Focus Features

Both Scott Macaulay and I here up at the Toronto Film Festival to take the pulse on contemporary world cinema and cover the premiere of the Coen Brothers new film A Serious Man. Toronto is probably my favorite festival: hundreds and hundreds of films, a minimum of glitz and glamour––it’s Canada––and knowledgeable, enthusiastic audiences. Here are a few facts: A) This is the festival's 34th year; B) It averages about half million admissions per year; C) It deploys over 2,000 volunteers; D) It offers 271 Features from over 64 countries this year.

People are already noticing that many––OK, more than normal--of those features are being directed by women and telling stories about growing up female. The most celebrated ones are, of course, the ones that pull the most star power. Karyn Kusama's Jennifer's Body––written by Diablo Cody (who’d also penned a previous Toronto hit, Juno)––looks at growing up female from a pop culture point of view. The movie’s tag line, "Hell is a teenage girl" gives a pretty good sense of the its brash mix of po-mo feminism and old school horror. While the film's star, Megan Fox, paraded her killer bod on the red carpet, her character is (literally) a man eater, a teenage girl who wreaks revenge on the man she's loved. And the film is hitting a nerve with fanboys and fangirls. Michael Cieply in the New York Times reports,” According to Natalie Johnson, a spokeswoman for Fox, tickets to the midnight show at the landmark Ryerson Theater, which seats more than 1,200, were gone within two hours of going on sale last week.”

Cieply goes on to wonder if this year marks (once again) the rise of women directors, looking at the number of potential breakout female-directed films, such as Drew Barrymore's directorial debut Whip It about roller derby gals, Jane Campion’s romantic bio-pic of John Keats Bright Star, and Lone Scherfig’s An Education. The same thoughts occurred to me, but quite by accident.  Weaving my way through various films on the opening day, I found much to my surprise a powerful theme of growing up female rising up, albeit not in the comic-book version of Jennifer’s Body. And these were all in films directed by women.

First I wandered into Xiaolu Guo’s Locarno winner She, A Chinese, an episodic story of a young woman suffering the indignities of lecherous men, nagging mothers, blind dates and lots of mud, before finding her way out of China and into Europe. It is not coincidentally a journey that parallels that of the filmmaker, who started out as a novelist in China before moving to London. 

Despite the specific cultural details, She speaks to the universal humiliation of growing up female, a fact that became all too apparent to me (a man) when I settled in to see Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank. Mia is your typical teenager—sullen, angry, and abused by all the men around her. Fish Tank is really the story of three women: 15 year-old Mia (a powerful Katie Jarvis), her little sister, and their young (and sexy) mom. So when mom brings in a young man into their home (and her bedroom), their cramped, paper-thin walled council flat indeed becomes a fish tank. While the characters’ Essex accent is as hard to understand as She, A Chinese at times, the grim reality of teenage girls is nearly the same.

Finally Women without Men, the first feature drama from Iranian-American artist Shirin Neshat, is a poignant, moving marriage of politics and art. Adapted from Sharnush Parsipur’s magical realist novel about the lives of four women during 1953, the year US helped push out the democratically elected Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh in order to reinstall the Shah. While each women is very different, their oppression in a patriarchal, theologically-based society is palpably similar. And while such allegorical touches comparing the fate of women (the oppression, their hope, their disillusion) to the fate of nation can come off as sophomoric, Neshat handles them was such poetic deftness and visual beauty that the ideas are articulated but never hammered. So is this the year of the woman, or the year we acknowledge again the impossible fate of growing up female?