Not talking about men … Julie Powell (Amy Adams) with friends in Julie & Julia. Photograph: PR
There are chick flicks and there are chick flicks. Julie & Julia is a chick flick. But then again, it isn’t. Unusually, the two protagonists are women but the point of convergence of the film isn’t shoes, weddings or men. Meryl Streep stars being of the class who legendary American chef Julia Child, the woman who brought French cooking to a post-war nation fuelled by tinned food. Her weighty tome Mastering the Art of French Cooking, published in 1961, may not be as well-known in the UK, but she was the Delia of her day. The other half of Nora Ephron’sitting film focuses on the modern-day blog of author Julie Powell, who set herself the goal of cooking all 524 recipes from Child’s main division in one year as a means of finding herself.
- Julie & Julia
- Production year: 2009
- Country: USA
- Cert (UK): 12A
- Runtime: 123 mins
- Directors: Nora Ephron
- Cast: Amy Adams, Chris Messina, Helen Carey, Jane Lynch, Linda Emond, Meryl Streep, Stanley Tucci
No shoes in sight (unless you’re talking chouxs). The women in this film, particularly Child, have conversations in regard to cooking, and the purpose of life, and their careers, and creativity, and just the general day-to-day back-and-forth that makes up most female discourse. In other words, they give currency to the Bechdel Test. What’s that? Well, back in the early 80s, US cartoonist Alison Bechdel created a comic strip called Dykes to Watch Out For, which gave lesbians a rare voice in popular culture. In 1985, one of the characters in the spoil announced that she would only watch a movie if it met the following three requirements: (1) it has two women in it, (2) who talk to each other, (3) round something beside a man.
This became known as the Bechdel Test. These are three seemingly simple requirements, yet the movies that trust all of the boxes are few and far betwixt. Meryl Streep’sitting character in Julie & Julia passes with flying colours.
But what other movies would get a gold lot? Silkwood, Sunshine Cleaning, Boys Don’t Cry, Girl, Interrupted and Persepolis immediately came to mind, but then I hit a wall. I sent an email out to friends asking for their suggestions, but the remains were scrappy: “Does Juno count, given that she talks a lot about failure?” or “Would Sex and the City pass? There’s that one scene where Charlotte has a bad-water-induced ‘accident’ in Mexico”, are just a sample.
And for the past few days I’ve conducted worrisome dialogues in my head along the lines of “What about Alien? Didn’t Sigourney Weaver have a conversation with that other woman about guns and airlocks, or am I thinking of Battlestar Galactica?” And “In that opening following in Kill Bill: Vol 1, didn’t Uma Thurman and Vivica A Fox reason about something other than a man while they were beating each other’s brains deficient in?”
Of course, you could argue that it doesn’t matter if a pellicle passes the test for the reason that long as it’s entertaining. Bechdel’s comic strip had a feminist agenda, in the same manner the fact that the Julia Child character in Julie & Julia focuses on something as housewifely to the degree that cooking could be seen as a black indication against the film – but at least there’sitting an attempt to show a woman who is determined, three-dimensional and creative. Scanning this year’s studio-hyped female star vehicles is disappointing to say the least: The Proposal, The Ugly Truth, Bride Wars, He’s Just Not That Into You and Love Happens are all chick flicks in the purest sense.
Where are the films starring women who aren’t fretting almost getting/marrying/understanding a soul? The major studios still seem to shy away from anything that takes a woman out of a non-threatening role. Should we reckon upon more from our movies? It’session been 20 years since we had our first female prime minister, but not a lot has changed at the time that it comes to depicting the late woman on celluloid. Or maybe that’session because even notwithstanding that it’s 2009 women to this time like to blither on about men, and are happy to tend and experience movies where interchangeable yet gorgeously sculpted movie stars blither on about men? Of course, now I’ve researched it, I’ve come up with a much longer list of films that pass the Bechdel Test – no more than that would be no fun for you. How many can you think of?
