Lethal sorority: “Black Widows” is the film the world needs right now
This is the story of the three best friends Darcy (Jordan Elizabeth Goettling), Nora (Brigitte Graham) and Olivia (Shelby Kocee). They look happy and fulfilled, but they have problems with the men in their lives. On her three-month anniversary, Darcy finds out that her boyfriend is married, in a scene in which the clever camera angle reveals pure rage in the cheated wife’s eyes. Nora is in an abusive relationship with a very jealous man. Olivia may look happily married, but her husband is violent and, when she fills for divorce, he starts making threats. And we are not done yet.
Darcy goes out with a man she has met through a dating website. Everything seems fine. But we all know that the worst things happen in the most improbable scenarios. She goes on a second date, goes to his house and they have sex. It’s not yet time to believe in fairy tales. When Darcy is in the bathroom, he grabs her and forces her to have sex again with him, this time against her will. For him, it’s the fulfillment of a sexual fantasy. For Darcy and any other sensible person, it’s clear: it’s rape.
We don’t usually see films about date rape. We don’t usually discuss date rape. In a society in which the very meaning of “consent” is not understood, it’s hard to believe that a woman could be raped by someone she knows, or even someone she is in a relationship with. But it happens more often than we think: whenever the “no” is ignored, the boundary is crossed, the statistics increase.
Jordan Elizabeth Goettling, writer and leading actress, was really date-raped in real life. She plotted revenge with her friends against her rapist, and later was convinced that she could heal in a catharsis. So she wrote the screenplay for “Black Widows”. She is a very brace woman, because I can only imagine the intense pain she may have felt while reliving her experience as both a writer and actress.
Knowing that calling the police is useless in her case, Darcy reluctantly tells her friends what happened, and they plan revenge. They intend to humiliate the rapist by drugging him until he’s unconscious, writing “rapist” in his chest and leaving him in the desert naked to hitch-hike back home. Could a plan like this work? In the 2015 world, yes. In the 2016 world, when a rapist can become president of the most powerful country in the world, I don’t know. And it actually doesn’t… Not in the way they expected.
Films about female friendship are multiplying. In a happy coincidence, I wrote this weekend on my classic film blog about how this theme was hardly explored in classics: women were never friends in Old Hollywood films, only rivals. But things are changing. A non-indie film with similar revenge plot stars Cameron Diaz: “The Other Woman” (2014).
We’re seeing more films with those important themes because women are getting together to fight for their rights. We’re seeing the sense of sorority growing, and we’re witnessing the birth of several social movements, like Brazilian’s “Vamos Juntas?” (“Let’s Go Together”, a movement that encourages sorority and female-to-female support). And it’s amazing that this film is not only written by a female, but also directed, produced and has on its soundtrack only rocker girls!
The film doesn’t exactly suggest that women should seek revenge. It’s not the moral of the film. By the way, who created the rule that films must teach something, like an Aesop’s fable? This films is not a fable, it’s a black comedy — in its darkest form.
If this film teaches us something, it is something hard to believe by November 2016, but something I hope that happens: it teaches us that the future will be female.
