On The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Capra, 1933)

Had the chance to see this at Film Forum. Was immediately taken with Barbara Stanwyck. She's like the original Greta Gerwig!

Frank Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), set in Shanghai during the Chinese Civil War, features Barbara Stanwyck as an American missionary’s fiancée who develops a psychosexual interest in General Yen, played by Nils Asther in yellowface. General Yen, too, is fascinated with Stanwyck’s character Megan and holds her hostage at his estate. The film is not a romance in the usual sense of the word; rather, Yen waits patiently for his hostage to capitulate and accept her capture, while Megan fights against the anxiously erotic feelings she has for this strange, baroque man. After an intense sex dream, Megan decides to give in to Yen, but it is too late — the general has poisoned himself because of his unrequited love. While other films may portray the female figure as a damsel in distress against a foreign Other, no white man comes to save Megan and preserve her white purity. The film is less an action narrative in which Megan is to be saved than a horror film about interracial desire. While the configuration of the General Yen character as a godless heathen yet elegant mandarin is undoubtedly racist, it is canny casting: for what is General Yen but an erotic fiction of a white woman’s imagination in the first place? Orientalism is a way to read and author text into being. The text does not produce itself. The character is so ridiculous, and so intertwined with Megan’s own sexual self, that he does not really exist at all, but is a mirror or projection, a phantasm. Asther’s performance is not that of an Oriental mad villain, but an impression of the white imagination. The on-screen prohibition of sexual contact between actors of different races belies a thematic fascination with miscegenation.

Catherine Breillat's "The Sleeping Beauty" (La Belle Endormie)

The Sleeping Beauty (La Belle Endormie). Dir. Catherine Breillat. France, 2010.

I wasn't familiar with Breillat's previous films and was looking forward to this feminist deconstruction of the classic fairy tale as my introduction to her work. It received a positive, if vague, review from Manohla Dargis in the NYT which spurred me to see it. Dargis posits the film as a road movie of sorts, making this one of the few quality films out there about solo female travel. I found The Sleeping Beauty pretty challenging, however, because I think Breillat's work is intellectually informed by a style of French feminism I'm not particularly attracted to. That's just a guess, though: many other American reviewers seemed to understand (but dislike) the film just fine. I suspect they are missing something though. So my review is speculative, based on the bits and pieces I could glean about Breillat's understanding of femininity, sexuality, and fantasy.

In this retelling of the tale, a trio of fairies augments the spell placed on princess Anastasia (played by Carla Besnainou) by a wicked witch. Instead of dying when she pricks her finger on a yew spindle, Anastasia will fall asleep at age six and wake up one hundred years later aged sixteen. Why? Because childhood is interminably long, and because “A little girl's life is really boring,” as she complains. (The slow-drip childhood is also the foundation of Terence Malick's recent Tree of Life, a film far more lucid, and far more American...I'll leave that for another post.) Breillat's princess does not merely fall asleep to wait passively for her prince to come. Instead of excising Anastasia from the film until the final act, Breillat chooses to follow her through her dreamland adventures.

As I said, I couldn't help but wonder if the cause of The Sleeping Beauty's opacity was cultural. In a move that seems more motivated by the Freudian underpinnings of French feminists like Hélène Cixous than American political liberalism, Anastasia disdains her girl companions in favor of being a boy, specifically a valiant knight named Sir Vladimir. This is not expanded by any means to the heights of Alain Berliner's 1997 child gender-identity study Ma Vie en Rose, nor is it meant to. Obviously, Anastasia merely wishes for the agency granted to boys and men; she argues that it is no use being a princess if she cannot do whatever she wants. This textbook reliance on penis envy is simplistic and trite, but reveals the unquestionably French psychosexual register this film operates upon.

Anastasia yearns to be freed from the restrictions of performative, mimetic femininity, embodied in an ballet scene put on by the princess and her friends. Anastasia will only perform this feminine masquerade for a man: despite the presence of her mother and grandmother, she refuses to go onstage unless her father, the king, is present. Angrily pulling out the chopstick placed in her hair as part of her Japanese costume (Breillat tiredly figures the Orient as the ultimate feminine), Anastasia pricks her hand and falls into slumber.

She is transported into the late 1970s – Joy Division graffiti gives this away. (Understanding why Breillat chose that decade requires more knowledge of French history than I have here.) She is taken in by a kindly woodland family consisting of a single mother and her pubescent son, Peter (Kerian Mayan). The mother dresses her in Peter's old clothes, while Peter dotes on the girl like a little sister. Soon, however, the line between stranger, sister, brother, and lover become confused. Breillat is brave to explore the confused sexual feelings between a six-year old and a slightly older boy; the two share an affection that is both fraternal and romantic. But when Peter feels his libido calling, he leaves home in order to accompany a malicious Snow Queen. Anastasia sets off on a knightly quest to retrieve her brother/not-quite-lover/crush.

This takes her through some fantastic scenes, such as an eighteenth century European kingdom ruled by albino children with a predilection for pastel colors and giant meringues; a romp with a knife-obsessed Roma girl who continually speaks of how “excited” she would be to slit Anastasia with her dagger (spoiler alert: it will come as no surprise when, as an adult, she seduces Anastasia); and a trip to Lapland on a doe, under the blazing northern sky. The young Carla Besnainou is a charming companion throughout, but the film lacks emotional and rhythmic centers: the cryptic dialogue did not do much to advance our adventure, nor did the film's pacing assure me of how long it would take to get there. This perhaps mimics the luxuriant passage of time for a six-year old, in which old friends are forgotten as quickly as new ones are met, and random occurrence guides the way. Yet despite Anastasia's abhorrence of girlhood, Breillat clearly treasures it in the delicate pinks Anastasia dons or via her fixation on the delectably crunchy toasts, biscuits, and gateaux that are high points in the film. Young Anastasia comes to learn that she cannot win Peter back, but that she has proven well her power by journeying successfully throughout the world befriending people and animals: though her prince may no longer exist, she is indeed a regal princess because she has become a citizen of the world. (A welcome message in cinema.)

With this, we enter the present day and the film's inexplicable latter third. Anastasia wakes up sixteen years old and staring into the eyes of the handsome Johan, who turns out to be Peter's great-grandson (though how is eighteen-year old Johan the great-grandson of Peter if Peter was a boy in the late 1970s?). The two embark on an exploratory sexual relationship, punctuated by the return of Anastasia's Roma friend, who convinces her that only other women can teach women about sex: it's better between women, she says, because it's “more mysterious.” The ineluctable enigmas separating men and women are reiterated here, with Anastasia confined to her castle, whalebone corset, and tightly-buttoned white dress; Johan wears black, lives in contemporary Paris, and comes and goes as he pleases. The two tussle and tumble and marvel at their intense connection: it comes as no surprise to Anastasia, however, since she has been waiting for Peter – and his goodness, courage, and intelligence – for a century. Yet Johan does not particularly possess these things; he comes off as a somewhat average young man. Anastasia doesn't mind, or is so blinded by physical desire she cannot tell: as she laments to Johan, who amateurishly desires to possess her, men cannot understand that women are continually in search of their originary girlhood loves. This is an another example of the large, supposedly obvious claims about femininity the film asks us to accept. In the end, Anastasia finds herself pregnant and (metaphysically) alone: a comment of bitter disappointment. The point is, I think, that though Johan eventually professes to love her, the purity of her first feelings for Peter cannot be requited by the metaphoric violence of her sexual relationship with Johan.

If this film is complicated, it is because it struggles to explore a topic very few have tread: the psychosexual development of a young girl, from age six to sixteen (considered a woman in the film). Were I a reader of Cixous, Irigaray, or Kristeva, I would hope that I could better understand the film's cloudy (to me) subtexts. Thus, for the moment, I'm considering my own ignorance more than the possibility of Breillat's bad filmmaking as the reason for my bewilderment at The Sleeping Beauty. I will certainly be watching her others, especially the retelling of Bluebeard, as a comparison.