Released in 1985, during the exuberant flowering of films by women brought on by second-wave feminism, Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk now feels less of those years than like a harbinger of the #MeToo movement, an early challenge to a cultural silence now broken wide open. At the same time, the film’s enduring power lies in its timelessness as a portrait of a young girl at the brink of womanhood—Laura Dern, in her first starring role—tested by an encounter with a sexual predator, played by Treat Williams, that we witness in a tour-de-force twenty-five minutes at the heart of the film.
Smooth Talk, Chopra’s first fiction feature, brought her wide attention, but by the time she made this Sundance prizewinner, she had been working for two decades as a documentarian. She had apprenticed with the Direct Cinema pioneers D. A. Pennebaker and Richard Leacock in the early sixties, learning from them both editing and how to use the portable 16 mm camera they helped invent that revolutionized documentary filmmaking; her first released film, the short A Happy Mother’s Day (1963)—about the Fischer quintuplets of Aberdeen, South Dakota—was a collaboration with Leacock. Regrettably, however—and predicting further obstacles she would face as a woman filmmaker—Chopra’s codirector credit was left out of the advertisements for the film. Nevertheless, she persisted, as the saying goes, the ambition to make her own films guiding her as she honed her craft.
I first met Chopra in 1971, when she walked into my consciousness-raising group. Our discussion that night—about whether to have children—was staged by Joyce and shot by one of our members, Claudia Weill, for a film they were working on together, Joyce at 34. They described the project as something then new in documentary: a “personal film.” Certain that having a child would change her life, Joyce was bringing her early Direct Cinema experience to what she would term a cinema-verité treatment of her own first year of motherhood.
Like many successful women of the time, Chopra had long taken for granted the opposition she faced, and was “barely aware of the feminist movement surging around me,” as she now recalls. Joyce at 34 changed that. Broadcast on public television in 1973, rapturously reviewed, and purchased for the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the film nonetheless failed to find a distributor—films about women did not attract audiences was the explanation she was given. Now Chopra became an activist, joining other feminist filmmakers in a cooperative called New Day Films, which sought to get their work—at first chiefly by and about women—to markets that included public libraries and colleges. Aided by endorsements from Gloria Steinem and Shirley MacLaine, the venture took off: “Each 16 mm print I put into a film can and hand-carried to the post office felt like a small victory,” remembers Chopra.
Joyce at 34 also brought Chopra her great subject: moments of change in women’s lives. Looking at the film again, I’m struck by how she staged improvisations to advance the story of what was, after all, a documentary—her deft juxtaposition of our CR group’s raucous discussion of motherhood with an old-fashioned kaffeeklatsch featuring her mother, a retired teacher, and some contemporaries of hers, sitting around a table talking about the compromises and pleasures motherhood had brought them. Chopra has sympathy for both generations, and the effect is refreshingly nonideological, as is the pure joy on Joyce’s face in the scene of the birth of her daughter—likely the first live birth shown in American film. One sees her eagerness to evoke rather than impose narrative again in Girls at 12 (1975), which tracks a group of white suburban girls as their ambitions to be scientists and astronauts fade into talk of makeup and boys—a perception that predicted Carol Gilligan’s research (“Confident at 11, Confused at 16” was the name of Francine Prose’s January 7, 1990, New York TimesMagazine cover story about Gilligan’s work); and in Clorae and Albie (also 1975), about two twenty-one-year-old friends, both Black, whose ongoing conversation exposes the chasm between what they desire and what has befallen them. This awareness of the undertow in the lives of women, even at the height of feminist optimism, also informs Smooth Talk.
In a marvelous coincidence, Joyce and I became next-door neighbors in 1978—I was a summer resident of Kent, a town in northwestern Connecticut, and she; her husband, Tom Cole; and their daughter, Sarah, had moved there full-time. I remember long afternoons when Joyce and I exchanged ideas about feminism and gossiped about our circle of friends, but most of all we talked about work. She’d screen a film, or I’d read her a new poem. At the time, Joyce was finishing a documentary, Martha Clarke Light & Dark: A Dancer’s Journal (1981); Clarke was an old friend of Joyce’s and a new friend of mine. Again, Joyce was making a film about a change in a woman’s life. Clarke, always a dancer, was becoming a choreographer. I expected the film’s sensitive attention, but I was stunned by its visual richness—striking images of Clarke’s quirky everyday gestures becoming choreographic moves and then dances. I knew Joyce was “burning to direct” a narrative feature, and I continued to be inspired by her perseverance in the face of crushing disappointments and near misses—a collaboration on a screenplay for a Hollywood film had been green-lighted and then canceled; she’d had to settle for producing a PBS film of Cole’s play Medal of Honor Rag because she was deemed too inexperienced to direct it. I was not surprised when one day she told me she’d optioned a story.
Written by Joyce Carol Oates in 1966, it was titled “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” “It has always haunted me,” Joyce said as she handed me a photocopy. “Tell me what you think.” Compact and chilling, the story centered around what seemed to me a freak encounter between a seducer, creepily named Arnold Friend, and a young girl. Still in my thirties and a committed feminist, I was unnerved by what I read as its pessimism. For Joyce, it hit a nerve. She’d had a brush with sexual assault as a girl and found herself fearful whenever Tom traveled and she was left home alone with Sarah. I lived in the country alone and without fear. I wanted stories that affirmed my optimism about the changes in women’s lives, not that explored undercurrents of danger I hadn’t yet confronted.
But my feelings soon changed. I was teaching a writing workshop for women in my living room. The flyers I posted at supermarkets and libraries had attracted eighteen participants, so many that half of them had to park in Joyce’s driveway next door. It took just a few meetings for one woman to reveal that she was a battered wife, and for another to write obliquely of her experience of incest. Despite having published a poem about my own childhood violation by a male babysitter, I was shocked by these revelations. Now I had a way of thinking about the story Joyce had given me, which she and Tom had begun to adapt. As I welcomed more discoveries and poems from my students, I began to understand that Oates’s story engaged something submerged in the lives of most women.
They called the movie Smooth Talk, after the smooth-talking seduction the screenplay takes almost verbatim from the story. But it was Tom and Joyce who filled in the life of a family on the outskirts of an American nowhere—especially the daughter Connie’s conflict with her mother (Mary Kay Place). “Sometimes, over coffee, they were almost friends,” Oates writes, until something came up and “their faces went hard with contempt.” And of the dynamic with Connie’s well-behaved older sister: “If June’s name was mentioned her mother’s tone was approving,” Oates writes, “and if Connie’s name was mentioned it was disapproving.” From those sentences, Tom and Joyce spun a complex and poignant family drama. The film offers a father (Levon Helm) who is loopy, kind, and checked-out, and, as a visual representation of her agitation, a mother who is endlessly redecorating the house. In a poignant invention of Cole’s, we see mother and daughter in separate rooms, both dancing to James Taylor’s song “Handy Man,” their respective sadnesses in sync with the lyrics: “I fix broken hearts / I know that I truly can.”
“No film I saw as a teenager so authentically dramatized my own confusion.”
What I remembered before seeing the film again: the play of fear and confusion across Connie’s face, clouded by a screen door, Arnold Friend just outside, each degree of mounting terror minutely portrayed by Dern; how sympathetically the camera tracks the disappointment and fearfulness beneath the mother’s hectoring; Connie’s physical recoil from her mother’s attempts to hug her. But most intensely I remembered Connie’s escape outdoors to the family orchard—pure image, the lusciousness of color, gold apples on a green grassy ground, the unexpected grace of such a tall girl, evoking for me the golden apples of Greek myth that tempt the beautiful huntress Atalanta during her race.
Watching the film now, I realize I’d forgotten the beginning. Three girls asleep on the beach, shocked awake, then racing to the mall for their ride home, Taylor’s “Limousine Driver” on their boom box as they hitch a ride with a guy driving a pickup—he’s the first hint of menace in the film, his scary flirtation a contrast to their giddy, childlike excitement. Connie arrives home, and there’s the fight with her mother, and her escape to that orchard with the golden apples.
The moment stayed with me, I realize, because it is the first contemplation in the film of Connie’s inner life, the cost of her struggle for independence. It brings back my own teenage fights with my mother, from which I took refuge in books of Greek myths that acknowledge the power of women and girls.
Later, Chopra rejoices in that girl power, when, at the mall, Connie and her friends break into a run, pulling bracelets and necklaces from their purses, cadging eyeliner and blusher at makeup counters, equipping themselves as women. Marvelous in Chopra’s cinema-verité observation is the moment when Connie, encouraged by her friends, removes her jacket to reveal herself in a new halter top, a gesture of independence and triumph, not of prurient display. “I know what you’re doing,” her mother says when she gets home. “I would never do that,” Connie insists, and we know she’s telling the truth—we’ve seen her in a boy’s embrace. “He held me so sweetly,” she says to her sister. If only her mother understood.
No film I saw as a teenager so authentically dramatized my own confusion. In 1959, when I was Connie’s age, three films about teenage girls, all starring Sandra Dee, were released—Douglas Sirk’s remake of Imitation of Life, in which Dee, the good white daughter, is set in contrast to Susan Kohner as the troubled light-skinned Black girl passing for white; A Summer Place, about a girl who gets knocked up, any other future erased by the unquestioned solution: marriage; and Gidget, my favorite, because the heroine becomes a surfer. Streaming Gidget now, though, I’m horrified at how Gidget is ridiculed for preferring books to boys, her close-to-tears upset made cute. When she confides her confusion, her mother reassures her that one day she’ll fall in love: “When it’s the real thing, you’ll know it. As surely as if you’d been hit on the head with a sledgehammer.” And the movie actually gives short shrift to her surfing, which I remembered as thrilling. No sooner does she become great on the waves than she falls for a surfer named Moondoggie, and abruptly morphs into a teenage Joan Crawford plotting his capture. In the end, the boy turns out to be an utterly appropriate boyfriend, in the final beach shot presenting his fraternity pin to Gidget in a prom dress, hair sprayed still.
How different the anticipatory glee when Connie and her best friend take themselves out to a hamburger joint, gorgeously filmed as an illuminated mecca of cars and boys and kissing couples, a gleaming jukebox blaring—“a sacred building that loomed up out of the night,” as Oates wrote it. The girls approach with the same jazzed velocity as they did the mall, now subsumed into a fiesta of sexuality and mating, underscored by music that rocks a little harder than the mellifluous Taylor songs earlier. It is here that we first see Arnold Friend focus his attention on Connie, who’s inside at the jukebox. “I’m watching you,” he says as she leaves with a boy she has just met—she sees him, then quickly looks away. It is days later, after another family battle, that Connie decides to stay home from a barbecue and Arnold drives up to the house in his beat-up gas-guzzler of a gold convertible.
We see what Connie sees—at first, a boy; then not a boy but a man in his thirties, a bit shopworn and with a pal along for the ride. Chopra gives us a flash of the playful teenager when Arnold first arrives, but the expression on Dern’s face quickly turns fearful and never settles. As Connie retreats behind the screen door, Arnold’s seduction—Williams’s portrayal, with his expert jabbing, acrobatics, flirtatious gestures, and provocative talk, is extraordinary—makes short work of her stab at being her own person. We’re both amused and filled with a visceral dread as we watch. He neither touches her nor crosses the screen-door barrier. No need to sever the phone line; Connie can’t even dial. Reduced to tears, she has only one defense, and it surrenders every vestige of her new autonomy: “Mommy, what do I do now?” What hangs in the air is a painful conundrum. How do we take care of girls, provide them with resources to keep them safe, without compromising the independence they need to become adults?
Now I’m remembering that in the myth of the golden apples, Atalanta loses the race and, against her own desire, must marry the prince. Second-wave feminism offered karate classes and began to shift the blame from girls and women to their predators. #MeToo has starkly exposed a predicament that still persists, but can it erase the dangers? In its refusal to be easy, Smooth Talk suggests that the myths that direct how girls come of age threaten their safe passage to womanhood. What new myths might we come up with? I’m thinking of that question when I remember Wonder Woman, the Patty Jenkins movie that came out in 2017, the year of the first Women’s March. The island of the Amazons, where the heroine grows up, is dedicated to peace, but in the way of movies, Diana (Gal Gadot) time-travels to an imagined World War I. It’s when she becomes aware of her superpowers, vanquishing an entire army of men, that I found myself unexpectedly in tears. In Smooth Talk, there’s a hint of such a realization. We see Connie slowly emerge from behind the screen door as if hypnotized—there’s no question she’ll get into the car with Arnold Friend. “You’re my sweet little blue-eyed girl,” he croons, and we’re sickened. But suddenly, a new toughness crossing her face, Connie pauses midstep and pulls herself up to her full height: “What if my eyes were brown?” she asks. It’s the beginning of her power.
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