|
Spotlight on France
Patric Jean, France / Belgium, 2009, 98 minutes
A survey of modern sexism doesn’t quite do Patric Jean’s incendiary film justice. Approaching the titular subject from multiple angles, Jean constructs an enormous assemblage of different ideas, phenomena and interviews, all of which add up to a disturbing vision of contemporary culture. When many young women refuse to use the F-word to describe themselves, and Marc Lepine Day is unofficially celebrated by the Canadian forces, you know that something is deeply wrong. Just how wrong, and exactly how it got that way after the hard-fought battles of second wave feminism, is what Patric is engaged in explaining. It is something of a Herculean task. The reality may be that for a great many women, equality, respect and even common decency, have taken a huge step backwards.
Beginning with a very up close and personal scene of a penis enlargement surgery, Male Domination pulls no punches about its intent and its arguments. If possessing a penis is the critical difference between power and control, the effect of the patriarchy is legion, infiltrating everything from advertising to speed dating to politics. One of the film’s most eloquent sections is a silent montage of men staring silently at the camera before launching into soliloquies about women taking over the world. The fact that this is preceded by a scene of women, of all ages, demographics and ethnicities with battered faces and bodies being interviewed in a medical emergency room hammers home this division between the real and the imagined.
If Patric’s film wears its politics openly, it succeeds by drawing connections between ideas, many of which have been purposefully, and carefully, obscured in recent years, including the return of old-fashioned sexism. Some might make the argument that it never really went away.
Much more than straightforward assessment of gender disparity, Male Domination follows the tangled skeins of sex, power, suffering and profit to uncover what is at the heart of the increasing divide between men and women. The next time someone says, “I’m not a feminist,” invite them to see this film.
Director’s biography
Patric Jean was born in Belgium in 1968. He studied theatre, literature and cinema at the Brussels University, conservatoire and cinema school. He first directed short fiction, then began making documentaries with les enfants du Borinage - lettre à Henri Storck (Kids from the coal - a letter to Henri Storck), a film about social problems in the south of Belgium (under the socialist party), causing a political stir in the country. In 2003, Jean directed, might is right (la Raison du plus fort). The film has been broadcast in 15 countries and screened in 40 cinemas in France. Following this was the documentary feature, Wall to wall - D'un mur l'autre, and most recently, he completed the feminist film Male Domination. Jean lives in Paris and Belgium.
» Website
Community Partners
 
Spotlight on France presented by
|
