At this year’s edition of Stockholm’s biggest film gathering, men were facing their own patriarchal demons on screen.
“What’s wrong with men?” is a question I, a single, heterosexual 30 year-old woman, ask myself a lot. Sometimes with a sarcastic undertone, but more often with genuine concern about the normalised (and, let’s say it, indoctrinated) inability of male friends, acquaintances, and lovers to reckon with the ways patriarchy has wronged them. From patterns of miscommunication, through challenges in communicating emotions, to the facade of unquestioned masculinity, the deficit that so many men struggle to articulate puts them at a disadvantage in comparison to a woman’s anti-patriarchal stance. Working through latent depression and the isolation that comes with abiding to the heteronormative rules of “the stronger sex” is a tough job and a long, arduous process. Art helps, representation does too, and the necessity of telling mens’ stories through the lens of vulnerability has never been bigger. At this year’s Stockholm International Film Festival, there were a number of films shown which tackle these challenges head-on, reaching for the empathetic qualities of cinema to overcome their characters’ dangerous (often self-imposed) isolation.
Anora, Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winning new film (and surely an Oscar-hopeful) opened the festival with a wink to the wounded stereotypes of “Russian mobster” masculinity. While the film follows Ani (Mikey Madison)’s pursuit of a dreamy, well-off life as an the bride of a oligarch’s son, the plot actually ping-pongs her between puppy-eyed Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) and the taciturn gentleman-henchman Igor (Yura Borisov). There is a lot of fun to be had with Anora and its comedy of errors that often poke at gender roles and the power fields that come with them in the land of the rich, yet Baker’s gaze remains sympathetic to the men who have lost their way (as was the case in 2021’s Red Rocket), and also to those who may never find it. Vanya fleeing the marriage at the first sight of danger (and by danger, I mean his mother’s scolding) condemns him to a cowardly life that is nevertheless protected by seven-figured dollar signs.
The festival’s programme itself circled out Men in Crisis as this year’s Spotlight, platforming films like Nathan Silver’s Between the Temples, Kyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud and Christopher Andews’ Bring Them Down where the beloved Barry Keoghan faces a terrifyingly harsh Christopher Abbott in a ripening, violent feud between two families in the Irish countryside. Family is also at the heart of Dutch director Jan-Willem van Ewijk’s film Alpha, where a father and a son snipe criticisms at each other, as well as passive-aggressive nods, during a ski holiday in the Alps. Alpha sits on the sidelines and lets the conflict grow in scope, counting on satirical distance and a potential risky situation in the mountains; with a carefully calculated (but hearty) dramaturgical arc, the film manages to reach deep into the festering wound inflicted by masculine ideals and generational trauma. Jesse Eisenberg, who received the Stockholm Excellence Award, presented A Real Pain, his sophomore directorial film in which he also stars alongside Kieran Culkin. A Real Pain takes two cousins on a trip from the United States to Poland, so they can pay tribute to their late grandmother’s heritage and legacy. A journey retracing trauma that is completely foreign to them, the film surprises with its responsible sentimentalism, allowing for both characters to confront, acknowledge, and even articulate the depths of their own despair – the despair of failing as men, whatever that means.
Dying (Sterben) by German director Matthias Glasner stars Lars Eidinger as an accomplished conductor sandwiched between his elderly parents, estranged sister, and ex wife and while he is the protagonist of only one of the film’s three parts, we are certain he very much dislikes being the glue between family members and tries to deflect responsibility. But his crisis is deeply rooted in obligation and the frustrations that come with spreading yourself too thin. Unlike, for example, Paul Schrader’s Oh Canada, where Richard Gere’s character reminisces a past where he felt more powerful and alive, as a bridge between war-torn past and future promises of love, Tom Lunies in Dying is a character that is always on the brink of erasing himself. Leonard Fife, the protagonist of Oh Canada, seeks to assert himself even on his deathbed: as proud as he is of his documentary filmmaking career, Fife is ashamed of failing as a father and Schrader’s film zooms in on that very feeling through monologue confessionals and multiple flashbacks where Jacob Elordi plays the director at a younger age.
At the festival, our chosen FIPRESCI winner, Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez, shows a strikingly political, thrilling, and musical attitude towards the so-called masculine order. In it, the titular Emilia Pérez is a trans woman who had to sacrifice everything in order to leave the male role, body, and burden, but the many scenes of joyful reclamation and the possibilities of arriving at your truest self through reinvention (transition) are what stays with you after the credits roll. It’s good to note that the film also won the Peroni Audience Award and in this agreement between critics and viewers I find yet another confirmation that dichotomies, such as male/female should be a thing of the past.
Savina Petkova
© FIPRESCI 2024