Sally Potter’s new British Cold War coming-of-age film Ginger & Rosa has been compared to Andrea Dworkin’s 1983 book Right Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females, for suggesting that the sexual revolution for women was, all in all, a scam, and that free love didn’t set women free from the inequality of domesticity, but rather it intensified it.
In the film the character Roland (Alessandro Nivola), the father of protagonist Ginger (Elle Fanning), embodies this critique of the sexual revolution. His portrayal is gleefully vicious: a dashing activist and political theorist who was imprisoned as a conscientious objector during World War II, Roland is, as one reviewer put it, “a giant, selfish prick” as far as his family’s wellness is concerned. Ginger’s real name is “Africa”, because Roland believes women are the Dark Continent, and her father shamelessly philanders, sleeps with his students and even with his daughter’s best friend, Rosa (Alice Englert).
When Roland’s wife gets upset because he’s treating her badly, he tells her that her tears are “emotional blackmail,” designed to impinge on his freedom and drag him into stultifying normalcy. With comments like this, the character both justifies his behaviour and bullies women further, and his radical rejection of domesticity doesn’t free his wife, but instead allows him to take her cooking and her service without any return of fidelity or affection.
This behaviour translates onto his daughter, Ginger, who becomes more and more committed to anti-war activism as she grows older. Not only does she do this to impress her father, but to also separate herself from the domestic despair of her mother, Nat (Christina Hendricks). Not unlike her dad, at one point in the film Ginger accuses her mom of political quietism as a way to one-up her in arguments. Activism also becomes a kind of escape for Ginger, as Roland and Rosa become more serious and even flaunt their relationship in front of her.
So then, is vaunting autonomy and sexual revolution just as rigged against women, if not more so, than more traditional arrangements? Like Dworkin, the film clearly says so, but offers only another kind of romantic ignorance – aesthetic solipsism – as a form of escape. Ginger doesn’t escape domesticity through the sexual revolution, but rather by turning away from politics altogether and writing a poem to Rosa, which only actually occurs in her head. Surely, there must be a better alternative.
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