history.To his credit, Kushner’s script never pretends that Noah’s lens is Caroline’s. One of the musical’s most revealing scenes takes Noah’s myopic vision head-on. After Rose (Caissie Levy) tries to teach Noah a lesson by asking Caroline to take home any “change” that she finds in his pockets before she washes them, Noah imagines Caroline’s children at home, happy to spend their entire evening thinking about him and how they will spend the money. This satirical turn challenges Noah’s nostalgia, putting his racial narcissism front and center. It is also a perfect counterpoint to the professed liberalism of Al Manner’s from “Trouble in Mind” and the unacknowledged white male privilege that he wields over his cast and stage crew.And yet, “Caroline, or Change” still feels incomplete. Not because Noah and Caroline are unable to resolve their conflict or because the unrest driving the civil rights movement is nodded to through the toppling of a Confederate statue, but because for the entirety of the show Caroline remains Noah’s fantasy, and thus unknowable to us. She is not a fully realized character.Such distance, of course, is realistic. Memory is fallible and given their differences, I expected Noah to have very little access to Caroline’s inner life or imagination. But I longed to see her unmediated through his sentimentality, and truly on her own terms. Though Caroline is the protagonist of this musical (and Clarke really does own this stage), Caroline is not fully empowered, her agency limited in the story because it was not really hers in the first place.Kara Young, left, and Uzo Aduba as the title character in Lynn Nottage’s play “Clyde’s” at the Hayes Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis is not to say that I need to have an all-access pass to a Black woman’s interiority in order to appreciate the depth of her humanity. In fact, I found the title character in Lynn Nottage’s comedy “Clyde’s,” played by the ever-perfect Uzo Aduba at the Helen Hayes Theater, to be refreshingly inaccessible.The owner of a truck stop diner in Reading, Pa., Clyde also oversees the kitchen that she only staffs with formerly incarcerated men and women. Not only does she impose her exacting demands on her employees — a direct contrast to the Zen-like style of her head cook, Montrellous (the wonderful Ron Cephas Jones) — but she is the only person whose back story we never learn and who, besides her endless stream of costume changes, has no clear character arc.In other words, she is intentionally flat, a feature that Aduba’s nuanced performance leans into with wit and grit, making Clyde a rarity for a Black woman actress: an antihero. She does not have agency, she has full-fledged power. Her omnipresence is most likely a stand-in for state violence or Satan, or both. Unlike Wiletta, who needs to break free of roles that confine her, or Caroline, who, we assume, feels suffocated by the oppressive conditions of the South, Clyde is the one who traps her employees in a permanent space of unfreedom and social purgatory.“One of the things about where we are today is now we have a multitude of Black voices on the stage,” Nottage said to me during a recent interview at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. “I feel the freedom to put someone onstage who isn’t perfect, who isn’t heroic, who isn’t necessarily showing the best of us, but showing an aspect of us.” In other words, Clyde’s villainy is also an aesthetic liberation for Nottage, a character that is neither born out of nor now embattled with the white gaze.Ultimately, such provocative personalities are signs of progress for us all, both on and off stage. We can only hope that such roles continue to exist — not as a one-off or in a vacuum — but as a sister among many. This is the Broadway that Wiletta Mayer really fought for as she longed to celebrate the complexity, diversity and messiness of Black life. More

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      Catherine Was Great. But Was She a Girl Boss?

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      In seeking to turn historical women into yassified contemporary heroines, pop culture creators are narrowing what female success can look like.Catherine of Aragon, the first wife of Henry VIII, enjoyed embroidery and fasting. Little in the historical record suggests that she was any fun at a party.“Unfortunately, Catherine of Aragon just, like, loved church and was always praying and was kind of a bummer,” Dana Schwartz, a writer who hosts the podcast “Noble Blood,” told me recently.Yet there Catherine is, in the Broadway musical “Six,” vibrating her vocal cords like a Tudor-era Beyoncé, in a thigh-scraping miniskirt and studded boots — a girl boss, early modern style. “Six,” a giddy pop confection about the six wives of Henry VIII, joins recent works like “Dickinson,” the AppleTV+ comedy just concluding its final season, and “The Great,” the Hulu dramedy that recently released its second, in revamping notable women of past centuries as the cool girls of today. It’s history. With contouring.For decades now, popular culture and media have made a concerted effort — mostly laudable, occasionally cloying — to reclaim forgotten or maligned women. Think of the “Rebel Girls” books, the biopics that glut the Oscar race, even the Overlooked obituary series in The New York Times.Some of these works explore women’s lives mindful of particular historical contexts, acknowledging their achievements within the often oppressive systems of their times. Others, like “Dickinson” and to a lesser extent “The Great,” take a deliberately freewheeling approach to history, inventing counterfactual privileges and possibilities for their heroines. Still others, like “Six,” feed history through the YassifyBot, Facetuning women’s lives so that they seem fiercer, sexier, more aspirational — selfie-ready, way before cameras were invented.This girlbossification nearly always puts women in competition with each other, rather than emphasizing shared struggle. It diminishes oppression and bias, suggesting that any woman can get ahead if she just puts on her big girl panties and rises-and-grinds hard enough, retconning the necessary fictions of our own cultural moment into the past.In a moment when popular culture confuses fame and excellence, works like these also imply an inability to appreciate female merit absent of sex and glamour. The desire to zhuzh up women of history — Hey, it’s so super that you changed the world, but couldn’t you have done it in a bustier?— says a lot more about our own time than times past. When we reframe herstory as an Instagram story, what do we lose?I should probably tell you that questions like these make me feel like a scold. I hate that. You know who’s really no fun at parties? Scolds. Besides, I love “Dickinson.” I admire “The Great.” The songs in “Six” are absolute bops. None of these works aspire to historical accuracy. “The Great,” in particular, has the cheeky tagline of “an occasionally true story.” And even if they did, we probably shouldn’t be getting our history from prestige comedies and musicals.Hailee Steinfeld, left, as Emily Dickinson and Wiz Khalifa as Death in “Dickinson.”Michael Parmelee/Apple TV+Also, real life, even the real lives of great women, is mostly boring. Would you watch three seasons of a show in which Emily Dickinson sits alone at her desk, scratching out verse with a pencil? But there are telling emphases in these shows and equally telling excisions. This new breed of heroine is ambitious and sex positive, with impeccably modern politics. Rather than understanding these women as products of their time, we make them creatures of ours.Schwartz told me that she understands the impulse to sex up historical women. It lavishes attention on them, correcting the dismissiveness of earlier historians.“But that then has the collective effect of making these women less interesting and less honest in who they were within their periods,” she said.At least, “Dickinson,” created by Alena Smith, plays with this dishonesty purposefully and boldly, taking the wildness and desire that suffused Emily Dickinson’s poetry, if not her life, and externalizing it through scenes in which Hailee Steinfeld’s Emily twerks at house parties and takes carriage rides with Wiz Khalifa’s Death.The real Dickinson was introverted and, despite her on-trend eyebrows, not a particular beauty. “In terms of being a cool girl, I don’t really know if she was,” Monica Pelaez, a Dickinson scholar who has advised the show, told me. “She chose to seclude herself.”The historical Dickinson doesn’t seem to have dressed as a man or protested as an ecowarrior or taken multiple lovers or heaved her bosom in a daring red dress. But her poetry and letters conjure vivid emotional states, so “Dickinson” colors Emily’s life with this dynamism, colliding reality and fantasy.“What the show does is bring that sensibility from her poetry and dramatize it,” Pelaez said.The Emily who emerges is confident, career-minded, fascinating to men and women, a corrective to previous works (even recent ones like Terence Davies’s 2016 movie “A Quiet Passion”) that ignored the queerness her letters and poems suggest. But while “Dickinson” seems acutely aware of the sociopolitics of 19th-century New England, the show often argues for Emily’s exceptionalism by differentiating her — and to a lesser extent her sister, Lavinia (Anna Baryshnikov), and sister-in-law, Sue (Ella Hunt) — from the other women of Amherst.Rather than looking for solidarity among the women of her progressive community, Emily emphasizes this difference. “I’m just not made for traditional feminine handicrafts,” she complains during a sewing circle scene, the implication being that women who are made for them don’t deserve a prestige TV series.Elle Fanning as Catherine in the second season of the Hulu series “The Great.”Gareth Gatrell/HuluIn this way Emily resembles Catherine, of “The Great,” which slid its 10-episode second season onto Hulu a few weeks ago. Created by Tony McNamara (who also co-wrote the lightly counterfactual battling-British-royals comedy “The Favourite”), the series stars a luminous Elle Fanning as a German princess who arrives at the Russian court as a teenager and promptly claims the tsardom for herself. Liberated from chronology and fact, the comedy-drama twiddles the timeline of Catherine’s career and marriage. (Let’s just say that the real Peter struggled to consummate their relationship and the Peter of “The Great,” played by Nicholas Hoult, does not.)Bright, colorful and cruel, like a dish of poisoned candies, the show occasionally portrays Catherine as naïve. But she learns fast and her emergent politics and commitment to hustle are beautifully modern. She wants to end Russia’s wars, free its serfs, teach women to read, inoculate her subjects. (This is more or less true of the historical Catherine.) And in her ball gowns? An absolute smokeshow.The legacy of the real Catherine, who came to the throne not as a dewy teenager, but as a more seasoned 33-year-old, was of course more complicated. “She actually increased serfdom,” said Hilde Hoogenboom, a professor of Russian who has translated Catherine’s memoirs.Hoogenboom describes “The Great” as the “Disneyfication” of the real Catherine. To make her a fairy tale princess, the series also insists on differentiating Catherine from the other women at court, representing her as a savvy It Girl, more beautiful and more powerful than her peers.“Bitch,” one noblewoman sneers.“Empress bitch,” Catherine corrects her.The real Catherine was different. (And as someone who routinely elevated her lovers and male allies, not so big on sisterhood.) But she was one of several 18th-century female heads of states, including the Empress Elisabeth, her immediate predecessor, a fact that “The Great” conveniently elides. Instead it presents Elisabeth (Belinda Bromilow) as a dithery nymphomaniac, raising Catherine up by pushing Elisabeth and her underwear down.“Six,” created by Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow, puts its women in competition even more explicitly, structuring the show as an “American Idol”-style vocal contest. A blingy take on trauma porn, it demands that each woman sing not about her character or integrity, but about the wrongs she suffered at Henry’s meaty hands. Here are the rules, as detailed in the opening number:The Queen who was dealt the worst handThe Queen with the most hardships to withstandThe Queen for whom it didn’t really go as plannedShall be the one to lead the band.From left: Andrea Macasaet, Adrianna Hicks and Anna Uzele in the musical “Six.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBefore ending in a mostly empty gesture of solidarity, “Six” simplifies and updates many of these women, turning Anne Boleyn, an astute political player, into a foxy good-time-girl, framing Katherine Howard, a blatant victim of abuse, as a barely legal tease. (“Lock up your husbands, lock up your sons/ K-Howard is here and the fun’s begun.”) The costume design, in a nod to pop norms, sexualizes each women, coupling their worth with their hotness.In her song, Katherine Parr, Henry’s widow, reminds listeners of her accomplishments:I wrote books, and psalms, and meditations,Fought for female educationSo all my women could independently study scriptureI even got a woman to paint my pictureWhy can’t I tell that story?Well, why can’t she? Instead, the songs from “Six” center the women’s relationships to Henry, emphasizing his attraction to them (or rejection of them) over any of the wives’ accomplishments. “The things that these women were doing should be of historical interest, regardless of whether or not they were all married to this [expletive] dude,” Jessica Keene, a history professor who studies the Tudor period, said.This substitution of sexuality for excellence can extend even into more enlightened shows. That sewing circle episode of “Dickinson” includes a dynamic cameo from Sojourner Truth, played by the writer and talk show host Ziwe. Because “Dickinson” remains exquisitely self-aware, it jokes about Ziwe’s youthful appearance (“I’m roughly 66, but I look good as hell”) and Truth’s 19th-century sex bomb vibe (“Oh, they’re going to know I’m a woman in this dress”).But the real Sojourner Truth, who came to public life in middle age, didn’t lead with sex. Corinne T. Field, who has written on Truth, described her as a figure who critiqued girlish beauty and sexuality. “Her whole public career is built as someone who had already aged beyond youth and was occupying a position of power and charisma that did not rely on girlish beauty,” Field said.I asked Field what we miss when “Dickinson” depicts a woman like Truth this way. “An investment in intergenerational networks of mutual care,” Field said without pausing. “We need to think about how you sustain female empowerment over the course of a whole life.”If creators, even creators with explicitly feminist aims like Smith and Moss, believe that audiences won’t pay attention to female protagonists absent of youth and beauty, they will likely frame empowerment narrowly. And maybe that’s necessary on some level. The recent and more accurate versions — like “A Quiet Passion,” 2019’s “Catherine the Great” and this year’s “Anne Boleyn” — tend to be less fun.“If girlbossification is the price to elevate female historical figures to the mainstream consciousness, so be it,” Schwartz said.That consciousness could then encourage viewers to seek out what Schwartz called “actual historically accurate sources.” And in these sources they might find that sometimes women changed the world in flats or with split ends or in common cause with other women or when they weren’t especially sexy or young. A few of them must have had a really solid grasp of traditional feminine handicrafts. Where is the absolute bop for that? More

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      ‘The Rise and Fall of LuLaRoe’ Review: Success? That’s a Stretch.

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      This formulaic documentary focuses on the individuals swindled by the multilevel marketing company known for leggings, LuLaRoe.In 2013, Mark and DeAnne Stidham founded LuLaRoe, a multilevel marketing company specializing in the sale of women’s clothing — namely “buttery soft” leggings in bold prints. According to The Wall Street Journal, LuLaRoe grew to a business generating $2.3 billion in retail sales in the span of four years thanks to its ever-increasing team of “retailers” who were mostly mothers seduced by the promise of financial success that could be reaped by buying and selling LuLaRoe merchandise from the comfort of their homes. In short, the company was a pyramid scheme.“The Rise and Fall of LuLaRoe” is essentially a documentary version of a 2020 investigative report by the BuzzFeed News writer Stephanie McNeal. Produced in association with BuzzFeed Studios, it’s a redundant effort given Amazon’s recent mini-series, “LulaRich,” though at least it’s less of a time commitment.“LuLaRoe” follows the template of most scandal-laden investigative documentaries, like the competing 2019 Fyre Festival exposes, “Fyre” (Netflix) and “Fyre Fraud” (Hulu), or Alex Gibney’s “The Inventor,” about Theranos and its former CEO Elizabeth Holmes.It begins with a montage that jumps from enthusiastic retailers touting the benefits of the LuLaRoe lifestyle to footage from the 2020 trial of the Stidhams. The rest fills in what comes between these two points, with a particular focus on the individuals victimized and brainwashed by the company, many of whom are interviewed, along with experts on entrepreneurship, linguistics and cults.One could go on about the fraudulent American dream that LuLaRoe represents — a sort of up-by-the-bootstraps mentality with a social media assist and the ideals of women’s empowerment, all of which are taken advantage of by manipulative crooks.But unless you’re really hankering for a visual component and video testimonies, you’d be better off simply reading the article than watching this thoroughly formulaic explainer.The Rise and Fall of LuLaRoeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Discovery+. More

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      Lina Wertmüller, Italian Director of Provocative Films, Dies at 93

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      She established an idiosyncratic reputation for blending tragedy, farce, politics and sex. She was the first woman nominated for a best director Oscar.Lina Wertmüller, who combined sexual warfare and leftist politics in the provocative, genre-defying films “The Seduction of Mimi,” “Swept Away” and “Seven Beauties,” which established her as one of the most original directors of the 1970s, died overnight at her home in Rome, the Italian Culture Ministry and the news agency LaPresse said on Thursday. She was 93.The culture minister, Dario Franceschini, said in a statement that Ms. Wertmüller’s “class and unmistakable style” had left its mark on Italian and world cinema. “Grazie, Lina,” he said.She was the first woman to receive an Academy Award nomination for best director, for “Seven Beauties” (1975).Ms. Wertmüller, an Italian despite the German-sounding last name, burst onto the cinematic scene with a series of idiosyncratic films that propelled her to the front rank of European directors. All the movies had screenplays written by her, and most relied on the talents of her two favorite actors: Giancarlo Giannini, usually cast as a hapless male chauvinist victimized by the injustices of Italian society and baffled by women, and Mariangela Melato as the always difficult and complicated love interest.In the broad sense, Ms. Wertmüller was a political filmmaker, but no one could ever quite figure out what the politics were. A lively sense of human limitations tempered her natural bent toward anarchy. Struggle was noble and the social structure rotten, but the outcome was always in doubt.Lina Wertmüller on the set of “Summer Night” on the island of Sardinia.New Line CinemaAntiquated codes of honor undo the title character in “The Seduction of Mimi,” a dimwitted Sicilian laborer, played by Mr. Giannini, whose neglected wife stages a sexual revolt. In “Swept Away” (1974), Ms. Wertmüller upended the Italian power structure by giving the humble deckhand Gennarino (Mr. Giannini again) absolute power over the rich and arrogant Raffaella (Ms. Mercato) after a shipwreck.After being dominated and abused, Gennarino turns the tables, and Raffaella becomes his adoring slave — until the two are rescued, and the old order reasserts itself. Feminists objected. With a characteristic bit of obfuscation, Ms. Wertmüller explained that since Raffaella embodies bourgeois society, “therefore she represents the man.”Giancarlo Giannini as Gennarino and Mariangela Melato as Raffaella in “Swept Away.”Kino LorberIn “Seven Beauties” (1975), Ms. Wertmüller again courted outrage by using a German concentration camp as the setting for a grim comedy, with farcical overtones. This time, Mr. Giannini played Pasqualino Farfuso, a craven Neapolitan deserter and two-bit charmer who, determined to survive at all costs, seduces the camp’s sadistic female commandant and, directed by her, murders other prisoners. Critics were divided over the merits of the film, but it earned Ms. Wertmüller the Oscar nomination. Not until 1994, when Jane Campion was nominated for “The Piano,” would another woman be nominated for directing.Ms. Wertmüller’s reputation, always more elevated in the United States than in Europe, remained uncertain. With “Seven Beauties,” the critic John Simon wrote, she ascended “into the highest regions of cinematic art, into the company of the major directors.” The critic David Thomson, on the other hand, ascribed her American popularity in the 1970s as “probably inevitable in a country ravenous for a female purveyor of smart cultural artifacts.”And her brand of sexual politics encountered hostility from critics like Pauline Kael, Molly Haskell and Ellen Willis, who called Ms. Wertmüller “a woman-hater who pretends to be a feminist.”Shirley Stoler as the Nazi commandant in “Seven Beauties.”Tiny and voluble, with a fierce smile and instantly recognizable white-framed eyeglasses, Ms. Wertmüller disarmed criticism by unleashing verbal torrents of explanation in a gravelly alto. Vincent Canby, after listening to her hold forth during a publicity tour for her first English-language film, “The End of the World in Our Usual Bed on a Night Full of Rain” (1978), wrote in The New York Times that she spoke “with enthusiasm and at such length and so articulately that (to vary an old Hollywood joke) it seems Warner Brothers might do better to scrap the film and distribute the director.”Arcangela Felice Assunta Wertmüller von Elgg Spañol von Braueich was born in Rome on Aug. 14, 1928, to a family of noble Swiss ancestry. Her mother was the former Maria Santamaria-Maurizio; her father, Federico, was a successful lawyer and a domestic tyrant with whom she quarreled constantly. After obtaining a teaching certificate, Ms. Wertmüller hedged her bets by enrolling simultaneously in law school and a Stanislavskian drama academy in Rome. Theater won out.During the 1950s, she toured with a puppet theater, wrote musical comedies for television and worked as an actress and stage manager. Her best friend, married to Marcello Mastroianni, introduced her to Federico Fellini, who hired her as an assistant director on “8½,” a life-changing experience that opened the world of film to her.Ms. Wertmüller with Mr. Giannini, who starred in many of her films, at the Algonquin Hotel in New York in 1975.Meyer Liebowitz/The New York TimesIn 1963 she directed her own film, “The Lizards,” a study of provincial life in the vein of Fellini’s “I Vitelloni.” It was followed by the quirky “Let’s Talk About Men” (1965), a study of sexual politics that foreshadowed her later explorations of the subject.Ms. Wertmüller’s long collaboration with Mr. Giannini began in television, when she directed him in the musical “Rita the Mosquito” (1966) and its sequel “Don’t Sting the Mosquito” (1967), whose art director, Enrico Job, she married in 1968.Mr. Job died in 2008. Ms. Wertmüller adopted Maria Zulima Job, her husband’s child with another woman, shortly after Ms. Job’s birth in 1991. Her daughter survives her.The 1970s presented Ms. Wertmüller with two of her richest subjects: the changing sexual politics brought about by feminism, and increasing political turbulence in Italy, as old social structures and attitudes buckled under the pressures of modernity. “The Seduction of Mimi,” chosen as an official entry at the Cannes festival in 1972, immediately established her as an important new filmmaker. “Love and Anarchy” (1973), with Mr. Giannini playing a bumbling country boy who tries to assassinate Mussolini, and the social satire “All Screwed Up” (1974) solidified her reputation for idiosyncratic political films blending tragedy and farce.Somewhat paradoxically, her career went into steep decline after the Academy nomination, although in 2019 she received an honorary Oscar for her work, and in 2016 she was the subject of a documentary, “Behind the White Glasses.”“The bubble seemed to burst,” the British critic Derek Malcolm told The Guardian, adding that “she could do nothing right.”The titles of the films grew even longer, and the critical response more uniformly hostile. “The End of the World,” with Candice Bergen as an American photographer and feminist engaged in marital struggle with an Italian communist played by Mr. Giannini, was roundly dismissed as raucous and incoherent. Each succeeding film seemed to bear out Michael Wood’s observation, in The New York Review of Books, that Ms. Wertmüller’s work displayed “a stunning visual intelligence accompanied by a great confusion of mind.”Ms. Wertmüller during filming of the documentary “Behind the White Glasses.” Emanuele Ruiz/Kino LorberBy the early 1990s she had qualified for inclusion in Variety’s “Missing Persons” column. “Ciao, Professore” (1994), about a schoolteacher from northern Italy mistakenly transferred to a poor school near Naples, suggested a return to form, but on a small scale, and with an unexpected sweetness. For perhaps the first time in her career, Ms. Wertmüller faced the charge of sentimentality.To this, as to all criticism, she responded by invoking the ultimate authority: herself. Her films, she liked to say, were made to please an audience of one, and her methods were intuitive.“I am sure of things only because I love them,” she said. “I am born first. Only then do I discover.” More

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      Hollywood Loves a Monstrous Mommy. Can It Do Her Justice?

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      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.I screened “The Lost Daughter,” Maggie Gyllenhaal’s adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s novel of the same name, in my living room on a Sunday afternoon. I was on the couch with headphones, and my daughters, ages 6 and 4, were on the floor, fighting over Legos. At one point my younger daughter hit me on the head with a giant stuffed seal. “Watch me,” she yelled. She was going to make soup “out of blood.”It was a distracted form of watching and working, but it is one that after nearly two years of pandemic life feels, if not ideal, habitual. And it was the ideal state to receive a movie like “The Lost Daughter,” which captures with uncanny precision one version of the multitasking mother and arrives on the heels of a year that many women with children will remember as one of the hardest of their lives.The mother occupies a bewildering place in American society, simultaneously omnipresent and irrelevant. Harried moms are enshrined in paper-towel commercials, while our political institutions show a Teflon-like resistance to addressing their material needs. It would of course be impossible for any one work to show this condition, this cruelty, in all its richness and iterations, but American art about mothers is rarely made or received with the necessary asterisk, one that acknowledges the labor of caregiving, the five-alarm fires that are raging in our personal lives and political spheres.“The Lost Daughter” is one of a spate of recent films and television shows that attempt to make audible the scream rising in the throat. It tells the story of an English academic named Leda, played by Olivia Colman in the present and by Jessie Buckley in flashbacks to her life as a young mother, and opens with Colman on the seashore at night. Pain shadows her face and she has what looks like blood on her blouse; she sways and paces before collapsing by the lapping waves. The scene strikes an unsettling note that will thrum for the duration of the movie, which in the present follows Leda at age 47, on holiday on a Greek island. We watch her float in the sea, write and read while she sunbathes, eat ice cream, unfurl into an uneasy relaxation. When a chaotic group — among them a young woman and child — disturbs her idyll on the beach, Leda watches the pair with tenderness and pain on her face.We learn that the large group is a Greek American family from Queens, including the young woman Nina (Dakota Johnson) and her child Elena. Nina triggers overwhelming memories of Leda’s own early years of marriage and motherhood. In flashbacks, we see a young Leda radiating love and frustration as she cuddles her two daughters, plays lacklusterly, throws a doll out the window, withholds a kiss, strikes one of the girls, laughs with delight. In these flashbacks, the camera is close on the little girls, capturing both how cute and defenseless they are, and how exasperating they might be to a parent on the edge of patience and sanity. In one scene, young Leda’s husband, slender and shaggy-haired Jack Farthing, shakes Leda from her focused work under headphones while the girls’ wailing fills their flat. He gestures to his phone call. “It’s Sunday, you’re on,” she whispers furiously. “I’m working,” he says. “I’m suffocating,” she replies. They are both scholars, but his work seems to take precedence. There’s not much money, and he’s often away — an old story.In the present, the older Leda’s relationship with Nina’s family is close, mutually antagonistic and strange. Nina becomes a kind of double to Leda, turning to the older woman for support, though they appear to have little in common. Leda is aloof, independent; Nina is young, tied to a menacing husband, worn out by her daughter. “She won’t sleep unless I’m in the bed with her,” Nina tells Leda. “I’m really tired. I’m like scary tired.” And then Leda tells Nina, and us, her secret: She left her children for a period of time when they were small. A flashback reveals the inciting incident, a trip to a conference where she felt the erotic thrill of both professional and romantic attention, unencumbered by the girls. The note of menace continues unabated until a surprising moment of grace at the film’s very end.Dakota Johnson and Olivia Colman in “The Lost Daughter.”Yannis Drakoulidis/NetflixAs I watched, juggling my own domestic responsibilities with varying amounts of grace, I felt strangely honored by the way the film made space for Leda to make what is undeniably an ugly choice, allowed her to both enjoy her escape and suffer its consequences. Even in my distracted state, it swept in like a stinging breeze off the sea, a cogent, sensuous and provocative work of art that made me reflect on the paucity of realistic representations of motherhood, and the difficulties inherent in creating them.Cinema loves a monstrous mommy. Leda is often rude and unkind, but Colman’s and Buckley’s brilliant performances allow the viewer to inhabit her desperation, rendering judgment irrelevant. And the film’s timing is transcendent, arriving in a moment when the pandemic has disrupted school, shredded an already frayed child-care infrastructure and forced mothers to cobble together care, work with kids on their lap or drop out of the work force entirely. In this moment, there is something cathartic about a mother who says not only, “I prefer not to,” but, “I cannot,” momentarily leaving the relentless work of caregiving to someone else. It’s both a fantasy of walking away and a warning about its costs.The urge to flee is in the air. “Scenes From a Marriage,” Hagai Levi’s remake of Ingmar Bergman’s iconic mini-series, shows a mother and breadwinner, Mira, played by Jessica Chastain, as she takes a temporary assignment in Israel, along with a lover. She is the mother as philanderer and absentee. Mira tells her husband, Jonathan, played by Oscar Isaac, that she will fly in biweekly to see their young daughter, justifying her plan with a note of hysteria in her voice: “Men do it all the time and then, you know, it’s not really a big deal.” Unlike Gyllenhaal’s, Levi’s representation of caregiving is gestural, the child almost always in bed, a suspiciously good sleeper. And unlike Leda, Mira doesn’t make the clean break. What is interesting about the series, stylish and very sexy, is how Mira does manage to live a bit like a man, primarily because of her co-parent, a man who explicitly loves caregiving, and the fact that there’s enough money to ease the difficulty. It’s a fantasy of another kind.A mother leaves in Mike Mills’s new film, “C’mon C’mon,” because her family obligations require it. Mills’s film focuses on the other side of maternal absence: the child, and the person who cares for the child. Viv, played by Gaby Hoffmann, lives separately from her co-parent, who has bipolar disorder, but is obligated to help him through a psychiatric crisis. Joaquin Phoenix plays her brother Johnny, a “This American Life”-style radio host, who volunteers to watch her 9-year-old son, Jesse, while she is away. This is Uncle Johnny’s first rodeo, and he receives parenting instructions from Viv over the phone. The film shows us, mostly through these conversations, that Viv is an involved, present and very real mother (“I [expletive] hate it sometimes,” she tells Johnny, before telling him that he needs to feed Jesse some protein). Upon the movie’s release, I read male critics respectively describe Jesse as “a handful,” his mother as “indulgent.” And yet the movie shows behavior that is fairly standard in terms of child rearing. We see Jesse running away from his uncle in the drugstore and on the street, refusing sleep, rejecting his noodles in favor of ice cream. On the phone with his sister, Johnny laments his inability to control the little boy. “Welcome to my [expletive] life,” she tells him. “Nobody knows what they’re doing with these kids. You just have to keep doing it.”“C’mon C’mon,” black and white and a bit slow compared with the frenetic sensuality of “The Lost Daughter,” mirrors some of its portrayals: It is, in part, about how hard it is to take care of a small person. In contrast to Leda and Mira, Viv represents a perhaps more common version of the absent mother, one who is gone simply because she has to take care of something else. It’s not quite wish fulfillment — Viv has her hands full caring for Jesse’s dad, and she is still phone-coaching Johnny through his babysitting crises — but the day-to-day stuff is, for once, not her problem. I noted with interest Johnny’s recruitment of another colleague as an on-site babysitter, and Johnny’s female co-worker needling him about putting off work.Woody Norman and Gaby Hoffmann in “C’mon C’mon.”Tobin Yelland/A24 FilmsThe film gestures at the deeper systemic struggles of parenthood. Johnny’s adventures with Jesse are interwoven with his work interviewing (real, nonactor) children, whose circumstances are often difficult and remote from his own, including a child who feels responsible for his little sister while their father is incarcerated. The most perverse — and oblique — object lesson comes only in the final credits. The film is dedicated to Devante Bryant, one of the little boys interviewed. The viewer who searches for Bryant’s name learns that he was murdered by gunfire near his family’s house in the Seventh Ward of New Orleans, an area where the average household income is half that of the city’s as a whole. There are American babies much less likely to survive their childhood, American women less likely to survive their matrescence. There are also mothers whose difficult moments, moments like Leda’s or Mira’s or Viv’s, can lead to children being removed from their care. If class and race cannot inoculate women from the difficulties of motherhood, it insulates them from the worst depredations of a cruel country.The recent Netflix special “Maid,” an adaptation of Stephanie Land’s memoir, shows how absence can be forced both by economic conditions and by the state. The series follows Alex, a young white mother played by Margaret Qualley, as she escapes an abusive household with her daughter and navigates the circular logic of American welfare. As she fights her way to stability with paltry assistance programs and cleaning jobs, captions show her dwindling funds, an unusually explicit comment on the impossible economics of American life. In one scene, a social worker explains how Alex can qualify for assistance. “I need a job to prove that I need day care in order to get a job?” Alex asks, incredulous. “What kind of [expletive] is that?”Alex is likable: spunky, funny, scrupulous, beautiful, working on her writing in her rare free time. She is never impatient or unloving with her daughter, a preternaturally placid preschooler. I liked Alex and the show, but was struck by the paradox her character represents, particularly in contrast with Leda and Mira and Viv, who are given the space to be frustrated and miserable, a sort of double privilege of white and comparatively affluent mothers both in reality and onscreen. I imagined how “Maid” would be different if it showed Alex, run ragged from cruel bureaucracy and hard, underpaid jobs, losing her temper with her kid, looking ugly, looking mean. It’s a risk the show doesn’t take, underscoring the challenge of showing the systemic challenges of parenthood alongside the embodied, chaotic act of caregiving and the individual human frailty of mothers. At one point in “C’mon C’mon,” Johnny picks up Jacqueline Rose’s book-length essay “Mothers” from Viv’s desk. “Why on earth,” he reads in a thoughtful voice-over, “should it fall to them to paint things bright and innocent and safe?” Why indeed?Screen portrayals of motherhood that deal explicitly with class are also invariably tied to the raced logic of America. Compare the sunny Alex of “Maid” with Paula, the protagonist Chiron’s mother in the film “Moonlight” — a Black mother, poor and addicted to drugs, presented to the viewer as she appears to her child: untrustworthy, frightening, possessive and cruel. The director Barry Jenkins has spoken of his concern that her character, taken from the autobiographical play “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue,” by Tarell Alvin McCraney, be presented in her full humanity, and she is carefully and empathetically played by Naomie Harris. Yet in the overall context of onscreen representations of Black motherhood, she still falls within what the scholar Nicole Rousseau identifies as a filmic tradition of “survival,” a motif which “illustrates a child attempting to survive a ‘bad’ Black mother.” “Moonlight” is the child’s story, not the mother’s. What might Paula’s movie look like? The love and terror and difficulty and grief of mothering without a safety net, the vagaries of temperament, chance and opportunity.“Maid” is a show with peculiar racial politics: In an effort to subvert tropes, perhaps, Alex’s first gig as a house cleaner is in the palatial home of a Black woman named Regina (played by a compelling Anika Noni Rose), who imperiously asks Alex if she can read. She and Alex eventually become friends, and fearful Regina, about to become a mother herself, asks Alex if she likes being a mom. “I live for my daughter,” Alex tells her. “You can go,” Regina says coolly, and I laughed out loud, annoyed that Alex didn’t use the moment to paint a fuller picture of the experience. She is a writer, after all.Rylea Nevaeh Whittet and Margaret Qualley in “Maid.”Ricardo Hubbs/NetflixWhile Alex is struggling in temporary housing, a court orders her to temporarily surrender her daughter to her boyfriend’s custody. To demonstrate her fitness, she attends a parenting class where a condescending man teaches nutrition to a roomful of mothers deemed lacking by the state. The implication of these scenes is that this is an injustice — Alex knows how to mother (it is her own mother, given space by the show to fall apart, who never learned). Poor women and women of color in America who are good parents are indeed uniquely vulnerable to having their children taken. And yet, the scenes made me think of the online parenting class I am currently taking through my H.M.O., one I tried for months to get into when the pandemic revealed I needed help — an opportunity born of privilege. Mothers around America eagerly scroll digestible TikToks and Instagram memes about how to be better parents. In “C’mon C’mon,” Johnny reads a script for “doing a repair” that his sister tells him to look up online after yelling at his nephew. Everyone benefits from an acknowledgment that raising children is hard work that does not always come naturally.When I watched “The Lost Daughter,” I felt seen by its portrayal of the condition of living simultaneously in joy and desperation, nostalgia and impatience. But I also know that Leda is a mother who looks a bit like me, with work a bit like mine — the kind of work you can do on the couch, lucky work, fulfilling work. Mothering is work, too — lucky and fulfilling, but work nonetheless, made harder at every juncture by a country whose institutions are built around white patriarchy, a country with rampant inequality, no paid leave, no universal child care or health care, no crisis plan beside “figure it out.” We can’t ask any one movie or show to encompass the entirety of a particular human experience. But we can point out what they show and what they obscure about our culture at a moment when the values and requirements of caregivers are argued in the corridors of power. We need more: more help, but also more art — art that is expansive, challenging, fair.Lydia Kiesling is the author of “The Golden State,” a novel. She lives in Portland, Ore. More