User Reviews

Pros: 1. The main characters have really good chemistry together. 2. The film is decently well-shot. It's nothing special but it gets the job done.

Cons: 1. The sex scenes are ridiculously incessant (there are 3 within the first 30 minutes), and it's just porn for the sake of being shocking. 2. There's forced conflict at the start when a random guy starts calling the main characters "dykes" out-of-nowhere. 3. Apparently, in this universe, a small woman can beat up two fully grown men with one punch. It's incredibly unrealistic. 4. The soundtrack is played far too loud. 5. The movie has no likable or interesting characters. The film is clearly more interested in the Progressive messaging than the story or the characters. 6. The movie is really slow-paced, especially when very little happens. 7. There is some bizarre and forced anti-Christian messaging thrown in.

Shocking works, if they were born a few years ago, might be included in the category of banned films in the world, but they are one of the most hearty female themed films I have ever seen. It is not only because the female characters in the film can live the most real self, but also because the director's perspective is natural and secular, and even goes further than the romance. Of course, to some extent, it still has the meaning of male gaze, but it is already a very avant-garde work.

This is the real deal. Its poetry is bold and unapologetic; its craft lithe, assured, and completely realised. Its themes and ideas are conveyed with fierce cogency. It takes a complex question - essentially: can pornography be truly empowering to women? - and essays it with a verve that gave me the giddy rush of seeing an at-his-peak Godard for the first time.

It is intellectually thrilling, but emotionally moving, too. It dances along the fine line between the intellectual and the base with a daring grace. (Is it pornography? Is it meta-pornography?)

The Daughters of Fire is formally inventive and philosophically incisive in a way that should embarrass Haneke for his hollow edgelord bloviating, or Von Trier with his juvenile provocations, would that they had any shame. Yet, this film is (at time of writing) pretty much unheard of, invisible. (But sure, tell me again that cinema isn't institutionally sexist.)

This is the first time I can truly say I watched a movie with *zero* concession to the male gaze. I'm a man, and this film was not made for me. And that is both the most refreshing thing about it (to me), and why my thoughts on it, and this very review, are joyously irrelevant.

I expect many men, should they bother to watch it at all, may feel threatened by this film and write reviews that attempt to belittle it in various ways. ("I'm not threatened, it's just really badly lit", etc.)

They shall have their tantrums. This film will prove resilient. If films can be important and meaningful to the world - and of course they can - then The Daughters of Fire is as significant as they come. (No pun intended.)

It's an extraordinary achievement. Given the film's radically ambitious aims - to examine representation of (queer) women's bodies, paradigms of female pleasure, and the integration of eroticism, pornography and poetry into a structurally feminist worldview - it's bordering on the miraculous how great it is.

Above insight, catharsis, and joy, the greatest feeling a film can leave a viewer with, I think, is gratitude. I felt it after watching The Daughters of Fire.