Damsel
They fight and bite and fight and bite and fight.
Bite Bite Bite Fight Fight Fight, it's the Eleven and
Dragon Show!
dir: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
2024
Maybe this flick doesn’t need to exist, but I super duper enjoyed it anyway.
Anyone who has watched Stranger Things on Netflix has already seen hundreds of hours of Millie Bobby Brown playing a kickass character who suffers a whole hell of a lot. This flick Damsel has her playing a character who doesn’t have superpowers, but does suffer a whole hell of a lot before she maybe triumphs, or dies in shame.
Either way it requires you to be on board right from the start. And it’s a pretty slow start, let me tell you.
When the movie starts, it’s set in a fantasy / medieval land possibly called Generica which could just as easily be the beginning of Frozen or Brave or any other kind of place where women have long cumbersome dresses and braided hair, and the men are either chubby old guys with long hair and beards, or young ponces. It’s all doublets and curtsying and thees and thous with weirdly dodgy British accents. Even in fantasy realms people have to sound like posh plumy jerks at all times. Even Angela Bassett.
Elodie (Millie Bobby Brown) is a princess from an impoverished realm. She is essentially sold by her father into marriage, to somewhere on an island. Long build up, lots of mystery and ambiguity, and then the other shoe drops (when she is thrown into a pit).
The island kingdom tricks other realms into sending their daughters, they marry the women in a sham marriage, somehow share their blood with them, and then throw them in a pit in order to satisfy the beast that lives below.
It’s a common story, as in, it’s familiar to anyone who’s ever heard or read any stories, ever. The theme of sacrificing people to monsters, gods, volcanoes etc is as old as humanity, I think, considering the place it holds in almost all old cultures’ mythologies. The theme of sacrificing young women for the “good” of society, well, it’s the very definition of patriarchy: women viewed as commodity, and valued in ways that takes none of their personhood or autonomy into account.
And arranged marriages? Well, it’s all about sacrifice, isn’t it?
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