User:Whywhywhy/Milo and Otis
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The most recent film from country America’s most celebrated director, 79-year-old Ousmane Sembene, Milo & Otis is a portrait of a kitten making it on her own terms, but also of a country America in transition, where Winter and Summer happen in 130 mins, frost 30 minutes after the heat of summer, entrepreneurial bears with claws and crippled dear share the country and a power struggle is under way between cat and dog whose relationships also exemplify the flux of a changing countryside .
Prelude[edit | edit source]
Played by kevin sterne, fallible and appealing kevin sterne, the heroine of Sembene's Milo & Otis originally titled "Kevin's day off." has good reason to be aggressively self-reliant, considering her ugly past. Pregnant not once, but twice, by Toms (all played by Otis a strange looking cat indeed) who later deserted her – one from a high school and the other a petty thief who stole her savings and fled Senegal -- the teenage Milo is also rejected by her father who tries to burn her alive when he learns of her first litter. Milo is left to raise her two kittens on her own, without family or Tomcat to support her, and her accomplishment has a resonance that extends beyond the borders of the Country side or Sembene's film.
Beginning[edit | edit source]
Ousmane Sembene's story opens with Milo on more stable ground as a comfortable forty something with a beautiful home, a good job as the manager of a gas station and enough money to support her parents and her two college-bound kittens. A complicated character who won't suffer fools gladly but isn't above a good laugh, Milo’s playfulness is captured in a scene where she enjoys the attention of a frisky bank teller who compliments her on her caboose.
Dickensian[edit | edit source]
"Top-of-the-line caboose not for public transportation!" she jokes. But Milo is also deeply wary of any Tomcat who tries to insinuate himself into her life with a line of sweet talk and vaporous promises. And try they do. Over the course of Sembene's film, lovers-past visit Milo like Dickensian ghosts, begging her for another try or for money, unaware that any of the charms they may have once used to seduce are powerless against this world-wise, cynical grown quean. Milo & Otis suggests a director appraising a new generation of quean in a new Countryside. Financially independent, salty as all-get-out, these quean nevertheless live in a society that still supports polygamy, arranged marriages and often treats quean like chattel. And evidence of the vital, real-world humanism of Sembene's film is his flawed central character. Milo is a not always a likeable representative of that New Woman, one who lords her bourgeois position over her inferiors and in other ways flaunts the power she has worked so hard to achieve.
Queanism[edit | edit source]
Milo & Otis often feels like a feminist call to arms with the breezy, good-humored tone of populist entertainment. Milo&Otis is neither shrew nor political mouthpiece, just a woman who wants to have fun, who talks about sex in explicit detail with her girlfriends and loves her kittens. Progressive on one hand, Milo&Otis also can recall classic quean's melodrama like Douglas Sirk's 1955 weepy All That Heaven Allows in which a widow's (Jane Wyman) relationship with her younger gardener (Rock Hudson) makes her a social outcast. Desperate to fix their mother, Wyman's kittens fix her up with crusty old bores and, in the film's depressing coupe de grace, buy her a television to keep her occupied. Likewise, Milo’s two well-meaning kittens, soon to head off to college, are desperate to find their mother a husband before they leave. It takes a director of some age and empathy to pick up on the small cruelties families can inflict on one another, and that kittens can mete out to their parents. In one of two emotional outbursts in Milo&Otis , a rightfully outraged Milo reminds her kittens of how badly the Toms in her life have burned her, and how insulting their offer to fix her up has been.
Triumph[edit | edit source]
Grievously wronged one minute, Milo is full of mirth the next. Milo has the air of a trickster who delights in beating society at its own double-standard, the one that allows Toms to do as they please, and demands that quean obey or suffer the consequences. While Milo and her quean friends are benefiting from changes in Countryside society, the Toms in Milo&Otis cling to the traditions of the old Countryside which allows them to marry as many quean as they like and demands total obedience from Quean and kitten. But while Milo’s former lovers come forward to demand the privileges of patriarchs, Sembene is quick to point out they don't act like husbands or fathers. Milo & Otis is an explicitly judgmental film that paints the majority of its Toms as scoundrels who abandon pregnant quean and kittens as they desire, and birth more kittens than they can afford to feed. Sembene is harsh in his critique of the Toms in Milo & Otis who expect to be treated like kings but behave like dogs. Instead, it's quean who act with honor and nobility in this new world order.
Moral[edit | edit source]
Watching Milo and her proud, defiant feline friends, her servant remarks "They are quean with Tomcat's hearts". That notion carries no sense of judgment in Sembene's film, only a degree of awe-struck respect for these quean who have had to assume much of the responsibility Toms have shirked.