Opinion
“One of the greatest tragedies in modern society,” said Chloé Zhao at the London Film Festival, ”is that we forgot the power of the crone, the power of the grandmothers and grandfathers and elders in society. And that we stopped gathering around them. We stopped going to them to help make decisions about how this tribe should work.”
It’s not easy being a crone in Hollywood. Women over 50, or even 40, who still glam up, and turn up, are subjected to the kind of exacting, often cruel scrutiny that would make the couch seem a far preferable option to the red carpet.
The lighting was apparently so harsh at this year’s post-Oscars Vanity Fair party that one actress spent the whole time on her phone yelling at her publicist, then went home and cried herself to sleep.
The Hollywood Reporter quoted a “VF Insider” saying: “It was just so unforgiving. Like being shot in extremely high-def. You saw a lot of excess pounds and wrinkles that used to be hidden. Nobody wants to be photographed like that!”
One problem with this whole charade is that it is just such a boring, limiting way to view women.
During this year’s awards season, past the parade of “best” and “worst” dressed, and those just trying to keep it together in a world of seemingly infinite judgment, came the sweetest relief in the figure of Chloé Zhao. The Beijing-born director is a marvel, an illumination in a sea of dross, talking with depth and sincerity about grief and loss and joy and dancing and pain.
I could weep every time I hear her speak, just like I wept during her beautifully crafted film Hamnet because she is so true and so wise. Because she wrestles with the real stuff, with who we are and how we go on. Because it does not matter what she wears; when she opens her mouth, she can make you catch your breath. She is both exceptional and relatable, with a gleaming poetic energy, and I hope we hear more from her.
Let me explain why. First, she grapples with grief in an open way, which is not coy and not sentimental, which recognises its howling emptiness – and yet also our capacity to endure, to live with and beyond grief. That this is part of love. This is powerfully evident in Hamnet, which is such an emotionally powerful and wrenching movie about the death of Shakespeare’s young son from the plague, an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s wonderful novel. O’Farrell had wanted to explore what the impact of the death of the 11-year-old Hamnet was on his father’s later writing of Hamlet.
Zhao insists that grief might be helped, but not resolved, by talking about it. “Ultimately,” she says, “one has to feel it, in order to transcend grief, or alchemise grief – and, more importantly, feeling the love that is on each side of grief. Because one cannot grieve unless they have loved deeply, deeply, and have a tremendous amount of empathy. So how do you get the audience to feel instead of just think about it? When they feel, it’s not just the character’s grief and love, it’s their own. For me, it’s about trying to capture something that you can’t quite grasp.”
By the end of the film, you understand grief is bordered by joy, and perhaps even faith.
Second, her creativity is rooted in empathy. She says that she makes decisions “from the feeling place instead of from intellect”. Steven Spielberg, who was her producer on Hamnet, described her as “the most spiritually empathetic director” he has ever known.
Zhao seems to have created quite an extraordinary environment on the set of Hamnet, where she used dream work interpretation as well as cathartic “dance takes”, where the cast shook out the emotions they were channelling in their performances. I have watched one of them – the final take – over and over, and each time found myself grinning at the exuberant joy.
From this came the inspired performances of Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal. When Buckley won the Oscar for best actress, she described the film as depicting “the chaos of a mother’s heart”.
Third, because Zhao speaks about spirituality without sounding daft, entwining Eastern and Western thought: the Japanese Shinto – believing every object has a spirit – that fascinated her as a child, and the symbolism of Carl Jung she found as an adult. (She told The New Yorker that her art has been shaped by her childhood love of manga, her relationship with the natural world and her neurodivergence.)
See the way she describes composer Max Richter, whose music defines Hamnet, when presenting him with the Berlinale Camera. He matters, she says, “because today the world feels really busy and really fast and loud. We have so much, and we somehow feel emptier inside. And in modern society we don’t have the time skills or safe spaces or even sometimes permission to descend into ourselves. And I think Max knows this about the modern world, and I believe that it is because of this that sets him on a journey deep into himself to bring us the music that helps us to reclaim our own connection to our inner divinity. And that’s why so many of us turn to Max’s music at the most intimate and vulnerable moments of our live. Including at birth and at death. Because of it, his music says to us this life matters, stay with it. And, so we do.”
I’m so tired of seeing discussions about which woman had what facial procedure and who has failed the ever-shifting bar of modern femininity – and so interested in hearing new discussions about ways of loving, grieving, understanding the world and each other, rooted in ancient truths and enduring symbols. About continuing to value and nurture human creativity during the rise of the robots.
About the stuff that matters, this life that matters.
The strength of leadership doesn’t come from dominance, Zhao said to an admiring Bradley Cooper in Interview magazine. “It comes from interdependence within an ecosystem that needs to be carefully protected and tended. Interdependence doesn’t really fit the model our industry is built on, even the word director.”
It’s a revolutionary way to think, and one the world is hungering for.
Julia Baird is a journalist, author and regular columnist.
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Julia Baird is a journalist, author and regular columnist. Her latest book is Bright Shining: how grace changes everything.Connect via X, Facebook or email.
