Damsel

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?

Elodie is obviously the Damsel of the title, and she’s definitely in distress, because she’s been thrown into a pit. But she’s not really waiting to be rescued. Whatever she wanted or aspired to before, none of that means anything anymore. All the jewels and costly fabrics she was encased in at the wedding have to be shed or transformed into something else in order to survive down, somehow, in the mountain.

Many of the dangers she faces are just from the fact that it’s a dangerous place. There’s more holes down in the hole, it’s dark, she could fall more. Claustrophobics should definitely not watch this flick. She gets belted around and damaged, burned and scored, and yells a lot, sometimes in fear, sometimes in defiance.

And that’s even before we get to the dragon that hates her and definitely wants to kill her, like, really badly. The dragon, surprisingly enough, speaks English, so it spends a lot of time taunting Elodie, or trashtalking her and others, making demands, being particularly bothersome and murderous.

I am going to type a sequence of letters here. They might not make any sense to you. It’s okay if they don’t. Shohreh Aghdashloo is a phenomenal Iranian-American actress, who’s been in a bunch of things over the years. She plays a major character on the great Amazon sci fi series The Expanse. She has a very particular voice. It sounds like she’s smoked a thousand cigarettes a day at least for the last twenty years. She gives a purring menace to this creature, which at least matches the ferocity of the CGI beast we see on the screen that is constantly trying to kill Elodie.

If none of the set up or the setting sounds appealing, well, nothing I’m going to say is going to change minds. I really enjoyed the parts where Elodie is desperately trying to survive and be resourceful. Parts where humans were talking with other humans, eh, generally they didn’t appeal as much.

Some people, especially ones that tend to get angry when the main character is not played by a white male, will bristle at what they feel is the implausibility of a human female surviving a fall, living by her wits, and triumphing not only against a powerful enemy, but also literally destroying a patriarchal system that was sending a steady stream of innocent victims to their deaths. On the other hand, I live for this kind of stuff.

I love that she survives not only because she’s determined, and very pissed off at the predicament that she finds herself in, and not just because she’s willing to do anything to survive, and, eventually, save her sister as well. She survives also because of the other young women who were sacrificed, who survived for as long as they could, and left something of a record, in order to help the other sacrifices that they knew would come after them.

The cumulative knowledge and wisdom of women in dire circumstances shared down through to the next generations – there’s a word for that. I’m not going to use it, though, mostly because a man directed it and a man wrote the screenplay. I don’t make the rules, but I’m also reluctant to call something when men called the shots a feminist masterpiece because, that’s just nonsense, that is.

It’s the same kind of nonsense that tricked us back in the day into saying shit like “Wow, Joss Whedon is such a great creative guy and is all about empowering young women because he created a great show like Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, and then we find out the truth (about what an absolute prick he was to plenty of people, but mostly women). The truth always outs, especially with guys who purport to create such empowering ‘feminist’ narratives.

All the better to eat you with, says the big bad wolf.

But that’s not to say I have anything bad to say about this director. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo made an absolute pearler of a flick many years ago called Intacto, which is without doubt one of the most amazing flicks I’ve ever seen, dealing as it does in surreal ways with the concept of luck. That film was phenomenal, and was probably made with a budget that, for this flick, wouldn’t have even covered the aspect of the budget devoted to Millie Bobby Brown’s lip gloss. And whatever I might have implied about the director or the screenwriter, there’s no doubt the person with the most power in this movie’s production was probably Millie Bobby Brown. Like a star ascendent, and like someone credited as the Executive Producer, I doubt a single scene in this flick wasn’t to her liking.

We’ve watched her grow up from a monosyllabic, frightened kid with a shaved head into a powerful Hollywood player with clout, so, more power to her. I have no notes. Dodgy accents aside she brings as much ferocity to this role as she does in her other more famous Netflix series which I am sure she will eventually transcend and leave in the dust. She has starred in a couple of other flicks already as the lead, so, at least until her parents steal all her money or she ends up in rehab, I think she’ll keep picking and choosing her roles with care, and with an eye for stuff which smashes the old narratives.

In some ways this flick is its own thing, and in others you can’t help feeling it’s slightly indebted to the Khaleesi / Daenarys Targaryen story in the Game of Thrones tv series, except this is the Khaleesi when she’s liberating (some) people, and punishing the guilty.

You know, before she goes all genocidal, sorry for the spoilers.

It helps that the face of this awful royal family is Robin Wright, who, despite being a great actor, and most famous in fantasy films for her role as Buttercup in the classic Princess Bride. She is so hateful in her role as the main instrument of these poor girls’ destruction, that when she gets her comeuppance, it’s really quite enjoyable. Let’s hope she finds that special place in hell reserved for women who perpetuate the worst aspects of patriarchy against other women.

And that dragon… she is women’s vengeance made flesh, and fire, here to cleanse the realm of this ancient fuckery, to do away with patriarchy, and the aristocracy, hopefully, to lead these peasants to a bright new day, maybe through collectivism, or anarchy, who knows. Either way, it will be a dragon-led recovery, with Elodie at the helm, and the dragon doing whatever the fuck it wants.

And the men, rightly, will be shaking in their boots Huzzah!

7 times there was not enough eating of bad people out of 10

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“Death is not enough for you. You will know my pain.” – promises, promises - Damsel