Movies (gasp) with female leads

Ever heard of the Bechdel test? Named after the comic-strip artist and memoirist Alison Bechdel, it assesses movies according to a three-step formula. To pass the test, a film “(1) has to have at least two [named] women in it (2) who talk to each other (3) about something besides a man.”

Although a visit to the website bechdeltest.com suggests that things have been improving recently, the test underscores the reality that most films are presented primarily with male protagonists and from a male perspective.

In an article in the New York Times (“Hollywood’s Year of Heroine Worship,” Dec. 6), film critic A.O. Scott points out that 2012 has been not only a good year for movies but “a pretty good year for female heroism.”

He names some movies with female protagonists: Snow White and the Huntsman, Brave, Hunger Games, Beasts of the Southern Wild and Zero Dark Thirty. This can be misleading, though, since the top-selling movies of the year, such as The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, The Amazing Spider Man and Skyfall feature mostly male heroes and are geared to a male (mostly teenage) audience.

And when we get to the Oscar race for best picture, the favorites, among whom may be Argo, Flight, Lincoln and The Master, feature male leads. An exception likely will be Zero Dark Thirty, which, though it features a female lead, is about the hunt for and killing of Osama bin Laden and thus appeals to male audiences.

While there are more Hollywood movies with female leads, these parts often resemble male leads in action films—they fight and kill their enemies.

Scott laments the loss of an earlier era, when Hollywood took “pride in its ‘woman’s pictures,’ a category that embraced many of the immortal romances and melodramas of the studio era and that made actresses like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Ingrid Bergman into powerful industry players as well as adored stars.”

That era also included many intelligent comedies with strong female characters. Such films are rarer today.

One place to broaden one’s exposure to female roles is in foreign films, either through Netflix or other sites. Many French films have strong female leads that aren’t under 30.

And if you look at British TV shows, you often find female leads who are older, not always strikingly beautiful and don’t look anorexic.

Beyond simply finding films with female leads, it is rewarding to find films with interesting characters. In such films, the characters develop and face complex situations beyond merely seeking revenge for some despicable act.

Scott offers some examples from this year. One is Amour, which won Canne’s Palme d’Or last May, tells of a couple in their 80s. Scott writes: “Anne, who is a wife, a mother, a musician and a teacher and whose decline and death, in the company of her faithful husband, Georges, constitute as intensely particular and as grandly universal a story as you could want. Anne is completely (and painfully) human. She is more than the sum of her domestic, artistic and professional roles, even though she bears the traces, in her extraordinary face, of the various roles she has performed.”

Films can serve to show us life and introduce us to new understandings of our life in this world. Portraying that world too exclusively from a male perspective does not serve us.