A Woman's Work is Never Done

"I'm not a woman; I'm a filmmaker," Martha Fiennes told a British newspaper recently. A bit broadly stated, but one gets her point: Fiennes doesn't want to be ghettoized by her gender, even if she is the sole female director with a film (Chromophobia) in Cannes's main program this year. Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, the two designations need not be mutually exclusive, as the annual "Women with Vision" festival demonstrates with its strongest and most cohesive lineup in some time.

Now in its 12th year, "WWV" always prioritizes fledgling voices--notably with its ever-expanding "Girls in the Director's Chair" project--and the latest edition showcases several debuts. Hailed as a scarce highlight of Sundance 2005, Me and You and Everyone We Know (screening Thursday, May 12 at 9:00 p.m.) is the first feature-length film by multimedia star Miranda July, who gathers a beguiling ensemble of interlocked suburban-L.A. stories: the frazzled shoe salesman who juggles a boring job with shared custody of his internet-glued kids; the earnest artist (played by July herself) trying to nudge a foot in the door at the local gallery; a snipey pair of teen girls trying on their nascent feminine wiles and seeing how they fit; and more. Here characters verbalize their thoughts, desires, and startling whimsies without submitting them to the usual filters first; July takes in their foibles unblinkingly and folds them into a stiff but heartfelt embrace.

The childlike discursiveness of Me and You conjures a heightened reality; elsewhere in the series, an ascetic realism often prevails. First-time feature director Debra Granik expands her short "Snake Feed" in the Sundance award-winning Down to the Bone (Friday, May 13 at 7:00 p.m.), which maintains a near Dogme-like austerity in following a drug-addicted young mother of two, Irene (Vera Farmiga), as she seeks help, loses and finds work, and stumbles into a codependent relationship. The rehab arc is familiar, but honestly rendered, and Granik burrows expertly into a painfully specific time and headspace: the War on Terror-era USA. The store-bought flag cakes, the "Keeping America Safe!" grocery bags, and the massive Stars and Stripes diffusing the light through a dealer's window all amount to a wan pageant of diseased Americana.

Irene gets fired from her deadening supermarket job only after she quits cocaine and her pace at the checkout slows accordingly; the indignities and bitter ironies of working for a living are a constant refrain in "WWV." The entries from Argentina, that ever-fecund hotbed of cinema, are typically fine: Ana Pollak's Pinboy (Saturday, May 14 at 9:00 p.m.) takes a kindly Warholian interest in the assorted employees at a manually operated bowling alley; and in María Victoria Menis's riveting, beautifully photographed Little Sky (Saturday, May 7 at 9:00 p.m.), a young drifter takes farmhand work with a drunken boor and his long-suffering wife, only to develop a pivotal fatherly bond with the miserable couple's baby.

The "WWV" programmers underline the labor-pains theme with the "Working Girls" retrospective, which ranges from Lois Weber's 1916 silent rarity Shoes (screened to live musical accompaniment by Dan Newton on Wednesday, May 18 at 7:00 p.m.) and Dorothy Arzner's 1940 show-biz catfight Dance, Girl, Dance! (Thursday, May 19 at 7:00 p.m.) to Lizzie Borden's 1986 film Working Girls (Wednesday, May 18 at 9:00 p.m.). Borden's wryly observant kammerspiel is a long night's journey into day for an Ivy League-educated photographer, Molly (Louise Smith), who slogs through a punishing double shift at a New York brothel until she arrives at a hard-won epiphany.

The "Working Girls" program also hosts veteran director Stephanie Rothman, who will introduce two of her hugely enjoyable '70s sexploitation films: The Working Girls (Thursday, May 19 at 9:00 p.m.) and The Student Nurses (Friday, May 20 at 9:00 p.m.). Roger Corman produced the latter, and, according to Rothman, his only requirement was "that the nurses be very pretty and that they be naked as often as possible." The faithful result shows Rothman's raw genius for adapting the stringently budgeted exploitation-film model to her witty, rambunctious brand of sex-positive feminism.

"Take not a maiden who loses possession of herself," reads a café chalkboard in The Student Nurses. That would rule out the heroine of Histoire d'O: Whipped, chained, pierced, branded, and prostituted, O consents to epic mortification as proof of her devotion to her lover. The slender documentary-cum-reconstruction Writer of O (Saturday, May 21 at 3:00 p.m.), directed by Pola Rapaport (who'll introduce the screening), adequately recounts the unveiling of O's author, Dominique Aury, in 1994--40 years after the book's scandalous first appearance. But the movie disappoints in its workmanlike approach to the fragrant material, adding banal first-person testimony and unfortunate expressionist illustration, as when Rapaport drops in some stock footage of...um, a train entering a tunnel.