ZERO Femele Director nominee this year, at major awards

www.indiewire.com/2018/12/lynne-ramsay-you-were-never-really-here-boldest-direction-oscars-1202023714/


Lynne Ramsay Made the Boldest Directing Choices of 2018, So Why No Oscar Buzz?
"You Were Never Really Here" is a four-time Independent Spirit Award nominee, but it really deserves a shot at Oscar glory.

“We’re still so used to glamorizing violence and it being so explicit that it’s almost become banal,” Ramsay said during a recent interview with IndieWire. “It’s become cartoonish, especially in Hollywood. In a weird way, this film disturbs people because it leaves a lot up to them to fill in the gaps. I wanted to avoid things that you’ve seen a million times before.”

Ramsay’s cut to the security camera forces the viewer to observe the nature of Joe’s violence as opposed to experiencing the violence itself. Directorial choices like these keep “You Were Never Really Here” focused entirely on how violence effects psychology and breaks the human spirit, a theme that’s the backbone of Ramsay’s works; they’re also why the film is one of the year’s most boldly directed movies. Ramsay flirts with standard action set ups like Joe prepping for a raid and then pivots to shots far more challenging to sit through and more rewarding for her character-building storytelling.



“It’s very mechanical for him at that moment you know?” Ramsay said about cutting to the security footage. “Joe is so damaged by the violence of his past that at this part in his life, in the film, violence is just a cycle. To me violence, once you’ve done one violent act it leads to another, it leads to another, it leads to another, it becomes routine. This moment isn’t exciting for Joe, it’s banal. It should be like that for the audience, too.”



Unconventional directing choices rooted in Joe’s psychology run rampant through “You Were Never Really Here.” During a climactic scene in which Joe breaks into a mansion on a rescue mission, Ramsay incorporates a rhythm of jump cuts that leap past every moment where severe bloodshed takes place. By omitting violence, she leads the viewer to wade through the disturbing possibilities of what Joe is capable of doing, which only makes the character feel more dangerous than if she were to show him bashing a skull in with a hammer. Cutting past the violence makes the audience fear Joe in the same way Joe fears himself.


“I think by omitting it, it also makes the viewer become self-reflective,” Ramsay added, “sort of like, ‘Well why did I want that in the first place? Why do I need to see that?’ I think seeing people’s reactions is funny because they come out as if they have seen the most violent film they have ever seen, when there’s not much physical violence at all.”


Contrast these two “action scenes” with the moment Joe is ambushed by two assassins while waiting in a hotel room. In the most gory shot of the film, Joe opens the hotel door and Ramsay photographs the character in close-up as blood from someone’s head splatters across his face. Joe now finds himself in an unpredictable situation, so it’s only fitting Ramsay uses visceral cuts and handheld close-ups to direct the fight scene between Joe and the assassin. If the security footage dissociated the viewer from Joe, then Ramsay’s direction here delivers the immersive action one might have expected from the entirety of “You Were Never Really Here.” It just so happens to be when Joe least expects it, a brilliant decision by Ramsay to link her character with the viewer by catching them both off guard in narrative and filmmaking.



Ramsay’s approach to action filmmaking has landed her an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Director, one of four total noms for “You Were Never Really Here.” But what it hasn’t done is broken her into this year’s Oscar race. The lack of Oscar buzz for Ramsay is hardly surprising, as it’s precisely her directing choices that make “You Were Never Really Here” such a challenge, but it still hurts to see her not even in the conversation despite making the boldest character-driven directing choices of 2018. One year after Greta Gerwig became the fifth woman nominated for Best Director, there are no women gaining traction in the race – not Ramsay, not Tamara Jenkins (“Private Life”), not Debra Granik (“Leave No Trace”), not Chloé Zhao (“The Rider”).



Read More:‘You Were Never Really Here’: Jonny Greenwood Mixes ‘The Master’ and ‘Under the Skin’ in Lynne Ramsay Score — Listen

“It’s always this way, you know?” Ramsay said about this year’s male-dominated Best Director race. “I think of myself as a filmmaker first. I hopefully made a strong film and I think it’s a dark film. It doesn’t fit into an easy mold, but that’s why I think it’s exciting. I believe I’ve made something that is a really powerful film and I hope you do, too. I don’t live for awards.”

You Were Never Really Here is divisive, Leave No Here is too restrained for mainstream appeal, The Rider is underseen.

I'm all for more female representation in the film industry. That's not the issue. The issue is that none of these films have the kind of clout that say Lady Bird did last year, or any of Bigelow's projects for example. I loved Leave No Trace and Granik makes my personal lineups because I don't automatically ignore restraint in the category. That being the case even I can't deny the bias for showier picks and that's why Granik, Jenkins, and Zhao never had a chance, and it has nothing to do with their gender.

Regarding Ramsay...personally I've never been a fan of her and I loathed YWNRH. The story was a joke and laughably unrealistic. It's the kind of film I can't stand; an intensely mood-heavy work that pretends to make a statement about the human experience using heavy symbolism while irreparably bending the realities (dare I say truths) humans live by. The film is a parable that exists in the real world but none of the characters act or talk like real humans; they talk like cheap arthouse noir archetypes. Joaquin Phoenix and a dying cop lying on the floor singing a song together makes no goddamn sense. Ekaterina Samsonov's character behaves more like a symbol than a human being. Making the film heavily stylized character-driven parable-esque gloomporn is one thing, but straddling it with a goofy meat and potatoes crime narrative undermines whatever Ramsay was trying to say because the proceedings are so unbelievably stupid. Pick a lane and stick to it or simply do a better job converging these disparate narrative vehicles. Have a story first before you just throw mood everywhere, because when your mood is heavy and your story is dumb, your movie starts to feel really pretentious really fast. That's what happened here.

so Lynne Ramsay's film can go fuck itself. Best director conversation my ass.

I’ve only see You Were Never Really Here of those 3 but Ramsey probably wouldn’t crack my top 20.

There wasn't the token female director to rally around this year, and the #MeToo movement has moderately waned. So the industry simply said, whatever. That's how things are at Hollywood.

Maybe in 5 years we'll see a Best Picture lineup with three female-directed movies like there could be this year with movies directed by black filmmakers (Black Panther, Beale Street, BlackKklansman), with the industry showing yet a little bit more of open-mindedness but I'm not holding my breath. Debra Granik, Chloe Zhao and Tamara Jenkins made some of the best cinema of the year. Lynne Ramsay's film disappointed me but she's such a phenomenal director that she would have made a brilliant nominee anyway. And I cannot wait to see Can You Ever Forgive Me?.

The #MeToo movement is about discrimination, harassment, and assault. Not this.

I think this problem is there still needs to be more opportunities for women to direct.  From what I’ve seen so far, I personally would not nominate any women for directing.

I never like it when people complain just about there being no woman/black/whatever nominees because it's essentially a call for tokenism. If you think a specific person should've been nominated who wasn't complain about that. Especially if they probably weren't nominated just because they were a woman (as opposed to the film being a small indie or having non Oscar-y subject matter).

Or you could just not care who wins at award shows in general because they usually award things that aren't that good and real artists don't let someone else grade their report card. But that's a different can of worms.

It's not that there's a female bias, ever really. It's just that many movies just don't carry steam for awards season, which is okay. There's plenty of great female directing talent that put out great films every year (many of which audiences just don't see, which is kind of their fault, honestly). Films aren't going to get nominated for major awards if they're not seen. I'd rather have five male directing nominees every year than a token female nominee. I think Ava DuVernay should have been a lock for directing in 2014, but despite a Best Picture nomination (and one other below the line category nomination), it just couldn't gain steam. Now, let's say a woman directed The Imitation Game instead of Morten Tyldum, and the movie were exactly the same, she probably would've been nominated. It's not like Tyldum was an Academy favorite. Most of the time, it really is just the film. James Gray's direction in Lost City of Z was bold and beautiful enough to earn him a nomination, but the film just came and went. Angelina Jolie's direction in First They Killed My Father was incredibly skilled and ambitious, good enough for a nomination too, just didn't happen. Unfortunately it just happens female directors are looked over more often than not, but only because either their films just don't usually carry steam, there's not enough females behind the camera, or the film are just not seen.

It's not about tokenism, or steaming buzz all year. The Rider kept its momentum getting an ISA nod last year and winning the Gotham this year. YWNRH carried its momentum from Cannes 2017 - where it won 2 prizes - to being a critics darling in 2018. Leave No Trace is one of the best-reviewed movies of the year according to Metacritic. Private Life has some buzz for its two lead performances. You wanna tell me that these four movies couldn't keep up with fucking Green Book and Bradley Cooper? You might not enjoy YWNRH, for instance, but there's no denying that it's one of the year's biggest cinematic events and one that generated a lot of passionate conversation for more than 12 months, something many "Oscar contenders" couldn't make for more than two months. Try releasing some of those things in the spring or in summer and you'll see that.

There is a bias against female directors, in which they make more compelling and more well-reviewd movies and yet get fucked over by their studios and their marketing teams every single year. Every single year. Had Eastwood directed The Beguiled remake last year the same way Coppola did her version, he'd get tons of award buzz. If Scorsese had made You Were Never Really Here, it wouldn't have been shelved by Amazon for a whole year. Woody Allen could've made Private Life in any pre-MeToo year and released it two days after going into post-production.

Studios and distributors treat female filmmakers as if they were niche products even when they are proven to play well with audiences. And the consequence of that to awards bodies is that groups like the HFPA follow suit to what pundits and distributors say are Oscar-worthy and nominate the same set of people when some are clearly not that deserving.

It's a travesty that Ramsay isn't in the conversation for Director.