Girls Before Swine: Why We Can’t Have ‘The Heat’ Without Having ‘Dirty Harriet’ First

Make no mistake, “The Heat” is definitely a bold step forward for representations of women in film, and I’m sure you’ll be hearing plenty about how Paul Feig’s “Bridesmaids” follow-up is a cinematic landmark. It’s the first buddy cop movie starring girls! It’s proof that the glass ceiling is cracking, genre lines are blurring, and “Bridesmaids” made its mark with studio honchos.  It’s a post-feminist film world, everyone!

Some of this is undoubtedly true. It is gratifying to see female-driven comedy, and there is a thrill in seeing two talented women tackling a typically male genre. Be that as it may, sight unseen I can’t help but see “The Heat” as a consolation prize.

This isn’t all the fault of the film. Action comedy is a very specific and very prickly genre. It hit its zenith in the ‘80s and ‘90s with films like “48 Hours” and “Lethal Weapon,”  and it’s struggled since.  Most 21st century filmmakers can’t figure out the special mix of action and comedy, and they tend to be too heavy handed with one ingredient over the other.  The films are impossible to take seriously or lightly, and they make for an uncomfortable viewing experience as we’re unsure if the film is just bad, or if it’s meant to be silly in its carnage.  (See: “Olympus Has Fallen,” a film I’m fairly sure was intended as serious, but many people viewed as crackling with intentional wisecracks.)

Now, the reason we had successful action comedies is because they sprang from slick and irreverent action films.  “Dirty Harry” and “Bullit” beget “Lethal Weapon,”  “Beverly Hills Cop,” and “48 Hours,” because they made working the beat cool. The heroes wore sexy sunglasses and leather jackets, and they rolled their eyes at rules and regulations.  They chased bad guys in screeching car chases, collateral damage be damned, and they threw their badges.  The dry sarcasm of Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood was witty, and their crackling one liners could be nudged further into outright laughs.  (Watch “Dirty Harry” again. You’ll be surprised at how gleefully snarky Callahan actually is.)

The reason “The Heat” seems like something of a let down is that we have yet to enjoy a Dirty Harriet.  There was a time when it seemed she would appear thanks to characters such as Clarice Starling, Dana Scully, Lethal Weapon’s Lorna Cole, Holly Hunter in “Copycat” and even Angelina Jolie in “The Bone Collector.”  It felt like cinema was finally acknowledging that women did carry badges, guns, and could hold their own on the streets.  (Yes, I know two of those characters are FBI Agents, but it’s a variation on the same job, and I am trying to be generous.)  The movies were catching up to real life.

Yet we never did get a female cop as a lead character, like Martin Riggs or Bullit.   They’re usually sidekicks, and too often, they’re raw rookies who barely make it out of a film alive.   They’re variations on “The Enforcer” – aka “The One Where Dirty Harry Gets a Lady Partner” – where the policewoman spends the film trying to prove she can do the job, only to get shot for a rookie mistake.  “The Enforcer” ends uncertain as to whether women belong in uniform, and it set a pattern that films have followed since.  Look at “Lethal Weapon 3” – it ends nearly the same way as “The Enforcer,” and the next time we see Cole, she’s setting up house with Riggs, and pregnant with his child.   Even “Dredd,” a film bold enough to have a vicious female villain, couldn’t resist sending its female cop forlornly off the job.  Contrast this approach with any male-oriented cop film – especially one with a greenhorn partner – and you’ll see it ends with cigars, laughter, and congratulations all around. It’s always “You’ll be a hell of a cop, kid!”, not “Eh, not surprised I needed to bail you out, my delicate flower.”

I feel like “The Heat” springs a lot from this tradition, rather than the cool and competent sarcasm that brought us Riggs and Murtaugh or Tango and Cash.  The movie is sold on images of Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy being ungritty – despite the marketing’s insistence on McCarthy being the toughest cop of her station – and the laughs come from their inability to pull off the things Axel Foley could do in his sleep (to be fair, McCarthy is packing a rocket launcher on the latest poster).   To add giggles to girliness, they can’t handle the sight of blood! WOMEN!  They just fall apart at a little injury, whereas you can pump Stallone full of bullets, and he’ll laugh it off alongside the audience. Badasses take bullets; ballerinas break beer glasses and shriek.

It’s important to stress that “The Heat” isn’t the problem, and I’ve heard reports from those who have seen the film that it’s refreshingly assured in its empowering message, and nimbly avoids the traps that might make this yet another frustrating exercise in faux feminism.  Even so, this isn’t shaping up to be the Lady Lethal Weapon the world has needed, Paul Feig’s film playing instead like a female version of “The Other Guys,” a satire that benefits greatly from a sturdy genre tradition. We’re getting the satire without the subject, dessert before dinner, and so “The Heat” seems like swan song for a cinematic corner we never got to actually have.  If we never got our Dirty Harriet, will a film like “The Heat” ensure we never will?  Can you go gritty with a female cop protagonist after you already went goofy with her?

That’s hyperbole, of course.  Action comedy cops didn’t kill the police procedural, and never will.  But “The Heat” may make it that much harder for studios and audiences alike to take a female-driven version seriously.  After all, they haven’t been willing to do it before they shoved her into slapstick and Spanx jokes.  Why would they be willing to now?

Categories: Features

Tags: Beverly hills cop, Bridesmaids, Dirty harry, Elisabeth rappe, Hot fuzz, Melissa mccarthy, Paul feig, Sandra bullock, The Heat

New Directors / New Films: Movies Without Borders

“Did you ever imagine yourself in a world where there is nothing at all?” In some ways this is the essential query of “Leones,” to the extent that the film even has a definable essence. Jazmín López’s debut feature is as enigmatic as it is bold, forging new cinematic ideas from the vastness of the natural world and brief flirtations with character and philosophy. López is interested in the “in-between,” exploring the often hazy landscape amid life and death and the gaps of time itself. It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen.

Yet at the same time, it is only one of a mighty handful of films at this year’s installment of New Directors / New Films to deal with borders and borderlessness, the spaces in between. Like many current film festivals, ND/NF is awash with international productions that explore human migration and the pores that have grown between nations. “Die Welt” is a particularly strong example, a debut feature from Alex Pitstra that looks into the life of a young man coming of age in Tunisia. Northern European tourists and American films filter in and out of Abdallah’s life in Tunis, until he finally decides to make the leap out into the world. Its narrative style is choppy but occasionally insightful.

Even a number of the shorts build from a similarly international context, taking single locations and giving them cross-border dimensions. Sofia Babulani’s “What Can I Wish You Before the Fight?” is a snapshot into the life of a French farmer and his adopted daughter, an Eastern European girl who remains mute despite years of therapy. An intrusion from a new outsider causes a sudden eruption of the family dynamic, and seems to argue for a Europe that is hardly settled within its borders. The French farm, historically crucial piece of that nation’s national definition, is here presented as node of European migration.

“Leones”

Both Babulani’s film and Jordi Wijnalda’s “Southwest” succeed in large part due to their willingness to remain vague, to only scratch the surface of vast human movement. The latter takes place on the Aegean coast of Turkey, where a middle-aged Dutch woman helps travelers sneak across the sea and enter Greece (and thus the European Union). Again, the past is only hinted at with the arrival of her son, while the complexity of the present takes a backseat to the prosaic Turkish landscape and the minutia of a treacherous and illegal arrangement. The presence of the “in-between,” the line between developed Europe and its fringes and the ominous continental implication therein, weighs over the proceedings with such import that to do more than even suggest it might come across as pandering.

These border spaces are the territory of relativity, legal and moral. Daniel Hoesl’s “Soldate Jeannette” doesn’t exist on a physical, international frontier but rather concerns itself with gleefully breaking down the barriers of moneyed European society. Fanni (Johanna Orsini-Rosenberg) is a wealthy socialite in Vienna who is running out of cash, mostly through her own lack of care. She purchases and immediately tosses away extravagantly expensive clothing, ignores her financial commitments with a head-in-the-clouds lack of concern (including rent) and seems to enjoy the thrill of theft. As she is driven out of Vienna by her creditors, she makes her way to the idyllic countryside, a change of circumstance rather than character. Fanni is unbound by the borders of society, without even an emotional attachment to the wealthy circles from which she hails. The anarchic spirit of Hoesl’s film (introduced as “A European Film Conspiracy”) is driven by the thumping rhythms of Bettina Köster and Orsini-Rosenberg’s unadorned, idiosyncratically ruthless performance.

From physical and social boundaries, the ND/NF selection turns to cosmological margins. “Emperor Visits the Hell” is a contemporary retelling of the Chinese classic “Journey to the West,” with Emperor Li Shimin as a high-ranking bureaucrat. The story necessitates a trip to Hell, as the title of the film suggests, when the Emperor dies suddenly of a combination of illness and guilt. His return to life can only be arranged through a corrupt manipulation of paperwork, perhaps a less-than-subtle critique of current Chinese governing practices. Yet director Luo Li doesn’t rely on the standard stylistic rendition of the fires of Hell, choosing rather to avoid differentiation altogether. The magic of the original narrative is effortlessly combined with the trappings of 21st century bureaucracy, and no effort is put into making the underworld look much different. This cosmological and religious borderlessness is the most audacious element of the film, an unadorned refusal to separate the corruption of the living and the lost souls of the dead.

“L’Intervallo”

When speaking of spaces in between, one has to mention the sole Italian film in the festival, Leonardo di Costanzo’s “L’intervallo.” The title, which literally translates to “The Interval,” is the simplest of these films. A timid teenaged ice-cream vendor (Alessio Gallo) is ordered by a local mob boss to guard a young girl (Francesca Riso), awaiting punishment for romantic involvement with a member of a rival gang. Both kids are about fifteen, quite literally in the adolescent interval of their lives. As they spend the day together they begin to understand each other, and this Neapolitan crime film begins to resemble “Before Sunset” much more than “Gomorrah.” Riso plays her character’s inherent frankness with shaky confidence while Gallo’s quiet uncertainty serves as a perfect counterpoint. With his open and calmly expressive face, the boy is a dead ringer for Falconetti. These two performances and their devotion to an unhurried script are in tune with Isabel’s query in “Leones”; for a brief hour, it seems that “L’intervallo” has found a “world where there is nothing at all” in the loud and violent context of Naples.

And that brings us back to López and “Leones.” This Argentine debut feature is easily the most intriguing film on the ND/NF program, and arguably the best. The plot is simple, at least as it opens. A group of teenagers are hiking through a breathtaking forest of epic proportions, ostensibly on a short vacation. The camera follows them from behind, building stunning long takes that wind through the trees with an almost cosmic patience. As we slowly learn more, López’s vision becomes progressively bolder up until what is easily the most stunning final shot of the last few years. The substance of the film? These characters are wandering through the in-between, a forest of metaphysical portent. They play word-games that open up the symbolic implications of the film with the brief audacity of Ernest Hemingway. Their youth is central, López understanding its inherent freedom. This is aspirational filmmaking at its best, a new director driving her art forward into an ill-defined frontier.

Categories: Features

Tags: Daniel Walber, Emperor Visits the Hell, Film festival, L'Intervallo, Leones, Lincoln Center, New Directors / New Films