Machismo, the female kind

Decide on the action genre and have women, rather than men, dishing out all the action. Is Hollywood's new-found recipe a genuine nudge towards women's empowerment or just another titillating trick? ANAND PARTHASARATHY looks at the new trio of ``Charlie's Angels'' - and their small screen sisters, in search of answers.

``ONCE UPON a time there were three little girls who went to the Police Academy, and they were each assigned very hazardous duties. But I took them away from all that, and now they work for me. My name is Charlie.''

Throughout the 1970s that opening voice-over narration, signalled the beginning of yet another instalment in a popular, prime-time American television serial, which suggested a startling premise: that three women could form the core of a mysterious crime- busting agency. The disembodied voice - it belonged to actor John Forsythe, star of the long running TV soap, ``Dynasty'' - represented the boss of the agency, Charlie Townsend, who is never seen.

Every week it summoned his team to take on a fresh assignment, with a guy named Bosley acting as the go-between. Every week the script writers came up with ingenious ways to turn three attractive women into a fighting force. For most of the 109 episodes aired by the ABC television channel till 1981, the threesome were played by Kate Jackson, Farrah Fawcett and Jaclyn Smith - turning all of them into icons and pin-ups of pop culture. Late in the serial, Cheryl Ladd and Tanya Roberts played Angels, and used the serial to launch successful big screen careers.

While the public (including high profile fans like the British Royal family) enjoyed the implicit role reversal in women dishing out rough justice to male baddies, cynics mocked at the serial as ``Jiggle TV'', sexist fare offensive to women, a sort of precursor to the ``Baywatch'' type of programming. But it was generally acknowledged to be harmless (if brainless) fun.

So why would any one want to dust the 1970s ``Charlie's Angels'', update the story and lavish the best of today's action techniques on a big screen cinema version? The answer lies in the currently fashionable media mantra: women's empowerment. Today you cannot fashion successful female characters out of the tried and tested goofiness-and- glamour combo: audiences demand that heroines are as one critic puts it, ``acrobats juggling the demands of career, romance and looking great, without pulling a muscle or breaking into a sweat.''

The executive producer of the original TV series, Leonard Goldberg, believes: ``Charlie's Angels'' went well beyond being a hit television series. It was a phenomenon... the beginning of empowerment of women within popular culture''. Twenty years after the series went off the air, Goldberg felt, it was time for an update. Macho women are ``in'' like never before. So today sees the all India opening of the new cinematic version of ``Charlie's Angels'', created by Columbia, whose parent company Sony Pictures Entertainment, just happened to own the rights to the old TV series. In a canny piece of marketing, the AXN satellite TV channel, owned by Sony is now airing the original ``Charlie's Angels'' serial on weekdays (11-00 a.m. and 4-30 p.m.).

Playing the 21st century ``Angels'' are a trio from today's new breed of confident young actresses: Drew Barrymore, who shot to fame, playing the young girl at the centre of the 1982 Steven Spielberg film ``E.T.'', was seen in such recent Hollywood products as the teenage comedy ``Never Been Kissed'' and the Cinderella reworking, ``Ever After''. She felt sufficiently excited about the new project to ask the makers for a role - and then to co-produce, with her own company, Flower Films. ``There is something so iconic about ``Charlie's Angels''... I have never seen such great loyalty from fans.'' She persuaded her good friend Cameron Diaz, the delicately featured star of ``My Best Friend's Wedding'', to come on board as a second Angel. And to complete the threesome, they asked Lucy Liu, the gritty co-star of the television serial ``Ally McBeal'' (currently running on the Star World channel) to take some time off to do the film. ``Ally McBeal'' was the archetype serial of female empowerment business, embodied by Calista Flockhart who plays the perpetually scatty and introspective title heroine, in the story set in a legal firm - so the choice of Lucy was a shrewd one.

The storyline of the film is straight out of today's Information Technology headline: The founder of a firm, Knox Technologies (Sam Rockwell), making a crucial voice recognition software, has been kidnapped and the head of a rival company (Tim Curry) is suspected. The shady female executive who heads Knox (Kelly Lynch) retains the services of Charlie's Angels and their contact man (Bill Murray) to retrieve the product before the baddies can invade the privacy of individuals worldwide.

As far as plots go this is no different from James Bond fare - indeed the positioning of the opening sequence, involving an ingenious use of latex masks, is a straight throw back on the 007 genre. The other action highlights reflect an admiring backward glance at recent potboilers like ``Mission: Impossible'' and ``The Matrix''. As a concession to 21st century sensibilities, Drew Barrymore exercised the clout of a co producer and ruled out the use of guns by the Angels. So it is karate kicks all the way - tutored by Chinese martial arts maestro Cheung-Yan Yuen (his brother Yuen Woo Ping choreographed ``The Matrix'' fight sequences). The film is replete with the sort of ``wire'' stunts that peppered recent martial arts movies such as ``Romeo Must Die''.

Barrymore, Diaz and Liu are redhead, blonde and brunette and also respectively vulnerable, cute and aggressive. Otherwise the film's debutant director known simply as ``McG'' - a cult music video maker - has deliberately made the threesome very similar: usually clad in identical jeans or scuba suits. They dress and act provocatively, in a variety of disguises, as they perform their collective high jumps, long kicks and splits. Most of the time they seem to be running away, in the nick of time, from huge explosions.

So is this empowerment? Most critics in the U.S. where ``Charlie's Angels'' was released six weeks ago, thought not. ``The film is dedicated to the proposition that you can have your cheesecake and eat it too'', wrote the New York Times, ``Its three heroines, played with varying degrees of swagger and sultriness are meant to appeal to teenage girls who will admire their professionalism and fighting spirit, and to teenage boys who will find other things about them to admire.'' The identical point was made in Time magazine: ``The film is about displaying the Angels in ways that are titillating to adolescent males, yet giving their dates the impression that something inspiring is being said about female empowerment''.

Veteran critic Roger Ebert finds it ``a movie without a brain in its three pretty little heads... eye candy for the blind''.

The film's success in the U.S. box office suggests that the paying public is not quite so choosy: lapping up the masala elements of easy-on-the-eyes film - non-stop action, scenes of broad if crude comedy, a script peppered with suggestive double meaning - without looking for too much display of brain.

But those who turn to contemporary cinema for a little more challenging entertainment, may be dismayed that buzz words like ``empowerment'' can be so brazenly trotted out by film makers still inspired by the old adage of Hollywood, that no one ever lost money underestimating the taste of the paying public.

As sure as night follows day and sequel follows money spinner, the glossy, new ``Charlie's Angels'' seems designed as the first instalment in a lucrative, new franchise of macho female- dominated films. So watch out for a sequel or two, with the same lines:

Charlie: ``Good morning, Angels!''

The Angels: ``Good morning Charlie''!

As the start of yet another action-packed adventure yarn centred round three hyperactive women, this is great. But let's not have any illusions about empowering women - or anybody else.

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Section  : Entertainment
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