Who You Think I Am, a 2019 movie by Safy Nebbou, braids together two very interesting themes: ageing and social media.

According to the film, ageing brings pitfalls for women that it does not bring for men. Whereas middle-aged men can -- pretty much with impunity, it seems -- dump their partners for much younger women, the opposite phenomenon seems harder to sustain. Claire, a 50-something professor of literature, still bright, beautiful, and capable, has found herself abandoned twice in short order -- first by her husband and then by the ghastly Ludo.

To get her own back, she turns to social media... She sets out her virtual stall as a much younger woman called Clara, reels in the vulnerable Alex, Ludo's assistant, and then proceeds to lose herself in the shifting, slippery interface between the real and the virtual. "Becoming" a younger woman is addictive, it seems, and Claire basks in the adoration that Clara receives from Alex. But we know, of course, that it's only a matter of time before the wheels will come off the wagon.


Paris, 2019

There are many comedic moments. We smile as we watch Claire getting to grips with Insta, and learning the language young people use to banter and court online. We laugh as she repeatedly drives by her bewildered children, because she needs to get Alex off the line before she picks them up.

But at heart this is a tragedy. Claire's therapist asks: "What are you looking for? To live another life?" (This therapist does seem slightly more judgemental than I think is the norm.) "Not another one," Claire replies, "Mine, at last." But she's not living HER life, of course. She's living a fantasy. And by the end, it is becoming increasingly difficult to work out "what actually happened", so thick are the levels of subterfuge, narrative, and counter-narrative.

I'm looking back on this movie after finishing Insurrecto, which makes the story-telling entanglement even more compelling (Ludo, Claire/Clara -- heck, even the names are similar...)

Mark Kermode points out: "It's significant that Claire is a professor of literature, well versed in the complexities of the authorial voice... At one point she compares her online life to a novel, and throughout the drama we watch Claire effectively writing her own story -- her past, present and future."





Claire is played (fantastically well) by Juliette Binoche, who has very interesting things to say about the experience of playing a woman suspended between fiction and reality: "These stories within the story hold out a mirror to us, help us understand what we are doing, how to play by the rules. We all tell ourselves stories, don't we? Subjectivity is the foundation of our lives although we somehow know that 'Reality' is somewhere else, we can sense it, and we can make it out. Yet we don't quite know what 'Reality' is, where its outline lies. The film gives us several different perspectives on the story."

Asked whether she is touching on something personal in her portrayal of Claire, she replies: "When you play a role in a story, the character allows you to explore a new part of yourself. Every time... On the other hand, it is true that Claire is one of the roles in which I most dared to lose my footing and come to terms with my own ageing."

Wow. Even Binoche... (She was 55 when this movie came out, but she so doesn't look it...)

Kermode again, to close: "It all adds up to a very modern drama about age-old anxieties: the fear of ageing and death; the desire for intimacy and reassurance; the allure of artifice and deceit."

Pretty chilling, all in all...



Guarani, made in 2015 by Luis Zorraquin (it's his first feature film, in fact), is wildly different, but also deals with societal expectations of women.

The Guarani, Eleonor Palacio tells us, are a people found in Paraguay, northeastern Argentina, southern Brazil, and parts of Uruguay and Bolivia. The family featured in the movie -- grandfather Atilio, plus multiple daughters and grandchildren, most particularly Iara -- live in rural Paraguay, but Iara's mother works in Buenos Aires, Argentina. (Zorraquin is Argentinean, but worked in Paraguay for several years.)

Iara, 14, is a bright, modern young woman. She listens to rock, likes cool clothes from the city, and values her education. She has helped Atilio since childhood, as he fishes, delivers goods, and sometimes ferries passengers;  she speaks both Spanish and Guarani; she comes across as very capable. But Atilio wants a male descendant, to whom he can pass on the secrets of fishing, of his language, and of the Guarani culture. This makes Iara feel under-valued and unloved.

He does love her, of course. The audience can tell that. And possibly, Palacio suggests, his attitude is rooted in something other than patriarchal values and stubborn conservatism. She wonders whether the emphasis on males in the passing on of traditional culture is due to the gender imbalance that resulted after the War of the Triple Alliance (Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay versus Paraguay, 1864-70) massively reduced the population -- by up to 85%, probably more in the case of males.


Again, as I have no experience of Latin America, I'm substituting photos from another great river area that's also of considerable ethnic interest -- Kalimantan Timur, Indonesia, 2014







Whatever his motivations, when Atilio learns that his Buenos Aires-based daughter is going to give birth to a son, he decides to go and personally persuade her to have the baby in Paraguay, amid the Guarani. And he takes Iara with him on his odyssey. After travelling by boat, bus, and train, stopping off to earn the money needed to go further, and ending up in hospital at one point because Atilio is sick, they eventually get to Buenos Aires. But they've both been changed by the journey. He's never a man of many words, but Atilio has obviously realized his vulnerability, and has grown to value Iara's multiplicity of talents. He decides to let things develop as they will, and not try to push them in a particular direction.

This is a very atmospheric movie. As well as Iara and Atilio, there are other important protagonists, among them the landscape, the river, the sense of longing, and the Guarani language itself.







The circumstances surrounding the language are very interesting. Iara interprets for her grandfather, who apparently understands but refuses to speak Spanish. Early on, he puts a stop to a family argument (in Spanish) by saying (in Guarani): "Shut up, all of you. Here we speak Guarani. If you don't like it, you can leave."

Damian Cabrera observes: "In Paraguay, speaking Guarani is charged with ambiguity: it evokes both fondness and contempt." The language has often been associated with the poorer classes, or with vulgarity. Speaking it was prohibited at one time. Yet it also represents a history of survival: "The persistence of Guarani in a society that is more western than indigenous is also ambivalent: the secondary language of Paraguay, its hegemony seems inconsistent in a country that vehemently rejects all that is indigenous."

This paradox is elaborated by Benjamin Fernandez: "If you arrived in a country where almost 90% of the inhabitants speak Guarani... but do not identify themselves as 'Indian' or aboriginal (and even the tribe has disappeared), you would think they suffered a severe identity crisis. However, we Paraguayans are very proud of our bilingual ... condition and of Guarani as an assimilation tool for our many different cultures: Mennonites from Europe and Canada, Russians, Ukrainians, Arabs, Japanese, Koreans, North Americans, Indians from India and Europeans from every corner of that continent... Today, politicians take Guarani language courses to improve their pronunciation because they know that without speaking Guarani, no one can get elected in Paraguay."

In a joint interview, the actress who plays Iara, Jazmin Bogarin, explains that she was not a Guarani speaker, although her mother and grandmother speak the language, and she understands it. Emilio Barreto, who plays Atilio, is a native speaker, and actually a Guarani teacher, and had to coach her pronunciation.

Let's hope that enables her to turn to politics one day...







Herstory, directed by Min Kyu-dong, was released in 2018.

Based on the "Gwanbu Trial", a series of court proceedings that took place during the 1990s, the movie portrays the profound physical and emotional cost incurred by Korea's "comfort women", not only during their period of servitude, but also when they first started to come forward with their stories.


Seoul, 2015



This is essentially a movie about solidarity. Moon Jeong-suk, a successful businesswoman and active member of a society of equally entrepreneurial and talented women, feels she needs to support these wronged "grannies" -- one of whom turns out to be her long-time employee -- because her life has been so easy, and she needs to pay back: "I'm ashamed of having enjoyed such a good life all by myself." The women learn to trust others with secrets they have previously locked away in shame. Their courage engenders broader solidarity by starting to change attitudes in Korea too. The dismissive opinions we hear at the beginning (along the lines of "they chose to go", or "they were just sex workers out for money, and now they're trying to get money again") give way to respect and sympathy. 

At the end, there is a victory that is quite ground-breaking -- but though there is no doubt that the legal campaign has significantly raised awareness, paving the way for further initiatives, the ruling itself will shortly be overturned by higher courts...

Which is pretty much how things go on this issue. An inter-governmental agreement was reached in 1965, but it sidestepped the issue of the comfort women, effectively contributing to a further silencing of those already silenced by cultural attitudes. There was an inter-governmental agreement in 2015, but it was repudiated by the Korean Government in 2018. There was a court finding in January this year, which ordered the Japanese Government to pay reparations, but it was overturned just the other week. This issue NEVER seems to be satisfactorily resolved, partly because the jurisdictional issues are complex, but also because the discourse has become very polarized, and has become entrammelled in a knot of competing nationalist and geopolitical narratives.







There have apparently been a number of Korean movies on this theme, but this one is unusual in its reliance on courtroom testimony to bring out the back-stories of the women involved. Conran judges Herstory to be "the most affecting and sincere" of the similarly-themed products, and laudable for its portrayal of the women not as one-dimensional victims or heroines, but as real people with flaws and weaknesses, who suffered enormously, yet were able to muster enough resilience not just to survive but to try to put the record straight.

However, Conran notes, Herstory was "a cataclysmic failure at the box office"... He speculates that this was because "it approached its subject in a more direct and less schmaltzy fashion" than other films dealing with the same topic. He also wonders -- tentatively -- whether the movie's inclusion of sympathetic Japanese characters was at odds with the political climate in Korea at the time.

All in all, I guess these movies showcase what a very long way we still have to go, on so many fronts.