THIS PAGE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY PICPAL.COM THE PICTURE PALACE

Title Search:

Site Search:

Synopses Article Bibliography Other Media Home

Angela Carter, Nelly Kaplan and Pauline Reage

In "Nea" Sibylle is a sylphlike delinquent who's fond of blood oaths, arson and stickbugs. The way she wears makeup, so clownish she looks like Bjork in a music video, makes it a protest statement. She shoplifts dirty books and masturbates with the effi ciency of a cat cleaning itself. After she witnesses her father break apart the long-running romance between her mother and his sister, Sibylle instigates a domestic revolt. Once she writes her own erotic novel on a dare, only to find her manuscript bei ng red-pencilled, she retorts, "Spelling is a bourgeois prejudice!" Sybille is a new kind of little red riding hood, determined to stray from the path any time she likes.

Remarkably, the fusion of stock fairytale elements and modern settings comes alive in this film. An offhand presentation of details builds up into a fullscale reconsideration of traditional legends, and of the mythmaking we all indulge during our workada y lives. Sibylle lives in a mansion called "Xanadou." Yet her real home she calls her "witch's cave," where she hides amid her gargoyles, skulls and dressmaker's dummy, writing her masterpiece.

Feminist literature has either worked against or tried to incorporate two main genres. Both are shown in "Nea" and, to a certain extent, in other Nelly Kaplan films: Baucis & Philemon become an underclass couple on the run; Cinderella a social outcast a nd "sex pirate," Snow White a menace to her Seven Dwarfs, Little Red Riding Hood the author of her own sexual initiation. Jean Paulhan's offhand remark in his apologia for Pauline Reage's "Histoire d'O" calls up both genres at once: "...we know that fai ry tales are erotic novels for children..." he says. You can as easily peg any pornographic story as a grownup fairy tale! So women have been left to wonder about the subtle propaganda in either. If the authors of fairy tales really have been uncredite d women all this time, what have they been trying to tell themselves and their daughters? What have they been trying to deny? Can a woman write a man his very own bedtime story, which "Pauline Reage" apparently tried to do for her publisher/lover? Is s he better off writing ones for herself? British writer Angela Carter did -- when she gave Little Red Riding Hood the upper hand, Edgar Allan Poe's mother a living form and tragically heroic biography; when she let the wolf in "Peter and the Wolf" survive after all.

Many films chosen for our "Crossroads" list show people telling themselves -- or others -- stories of their own invention. Sometimes this is to their detriment or for their own protection. Sometimes it's a way to heal rifts or lay the foundation for a s hared future. Others movies are pithy little yarns, animated picture-books or embroidered cautionary tales.

Mythology is not always escapist, but escapism has a pantheon of demiurges -- including these collected filmmakers, and the three controversial women listed in the title above: Carter, Kaplan and Reage.

- by PicPal's J. Kramer

The Picture Palace Home Page

Our site last updated 07/15/2008
Print out our order form (PDF), query about an existing order with an email
Fax us at 1-800-261-0906 (US only)!
The Picture Palace, PO Box 281, Caldwell, NJ 07006.