Another shot for Shortland

We’re supposed to celebrate the news of a woman or minority being picked to helm a big studio project with big expectations at the box office. Instead, such news disturbed me this past week.

After first being shocked that Cate Shortland was even a candidate to direct Marvel’s first solo Black Widow movie, I was then even more shocked, and also dismayed, to learn she’d actually landed the job.

What’s wrong with Cate Shortland, Vance? And given that she’s an Australian director, shouldn’t you support her candidacy all the more?

I would if Shortland had not made one of the most reprehensible films I saw in 2017, Berlin Syndrome. I was sure it would be my lowest ranked film of the year until I saw the Sean Penn abomination The Last Face.

Berlin Syndrome is the type of movie that’s so misogynistic it could have only been directed by a man. And yet it was directed by a woman.

What makes it so disturbing is that it’s the story of an Australian woman (Teresa Palmer) who is traveling in Berlin when she goes home with a man she meets (Max Riemalt), and he proceeds to take her captive. That’s not the disturbing part. The disturbing part is that the woman demonstrates an inexcusably pathetic level of agency, failing to take numerous obvious opportunities to escape, even though it’s very clear from her hysterical emotional state that this is what she wants. In this state of captivity she then dresses up in lingerie and takes photos of herself in poses that are both tortured and seductive, from what I remember (though I’ve blocked some of it out).

That’s half of what’s disturbing. The other half is that the film does not take a negative stance toward her captor. If keeping her captive were not bad enough, he does some other things that are disgusting enough to forfeit all audience sympathy, including a scene where he slams her hand in a door, smashing her fingers and causing her to faint (at which point he carries her back inside, like a groom carrying a bride across the threshold). That scene is plenty sickening by itself. But then Shortland, for some reason, wants us to care about this man and his motivations in the world. She follows him during his daily life at work and interactions with co-workers, and even to go visit his father, who is dying of cancer. The camera stays with him as he processes the sadness of his father dying.

This “creeps are people too” perspective is bizarre and, I would argue, irresponsible. Shortland is not even trying to suggest that something fundamental about his past has turned him into a person who abuses and kidnaps women. That would at least be something. Instead, this guy appears to have a loving father who is dying of cancer, not some bastard who beat him and passed on his violent tendencies in the cycle of abuse. Just some normal good dad whose grieving son happens to be a deviant and practitioner of sexual violence.

The thing that left me aghast about the film is that it was received positively. Berlin Syndrome holds a thoroughly inexplicable 73 on Rotten Tomatoes and 70 on Metacritic. Could that many critics have been blinded by the good cinematography?

It would have been easy to write Cate Shortland off from this one bad movie. It’s the kind of bad movie that makes you doubt all the artist’s judgments, and feel comfortable making blanket statements that their artistic output is of little value.

But then the news broke that Shortland was being considered for the Black Widow gig, along with a few other women who seemed like eminently preferable options. One of these was Amma Assante (Belle, A United Kingdom), who would have been a great choice. Not because her films were more like a potential Black Widow movie than Shortland’s were, because they aren’t – though you could say the same for Patty Jenkins before she made Wonder Woman. It was simply because both movies she’d made that I’d seen were actually good, whereas Shortland’s wasn’t.

But Shortland had a disadvantage to Assante in this discussion. I was basing my assessment of her usefulness on only one film, rather than two. I thought I should see at least one other before delivering a final dismissal. Maybe that would show me what others saw in her.

So the other Shortland film that seems to be a calling card for her is called Lore, and it was available from the library. In fact, I didn’t even have to reserve it; I stumbled across it a few weeks back. So I guess I’m telling things slightly out of sequence. I picked up Lore out of a general interest in giving Shortland a second chance, and her appointment as director of Black Widow ensured that I’d watch it before it was due back. Which I did on Sunday night.

I wish I could say my opinion of Cate Shortland improved radically. It improved only slightly.

Lore at least does not have the same kind of female character agency issues as Berlin Syndrome. The title is the nickname of the film’s main character, Hannalore (Saskia Rosendahl), who is the oldest of five siblings essentially left orphaned when their Nazi parents are taken into custody after the death of Hitler. She has to lead her twin brothers, sister and infant brother on a journey throughout Allied occupied Germany to get to her grandmother’s house. And she does indeed take a lot on her shoulders, and takes it well enough. I mean, you can’t accuse her of shrinking from her responsibility or collapsing in hysterics and failing to escape from the man who holds her captive, anyway.

But this film is permeated with the strange sense of watching people you don’t like, not because they’re bad people in general but because they’re … well, they’re Nazis. Now granted, Lore is only 14 and she’s the oldest, so you can’t really say she or her siblings have adopted the values of the Third Reich in any meaningful way. But surprisingly few of the people we encounter in this movie, including her and her siblings, seem to regret their complicity with the philosophies of Adolf Hitler, and again it doesn’t seem to matter that much to Shortland. It’s her showing a violent kidnapper/rapist touchingly visit his cancer-stricken father all over again. Of course, Lore comes first in the chronology, so I guess it informs Berlin Syndrome.

I didn’t mind that the film was hard to watch in a metaphorical sense, as it includes things like ant-infested corpses and men slumped in chairs after they blew their own brains out. I did mind that the film was hard to watch in a literal, physical sense. It uses this oversaturated film stock in which the reds and greens stand out in a really woozy way. I won’t actually say I felt nauseous while watching it, because I have a strong stomach and I’m proud of that. But I think the colors in this film could make a person nauseous. If I thought that was Shortland’s intent, rather than a demonstration of her misguided aesthetic sensibility, I might applaud it. Instead, another demerit.

I don’t know what I expected from this movie, as any movie set in the closing days of World War II, from the perspective of the Germans, is going to be pretty bleak. But a good point of contrast is Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall, which actually goes inside Hitler’s bunkers, and provides us with a snapshot of a bunch of different personality types and their perspectives on what they have been involved in. That film offers the shades of gray that this one does not. This one only involves shades of puky green and red.

What I just don’t, can’t understand is why Kevin Feige would have looked at these two films and thought “Here is our Black Widow director.” Shortland’s aesthetic choices are nothing like the ones she will be expected to adhere to in the MCU, with a lot of the camera lolling around at close range to its subjects in these overstylized compositions. And if you’re making a movie about a badass woman, it hardly seems right to have made a film in which the female character shows a curious lack of ingenuity and fritters away all her advantages. The title character of Lore is better than that, but she doesn’t feel like a powerful woman – she feels like a woman who does what she has to and doesn’t sufficiently divorce herself from a hateful ideology.

It did occur to me whether Shortland’s obvious affinity for all things German – both of these films are set in Germany, and Lore is entirely in German – played some role. Not that Natasha Romanoff, a.k.a. Black Widow, is German, mind you. Clearly, she’s of Russian heritage (which gets generally downplayed in these movies). But I can see it being somebody’s myopic idea of an equivalency. “Russian? German? Both enemies of the United States at one point. It’s all the same!”

The thing is, this is a win-win for Shortland. Because she will not be the primary auteur behind the film – that’s Feige if it’s anyone – she will inevitably take the credit for sitting in the director’s chair when the movie inevitably plays well. All she has to do is not screw it up and she’ll reap the benefits. And Feige and Disney don’t really allow you to screw it up – they axe you long before then. I guess her getting axed is the most I can hope for.

And why do I want Cate Shortland to get axed from the job she’s only just gotten?

Because I don’t think a person should get rewarded for putting a film like Berlin Syndrome into the world. I’ll forgive directors for making bad movies, but I’m slower to forgive them for making wrong ones.