Music Box Films
By Andrea Thompson
“Represent” is an exception among the many political documentaries, which have become quite prolific recently. At their best, they tend to reveal unsettling truths, but not much food for thought, at least for the most part. There are exceptions of course, but that’s not entirely a bad thing. Our politics, which tended to comprise various shades of gray, haven’t so much polarized the way everyone believes. Rather, they’ve been stripped to reveal what we’ve become, and how we could deteriorate into something far worse if things continue to unravel.
But “Represent” doesn’t just show the common ground that exists between the various aspiring Midwestern politicians it follows, all of them women, it got me to do something I didn’t think was possible in our current climate: sympathize with a Republican running for office. The documentary could never have made me vote for her even if I could have, but I challenge the most ardent Democrat not to feel some compassion for Julie Cho, who decides to run for state representative in Evanston, a liberal suburb of Chicago.
Cho is certainly the most complex of the three women director Hillary Bachelder follows for her feature debut. Cho is in many ways the ultimate American success story - an immigrant who fled an oppressive country, in her case North Korea, and saw the best of America in the small town she and her family ended up in. Distrust of any state or national authority was already a given for Cho, who soon found herself drawn to the Republican party of the 80s, which advocated for small government.
It’s not that Bryn Bird and Myya Jones are less fascinating, they’re just on more predictable paths as Democrats. Bird is a farmer and happily married white mother of two small children who runs for township trustee in her small rural town of Granville, Ohio, and Jones is a 22-year-old Black woman who’s freshly graduated and decides to run for mayor of Detroit, then state representative when her mayoral bid fails.
Bachelder doesn’t need to do much to convey just how much gender plays into all three campaigns, or how much more Jones has to shoulder as a Black woman, a demographic which is the backbone of the Democratic voting block, but doesn’t seem to get much support once they decide to put themselves front and center.
Not that Cho or Bird have it easy. Cho, who makes gerrymandering and the effect it has on suppressing minority votes the central issue of her platform, doesn’t just encounter open scorn, and even threats of violence when she goes out campaigning, but a complete lack of support from her own party. They become so bent on silencing her they pressure her to drop out, and in one case a top official outright hangs up on her during a phone call. There’s also numerous other macro and microaggressions, including some casual racism at a Republican luncheon.
Bird has her own issues. Her area is heavily Republican and never had a progressive candidate representing them. The trustee board also consists of a very entrenched old boys network who constantly undermine the only (also Republican) woman in the room, whom Bird is angling to replace. So Bird has an uphill fight of her own, even if she does manage to convince quite a few others to get involved in political campaigning for the first time.
Under such circumstances, it can often be difficult to not define subjects by their worst experiences, and Bachelder avoids this by revealing some of their biggest obstacles during the latter half of “Represent,” which include Cho’s past cancer diagnosis, Bird’s mother passing away, and Jones recouting her childhood sexual abuse.
Music Box Films
The fly-on-the-wall approach doesn’t always prove to be the best, given that some of the more minute aspects of their political journeys fall through the cracks. But it just might be a fitting angle for the mostly non-flashy style of campaigning all three candidates embrace. That Myya, who has all the characteristics of a political star on the rise, doesn’t overwhelm the others with her dynamic, intensely charismatic presence that’s a natural fit for the social media she embraces (and eventually includes a viral rap video), is especially impressive, reflecting Bachelder’s commitment to give equal weight to all of her subjects.
The doc is also curiously reluctant to embrace its influences. That “Represent,” which takes place over the course of 2017-8, was partially inspired by the influx of women in politics in 2016 is evident. But as the doc points out in its opening, there have been many cases when the number of female politicians have suddenly seemed to increase. If it’s treated as a lark each time, then the timing of the film’s release, which coincides with Biden’s pick of Kamala Harris as his VP, is impeccable. Who knows? Maybe the normalization of women in office could arrive sooner than any of us would have allowed.
