‘Antonia’s Line’ An Intriguing Story Of Female Empowerment

The feminist fable “Antonia’s Line” is full of flapdoodle - but it’s great flapdoodle, doing for the feminine virtues what “Pulp Fiction” did for macho posturing.

This Dutch film, winner of this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, follows several generations of extraordinary women in one family in one rural village. We’re talking female empowerment here, folks. Down with patriarchal arrogance! Up with women’s solidarity!

And while we’re at it: Out with common sense!

But if “Antonia’s Line” doesn’t quite ring true, that’s because writer-director Marleen Gorris isn’t dealing so much with reality as with wish fulfillment. Indeed, the film seems a near cousin of the Mexican hit “Like Water for Chocolate,” blending the same elements: strong women characters and magic realism.

“Antonia’s Line” begins with the arrival just after World War II of Antonia (Willeke van Ammelrooy) in the village of her birth. A widow and single mother of a teenage daughter, Antonia is a formidable personality. She’s smart, proud, outspoken and clearly the equal of any man - especially given the narrow-minded bigotry that passes for masculinity thereabouts.

Almost immediately Antonia begins assembling on her family farm the misfits and outcasts of local society: the retarded girl whose brother sexually abuses her, and the gangling, dimwitted hired hand called Loony Lips. Before long their numbers are bolstered by unmarried mothers (and their countless offspring), lesbians and a former priest with an overactive libido.

There’s also an open-minded farmer (having lived there for only two decades, he’s still regarded as a newcomer) who for years quietly adores Antonia until she informs him at long last that while she won’t give him her hand, “you can have the rest.”

“Antonia’s Line” exudes the same sort of rosy-lensed depiction of female empowerment that marked Agnes Varda’s “One Sings, the Other Doesn’t.” Are we to believe, for example, that rural Catholic villagers in the 1950s and early ‘60s would tolerate in their midst the sexual and artistic shenanigans going on at Antonia’s place? Nah, but this is the way we wish things could be.

And it works. Gorris deftly blends earthy realism with a poetic sensibility, and the results are surprisingly seductive. As generation after generation of Antonia’s extended family keeps being born and growing, and as the principal characters age, wither and vanish, we really do get a sense of what the film’s narration calls “the exhausting round of birth and death.”

MEMO: Two sidebars appeared with the story: 1. “Antonia’s Line” Location: Magic Lantern Cinemas Credits: Directed by Marleen Gorris; starring Willeke van Ammelrooy, Els Dottermans, Jan Decleir, Mil Seghers, Thyrza Ravesteijn, Catherine Ten Bruggencate Running time: 1:45 Rating: Unrated (contains some adult language, violence, nudity and sexual material) Language: Dutch with English subtitles

2. Other views Here’s what other critics say about “Antonia’s Line:” Rene Rodriguez/Miami Herald: Like a good John Irving novel, “Antonia’s Line” veers without warning from the ridiculous to the sublime, from the tragic to the absurd, and once you latch onto its rhythms, the movie becomes an engrossing chronicle of an everexpanding family headed - and populated - mostly by women. Jay Carr/The Boston Globe: “Antonia’s Line” isn’t a man-hating film; it’s just that men are on probation and have to demonstrate a capacity for civilized, compassionate behavior. Some do better than others in this respect …