Tell It Like a Woman (2022)

Not rated...again.  Was 2022 the year that the MPAA just phoned in and said that they we're going to give ratings to films?  Anyway, the closest thing to issues that might be offensive to younger audiences is that many of the women in these stories are treated poorly.  One deals with schizophrenia, so it is just said.  There seems to be a woman with DID.  Also, there's the story of domestic abuse. There's implications of sex work done in one of the stories as well. There's some language, as far as I remember.  Regardless, not rated.

DIRECTORS: Taraji P. Henson, Sylvia Carobbio, Catherine Hardwicke, Mipo Oh, Lucia Puenzo, Maria Sole Tognazzi, and Leena Yadav

Oh dear.  Oh dear dear dear dear dear.  So much went wrong with this movie. It hurts to almost think about this film.  This is the last movie off of my list of Oscar nominations.  My inbox will be cleared out if I can just remove this movie from the list.  But I'll tell you what.  There's going to be nothing flattering about this review.  The thing about the "Best Song" or "Costume" categories is that you have to sign up for the idea that a bad movie has something that really works well.  You aren't judging the movie as a whole. The Academy is judging a single element.  But even the worst of these movies tend to be watchable.  I don't know how this movie was made.  Maybe it is an example of complete control over content.  But, boy.  This movie looks bad.  (In the sense of being visually awful).

​I tend to freak out about writing about anthology films.  There's no single throughline in a lot of them.  Especially movies like Tell It Like a Woman have different voices talking about femininity, there's no one person to pin it on.  I suppose the nicest thing I can say about something like this is that some of the stories kind of work.  Nothing is a real grand slam, but the stories work.  I don't know what it is about the diminishing returns of anthology films either.  When I saw Paris, Je T'aime, I loved it.  Then came New York, I Love You and I was less excited about it.  Finally came Berlin, I Love You (which should have been in German, right?) and I just got straight up mad.  It almost feels like Tell It Like a Woman is part of that franchise, simply due to format.  Maybe it is because all of the best storytellers already came out for the first movie and we kind of just take who shows up for the other films.  But I will tell you, Tell It Like a Woman feels cheap throughout.  The other movies I mentioned have a certain degree of prestige.  I read that Tell It Like a Woman was released on VOD?  It feels like it.  Anyway, I freak out about these movies because I don't know what to say about anthologies.  But if I write a paragraph about each movie, that thing writes itself, right?  Besides, I have the benefit of knowing that there's going to be a dopamine rush knowing that my To-Do List is done and that I can take a mini-vacation from writing.  Fingers, don't fail me now!

It's odd how "Pepcy & Kim" is the biggest crime out of these movies (with maybe a bit of a finger wag at "Aria" because it starts off the whole thing.  I know why it did and it's for a dumb reason. The first movie on the list is meant to grab attention.  "Taraji P. Henson directed this?!  I know her!"  That's the entire reasoning behind putting this movie first.  I'll tell you why that's a dumb idea.  The entire piece would have been better if this movie was stuck dead center of the pile.  "Pepcy & Kim" looks cheap.  Not all of the shorts do.  Some of them actually have some visual quality behind them.  While none of the stories necessarily knocked me back, I could have been tricked into thinking that this movie had some quality to it if "Pepcy & Kim" wasn't first.  The short is so poorly made and so cheaply made that I had to Google all of Tell It Like a Woman.  That camera shaking effect did nothing for the film.  Considering that this is a story about marginalized Black women, it should have been crafted and honed.  Instead, it feels like community theater coupled with first year film students.  I like the idea of the story, but so much of it tarnished by hamfisted execution.

"Elbows Deep" was written by Catherine Hardwicke, who wrote "Pepcy & Kim".  You can kind of tell.  It's directed by Hardwicke, who wisely plays it a little safer on the narrative elements.  It's a very basic story.  Both "Pepcy & Kim" and "Elbows Deep" are about true heroes of mental health and I thought that was going to be the theme of the whole anthology based on these two shorts.  (This is why it is important to plan ordering.  Albums are analyzed closely before dropping tracks so it doesn't feel like a mixtape.) Like with the first short, the acting is rough because the script is...not good?  Everything feels disjointed.  I get the vibe that Cara Delevingne really thinks that what she's doing is important (and I don't blame her!), but it comes across as more preachy. Part of that is that we don't really get the subjects of mental illness in a state that they have a goal. If anything, Delevingne is just playing schizophrenic.  That's it.  It's kind of an ABC Afterschool Special about the dangers of drugs.  While important, no one really considers it impressive cinema.  But points should be awarded for making the visuals watchable.

"Lagonegro" is the first short where I had hope for the movie.  It's a gorgeously shot short (say that a bunch of times fast), but I wonder if it is just smart to film things in Italy because Italy is so beautiful.  There's a story here and there's stuff to mine.  I wish so much of the movie didn't have Eva Longoria on her phone because that feels like the most cheap way to get information across.  Instead of having the element that big budget films do, we know that Longoria is just talking to herself and delivering far too much exposition for the sake of keeping the story going.  But the character's motivations to balance work and family is something that at least is kind of valuable.  I'm going to feel really awkward, but casting such a big name actress, whose background is LatinX as an Italian really sticks out.  It's not to say that it can't be done. But it also stands in the way from really investing in the character.  It's really hard to bond with characters in a short.  When I'm spending the majority of the short trying to figure out if Eva Longoria knows Italian or if she just memorized things phonetically, that's probably not great for the overall digestion of the piece.

"A Week in My Life", oddly and for no reason, might be my favorite of the shorts.  There's something incredibly serene in the knowledge that this is a story of nothing else but the frustrations of being a full-time mother.  It might be the movie that embraces the notion of a short the best.  I've been writing about the International pictures for the Academy Awards and commenting on how these full length movies focus on such a simple subject matter that they should be shorts.  This might be my example that I give.  We get a sense of pacing in the movie by the progression of the days of the week.  There's something almost Groundhog Day about the whole thing.  It's the same behaviors, but somehow it gets more and more overwhelming as time goes by.  Yeah, the end is a little bit cornball, but I really like it.  It is a natural conclusion that both alleviates the misery that the mother is going through while also validating the character's existence.  It's not perfect because its scope is so small, but I did like this one the best.

Now I'm unfortunately embracing the straight white male stereotype and I'm a little ashamed.  (But not ashamed enough not to point the following out.)  If you knew that Tell It Like a Woman was about women telling stories about women, "Unspoken" is the one that most embraces that.  It has an element of Lifetime behind it.  It almost fits tropes all the way through.  There is the strong doctor who has to put her family on the backburner yet again.  Then we find a woman who has been abused and her abuser is there. While "A Week in My Life" may have wisely kept the story simple, "Unspoken" needs to build a plot into this because we've seen these archetypes before.  Domestic abuse is a real problem, especially with men abusing women.  But if we become placated into treating people like thes simply as poorly constructed archetypes, it somehow becomes less real.  Nothing about this really felt real.  It looks pretty and the pacing is on par with most short films.  It just does a disservice to abused women when it should be deep diving into this subject matter.  Also, spelling is important.

I was mentally done by the time "Sharing a Ride" came along.  My wife has this notion that live action shorts almost have no purpose for existing.  They seem like they're made for the sake of getting Oscars.  I don't agree with her, but I also don't have the mental ammunition to fight that argument in the least, especially when it comes to shorts like "Sharing a Ride."  Visually, the director wanted to do something cool.  But there's something almost Joel Schumacher's Batman & Robin about the whole thing.  This is a story about basic empathy, aimed particularly at cis upper class women.  Okay, I love it.  Why is everyone acting so weird?  The motivations seem really weird and it just screams like it wants to be artsier than it actually is.  I don't really know how this plastic surgeon gets from the beginning of the story to the end outside of the fact that she has a weird spiritual and mental break from who she is in the beginning of the scene.  It's Ebenezer Scrooge without any of the slow change that happens over the course of "A Christmas Carol."  It's just bananas.

Finally "Aria".  I wanted to love this one so much.  When I saw that one of the shorts was animation and it was going to be the last one, I kind of had my hopes up. I was desperately counting down now.  I had thrown my phone across the couch so I couldn't distract myself and I had actually gotten up to pick it up twice because I needed to know that I was almost done with this movie.  It starts off strong and I kind of like the minimalist animation and character designs.  But once the creature escapes its cage, I realized it was minimalist because it either wasn't very good, they didn't have any money, or they didn't have any time.  Realistically, it was all three. The metaphor of being trapped in cages feels like a freshman level philosophy class.  You could have told the exact same story if the story was told out of animated doodles in the margins of a composition book.  At least there would have been a meta element to the story with a cool visual approach.  Instead, this last one ended up being almost soul-crushingly empty.  I left hating the movie, which is rough.

Do you know how much I needed the woman's anthology film to succeed?  I feel like it's becoming my own little sexist thing that I keep saying with movies.  But nothing about this anthology was great.  There was the one scene that was good and one scene that probably could be good with some tweaking.  But everything about this felt rushed and cheap and that's the last thing such an important movie needed.