Feminist Movie Recommendation

Antonia's Line
By Alyson Greenfield CNOW Education Fund Board
In the heart of a true story is the ability to accept reality. To look at death as a miracle and injustice as a space for triumph. To live life by one's own standards, and through example silently encourage others to do so as well. Anotina's Line (written and directed by Dutch filmmaker Marleen Gorris) follows a strong family of women through four generations showing how they affect the community hey live in, and how the community does not affect their self-made matriarchy. The film successfully forces the audience to examine widely-held notions such as the traditional roles of women in the family and the common human fear of death.

After World War II, Antonia (Willeke Van Ammelrooy) returns with her daughter, Danielle (Els Dottermans), to the small town she grew up in so they can say good-bye to Antonia's dying mother. The audience is greeted with numerous candles illuminating the dying mother's bedroom as she spouts profanities, with her head wobbling on her neck and her eyes rolling back into her head. She alternates from sitting up and flopping down on the bed, until she finally appears dead, but opens her eyes once more to yell at Antonia. All the while Antonia and Danielle stand calmly at the foot of the bed, smiling and quietly remarking to each other as if watching a play.

After Antonia's seemingly absurd mother dies, the audience is better introduced to the town prominent characters whom we will curiously follow throughout the film. At the funeral we are introduced to Danielle's vivid imagination, as she sees her dead grandmother come back to life, sitting up in her coffin, smiling, and singing joyfully. We also watch Antonia as she reclaims the house and the farm. Her strident feminine energy filled with confidence and sensitivity enters the town like the wind, flowing through the church and the fields, the stone houses, and gravel roads. The locals turn their heads and laugh at Antonia's arrival, but soon realize that the mother-daughter team who work the farm and live by their own values will not succumb to the community's unspoken rules.

When Farmer Bas (Jan Decleir) requests Antonia's hand in marriage shortly after she returns to the town, Antonia declines. Farmer Bas is surprised and says to Antonia, "My sons need a mother." She retorts back, "I don't need your sons." He follows with, "Don't you want a husband?" Antonia smiles, holding back a giant laugh and asks, "What for?"

It is this kind of strong-willed mother that teaches Danielle to do what she truly believes is right and to follow her instincts. When Danielle goes to borrow a tool from another family's farm, she finds the son of the family, Pitte (Filip Peeters), raping his mentally challenged sister, Deedee (Marina De Graaf), in the barn. Recalling the biblical story of Judith and Holefernes, where Judith's nursemaid cuts Holefernes' head off for raping Judith, Danielle takes a pitchfork and stabs it into Pitte's hands which are covering his genitals. Danielle brings Deedee back to Antonia's farm and Deedee joins the farm along with other outcasts who have found security there.

Time goes by, the farm gains more helpers; Danielle has a daughter who by the age of three befriends Crooked Finger (Mil Seghers), the town recluse who obsessively reads the likes of Nietzche and Schopenhauer; Danielle finally finds romantic love in the image of Lara (Elsie De Braw), her daughter's school teacher whom she sees as Botticelli's "Venus" when she first lays eyes on her; Anotina happily accepts the love of Farmer Bas; and Danielle's daughter, Therese (Veerle van Overloop), grow up and has her own daughter, Sarah (Thyrza Ravestelin) , who has inherited the uncanny imagination of her grandmother, Danielle.

The farm and the people who both inhabit it and visit it have their ups and their downs. There is more rape and there is more life that is born. There is dancing and there is mourning. There is conflict and there is connection. Yet in a world that Crooked Finger (quoting Schopenhauer) explains to Therese as "a hell inhabited by tormented souls and devils," there is a subtlty and calm to the film. there is a rejuvenating return to nature and keep attention to the life cycles that give life, lay death, and give life again.

In our own time and society where the media is promoting control, fear, and anxiety as prominently as the billboards telling us what alcohol to drink, what radio station to listen to, and what clothes to wear, revisiting Antonia's Line (1995), is a great help. It is a movie of hope and positive acknowledgment that is just what the realist ordered to help cope with current times and learn that reality, equally enrapturing beauty and pain, is what we need to open our eyes to, and that if we do, we can actually be more calm and balanced for it.