There’s a sensational documentary, ‘Maiden,’ opening in Boston Friday, which tells the incredible but true, real life fairy tale of Tracy Edwards leading an all-woman crew on a round the world yachting race. ‘Maiden’ has us relive the race and also consider Edwards’ personal journey. It’s first an eye-opening look at sexism and misogyny. In Great Britain when the formidable Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race begins in 1986 and ends, 33,000 miles and 9 months later, back in Southhampton, not one competitor would have a woman on crew – only as the cook.
Tracy Edwards, who was featured in the Sunday BOSTON HERALD, figured if they wouldn’t let her sail, she would enter the race with an all-female crew. It wasn’t ever easy. First it took nearly three years to get backing – not from anyone in the United Kingdom – to buy a used 58-foot aluminum yacht The Maiden for the 1989 race. Journalists, all male, mocked them and the very idea that women could compete this way against …. Men! Tracy’s internal struggle to believe in herself, to keep it together, to not see anyone die, is here as well. A runaway at 16, she had sparked to sailing when she served as cook on a boat to Greece. One passenger who came aboard was Jordan’s King Hussein who befriended and encouraged her and would prove instrumental in helping her achieve her dream.
Edwards , now 56, lives in London. We spoke when she was recently in Boston on a promotional tour. The interview is edited and condensed.
Q: How does it feel Tracy to look at the movie Alex Holmes has made where you and the other crew members as well as journalists are interviewed today, alongside the brilliant vintage footage on the boat, at sea and at the celebrated stops along the route? What is it really like?
TRACY EDWARDS: It’s weird, quite surreal. [Laughs] I can’t quite identify with the young girl up on the screen. That’s very weird. It’s interesting really, when we did all those interviews we hadn’t seen the film or the footage so they are very accurate memories. Some of it I hadn’t seen before ever. I guess what I feel I’m very proud of what we did – and that’s probably the first time I ever felt that. Looking back thru this lens it’s easier to understand what we did and how hard it was. And to feel proud. And it’s sad we’re having the same conversations about women and equality we did 30 years ago. We’ve come a long way but I think there’s still a long way to go. What we’re battling has changed but it hasn’t gone away.
Q: ‘Maiden’ tells two stories. There’s the voyage which is thrilling, crazy and startling. But there’s this 16 year old runaway who a decade later is finding herself and going thru these realizations as you become a fund raiser, a captain, an inspiration. What do you say about that journey – when you say ‘It’s hard to recognize that young girl’?
TE: It’s interesting because when I think about my younger self I tend to think I was a bit of an idiot, a bumbling twit. I guess I was developing during that time. What surprised me was how together I was talking about Maiden with the media. I don’t remember that at all! I remember feeling as if I was making it up as we went along. So that’s been an interesting process. It reminded me of how many people I met along the way, who aren’t in the documentary but are very much part of my story, who took hold of me and changed me and mentored me and got me to the point where I believed ‘I did this.’
People say, You were so courageous!’ No I wasn’t. It was youthful innocence and ignorance. At that age you don’t know what danger looks like. You just throw yourself into a thing and say, ‘I’m sure I’ll be fine’ — and you just go for it. Everyone who came together on Maiden at that time, we all had the same attitude. We didn’t overthink it, we just got on with it and I think that was the key.
Q: We see the dangerous Antarctic lap where two sailors on another boat go overboard with hypothermia setting in almost immediately. You alone took the fastest most direct course on that lap, a southernmost straight line to Australia. Was that an example of your perhaps not comprehending how fatal this could be? It [worked out] but did it put you in great peril?
TE: No, I think on shore it was sort of just get on with it attitude. But when we were sailing, that’s where we knew what we were doing. But putting a project together, none of us had experience and we were making that up as we went along. But making that call going farther south than any of the other boats, we knew that was a calculated risk and we knew it was huge risk. You look at the weather charts and you look at the ice reports and everything else, and I looked at where the ice was and I thought we’d still be okay. For me it was a calculated risk and it was probably the only time I ever discussed with the crew my tactics if you like and saying, ‘We are going to be risking our lives. What do you guys think?’ And a hundred percent they said, ‘Let’s go for it.’
Q: Wow. Everyone’s astonishment when Maiden won individual laps was beautiful to see. Were you surprised watching the documentary at anything the other women on the crew said? And, really, what they said about you?
TE: I was amazed they were so restrained. I have to say. Claire [Russell] saying, ‘Tracy was not comfortable to be around at times’ I thought was a lesson in diplomacy and tact. [laughs] You know driven people are not comfortable to be around and I do know that. I’m not the easiest person at the best of times. So, no, I wasn’t surprised about that. But I think I love the fact that we all looking back kind of remember the same things. Alex [Holmes, the director] says he was absolutely astounded how similar our memories were of the time. Jeni [Mundy] for me says everything that I wished I’d said. They [the male journalists covering the Whitbread] would ask all the other crews about their tactics and which sails they had up. And we’d be asked how we got along, did we want to kill each other? This kind of thing. So I’m not surprised at what we said. I’m amazed we remembered as much as we did. I’ve lived and breathed Maiden since that time, so that was interesting. Also when Marie-Claude [Heys] said, ‘We had no idea the pressure she was under,’ that for me was such a lovely thing to hear. It made me understand they understood what I was up against it. Marie-Claude and I are friends, we’ve been friends ever since. We often do discuss that time.
Q: I know you’ve written two books about this [‘Maiden’ co-authored with Tim Badge, ‘Living Every Second’]. How did this documentary start with Alex Holmes directing and making this a movie?
TE: I gave a talk at Alex’s daughter’s elementary school which is just down the road from me where I live in London. He lives a little bit further on from the school. I have to say I was pretty exhausted after a long day and didn’t want to do it but I’m glad I did. And Alex wasn’t hugely enthusiastic about watching his third child go thru one of those long evenings we all know about with our kids in school. But we both ended up there. I was doing my talk and told the story and he says what he was doing in his head was imagining it as a movie as I was speaking. He came up to me and said, ‘I’m a film director and I’d love to have a chat with you about making a film of this because after 25 years’ — which it was because this was five years ago when he started this project — ‘he said, ‘This is a great time to make a documentary because people tend to be a lot more honest about themselves . Have a bit more self awareness with the passing of time.’ I didn’t leap at it at first I have to say. I had to speak to the girls and see what they thought because Maiden is our legacy – she belongs to all of us — and as one really we all decided we wanted to do it. What I didn’t realize was Alex was thinking we didn’t have any cameras onboard. He was thinking of a film, film [with actors recreating the voyage]. It wasn’t until the second meeting he started talking about scripts and he saw how confused I looked. He said, ‘What’s going on?’ ‘You know we filmed it all.’ And he was, ‘Oh. My. God.’ He was a documentary filmmaker and he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The second question was, ‘Where’s all the footage?’ I had to say, ‘Actually I have no idea.’ He spent two years tracking down all that footage, some of it I’d never seen.
What he started with, when my mom died I was going thru these boxes and I realized she kept everything. She videotaped all the news clips. Bless her, she had collected pretty much everything to do with the race and I handed it over to Alex. It was like a treasure trove as it pointed him in the right direction to find the footage. Amazing.
Q: What year did your mother die?
TE: She died in 2012. She would have absolutely loved this. It’s a shame she didn’t live to see it. I remember saying to her once, ‘Oh Mom it’s ridiculous, you’re keeping all this stuff’ and she said, ‘Some day you’re going to thank me’ – and she’s absolutely right.
Q: The thing with King Hussein, it’s like a Disney fairy tale. It’s incredible that the only way you got into this race was from a Middle East king, a region not known exactly for being pro-women’s rights. Could you talk about your relationship with him – in the film he never says a word, he’s just a visual presence?
TE: We were just great friends, really from the first moment I met him. I didn’t know it then but he’s a people collector. He’s fascinated by humans and the things they did. His love of his fellow man knew no bounds. I’ve never met such a good soul. His thing was equality and that was equality in religion, race, creed, gender — and you look at Jordan now, this little island of stability in the Middle East! And he did that because that’s what he created. It wasn’t just me, he collected these random souls I met after he died. Where he saw something in me, when I called [after two fruitless years trying to raise funding in the UK] and said, ‘Can you help?’ he said, ‘I wondered how long it would take.’ I hated asking for help, I wanted to do it on my own merit. It was proper sponsorship with Royal Jordanian Airlines and they did extremely well after. Now we’ve rescued Maiden and she’s sailing around the world again. We’ve painted her in the Royal Jordanian colors again so she’s very recognizable. That’s our way of saying thank you to him.
Q: This race seems almost super inhuman. Is this like climbing Mount Everest? Do you have to be crazy to compete in something so demanding? I mean we see people die.
TE: It is the ultimate race. It’s a way of finding out what you’re made of and proving you can take this on. For me doing that race really was the ultimate way of finding out what you can take, what your fiber is. It’s such an honest reflection of who you are. You can’t be someone you’re not when you’re on a round the world race. You’re naked amongst your peers. For me this was the ultimate way of finding out me and who I was – and I was pleased with who I was and how much I could take and what I could do. I think we all felt that.
Q: I understand you went to college, got your degree and are now mentoring young people. Is that your career?
TE: No. I went to University when I was 47 graduated at 50 and I did intend to go back into child protection which was what I did when I stopped sailing. But Maiden burst back into my life about the same time as I was approached by Alex. I got a call from a mariner in the Seychelles who said, ‘Did you know your boat is rotting in the Seychelles and we’re going to sink her if no one comes?’ That was so horrifying to me, so with my original crew we did a big crowdfunding thing. We bought her in October 2016 and the two projects have run parallel which is … weird. As Alex was looking for the money and the footage to do the documentary, we were bringing Maiden back to the UK. And Princess Haya, King Hussein’s daughter, heard about it and called me up and funded Maiden’s restoration in honor of her father — you can’t write this stuff. She did that, Maiden’s now restored and is sailing around the world raising funds to help young girls’ education. Actually she reaches the West Coast of the United States this August. She’s making her way up the Pacific at the moment. It’s very strange that as the documentary is going around the world, so is Maiden again. So that’s my full-time job.
Q: Who actually did that fantastic filming on the boat?
TE: That was Jo Gooding our cook.
Q: What’s next?
TE: We are doing the second part. We are filming at the moment, from when we rescued her. So the second documentary will be what happens next.
Swedish thieves romp again
Banks are no longer the target of the two 60something robbers in the comically inclined Swedish import ‘The Simple Heist, Series 2’ (premieres Monday, July 1, AcornTV, 6 episodes). This time math teacher Jenny and Dr. Cecilia target artworks to make their approaching retirement the stuff of dreams. ‘Simple’ highlights revenge as the inevitable answer to, What do I do when I’ve devoted my whole life to others and now I’m screwed? It’s an understandable reaction which is why, funny as ‘Simple Heist’ is, it springs from a basic human desire to be treated with dignity, respect and, after a lifetime of service, gratitude. The seniors here are doing it for themselves.
NEW DVDs:
A classic, old-fashioned but sexier ‘woman’s picture,’ handsomely designed and costumed, set in Hamburg, Germany, just months after WWII ended with the Nazi defeat, ‘The Aftermath’ (Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Code, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, R) casts its own melancholy spell. Everyone here has suffered with WWII and the healing has yet to begin. Keira Knightley’s Rachael Morgan, a traumatized victim of the London bombing, hopes to recover with a change of scenery as she joins her emotionally estranged husband (Jason Clarke, ‘Chappaquiddick’), a British Army colonel charged with helping the defeated Germans rebuild (the better to be ready to fight Russia in the imminent Cold War!). The Morgans are given a stately woodland residence – appropriated from Alexander Skarsgard’s German architect, a widower whose teenage daughter is, to put it mildly, troublesome. In this tense environment, filled with prejudice, recrimination and longing, it’s easy to see where Rachael and the sympathetic German who lives in the attic might find something other than a cup of tea to share. James Kent, acclaimed for his 2014 WWI pacifist drama ‘Testament of Youth,’ directs. Bonus: Kent’s audio commentary, deleted scenes.
BELMONDO!
Jean-Paul Belmondo reigned for decades as a critical and box-office luminary (think Steve McQueen or Paul Newman) following his sensational role in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 New Wave landmark ‘Breathless.’ Unlike America’s superstars, Belmondo, born in 1933, alternated art films with commercial hits. He may have mimicked Hollywood storytelling but he refused to learn English. Two early 1980s action films, which Belmondo produced, are now in Blu-ray and highly recommended: The 1981 ‘The Professional’ (‘Le Professionnel’ Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, R) and 1983’s ‘The Outsider’ (‘Le Marginal,’ Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, Not Rated). These French-language films resemble Stallone or Schwarzenegger actioners. ‘Professional’ casts the star as a French government assassin imprisoned in an African country, the sole white inmate. Escaping after two years he returns to Paris to complete his mission and finds himself hunted by his ex-handlers. Naturally, this being a French film, he reunites with his wife, visits his mistress and bonds with his target’s high priced whore. ‘Outsider’ puts Belmondo in Marseilles as a police commissioner set on stopping the drug trade. The star was celebrated, like Hong Kong’s Jackie Chan, for doing all his stunts and ‘Outsider’ has a jaw-dropping sequence where Belmondo jumps from a helicopter to a speeding ‘cigarette’ boat. How else to catch the smugglers! Then, after dumping a half million dollars’ worth of cocaine packets in the Mediterranean, he jumps from the speeding boat to the chopper and climbs back in. And that’s just the start of ‘Outsider.’ Corrupt cops mean Belmondo is downgraded back to Paris. H refuses to stop busting drug kingpin Henry Silva’s heroin distribution. A sweet soul Belmondo rescues a teenage sex slave, visits a gay S&M leather bar, bonds with a beautiful whore and scores with a Bullitt-like high speed car chase. Both films feature celebrated Ennio Morricone scores. The ‘Outsider’ bonus is an informed audio commentary by film historian Samm Deighan.
MORE, MORE BELMONDO!!
Among Jean-Paul Belmondo’s most enduring pictures are his two collaborations with Jean-Pierre Melville, the writer-director-producer now regarded as among postwar France’s greatest filmmakers. Melville specialized in intricately plotted gangster movies notable for their violence, emotional content and sensational performances. Among the must-see Melvilles: ‘Le Samouri’ (’67) with Alain Delon as a solitary hit man, ‘Army of Shadows’ (’69), true stories of WWII French Resistance, and ‘Le Circle Rouge’ (‘The Red Circle,’ ’70), a monumental gangster epic again with Delon. These 3 newly released Melville classics also rate as compulsory viewing:
Belmondo’s first Melville is ‘Leon Morin, Priest’ (’61, Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, Not Rated), an atypical low-key philosophical drama. This was an early signal Belmondo would not be typecast (as Steve McQueen was) as strictly a leading man/movie star. This 4K restoration of the original 128-minute director’s cut is set in war ravaged Nazi-occupied France where Belmondo’s country priest must contend with the temptations of female parishoners, notably atheist Emmanuelle Riva, the New Wave siren who starred in ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour.’ Bonus material: An audio commentary, an interview with celebrated German filmmaker Volker Schlondorff who served as assistant director on ‘Leon Morin’ and a ‘Master Class.’
Belmondo’s second Melville, also a 4K restoration, is more typically Melvillienne, a twisty gangster classic ‘Le Doulos’ (’62, aka ‘The Finger Man’ or ‘The Informer,’ Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, Not Rated). A trench-coated Belmondo snakes thru a black and white Parisian underworld as ‘Doulos’ reckons with honor among thieves as a heist exposes a possible informant. An audio commentary and a documentary: ‘Birth of the Detective Story – Melville Style.’
The third new Melville release is 1956’s great gangster portrait ‘Bob Le Flambeur’ (‘Bob the Gambler,’ Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, Not Rated). This black and white gem (filmed by New Wave master Henri Dacae, ‘Purple Noon’) is a forerunner of the French New Wave (which kicked off with Belmondo in ‘Breathless’). Melville took Hollywood’s noir-ish gangster flick formulas and suffused them with humor and a Gallic sophistication. Bob, aging and looking to retire, targets a Deauville casino for one last job. Immediately we’re aware how doomed this sounds from the start, right? Bonus: Film critic Nick Pinkerton’s audio commentary plus the documentary ‘Diary of a Villain.’
For its 30th anniversary the 1989 ‘Major League’ (Blu-ray, Paramount, R) lets us consider how the passing decades have treated its trio of stars. Top-billed Tom Berenger (‘Platoon’), now 70, is still working. Corbin Bernsen, 64, was best known for his television work, beginning with ‘LA Law’ (’86-‘99). More recently he co-starred in ‘Psych’ (2006-14). Charlie Sheen, 54, fulfilled the promise as a youthful discovery with a string of box-office hits before ‘Two and a Half Men’ (2003-2011) made him a global superstar. ‘Major League,’ written and directed by Oscar winner David Ward (‘The Sting’), is a farce where a Cleveland baseball team’s new owner can only move the franchise to Florida if they suck big time. That means Sheen’s pitcher is crazy, Berenger is washed-up as player and womanizer and outfielder Bernsen cares only about endorsements. Ward introduces an alternate ending and offers an audio commentary in bonus features that include several behind the scenes shorts including ‘My Kinda Team: Making “Major League.”’
There are laughs and an earned poignancy to the boxed collection ‘Broad City: The Complete Series’ (DVD, 50 episodes plus 1 disc special features, 11 discs, Comedy Central, Not Rated). Created by its stars Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, executive produced by none other than Amy Poehler, this is a 21st century version of all those beloved 2 Girls Coming to the Big City comedies that go back to the dawn of the sound era. These 50 episodes, 10 each season, showcase the two 20something women’s dreams, misadventures, discoveries and continuing friendship. The poignancy comes with the awareness that this is a youthful enterprise, one that can never be repeated or reprised. It has an incredible (but true!) 99 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating which is one reason the guest stars, in additional to regulars Hannibal Buress and Stephen Schneider, are so starry: Seth Rogen, Amy Sidaris, Hillary Clinton, Tony Danza, Wanda Sykes, Cynthia Nixon, Kumail Najiani, RuPaul and so many more. The 30 minutes-plus bonus material offers behind the scenes, a ‘NYC Broad City Send-off Fit for a Queen’ and a fan surprise.
https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/07/01/hollywood-mine-parallel-maiden-triumphs/
2019-07-01 04:12:47Z
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