Fenster writes:

Sax wrote recently about his search for a good women’s picture.  Now, I am a charter member of a 25+ year old group that calls itself Men’s Movie Night, a shifting group of guys devoted to watching, mostly, action flicks.  I trot these creds out, in this Era of Game, to quite obviously cover my backside from charges that I’ve gone soft, since I do happen to know about, and to like, the kind of movie Sax is looking for.

Well, sort of anyway.  It does seem tough to find Sirk equivalents–“weepies” and “melodramas”.  The odd tribute flick like Far From Heaven reminds us how difficult it can be do update a genre too literally, especially with respect to an issue like gender, which is part of a permanent polarity but which is also quite plastic.

History doesn’t repeat but it rhymes.   So I think Sax might have to undertake a rhyming exercise of sorts to find what he seeks: films that are “stylish and smart without  skimping on the sentimentality.”

Here are a few on my list:

Men Don’t Leave.  Jessica Lange’s happy middle-class existence crashes and burns after the unexpected death of her husband.  She is forced to start over with her kids, downscale in Baltimore.  Weepie?  This one qualifies.  The last scene has had me in tears each time I have seen it, and I have seen it any number of times.

Living Out Loud.  Holly Hunter finds herself for a different reason than Lange out on her own.  Can she put the pieces together?

House of Sand and Fog.  Jennifer Connelly also finds herself on her own.  Can she put the pieces together? (Note a theme here: this is one of the ways women’s pictures have needed to change, by looking to reconcile emotion and the need for connection with the double-edged sword of independence.)

Further afield from melodrama but other movies with an appeal to the feminine side: Sliding Doors, Enchanted, Junebug, Away We Go, the bitter but gendered Notes on a Scandal, the action-tinged but curiously distaff-in-sensibility Children of Men, and all the films of Nicole Holofcener.

Then there’s Robin and Marian.  Richard Lester’s film has always struck me as a near-perfect balance between male and female sensibilities.  Connery and Hepburn.  Sword fights and romance.  For me, a kind of bliss, and always tears at the end when the arrow goes flying out the window.