![]() ![]() As they move languorously through the world, observing and operating with a cool detachment, their questionable choices - stalking an ex-lover, having sex with a Yeti, living with her husband and 100 ex-boyfriends - fuel the narratives, and heighten their stakes. The women populating these stories are not merely at the center, they are the center. Ling Ma’s own “Bliss Montage” is a surreal subversion of this trope. ![]() ![]() Basinger called this sequence the Happy Interlude, or the Bliss Montage. ![]() These were “a woman’s small piece of action,” Basinger explained, “the rapid and brief passage of time in which a woman can be happy.” They signaled the film’s fleeting interest in a woman’s actions instead of her endurance of social terrors - heartbreak, marriage, pregnancy, motherhood, etc. In her 1993 book “A Woman’s View,” the film historian Jeanine Basinger observed a peculiar phenomenon in early Hollywood movies about women: They almost always included a sequence depicting “the protagonist in her marginal territory of joy.” Sound-tracked by a swelling score, the elegantly dressed leading lady would, in the company of a lover, throw her head back in laughter, beam over dinner, stroll contentedly in the park or dance into dawn. ![]()
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