Lola Kirke Responds to The New Yorker’s “Glib” and Sexist Review of Her Movie Gemini

Gemini is a neo-noir slow burn of a murder mystery. It stars Lola Kirke, Zoë Kravitz, and John Cho, and reviews are mixed, though largely positive. I haven’t seen it, but it sounds like critics are praising the performances, especially Kirke’s, and the stylized filming, filled homages to the genre’s tropes. Detractors are mostly criticizing the slowness of the story and a lack of depth.

And then there’s The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane, whose big problem with the movie seems to be Lola Kirke’s lack of hotness. In fact, he dedicates nearly a quarter of his review to his perplexity at Kirke’s styling.

“The role is hardly flattering,” he writes; “most of the time, she wears big jeans and a baggy gray top, while sporting the haircut from hell—brown bangs cut straight across, as if by a six-year-old with blunt scissors.”

At one point in the movie, the character needs a disguise, so she dyes her hair blonde. But, to Lane’s dismay, “keeps the style.”

He continues, “Kirke, however, who made such an impact, in Mistress America (2015), requires no disguise; she is sphinxlike enough as it is. The cracking of the mystery, at the conclusion of Gemini, is daft and unsatisfying, but no matter. The case of Lola Kirke remains unsolved.”

Kirke has responded to the review, and has done so in a fantastic way: in the magazine’s Letters to the Editor section.

“I am disappointed by Anthony Lane’s glib criticism of my character’s appearance in the film Gemini,” she writes. “To deem unflattering the ‘big jeans’ and ‘baggy gray top’ I wear throughout the film is to suggest a preference for heroines in more tight-fitting clothes.”

Indeed, Lane’s confusion at the character’s “unflattering” style, even when in disguise, sounds like a disappointment at the film’s refusal to comply with tired tropes. How often does a movie use life-threatening situations or a character’s struggle for safety as an excuse for a sexy makeover? The absence of that is not a valid basis for a negative review.

This letter to the editor Lola Kirke sent The New Yorker had me pumping my fist and cheering out loud pic.twitter.com/V4vuN66NcD

— Ester Bloom (@shorterstory) April 18, 2018

Lola concludes by saying, “And to even mention my ‘haircut from hell’ is to miss the point of my performance entirely. We need to see female characters be powerful and beautiful in ways that don’t rely on outdated representations of women.”

(via Vulture, image: Neon)

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