Jane Campion Out Front

In Campion’s adaptation of Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel, a rancher in 1925 Montana terrorizes his brother, his brother’s wife, and her teenaged son with his brutish manliness. “Never didactic,” writes Amy Taubin in Artforum, “Campion constructs the film around the power dynamic central to patriarchal rule: the binary, which requires the oppression of all women and the repression of the feminine within all men . . . In discussions of gender, we often refer to femininity as a masquerade, but seldom do we describe masculinity in that way. In the first of her eight theatrical features to have a man at the center, Campion exposes masculinity as just as much a mask—as armor against the exposure of vulnerability, tenderness, loss, and above all, forbidden desire for another man.”

For the first time in the history of the DGA, both the best feature and best first-time director awards went to women. Maggie Gyllenhaal, who won best film, director, and screenplay at the Film Independent Spirit Awards the previous weekend for her directorial feature debut, The Lost Daughter, called out Campion in her acceptance speech on Saturday. “Listen, I’ve seen so many incredible movies made by men,” she said. “I grew up learning that language until I was fifteen years old and I walked into the movies and saw The Piano. I had never seen anything like that. It changed me.”

Stanley Nelson won the DGA’s documentary award for Attica, which Odie Henderson, writing for RogerEbert.com, calls “a harrowing, infuriating look at racism and the abuse of power by people who see others as inhuman.” Barry Jenkins won the award for outstanding achievement in a movie for television or limited series with The Underground Railroad, his ten-part adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel.

Besides Campion, another big winner this weekend was Netflix, which is currently streaming both The Power of the Dog and The Lost Daughter. When ASIFA-Hollywood, the Los Angeles branch of the International Animated Film Association, presented thirty-one Annie Awards on Saturday, twenty of them went to productions distributed by Netflix. The bulk of these went to The Mitchells vs. the Machines—which swept the film side of the aisle, winning eight Annies, including best animated feature—and, with nine wins, Arcane, the series set in the universe of Riot Games’ League of Legends.

The Annie for best independent animated feature went to Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee, which tells the story of Armin, the director’s friend who left Afghanistan as a teenaged refugee and has since become an accomplished academic in Denmark. “Flee’s blend of 2D animation, expressionistic flourishes, and archival footage faithfully capture the chimerical contours of Amin’s mind as he relays the alternatingly real and surreal details of his life,” writes Marshall Shaffer at the top of his interview with Rasmussen for Slant.

While The Power of the Dog took the top prizes at the BAFTAs, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune actually won more of them—five—than any other film. “This was a movie that benefited from the reopening of cinemas,” writes the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, “a movie about a doomed colonial tyranny on a mineral-rich planet, a movie whose ineffable vastness has to be experienced on the big screen. These awards feel like justice, although they might reinforce the impression that Dune was a cloudy impressionistic experience: one giant visual effect whose actual narrative is fading in the memory. But it’s a massively audacious film and part of a vibrant tradition of epic movies.”

Ryusuke Hamaguchi had a pretty good weekend, too. While he was in London to accept his BAFTA for best film not in the English language, Drive My Car won best foreign language film at the Critics Choice Awards in Los Angeles. And just two days before, on Friday, Hamaguchi’s adaptation of a story by Haruki Murakami took eight top awards at the forty-fifth Japan Academy Film Prize ceremony in Tokyo.