A 'Feminist Fairy Tale': A Review of Antonia’s Line (1995)

“Nothing dies forever. Something always remains from which something grows. 

So life begins without knowing where it came from or why it exists. 

Because life wants to live.”

-Antonia's Line

Described as a “feminist fairy tale” by its feminist director, Marleen Gorris, this 1996 Oscar Best Foreign Language Film celebrates the lives of women in a small agricultural town. Its narrative centers on Antonia and her lineage of women geniuses: Danielle, her daughter, a painter; Therese, her granddaughter, a math wizard and a composer; and Sarah, her great granddaughter, a writer. In the periphery are the stories of Antonia’s friends and neighbors, making the film also about the story of the town itself with its eccentric characters after World War II.    

The fairy tale starts when Antonia’s declared, “It’s time to die.” Perhaps it’s part of the fairy tale that a woman can choose the time of her death and not let sickness or accidents or another individual end her life abruptly, a life she had lived fully every moment. The film then brings us to her past in a flashback when she, together with her young daughter, returned to her birthplace to attend to her mother who seemed to have waited for her before dying. From there, the film followed the lives of Antonia and the three generations in her lineage, then returns to the first scene.

In her deathbed, Antonia’s mother curses Antonia’s father for leaving them. At this early part of the film, the director already expressed how women suffer emotional abuse from men. Later scenes show more of these abuses in the form of rape and verbal abuse. However, this is not to say that the film hates men; in fact, it also depicted them in a positive light through the character of Farmer Bas, Antonia’s love interest, Simon, who fathered Therese’s daughter, and Crooked Finger, Antonia’s childhood friend who never left his house since after the war.

The first two both respected the decisions and choices of ‘their’ women--Antonia did not want to give her hand in marriage to Bas (“but you can have the rest of my body,” said Antonia), while Therese wanted to focus on her career as a mathematics lecturer and as a composer that she can’t fully attend to her motherly tasks (Simon tells his daughter, “I regret to tell you that your mother is not normal.”) Crooked Finger, on the other hand, serves as the source of wisdom in the film, having read Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and other philosophers all day for decades. He occasionally provides philosophically-grounded moral advice to his childhood friend’s (Antonia) daughters, though the latter did not adopt them at all times.

The characterization of women in the film mirrors the concerns of its audience during the 90s--the ‘modern women’ who are already familiar with gender politics. Themes such as marriage, pregnancy, career, and lesbianism were touched upon in the film. It is in depicting these themes that the film turns into a fairy tale because it showed possibilities that women can aspire for. Antonia and Therese’s characters show that marriage is a choice and not an obligation of women, that it’s okay that a woman is not married because she can still have love and build a family even without it. Danielle found her love in another woman, and their relationship had stood the test of time. Lesbianism in the film, as with feminist discourses, is depicted as a relationship as ideal as that between a male and a female.

Antonia and her daughter Danielle return to her hometown after 20 years

In addition, the film is filled with strong and independent women who, like men, may have doubts and other issues when it comes to lifetime commitment with another person, but who, unlike some men, are courageous enough to face their real desires. Strength is also seen when Therese weathered her tragic experience of rape and overcame it to continue living her life. Moreover, the feminist discourse on women solidarity was also shown when Antonia helped other women in need, such as Deedee when she was raped and a friend who gives birth year after year when she needed a roof to shelter her children. 

Aside from issues relevant to women, religion is another recurring theme in Antonia’s Line. One scene shows the town priest babbling about indecent and immoral women during his sermon. Antonia and Danielle stormed out of the church, followed by Farmer Bas and his sons. The next scene shows the Antonia and Farmer Bas blackmailing the priest whom they caught kneeling down, not in prayer, but giving oral sex to a crying woman. By this time, the audience knows what to expect next--the priest reverses his sermons about women. This sequence also shows how religion can be a means of oppressing women.

Antonia’s Line celebrates the lives of women--complex and vibrant these are. Echoing the basic ideals of feminism, the film provided clear illustrations of lives lived in these ideals--the practice of the theory. Perhaps, it is not just a fairy tale after all.

Some Memorable Scenes:

• When Danielle told his mother, “Mom, I want a baby” while she helps her put a fence in their farm. She explained to her mother that she only wanted a child but not a husband. In the next scene, they went to the city, asked a friend where they can find a “donor,” found one and sealed the deal.    
•  When Antonia, carrying a shotgun and full of anger, went to Olga’s bar to look for the man who raped her granddaughter. Although she had a loaded shotgun, she could not use it, so she just cursed the man and left him in the fists of the bar regulars.
• The last scene, when Antonia was in bed ready to die and her family and friends surrounded her. There was no dialogue, but Antonia’s eyes conveyed what she wanted to tell the women in her line more clearly than any words.