Change Your Image
mireillebelleau
Reviews
E=mc² (2005)
Excellent introduction indeed (even if a rewriting of history!)
In reference to tarmcgator's comment of December 2005, I have only to add to his generally excellent review of this production that while I fully agree that we should not rewrite history in order to delude young women into believing that our sex's role was more instrumental than it actually was in the scientific processes of history, I do commend Johnstone and Bodanis for mentioning some roles women did play in the development of this enormous scientific discovery. While I myself am not a scientist, I have long been interested in quantum physics, but had never heard of du Châtelet or Meitner before seeing this production. Bravo to Dr. Bodanis for bringing their names - and their work, however small a contribution it may have been in truth - into light in his book (and now this t.v. production).
As for the problem of rewriting history in order to assuage minorities, well, I understand Mr. Tarmcgator's taking issue in this case with the (possibly) fallacious reinvention of female scientists' roles in order to encourage young women of today to go into the sciences. I think we would be far better to discuss the possible reasons that young women are not going into or staying in the sciences as readily as men. This, however, is the one of the "giant" questions that we so far cannot answer - just seeing the reaction to Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers' speech last year (http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html) is evidence of that (as an aside, I'm not about to say that he was horribly misguided in the questions he posed, which I think need badly to be discussed, but that perhaps - as has been widely suggested, in fact - he jumped to conclusions regarding the supposed greater weight of the role of genetics when comparing the sexes' abilities in mathematics).
No, I do not want to be lied to about women's roles in history (however dreary and depressing they usually turn out to be), but to quote you: "Emilie du Châtelet was no doubt a brilliant woman who tried to make the most of the limited intellectual opportunities that women could pursue in early 18th-century France; but one wonders how much more influential she was on the course of the development of physics than, say, Newton or Leibniz." One wonders indeed, sir; unfortunately, we will never know how great she would have been had she had the chance to attain the same education and encouragement as her male peers. All other things being equal, why couldn't she have been as great a mind as Newton or Liebniz? I, as a woman, was inspired by "E=mc²" to hope that she could have been. The authors seem to be attempting to give her this due, and perhaps in exaggerating the role that she did have, they are merely paying homage to the role she might have had, had she not been a prisoner to the time in which she lived. Can you honestly begrudge them this effort?
Une vraie jeune fille (1976)
Not (as most of Breillat) for the faint-hearted...
**SPOILERS and frank, disturbing details from the film...**
This is Breillat's shock value at its extreme. It could honestly be said that with "Une vraie jeune fille" Breillat makes Jon Waters look like Nora Ephron.
But the movie's actual point seems to be to explore, with an adolescent aptly named Alice, the advent of a young girl's sexuality on a boring family summer vacation to an arid farm. With no real men interested in her sexually (aside from, it is implied, her father, and a lecherous man his age she meets while at the fair), she turns to her own body for entertainment, inventing bizarre autoerotic games for herself, such as walking home with her underwear around her ankles or placing it on rotting dog carcasses. It is an unflinching look at a young girl's exploration of the female body - her own - mindless of the regard of the other.
That said, having first stumbled upon "Une vraie jeune fille" on the "arte" channel the other night in my Paris hotel room, the shock of the images took over any thought processes I was having as to why these visuals were even present and what they represented. There is a scene where the girl's mother unflinchingly saws at a live chicken's neck with a dull kitchen knife, which was obviously not fake (the poor chicken!). In another, Alice puts a bottle of vinegar into her own hind quarters. In one (dream) scene, she writhes tied up on the ground as her love interest tears up an earthworm and places it around (and tries to get it in) her vagina. There are lots more where these came from, but I'm describing these scenes as they are in my mind and not in the "coherent" order in which they appeared in the film, which is unfair to Breillat's intentions. Besides, any further description of the movie might pass as obscene and be edited out of my commentary.
The filmmaker herself has been quoted as saying that she wonders if the spectator can make it beyond the shocking images of her works to the emotions and meaning behind them. It is a tough task she asks of us, especially here. While I liked both "Romance" and "36 Fillette" (there is much rapport avec "jeune fille" ) and find Breillat's feminism thought-provoking to say the least, a film like "Une vraie jeune fille" is just too hard for most people to sit through (I haven't brought myself to eat chicken since seeing "jeune fille," and can't get the rest of the images out of my head). Yet through our participation-voyeurism and the heroines' brutal honesty they tell us a certain raw, in-your-face truth about female sexuality. The question is, can we bear to watch long enough to find that truth?