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Rebecca came into town last month just so we could see “Mama Mia!”. We’d been watching the previews online for several months and had agreed there was no way we could pass up a movie that included Meryl Streep dancing, Pierce Brosnan singing and the clear blue Aegean Sea.
We were not disappointed.
Because in addition to all of the above, we also got Stellan Skarsgard’s naked backside in the bargain.
Talk about eye candy.
I said, “Freud would have been a lot happier if he could have seen this movie because then he would have truly understood what women want.” Rebecca said, “Some people would say the same about ‘Sex and the City’.” I said that if Chris Noth, Evan Handler, Jason Lewis and David Eigenberg were as good as it got in New York, a lot of women would be leaving Manhattan for Meryl’s Greek Island very soon.
This led to a very philosophical discussion about whether Colin Firth aboard a yacht in Greece was better eye candy than a pair of Manolo Blahnik’s (yes, and more fun in bed) and which women we would prefer to hang out with, the ladies in “Sex and the City” or the women in “Mama Mia!”?
I said, “The women in ‘Sex’ seem fundamentally unhappy to me” and Rebecca said maybe it was because they had to wear high heels all the time. “On the other hand, the women in ‘Mama’ wear casual, loose-fitting clothes, bare feet and sneakers,” she said. I agreed that this attire allowed for looser behavior. I said, “Meryl has already slept with three great looking guys and she gets to go back and score the best looking one—again! Plus Julie gets to dance on a table-top and leap into Stellan’s arms, while while Christine Baranksi dances a whole beach full of younger men into the sand!” Rebecca said, “She kicks ass.”
We sighed.
I pointed out that the remake of “The Women” was opening soon and that we could expand our discussion to include those cast members when as we saw it.
We each love the original, 1939 film. It’s a deliciously catty, very nasty movie about female friendships—or, so called female friendships. In the original, Norma Shearer plays Mary, a virginal wife and mother, whose husband betrays her with a perfume saleswoman (Joan Crawford was never harder). Norma’s best friend Sylvia, played by Rosalind Russell, learns of the affair from a manicurist while having her nails done in a hot new color, “Jungle Red”. Information is power—as is Jungle Red—and what Sylvia does with her information throws the women’s friendships into turmoil as they begin to turn on each other.
“The Women” is the original “mean girls” movie. It doesn’t flinch from portraying the way women can treat each other—which is often despicably. The brilliance of the film is that even as you are horrified by their behavior, you laugh at it. And the more you laugh, the more you’re drawn in, which makes you complicit
