Every now and again you find yourself in a strange wrinkle of synchronicity. You think of someone and they call; you find your friends reading the same book at the same time; you rant at lunchtime about the perfidy of Blackberries and find an editorial on the subject in the paper that very evening. Coincidence? Zeitgeist? A periodically more alert sensibility? No one has figured it out satisfactorily, but it’s intriguing when it happens, and it can even deepen your understanding of time or your engagement with the world and its mysteries.Recently, I watched two films back to back that couldn’t have been more different and more similar at the same time. They landed randomly in my mailbox through the mystery that is a “Netflix” queue—I selected the films weeks ago and with no intention whatsoever of having a mini-festival of a certain type of film. But in fact that is what happened, and what I’m writing about today; call it the Women’s Choices Film Festival, or, more ominously, The Women and Marriage Film Festival, or more reassuringly The Women and Careers Film Festival…

The first film I had already seen twice, and was ready to see again, remembering it as one of those films which, if you are a woman, you see all too rarely and which leave you with a sense of possibility and freedom, a glimpse into another world where things might be done differently. And even in our own world, occasionally they are. Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career did very well when it came out in 1979, and it was somewhat revolutionary in its depiction of a young woman, Sybylla (played by Judy Davis) who turns down the Perfect Husband (Sam Neill) for her tentative career as a writer. I should mention at this point that they were clearly in love—no arranged marriage here. I think this film—like The Piano fifteen years later—could only have been made Down Under, and by a woman; there’s a sense of space, a pioneering rawness in the exploration of emotions that allows things to be said that Americans or Europeans, or men, might find either too trivial or too bold. While the film has lost its revolutionary feminist originality, and would probably not even be made today (although one sometimes wonders if it isn’t time for a 21st century version…) it remains fresh and beautifully filmed and acted, set in the outback at the turn of the last century, a charming mixture of Victorian lace and the sheep dip.

An older film, with a more recent setting, is Late Spring, by Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. It was made in 1949, just after the war, and is the story of a widowed man who uses gentle deceit to oblige his daughter to marry. Noriko is played by Setsuko Hara, a radiant young woman as sweet as Judy Davis is saucy; but like her Australian counterpart, Noriko does not want to marry. It’s not that she has a brilliant career ahead of her; she loves the life she has with her father, she loves riding her bicycle by the shore, the man she might have loved has gone elsewhere. She has everything she needs or wants, but she lives in a patriarchal society that cannot tolerate unmarried women. So even though he’ll have no one to look after him, Noriko’s father forces her out of the house and into an arranged marriage. We never see Noriko’s husband, and she fades from the story just as her smile faded, leaving us with the memory of her sad, tearful gaze.

Sybylla, on the other hand, smiling dreamily, gazed off beyond the sunset into the larger world, where her manuscript would be published to great acclaim and success. And this was not altogether a fiction: the author of the original book, Miles Franklin, never married and went on to become one of Australia’s most successful early writers.

What was so striking about the second film, despite its predictable, sad outcome, was the sympathy which Ozu seemed to have for his heroine. He seems to be saying, in this film, and in another one entitled Early Summer, Why can’t Noriko live the life she wants? And at the same time, Why is she different from other Japanese women of her time? Throughout the film the women characters mark the transition from old to new, from kimono to the latest fashion; was Noriko eager to explore the change of the years just after the war, or did she simply have a more independent nature? We never really know, as Westerners. We cannot apply our own socio-cultural logic to the film, in the end. What is clear is that, unlike Sybylla, she had no choice.

Watching these two films back to back has made me wonder why there are not more women like Sybylla and Noriko, especially nowadays when the Brilliant Career is a given. Perhaps my own circle is a bad example, or simply through some fault of synchronicity or coincidence I do not run into young women who defy the still prevalent social injunction to marry, but wherever I look, whomever I talk to among female friends—young, older, married, single—no one comes forth with the example of the defiant eligible woman who remains single by choice, turning down what looks like a dream life with Sam Neill on a huge Australian farm…

I have my own little theory about this. If we had been raised in the Australian outback like Miles/Sybylla where practically the only men we ever saw were loud vulgar dirty drunken sheep farmers, and the only prospect before us was that of being such a sheep farmer’s wife, would we not want to dream up an alternative? Even Sam Neill for all his good looks and refined manners and wealth could not offer Sybylla a life as glorious as the one she had imagined for herself all through her adolescence. She had the force of character to imagine a world beyond the bush.

Whereas for us benighted souls of the twenty-first century…the bush is filled with Hollywood, and pop psychology, and dating sites, and the eternal insidious female gossip that nurtures the assumption that one must marry, or at least find a partner, in order to feel brilliant. We are as bound to tradition in many ways as Noriko in her Japanese village. Even when we argue against marriage, we are saying God doesn’t exist—well, if he doesn’t exist, why are you trying to prove he doesn’t?

I know that all over the world there are pockets of resistance, hard fought corners of feminism and defiance, but they are ghettoes, with their own forms of socio-cultural coercion, and I’m not sure I want to go there. They are places full of theory, and anger—often righteous, I don’t question that—and a kind of reclusion. No, I want the world that Sybylla let us glimpse, and that Noriko longed for. A place of exuberance and possibility, of self-fulfillment on one’s own terms, absolutely. Exhilaration, riding your bicycle by a deserted shore. Call it freedom if you like; perhaps it’s selfish, and that’s why it hasn’t been allowed to flower, why we are still coerced into something we say cannot be submission, not in this day and age, but it is. Submission of our real selves to the fairy story, the need to please others, to please society.

One of my friends who has resisted since the break-up of her marriage 20 years ago, but watched with some dismay as her daughter postponed her studies in order to marry, speaks of the violence in male-female relationships caused by the struggle for power. Clearly, to choose one’s own path is to allot the power to oneself, to struggle for achievement rather than power within a relationship and against another person. But what of tenderness, of intimacy, of solidarity, I ask my friend, after some reflection. (Not to mention the other usual criteria, like children or sex or sharing a roof.)

We both grew thoughtful in the midst of our God-is-dead discussion. How often do people—individually or as a couple—use up their allotted measure of tenderness, see it consumed in the struggle for power? Are the months or years of tenderness worth the price one may—or may not—pay? There’s no easy answer. And the fact we are still talking about these failures or disappointments, years later, makes us wonder what went wrong—and why do we even care, still, to talk about renewing such experiences, nurturing hope or illusions?

More synchronicity: in the bus yesterday I read an excellent tribute by Zadie Smith to Zora Neale Hurston. At the (precocious) age of 14, Zadie initially resisted reading Ms. Hurston, fearful she would find just another book about “love tribulations of women.” Ah-hah: this is the attitude that makes for brilliant careerhood—and, as we know, Ms. Smith has fulfilled everyone’s expectations. Miles Franklin would have been proud. Although Ms. Smith did marry, after her initial success. However, I seem to recall reading an article a few years ago where she said she wanted to take a break from writing, that she wanted to have a life that wasn’t a “literary life.”

Well, one could argue that there are women who have it all. Who know how to have it all, who have that kind of power. While the rest of us endure our tribulations, or dream of alternative routes.

Sometimes I think it’s all a myth. That women are driven to romance just as men are driven to power and wealth. I feel cheated: we’re fed this crap from infancy, and it takes extraordinary circumstances to resist it and find out who we really can be—the true nature of our power.

But this is a big topic, and I’m merely scratching the surface at the moment. I would like other people’s ideas on the subject. In the meantime, here’s my provisional conclusion: if that’s what it takes, in my next life, I’m reserving a spot next to the sheep dip. And Sam Neill, watch out.