Today all is talk of the Bechdel rating test for films.  To pass there must be i) two named women characters, ii) talking to each other, and iii) not about men.  It was devised as part of a cartoon strip in 1985.  Mentally I scroll through my list of favourite films ‘Some like it hot’ – pass.  The Apartment – the doctor’s wife talks to Shirley Maclaine, OK.  Klute – Jane Fonda talks to her invisible therapist, and she also talks to one of her ex-colleagues.  Is that good enough?  Cabaret – Lisa Minelli talks to Marisa Berenson – in the wonderful language-class scene, and later about Marisa’s father’s library sofa – although that conversation is basically about a man.  Private Benjamin – Goldie Hawn.  Women have to talk to each other.

Get Shorty – does it have Green Onions?  Yes.  Does it pass the Bechdel test?  No.  Fargo?  Argo?  Hard to say.  Mid-August Lunch – beautiful film.  Four women who come to share an apartment over the summer in Rome while their adult children are away on holiday.  Yes, they talk to each other.  I think.  Miss Congeniality, yes – good old Sandra Bullock.  Shame that her last film which passed the test (the Heat, not Gravity obviously) was so terrible.  She played an up tight police officer, whose partner was the more relaxed Melissa McCarthy.  Terrible script, terrible plot.  Sweetwater, (in France Sherif Jackson) a film with January Jones from Mad Men, where she is the star who goes out to avenge her husband’s murder, has very few women and they don’t talk to each other.

It makes you think.  What are we watching at the cinema?  What are films telling us about women?   Sex in the City, Bridesmaids, Maid in Manhattan.  Do they pass?  Should they pass?