Conversations with a female slant at Miu Miu Women’s Tales

On September 5th, the Sala Perla screened the shorts Discipline and Avec Kim, the latest entries in the project Miu Miu Women’s Tales, directed by Mona Fastvold and Claire Denis respectively. The next day, the Norwegian writer and director (Denis was unable to attend for personal reasons) – joined by Kim Gordon, Suzanne Lindon, and Amanda Seyfried – dialogued with festival audiences at the Hotel Excelsior, in the Veneto Region / Veneto Film Commission Space.

Along with this first exchange between women in film, in the same location two more Miu Miu Women’s Tales Conversations were held, both moderated by Stoppard.

The second of the three talks saw Stoppard dialogue with Antonia Gentry and Zoey Deutch about familiar female characters and how they are interpreted. Amidst tropes and clichés, the real problem appears to be the lack of variety. The two actresses, Gentry in particular, emphasized the difficulty cinema encounters in expressing the complexity and broad range of female figures in a woman’s universe. While on the one hand, the attempt is made more and more often to show strong, independent women on screen, on the other, women’s problems never seem to stray far from their romantic dilemmas in a man’s world.

The talk series wrapped up with a conversation between Stoppard, Thuso Mbedu, and Cailee Spaeny over the challenges of roles set in different times and places, as in fantasy films or historical dramas. For the two actresses, the chance to play characters embedded in settings so very different from our own is a form of escapism, particularly from today’s world, with all its undersides.

The three conversations, all extremely engrossing, leave us with an unanswered question: while cinema dons the mask of inclusion, how many of the films we see would really be able to pass the Bechdel Test?