A Real Man

‘Films on how not to be a man’ could have well been an Oscar category. Or ‘films about what men think being a man is.’ Or ‘male directors don’t believe that the reality of a man is substantial enough.’

Interestingly, the films directed by women this year say more about what being a woman is than their macho counterparts say about being a man. Neither I nor any of my male friends are going around killing union leaders or are traumatised like the Joker, and I’m convinced that all of us are brighter than Tarantino’s two main characters (not a difficult achievement, by the way). In the meantime, those ‘women films’ painfully ignored by the awards, like Little Women, The Farewell, The Souvenir or the sublime High Life, are about the blisses and the sorrows of real women, of real people. 

I watch 1917 with joy. An odd feeling because there’s nothing I have in common with what’s happening on the screen. I never had to step into a battlefield, the film happened more than a century ago, and the main characters are twenty years younger than me. And yet, despite the corpses, the explosions, the struggles and the rampant rats, there’s someone struggling, crying and repressing his tears, as well as dreaming and fantasising of going back home. Suddenly, there’s a real man.