Just how many powerful, impressive films does a woman need to make before she’s taken seriously? In Angelina Jolie’s case the answer is four, over a timespan of six years. Her most recent, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, has just been announced as Cambodia’s official entry for the foreign language category at the Oscars, following a successful premiere at the Telluride Film Festival. Based on Loung Ung’s memoir, it stars Srey Moch as the young protagonist trying to survive the genocidal violence, forced child conscription and labour camps of the Khmer Rouge’s terrorisation of civilians in Cambodia in the 1970s.
The reviews have been very good, although the wider world seems baffled as to why one of the most beautiful women on the planet would value politics, internationalism and human rights activism over prettiness, Hollywood privilege and American insularity; why she would want to speak and create rather than be gawped at. In Jolie’s case her commitment, lack of dilettantism and the evident political seriousness of her outlook have prevented her from being trashed outright – as Madonna was for her beautiful-looking, intelligent and delicate film WE, say – but her work has still been erased, ignored, talked down, picked apart in countless petty ways and ultimately dismissed. Two decades into her career, she is still not seen as a heavyweight.
It’s disappointing, because in Jolie’s work both as a film director and a stateswoman she is propelled by the single most important impulse behind the global fight for women’s liberation: confronting endemic male violence against women, girls, boys and men. Her 2011 debut, In the Land of Blood and Honey, is one of the best war films I’ve ever seen. Focusing on the Bosnian war of the 1990s, it shows conflict as ugly, nihilistic and unjust, riven with frenzied male sexual violence against women and macho abuse and one-upmanship even between men ostensibly on the same side. Jolie looks where other people refuse to, shooting scenes of men raping and brutalising women unflinchingly, realistically and with no titillation whatsoever. It’s a shocking, visceral, deeply feminist film, led by the actress Zana Marjanović who plays a prisoner of war who attains some sort of sick “special status” as the sexual possession of a soldier whom she knew before the war. Repulsively, the film is billed on Wikipedia as an “American romantic drama” and “a love story” when it is the precise opposite: a serious depiction of the way human connections are twisted by mental, political and physical violence.
Of course most war films, whoever they are directed by, depict conflict as brutal, unjust, callous and grievously wasteful of human life. But relatively few include women as plentiful or significant characters or make the obvious gendered point that it is men, not women, who are the perpetrators of virtually all the world’s violence in “peacetime” as well as war; and that it is women and children who must suffer, unasked, through the acts and consequences of men’s violence.
Jolie excels when she puts the experiences of women and girls in the spotlight. Her second film, Unbroken, in 2014, was a solid biopic of Louis Zamperini, the former Japanese prisoner of war who became an Olympic runner. It was well made, but stately and too worshipful of its subject.
Unbroken was superseded by her much smaller film, By the Sea, in 2015. Based somewhat on Jolie’s parents’ marriage but also redolent of Gena Rowlands’ work with John Cassavetes, it tells the story of a couple pulled apart by grief after two miscarriages, which causes them to act out in various unflattering and perverse ways. Although this luxury arthouse work is anomalous in terms of Jolie’s much wider interests as a director, By the Sea marks her out as an auteur who can create stunningly beautiful work that balances sumptuous design with (particularly female) emotional torment. In one scene Jolie’s character Nessa tells her husband, played by Jolie’s then-husband Brad Pitt: “Maybe you shouldn’t have a drink today. It’ll be good for you.” Clearly Brad didn’t listen. And have you heard him speaking French, as he does throughout the film? Oof – it’s like overhearing an upstairs neighbour struggling to move heavy furniture.
I love By the Sea, but it’s a gorgeous curio when set alongside the rest of her output. In returning to the bigger, more heavily political canvas of First They Killed My Father, Jolie reconnects with her prior body of work and looks afresh at the often disregarded collateral damage of male warfare: women and children. Let’s hope the world is ready to listen this time.
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