Four films into an impressive career, writer/director Alex Ross Perry has delivered one of 2015’s most powerful films with rattling mood piece “Queen of Earth,” which opened last week (here’s Rodrigo’s A- review). Ostensibly the study of a fractured friendship between two women —Catherine (Elisabeth Moss), who is reeling from a recent breakup, and her frenemy Ginny (Katherine Waterston)— Perry’s potent film is one in a long line of cinematic journeys that chart the agonizing downward spiral of a woman perched on the precipice of sanity. It’s a tradition that Perry overtly embraces.
Roman Polanski’s influence is particularly pronounced, in everything from the film’s swoon-y pink typeface (a tip of the hat to “Rosemary’s Baby”) to the slow rotting of a summer salad that recalls the plate of rabbit in “Repulsion.” Yet despite further nods to the theatricality and artificiality of Rainer Werner Fassbinder‘s melodramas, and to the more experimental work of Robert Altman and even Ingmar Bergman, Perry’s film feels remarkably raw, far more so than the pastiche-y, winky cinephile in-joke it could have been. In fact, many of the below films with which it shares its central subject —a state that in less enlightened times would have been referred to as “female hysteria”— also take place in that fascinatingly arch area just beyond the boundaries of “traditional” realist drama, but right before the territory of all-out camp.
We’ve curated a list of 12 titles that take this theme and run with it. Some of these films were directly namechecked as influences by Perry in interviews in February and August; we’ve picked others. But all are characterized by a similar push-pull between close-up, subjective psychological decay and a certain ironic objectivity, an almost clinical remove from the doom and drama their female protagonists are undergoing. Perhaps there’s even an element of sadism here, as well as an exploration of the idea of female sexuality as troublesome and potentially threatening: it’s worth noting that all these films are concerned with a distinctly female-gendered experience ( it’s seldom like this when men go mad in movies), yet all are directed by men.
That sadism is maybe also reflected in whatever odd, probably unsavory desire these films serve in the audience. Some sick part of us gets a jolt from seeing these delicate heroines put through the wringer, while another, more compassionate impulse simultaneously leads us to sympathize with the woman being treated with such seemingly needless cruelty, whether by the filmmakers or by her onscreen companions, or both. It’s a tricky tightrope, but it releases a certain fascinating energy that all 10 of the following titles share with Perry’s terrific “Queen of Earth.”
“3 Women” (1977)
Part mythic American tapestry, part waking reverie, but all Robert Altman, “3 Women” remains arguably the restless American director’s most puzzling and challenging film (though his second film, the batshit “Brewster McCloud,” would probably also be in the running). Eschewing traditional narrative storytelling techniques almost entirely, Altman instead opts for a series of hazy, blissed-out scenes that depict the strange, powerful relationship that develops between, you guessed it, three women who find themselves serendipitously drawn into each other’s orbit. The film starts with the forced friendship that is thrust upon Pinky (Sissy Spacek) and Millie (Altman regular Shelley Duvall), two employees at a health spa for old folks. Pinky, like Spacek’s heroine from Brian De Palma’s “Carrie”, is shy, withdrawn and socially inept. Millie, meanwhile, is a classic go-getter: effortlessly confident and also more than a bit annoyed at Carrie’s awkward attempts at what should be harmless work rapport. A third principal character, Willie (Janice Rule), who paints bizarre murals inside of pools, enters the picture, but to describe any more of the plot would be to give too much away. “3 Women” seems born straight from the subconscious, where logical analysis couldn’t possibly apply (indeed, Altman said several times that the genesis for the film came to him in a dream). The film’s focus on a strained female relationship occasionally recalls parts of Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” but the director’s aim here is entirely different. A slow, creeping unease pervades the movie’s corners, which depict a blighted, dusty desert America that seems all but left behind by the modern world. “3 Women” may not be as dark as some of the other films on this list, but it’s every bit as strange: a beguiling and wonderful trip into the mind of its creator, via the minds of its characters.
“The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant” (1971)
If part of the acid pleasure of “Queen of Earth” is the slightly synthetic edge to its highly-strung interactions, it’s a quality that you can see in abundance in many of the films of Alex Ross Perry’s avowed influence Rainer Werner Fassbinder. But his terrific, single-setting ‘Petra Von Kant’ feels like its closest kin, not just formally, but in thematic terms too: it is all about the power plays that manifest in female relationships, here in a hothoused environment isolated from the normalizing influence of the outside world. Petra (Margit Carstensen) is a successful fashion designer who dominates her submissive assistant/servant Marlene (Irm Hermann). But when she’s introduced to the pretty, shiftless Karin (Hanna Schygulla), Petra falls instantaneously in passionate love, which renders her the powerless one. The whole film unfolds in Petra’s boudoir/workspace, one wall of which is dominated by a massive print of Poussin‘s Midas and Bacchus —the naked male forms on the wall are the only men we see throughout, though such presences from the women’s past dominates many of their conversations and interactions. Karin, apparently using Petra for her money and for the boost she gives to her burgeoning modelling career, is easily irritated by Petra’s constant protestations of love, and seeks outside pleasures which she uses to torture Petra further, and all the while Marlene, doglike and clad in black, toils away in the background, typing, sketching and waiting on Petra in mute servitude. After Karin eventually leaves her, Petra, coded in different colored wigs and some spectacular Mata-Hari-style costuming throughout, has a breakdown on her birthday during which she flings recriminations at all the other women of the cast —her mother, her friend, her daughter (Eva Mattes), before finally ruining her relationship with Marlene by being, of all things, kind. A peculiar mix of grotesque and graceful, it’s one of Fassbinder’s most iconic and endlessly fetishizable films, being so overtly about fetish and mutually enabling, destructive relationships.