“Based on events that occurred in the director's life.
The actress who plays Martha was also raped in high school.
The names and places have been changed,” is explained at the beginning of
Not a Pretty Picture
(1976), the brave and devastating debut feature of the American filmmaker Martha Coolidge (director of the cult romantic comedy
Valley Girl
or chapters of popular American series such as
Sex and the City
or
CSI: Las Vegas
), restored in 2022 by the Academy Film Archive and the Film Foundation, selected by director Céline Sciamma for the Retrospective section of the 2023 Berlinale, and now distributor Atalante has just re-released it in Spanish cinemas.
In 1962, when she was a 16-year-old boarding school student, Martha Coolidge was raped by an older classmate who invited her to go to a party with other friends.
It was already in college, at the age of 20, when she started going to therapy and she knew how to identify that what she had suffered was rape.
“I didn't date anyone for two years.
The following year I went to another center.
I remember going on a couple of dates and crying all the time,” Coolidge says at one point in the film.
12 years later, that event would give rise to what would be her first feature film, a mixture of fiction and documentary in which the director faces, analyzes and reflects on this sexual assault experienced firsthand and tries to recreate the circumstances in which it occurred. which was developed with a group of actors in a New York loft.
Still from the film 'Not a pretty picture'.JANUS FILMS
Almost 50 years after its release,
Not a Pretty Picture
not only remains a pioneering film in the cinematographic representation of the culture of abuse and rape and the sense of consent (that too), but a work that dialogues in a surprising and chilling with the present.
Am I the one who got into that situation?
Did I somehow cause myself to be raped?
Do I have any responsibility for what happened?
Does having certain fantasies make me guilty?
Could I have avoided it?
Maybe the guy's intention wasn't to hurt me and I did something that led to it?
What have been the consequences of what happened?
Why has this happened to me?
These are some questions that arise in the conversations between the director and the two protagonists – Michele Manenti, who also suffered a rape when she was a teenager and Jim Carrington, who tries to understand and at times justify his character's behavior – and that probably Many other victims of sexual violence continue to arise today.
In the New York
loft
where the rape is recreated, Coolidge creates the space for the staging of the events from reflection and debate with the cast of the film, giving voice and freedom to the different points of view of the actors and the actors. characters they play.
“It occurs to me that, just as I voluntarily lent myself to this film, I just as voluntarily asked for a man to abuse me in this way,” Manenti begins by revealing when he tries to explain to Coolidge his motivation for making the film.
“The only question I think you could ask yourself is whether you could have done something to prevent it,” Carrington says, thinking that this is helping them, or: “I know of many cases, from when I was in college, where a woman technically they were raping her because she was not giving consent.
It was supposed to be something mutual, but… And there wasn't necessarily any bad intention on his uncle's part, it was just that at that moment he needed it and he believed that what he did was right.”
It is in that conversation that arises between them throughout the film where one of its most interesting aspects lies, which ends up becoming a revealing mirror of what we are as a society, of the disturbing power dynamic inherent to sexual violence, of how we face abuse depending on the place from which we experience it.
Martha Coolidge in 1991.Everett Collection / CORDON PRESS
The eternal blaming of the victim, the difficulty of understanding the reason for abuse, of living with it despite having turned the page, how this feeling of guilt and shame has been socially constructed, the false image of the sexual aggressor, how often The aggressor is someone normal and ordinary, apparently harmless, from the environment and trust of the victim, who can have several faces depending on the context and those who are by his side, the distance between fantasy and reality, between the frames in which an imagined event and another real one happen, the sense of consent, how deeply rooted and widespread rape culture is in society, the complicit silence of those who know and decide to look the other way.
All of this is reflected in a film in which violence emerges from phrases that are still as normalized today as “What are you doing here if you don't want to kiss me?”
and that in the eyes of many transfer the responsibility for the abuse to the victim.
“And here I am, 28 and a half years old, and I have never had a serious relationship with a man.
Sometimes I wonder... Maybe it's to protect myself.
Partly it may be for protection.
That is to say, I think it would take something incredible, something special, that surely does not exist, for him to be able to trust me, because... Because it scares me a lot," Martha Coolidge ends up confessing in a heartbreaking sequence.
And that is possibly where the most devastating part of the film is, seeing how an abuse or rape marks the life of the victim forever (even if he manages to “turn the page”, there is a wound and a fear that does not go away), in the realization that despite the passage of time things have not changed as much as it may sometimes seem, that despite the necessary progress made we still do not have sufficient answers to confront rape culture.