Inspiring or irritating, empowering or exploitative, maternal or manipulative — with many shades of gray in between — female mentorship is a common dynamic in many of 2024’s most affecting stories.
In films as diverse as “All We Imagine as Light,” “Babygirl,” “Emilia Pérez,” “The Girl With the Needle,” “Inside Out 2” “The Last Showgirl,” “My Old Ass” and “The Substance,” women develop relationships with one another that alternately risk harm as much as they mean to be helpful, forge camaraderie out of competition or simply provide a mirror reflecting — frequently uncomfortably — who they once were or may one day become.
Inspired by its writer-director’s curiosity about multi-generational friendship, Payal Kapadia’s “All We Imagine as Light” tells the stories of three nurses — Prabha (Kani Kusruti), Anu (Divya Prabha) and Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) — navigating the sociopolitical complexities of Mumbai. “When there is a lot of difference in the generations, there is a sort of conflict that, for me, brings about a change in both people,” Kapadia says.
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While Parvaty boldly aspires to live on her own (“Being alone as a woman in India is complicated, not like in the West,” Kapadia notes), Prabha pines for the absent husband from her arranged marriage (“she’s dying to have a family”), even as Anu maintains an affair with a man she knows her family wouldn’t approve of. All three give and receive advice and inspiration, much of it simply by witnessing each other’s choices. “[Anu] could make the choice that Prabha couldn’t, and there’s a lot of envy in that, and a hint of admiration,” Kapadia says.
“I thought about it as one chronology of one life — that we are meeting, let’s say, this person when she was like Anu, or then she became like Prabha, or then Parvaty.”
Co-written by Line Langebek and its director, Magnus von Horn, “The Girl With the Needle” loosely filters the real-life story of Danish serial killer Dagmar Overbye (Trine Dyrholm) through the journey of a willful young factory worker, Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), who’s determined to live by her own rules in patriarchal post-WWII Copenhagen. Dyrholm and Sonne worked closely to develop the codependency between the two women that allows Dagmar to deceive Karoline even as they grow increasingly close.
“When she meets Karoline for the first time, Dagmar’s trying to help her, but I think that she needs Karoline to share the burden of what she’s doing,” says Dyrholm. “It’s a complex kind of mirroring that’s happening with these two women… in the beginning, Karoline needs Dagmar, but then it becomes the opposite thing — Dagmar needs Karoline.”
Sonne suggests Karoline feels protected, even empowered by Dagmar, even as she’s shocked by the crimes she’s unwittingly led to participate in. “It was both this sort of Faustian shadow of something that Karoline holds within herself,” says Sonne, “and then on the opposite side, [Dagmar] had this sort of autonomy and anarchist way of doing things that Karoline could sort of leap into and copy and be under the wings of and be helped.”
Meanwhile in “The Last Showgirl,” Pamela Anderson plays Shelly, a veteran dancer who finds herself at a crossroads when the Vegas revue she performs in abruptly closes after 30 years, just as her estranged biological daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd) re-enters her life. Working from a script by Kate Gersten, director Gia Coppola contrasts Shelly’s potential future with those of her much younger counterparts Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) and Mary-Anne (Brenda Song), whom she alternately competes with for jobs and serves as a surrogate mother. “Kate’s script was so well executed in depicting how it can happen where you foster your work family more so than your blood relationships,” Coppola says.
“I think that there’s a lot of guilt and shame that kind of creeps up on her when she realizes she’s not their mother, and she has a daughter,” says Anderson of her character. “Shelly wears her heart on her sleeve, and there’s only so much you can give and then you hit a wall and you’re the enemy.” Adds Coppola, “[Shelly] is a flawed character, and I just liked that contradiction and that humanness.”
With her first narrative feature “Santosh,” writer-director Sandhya Suri traces the relationship between the title character (Shahana Goswami), an Indian widow who takes over her husband’s job as a constable, and Geeta (Sunita Rajwar), a senior officer. As two women in a heavily male-dominated police force, their relationship is already highly charged, even before Geeta orders Santosh to help investigate the murder of a young girl.
Suri says that the distantly romantic chemistry that develops between Santosh and Geeta “doesn’t necessarily need a label,” but its ambiguity further complicates their partnership when Santosh is implicated in an act of police brutality, and Geeta is forced to choose whether or not to protect her from punishment. “That at the end of the film she makes a sacrifice for Santosh seemed a bit naive that she would do this just out of goodness of her mentorship,” she says. “So that’s why I felt that it must have come for a deep love for Santosh at some level, and the strength of her feeling for her would come as a surprise.”
Written and directed by Megan Park, “My Old Ass” introduces 18-year-old Elliot (Maisy Stella) to her 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza) for some cryptic and mostly unwanted advice after the younger version of the character takes hallucinogenic mushrooms. Though she’s closer in age to the “elder” Elliot, Park says “exploring this idea through this lens of this ‘idiot’ 18-year-old who is really naive and in her own head as we all are at that age is such a more interesting [point of view]. The audience just gets to be reminded of what it’s like through a very modern-day young person, but through the setting and the tone, we really tried to make the film feel nostalgic and evergreen.”
Twenty-year-old Stella, who makes her film debut as the younger Elliot, credits her older sister for guiding her into her real-life adulthood, but displays more humility and self-awareness than the know-it-all character she plays. “Me and Megan always joke that when I read the script, I read it from the Old Ass’s perspective, but I’m very much the Young Ass that’s very much learning and figuring everything out.”
Though “Inside Out 2” co-screenwriter Meg LeFauve insists that she never thought about the film series’ anthropomorphized emotions as explicitly gendered characters, Amy Poehler and Maya Hawke forge a uniquely contentious relationship as (respectively) seasoned cheerleader Joy and frantic young strategist Anxiety, who draw battle lines across 13-year-old Riley’s expanding landscape of feelings. “They really do love Riley and they’re trying to help her,” LeFauve says. “They’re just doing it in ways that aren’t helpful.”
Both Poehler and Hawke insist that the two characters share more in common than one might initially think. “Anxiety has a lot to learn in terms of living in the moment, but Joy has a lot to learn in terms of realizing that every moment can’t be the best one,” Poehler says. “Without joy, anxiety is a miserable place to live,” adds Hawke. “So I always saw them as partners in crime, and every good crime partnership has to have a rocky beginning.” LeFauve suggests that what the characters teach each other doubles as an important lesson for Riley — and many other women — to learn.
“For me, what Joy really learns through interacting with Anxiety is self-compassion,” LeFauve says. “You need to love all of yourself, or at least accept everything that’s there.”