As a colloquialism, the love of a good woman has coalesced into the suffering and placation of many, many women on screen. The beauty and the beast narrative mode, which has again reared its head in discourse about how the monster is never the woman via the new Frankenstein, has its active challengers however.

Go Fish (1994)

In Rose Troche’s romantic drama, both the beauty and the beast are women. The film follows the recently single and veritably hip Max, who is set up with the eccentric and somewhat frumpy Ely. The friction of their attraction is couched by other loose plot lines that interrogate lesbian romance and affirm the complicated nature of friendship among women. Guinevere Turner stars and wrote the script with Troche. Formally, the film’s DIY bones is filtered through natural, kinetic performances complete with a Greek chorus and chiaroscuro montage of a girl’s bisexuality put on trial. A film that invites you to imagine all the foolish things a woman could do that no one got to witness. To dream of them, even!

Merrily We Go To Hell (1932)

When your husband cheats on you with his ex, the best way to punish him is by opening up your marriage. Rage will drive him away, despair will emasculate him but pettiness will slowly kill you both. Dorothy Arzner’s unflinching examination of the mental prisons men make for themselves, and how redundant it is when women make martyrs of themselves, stars Sylvia Sidney and Fredric March. The film frames Sidney’s Joan Prentice as a good woman; a kind heiress who falls in love with a drunk failing playwright, and even marries him against her father’s wishes, thus initiating a near fatal endeavor of beckoning vulnerability out of him.

One Way or Another (1977)

The class divide between Yolanda Cuellar, an outspoken school teacher and Mario Balmaseda, a macho factory worker is the center of their romance. In one of their first interactions, Mario chuckles in disbelief when Yolanda casually tells him her parents were “comfortably off.” Because it is a film structured around duality; melting the lovers’ voice overs into vérité style depictions of post-revolutionary Cuba, every conflict presents itself as a dialectical process. The romance is leveraged against the many states of the country to demystify gender roles. Although she directed several shorts, the film was Sara Gomez’ only feature before her untimely death at 31 years old.

The Annihilation of Fish (1999)

Would you pick up a gun, and kill the ghost that is terrorizing your lover? Charles Burnett’s kooky romantic comedy about two mentally ill people falling in love over card games and night caps. James Earl Jones and Lynn Redgrave give deeply moving performances, both entirely imbued in their respective characters’ outrageous peculiarities. Burnett’s camera rarely denies them indulgences and in fact sides with them over the audience; suggested by the leaves rustling under the window when Jones hurls a ghost named Hank out after a wrestling match. When Redgrave ultimately confronts Hank on her lover’s behalf, relief is superseded by a bruised ego. A good woman would kill your demons if she could, but is it really any of her business anyway? A love story like no other.

One Way Passage (1932)

A romance built on a lie, one of culpability and one of frailty. Aptly named Joan as she suffers and is set to die with no room for redress, Kay Francis plays an ailing woman who falls for William Powell, a wanted murderer. On a ship, in international waters, their doomed romance heaves arduously on. Tay Garnett presents a bare vision of romance, both somehow heavy with romantic gestures and light on frills. Is it a sacrifice of her health, to enter into a romance with a criminal or is it a virtue of her impending death that she must indulge her every desire? What would a good woman do? Surely not fuck on her deathbed…

The Dish & the Spoon (2011)

An affair sends Greta Gerwig’s Rose into a tailspin, she deserts her husband (who is named in the film’s credit as “Husband”) and goes on a drinking rampage with a well off British teen who quickly becomes enamoured with her. Her deranged behaviour towards him includes dressing him in drag to recreate how she imagines her husband’s affair happened, ushering him around town; beer in one hand, steering wheel in the other. A good woman, gone off the rails. Framed by Alison Bagnall’s dizzying camera, her goodness as a wife is not demonstrated by a self sacrificing nature per se, but the heaviness of her reactionary behaviour implies that at least in her own mind she really doesn’t deserve this heartbreak.

See You in The Morning (1989)

Jerry Livingston, played unreservedly by Jeff Bridges, is given two good women. His ex-wife Jo (Farrah Fawcett), and his new wife Beth (Alice Krige), with two kids each. Directed by Alan J. Pakula, better known for his New Hollywood classics, he forgoes any sort of substantial plot for intricate character work. The film has a somewhat optimistic perspective on the romantic neuroses that dictate gender dynamics in relationships. Krige and Bridges are wonderful to watch together, and a young Drew Barrymore gives a perfectly saccharine performance as the eldest of the children, herself confronting her own role in the family unit.

A Dream Is What You Wake Up From (1978)

Another dialectic docudrama with a vérité penchant, and dedicated in the epigraph to Sara Gomez and Josina Machel, this collaboration by Carolyn Johnson and Larry Bullard investigates womanhood across class. The rage of a good woman, who despite the conditions of her financial situation cooks and cleans and works and only asks not to be beaten down by her drunk husband, is parallel to the rage of the respectable middle class professional who has no say in her marriage because her intellect is dismissed by the man that is supposed to love her. In general, the men in this film seem almost existentially preoccupied with humbling the women they are supposed to love.

The hidden desires that seem to betray womanhood are plentiful. They are a wonderful burden to bear, a reminder of humanity in many ways. It’s important to write little prayers to yourself.