Embrace

Synopsis: In 2013 Taryn Brumfitt posted a before-and-after picture on Facebook. Before was her in a bikini in a beauty pageant, the other was her naked after having given birth to three children. A media frenzy ensued which inspired Taryn to travel the world interviewing all manner of people regarding the issue of body image.

Taryn Brumfitt's documentary is not a novel concept. Back in 2007 Kim Farrant's Naked on the Inside got up close and personal with  people with various body image issues. Brumfitt covers some of this ground, but her main theme is the widely discussed problem of how the media dupes women, and girls in particular, into believing they must look a certain way.

She begins by outlining the sort of responses she got to her Facebook posting then examines the role of women’s magazines in enshrining normative body imagery, interviewing Mia Freedman, former editor of Cosmo magazine who recalls how models were never allowed to be above a size 8, and the interplay between this and eating disorders. She also gets into some very confronting stuff with inspirational burns survivor, Turia Pitt, who is very badly disfigured yet manages to retain a positive self-image and perform ambassadorial work for a burns organisation. She meets Haarnam Kaur a beautiful bearded lady who battles polycystic syndrome, causing an excess of facial hair. Ultimately Kaur decides bravely to just let the beard grow, while still making herself as pretty as possible. Brumfitt also visits a plastic surgeon who gives her body the once over, with umpteen expensive suggestions as to how she can surgically improve on Nature.

Embrace is an eye-opener insofar as it makes plain how many women hate their bodies and how society, especially the media, reinforces that self-loathing and aspiration to be something you are not. The message is, over and over, that women must learn to come to grips with their self-loathing, whether there are real physical issues or whether they are victims of warped self-perception, and that the solution must come from within (as much as societal attitudinal change is needed).

The film-making style is one often used in docos – plenty of interviews, lots of passionate and persuasive talking heads and enthusiastic gadding around the world to get insights from like-minded women. (There’s also one generous man involved – a professional photographer for Ralph Lauren who gathers together a diverse selection of women from “normal” to obese to handicapped and gives them a professional photo shoot). But regardless of the director’s unremarkable presentational style, it is the content and message that makes this film important.

Such messages are needed to change the negativity embedded in societal attitudes to women who don’t fit into the “body beautiful” ideal, a construct that has changed over the decades, from flat chested flappers in the 1920s to curvaceous Hollywood bombshells of the 1950s, to the heroin chic waifs of the 1990s, to the porn-star look of today. Through it all Brumfitt’s message remains constant: “Don’t waste a day of life being at war with your body”.

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