We women are thirsty for our own complex truths on the screen

Brilliant: Maggie Gyllenhaal. Picture: Frazer Harrison/Getty/AFP

Watching the recent film The Lost Daughter, as a working mother, is excruciating. The honesty is lacerating. So many little truth bombs, so much tension. It made me realise I’m thirsty, so thirsty, for brutally honest stories that examine the female condition. Bring on the female film makers, reviewers, gatekeepers and tastemakers, so that more of our lived realities make it to the screen.

This film captures the complex contradictions of motherhood, the sheer relentlessness of it. How some mothers can be… unmaternal. And we may be good mothers yet rage for something other, something easier as we implode with the impossibility of extricating ourselves from the vine-like tenacity of children.

The film reminded of my own nadir as a parent. Curled in the foetal position on the kitchen floor, clutching a throbbing head with two children under two beside me as I keened in despair, “I can’t do this, can’t.” How often is that kind of reality shown on screen? Yet it’s one many women recognise.

Some of our most respected film reviewers didn’t seem to get the film. Here’s Paul Byrnes – who I’ve long admired – on the protagonist, Leda: “[Director Maggie] Gyllenhaal... keeps Leda’s feelings unknowable... That means we must labour for long stretches without much illumination. Gyllenhaal does reward that patience with a cracking finale, but by then some will have given up. It’s hard to maintain sympathy for a woman so deeply closed.”

And here is Deborah Ross: “The Lost Daughter is an adaptation of the Elena Ferrante novel about motherhood that says, quite ferociously: it’s complicated. And: mothers aren’t necessarily motherly, and can feel ambivalence. You’d think it was unfilmable [but] this film is entirely gripping.”

Two entirely different takes that reveal the male/female film reviewer dichotomy. We need more female film reviewers across the board, urgently; people who understand the nuances of our stories, our truths. That understanding would result in more of “our” films being made. Understood. Greenlit. It would bleed through to the gatekeepers of the industry who dole out enormous amounts of money to a lucky few.

Olivia Wilde recently told Vogue that her hit film, Booksmart, was a critical success with adoring fans, yet “it didn’t make any money”. It failed to clear the magic $100 million mark, and “it’s much harder for female directors to get a second film greenlit if your first film didn’t make $100 million”.

Catherine Hill is an Australian filmmaker of extraordinary subtlety and courage whose luminous new film is Some Happy Day, about a middle-aged homeless woman in Melbourne. How often is that kind of story told? The film took years of struggle, and a lot of Hill’s own money, to get made. “I’d approached four distributors in Melbourne,” she explained. “All of them are male. We have learnt to travel with the male protagonist, to tune in to their journey, and I find that really tricky with male distributors, male sales agents. They couldn’t see where to take this.” Yet, as a woman, I found her deep dive into female trauma, complexity and resilience profoundly moving. Hill continued, “As a female filmmaker, I constantly think, it’s so hard. It’s not step up for us, like male creatives around me. It’s step up, step back. Step up, step back. The pathways are so tricky.”

We women are thirsty for our own complex truths on the screen; for a lacerating honesty that some male reviewers might not get. That bewilderment bleeds through to yearly “best of” lists, to award finalists, fan cultures and tastemakers who have “their” types of film greenlit. And a note to the gatekeepers of Australian filmmaking: do we really need yet another version of the Ned Kelly story? Please no (I count 14 iterations). It’s time for other stories to be told.