Women Is Losers Is Littered with Reductive Clichés

The setting of 1960s San Francisco is what explicitly connects Women Is Losers to the matriarchal lineage of first-time writer/director Lissette Feliciano. Just in case this fact would not be made abundantly clear mere minutes into the runtime, the very first frame contains the blatant statement: “Inspired by real women.” Though initially positioning itself as an “inspirational” story that confronts this country’s festering inequality, the film’s eventual assertion that systemic disparity can be overcome by sheer gumption is clichéd and disappointing. It is also charged with didactic platitudes in its approach to unpacking gender and racial discrimination, suffused with the very stereotypes it attempts to dispel.

The viewer first meets Celina (Lorenza Izzo) when she’s in the midst of a fight with her husband Mateo (Bryan Craig), who himself is being concurrently thrown out by his white trash mistress (“America! English!” she barks at Celina). The year is 1972, and Celina wastes no time immediately breaking the fourth wall and giving a quick history lesson as to why the nameless woman’s words are actually offensive: “Native Americans had over 300 different dialects,” she preaches with her four-year-old son perched on her hip. The other three walls soon quickly dissolve as well, the set deconstructed in front of the audience’s eyes as Celina shimmies into a Catholic schoolgirl outfit. With this wardrobe change, Celina is transported five years into the past, retracing the steps of how she got to the film’s opening scene. While principally concerned with the experiences that shape the protagonist as a woman, worker and mother, Women Is Losers is similarly interested in the other women that influence Celina’s life and decisions from the sidelines.

Unfortunately, the women explored in the film—including Celina—are flat to the point of near parody. Her mother is abused and terrorized by her father; her best friend is an unfortunate victim of misogynistic legislation; Celina herself is a single mother who works three jobs for a shot at the “American dream.” These characters also permeate a heteronormative worldview that hinges on the presence of men, if only to saddle women with problems they must valiantly overcome on their own. There is the additional noxious insistence of adhering to a “bootstrap” mentality, a touch that Feliciano directly addressed ahead of the film’s SXSW premiere: “[My mom] still believes in America…the land of opportunity. She’d want people to believe that, too.” Women Is Losers therefore claims that women oscillate between fulfilling the role of martyr or girlboss, depending on their determination to conquer adversity through working themselves to death. In contrast, men are depicted as cartoonishly lazy, evil and inept, mistreating the women in their lives with an almost inhuman contentedness. While primarily invested in gender divides, the film manages to evoke a stark perception of racial conflict and disharmony—often resulting in tokenization as opposed to representation. The sole Black man in the film is mild-mannered and polite to the point of banality, while multiple white women have their waking hours dominated by a rabid quest to undermine Celina in all of her endeavors. The only exception to their uniform cruelty is when one of the film’s seemingly brusque white women is revealed to be in an interracial relationship, which in turn renders her an instant ally. Once again, the women in the film are only as valuable or interesting as their relative proximity to the men in their lives.

Yet it’s the constant fourth wall breaking that truly cements Women Is Losers in the realm of distasteful tweeness. These cloyingly self-aware quips almost always occur between scenes of wife beating and bank loan discrimination, effectively yanking the viewer out of the few scenes that come close to establishing emotional stakes. Solely performed by women, these asides instill these characters with an improbable sense of hindsight; these are not the thoughts of ‘60s and ‘70s-era American women, but rather the unmistakably millennial filmmaker. Imbuing these women with an inherent understanding of 21st century identity politics is an easy and disingenuous way of presenting them as courageous feminists, a portrayal that is eons away from tangible insight and understanding. It is idolization without introspection.