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"  Wendy, the failing playwright Laura Linney portrays in The Savages, the 2007 movie written and directed by Tamara Jenkins, is a passive-aggressive basket case mired in a dead-end\u00ADrelationship with a married man. Gulping down other people&amp;#039;s prescription drugs as she goes, she attempts to arrange care for her dementia\u00ADstricken father\u2014who never took care of her\u2014while mending fences with her estranged brother (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a drama professor who&amp;#039;s as strung out as she is, only quieter. Did I mention that The Savages is a comedy? &amp;quot;Wendy is a version of myself with \u00ADreally bad luck,&amp;quot; says Jenkins, a vivacious fortysomething who struggled for nearly a decade to get The Savages made despite the success of her 1998 debut, the semi\u00ADautobiographical teen-angst comedy Slums of Beverly Hills. &amp;quot;Wendy&amp;#039;s still out there with her backpack, humping toward an artistic career. She&amp;#039;s not a young person anymore, but she&amp;#039;s still living like a graduate student. I&amp;#039;m not her, but I came pretty close.&amp;quot; Grappling none too capably with the ill-defined pressures so many modern women juggle without a guidebook, Wendy is over the top, but not by much. Contrast her to the cardboard types portrayed in the recent run of studio chick flicks: compulsive consumers in search of designer shoes and lovers, in that order (Sex and the City and Confessions of a Shopaholic); gallant old broads dancing their way back to happiness (Mamma Mia!); love addicts in need of tutelage by worldly cavemen (He&amp;#039;s Just Not That Into You and The Ugly Truth); sexually repressed office dictators (The Proposal). &amp;quot;These movies are very entertaining,&amp;quot; says Diablo Cody, who wrote the screenplay for Juno, which ran away with the box office in 2007, earning nearly a quarter-billion dollars worldwide. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re an escapist genre unto themselves and have a place in the culture. But,&amp;quot; she continues wickedly, &amp;quot;I hope women don&amp;#039;t think of them as cinema verit\u00E9.&amp;quot; Cody belongs to a group of female filmmakers and screenwriters, working mostly outside the studio system, who are creating a whole range of quirky protagonists in movies that address the without-a-road-map dilemmas of women&amp;#039;s lives in the twenty-first\u00ADcentury. And for the most part, they&amp;#039;re framing the crazy quilt of modern life in the only form that fits it: black comedy. &amp;quot;I like art that isn&amp;#039;t \u00ADtelling you in advance where you&amp;#039;re supposed to be with it,&amp;quot; Jenkins says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m interested in that quivering space between comedy and tragedy.&amp;quot;  At the blood-and-guts pole of female confusion, we find the films of Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol, The Notorious Bettie Page), who&amp;#039;s currently adapting a teen-vampire movie from the novel The Moth Diaries. After a long absence, Allison Anders is shooting a sequel to her Latina girl-gang melodrama, Mi Vida Loca. Catherine Hardwicke, who debuted with Thirteen, most recently made Twilight. And Cody wrote the script for Girlfight director Karyn Kusama&amp;#039;s revenge flick, Jennifer&amp;#039;s Body, about a teenage girl who, despite the pleadings of her bookish best friend, cannibalizes a string of their male classmates. &amp;quot;But,&amp;quot; Cody says sweetly, &amp;quot;the film is really about her toxic victim-\u00ADaggressor relationship with her best friend.&amp;quot; At the other pole lie troubled souls confronting middle age: Wendy in The Savages, or the bitchy, floundering, occasionally hysteric types played by Catherine Keener in every comedy made by Los Angeles\u2013based writer-director Nicole Holofcener (Lovely and Amazing, Friends With Money). In Please Give, out next spring, Keener plays a New Yorker waiting for her elderly tenant to die so she can annex her apartment. Holofcener cheerfully admits that every character Keener plays is a muse, or alter ego, who embodies different aspects of the director&amp;#039;s fears and desires. &amp;quot;The women who like my movies look a lot like me,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re between 30 and 50, verbal and outgoing, have been in therapy, and aren&amp;#039;t afraid to laugh at themselves.&amp;quot; Between these poles stands Sofia Coppola, whose Lost in Translation, about an encounter between a jaded movie star and a neglected young wife, wistfully captured a distinctly global sense of dislocation and isolation.  None of these complicated characters are nice, thank heaven, but most are intensely personal creations who are also sympathetic creatures of our time. They&amp;#039;re canny exaggerations of women we know firsthand. Hysterical or angry worriers, often unsuccessful by conventional measures, few have glamorous jobs or perfect husbands. They&amp;#039;re not automatically loyal to one another. Sometimes they make rotten mothers. They can be hapless, immature, and uncertain of their relationship to feminism, which has brought them a measure of freedom and autonomy without necessarily equipping them for the ambiguities of urban life, in which the boundaries between work, love, marriage, and family have grown hazier and hazier even as the cacophony of experts telling us how to live swells to a deafening roar. They may rage and flap their hands a lot, but like most of us, they&amp;#039;re trying to behave like adults in a culture that encourages perpetual childishness. Every filmmaker I talked to calls herself a feminist and credits the women&amp;#039;s movement with giving her the courage to launch her career. Not one of them, however, is willing to toe an ideological line in shaping theme or character. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s a difference between feminism and political correctness,&amp;quot; Cody says. &amp;quot;P.C. sucks.&amp;quot; Their characters stumble their way to provisional competence and independence, if they do so at all, without sudden epiphanies or rescue by handsome strangers.   &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s all in flux right now,&amp;quot; says Holof\u00ADcener, who is 49 and has twin boys. &amp;quot;The balance between babies, careers, money, women having babies without husbands, or too late\u2014there&amp;#039;s a new species out there of women my age.&amp;quot;  That species deserves a voice, but if there&amp;#039;s one thing the writers and directors trying to express it can agree on, it&amp;#039;s the uphill struggle they endure in getting their movies made. Data from a forthcoming study by Martha Lauzen, a communications professor at San Diego State University, also paints a dispiriting picture of women&amp;#039;s representation in independent film, once their natural home. Lauzen found that women directed only 15 percent of the more than 900 narrative features at the top 25 U.S. film festivals in 2008 and 2009. And even this figure is higher than the paltry 9 percent of women-directed films among the top 250 domestic-grossing titles in 2008. &amp;quot;Year after year, these figures are telling a story of incredible discrimination going on out in the open,&amp;quot; says Jane Campion, whose chamber piece, Bright Star, about poet John Keats&amp;#039; love affair with Fanny Brawne, was recently released. &amp;quot;But people are afraid to say it. What&amp;#039;s going to happen?&amp;quot; she scoffs. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re going to get called a lesbian?&amp;quot; Most women directors have to moonlight in television, which is also easier to fit around family life, and, in the case of cable, offers a working environment less hamstrung by chick-flick sensibilities. Even Hardwicke, who notched a studio hit with Twilight and proved her range with the skateboarding action movie Lords of Dogtown, had difficulty funding her next project. &amp;quot;After Twilight, I thought, They can&amp;#039;t turn me down on the grounds that my films don&amp;#039;t make money,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I put my name in the hat for two different projects, and the response was, `We need a guy for that movie.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Once their scripts are handed in, women directors tend to get notes, and notes, and more notes about whether their characters are likable enough. A woman friend who read Jenkins&amp;#039; script for The Savages urged her to cast a sympathetic actress. &amp;quot;It never crossed my mind that Wendy was unbearable,&amp;quot; Jenkins says. &amp;quot;She earned her neurosis. She&amp;#039;s justified in her difficultness, so you can identify with her.&amp;quot;  Harron had to explain to her financiers that Bettie Page was simply &amp;quot;a sweet person who found herself&amp;quot; in the fetishizing pinup industry, and that this was a mystery she didn&amp;#039;t feel obliged to solve.  &amp;quot;I was told to make Vanessa&amp;quot;\u2014Jennifer Garner&amp;#039;s yuppie who wants Juno&amp;#039;s baby\u2014&amp;quot;more likable,&amp;quot; Cody recalls. &amp;quot;I was fine with that, because she started off as a real bitch. But the higher-ups always want female characters to be sympathetic, which is frustrating. Why can&amp;#039;t you write a nuanced psychopath?&amp;quot;   For that, you have to present a united front, as Cody and Kusama did with Jennifer&amp;#039;s Body, or be wily and quick like Hardwicke, who shot Thirteen so fast that no one had time to impose their notes on her. &amp;quot;You have to have a lot of balls in the air,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s exhausting. My head is in five worlds at once.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Your only obligation is to make the film you&amp;#039;re inspired to make,&amp;quot; Harron says. And that includes films that aren&amp;#039;t about women, like Kathryn Bigelow&amp;#039;s The Hurt Locker or Lynn Shelton&amp;#039;s Humpday.  So what is a women&amp;#039;s movie these days, anyway, I ask Cody. &amp;quot;Anything directed by George Cukor,&amp;quot; she quips, giving props to the director of silver-screen films such as The Philadelphia Story and The Women, showcasing famously edgy and independent-minded gals. &amp;quot;I want to continue to tell women&amp;#039;s stories,&amp;quot; she adds. &amp;quot;If that makes them women&amp;#039;s films, so be it.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/a10578/the-new-generation-of-female-filmmakers-383480/>