Shirley (2020)
Directed by Josephine Decker
A famous horror writer finds inspiration for her next book after she and her husband take in a young couple.
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7 films that influenced Shirley
What critics say influenced Shirley
When Jackson sees Rose up close, guessing correctly that she’s pregnant, Mike Nichols’ classic merges with Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby , before evolving again to suggest a psychological female relationship of unifying identities akin to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (already a heavy inspiration for Madeline’s Madeline ).
It’s easy to cite Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as inspiration for the machinations of Shirley , but it also taps into my favorite genre of cinema that I’ll simply refer to as “Persona-esque” (as insufferable as that sounds).
There are a lot of influences bubbling under the surface of Shirley, such as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Bergman's Persona (a film with which feminist filmmakers seem to have a love/hate relationship), but the director's vision emerges as something more than the sum of its parts.
There’s a bit of “Persona” to the relationship, as which woman is the stronger is always in question until very nearly the end.
On top of that, the film is abrasive in its visual approximations of misery, a mise-en-scène often green-tinged and blurry, that reminds me of the stifling gloom of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York.
But I also found that Shirley spoke to the insanity of womanhood in the same way Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse spoke to the insanity of masculinity.
There’s a synergy with Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse in how Shirley conducts itself.
It’s a bit more commercial than The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea, the other two features by Tomm Moore (who directed this one with Ross Stewart), yet sacrifices neither of his hallmarks: sincere fairytale pathos and a lovely visual style that places cartoony figures against rich backdrops.
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This goes for her work in this, Assassination Nation, and a stage play she was in called The Mother.
They will bear witness to the stormiest marriage since Javier Bardem terrorized Jennifer Lawrence in Darren Aronofsky’s mother!
And such portrayals haven’t been limited to biopics: Céline Sciamma’s 2019 Portrait of a Lady on Fire , though billed as a romance, is also an examination of the female artistic process and the way it can joyously flourish in a matriarchal environment.