At first, everything went swimmingly. Never had a film by a female director been given such royal treatment in Cannes. The second feature from French film-maker Eva Husson was given the festival’s best screening slot on the Saturday evening. And to accompany the film’s team up the red carpet, Girls of the Sun got the best fan base it could possibly wish for: 82 female film professionals, all there to celebrate women’s empowerment. As the Hollywood activist Melissa Silverstein tweeted: “I am honoured to share that I will be one of the 82 women on the steps of the Palais tonight. We will stand for the 82 women directors who have been in the official selection. 1,645 films have been directed by men. This is very emotional for me and is massive milestone towards change. Thunderous.” Finally, to add to this historic moment, the film’s topic, Kurdish female soldiers fighting against Islamic State in the winter of 2015, promised to be both powerful and emotional.
Two hours later, Girls of the Sun’s director, actors and producers got the usual standing ovation in the main Lumière cinema. Silverstein tweeted: “Thunderous, long ovation following Girls of the Sun. It was the kind of movie they say women can’t make. A war story. Epic. Big scale. All told through the eyes of women. The epitaph read: ‘to the ones forgotten by history by those who shape it.’ Eva Husson is the real deal.” She had probably forgotten that Kathryn Bigelow has been making some of the best war films for decades. However, the majority of critics who had watched the film in the nearby Debussy theatre were left reeling with shock as the end credits rolled. “Immoral,” shouted a Spanish critic, as boos broke out.
Apart from the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw – who seemed to have enjoyed the film and found it “a powerful, forceful story”, giving it four stars – an overwhelming majority of us critics found the film appalling: dreadfully written, poorly directed, verging on obscenity for treating tragedy with Valkyrie-like music and aestheticised images. “Insultingly bad,” one colleague said to me. “It cheapens everything it touches,” said another. How right they were. Girls of the Sun is immoral, as the Spanish film critic shouted, because it used a good cause for self-aggrandisement instead of serving it.
Girls of the Sun is far from being a feminist film. The two main protagonists, a French female war reporter and a female Kurdish fighter, are defined mostly by motherhood: one flees her young daughter because she can’t handle the fact that her daughter is the spitting image of her recently deceased husband; the other has enrolled in the Kurdish army in order to get back her young son, who has been kidnapped by Isis. Never do we get to know those female characters as political, active people. When – spoiler alert – the Kurdish female commander finds her son, the film ends and her advice to the wounded French reporter is to go back home and look after her daughter. Kurdistan can wait.
Disagreements between critics who loathed the film and the few who enjoyed it could have stopped here, had it not been for the moralistic brigade who have taken healthy criticism as a personal affront. Silverstein, on hearing that the ratings for the film on the professional film movie database IMDb weren’t exactly glowing, tweeted: “Fuck IMDb and all the other male-centric places that people use to define the quality of movies. Ignore.” Followed a few hours later by: “So folks. Has there been a review written by a female on Girls of the Sun? I’ve only seen male-written reviews and women are responding very differently to it.”
Film critics judge films as human beings, aided by their knowledge of cinema and its history. They judge a film objectively and subjectively: they consider the mise en scène, editing, framing, acting, and they also respond emotionally – an emotion built on their shared humanity. To think that your gender, and by extension, the colour of your skin, your age, your religion or lack of, the size of your bank account, predetermines your every thought is denying our ability to think and decide freely and to engage with the world in all its diversity and complexity. There is such a thing as universal human experience: it is what binds us all together.
Activism never makes for great art, nor does it make for great journalism. The feminist cause is far better served by artists, male or female, white or black, young or old rather than by the thought police. If movements such as #MeToo allow themselves to be co-opted by moralists, they risk losing credibility, and they stifle creativity.
Girls of the Sun is an exploitative film that doesn’t have the courage, calm and purpose of the Kurdish female fighters it claims to depict. The irony is that only a few hours after the screening of Girls of the Sun, Cannes gave us the most feminist film of the festival. It is called Three Faces and is the quiet, subtle and beautiful work of art of a 57-year-old male Iranian, Jafar Panahi. He also happens to be an artist.
