Mona Fastvold’s Lessons in Discipline

When Mona Fastvold premiered her third feature film, The Testament of Ann Lee, in Venice last fall, she was naturally nervous. The film, which stars Amanda Seyfried as the charismatic leader of the puritan Shaker movement, was her biggest project to date, and its international distribution depended on a positive reception in Venice. It was also, as an original-concept period piece that doubled as a musical, a big creative risk. As she prepared to stare down a phalanx of reporters and paparazzi, Fastovold chose to wear a blue-striped pleated Miu Miu dress that, she later said, reminded her of an Italian girls’ boarding-school uniform. “Putting that garment on was like a little bit of armor for myself,” Fastvold recalled.

Five months later, designer Miuccia Prada offered Fastvold the chance to return the favor with Discipline, a short film that premiered in New York last week as part of Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales series. Building her charged impressions of the dress into a miniature fantasia, Fastvold sets her tale at a women’s finishing school, shot at a foggy Hudson Valley manse and featuring a cast of young women in similar striped Miu Miu clothing – or at least, the deconstructed idea of young women. The concept Fastvold employs, in partnership with her longtime choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall, is far stranger and more intriguing. Going through the motions of a regular day at boarding school are, instead, a few dozen obscured and masked dancers. Each controls a faceless, mannequin-sized mobile puppet in a uniform dress. Private consciousness and public persona are represented here as separate, though linked. The hidden dancer must express herself through the inert body she controls.

This unusual imagery adds a level of mystery to a story that viewers might otherwise know: Living together in a cloistered world of strict tutors and high garden walls, the characters in Discipline perform their routines, size one another up, and gradually come together for a moment of groundbreaking self-expression. The dance that Rowlson-Hall stages (itself an evocative homage to her work in Testament of Ann Lee) carries with it connotations of spiritual transcendence, despite the masks that carefully abstract each performer. While enough variation in bodies and dress (and even puppet-doll fabrics) prevents this from becoming a tale of banal uniformity, the sense of release from imposed standards of discipline feels revelatory when it finally happens. I won’t spoil the ending (you can watch it yourself) but it includes a moment of genuine surprise, as objects that were taken for granted begin to express lives and wills of their own. Such a rupture parallels the representation of women across the history of cinema, from figures of passive objectification to subjects exercising the freedom of creative control. 

Fastvold, who has an 11-year-old daughter with her husband, co-writer and fellow filmmaker Brady Corbet, appears to be thinking about the relationship between the personal ethics and public presentation of young women a lot lately. “I remember overhearing my [daughter], who had just started middle school, talking with a friend,” she told me, when I asked about the association she made between women’s clothing and armor. “One of them said, ‘Every Sunday is the night before war.’ That stayed with me. Those early years of figuring out who you are—and how you’re meant to present yourself to the world—can feel genuinely painful. So much of identity formation is tied to performance, expectation, and endurance.” 

At the premiere, when asked if the director had any advice for the younger version of herself, Fastvold responded, “Yeah, I think I try to offer something every day. What do you think?” and turned to her daughter, who was seated nearby. That gesture, conferring with someone else to ask about the effect of her intentions in the world, said more about Fastvold than any quick quip on how to enter adulthood. It also echoes her approach to filmmaking, in which she relates “the job of a director [to that of] the multitasking mother.” This comparison rings so true (when directing’s done properly, with humility and no small amount of grace) that I was surprised I hadn’t heard it described that way more often. Speaking after the film to some of the dancers who worked on Fastvold’s set, I was delighted to hear that Fastvold not only wishes to come off this way on set, but does so: “She felt like a mother figure on the production. The room where we staged the final dance scene was unheated, and between takes she kept coming around to check on us, and offering blankets to anyone who was cold.” 

Fastvold is clearly someone who thinks about how desire, intention and enactment are independent forces which merge together in how we present ourselves. Effortlessly assured yet obviously curious, she embodies this dichotomy and unity on stage (as in that Venice press conference) as well as in private. Like the puppet-performers in her finishing school, she has perfected the art of poise, but that doesn’t prevent her from wanting more from life than self-possession. It’s become an intriguing topic to speculate on what, exactly, propels the Miu Miu girl’s peculiarly powerful allure, but Fastvold’s deep dive into the divided consciousness of a figure approaching womanhood may have hit on the tension that charges the whole brand: she needs manners and discipline to make a good impression. And then, having done this, she breaks free.