Medusa

After taking a spontaneous dip in the South of France, visiting Swedish perfumer Mia (Elektra Kilbey) is badly stung by a jellyfish. She rushes out of the water—topless, shivering, limping—and Franck (Franck Sémonin), a local out for a stroll, leaps into chivalric action, giving the bare-chested woman the shirt off his back. Tending to her injury, he runs a credit card over her thigh in order to remove the venom lingering on her skin. In France on a residency to further her craft, Mia grabs the card from Franck’s hand and wafts it under her nose—traces of lavender from her sunscreen, the metallic stench of blood, ocean brine. Bringing this olfactory element to their encounter evokes an erotic connection. 
What begins as a “meet-cute” evolves into what co-writers Sarah Meyohas and Courtney Podraza—the former also serving as director—dub a “a constant power play” that tests audience limits for taboo sexual proclivities. As the title suggests, the Greek myth of Medusa (the French homonym for “jellyfish,” a gorgon’s serpentine tresses mirroring the invertebrate’s tentacles) is directly channeled here, with aesthetic nods to decapitation rife throughout, but never as jarring as when Mia and Franck reach his car, parked in a desolate overlook above the sandy shore. Some will find the sexual crux of this film troubling, others titillating. “A word that came back over and over in my mind was ‘transgression,” Meyohas, who comes from a visual art background, told me over Zoom. “Transgression can be both incredibly sensual and erotic and it can also be crossing the line.” Viewers will all have different opinions on where it is acceptable to toe the line, and that’s part of what makes Medusa so compelling, alongside Trevor Tweeten’s stunning cinematography, which Podraza says allowed them to create “a gorgeous piece of 35mm ’70s porn.” Meyohas clarifies: “We’re not showing you genitalia, but it’s still giving you erotic shock because of how close you are to her face.”
I spoke with Meyohas and Podraza, who also produced the film, during their short’s extensive festival run, which included screenings at New/Next, Palm Springs, SIFF, Chilliwack and more. Below, the pair discuss the varied reactions Medusa has spurred from audiences, Podraza’s decision to study perfumery during the writing process and working with French intimacy coordinator Rachel Zekri. 
Filmmaker: Can you tell me a bit about how you came to collaborate on this? 
Podraza: I was told about this project by a mutual colleague of ours who said, “I know this conceptual artist. She has this concept for a film that I think you’d really like and wants to partner with a screenwriter on it to realize it.” I listened to the pitch and was completely taken with it on a gut level. I didn’t even really know why, I just loved it. I had just produced another short film, so I came on to be the producer as well, because Sarah and I worked really well together collaborating on the project in its totality. 
Meyohas: I came to the myth first, the visual motifs of Medusa—the gaze of the snakes, reflections—were motifs that I was drawn to. They’re hyper-symbolic. I started reading the story of Medusa and was struck by how contemporary and modern it was. She’s Athena’s priestess and she’s taken—raped, but they made no distinction at the time—by Poseidon in Athena’s temple. Athena’s the one who curses Medusa and turns her into a monster. What was interesting to me was how often Medusa has been reinterpreted. She was a Gorgon at first, just this scary face. Then she became, during Christian times, the seductress. In modern times, she became a nihilist. She’s been reinterpreted so much. The core that I was interested in, partly, was that this is [society’s] relationship to sexuality, right? In the short, we’re focusing on a much more refracted version of this, but it is a myth about the confrontation of the gaze and image. Medusa’s gaze petrifies—you can look at her through an image—but then Athena’s shield needs the power of the gaze. Making art about Medusa is very interesting because you’re making a sculpture of this thing that you could never see and survive. I thought that film would be a very interesting medium to petrify the audience. That was the goal: how do you turn this myth into a film that’s not an allegory, metaphor or just a framework, but actually fully functioning as the myth? I thought the screen is like a shield. So that was my entry point for deciding to do a film about Medusa, then came the jellyfish homonym and the car as the formal structure. 
Filmmaker: As co-writers, how did these ideas get fleshed out and what felt most interesting to refract from this fable? 

Podraza: To clarify, the French homonym of the word “jellyfish” is “medusa,” so that was Sarah having a great gift for this story, taking it and running with it. I became obsessed, in some of my own overlapping and divergent ways, with the material, particularly in wanting to weave as many perfume-specific details as possible. I was like, “Sarah, I’m gonna go take a perfume class at Pratt and learn how to smell perfume.” This is why she waves the credit card in a very particular way—all of these are the details of how you would interact with scent, particularly as a perfumer. In this class, we studied every single note of perfume and the different sexual connotations of some of these notes. There’s always been a relationship between sexuality and scent. Hookers wore certain perfumes that “ladies” weren’t allowed to wear. There is stuff historically that’s really coded in scent. I am obsessed with research and wanted to bring as much of how a young perfumer would really experience the world and discuss their work. That’s how you get the story about labdanum [being] linked to ambergris, which is a very sexual scent. There are Easter eggs for the perfume aficionados in the audience. 
We embed the film with many images of headlessness. We start off with a sort of teaser when we see her in the water. Once we see her just from the head below, then when she pops up, you just see the head framed. We’re sort of teasing the ending from the beginning. One of my favorite moments, that I now call “the Medusa moment,” is that the main character, when she’s asked if she’s afraid, if she wants to proceed with this, says no and then immediately spikes the camera. There’s this direct connection between the audience, the actor and the character in that moment. It’s almost a dare: Are you going to be able to watch this? You’re here with me, you’re complicit in this moment. How do you feel about it? That is probably my favorite moment in the film. 
Filmmaker: I want to get into the erotic nature of smell. I’m also curious if the scent of a jellyfish sting—that slightly sweet note of decay—is something you encountered as a student of perfumery? 
Podraza: I am truly just a detail-obsessed person. I did so much research and talked to people about what the stuff you scraped off her could possibly smell like. She sort of itemizes it: Lavender is a common note in sunscreen, so that comes from there. You have the metal of the wound and the salt. That sea salt note is actually very common in a lot of perfumes. The jellyfish is an imaginative leap based on research. I mean, my search history is just trying to get anybody who’s ever talked about what jellyfish smell like, what dead jellyfish smell like [laughs]. Surprisingly, it’s not a popular topic of discussion, but I found enough to imagine that this is a credible explanation of what these factors together could meld into. 
Filmmaker: As a student, do you think that this combination of notes would smell good together? 
Podraza: I think it’s like she says in the film: without something that smells bad, you wouldn’t have something that smells good. One of the things I find so fascinating about perfume is the juxtaposition of ingredients. So many of these notes that you’re smelling, individually, you would never want to wear, but you need them to create anything that has a level of depth. I do not buy that what is on that credit card smells good, but I buy that it would be very useful in the way that she thinks it would be useful to bring dimension to a scent that might otherwise be too simplistic to be interesting.
Filmmaker: Tell me about casting Mia and Philippe. Elektra Jansson-Kilbey and Franck Sémonin have electric chemistry.

Meyohas: On the U.S. side, we worked with a casting director named Angela [Demo]. My UTA agent, who’s Australian, brought up Elektra to us—who is Australian and Swedish—and who is just her friend. Maybe I’m not supposed to say this, but at first, I just didn’t really consider Elektra. She wasn’t at the top of my list because she’s not coming through the casting director, she’s a friend of theirs. But it was actually a pretty hard role to cast, because you’re asking so much from the actress who’s going to play this. To a certain degree, the fact that she is not American meant that she has a different relationship to nudity, so she was more open to exploring this. If you talk to Elektra, you realize she’s a really brilliant person. She’s a writer herself, she’s a real thinker, so she could grasp the complexity of what we were dealing with. I’m not sure if other actresses would have grasped it, so we really got quite lucky with finding Elektra. 
Elektra’s really beautiful and that was another choice. Other opinions could be like, “Don’t choose the most beautiful girl, because maybe this could happen to anybody.” It’s a really different story depending on if you’re looking at someone who’s closer to being a model than someone who’s not. To be honest, I really went with my gut in terms of wanting beauty. This is where we can get into other things about what’s politically correct or not and how that line is changing. But we actively went, “Okay. We are going for beauty.” We were committing to beauty and this body type.
With Frank, we were really in trouble. We were getting all these videos of people doing the lines and I thought they were all, you know, not great. Then our local French producer was like, “I know the guy.” When we met him in person, we agreed that [Franck] was literally him. He’s charming in that way. He rides a motorcycle through country roads. He lifts weights. We wanted someone a bit older, because if you think about it, a young man today does not pull this move. You need an older Frenchman to be able to do this in this way.
Podraza: I do want to tag on here to say that we actually did like a couple other guys who turned us down because they were uncomfortable, even though they were of that age range. They were like, “Woah, I don’t know if I want to be this guy.” We weren’t expecting to get pushback from French men. We thought we’d get more pushback from women, but we had a lot more young women interested in doing this and a lot more nervousness from French men, which we found interesting. 
Filmmaker: I’m curious about what you were specifically looking to comment on with this interplay between the myth and our current climate in regards to sexuality and consent. There is a lot of good that comes from people being adamant about consent, but sometimes you need to experience discomfort in order to understand yourself better. Tell me about reactions from you, your actors, and audiences on this front. 
Meyohas: A word that came back over and over in my mind was “transgression.” Transgression can be both incredibly sensual and erotic and can also be crossing the line, right? We’re definitely along that line. There are a few ways to approach this topic. One of the most basic is that we’re showing sex in a way that is not being shown in film. To a certain extent, I’ve definitely felt this keenly, there is no sex on film. I think the numbers are, like, a 40 % drop since 2000, right? That’s because we have pornography literally a browser tab away. You have studios who are trying to appeal to lots of different geographies and tastes. Politically, we got to this moment where it felt like depicting sex was something that both sides could agree on. right? The Right doesn’t want to see sex on film, then we went through the #MeToo movement. That reckoning needed to happen, but it meant that we couldn’t put danger and pleasure on the same path, when [in reality] they do overlap. The problem is that by not even depicting it, we can’t have the conversation about sexuality and power. Between [the characters], it’s a total power play of who’s seducing and in control. Once her head’s through the window, she’s probably nervous. But she’s also going with it, which takes back her power. So, it’s like a constant power play. You can’t explore that if it’s either porn or nothing, so committing to being an erotic film was a thing in and of itself. And we filmed it in such a way that we are making the audience form their own interpretation. People have had varied interpretation. I think this partly comes from being an artist, where you want the audience to have a big role in interpretation. Sometimes in film, it feels like things get boring because there’s too much moral closure. But sex is the perfect material for not having moral closure or for having things be contradictory, even, because your own emotional state in these types of situations can be contradictory. At the end, when she’s looking back [on the experience], she can be replaying the scene in her head one way and then a totally different way. That’s how I’ve replayed moments in my head. Tying that to the myth, obviously, is the decapitation. I thought in a more theoretical art way about how decapitation is framing and framing is like a decapitation. The director’s gaze is cutting everything else out. It’s also forcing you to stay eye to eye with her, which is what makes you have to be so present in the situation. You can’t even really objectify her because you’re literally with her. We’re not showing you genitalia, but it’s still giving you erotic shock because of how close you are to her face. 
Podraza: If I had my way, I would make things, put them out in the world and never talk about them. But I absolutely love talking about the different ways people watch this film. There are people who watch this as a woman’s pornographic fantasy: the opening shot is her reverie and that this is sort of a rape-adjacent fantasy that she’s having and then it didn’t happen. Some people go, “Well, what if she said that she was afraid and wanted to stop at the window? Would he have?” and really want to interrogate that particular aspect. A lot of women just think it’s fucking hot. We’ve created a gorgeous piece of 35mm ‘70s porn. Then there are people who will watch it the first time as a thriller, not knowing what’s going to happen to her, then they’ll rewatch it as something that’s more titillating when they know that she’s gonna be fine. I just got an email like that this morning from a poet I shared the link with over the weekend, so I find that really cool to create something that not only people have such diverse reactions to. I myself, depending on the day I watch it, feel a diverse reaction to it. It can also depend on who I’m sitting next to in the theater. I was sitting behind a row of people who are all my parents’ age at New/Next. I felt sheepish in a way I’ve never felt watching this [laughs]. 

There’s a bookstore in Brooklyn called The Ripped Bodice that’s a romance novel bookstore. Every time they have any event, there are young women down the block. I am very curious now about the fact that we have all these discussions about how young people supposedly don’t want to see sex in movies, but I wonder if that’s even real, because then why are romance novels so popular with people in their 20s and 30s right now? And they’re not chaste romance novels. I do think that this film also plays with tropes—not just pornography, but tropes of the romance novel and even softcore French erotic films from the ‘70s and ‘80s. There’s just a lot that it’s nodding to in different ways. So I just kind of wonder if our discussion is really on point because I don’t think that many women are waiting in line to get romance novels if we’re not deeply interested in sex.
Filmmaker: Do you think that there’s something about the inherently solitary act of reading versus the communal nature of watching a film, especially at a festival? 
Podraza: Unfortunately, we all still mostly watch things alone. I would maybe extrapolate the question to being the things that are envisioned for us versus the things that we get to envision in our head. I do think there are rightfully questions about how we film sex scenes. We filmed this with [Rachel Zekri], an amazing intimacy coordinator, who was so excited to be working on this because the French don’t use intimacy coordinators. She gets to do this like five times a year when the Americans come to town. She was a brilliant choreographer. She works in theater and had so many ideas. Elektra had so many ideas. Franck had so many ideas. Sarah and I had so many ideas. Everybody was on a mission to make everyone feel comfortable, but also to make it as hot as possible. One detail that I really like is that we were very clear with Elektra that it was about her pleasure. The reason the scene is long is that it’s supposed to be long enough for a woman to reasonably cum. His hand is between her legs the whole time for a reason. It was on Elektra to cum when she thought she would cum [in real time]. You go back especially to the ‘80s and the guy jumps in bed and the woman’s like, “Ooh, ooh, ooh.” And you’re like, “What the fuck?” Duration is actually important to women’s pleasure and that was a big thing we wanted to capture with the sex scene from the beginning.