Lisa Aschan's first feature is a stunning visual debut and was
funded by the Swedish Film Institute for 1 million Euros. This has
proven to be money well spent as She Monkeys won the prize for Best
Narrative Feature at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this
year.
Lisa Aschan graduated from the National Film School of Denmark
in 2005 where she created some fake commercials for spiked tampons
called Fuck the Rapist and thus nailed her feminist credentials
firmly to the mast.
She Monkeys has been described by Aschan as a Western. The film
is set in a tough equestrian club where there is a brutal pecking
order of girls with Cassandra ( Linda Molin) riding on top. When
Emma (Mathilda Paradeiser) an awkward teenager joins the team,
Cassandra takes her under her wing. However her friendly overtures,
laced with sexual seduction, masks darker motives. Emma has other
things to worry about as she is effectively the surrogate mother
for her younger sister Sara (Isabella Lindquist) as they are both
growing up with a single father. Sara is struggling with the
growing awareness that she is a child on the cusp of adolescence
and all the scary and thrilling feelings that go with that change.
She swings hormonally between being a little girl wanting to be
noticed by her big sister, and tickled by her father, and at other
times wanting to be the object of desire for her teenage cousin
Sebastian.
Lisa Aschan gets inspired to make her films by images she
collects and her directing muse moves her in organic ways 'I
look for patterns from the piles of images that I collect. One of
the images that struck me was an image of the young Shirley Temple
in a bikini licking an ice-cream." In fact this image is projected
on to the character of Sara who in one poignant scene wears a
leopard skin bikini exposing her puppy fat girl/woman body to dance
for her cousin Sebastian in order to make him fall in love with
her. Lisa further explains that She Monkey's is basically a
film "about how sex and power are parts of all relationships
between people"
Some lesbian viewers might assume Cassandra is a lesbian because
of her bold advances on Emma but she also uses the same seductive
manipulations to excite and then humiliate a potential male love
interest of Emma's. It was not Lisa's intention to make a "lesbian
film" and she did not think of it as a dominant theme of the film
until it was nominated for the Teddy Prize in the Berlin Film
Festival. "Lesbian audiences have been divided, some love it
and some hate it. I guess She Monkeys does not offer that happy
ending that some crave"
She Monkeys is composed, stylish with that cool Scandinavian
aesthetic that has dominated furniture sales in the UK for decades.
And yet it somehow feels so embedded in the idea of it's own
pristine image and the restraint that it forgot to be a little bit
more monkey.
She Monkeys is on general release from 18 May
