Hunter Haley Bennett is the ideal wife. Or not. She cleans the house and cooks exquisite dishes for her husband prepares his bed at night and waits to the nines for him to return from work. At dinner, she tells him that she feels very lucky but he doesn’t find out, he’s busy answering little messages on his cell phone.
The turning point for Hunter is pregnancy, which definitely reveals her womanhood as an empty vessel. The container woman is nothing by herself. That it only has value as a complement to the perfect man, as an ideal daughter-in-law, as the mother of the offspring that everyone claims. these characters regarding the premiere of Hunter (Haley Bennett) is the ideal wife. Or not. She cleans the house and cooks exquisite dishes for her husband, prepares his bed at night and waits to the nines for him to return from work.
At dinner, she tells him that she feels very lucky but he doesn’t find out, he’s busy answering little messages on his cell phone. The turning point for Hunter is pregnancy, which definitely reveals her womanhood as an empty vessel. The container woman is nothing by herself. That it only has value as a complement to the perfect man, as an ideal daughter-in-law, as the mother of the offspring that everyone claims.
In Swallow, Carlo Mirabella-Davis takes this metaphor of the emptiness inside to its last consequences. In capital letters in a self-help book her mother-in-law lends her, she reads that she has to try new things every day. Begins to swallow objects. First, ice then a marble. He takes a thumbtack stuck in the vacuum and swallows it. Sounds raucous This Is the Day, of The The, but then the score of Nathan Halpern which we already touched with his soundtrack for The Rider and zooms very slight but insistent warn us that things are going to end up in the emergency room with the despot husband singing to his wife the forty.
With its premise and its brilliant interpretations especially of the protagonist, Haley Bennett its distant shots, and that main character is so well written it is surprising to see that the husband is rather a broad brush. He is the archetype of a bad very bad husband, as the director exaggeratedly emphasizes in that scene in which he scolds his wife for having badly ironed a silk tie. After the first visit to the ER, Swallow’s script takes an unexpected turn that includes a somewhat spectacular resolution and a morbid past that explains everything and that prevents Mirabella-Davis from exploring in-depth the inner emptiness that her main character tries to alleviate by swallowing the most unusual objects.
However, the character of the unhappy, dissatisfied, bitter housewife has been immortalized. And, well seen few films perhaps family comedies, escape the portrait of the depressed and invisible housewife. I think of April Wheeler, Kate Winslet’s character in Revolutionary Road, a paradigm of the woman who has ceased to exist by becoming a wife, like Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore) in Far from Heaven or Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) in The Graduate. All of them are undoubted heirs to the Tennessee Williams housewives, special mention to Maggie Elizabeth Taylor in The Cat on the Tin Roof. Because there is something harder than your husband ignoring you and that is your husband ignoring you if he is Paul Newman.
We review the way fiction has portrayed these characters regarding the premiere of Swallow in Movistar Swallow the adventure hunter Haley Bennett is the ideal wife. Or not. She cleans the house and cooks exquisite dishes for her husband, prepares his bed at night, and waits to the nines for him to return from work. At dinner, she tells him that she feels very lucky but he doesn’t find out, he’s busy answering little messages on his cell phone. The turning point for Hunter is pregnancy which definitely reveals her womanhood as an empty vessel. The container woman is nothing by herself. That it only has value as a complement to the perfect man, as an ideal daughter-in-law, as the mother of the offspring that everyone claims.
In Swallow, Carlo Mirabella-Davis takes this metaphor of the emptiness inside to its last consequences. In capital letters, in a self-help book her mother-in-law lends her, she reads that she has to try new things every day. Begins to swallow objects. First ice, then a marble. He takes a thumbtack stuck in the vacuum and swallows it. Sounds raucous This Is the Day, of The The, but then the score of Nathan Halpern which we already touched with his soundtrack for The Rider and zooms very slight but insistent warn us that things are going to end up in the emergency room with the despot husband sing Moore at The End of Romance, much more help than the final cliff of Thelma & Louise.
The life of the housewife is so depressing that in contrast her liberation usually goes through a crazy road trip, as in Alicia no longer lives here Martin Scorsese, 1974) and in the Spanish version of this film Vamonos Barbara Cecilia Bartolome 1978. Even Woody Allen, one of the filmmakers who has best known how to portray the female psyche on the big screen, paints a rather bitter portrait of the housewife in his psychoanalytic Interiors, whose underlying theme is the dissatisfaction that the mother played by Geraldine Page has instilled in his daughters throughout family life.
But it is possible to be crueler with the figure of the housewife and some have done it. For example Polanski in The Devil’s Seed where the punishment for Rosemary is not boredom but begetting the devil himself. Or Safe by Todd Haynes in which Carol White fills her inner emptiness with increasingly hygienic precautions in the face of the bacterial and viral world around her. So we consider her crazy today, however, she is a visionary.
The epitome of all this would be Gray Gardens, the Maysles’ wonderful documentary that can serve as the ultimate warning of the dangers of the home for women who choose to dedicate their lives to it. Why doesn’t auteur cinema-like housewives? Is it because home care and upbringing have traditionally been considered a conservative value and this cinema has progressive aspirations that go through the liberation of women?
Although it is great that the labor and economic emancipation of women is encouraged, isn’t this mistreatment of the characters who freely decide that they want to dedicate themselves to their family a bit dogmatic? Sure there are more but I can only think of one example of a happy housewife in a movie and it is curiously, of a woman. In happiness, of Agnes Varda film not particularly liked feminists of her time. It is from another title of hers, One sings the other, not that phrase she said about her main characters. The two had fought hard to achieve the happiness of being a woman. Whether outside or inside their homes.
