Two-woman travelling show series of one-night stands

Press, 2 June 1986, Page 7

Two-woman travelling show series of one-night stands

yrt

LADIES ON THE ROCKS

Directed by Christian Braad Thomsen Screenplay by Helle Ryslinge, Anne Marie Helger and Christian Braad Thomsen

“Ladies on the Rocks” (Academy) is a series of one-night stands by a twowoman travelling show — different small halls in different small towns, different hotel rooms, and different bed partners. It is a bleak existence, with only the flashes of humour of their own acts, and their friendship to make it worth while. This film about women seeking self-expression and independence through the art of theatre has been put together by the Danish director, Christian Braad Thomsen, who also wrote the screenplay with the two leading actresses, Helle Ryslinge and Anne Marie Helger. Thomsen says he got the idea from a women’s cabaret with Ryslinge and Helger, which was a fearless type of comedy he had never seen before; far from the puritanical niceness usually associated with the established views of women. When asked in the film whether they were inspired by modern or absurdist theatre, the girls can only shrug and say, "Well, more by women’s magazines.” Their show is a crude, but hilarious attack on patriarchal society that tends to polarise its provincial, middle-class audiences. The film also follows the estrangement they encounter in the everyday incidents which befall two women travelling in a man’s world.

Their offstage expert-

ences are inevitably incorporated in their performances, so the (film) audience has a vantage point from which to assess the (stage) audience’s often violent refusal to accept the veracity of the performers’ statements. In one particularly heavy-handed act, they play a couple sitting on a makeshift bed, dressed in pyjamas and reading a book of sexual instructions; the one playing the man obviously looking for new ways to please the woman. After some simulated intercourse, out comes an egg beater, to be followed by a gross scene with a vacuum cleaner. Most of the audience in the film seem to find it hilarious. There is one man, however, who does not. He is the very conventional, lawyer husband of one of the girls on stage, who is appalled at his wife in this act, but he is also not amused to see these goings-on as a satirical reflection of their own personal sex life — and that’s what really hurts. In another act, they discuss the imperfections of an ageing woman’s body, including the “pencil test” — you fail if a sagging breast will hold up a pencil. On seeing this, a fat lady in the audience walks out declaring, “You’ve really betrayed us. You’re showing contempt for women.” That is what they ap-

pear to be doing, but their goal is a much more serious and difficult one: the demystification of woman’s lot, and they certainly will not be thanked by many for their tilting at middle-class mores and morality. Ryslinge, the more aggressive of the two, has made touring a way of life, while Helger, coming from a nice bourgeois background, has never broken away from home before.

At the start of the film, both women are involved in relationships. Ryslinge has a problem-filled love affair with an ageing rock musician (Flemming Quist Moller), who considers her only as a casual bed companion. Laura’s husband (Hans Henrik Clemmensen) is the lawyer, and they have two daughters. When he puts the ultimatum that she either return home or continue with the show, she decides to continue to tour. With hardly enough time to bat an eyelid, he takes up with a former school friend, while the mother takes the children with her.

Through all this, it is

the men who are almost invariably portrayed as scheming, unfeeling pigs and lechers. One would be forgiven for considering “Ladies on the Rocks” as a hard-hitting, political feminist statement.

It is saved from this, however, by being cowritten and directed by a man, who (together with the girls) manages to lift the film, with cutting humour, from a sort of no-man’s land to a much more interesting state of quasi-feminism, which even men in the audience can appreciate. Late in the film, one outraged woman vents her disapproval at the young children being dragged around with the tatty tour. “If you think this is bad, you’ll have a heart attack during the show,” replies Ryslinge. Obviously, the two women have been instrumental in writing much of their own dialogue. What gives them, “Ladies on the Rocks,” their freshness is the fact that Ryslinge and Helger have been given the chance to express themselves so openly through this film.