Who really likes anthology movies? We’re not talking about multistory films like Short Cuts or Wild Tales – those are often good, even great – but those bundles of shorts by different directors. More often than not they are lucky-dip packages of horror stories, but there are also more pretentious upmarket ones, held together by some thin thematic connective tissue, like the Cities of Love series. Tell It Like a Woman’s only obvious unifying concept is that all the shorts were directed by female directors. It’s depressing for starters that this is still considered enough of a novelty to justify calling attention to it, but it’s also a bummer that the films in this particular rattlebag are mostly sketchy, earnest and dull.
The opening one, Pepcy & Kim directed by Taraji P Henson, stars Jennifer Hudson as a female prison inmate Kim, who has dissociative identity disorder; her alternate personality (Pepcy) pops up over her shoulder, trying to steer her actions when she’s on the verge of getting released. Hudson’s performance is serviceable if a bit broad, but the editing is hellishly clunky. In Catherine Hardwicke’s Elbows Deep, Dr Tartovi (Marcia Gay Harden) and a nurse don masks and rubber gloves to treat an unhoused woman, Validation (Cara Delevingne, pretty good), who is staying temporarily at a fancy hotel during lockdown in 2020. They remove layer after layer from the mentally ill woman until she’s ready to take a shower, but it’s hard to grasp what the final point is meant to be at the end of this dance of the seven hundred veils and T-shirts.
More impactful is one by Japanese director Mipo O, called A Week in My Life, in which single mother (Anne Watanabe) with two small kids struggles to stay on top of her daily routine; the film tells its story with brisk, clear brush strokes. Maria Sole Tognazzi’s Unspoken, which stars the incomparable Margherita Buy (The Caiman) as a harried veterinarian, also shines for tight construction and strong performances. The others, though, are on a spectrum somewhere between insipid and awful, and one can’t help but feel packages like this are not doing a huge amount to further the cause of gender parity in film direction.
• Tell It Like a Woman is released on 8 May on digital platforms.
