Be a man by losing yourself. Such documentaries rarely reach the public. They are played in small festivals, where only a certain number of lucky people who catch up on time, manage to witness this revelation, while school classes or parental heads are filled with a completely different philosophy. “The Mask You Live In” is a film necessary for society, a medicine and an antidote that, even if initially rejected, will sooner or later cure most of us.
It is amazing that the director is a woman, although it will be mostly about men. Jennifer Sibel Newsom can not be called an experienced professional, because behind her fragile shoulders there is only one more documentary, even with her description, which betrays the presence of obvious feminism (albeit in a healthy, quite justified measure). In her second work, she explores the problem that can be conventionally called: “The education of masculinity in men.” The analysis of the situation begins with a rather easy step: the recognition that you do not need to hide your feelings, but boys around the world are taught very different truths from childhood. “Be a man!” is the motto of raising boys. “Be a man!” is a phrase that involves so many different contradictions and limitations that are supposedly useful, but in fact are the main causes of the destruction of the whole world – both inside and around man. “Be a man!” is an order, a sentence, and a curse. Hide your feelings, fight back, own women, drink and smoke, don’t cry, work like the last miner, have a lot of money, don’t let yourself be hurt, don’t speak in a mannered voice, don’t wear women’s clothes, never hug or kiss guys. A million embittered “no” and disease-causing, questionable “yes.”
So, the analysis of the situation in the course of the plot turns into a picturesque picture of the catastrophic errors of society, mired in its own stubbornness and denial of everything feminine. It is not even a matter of feminism (although there is one, which is only worth denying a woman as a person, but recognition as a piece of meat intended for sexual intercourse). It's about human biology and behavioral psychology. The director managed to dig so deep that various and important aspects of the development of the problem were touched upon – from animal reflexes to the influence of the media on the masses. For the first half of the movie, I was sitting there thinking, ‘Well, this is happening in the world of fauna. Everyone seeks his place under the sun, fights for it, destroys and often eats a member of another race. And among people, too. The philosophy of masculinity as power over others, sometimes with violence, dominates. You have to be a leader, otherwise you are nothing. In the second half of the film, I no longer imagined animals in the place of people, but I saw man in man, and there were other thoughts in my head: We are the product of ourselves. We influence each other, and if you break a person, he will break other people. He will break his own children, which is even worse. Everything comes from the family, from the environment. We are made up of what we see and feel every day. We put on our masks to appear stronger – but so many of us have been trained since childhood to hide pain, until it slowly and surely devours us until it bursts out with new pain, new revenge, new catastrophe.
It is in this way that this picture has captivated me and the audience, showing, it would seem, not the biggest problem as a global vice of the public, not distinguished by very many, because it is customary to sing this vice and hide behind it in order to avoid unwanted gossip. It is customary not to be real, but daily to put on yourself invented and learned to survive - thereby leading yourself to death. It is customary to give a false characterization of masculinity and masculinity, why in the world there are still various kinds of discrimination, racism, nationalism, homophobia and other disappointing ways to become superior to others - because we, they say, should be men, and God forbid go against our own savagery, try to be normal, accept and love our neighbor as ourselves.
In everything I have shown, I was only embarrassed by too frequent statistics (with distrust of statistics as such) and a little pretentious moralizing in the final. However, this is the only drawback in the work of Jennifer Sibel Newsom, which even the editing of scenes of popular films between interview screenings looks very good.
And most importantly, “The Mask You Live In” is a real social slap, revelation and denunciation, which elevates this work for me personally to such heights that not even every professional documentary director can conquer.
There is only one and the most powerful reason to sum up.
This documentary... I need it.
9 out of 10