Woman of the Month: General Nanisca

General Nanisca from The Woman King

Nanisca is to The Woman King what Maximus was to Gladiator: not just the protagonist of an historical epic, but the entry point through which an audience can be introduced to a very different time and place; a character who is not only of the world they inhabit, but also someone that embodies the recognizably human traits of honour, bravery and familial ties. Both have endured a horrific tragedy, both are formidable fighters, and both are driven by a deep loyalty to those around them.

Of course, if you want someone who can pull all that off, you cast Viola Davis. She’s a force of nature in this movie, which is no mean feat when you’re in your mid-fifties – something I’m only mentioning because she herself brought it up in various interviews. Her age is woven into the basis of her characterization, and there are several times in which we see her tend to long-standing injuries or physically struggle to keep up with the younger warriors.

There’s also an inner conflict between her sense of duty and her moral compass – every time she disciplines new recruit Nawi, the audience is very aware that she herself is a rule-breaker.

In short, Nanisca is the quintessential protagonist of an historical epic. Everything about her – her background, her personality, her status, her trauma – is larger than life. I was genuinely moved by some of her scenes with Nawi, and her emotional arc is the main thoroughfare of the film. Towards the end of the film she tells another character: “you are not the thing that hurt me” and I bawled my eyes out.

More than anything, this is a story of healing, which isn’t something that was apparent in any of the reviews or promotional material surrounding the film’s release. Nanisca is a striking example of a woman who suffered a terrible ordeal, and yet has the strength to find her way back out of the darkness. Everything else in the film is secondary (or supplementary) to this inner journey.

For this reason, I’m aware but not hugely worked up about the liberties taken with the portrayal of Dahomey, which is the advantage of being an adult who can grasp that history and entertainment seldom go hand-in-hand. Because The Woman King isn’t just a depiction of this specific time and place, it’s a story about women and their connections to each other – largely for good, sometimes for bad, but as part of a much more complex and nuanced portrayal of womanhood than anyone seemed to give the film credit for.

Reading/Watching Log #89

Over the Easter break, I made it my goal to watch one eighties fantasy film per night, partly because why not, and partly because I’m so exhausted with the churn of today’s media. At the risk of sounding like an old fogey, nothing excites me anymore – all the biggest franchises are just remakes and reboots and sequels and prequels and I am SO BORED with all of it. So I deemed it was time to revisit my childhood and watch some cult-classics.

They ended up being The NeverEnding Story, Ladyhawke, Legend, Labyrinth, The Princess Bride and Willow. Good times.

This post also kicks off SLAVIC FANTASY MONTH, which may well last until the end of the year given all the books I have to read in this niche subgenre. It’s something I’ve been organizing for a while now, with at least twenty-five books based on Slavic folklore and legend stacked in a neat pile next to my bookcase:

It’s going to take me a while to get through all of these, so buckle up.

And as it happens, I’m about to start a new job. I’ll still be a librarian, but at a different – much bigger – library. I have mixed feelings. The position I was in was full-time, but its permanency depended on whether the colleague I had taken over for would be able to secure a promotion in another library.

And... she wasn’t. Which means that when I was offered a full-time, permanent position elsewhere, I didn’t have much choice but to accept. On the one hand, I’m looking forward to a change of scenery and the chance to meet more people; on the other, I’m going to be well outside my comfort zone and forced into a half-hour commute in rush hour traffic each morning. That I’m not looking forward to, especially not in the dark winter months.

But it would seem the universe wants me to try something new, and who am I to argue with that? My mortgage won’t let me.

Legend of the Seeker: Dark

I’m back! No, I hadn’t forgotten about this show, I’ve just been swamped with other stuff – but in saying that, these reviews will probably go on hiatus for a while, as I really want to get to the third and final season of His Dark Materials.

But let’s have a quick catch-up first. When we last saw our heroes, they’d been forced to part ways, with Richard accompanying several Sisters of the Light (essentially kung fu nuns with magical powers and ninja-stars) to the Palace of the Prophets in the Old World (no context is given for either of these things, save that they’re shot through a gold filter to differentiate them from the New World) while Zed, Kahlan and Cara go in search of a replacement Seeker.

The head sister is called Verna, who has apparently been searching for Richard for the last twenty-four years (so if nothing else, we know they’re really bad at finding things) and has the solution to his debilitating headaches: to get the proper training that will allow him to balance out the potent magic of both his bloodlines. Richard wants to get there, learn what he has to, and leave again ASAP, though it’s obvious that Verna has other plans...

Woman of the Month: Evelyn Quan Wang

Evelyn Quan Wang in Everything Everywhere All at Once

Some of these entries chose themselves, and this month was always going to be Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang. What a character, what a performance!

She’s a middle-aged Chinese-American immigrant and laundromat owner who is clearly enduring rather than enjoying her life. With a stressful tax audit, a judgmental visiting father, a husband vying for a divorce, and a gay daughter whose orientation she still wants to keep under-wraps, Evelyn is not the most auspicious heroine of any type of movie. But as Yeoh said in her Oscar acceptance speech: “ladies, don't let anybody tell you you're ever past your prime.”

While at the IRD office, an alternative-world version of her husband Waylan pulls her into a janitor’s closet and gives her some mindboggling news: the multiverse is real, and in his reality, Evelyn is a genius scientist who discovered a way of sending her consciousness into every version of herself across the aforementioned multiverse. But in doing so, Evelyn destroyed the mind of her own daughter, who is now a nihilistic supervillain intent on destroying all existence, in every version of reality.

Evelyn has to – you know, stop her. With a quick primer on how mental world-hopping works, Evelyn is soon tapping into the knowledge and skills of her alt-world doppelgangers, learning more about herself and her family in the process – from the life she would have led had she never married Wayland (which looks like her life as Michelle Yeoh) to what history would have been like if humankind evolved hotdog fingers.

The most important thing about Evelyn as a character is that the film doesn’t shy away from her very-real faults. She does treat her husband and daughter badly. She does have a grim and unappealing outlook on life. She is a real struggle to be around. The disappointment on her daughter’s face when Evelyn describes her girlfriend as a “good friend” to her grandfather hits like a freight train. She hurts the people she’s supposed to care about, and it’s from the bottom of this pit that Evelyn must climb.

Or as this review points out: It's a story about an anonymous loser who discovers that they are actually incredibly special, but whereas most stories like this focus on young people, here the heroine is middle aged and trying to come to terms with the fact that she's probably made all the big choices in her life already—and what makes her special, it turns out, is that all those choices were the wrong ones. (Also, let's not ignore how unusual it is for a woman to be the protagonist of this sort of story, much less a woman of colour.)

The levels of characterization that the screenplay gives his woman is extraordinary, and Yeoh is more than capable of parsing through them all. This movie – as its title indicates – is about so many things, and Evelyn is at the axis of all that, juggling the multitude of storylines and characters that ripple out from our first glimpse of her sitting at a cluttered desk, grumpily rifling through tax-related forms. I hope I get the chance to watch it again soon, as I guarantee you’ll spot something new and ingenious each time.

Reading/Watching Log #88

This was a month of FINALLY finishing shows that I started ages ago and then neglected to finish in a timely manner, as well as a slew of children’s books, a trip to the Court Theatre, a couple of graphic novels, and two fantastic, absolutely-recommend movies.

Naturally I’ve seen the second season of Shadow and Bone, but I’ll hold off talking about it until I can write up a proper post in its honour, but believe me when I say I live in fear of it being cancelled. I’ve no idea how confident Eric Heisserer is about his proposed Six of Crows spin-off, but he clearly set up for it in this season (somewhat to its detriment) and adapting the Ice Court heist is blatantly the reason he came on board in the first place. If Netflix doesn’t come through, then I think it’ll be the end of streaming services for me. I’ve been burnt too many times by cancelled and unfinished stories that I just don’t have the energy to care anymore.

Easter is also on the horizon, and I’ve decided to make it Eighties Fantasy month: that means I’ll devote the long weekend to Labyrinth, The Neverending Story, Ladyhawke, Legend, The Princess Bride, and maybe The Dark Crystal – though I’ve been planning to watch that one in the context of all the most recent books, graphic novels, and (cancelled) Netflix show, so we’ll see.

King's Quest: Romancing the Throne

After the success of Quest for the Crown, a sequel was inevitable, and the nature of its quest obvious. Having won the crown and the throne in the previous game, what does a young king need next? A wife and heir, obviously. The magic mirror retrieved during the course of Quest for the Crown is the perfect device with which to introduce Graham to his would-be bride, and the opening act depicts a lonely Graham glimpsing a lovely maiden in the glass.

He's informed by the mirror that her name is Valanice, and that she’s trapped in a quartz tower behind three magical doors located in the nearby land of Kolyma (I’ve no idea how to pronounce that). Exchanging his crown for his adventurer’s cap, he sets off to find her. Because, you know, it’s totally fine for a king to just leave his kingdom to go off and do this sort of thing, and he doesn’t even bother to take any coins from the ever-replenishing chest or the magical shield that can protect him from all harm.

Romancing the Throne (an obvious play on Romancing the Stone) was released in 1985, and uses the same interface, “wrap-around” geography, and AGI game engine as its predecessor. In fact, of all seven games in this series, Quest for the Crown and Romancing the Throne are the most similar: each feature Graham as the protagonist, a threefold quest, villains that are easily evaded by simply not entering the screens they inhabit, a magical fairy helper that gives you a protective spell, and even the use of “Greensleeves” as the opening theme music.

As ever, non-violent solutions garner the player more points than using lethal force (except when a truly evil character needs to be taken out) and hidden treasures can be traded away – along with the points they accrue – in order to advance.  Many of the previous game’s bad guys have relocated to Kolyma, including the dwarf, the sorcerer and the big bad wolf, and there’s a clear narrative continuum between winning a kingdom and finding a bride.

They form a neat two-part story in the wider scope of the series, for starting with the very next game, writer/designer Roberta Williams shakes up the formula considerably, from the nature of the quests to the motivation of the protagonists, to the lack of single-screen villains, miscellaneous treasures, and helpful fairies that provide the player with temporary magical protection.

Woman of the Month: Zoe Reynolds

Zoe Reynolds from Spooks

I’ll admit that it was a bit of struggle to find a Woman of the Month for March. When I started this blog, I told myself I could only chose heroic female characters (no villains) and that I would limit myself to one per book, film or show. I also try to refrain from choosing a character until the entirety of her story is completed – you never know where she’s going to end up, and I've had one too many instances in which I would spotlight a female character right before she came to a sticky end. Occasionally I break these rules, but given that I’m in the middle of finishing or continuing a lot of shows that are well into their collective runs, I find myself scrambling to find a decent candidate.

So, let’s go with Zoe Reynolds. No, I have no idea where her story ends up, and given the nature of the show there’s a good chance it won’t have a happy ending, but I don’t have many options at this exact moment. (I suspect that if I was further along than season two, it would be Ruth Evershed getting profiled here, as I know she sticks around until the final season).

Like last month’s Camille Bordey, Zoe Reynolds is more of an archetype than a full-formed, three-dimensional character… and that’s okay. The general vibe of Spooks is one of secrecy and professionalism, and we learn very little about the backgrounds of our main cast beyond their basic training and specialized skill-sets. Their lives revolve around their jobs, and they exist almost entirely in the moment. This actually poses something of a challenge for the actors, as they’re required to convey internally complicated people beneath carefully controlled veneers – and for my money, it’s mostly through Zoe that the writers explore the strain between the necessities of the job and the allure of normalcy. Whenever she goes undercover (most notably as a high school teacher) you can tell she enjoys the perks of “civilian” life.

Although she’s a consummate professional, who can keep her head in high-stress situations and never loses sight of long-term objectives, every now and then her cold demeanour gets punctured. When a superior officer she admires is revealed to have been running phantom agents and pocketing the bribe money for herself, she’s distraught. When she learns the man she’s been seeing in a local pub is married, she ends up in tears in an office corridor. At the end of the day, she’s only human.

It’s fun seeing Keely Hawes in one of her first major roles, and I like that she has a short, practical haircut and is allowed to wear non-glamourous clothing to work. Every now and then she’s required to present herself as something of a honey trap, but it’s never gratuitous (*side-eyes Sidney Bristow in Alias, who spent most of her uncover work in a bikini*) and in many ways, she’s the antidote to all those sexy supermodel spies, being more likely to save the day from a boardroom while wearing sensible shoes than doing dangerous field work in an evening dress. Now, here’s hoping she doesn’t meet the same fate as poor Helen Flynn…