20 Great Debut Films From Female Directors

“La Pointe-Courte” (1955) — Agnès Varda
Balanced exactly between the Italian neorealist tradition of De Sica, Rossellini and Visconti that preceded it, and the French New Wave sensibility that would follow, Agnès Varda’s debut film “La Pointe-Courte” (edited by Alain Resnais) is without doubt one of the most beautiful on this (or any other) list. With her documentarist’s eye for authenticity she captures a few days in the life of the titular fishing village, using the local inhabitants as her supporting cast and only employing professionals Sylvia Monfort and Phillippe Noiret, for one of the two central couples. Appropriately, they play outsiders anyway: a couple who have come back to his childhood home from Paris to discuss the future of their relationship. The walks the two go on, and their monotone, quasi-philosophical meanderings on the subject of love and life and inevitability foreshadow the more navel-gazey aspects of New Wave filmmaking, and the Bergman-esque close ups of the two faces set at right angles feel similarly artificial and constructed, verging on affectation. But that’s only because Varda’s heart (and her extraordinary eye) seems to lie really with the townsfolk as they go about their daily lives, and the contrast between the effortless grace she finds in a hand grasping for a peg on a high clothesline or a little kitten playing in the mesh of a fishing net, and the lugubrious musings of the ‘sophisticated’ couple seem so marked as to almost feel satirical. Especially compared to the breezier nature of the other central relationship in which the obstacles are far more tangible (a young fisherman, disapproved of by the father of the girl he likes, falls foul of the authorities). Varda’s curious, rarely static camera finds such astonishing images within the downtrodden pre-modern shacks and boats the villagers inhabit that although the film is light on narrative, from its opening frame it never lifts its peculiar spell, right up till a fascinating climax set during the carnival-like atmosphere of the village’s chief sporting amusement: a kind of jousting tournament in which, instead of horses, the participants try to knock each other off gondola-like platforms built on the rear of rowing boats. It would be seven years before Varda made her next fiction feature, the seminal “Cleo from 5 till 7,” before which she made several documentaries, and during which time the French New Wave, whose first glimmerings many film historians trace to this very film, burst into life. Even without this context, “La Pointe-Courte” is a film of exceptional beauty and power, but to have essentially launched one of the most influential movements of in film history with your very first film?

“Fast Times At Ridgemont High” (1982) — Amy Heckerling
Forcing many a moment of quiet Life Re-evaulation when it turned 30 (THIRTY) last year, Amy Heckerling’s “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” has, over its three decades (THREE DECADES) become such a cultural touchpoint that it’s easy to forget it was her first feature. With only one short to her name prior, Heckerling mined Cameron Crowe’s thoroughly-researched script for all the moments of teen awkwardness and glory it afforded, but mainly what still sets the film apart from its genre is not how well it establishes certain archetypes (though it certainly does) but in how unpatronizingly and with what heart and conscience it does so. It may be frothy and funny in part (we do miss the days when Sean Penn could be this goofy) but it doesn’t play out in some consequence-less platonic ideal of High School. After all, this is a teen comedy in which a fifteen-year-old girl (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is underwhelmed by her first experience of sex, gets pregnant and has an abortion … it’s not all Phoebe Cates’ bikini. This is a tricky tone to manage and keep consistent, but Heckerling pulls it off here and turns in a film that gets to play in so many different fields at once (we’ve listed it, variously, in our high school movies, losing “it” movies, seminal nude scenes, as well as running a “5 Things You Might Not Know” about it). It’s also to her credit that she marshals an amazing before-they-were-famous cast, most of whom give the kinds of performances that they could look back on with pride even after-they-were-famous (in addition to the leads — Judge Reinhold, Leigh, Cates and Penn — Nicolas Cage (then Coppola), Anthony Edwards and Forest Whitaker all have small roles too). Strong as it is, both Heckerling and Crowe would go on to top ‘Fast Times’ later in their careers, with Heckerling’s “Clueless” probably still sitting high atop the all-time high school comedy greats, but this early sampler of both of their talents will forever occupy a place in our hearts, for the warmth and the sweetness in what’s overall an impressively unsentimentalized film, and for the deceptively loose narrative structure that still feels atypical in a genre too often marred by rote formula.

“Salaam Bombay” (1988) — Mira Nair
Mira Nair’s documentary background is hugely in evidence in her groundbreaking, harrowing narrative debut “Salaam Bombay.” Only the second ever Indian film to get a Best Foreign Picture Nomination (it lost the award to “Pelle The Conqueror”) it also picked up the Golden Camera and the Audience Award in Cannes, among many other international plaudits. And it’s not hard to see why — “Salaam Bombay” may not be the easiest or most polished film on this list, but the society into which it submerges us is so authentically drawn, and the stories it tells so representative of a world of poverty and deprivation then completely unknown to Western viewers that its sheer importance, for want of a better word, can’t be overstated. Loosely following the story of Krishna (Shafiq Syed), a guileless young boy who ends up in Bombay trying to scrape enough money together to be able to return home to his village, but who finds the vortex of poverty, petty crime, drugs and prostitution all but inescapable once there, Nair made the controversial decision to cast the film using actual street children, who in most cases had lived lives very close to those they approximate here on film. The ethical issues that choice raised were among the criticisms levelled at the film back then (along with insinuations about its authenticity, as Nair herself was an expat) but the filmmakers clearly signalled the sensitivity of their intentions by setting up a trust to provide support and opportunity for the children in the film — a trust that still exists today as a charitable organization dedicated to India’s street children. The many dangers those children need protection from are detailed extensively in “Salaam Bombay” less a coming-of-age film than a film about having childhood stripped from you in a messy struggle to survive. As bursting with life as the streets of Bombay undoubtedly are, here there’s no trace of exoticism or romance to the portrayal of India — the life that teems from every gutter and every window is not exuberant but pointless, desperate and cheap, and the connections made against all odds between strangers are cruelly sundered simply by a press of the crowds. It’s pessimistic but profoundly moving stuff and Nair’s skill is not just in showing us the macro picture of a seething, unjust society that grinds down its most defenseless, but also in filtering that vast struggle into the story of this one little boy fighting against the inevitability of losing his own identity to the uncaring streets. “Slumdog Millionaire” it is not.

“La Cienega” (“The Swamp”) (2001) — Lucrecia Martel
Argentinian filmmaker Lucrecia Martel hasn’t made anything short of an excellent film yet in her short career. And while if you had to rank her unnerving works, “The Holy Girl” and “The Headless Woman,” might come out in front by a hair or two, her absorbing debut, “La Cienaga” is a remarkable first film that announced the arrival of a natural-born filmmaker, albeit an unconventional one. Dubbed the David Lynch of Argentina, while this is incredibly high praise, it actually does a disservice to not only their disparate styles (she never has phantasmagorical elements in her work, but is haunting in her own manner), but Martel’s incredibly unique and idiosyncratic approach to movies. Martel’s subtle films are like nightmares without any overt nightmarish elements. Her portraits of females, class and conflicting human dynamics lie in the nuanced space where passive-aggressive tension, friction, discomfort and unsettled emotions live. Set in the high plains of northwestern Argentina, “La Cienega” portrays the life of a self-pitying Argentine bourgeois family. Quietly voyeuristic, employing sound in almost subconscious ways and framing shots in an ever-so-slightly disconcerting manner that implies an almost subterranean unease, Martel is already fully aware of her craft, the power of camera placement and how to manipulate emotion with cinema. Seeing her films for the first time can produce the odd sensation of a puppeteer psychically pulling your strings. Using an unbearable heat wave, claustrophobic interpersonal dynamics and narcissistic, self-absorbed characters, Martel creates a telling portrait of family, servants and parental indifference. While it does feel improvised, credit to the filmmaker: the machinating picture is actually carefully scripted and won her a Sundance writing award in 2001. Two of her three films have been selected at Cannes thus far and whenever Martel finds the funds for her next project (a sci-fi-ish one in development over the last few years fell apart), she’ll surely be a mainstay going forward with an in-competition slot practically already reserved for her bold and disquieting works.

“Me And You And Everyone We Know“(2005) — Miranda July
One of the most polarizing films of the last decade, at least for a certain section of easily annoyed 20-30-somethings, perhaps no film provoked as much wrath as Miranda July‘s feature debut “Me And You And Everyone We Know.” Viewed by some as the urtext of pretentious, whimsical indie cinema, this story about a lonely, single-fathered shoe salesman (John Hawkes), his precocious children (including a revelatory Brandon Ratcliff), a peculiar and fanciful performance artist (July herself) and the bus stop where their lives interrelate is actually an observant and contemplative consideration of daydreamers in search of a warm blanket of belonging. Offbeat to the point of irritation for some, the picture is really so honest in its depiction of yearning that its awkwardness is part of its reality. But the calculatedly uncomfortable moments that come as characters seek connection and love (some of which are uproariously funny; others nakedly optimistic) are counterbalanced by a wondrously pillowy and buoyant atmosphere (thanks in large part to Michael Andrews dreamy and illusory synth-lullabies), and keen sense of self-aware humor (July knows her character is part-nitwit). Charming and effervescent, July has a keen sense of humanity, music, tone and absurdist humor, plus a patient watchful eye that makes for a deeply expressive movie. Many of us who loved ‘Everyone We Know,’ found her follow-up, “The Future” wasn’t quite as successful in its aims, but we’ll still be at the theater any time she decides to stray from her art projects and make a film instead. Back and forth forever (“))<>((“), indeed.