SANTA BARBARA, Calif., “I think there’s only one way, forward, for women, and we are 51 percent of the world, so 51 percent of women should do movies,” Austrian director Eva Spreitzhofer (“What Have We Done to Deserve This” a.k.a. “Wo mit haben wir das verdient?”) said at a red carpet event at the last Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF) (a still from the film is this article's featured image). With #MeToo and #TimesUp
Glenn Close will be widely praised for her subtle work in Albert Nobbs, as the eponymous Irish woman surviving the nineteenth century disguised as a male waiter. Her performance nevertheless seems to be a classic case of undermugging (if one can have a classic case of something I just invented.) While I admire her willingness to try something so tranquil, the result is understated understatedness, which has a strange way of