The year movies were named like hurricanes

Have you noticed how many 2015 movies have just a woman's first name as their title?

Joy became the fifth on my list for this year, and there are two more prominent ones I'm planning to see over the next ten days. And Joy isn't even the only one starring Jennifer Lawrence. (Nor is it the only 2015 movie with a prominent character named Joy, thanks to Inside Out.)

Forthwith, we'll look at the candidates and their worthiness of being named after the main character, starting with ...

Joy
Directed by: David O. Russell
Worthiness of being named after the main character: High
Thoughts: Joy has a lot going on, to put it mildly, but it does mostly focus on this one character and her mop-inventing aspirations. It's also, I suppose, about her search for happiness, so yeah, she joins a storied cinematic tradition of characters with names that also function as intangible nouns. (If I see another movie character named Grace, I may have to kill myself -- and lookee here, there's a movie called Looking for Grace that came out two months ago.)

Serena
Directed by: Susanne Bier
Worthiness of being named after the main character: Moderate
Thoughts: The other film starring Jennifer Lawrence actually bears a 2014 release year in IMDB, but didn't get released theatrically in the U.S. until February, and I'm firmly counting it with my 2015 movies. Like Joy, this also co-stars Bradley Cooper (we just can't separate these two -- they've been in at least four movies together, three of them directed by David O. Russell). It's about a Depression era North Carolina timber baron who marries a headstrong woman named Serena. However, it does not seem very essential that the movie was named after her, even if his fortunes do turn on his relationship with the character.

Cinderella
Directed by: Kenneth Branagh
Worthiness of being named after the main character: High
Thoughts: I mean, it's the name of the story. Who are we to argue with that? However, as discussed in this post, I would have liked the movie better if the character had actually felt like the center of her own story, and not just a bystander letting fate buffet her around like a sailboat on a stormy ocean.

Maggie
Directed by: Henry Hobson
Worthiness of being named after the main character: High
Thoughts: Wake up, Maggie, I think I've got something to say to you. You've been bitten by a zombie, and I don't think you're ever going BACK to school. Indeed, this is the story of Arnold Schwarzenegger's emotional struggle to save his daughter from the inevitable: death at the hands of a zombie bite. Her name is Maggie. Seems like as good a reason as any to choose this as the name of the movie -- it works a bit in the same capacity as We Need to Talk About Kevin, because yeah, when you've got a bitten daughter, you do need to talk about that shit.

Victoria
Directed by: Sebastian Schipper
Worthiness of being named after the main character: High
Thoughts: As the single character who is basically on the screen for the entire length of this daring single-take movie -- "basically," because during one scene where she could afford to get away for a moment, she supposedly excused herself to answer a desperate need to use the bathroom -- Laia Costa's Victoria does earn having a movie named after her. She's the sole constant in this two-plus hours of one late night in Berlin that goes from banal to crazy, in a believable if sometimes tedious fashion.

And the ones I haven't yet seen, and can only truly speculate about ...

Amy
Directed by: Asif Kapadia
Worthiness of being named after the main character: Moderate to high
Thoughts: I understand this to be a stripped-bare look into Amy Winehouse's life, and the title certainly works to convey that type of intimacy. My question is, is the single name Amy distinctive enough to indicate that the movie is about Amy Winehouse without any other knowledge of the film? I'd say no. Not like the future documentaries Beyonce and Rihanna will be, anyway.

Carol
Directed by: Todd Haynes
Worthiness of being named after the main character: Dubious
Thoughts: I say "dubious" only because I know this is a two-hander, meaning it is mostly about the two characters with (as I understand it) somewhat minimal acting contributions from others. If that's the case, naming the movie after only one of them seems to throw off the apparent balance. But I look forward to finding out for myself when this becomes one of the final films I watch before closing off my 2015 list next Thursday.

Other movies I've seen that would have fit well in 2015:

Amelie
Chloe
Coraline
Diana
Domino
Elizabeth
Emma
Evita
Frida
Gigi
Grace
Guinevere
Hanna
Ida 
Juno
Lucy 
Mallory
Margaret
Maryam
Miral
Mulan
Nell
Nena
Oleanna
Paprika
Selena
Tammy
Tess
Woo

That's only 29 other titles among all the 4,400+ movies I've ever seen. Makes the seven titles I will see in 2015 seem even more like a conglomeration.

A trend! I've identified it!

Persona is having a moment

The fact that a number of films set in San Francisco should come out the same year, as discussed yesterday, does not seem quite as unusual as the fact that there are a number of concurrent films that are duplicating the essential relationship dynamics of Ingmar Bergman's Persona.

If anything, that should come next year, when the movie celebrates its 50th anniversary. But I guess there's no accounting for when a certain movie starts to really express itself in the artistic collective unconsciousness.

For those who don't know -- and that might have included me before I actually saw Persona last year -- Bergman's film deals, very elliptically (would there be any other way with this subject matter?), with the blending of personalities of two women who are holed up together for a period of time in a seaside bungalow. They are an actress who's lost her voice, and her nurse. It's considered by some to be one of the greatest films ever made. I don't consider it that, but I can't deny that it has a certain elemental power that you just have to see to understand -- to try to understand, anyway.

The same feeling, more or less, struck me when I was watching The Duke of Burgundy on Tuesday night -- only I think I like Burgundy even more than I like Persona. Peter Strickland's follow-up to Berberian Sound Studio (which was my #5 film of 2013) also features two women in a confined space, a comparatively confined space (it's a mansion), though they do also spend time apart and with other women. (No other men, though.) They have some kind of dominant-submissive sexual relationship, though it's not always clear who's the dominant and who's the submissive, and to even get caught up in the fact that their relationship is kinky tends to belittle just how much profound other stuff is going on here. In any case, comparisons to Persona seem obvious, though apparently Strickland was surprised to hear them as that was not what he was thinking of when he made the movie.

The Duke of Burgundy may have been the first of these movies in 2015 -- it was released cinematically in the U.S. way back in January, though not until last week here in Australia -- though it was not the last. Next came Clouds of Sils Maria, in which a fortysomething actress and her twentysomething assistant have some personality overlap as they run lines for a play, which also features two characters about their same ages. Making matters more complicated, the actress actually played the younger role when she was an ingenue, but is taking on the older role now that the play is being revived. Though I didn't particularly care for this movie, and have decided I'm fairly cold on Olivier Assayas in general, it's sat with me enough that I probably need to revisit it. Again, the comparisons to Persona seem fairly obvious, as the film's key moments take place while they are staying together in a remote cabin.

Lastly -- or at least, I think it's lastly -- there is Queen of Earth, which has yet to open in Australia and which is the latest film from Listen Up Phillip's Alex Ross Perry. This film apparently features another two women, this time both young (as is the case, more or less, in Persona), staying by themselves at a lake house. As I understand it, they were once close but have discovered they have grown apart, and the movie becomes a full-on psychological thriller. It's the poster as much as anything that probably makes a person think of the emotional dissolution of a movie like Persona:

So why are all these filmmakers trotting out their influences -- acknowledged or otherwise -- at the same time? And why don't we ever seen any movies where men exchange personalities? Is the female mind considered more malleable, more subject to destabilization? And if so, isn't that kind of sexist? Or is it just that women are more mysterious, which is less sexist but still sort of sexist? Would men blending personalities be "too gay" for us?

It may be no coincidence that these are all males directing females. Could a woman directing men get away with the same thing? If Sofia Coppola wanted to make a movie about two men blurring identities, would we question her authority to do so? Or her motivation behind doing so?

It's just an extreme continuation of what male directors have always done to their female stars, molding them and shaping them and turning them into inscrutable figures. And though I certainly don't want to get on my high horse about gender politics -- especially considering how much I like both Burgundy and Persona -- I do have to wonder.

But wait, there's more! One of the movies I'm most looking forward to later this year is Carol, directed by Todd Haynes, about a relationship (with psychologically bizarre overtones?) between a young department store clerk and an older, married woman. Can this be just a lesbian love story, or will it have to make us question what is reality and what isn't?

Well, I look forward to finding out, anyway.

One side note about The Duke of Burgundy, which I'll throw in here so I don't have to devote a whole post to it: There's a particularly unusual type of service credited in the opening credits. No, I'm not talking about who provided the lingerie, though that's unusual enough. I'm talking about who provided the perfume. That's right, a production element that you could not possibly detect if you tried, and in fact is completely unnecessary even for the performers, was credited. "Perfume by" and then whoever it was. I love the idea that they considered perfume such an atmospheric, essential part of filmmaking that they went so far as to let us know who provided it. I hope that gives you some sense of the type of experience you're getting involved with here.