Wife of a Spy, directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2020. Kino Now
The Mad Women's Ball, directed by Mélanie Laurent, 2021. Amazon Prime
La Cérémonie, directed by Claude Chabrol, 1995. Criterion Collection
On the Verge, created by Julie Delpy, 2021. Netflix
My Zoe, directed by Julie Delpy, 2019. Amazon Prime
Ema, directed by Pablo Larraín, 2019. Amazon Prime
Sibyl, directed by Justine Triet, 2019. Mubi

I found myself getting annoyed at the wife in Wife of a Spy. “Come on, lady,” I kept thinking, as she haphazardly replaced the chess pieces she had knocked to the ground while stealing documents from a safe, as she nearly blew their cover while being followed by having an emotional outburst, as she fell to the floor of the police station after being arrested. “Pull it together.”

I don't know why I expected this woman to turn out to be some sort of secretly amazingly competent agent of subversion against her native country of Japan in the 1940s. The beginning of the story made it clear she had enjoyed a charmed, and insulated, life, kept in a childlike state through money and coddling and black market goods by her businessman husband. When he turns out to be a spy, trying to smuggle out secrets about Japan's horrifying medical experiments in Manchukuo to the Americans, she enthusiastically gets involved, but not very well. If I were put in the same position, I too would probably fuck it up by serving forbidden imported whiskey to the secret police.

By the end of it all, I admired what Kiyoshi Kurosawa was doing. Satoko lived only through loyalty and relationships, with her country, her husband, her servants, her family. As she is betrayed again and again, all of those ties proven to be imaginary or manipulative, she talks a good game about bravery and certainty, but the last shot of her is collapsed by the seaside, bereft, weeping, mad.

I think I had gotten out of the habit of seeing women represented in film like this. This is not how we like to see our women anymore. Now any time a female character is shown to be weak, incompetent, cruel, crazy, ugly, amoral, or stupid, there has to be some structural reason behind it. A film critic friend recommended The Mad Women's Ball on Amazon Prime, and as I watched it I just couldn't see why she would think this was good. It's the story of a sane woman sent to a 19th century sanitarium for “gender non-conformity” (she just wants to read poetry in a cafe, it is not like she starts chewing tobacco or wearing trousers or fucking women) and thinking she can see ghosts, and she is tortured by her doctors and guards. The 21st century filmmakers guide the story with a heavy hand, giving the 19th century character a 20th century reading list, as she goes around telling the other women hysteria patients that they are fine, “the doctors are making you sick,” like some annoying Lyme disease influencer who just read two pages of Foucault.

Those asylums were filled with murderers and arsonists and nymphos, maybe we could make a movie about one of them? Why are we following this well-behaved bore? The truly crazed seem more interesting than this sort of sullen and very pretty spiritualist, and at the end I wonder if the whole point of this is just that if a girl can see ghosts we should not lock her into an ice bath for hours, that is wrong. This would be a more compelling point if the ghosts weren't real, or if she was just having a fit of some kind. Remember those two women working as maids who murdered their employers, and there were a ton of films and plays and novels made about it? Now someone would remake La Cérémonie to explain how economic exploitation causes emotional instability or they'd have the father of the house raping the maid or something, rather than trusting Chabrol's version of events, where Isabelle Huppert has a grand time flitting around the house causing mayhem and Sandrine Bonnaire does a wonderful job of pretending to be stubbornly thick. The violence of the climax is disturbing because it stands outside of explanation, and because it never seems fated or inevitable. These women are not simply products of their time, automatons showing dreary cause and effect — exploitation goes in, violence comes out — they are vigorously alive, no more so than when they are creating death.

But when I go looking for more Isabelle Huppert, mostly what I find is, sad trombone sound here, Julie Delpy. Netflix's algorithm kept recommending On the Verge to me, maybe because I watched some of the other wacky Julie Delpy comedies in the past. Now she is middle-aged, and writing this show about being middle-aged and still wacky. The intro, the way it collages famous, historical, and imaginary women like Joan of Arc and nostalgic 1950s housewives from advertising, makes it clear it thinks it is doing something; as it announces from the very beginning, this is a show about women. All of the women.

But of course it's just a show about white women who own houses in Los Angeles — there is one Iranian character but she complains about her life and perspective being too white, just so they don't have to deal with any tricky race stuff in the actual writing. These are the types of women who probably own an organic cotton tote bag or a bumper sticker that says “Well-Behaved Women Rarely Make History,” but the only times they have ever misbehaved is with the waiter or the grocery store clerk who is being vastly underpaid to put up with their nonsense. I don't mean to add to the Karen discourse, but every Karen who has had a meltdown in public feels entirely entitled to be having that meltdown in public in the same way that every character on this show feels entirely entitled to make their inability to manage their tempers or impulses or frustrations the problems of everyone around them. And it's never in the way of being actually messy and weird or complex, but just in the way we see on social media now every day, of yelling at a black person for existing in public or throwing their iced whatever in the face of the Starbucks barista because they were out of caramel flavoring.

I would absolutely take a show that wants to show me why middle-aged white women are losing their shit all over this great nation, but the why either has to be bogged down in this “well, she had this thing happen to her 17 years ago” and “really, this is the patriarchy's fault.” It's never, this person has always gotten their way or been able to manipulate their way out of consequences because of their beauty or money, and now they are having a hard time dealing with even the smallest amount of accountability. And of course for every asshole caught in a moment of vile behavior there are other women with real problems, having a mental health crisis in public, whose real complexities are flattened in the pursuit of turning her into a spectacle and a scapegoat. But these are also — extremely compelling — stories that Julie Delpy is not interested in telling. Instead, On the Verge always defends these legitimate Karens, whose issues mostly boil down to aging being hard and men being bad and so on. Does anybody on this show know that some people have real problems?

One woman character gives a recovering sex addict a non-consensual blowjob, thereby causing him to relapse and spiral, just because she was feeling lonely. She's wacky! Another woman is inconvenienced by a barking dog, so calls animal control and files a false report of abuse to get the dog taken away from its owner. So zany! Another woman loses her shit at the farmers’ market (lol) because she has a cold and can't smell the delicious truffle in front of her so she starts shoving produce into her mouth, throwing food around, screaming at the man trying to serve her, then storms off, leaving her brown assistant to apologize and clean up. Oh my god, what a cut up! It's a bit like a season of Real Housewives if the throwing shit and yelling and outrageous consumption was presented solemnly. Ultimately, all of these women are brilliant and competent and just doing their best.

There is even a storyline where a woman is recruited to be a spy and is of course immediately great at it, even though just a couple episodes before she had a panic attack because she couldn't stand to be away from her son for more than a few hours. Unlike our trembling wife from the Kiyoshi Kurosawa film, Yasmin flawlessly steps into the role of covert agent and is soon being asked to spy against the Saudis or whatever, I don’t know, I kind of zoned out by this point. But then I recognized what this was, which is a kind of bizarre wish fulfillment that is the natural result of centuries of oppression? Like, if you are kept from something and forbidden things, you will naturally create fantasies where you not only have these things, but you are more grateful and better at them than the people who are given access and take them for granted. But are women really that repressed anymore? Certainly not the women on these shows. We are not forbidden from becoming spies, we are in charge of the fucking CIA. Having a shitty husband is not a form of oppression, this is just bad decision-making. Being an actual spy takes a lifetime of learning certain skills and languages, and the women who were great at it didn't just one day put down their turmeric latte and think, you know what, I think I'll allow myself to be recruited by the NSA.

It's a bit like all of Sofia Coppola's Ladies in Waiting, you know, maybe I'll just one day pick up a pen and find out I am a genius writer, or The Queen's Gambit, maybe I am a chess genius who doesn't really have to work at it. Which makes me think that what I am really doing with this column is trying to figure out women's cinematic fantasies about themselves, which seem as infantile but as pleasing as men's fantasies of saving the world. Women want to be accepted for who they are, but they also want themselves to be elegant, brilliant, and beautiful.

In the other Julie Delpy product dumped on streaming services, My Zoe shows Julie Delpy mourning her dead daughter. All of a sudden, this woman whom we mostly see doing data entry in a lab becomes some sort of scientific genius and takes her daughter's genetic material to a German scientist living in Russia and asks him to violate international law and all ethical guidelines to clone her. She ruins everyone's life, endangering everyone who works on her case, in her bourgeois, narcissistic pursuit of never feeling pain. Nothing is her fault, everything is probably the fault of her ex-husband, or the nanny, or Interpol or whatever, and in the end it is all worth it because she gets her daughter back. And we never have to worry that this kid, born through medical experimentation, living on the run under a cloud of secrecy, unaware of her true origins, will grow up a little Frankenstein's Monster, because she is surrounded by her mother's love™ .

When I saw the American reviews for Pablo Larraín's Ema, I started to wonder if the critics and think-piece writers had seen a different movie than I had. Ema is burning down the patriarchy, they said. Ema is showing how far a good mother will go to save her child. The story of a woman who gives up her traumatized adopted son after he sets a fire that scars her sister's face and then just as suddenly tries to retrieve him as soon as he feels settled with another family, this was not about feminist achievement or the power of a mother's love. This is about how far one person will go to prove her older and more famous husband wrong when he tells her she was a bad mother.

And she is absolutely a bad mother, with terrible boundaries and chaotic ambivalence. But she can't stand to be criticized or challenged, not by her social worker or her husband or her colleagues. Ema is a monster, and she is thrilling to watch. Once she decides to retrieve this boy, not even her own son, but just a kid she had custody of for a short time, driven as much by a desire to prove the people around her wrong rather than any selfless love, she pursues her goal with ruthless narcissism, not unaware but definitely uncaring about whom she hurts in the process. But this isn't the tantrum of a middle-aged woman, or the smug maternalism of a Julie Delpy project, this is the world-destroying energy Delpy is terrified to admit exists. Watching Ema work, you are rooting for her, even as you are aware she is probably going to ruin this kid's life, and even as you are afraid of the kid, too, once they find that dead cat in the freezer.

The love on display in Ema is barbed and wild, whether it is romantic or maternal or fraternal. There is kindness and virtue, but no one here is purely virtuous or kind. There is a sense here of community as a compensation for fuck-ups, that Ema's inadequacies as a mother, her partner Gaston's inadequacies as a father and a lover, the adopted parents' inadequacies and their friend's inadequacies, can coalesce and surround this child, the gaps filled in by more and more people, that enough instability can actually become a different kind of stability. But at the same time, we see how Ema's community enables some of her worst impulses. Yes, we support you, we are here for you 100%, whatever you need, while she's literally plotting to kidnap a child. There's always the possibility that in fifteen years it's not a cat in the freezer, it's a human head.

So why did it get translated in American media as a story of feminist empowerment and unconditional love? Oh, I don't know, maybe because our entire creative class is trapped in a first-person narrative, as we construct our hero's journey for the masses with every tweet and tagged photo. Or maybe, as the world collapses around us, we are haunted by an unconscious sense that maybe we have too much, maybe we are taking up too much space, maybe we are mostly takers and the only thing we really contribute is an endless stream of microplastics into our waterways. And to come close to grasping that, even a sliver of that, is so grotesque and intolerable that we have to keep a steady refrain of “I earned this, I can't help this behavior, this is my trauma response, I have suffered, I deserve this” running through our heads. We have to stick Ema into a hero's journey so we don't have to question ours.

And it's always going to be easier to tell stories of overcoming adversity and therapeutic recovery than to reveal the ugliness that lies inside of you like the hair and grime and soap scum that lies in your shower drain. If I ever told the story of how I learned, after five years of romantic involvement with a man, that he had had sex with my sleeping and non-consenting body after I had too much whiskey the night we met, and how after his confession I had flung myself at him, uselessly swinging my arms, despite being half undressed at the time, and then I tried to throw his laptop out the window, well, a) I never tell that story and b) if I did, I would say that I coldly gathered my things and left the room, all the while having great hair and impeccable eyeliner.

But you know, as the kids say, normalize ineffectively pummeling your boyfriend with bared breasts after he out of nowhere tells you that he sexually violated you five years before! Or don't, but allow it to be a big fucking mess of indignity, rather than trying to rationalize it with, well, he had it coming, or what a heroic, feminist moment, truly a triumph for all of womankind. Let it be a disaster rather than a fight to get you on “my side” of this imaginary argument I am having. Not everything that happens to us is going to be dignified or pretty or ethical or #winning. Some stories have stakes.

I think about how many times I have known women like the character Margot from Justine Triet's Sibyl, and how many of them have been in their thirties with access to their mommy's credit cards. Margot crashes into the shrink Sibyl's life as a patient, destroying all of her boundaries with frantic texting, hysterical sobbing, and a wounded facade. She's vulnerable, she needs you, only you can help her stabilize again, or she's going to do it, she's really going to kill herself this time, and it'll be on you. It's only after you've taken her to the emergency room for the third time that you fully understand there is no end to this, this person is going to crash from crisis to crisis for as long as you know them, you are not helping, the only thing you are doing is losing your own sense of stability and security for the sake of this mad bird. There's something I almost envy about these women. What a relief never to have to be the one to restrain oneself, never have to fight against your own violent impulses or confront your culpability in your own mess. I wonder if Sibyl is a bit like the stories the people around the characters in Julie Delpy's work would tell if they had the chance.

Whatever professional boundaries Sibyl learned in her training, the appearance of Margot erodes all of them. Margot has created a mess. An actress, she has started an affair with her co-star, who also happens to be the longterm partner of their director. Now she's pregnant, and she is looking for someone to make all of her decisions for her, whether to end the affair, whether to end the pregnancy, whether to end the movie, and Sibyl, the daughter of a similarly messy, uncontrollable woman, feels compelled to help. But she's also like all of us, we want to know how the story ends. As unhinged as Margot is, and as she causes chaos in every person's life around her, she has a magnetism and an ability to self-dramatize that draws you in. Any attempts to assist her in making her own decisions only seem to enable her to make absolutely worse decisions, and the mess spreads. Sibyl loses her self-control, her sobriety, and her job, then shows up drunk to the film premiere and finds the actress there, looking great, on her press tour, pretending like nothing happened. I noted in my notebook: “Running into the person you ruined your life for and then they are fine!!!! Relatable!!!!”

“Sometimes having a breakdown is a luxury,” one of the characters scolds Margot. There's something really interesting going on in Sibyl about the costs of taking care of one another and how certain people are always going to take more than they give. Sibyl's alcoholic mother required constant attention and care from her two daughters. The daughter who stayed to do that work ended up broken and alone after their mother’s death, unmarried and despairing that she could ever have a family of her own. Sibyl abandoned her mother and refused even to visit, thereby saving herself by letting her mother and sister drown.When Sibyl herself started drinking too much, her boyfriend Gabriel sacrificed time and energy to take care of her, as she used him sexually and emotionally. “I almost resent helping you,” he spits at her after she cleans up her act. Then when it's Sibyl's turn to care for Margot, she loses whatever progress she had made and ends up drunk and slutty again, embarrassing herself in public.

The alternative, callousness, is no great solution, though. As Sibyl hardens herself to clean up again, stoically shutting herself off from her husband, sister, and patients; it's a failing. Sibyl doesn't have the last word, it's her daughter, staring back at her, seeing more than she can fully understand, as yet unaware that her mother is presenting her with a burden that she'll have to carry for decades to come. There is no purity, only mess, and a mess that spreads the more you try to clean it up.

Relatable!