F  L  A  U  N  T

At this year’s Venice Film Festival, flawed heroines were the norm. Complex, courageous, and unconventional women rule the Lido for a festival that may not have had as many women filmmakers at the helm of films in competition, but definitely outdid all other events as far as female characters go. 

And when all was said and done, it was a woman filmmaker who walked away with the coveted Golden Lion top prize—Audrey Diwan for abortion drama Happening (L’Eventement).

Real-life heroines alighted on the big screen, like the late Princess Diana, played by a fragilely perfect Kristen Stewart and immortalized by Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain in Spencer. But also literary characters translated to cinematic ones, as with Olivia Colman’s depiction of Leda Caruso, a fifty-something mother with an unsettling past in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s feature directorial debut The Lost Daughter, based on the novel by Elena Ferrante.

In Madeleine Collins, the magnetic Virginie Efira played a central woman figure whose name turned out not to be Madeleine but Judith, and even sometimes Margot. Antoine Barraud’s psychological thriller not only redefined the idea of freedom for women, but also introduced us to a new kind of prince Charming slash fairy godmother character via a screen cameo played by Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid.

There were also the leading ladies of Last Night in Soho, including a fantastic last performance by the late Diana Rigg. Within Edgar Wright’s fashion and music extravaganza, with an opening sequence featuring a newspaper ballgown that made us giggle with joy, divas, both contemporary and from times past, grappled with London’s West End in the 1960’s and all the ghosts that may have entailed. It was a hippy, trippy ride down memory lane, with a bit of zombie genre film thrown in.

Many, many more leading ladies ruled the Lido. Isabel Sandoval, a trans Filipina filmmaker presented Shangri-La as part of ‘Miu Miu Women’s Tales’—the latest installment in the coveted Prada-sponsored series of shorts which asks female directors to examine "femininity in the 21st century.” The other short for this season was by Kaouther Ben Hania, the Oscar-nominated Tunisian filmmakers who has been featured in Flaunt. 

This was definitely a women-centric line up. Yet not one always filled with our preconceived idea of what a proper leading lady should be. And isn’t it time that notion should be done away with anyway?

Another mention-worthy entry of this line up is Thomas Kruithof’s Promises (Les Promesses), where French superstar Isabelle Huppert plays Clémence, the fearless mayor of a town near Paris. In her quest to survive in the political arena, Huppert’s character finds herself at odds with her citizens, but also her conscience. 

Lately, the versatile Huppert, who is known for bringing credibility and warmth to characters who would otherwise be labelled as cold and aloof, has played a wide range of roles. From the police translator turned hijab-wearing drug dealer “Mama Weed” in the homonymous film by Jean-Paul Salomé, to her interpretation of Maud, the alter ego of filmmaker Catherine Breillat as she dealt with the struggles of suffering a debilitating stroke, in the French director’s haunting autobiographical drama Abuse of Weakness. 

I asked Huppert in Venice what draws her to a part. “The director,” she admits, but conceded that “it’s different things every time. In the case of a first time director, it is pure intuition. But always, more concretely the dialogue—the more time passes, the more I think that dialogues tell most about what the film will be.”

So does Huppert think life should be lived in shades of grey, as the heroines she often plays do it? “I think it makes good movies. The rest I don’t know…” She concedes, “It surely makes good movies because it’s more accurate about human kind. You don’t have the good, you don’t have the bad, you have how you deal with opportunities and with reality.”

When prodded about men telling women’s stories on the big screen, as Kruithof has done with Promises, and whether women should be the ones doing it instead, she used an old favorite quote of hers by French writer Nathalie Sarraute. “There is no female literature,” but Huppert also acknowledged that “you can spend the afternoon trying to find the good answer to that.”

Another unconventional heroine came by way of Rumanian filmmaker Bogdan George Apetri’s Miracle. Part woman’s tale, part police thriller, the film tells the story of Cristina (played by the stunning Ioana Bugarin) a novitiate in a Romanian convent who gets into trouble during a journey back from a doctor’s appointment. All is not what it seems in Apetri’s film, and while Cristina may be seen as a the tragic heroine in the story, there is also a supernatural feel to her character. 

I wondered out loud if Bugarin felt her character’s special powers and she answered my question, “she is certainly a very spiritual character, somewhat like a modern saint. She believes in a bigger scheme of things, maybe even destiny which is immutable.” Bugarin also admitted that “the moment in the woods [a turning point in the film] awakens in her a sort of intuition that this place, the woods, have a mysterious, even eerie atmosphere. She notices the surroundings and understands something instinctively, without being able to articulate it. It’s only later that she is able to connect the dots and perceive it as a divine signal.”

In Ana Lily Amirpour’s third feature Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon, which also saw its world premiere in Venice, the heroine is a young Korean girl (Burning's Jun Jong Seo) who has just escaped from a mental institution. On her first night of freedom, dressed in a crisp white straight jacket and barefoot, she meets up with a medley of eccentric characters wandering the streets of New Orleans. Stylish and cool, colorful and dark, and also starring Kate Hudson as a lady of the night, Amirpour does what she is best known for—paint us a picture that takes up place in our hearts, for ages to come. 

With a hip cast of modern Italian thespians and one classic diva, Laura Bispuri’s The Peacock’s Paradise also felt like a collection of women’s lives on the verge. Featuring young cinema favorite Alba Rohrwacher along with the legendary Dominique Sanda, Bispuri’s film redefined the idea of heroine. I ask the Italian filmmaker for her definition of the word. "A heroine for me is a woman who decides to go where others don’t dare to go. A heroine is a woman who decides to fight the conformist world, without compromise and with a sincere idealism that is more important than anything else. A heroine is a woman who wants to change the injustices of the world.” Does Bispuri set out to redefine the modern woman with her work? “I set out to tell sincere, real, complex stories about women and what happens is that I fall out of the traditional idea of the woman as it has been told for a long time,” she replies.

Finally, I also asked Romanian actress Ioana Bugarin about women’s stories and whether they should be told by male or female filmmakers. “I think it’s important that women stories start being told more often, more nuanced, more diverse,” she admits, continuing “of course it would be ideal to envision a world where women occupy key roles in the industry as much as men. It is important that we make our voices and stories heard. But then, at the same time, I don’t think men cannot write strong female characters. I think it’s more a discussion of how women are being portrayed on screen, than the gender of the authors.”

At awards time, women also walked away winners at this year’s Venice Film Festival, with Jane Campion becoming the second woman ever to receive the Silver Lion for Best Director (for The Power of the Dog) since the award was introduced in 1990—with the first having gone to Shirin Neshat in 2009. Maggie Gyllenhaal picked up Best Screenplay for The Lost Daughter, and the Volpi Cup for Best Actress went to Penélope Cruz, for her turn in Pedro Almodóvar's Parallel Mothers. So it seems that these divas on the verge have approached the edge, beckoning others to follow, looking at the broad expanse ahead.