We are those women – constantly on guard, whether consciously or unconsciously – even in 2015. The Keeping Room could just as easily reflect the internal life of women in the first or second World Wars, the 1950s, or any decade since. It could reflect today – being the story of someone inadvertently drawing the attention of the wrong person simply by being female, or in the depiction of rape as a weapon of war, or in the unflinching way it bears the oppressive weight of every bullet fired, and every fire set. In these ways, The Keeping Room leaves us with its powerful truths etched on our bones.
And yet, audience reaction to the movie as a whole – and even its preview footage – is widely varied. The film has revealed itself to be the type of tale that executes its intention effectively, while allowing viewers to interpret it through the prism of their own experience. The greatest disparity in reaction, unsurprisingly, seems to exist between men and women – which in turn, reveals a further, interesting point.
Historically, the western has been a genre for tales told from a male perspective. Female characters have, for the most part, been fleeting and unrelatable. While there are exceptions to the rule, this has generally resulted in the western genre being populated with films that are difficult for women to identify with. Here, that is perhaps turned on its head, by having the women drive the action – telling this western-style tale from their perspective, and having the men be the characters that are held at arms’ length.
“I have to say that I love it [people responding in different ways]. I definitely didn’t set out to make art that made everybody feel the same thing – I love that people are having strong and different reactions to the film, both positive and negative. I just think it makes for such an interesting conversation. People feel so passionately one way or another about it. We obviously set out to make what we knew would be a difficult film, and a challenging film, and so it’s honestly exciting for me to see people having such strong and varied reactions to it. I used to be a high school teacher, and the most boring conversations would be when the kids would be, just, “Yeah, I liked it,” or, “ Yeah, we all felt this way about it.” It’s like, we’re doing our job as artists if people are finding such varied things in it – and it’s not just a carbon copy of my opinion about the world. And people are seeing different things from literally the same frames of film. So I think that’s very exciting. And I hope the conversation continues to get more passionate, and louder, and people keep talking about it.”
Beyond the challenging of gender roles, it is the presentation of race, violence, social structure, and even genre elements in The Keeping Room that has led to vigorous discussions in reviews and comments sections across the web. The most interesting of these come from those that have yet to see the film, and are revealing their assumptions based on the trailer. It is an inescapable truth that Julia Hart’s outstanding screenwriting debut challenges all of those assumptions. Just as the plot sounds simple when described, the simple fact of the matter is that expectation holds no currency when it comes to The Keeping Room – sparking debate in theatres from September 25th, 2015.
