Screen Notes:
Her Lens, His Story

Featuring films from the UK, Norway, the Soviet Union, Argentina, Australia, Afghanistan and Japan, this film season shows how great female directors have reversed the traditional male-female gaze to give us exciting and challenging male characters across multiple genres, including film noirs, melodramas, comedies and war movies.

Ana Kokkinos’ explosive Head On (1998), following a day and a night in the life of a troubled gay Greek-Australian teenager in Melbourne.

Based on the novel Loaded by Christos Tsiolkas (The Slap), the story follows Ari (Alex Dimitriades): a hot-blooded teenager, who keeps his homosexuality secret from his Greek-Australian family. A drug-fuelled 24 hours of sex, drugs and partying culminates in an unexpected opportunity for romance.

Director Ana Kokkinos explores the protagonist’s complex attitudes towards masculinity, rooted in his family's cultural customs and traditional views, with tact and precision. Excellent support is is provided by Paul Capsis as his genderqueer friend, who forces Ari to confront his own masculine identity.

Edith Carlmar, Norway’s first female director, kicked off her career with the splendid, subversive film noir Death is a Caress (1949), a film that deserves to be far better known - the film delivers a frankness about toxic relationships and what happens when passions fade.

While the tropes of noir present – the hardbitten man, the femme fatale, the moody lighting – Carlmar deftly uses the genre to comment on the complexities of her male protagonist. The dashing Erik almost knowingly makes bad decision after bad decision, jilting his loyal fiancee to have an affair with Sonja, an older, married and, crucially, more confident society woman. This sparks a downward spiral of suspicion, paranoia and male hysteria, as Erik realises he has no control over Sonja, and dark passions threaten to veer into violence. While male directors may have focused on presupposed wickedness of Sonja, Carlmar instead critiques Erik’s fragile masculinity, while emphasising with his plight, creating a hugely enjoyable male melodrama with a Nordic noir twist.

The Ascent, the final film from brilliant Soviet filmmaker Larisa Shepitko plunges us into the horrors of the Great Patriotic War, as two soldiers struggle to survive in German-occupied Belorussia. She elicits great performances from Boris Plotnikov and Vladimir Gostyukhin, conveying the desperation and complex emotions of men under pressure to fight for their lives.

Throwing any hackneyed notions of machismo and derring out the window, Shepitko shows how the determination to live leads these men making drastic decisions, with one styling himself as a martyr-like figure while the other considers collaboration with the enemy. Rounding off the triptych of superb performances, Tarkovsky regular Anatoly Solonitsyn is quietly terrifying as a collaborationist interrogator. In The Ascent, war is hell, a man-made catastrophe where we are all the victims.

In Anahi Berneri’s sexually explicit A Year Without Love, Juan Minujín gives a touching portrait of male vulnerability, starring as Pablo, an HIV positive gay man searching for love and connection in Buenos Aires. Marginalised in society, coldly received by his family, Pablo becomes drawn to the city’s S&M and leather scene, where a hot encounter with a charismatic bondage master promises passion and romance.

Berneri provocatively explores an underworld where gay men, so often rejected for not confirming to societal gender norms, take on uber-masculine roles, steeped in machismo and sexualised violence. Sensitively played by Minujín, the intelligent and artistic Pablo desperately seeks love and affection in this dark and potentially dangerous environment.

Gone Too Far!, Destiny Ekaragha’s consistently hilarious comedy, set in South London, focuses on London teenager Yemi (Malachi Kirby, future star of Roots), whose street-cred takes a hit when his eccentric Nigerian brother, Iku (OC Ukeje) comes to visit. Yemi’s yearning for the glamorous Armani (Shanika Warren-Markland) earns him the wrath of the latter’s ex boyfriend, Razer (Tosin Cole).

Despite its playful use of caricature and moments of slapstick, Bola Agbaje’s script, based on her play, is packed with sharp wit, as she affectionately sends up masculine cliches, as bravado unsuccessfully covers insecurity. She also depicts the complexities of the characters’ attitudes towards race, as some take pride in the fact they are not from African heritage, an identity that makes the cheerfully ostentatious Iku stand out from the crowd.

Her Lens, His Story ends with The Orphanage, a new film from Shahrbanoo Sadat. Set in a Soviet orphanage in 1980s Afghanistan, a time of drastic change in the country’s history, her film follows 15-year-old Qodrat (Quodratollah Qadiri), who is sent to the institution when he is caught selling black market cinema tickets on the streets of Kabul.

Although there are a couple of bullies in the orphanage, Sadat shows it as a place where boys form friendships, boosted by solidarity and camaraderie. She also shows the dreams and fantasies of her main character, who daydreams himself into a series of elaborate Bollywood numbers. This unique coming-of-age tale, set when a new regime was about the enforce a strict new form of masculinity on its male population, is a delight.

The boys and men in these films, unencumbered by cliched representations of heroism or toxic villainy, are flawed, often likeable and above all recognisably human. These directors, looking at different manifestations of masculinity around the world, show how reversing the tradition gaze can produce brilliant and challenging works of cinema.