The Ballad of Little Jo

The year is 1865 and a young woman is thrown out of her affluent family after giving birth to an illegitimate child. She goes west in the wake of the gold rush, but learns the hard way that travelling alone is not easy if you are a woman. To survive the hard life of the West she cuts off her hair, scars her face and becomes ''a man'' - Little Jo.

COMMENTARY
In Sally Potter's spectacular film based on the novel by Virginia Woolf, Orlando is a young nobleman who becomes a middle aged lady of the manor. Maggie Greenwald's Western pastiche The Ballad of Little Jo also plays around with gender roles. It is also based on a true story. In 1865 a woman in Buffalo gives birth to an illegitimate son, is disowned by her family and leaves for the Wild West.
In order to survive as an outlaw and lonely traveller she is forced to change sex. A pair of scissors and her curls are gone. A razor blade and her features are coarsened. A sneer below the cowboy hat and she even resembles a young Clint Eastwood.
You are not born a man. You become one.
The atmosphere is low-key, the pace is lingering and the camera work is stylishly lighted in autumnal colors. David Mansfield's desolate guitar riffs reminiscent of Ry Cooder emphasize the feelings of vulnerability and loneliness. Our heroine ends up in a goldmi-
ning community where the residents find the shy, scarfaced Little Jo strange. But ''the young man'' earns respect through his ability to work like a man.
Jo learns that there are loyal friends among male roughnecks and tyrants among the benevolent ones. Without revealing her sex she masters the male language, learns how to shoot, go hunting and to survive in the wilderness. She is put through a more difficult test when the prostitutes come to town. And when a Chinese cook comes to work in her home the attraction is inevitable.
Maggie Greenwald's intelligently told film is daring in the sense that it is both rough and sympathetic. It has been labelled a feminist Western, but besides the ever present problems of gender, the scenes are for the most part typical of the genre.
It is deceptive to look for gender specifics in artistic expressions. While running the risk of expressing the kind of narrowmindedness that the film tries to deal with, I wonder if a man is capable of depicting love scenes in such a carefully tentative and contemplatively beautiful way as Maggie Greenwald. ':'
Anneli Jordahl