“Their movies didn’t make it to me”: The 1999 movie that opened Greta Gerwig’s eyes to female directors
In 2024, Greta Gerwig made history when she released Barbie, becoming the first female filmmaker to gross over $1billion, which was monumental because ever since cinema emerged as an art form over a century ago, women have significantly struggled to have their voices heard, the ratio of male versus female directors strikingly huge.
While the first ever narrative film can actually be credited to the groundbreaking early silent filmmaker Alice Guy Blache, as cinema became a popular mode of entertainment, women were quickly sidelined.
The belief seemed to be that a woman couldn’t possibly have the skill to command a whole cast and crew, to be a boss, and moreover, what’s the best way to keep the status quo intact? To employ white male filmmakers whose work avoids difficult topics, such as racism or sexism. Of course, as cinema became a bigger and bigger industry, these topics became unavoidable within filmmaking, because they’re such significant parts of the human experience.
Female filmmakers, and anyone who wasn’t a white man, slowly but surely came to make movies. But don’t ignore the emphasis on ‘slowly’, here. For many years during the Golden Age of Hollywood, there were no active female filmmakers, and it wasn’t until Julie Dash made Daughters of the Dust in 1991 that the first film directed by an African-American woman hit mainstream theatres.
It’s bewildering that it took that long, but even in the ‘90s, female filmmakers were a rarity. For Gerwig, then a budding movie lover, the existence of female directors seemed like some fantasy that she wasn’t quite sure existed or not. She hardly knew that this was an option for her, that she could one day pick up a camera and direct a movie that would change pop culture forever.
“‘I didn’t know a single female filmmaker until college, because their movies didn’t make it to me,” she told Time Out. But then she saw a certain movie that opened her eyes to the possibility of being a filmmaker, and she never looked back. She knew from that moment on that maybe, after all, there was a space for her in the industry to do what men have long had no difficulties in executing.
“Then, when I was at college, I watched a movie I didn’t even know was directed by a woman until the credits rolled: Claire Denis’ Beau Travail. It was the first moment I realised women could make movies,” she explained.
Denis had made several movies before Beau Travail, like Chocolat (not to be mistaken with that Johnny Depp romance movie) and Nenette and Boni, but when she released her 1999 film, a stunning study of masculinity, she earned widespread recognition outside of her native France. Denis had plenty of experience, having even worked as an assistant director on Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas in 1984, but for the first time, she gained the proper praise that she long deserved.
Beau Travail is a sizzling tale of gender and sexuality, with the film following Galoup, a retired French Foreign Legion officer, as he reflects on the jealousy he felt when a new recruit, Sentain, joined the squad in Djibouti for training, winning the attention of commanding officer Forestier.
There’s a lot of repression and tension at play, with the movie ending with a mesmerising dance sequence featuring Galoup, played by Denis Lavant, moving frantically to ‘Rhythm of the Night’. Gerwig, like most wannabe filmmakers who watch Beau Travail, was so deeply inspired that she ultimately began taking her own steps towards making movies. And clearly it paid off.
