EATING
A film review by Myra Van Inwegen
Copyright 1991 Myra Van Inwegen
Today I saw, in a matinee, STRANGERS IN GOOD COMPANY (directed by ?, sorry, I forgot to write it down; it's a woman, and the film is sponsored by the National Film Board of Canada) [reviewed in a separate article]. This time last week I saw EATING, directed by Henry Jaglom. EATING is about a bunch of mostly beautiful, rich, well-dressed, successful women gathered for a triple birthday party. STRANGERS IN GOOD COMPANY is about seven very ordinary women, six of whom are senior citizens, who have gotten stranded by a broken-down bus. Neither film has any male characters in it (except for a very brief glimpse of a male at the very end of STRANGERS IN GOOD COMPANY), and neither film is missing anything by not having them.
EATING is a fast-moving film where emotions run high and the words run fast, and all the scenes are filled with people. STRANGERS is a much slower, quiet film, where the Canadian countryside is as much a part of the film as the characters are, and emotions are much more subdued, as if the many years of living have put these women's feeling deeper into them. EATING is billed as a comedy, but I thought is was much more serious than funny, and the end result is that I felt very depressed about being a woman. STRANGERS is actually very funny, in a quiet way, and I left the theater feeling uplifted.
EATING is about women and food. And boyfriends and husbands and careers and friendship and loyalty and trust and childbearing and daughters and mothers and smoking and drugs and cosmetic surgery. But more about food and the way we view our bodies than anything else. The overwhelming feeling I have about this movie, a week after seeing it, is that it is about beautiful women complaining about how ugly and fat they are. Now, not all the women in the film have the shapes of Vogue models (although some did), but most of them had perfectly normal shapes. And all these women were talking about their fights with food: how they would binge, then starve themselves or force themselves to throw up, and how each of them felt inferior in the company of all the other women.
This made me think pretty seriously about myself. I am right now about the lightest I have been since growing to full size, but yet I still feel fat. I'm not thin, but neither am I fat, and I'm actually in quite good physical shape (I'm exercising lots nowadays). Now, I could lose about 10 pounds, and it wouldn't be physically damaging to me, but on the other hand, it wouldn't make me any healthier either. Yes, I would look better *by society's standards*, but is that a sufficient reason to lose weight? A man with a build similar to mine would simply be considered stocky, and no one would suggest that he go on a diet or ask him if he had gained weight recently. But as women, we are subjected to that sort of treatment.
After seeing this movie, and seeing the extremes this can be taken to, I say: to Hell with it. We are beautiful *as we are*; we don't need to be dangerously thin to look good. In the past week, since seeing the film, I have found myself challenging traditional notions of beauty when expressed by my friends. I hope this stays with me.
I believe EATING should be see by every woman who eats.
-Myra myra@saul.cis.upenn.edu
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