Certain Women

CERTAIN WOMEN   ***

Kelly Reichardt

2016

IDEA:  Three women in Montana - a lawyer with a volatile client, a family woman looking to build new property, and an independent ranch hand - experience adversities small and large.

BLURB:  The women of Certain Women are steady, determined, and courageous in ways they never have to call attention to. Kelly Reichardt, whose filmmaking is shorn of any shred of didacticism or bombast, gets this, and presents them plainly: never are they dramatically elevated to symbols of a particular gendered condition, but shown as humans negotiating the particulars of their socio-cultural environment. In this case, that’s an American West that Reichardt has remarkably demystified and empowered at once. Written and hegemonically upheld by Man, she doesn’t so much reimagine the landscape from a contemporary female perspective as demonstrate how its ideals are experienced and reworked through various female subjectivities. Law, property, and freedom, those sacrosanct male-scripted institutions, are undertaken by the women of Reichardt’s film, who operate within their patriarchal constraints while asserting their own agencies. Certain Women is not after a polemical call-to-arms but an inductive observation of social roles prescribed by gender and, in the superior final chapter of its triptych, by class, race, and sexuality. Reichardt offers neither a fantasy to redress systemic inequality nor a jeremiad; in the fashion befitting her unsentimental, understated style, she simply shows women living their lives, compelling us to realize that when it comes to the art of the West, that’s a quietly revolutionary thing indeed.