52 Films By Women: Fire (1996)

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By Andrea Thompson

To say that Deepa Mehta’s film caused a stir when it was released in her home country of India in 1996 is an understatement. It was the first mainstream film in the country to depict a lesbian relationship, and the response was explosive. Conservatives practically foamed at the mouth to denounce it, and crowds of protestors attacked theaters where it screened.

There was certainly much to provoke. “Fire” isn’t just a film about two women falling in love, it’s about the various ways women are exploited in a home environment which is enabled by the staunch traditionalism outside of it. Yet a few still manage to take their power back and find happiness, even as some remain complicit.

Conservatives, however, are very right to fear modernity, as Radha (Shabana Azmi) and Sita (Nandita Das) have a hell of a lot more choices than their cinematic predecessors. Much like the women who embrace queer love in “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” and “The Handmaiden,” they fall for each other not exactly because they identify as queer (which doesn’t seem like much of an option for them anyway), but rather, in the sense that they are able to find freedom and understanding only with each other in their stifling patriarchal surroundings. 

Sita and Radha actually have more in common with Carol and Therese of “Carol,” and Wil and Vivian of “Saving Face,” and it’s directly related to its more contemporary 90s setting. If their love stories have a common thread in settings hell-bent on heteronormativity, there are still far more options than the far too fleeting, isolated feminist utopia of “Portrait.” 

That said, Sita and Radha probably never would have connected if not for one of the most traditional structures in existence-marriage. Mere days into Sita’s arranged marriage with Jatin (Javed Jaffrey), she’s already feeling the pain of his cold indifference, exacerbated by the rigid expectations of her new home, where she is expected to serve not only her new husband, but his mute and paralyzed mother Biji (Kushal Rekhi), who is also subject to perverse exploitation by the family servant Mundu (Ranjit Chowdhry), but nevertheless rigidly helps to enforce conservative standards of behavior and dress.

Sita’s consolation is her older sister-in-law Radha, who is unable to bear children and likewise suffers from the emotional abuse doled out by her pious husband Ashok (Kulbhushan Kharbanda), who has fallen under the sway of a local religious leader and believes that desire is the root cause of all unhappiness. To prove his devotion to self-control, he has refused to have sex with Radha for 13 years, and whenever he feels the urge, has her lie motionless next to him while he refuses all touch.

It’s an excruciating way to live, and Radha has resigned herself to it until the younger, more rebellious Sita joins the household. Sita quickly realizes that her husband Jatin would much rather spend nights with his Chinese mistress Julie (Alice Poon), but her pain fades as she and Radha form a close friendship that quickly blossoms into a connection that’s as emotional as it is physical. And neither much bothers with what the men around them think. After they consummate their relationship, Radha is quick to reassure the more forward Sita that they’ve done nothing wrong, and they refuse to put a stop to their affair, which they’re essentially having in plain sight.

When they are discovered, as we know they will be sooner or later, “Fire” only reserves the last fifteen minutes to others’ reactions, and perhaps that might be the biggest insult of all to those who opposed this film and its empowering message. “Fire” never shies away from painful realities, but the emphasis is always on life, and the right to defy those who would try to deprive others of it. It’s a dangerous message for those who insist on adhering to a rigid code at the expense of all else, and that it involves a tender love story between two women might just represent the greatest threat of all.

52 Films By Women: Xena: Warrior Princess-Here She Comes...Miss Amphipolis (1997)

The Mary Sue

By Andrea Thompson

Note: Some spoilers ahead.

I’m cheating a bit for this week’s column, since I’m writing about a TV episode rather than a film. But hell, it’s Pride Month, “Pose” has recently ended, and the episode I’m focusing on was not only directed and written by women, it has a fantastic origin story.

But, as is habitual with me, I’m getting ahead of myself. Like many, I’ve turned to fun, light-hearted content during the pandemic, some new, some rediscovered. One example of the latter has been “Xena: Warrior Princess,” a show which I enjoyed whenever I could catch it (ah, life before streaming) and have likewise enjoyed revisiting. If you’re somehow unfamiliar with the premise, it was set in a fantasy version of ancient Greece and followed the titular character Xena, (Lucy Lawless) a former warlord who chose to fight for good in an effort to atone for her past. On her journey to redemption, she was aided by a farm girl named Gabrielle (Renée O'Connor), who became her conscience, friend, fellow warrior, and eventually, far more, even if it couldn’t become official canon at the time, although it was clear enough to the ardent fan base it garnered during its six season run from 1995 to 2001.

One episode in particular was one of those completely random watches I enjoyed as a teenager, and ended up being one of those childhood gems that’s even better once you can really appreciate what it was doing. Granted, there are many episodes of “Xena” that fit this description (and to be fair, some that don’t), but the one I’m singling out is the season two episode “Here She Comes...Miss Amphipolis,” which aired in 1997. 

As the title suggests, it revolves around a beauty pageant, but in typical Xena fashion, there are higher stakes than just determining a winner. A fragile peace has been in place in the unnamed setting for about a year, but that peace may soon be shattered. All three of the warlords who previously waged war on the battlefield are now basically fighting by proxy, with each having entered their respective girlfriends as contestants. Now someone has been attempting to not only sabotage each contestant’s chances of winning but do away with them completely, which would kick off another war.

Xena and Gabrielle aren’t shy about sharing their thoughts on beauty pageants and how degrading they can be, but as Xena points out, “War makes everyone a victim.” So she decides to pose as a contestant for the title of...Miss Known World (not making that up), with Gabrielle adopting another kind of disguise, complete with a hilarious accent, as her sponsor.

And what happens next is surprisingly complicated, far ahead of its time, and in many ways, our current time. But perhaps the biggest relief is how this episode avoids the most tired cliche of all - the “tough girl” struggling to perform traditional femininity. Xena sees no conflict between her warrior skills and the demands of a contestant, gamely donning a blonde wig and various costumes. She not only performs her part to perfection, she WORKS IT as a blonde bombshell. To her, it’s just another adventure, and this one happens to demand this particular set of skills, some no doubt inspired by Lawless, a former beauty queen herself. It’s what I refer to as the “Clueless” brand of satire, which maintains a respect for the characters they’re portraying even as they’re poking fun at them.

So it makes sense that the other contestants are far different from the “underdressed, over-developed bimbos” Xena was expecting. As the episode reminds us, all of them have seen the horrors of war up close, and it’s given them the kind of perspective that makes it impossible for them to take such frivolities seriously. As one contestant puts it, “You can’t know how stupid something like this seems when you’ve been through a war where it was a fight just to survive.” It’s what they stand to gain that get them invested in winning rather than the pageant itself, with one contestant being promised food for her village, another hoping to find another life far away from the trauma she’s endured, and one believing she has so little right to her own feelings she’s chosen to go along with her sponsor/boyfriend’s decision to enter her in the pageant.

Only one contestant is actually invested in the pageant itself, and that is Miss Artiphys, which is when the episode really gets interesting. Yes the name is pronounced artifice, and Xena quickly discovers they weren’t born a woman. In fact, Miss Artiphys was played by Karen Dior, a bisexual adult film star who was a female impersonator, then moved into more mainstream roles in the 90’s, and from what I could discover, apparently identified as a man rather than a trans woman. Given that information, I will use he pronouns when referring to Dior, and they when referring to the character of Miss Artiphys.

The character of Miss Artiphys not only isn’t a joke, but is treated with dignity. When they lock Xena in a steam room, it’s not out of a sense of competition, but out of fear that Xena will reveal their secret. As Miss Artiphys struggles to explain their reasons for joining the competition to Xena, they point out that Xena was born a woman and can take her identity for granted, while for them, “This is a chance to use a part of me most people usually laugh at or worse. The part I usually have to hide. Only here that part works for me.” Xena doesn’t pretend to fully understand, but she not only listens to Miss Artiphys, she refuses to out them and says, “May the best person win.”

How was such respect possible at a time when trans (or in this case, trans implied) characters were nonexistent, or when they were acknowledged, were generally treated as jokes at best, or violent killers at worst? That’s probably due to writer Chris Manheim, who was inspired to create the character of Miss Artiphys by her brother Keith Walsh, who apparently died of AIDS in 1992, and was also a regular drag performer. 

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For Miss Artiphys, the pageant is genuinely empowering, and it’s easy to see their arc as Manheim’s wish fulfillment for her brother. Miss Artiphys not only steals the show (no small achievement when you’re standing next to Lawless), they get the best moments. They not only appear onstage in Xena’s signature costume and proclaim, “Honey, I’m no princess. I’m a queen,” they also get to (spoiler!) win the pageant. All the other finalists proudly declare their agency and decide to drop out of a competition that’s based on their objectification, leaving Miss Artiphys as the winner to raucous applause and tears that were probably genuine on their part. 

Such dreams were rarely fulfilled in real life at the time. Karen Dior never found mainstream stardom and died of AIDS-related complications in 2004. Manheim had long been a prolific TV writer and continued to not only write but produce several “Xena” episodes, but her last IMDB credits is as a writer of an episode of “Monk” in 2004. This was also the last director credit for Marina Sargenti, who also directed the underrated 1990 horror film “Mirror Mirror.” 

No, pop culture as a whole wasn’t prepared to follow the example set by “Xena” at the time, even if Lucy Lawless and Renée O'Connor embraced their status as queer icons long before it became trendy or just good PR. Nevertheless, “Here She Comes... Miss Amphipolis” sums up the show’s legacy nicely, and in a fashion that much of the mainstream is still struggling to catch up to. Or as Xena herself quite simply puts it, “Beauty is beauty.” Indeed it is.

52 Films By Women: To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar (1995)

Universal Pictures

By Andrea Thompson

Critics may not have been ready for “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar,” but a lot of other people sure as hell were. A comedy about three drag queens driving from New York to compete in a drag beauty pageant in L.A., the film received such mixed reviews that Rotten Tomatoes disgraced itself by giving it a rating of 39%. It clearly made an impression on audiences though, since it was the top grossing movie at the box office for two weeks.

The title refers to a signed photo by Julie Newmar that Vida (Patrick Swayze), the most maternal of the trio, steals as a kind of good luck charm on their journey. It seems to have done the trick, seeing as how Newmar makes a cameo as herself in the film. 

It also seems to have worked its magic on the remainder of the film as well, which remains charming, even if the ending veers too far into wish fulfillment. “To Wong Foo” doesn’t just take the concerns of Vida, her friend Noxeema (Wesley Snipes), and Chi-Chi (John Leguizamo), the newcomer they take under their wing, seriously, it reslishes their passionate appreciation of glamorous femininity.

Nor were any of these ladies defined by their oppression, or what so many outside of their tight-knit community and surrogate family thought of them. Aside from a brief glimpse of Vida’s disapproving mother from afar, Noxeema, Vida, and Chi-Chi are wholly themselves, with no need of validation from said family who are typically the focus, even as they constantly rejected those they deemed outsiders, only to tearfully embrace their choices by the end. 

Perhaps critics also expected the film to at least mention the AIDS crisis, which was the leading cause of death for adults aged 25 to 44 at the time, according to The Advocate. While suffering seems to be the industry’s go-to strategy to build compassion for the marginalized, “To Wong Foo” immerses us in the drag community from the beginning. It’s not only aware of the tough guy/heartthrob personas of Swayze and Snipes, it plays on them, both in the original trailers, and from the moment the film kicks off, with an objectified Patrick Swayze stepping out of the shower in all his swoonworthy, abtastic glory, only to objectify him in much different way as he begins to put on his feminine persona.

How this process is portrayed sets the tone. Just four years prior in “The Silence of the Lambs,” a man feminizing himself was depicted as the ultimate horror, but as the central characters delightedly, carefully adorn themselves with makeup, wigs, stockings and all around style, director Beeban Kidron likewise relishes their joy and the care that goes into it. It’s indicative of the movie’s respect, not just for femininity, but women in general.

Critics might have accused “To Wong Foo” of timidity, political correctness, and a lack of originality in terms of plot, and they weren’t completely wrong. There’s a certain suspension of disbelief required, not just for the over-the-top, utopian ending, but that almost none of the residents of Snydersville, the small town Noxeema, Vida, and Chi-Chi become stranded in, recognize them as men in drag. 

No, “To Wong Foo” couldn’t be accused of diving too deep. But it does mostly accomplish what it set out to do, which is be funny as hell. Snipes, Swayze, and Leguizamo are all in top form, and it’s not only the jokes that land perfectly, it’s the banter, which ranges from tough love to outright animosity, and finally, to camaraderie. 

It’s also not as if the movie is unaware of the very real danger these three face on a daily basis. They only become stranded in Snydersville in the first place because a sheriff attempts to assault Vida one night after he pulls them over. She fights him off, but believes she kills him in the process rather than merely knocking him out, causing all of them to flee in terror. That terror is also present from the moment their encounter with him begins, when Sheriff Dollard pulls them over while they’re driving in a remote area at night. As he comes up to them with his hand firmly on his gun we know is going to be unpleasant at the very least. The only question is whether it will also be horrific.

Thank goodness not all small towns are completely hellish, because while Snydersville proves to have the kinds of characters who benefit from the trio’s presence, it has its share of dangers as well. At one point, Chi-Chi gets harassed from a group of male rednecks in an encounter that threatened to become a gang rape, only to be saved by a nice local boy who actually becomes her love interest. 

One of them also gets his comeuppance from Noxeema in a scene that’s become both iconic and queer canon, and deeply reflective in how the women of Snydersville become stronger and more confident thanks to the three, who literally brighten up a place which initially appears as drab and almost colorless, only to become awash in a sea of red as Noxeema, Vida, and Chi-Chi decide to participate in the town Strawberry Social. By the time the despicable Sheriff Dollard tracks them down, the stage is literally set for a fabulous Western standoff that involves literally running the toxic men in their midst out of town. 

Interestingly though, one of the most difficult tasks wasn’t finding the movie’s leads, it was finding a director. Swayze, Snipes, and Leguizamo eagerly signed on, but practically every male director passed, with Beeban Kidron getting the gig, it seems, more out of desperation than any appreciation for her very considerable skills. 

The ending is also more bittersweet than intended, what with Dollard’s rant about how the Constitution doesn’t apply to such “deviants,” amidst the resurgence of an alt right determined to roll back every hard fought gain progressives have made, including recent court rulings. But at least he gets the clap back he deserves, and “To Wong Foo” also remains an unapologetic celebration of its leads and queer culture, (with cameos from icons that include Ru Paul) paving the way for much more to come.