Madame X: An Absolute Ruler

I don’t know where to begin with this one. Even this intro is tough. Which joke do I use about the title? A reference to Madonna’s late-stage career? Or some sort of absolute unit joke? I think I’ll go for the latter. At 2 hours and 17 minutes, Madame X : An Absolute Ruler is an absolute unit of a film. Great, that’s sorted. Now I still gotta figure out how to talk about this weird movie for the rest of the review.

Madame X: An Absolute Ruler is about a group of women who reject society in favour of joining a pirate ship of strange women that promises adventure on the high seas. The women come from all walks of life but are uniformly displeased with society. The ship is run with an iron fist or rather, the spear hand of Madame X. While initially, the crew engage in harmless, if weird bonding activities, things eventually descend into violence when the ship comes upon a vessel of rich people.

Madame X is first and foremost a feminist statement. And it’s largely successful on this front. I like how the women in the film are so different. There’s housewives, academics and psychiatrists. There’s also an effeminate male who joins the crew. And they’re at least initially fine with having him there. Being a woman is not the sum total of any of these characters’ identities nor a requirement to join the ship. Madame X’s ship is a place for misfits and weirdos. And given a chance to be their weird selves, everyone seems happy and also initially harmless. This rejection of society at least initially manifests as little more than weird outfits, being queer and dancing a lot. At least initially, it feels like the film is saying that society tries too hard to control self expression. And for what? So people can’t do a weird dance? Oh, the horror.

But Madame X doesn’t depict a utopia. By the film’s end, Madame X’s uh, fascist tendencies have culminated in her basically running a cult. Because yeah, that’s what happens when you isolate people who feel rejected and act as a charismatic leader. And this too works as part of the feminist statement. Women are not immune to fascist ideology. Part of seeing the whole humanity of women is understanding that they can be flawed and harmful themselves. And Madame X sure is. I also like this as a potential commentary on why separatist politics don’t work. Rejecting society and making your own is a cute thought. But you’ll likely just reenact the problems from the society you left. That’s certainly what happens here. Yeah, everyone gets to wear weird outfits. But without a dismantling of power structures, it’s all more of the same.

It’s also notable how queerness plays into this feminist film. It’s essentially not an issue. There are various relationships on board Madame X’s boat. And it’s fine and essentially unremarkable. Feminism, especially earlier waves of it were frequently exclusionary to lesbians. Yet there is also a good amount of art as well as feminist sub-movements that are inclusive of queerness. It often seems to follow that if women are liberated from the patriarchy then they might have relationships with other women. And nobody gets to say shit to them because this is what liberation looks like. That’s the philosophy represented in Madame X, anyway.

So yes, Madame X had something clear to say. It’s obvious Ulrike Ottinger is intelligent and wants her art to say things. She also wants to experiment. But the thing about experiments is that they don’t always work. While Madame X’s feminist statement came through, some specifics were probably lost on me. Much of this film feels strange for the sake of it rather than strange in a way I could interpret meaning from. Maybe I just didn’t get it. Comparing this to another feminist experimental film like Je Tu Il Elle is useful for me. Because that film felt to me like every decision was extremely precise. Madame X feels a bit more like Ottinger threw a lot of stuff at a wall to see what would stick. And some of it did. But some of the stuff that didn’t still makes it into the lengthy final cut.

The length is a problem. It’s hard to be continuously weird for over two hours. Almost every scene feels like it goes on too long. And most of the scenes are basically experimental dance theatre on film. Madame X advertises her ship using the promise of adventure. It takes over an hour for anything remotely adventurous to occur. In the meantime, as ever, it’s just a lot of weird dancing. Yeah, the dancing is weird and engaging for maybe a minute. But then it’ll go on for five minutes and scenes like that will keep happening. I really liked the absurdist elements of the film. But there’s actually not enough of them to fill out the film. The fact that the characters wear weird makeup while doing very little isn’t absurd enough to me. And again, if it’s trying to make any sort of commentary, it was lost on me.

Madame X: An Absolute Ruler taught me a lot about its creator, Ulrike Ottinger. This is my first film of hers and I think she’s fascinating. Which is sort of weird because I actually found Madame X frequently boring. It’s a project made by someone very smart with a lot of ideas. But not all of those ideas pan out. And regrettably, the ideas that don’t pan out probably drag down the ones that do. It still gets points in my book for the originality of the project, the potential and because Ottinger clearly has something to say and works hard to say it. It’s also a way better feminist separatist film than The Misandrists. That film had “ironic” sexy pillow fights. This one had a bunch of absolute freaks doing interpretive dance to communicate. My brand of feminism lends itself a little more to the latter.

Overall rating: 5.6/10

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