Women Like These
By Ksenia Kwiecińska
For years I’ve been trying to trace freaky, lonely, obsessive, kind, imaginative, odd female leads in the cinema. My pursuit, initially one of identification quickly turned into a private research project on female cinematic representation, surrounding especially questions of strangeness and irrationality but also, and undeniably consequently, total liberation and freedom. In one way or another all the women I felt drawn to were largely disobedient to a variety of structures of behavior expected from them. They came across as rude to the men encountered on the street, smoked too much weed, ate exclusively green peas for weeks on end, made awkward conversations and inappropriate comments at a formal dinner, fell in love very often, loudly and shamelessly or not at all, they screamed, obsessed, masturbated, confronted, withdrew, fought relentlessly for the things they believed in, pretended for the sake of comfort or fun rather than obligation, unsettled, experimented, questioned, rejected and approved sincerely and in line with themselves. I believe and hope that we all know women like these, I believe we are these women. This list is a personal (shortened) guide celebrating these women on the big screen which at some point or other paved a way towards their own kinds of freedom.
1. Polly Vandersma (played by Sheila McCarthy) from I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987) directed by Patricia Rozema
2. Faye (played by Faye Wong) from Chungking Express (1994) directed by Wong Kar-Wai
3. Cheryl (played by Cheryl Dunye) from The Watermelon Woman (1996) directed by Cheryl Dunye
4. Silvia Prieto (played by Rosario Bléfari) from Silvia Prieto (1999) directed by Martín Rejtman
5. Amélie Poulain (played by Audrey Tautou) from Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (2001) directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet
6. (A proposal from my Babcia) Aniela (played by Danuta Szaflarska) from Pora Umierać (2007) directed by Dorota Kędzierzawska.
7. Mary Daisy Dinkle (voiced over by Toni Collette) from Mary and Max (2009) directed by Adam Elliot8. Val (played by Regina Casé) from Que Horas Ela Volta? (2015) directed by Anna Muylaert
9. Young Girl from Cipka (2015) directed by Renata Gąsiorowska
10. (A proposal from my Mama) Janina Duszejko (played Agnieszka Mandat-Grabka) by from Pokot (2017) directed by Agnieszka Holland (based on Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead).
11. Fran (played by Daisy Ridley) from Sometimes I think About Dying (2023) directed by Rachel Lambert
* An unsettling majority of the female characters I have so far managed to compile are predominantly white, able-bodied and cis women (quite like myself). I have struggled to come across portrayals of female strangeness alongside characters that stretch beyond those characteristics. Thinking of portrayals of e.g. spectacular women of colour a variety of TV productions come to mind (Chewing Gum, Insecure, Orange is the New Black, Never Have I Ever among others), but those roles rarely enter the big screen. An issue of cannon emerges here, accessibility to representation, as well as access to funding, my own engagement with largely Western cinema and the urgent question of: Whose strangeness and oddity is recognized as crowd-drawing? Consequently, whose strangeness and eccentricity is deemed audience-inaproppriate, monstrous or mad?
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