‘The Hate Club’, a meeting of fascist women that warns of the rise of the extreme right

2023-04-29 21:54:55

The camera follows a school teacher. Before taking her car, he sees a student who is waiting for her mother and stays with him. She brings a cake for a date with friends under a piece of silver paper and mysteriously shows it to her. As they talk, a Mexican cleaner makes noise. She convinces the boy to go and scold her for bothering them, for not showing respect and subservience. A few minutes later, without cuts, with the camera always behind her, she arrives at the meeting with her friends. Before seeing them, she sets the dessert down next to some sandwiches. She lifts the wrapper and there it is, a cake with a dripping red swastika in the middle. They laugh. They cut it. they eat it

The Nazi general who laundered his fortune by making movies in Franco’s Spain

Further

The opening scene of the hate club —which can already be seen on Filmin— is quite a declaration of intent and puts all the cards on the table. Also the visuals, with that uncut sequence shot that remains iron until the end. Beth de Araújo’s directorial debut, sponsored by producer Jason Blum (Paranormal Activity, Insidious) —which smells the talent in the genre from kilometers around—, is a sequence shot that begins as an innocent meeting between friends to become a tale as terrifying as it is real, that of extreme right-wing women that the cinema does not normally show . This meeting between cakes and tea becomes an example of the chilling, racist, homophobic and supremacist arguments of a sector that sees how its hate speech acquires legitimacy in the United States Congress with the arrival of far-right parties.

“We are feminine, not feminists”, “they have promoted her for being Latina and I am white”… a battery of offensive slogans that these women launch convinced that their country would be better if there were no immigrants. White supremacy that ends up becoming a hate crime. A film that was born from the director’s impulse when she saw the video of Amy Cooper, a white woman who reported a black man to the police for threatening her. It was a lie, but the video went viral. It was May 2020, with the pandemic in full swing and plenty of time to write. De Araújo was clear that she wanted to create a film in which the protagonist and her point of view were that of “a white supremacist.”

What she was also putting into words were her own fears as a rationalized person, with an Asian mother and a Brazilian father. “That year, hate crimes against Asians in the US were on the rise. They had gone up like 300%, people said it was because of COVID. My mother is of Chinese origin and my father is from Brazil. She takes very long walks every day and we even changed the places where she walked and the times at which she did it so that my father could accompany her and that she would not be alone, ”says the director.

“It was a real fear because they were things that were happening even in more liberal areas like San Francisco, New York or Los Angeles. He scared me because someone I loved could die. Also, when I saw the video of Amy Cooper, she reminded me of several women I had met in my life. Probably none were as extreme as the character I’ve written, Emily, but some are perhaps not so different from Marjorie, that young woman who is indoctrinated into the journey that the film takes place in, and I wanted to portray those types of women.” Add.

The reality is that they cannot kill us all.” They have tried and tried throughout history and have even been successful at times. But, look at the world, we keep getting over it

Beth de Araujo
— Film director

All the phrases that these reactionary women say are heard in the media and on the streets, but its director and screenwriter never wanted “to make it look like a Fox News clip embedded in the movie”, but simply “to be faithful to what that character would say ”. “I think each of these women represents a different facet and different ways that these people engage with these extremist groups. She wanted what they said to sound authentic, things they would actually say and behaviors they would have.”

the hate club he makes a risky narrative decision. The point of view is that of the villains. The spectator accompanies them in each barbarity said, in each crime committed, and is a close-up witness. For Beth de Araújo this can even be useful, because “people of color have to understand how these people think to stay safe.” “For me, it wasn’t really a challenge. It was more annoying than anything else. I also made that decision because I think victimhood is pretty boring, but there was no other way to tell what happens to the two sisters in the movie, they are victims, but I thought that if it had been told from their perspective it wouldn’t have been enough. enlightening or attractive”.

Despite everything, the end of the film leaves a window to optimism, to survival. The far right cannot win. The director of the film does not believe that it is an “optimistic or pessimistic” ending, but an ending that she had to “portray reality and the reality is that they cannot kill us all.” “They have tried and tried throughout history and have even been successful at times. But, look at the world, we keep getting through it and in the end what’s left is a person who has to deal with trauma on his own in order to survive. There are no witnesses to the internal trauma that they will then deal with for the rest of their lives. The only thing that changed from the first draft of the script to what is seen in the film is precisely the ending, because originally I didn’t feel it was honest and realistic, ”she explains about that plane with which the viewer catches air and breathe.

Another complex choice is that it be the women of the extreme right and not the men, a point of view that is not normally chosen and that for the director is motivated because “those who tend to exercise physical violence are men.” That is precisely why she was interested in talking about how a woman can be “part of a system that has her subjugated.” Characters that she finds fascinating because she can’t understand them, but precisely “trying to understand” is one of the motivations of this film even though she doesn’t have “easy answers”.

Beth de Araújo surprises with the confidence with which she speaks and how clear her film was even before it started. She always knew that it would be shot in sequence, and the virtuoso exercise was performed without cuts four times, once a day, since the action had to end at sunset. They were adjusting the start times to have better light and the final cut is the mixture of two days, although almost everything belongs to the last day of shooting. With this decision she wanted to provoke a clear sentiment: “Hate crimes and racism are inescapable.”