“The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man. [For women,] only one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl. […] There is no equivalent [of the man] for women. The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every gray hair, is a defeat. No wonder that no boy minds becoming a man, while even the passage from girlhood to early womanhood is experienced by many women as their downfall, for all women are trained to continue wanting to look like girls.”
— Susan Sontag, in her essay Beauty and the Double Standard of Aging.
In Lion’s wrinkle and Crow’s feet (2024), director Juliette Léonard reflects on herself aging in a world that antagonizes wrinkles and promotes anti-aging products. Through mixed media: guerilla recordings of the beauty aisle in a supermarket, her intimate video call with her nana, and making herself look older with make-up, we explore her fears and the paradoxes that come with it. Of knowing that aging is natural, but still having to avoid it. Of saying “no” when her grandma asked her if she was ugly, but still fearing to look like her. Her reflections, her fears, reminds me of the women in my family—my mother, my sisters.
My mother, even in the times when our family had no money at all, insisted she had to continue visiting a beauty clinic. I never understood it when I was little, seeing it as something unfair. The place seemed fancy, so I knew it had to be expensive. It was like the creams they prescribed to her gave her a dependency. As it turns out, it did. She even said so herself. When she stopped, she told my sisters to not fall for these beauty clinics like she did. She explained to them that the clinic deliberately prescribed her facial creams that had to be taken regularly, over and over again—if not, the effects would revert. My sister had to go through similar pains. She used to suffer from severe acne and had to wear face masks to hide it from the world. I would see her look into the mirror, pinching and obsessing about the acne on her face. In her frustrations, she told me that she contemplated on consuming birth control pills just to reduce the hormonal acne she had. She still contemplated even after telling me its side effects—risks of depression, irregular menstruation, and the others. It never occurred to me: the pain of beauty. I know of it, because that phrase gets thrown around a lot—but I don’t think I will ever understand.
From the appropriation of Nabokov’s Lolita, turning into a distorted cultural archetype. From the overtly sexual gaze towards school girls in anime. From sex icon Marilyn Monroe, who said, “I can be smart when it’s important, but most men don’t like it.” From photographs of models inevitably turning into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Camera apps and beauty filters that whitewashes you, makes you free from blemishes. From Leonardo DiCaprio’s obsession towards young girls. Films, books, the arts that glamorizes youthfulness, fetishizes innocence. In a man’s world—to be young, apparently, is to be desired. To achieve it is to be homogenised, dehumanised.
Through this documentary, Léonard confronts the fear in a world that fearmongers her. In retaliation, in Situationist fashion, she détourned an advert for a fitness center for a poster subverting the anti-aging propaganda: “what if we had… nothing to fix, nothing to fight, nothing to fill?” (Timmie) (Ed. Vanis)
Film Details
Lion’s wrinkle and Crow’s feet (Ride du Lion et Pattes d’Oie)
Juliette Léonard | 24 min | 2024 | Belgium
Official Selection for Spektrum
Festival Film Dokumenter 2025
