Reel Women

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• SOPHIA LOREN:

  Hello.

• CARY GRANT:

  Oh, hello. (Wolf whistle )

• ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING:

  i was doing fine until I saw her again in an old movie. She'd come to tend Cary Grant's children and ended up falling in love with him. It was all that delicious near- miss romance stuff, and she was ever more the full-bodied, smoky adult female. Watching her move, and laugh, and banter, and flirt was to sigh again at the general lack of such film females today. And this wasn't even Sophia as the Italian temptress, with Marcello Mastroianni in those hot-blooded movies to hole up with on a long winter weekend.

• SOPHIA LOREN:

  We can't, i'm sorry. It's impossible.

• ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING:

  Or Sophia in "Two Women," where she was luminously unglamorous.

• SOPHIA LOREN:

  Good evening, Mr. Donatello.

• ACTOR:

  Holy jumping cow.

• ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING:

  This confection with Grant was all froth, beguiling silliness. There was no nudity, no pawing, no "none of that stuff." And yet she was sumptuous, complicated, can't-take-your- eyes-off-of-her provocative; the quintessential woman with a capital "w."

• ACTOR:

  By all the stars in heaven, who is she?

• ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING:

  I keep waiting for them, waiting for their return. But no, we get instead these hybrid girl-women like Gwyneth Paltrow. Sure, she's lovely and sometimes actually acts up the screen with an appealing warmth. But you always feel as if there's something deeply girlish about her, and might always be. Same for Meg Ryan.

• MEG RYAN:

  ("Proof of Life") You. You stood in my kitchen and you told me my husband was coming home.

• ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING:

  Nearing 40, she still feels preternaturally perky, even in a darker role. Except for the hair changes, she's the same sharply sweet ingénue of "When Harry Met Sally" or "You've Got Mail."

• MEG RYAN:

  It just so happens that i have had plenty of good sex.

• ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING:

  There just doesn't seem to be any density here, any complexity and weight, any real wounds. These women seem somehow like pretend women: Thin, giggly, high-strung.

• JULIA ROBERTS:

  Believe it or not, I'm on the prowl for some water records.

• ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING:

  Think Julia Roberts. True, she lights up a screen, but hardly with the dangerous adult charms of a Sophia Loren or Ingrid Bergman. Can you imagine her, for example, in "Casablanca," when there was big stuff at stake, real war and real heartbreak? What happened?

  Was this where we women were heading with all of our liberationist bravado? Into this perpetually youthful arrested development? Was this, in fact, the price we agreed to pay– to strike this pose, to affect this girlishness, in hopes that we would somehow be less threatening to men? Sure, the culture is youth- oriented.

  To say that is to say the obvious. We're all trying to stay young, look young, be young. From vigorous exercise to vitamins, from liposuction to lip injections, women are attempting to defy time.

  You often can't tell anymore in a female pair who is the mother and who is the daughter now, given the clothes, and cosmetics, and coltish gaits. But there's also our desire for camouflage, apology, a retreat from a fulsome sense of a female self. And with it comes not a joyful sensuality– a la Loren– but an often ugly, trash-talking teenage boy sexuality, a grumpy, angular, r-rated assertiveness, a la Calista Flockhart in "Ally McBeal."

  This is a real, live accomplished lawyer, circa 2000? This mini-skirted, eyelash- batting, hungry-looking bundle of insecurities? What in the world would Cary Grant have made of her, with all her tics and tricks? Or for that matter, of any of the rapacious quartet on "Sex and the City."

• ACTRESS:

  And P.S., it was on the ping- pong table.

• ACTRESS:

  Oh.

• ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING:

  Again, so adolescent, for all their collective sexual swagger. And if you want some real life trash talk, try not MTV, but the daytime women's chat show, "The View," where in some sort of mockery of liberation, four adult women– including Barbara Walters and "60 Minutes" alumna Meredith Viera– inevitably engage in smirky, sexually-laced chitchat.

• SOPHIA LOREN:

  (singing) I want my baby home by midnight…

• ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING:

  Oh, Sophia, where have you gone, with your subtly unsubtle charms? And Ingrid. Maybe it's just my youthful nostalgia for what women used to sound, and look, and feel like. Or maybe i'm just lonesome for what i thought we might be, the sophisticated, smoldery fun we might have had.

• HUMPHREY BOGART:

  Here's looking at you, kid.

• ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING:

  I'm Anne Taylor Fleming.