lot of work to be done, particularly in positions of power behind the scenes, which are still heavily dominated by white men, most notably in the most central creative and powerful position in all of film, the feature film director.
But that’s not to say the landscape has been completely barren of women in the director’s chair prior to the #MeToo movement. There have been a few notable barrier breakers in the industry, and one of them is Sofia Coppola, a writer/director/producer who is only one of five women to have ever been nominated for the Best Director Oscar. At the time of her nomination, in 2004, for Lost in Translation, she was just the third woman ever to be nominated for Best Director. Since then, there have been two women nominated, Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker in 2010 and Greta Gerwig for Lady Bird in 2018. Bigelow is the only woman to have won Best Director so far.
History is doomed to repeat itself. If anyone thinks the ‘60s are behind us, they don’t know what it was about. The revolution that played out in the late ‘60s in this country was mobilized by the war in Vietnam, yes, but the undercurrent was racial, gender and class inequality. It was motivated by a government who abused the people it supposedly represented. And it inspired a movement of the people, by the people, to push the country to become more progressive and equal. Sound familiar?
Two Oscar-winning directors are at the top of their game in these films that are as much about the awesome power of nature and an individual’s place in it than they are about survival. Life of Pi, for which Ang Lee won his second Oscar for directing (following his 2005 win for Brokeback Mountain), is a visual feast of a film, relying heavily on incredible CGI to help create this masterpiece of imagination and adventure. After Pi (Suraj Sharma) is caught in a storm while crossing the ocean with his family’s zoo, he ends up in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, with whom he embarks on a fantastical survival story. That’s pretty much the story of Life of Pi: how a boy and a tiger survive together on the open ocean. But the experience of Life of Pi is how this simple tale becomes a visual extravaganza, courtesy of Lee’s adventurous filmmaking, that fantastic CGI team, and Claudio Miranda’s gorgeous cinematography. It is a feast for the senses, a ballet of special effects against a canvas of sky and water, a dreamlike kaleidoscope of nature and fantasy. But nature isn’t always pretty and there is a lot of suffering in this film, as there would be. But trust Lee to never wallow in it, instead he revels in nature’s beauty and amazing capacity for transformation, inspiration and connection. This movie is so rich with interpretive possibilities—the definition of a parable, which it is—but the part that is undeniable is the outsized and emotionally riveting cinematic achievement that it is.
Ending Things, is similarly dense and dark, with only a smattering of the offbeat comedy we have come to expect (and need) in his films. So why is it still the most memorable and worthy of watching, even now? Because sometimes, the best thing to offset the unreal is the surreal. 