Show Hide image Film 24 August 2015 BBFC director: Diary of a Teenage Girl didn't earn its 18 certificate from an all-male panel The film's distributor claimed that it was given an 18 certificate by an all-male panel. British Board of Film Classification director David Cooke has told the New Statesman that this was not the case. Print HTML When Marielle Heller's film Diary of a Teenage Girl was released last month, a huge amount of the coverage focused not on the film, but its classification. The film explores the sexual awakening of 15-year-old Minnie (played by Bel Powley), including her affair with her mother's boyfriend Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård). Understandably, the director's accusation that the film was awarded its 18 certificate by an all-male panel, despite its focus on a younger teen girl, provoked anger from filmmakers and cultural critics alike. However, David Cooke, the director of the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has told the New Statesman that the accusation is unfounded. The film was classified according to the BBFC's guidelines (created through regular public consultation), thanks mainly to its eight sex scenes, use of cocaine, LSD and marijuana, and what Cooke calls the "glamorisation" of drug use in the film. He added that the age gap between Minnie and Monroe, and the fact that Minnie is underage, would also have affected the decision. After the film was awarded an 18 certificate, the writer and producer submitted it for a reconsideration, along with letters explaining why they disputed the 18 rating. Cooke said that the BBFC rarely gives out information on its classification processes, but in this case he's willing to clarify that the reconsideration was carried out by a mixed group of the BBFC's senior management, including Catherine Anderson, the head of communications. He also said that the film very clearly fits into the 18 classification: It wasn't a borderline case. As part of the reclassification process I saw the film for a second time, which can sometimes change my opinion, but in this case I felt exactly the same about the film." Cooke emphasised that the film's classification shouldn't be seen as a judgement on its depiction of female empowerment: As part of our remit, we have to be fair and consistent, and fixing a rating for this film involved looking at our guidelines and lots of precedents. The last thing we'd do is claim to offer a definitive interpretation of a film." Sony Classics, the film's distributor, has yet to respond to requests for comment. We will update the piece if and when they do. › Female viagra is another example of society trying to make women sexually "normal" on men's terms Barbara Speed is a technology and digital culture writer at the New Statesman and a staff writer at CityMetric. More Related articles The tall and short of it: does size matter for men in Hollywood? Can a film work in a single, unbroken shot? Victoria shows it can Spectacle departs from sense in Batman V Superman
Show Hide image Food & Drink 3 April 2016 Sake: a spirit made from the spit of ancient virgins Around the solid centre of the rice kernel, mystery builds. Print HTML Wine buffs praise its “body” and Catholics revere it as blood; still, nobody has yet credited wine with a heart. That honour belongs to sake, the Japanese liquor whose quality is measured in its closeness to a rice-grain’s starchy centre: its shinpaku, or heart. The more the grain is polished – that is, the more its outer layers are milled away – the better the sake, a liquid evocation of the “less is more” philosophy that seems entirely appropriate to the signature drink of a nation that has produced both the paper house and Marie Kondo. Around that solid centre, mystery builds. Nothing about sake is quite as it seems. This rice wine is no wine at all – rice is a grain and sake is brewed, like beer – and in fact, “sake” is simply Japanese for alcohol: a local would order nihonshu. As for sake’s status as a national drink, its birthplace was probably the Yangtze Basin of China, in about the 5th millennium BC, though it was the Japanese who refined that early potion into the elegant beverage we know today. That process, once again, is based on a lack – one as crucial for an alcohol as having a heart is for a human being: a lack of sugar. Without it, yeasts have nothing to transform into alcohol; deprive them of their dinner and we’ll have no drink. In grapes, sugar occurs naturally, and the grains in beer or whisky can be malted into sugariness. Rice cannot be malted without its husk – and husk removal, as we have seen, is the beating heart of sake creation. Almost seven thousand years ago, a bored or hungry peasant popped a grain of rice in her mouth and noted, as she chewed, an increasing sensation of sweetness: saliva, it turns out, contains an enzyme able to break down rice starch into glucose. How she got around to fermenting the soggy remains of her prehistoric chewing gum I have no idea, but her descendants took to the results with enthusiasm, allocating unmarried girls to help create bijinshu, or “beautiful woman sake”. And so, for many centuries, Japan’s famously delicate national spirit, served in ritualistic fashion to emperors, warriors and Shinto gods, was created from rice and the spit of virgins. These days, you’ll be relieved to hear, a special mould does the job, but the other essentials have not changed. Water is still the crucial component, as it is in all brews, from beer to whisky. The equivalent of soil for vines, it is believed to convey flavour, distinction, a sense of place, and breweries are as fiercely proud of the streams they turn into sake as an alchemist would be of the base metal from which he created gold. The dangerous tradition of heated sake also persists: how speedily and imperceptibly those miniature flasks empty! The subtler flavours of certain sakes are, however, spoiled by heat – and in any case, the precision of chilling may be better suited to the favoured tipple of a country that didn’t open its frontiers to Western sloppiness until 1853. In that year, Commodore Matthew Perry sailed in from the United States to “persuade” the Japanese to trade and treat. His success, coupled with the law of unintended consequences, enables me to drink a delightful, surprisingly light cocktail of Bourbon, genmaicha (brown rice tea) and sake at Pidgin, the funky fusion restaurant in Hackney, or sip Ine Mankai, a delicate pink sake made from red rice by a rare female master brewer, at the superb restaurant in Beechworth, Australia, that its chef, Michael Ryan, has aptly named Provenance. Gunboat diplomacy isn’t usually responsible for spreading love but Perry’s inroads have bequeathed the world the juice of a very particular kind of heart – a liquid hard to make and almost impossible to describe, but excellent in every sense at making its presence felt. Next week: John Burnside on nature Nina Caplan is the 2014 Fortnum & Mason Drink Writer of the Year and 2014 Louis Roederer International Wine Columnist of the Year for her columns on drink in the New Statesman. She tweets as @NinaCaplan. This article first appeared in the 31 March 2016 issue of the New Statesman, The terror trail More Related articles The holy bun that crossed the centuries Let’s stop with the frozen food snobbery The time has come: I'm opening the Virgin snack box
