Five years, 17 countries, four continents, countless conversations. The two-part documentary by the New York-based film-maker Jennifer Fox, Flying – Confessions of a Free Woman, which screens on BBC Four next week, is a modern epic. It follows Fox’s quest to establish common ground between women the world over, and at the same time, by following her own story over those five years, examining what it means to be a ?modern woman?.
She and her subjects, from outcast widows in India to prostitutes in Cambodia, as well as her ?girlfriends? in Berlin, London, Johannesberg and elsewhere, pass the camera between them as they talk, always over food, about sex (mostly), their freedoms, their restrictions. Fox isn’t afraid to ask embarrassing questions (the widows become hysterical with laughter when she explains the concept of masturbation), sometimes acting as a ?cultural bulldozer? to establish where the boundaries lie. But everywhere she goes, regardless of religion or culture, the intimate way women talk together is the same.
The documentary language is ingenious but as another single, affluent, middle-class, Western, ?modern? woman, for me it is Fox’s own journey that struck a chord.At the start of the film Fox has two boyfriends: a married lover, Kai (a pseudonym), and Patrick. The first is a forbidden romance – she describes Kai, when we speak, as having been her ?artistic muse? and says that neither ever wrote so much as when they were together. If the nauseating text message he sends her during the film is anything to go by then they’re better off apart. The second is a slow-burn friendship that matures into something more, much to Fox’s continuing surprise. As her friends fight in divorce courts, marry, have babies, Fox realises how much she wants children, and must come to terms with the possibility that she may have left it too late (she was 42 when filming began). She learns to understand her mother and grandmother, whose domestic way of life she has rejected, and see them in the context of their own era. None of this constitutes a huge revelation, though it becomes clear, as she notes, that ?to be a single woman, and not be the focus of people’s pity, you have to be a very strong person?.