She said
By Jessica Stites
With cartoonish playfulness, Itty Bitty Titty Committee, the new film by director Jamie Babbit (But I'm a Cheerleader) updates riot grrrl culture and breathes new cool into feminism.
Our heroine, wide-eyed young dyke Anna (played with range and depth by adorable newcomer Melonie Diaz, 23), has just been dumped by her first girlfriend. She works a miserable job at a breast augmentation clinic and suffers her parents' and coworkers' efforts get her to pad her own "inadequate" chest. But her plunge into self-loathing is arrested when she is swept into a guerrilla feminist cell by the enticing Sadie (blond bombshell Nicole Vicius, no relation to Sid).
The group—called Clits in Action—embarks on an anarchic rampage with a riotous glee rarely granted to women in movies: they run from cops, hop fences, spray-paint over sexist billboards, shout feminist slogans, and sign everything with their acronym, C(I)A (whose middle (I) is deliberately vulva-evoking). A road trip also yield lots of sexual mayhem, as road trips do when you're 18. It's here that we learn that Diaz is completely miscast as flat-chested—but watching her tussle with Vicius, it's hard to muster up much indignation.
Clits in Action soon runs afoul of the same problems that have beset activist groups since the 1960s: sexual drama, overseriousness, a dependence on an older and stodgier generation for money, and heated debates over the use of violence. But the film reminds us that just because these problems always crop up, that doesn't mean they're insurmountable—and that actually, looked at in the right light, they're kind of funny.
The movie is carried by its young cast, which includes Carly Pope as militant Shuli, Deak Evgenikos as “Meat” (an instantly recognizable faux-hawked college dyke), and Lauren Mollica as tenderhearted tranny Aggie. Cameos by Clea Duvall, Jenny Shimizu, Guin Turner, and Daniela Sea are completely unnecessary to the plot but add to the campy fun. Shimizu plays a jaded older tenant of C(I)A's warehouse who serves to temper the young activists' uncool excesses (“God! More vagina imagery?”). Sea, freed of her L Word character Max, reminds us why she's a sex symbol. Playing a rugged hitchhiker, she drops a come-on line that sends Shuly's panties racing to the floor, and lots of hot (and kinky) sex ensues.
If there's any serious criticism to be made of Itty Bitty Titty Committee—besides the fact that the title goes unexplained until the epilogue—it's that the film's focus on feminism and gender comes at the expense of other politics. Though Anna and her family are played by Latinas, that's where any acknowledgement of race ends. The script could have been about a white family. (My bet: It was.) And despite the dyke protagonists, homophobia also seems to be mysteriously absent.
But it's hard to chastise a film that celebrates the important and too-often-belittled political power of young women. There's also a deeper message threaded through the film: a reminder that “the political is personal” means that ultimately, living one's politics is the only way to find happiness. Rightly, none of the film's characters gets her love life sorted out until she gets her politics straight.
Itty Bitty Titty Committee is likely to provoke an “aha!” moment in more than a few 18-year-old girls. Expect to see C(I)A copycats in your neighborhood soon.
Stites is a writer for Ms. magazine.
He Said
By Kyle Buchanan
The star of Itty Bitty Titty Committee is Anna (Melonie Diaz), and she's in a not so itty-bitty rut. Her girlfriend has broken up with her, her family is obsessed with her older sister's wedding, and every day she reports for work at a plastic surgery clinic wearing cardigans that even Pam from The Office would reject as too plain. Clearly this girl needs a jolt, and she gets it from punky Sadie, who introduces Anna to an underground group of female revolutionaries entitled Clits in Action—C(I)A. With the help of some Sleater-Kinney and spray paint, Anna is ready to shake off those dusty cardigans and uncork the radical feminist within.
Itty Bitty has a similar transformative effect on director Jamie Babbit, who's best known for her debut film, But I'm a Cheerleader, and was last in theaters with The Quiet, which barely made a sound. This movie, though, is an assured piece of filmmaking; working from a smart script by Tina Mabry and Abigail Shafran, Babbit captures the allure of revolutionary transgression while peppering the film with knowing winks. Though the young members of C(I)A are ardent, they're still freeloading off their bemused elders—no one more than Sadie, who lives with sugar mama Courtney (Melanie Mayron).
Courtney isn't just an obstacle to the inevitable Anna-Sadie romance; she's also a more temperate feminist who functions as Babbit's example of revolutionary contrast. Courtney has been around the block more than once and now tries to change the system from within rather than by aggressively challenging it as C(I)A does. Her most pivotal scene is when she's trying to hold together a motion-driven committee in her living room as the rowdy members of C(I)A yell at each other in the room next door. Courtney is attracted to the passion the younger girls display (her devotion to Sadie functions almost as proof to her that she still retains an anarchic spark), but still she can't help but reprimand them. This is a woman who's seen too many ideals crushed by the realities of revolution, and she's only too quick to hand down that feeling.
That Courtney is still treated sympathetically by the filmmakers is emblematic of Itty Bitty's generosity. The members of C(I)A tend to see things in black-and-white (fittingly, the film's first sequence is shot in that format) but Babbit is more interested in provocative shades of gray. No one here is an easy villain; even the members of Anna's family are acting out of love (and, in a refreshing change from the norm, are comfortable with their daughter's homosexuality from frame 1). Most of C(I)A's stunts function as incitement to question not just authority but history itself, and Babbit references feminist figures like Emma Goldman and Angela Davis but leaves it up to viewers to do their own homework. As we learn in the film, sometimes change is only itty-bitty, but you've got to start somewhere.
Buchanan is the film critic for The Advocate.
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