Recently I seem to have developed a sort of allergic reaction to films. The symptoms are as follows: about an hour into watching almost any given movie, I find myself contorted with irritation, and begin muttering like a mad person: “But what about her? What does she have to say?” After a lifetime of happily sitting through films directed almost exclusively by men, this allergic reaction seems to be telling me I need a more balanced cultural diet.

Admittedly I have always been more of a book lover, but my husband is a cinema buff, and every so often he’ll try again at converting me. “This one is critically acclaimed,” he will say. “Tipped for an Oscar! I’m sure it will be fine. Just give it a go.” Most recently, we settled on Marriage Story, the almost universally praised film by Noah Baumbach. I’d read a couple of reviews, which had assured me that this was an admirably balanced portrait of the disintegration of a relationship. Great! I love relationships. I love disintegration. Surely this would be a safe bet?

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But it happened again – there I was, after precisely an hour, tense in every muscle, shouting at the screen. Don’t get me wrong: Marriage Story is a brilliant film. It’s nuanced, it’s real, the acting is excellent, and it has some interesting stuff to say about relationships and families, and how they can evolve during periods of intense, soul-battering conflict.

But balanced? Pull the other one. In all kinds of subtle and not-so-subtle ways, Marriage Story only tells half the story – the husband’s half. We see Nicole, the wife, refuse to take part in mediation; we see her appoint a rapacious (female) lawyer; we see her force the long-suffering Charlie to move to LA in order to maintain contact with his son. We are shown a divorce industry that is skewed towards Nicole’s rights (it is mentioned – very much in passing – that this is in order to protect the many women whose husbands leave them with the kids and then refuse to pay up).

Meanwhile we never see, and are told a minimal amount about, the dynamics that drove Nicole to seek a divorce in the first place: the fact that Charlie had had an affair, and that he had insisted on staying in New York to further his career, at the expense of hers. In the publicity for the film Baumbach has made it clear that the story is partially based on his own divorce from the actor Jennifer Jason Leigh. He assured one interviewer that he showed the film to Jason Leigh prior to its release, and that she “likes it a lot”. Perhaps that’s true, but if so I’d like to hear it from her. In fact, I’d like to watch a film about a disintegrating marriage, written, produced and directed by her. I have no doubt that it would be very different.

Perhaps it is unfair to pick on Marriage Story, which does at least try to engage with questions about power, and who controls the narrative. Its limitations only bother me because I have reached middle age with a serious deficiency in my cinematic diet. I could probably count on my hands the number of films I’ve seen that explore women’s experiences with anything like this level of nuance and complexity – whereas I couldn’t begin to count the films in which women are overlooked, stereotyped, or treated as little more than eye candy. It was for this reason that cartoonist Alison Bechdel first devised a test to measure women’s representation in fiction; a story passes the Bechdel test if it has two named female characters who talk to each other about something other than a man. But even with such a low bar, fewer than half of best picture winners pass.

My generation grew up thinking all of this is normal – and at this rate of progress our kids will, too. I was watching an animated Christmas film with my boys the other day in which Mrs Claus – as in, the middle-aged, grey-haired wife of Santa – was depicted with a physique that would make Barbie look like the Vicar of Dibley. I just couldn’t stop myself imagining the conversations that must have underpinned that creative decision. “Hey, guys, could we make Mrs Claus sexier? This is a film for preschoolers, after all.”

My allergic reaction is not to any one film, but to an entire creative sector that has so utterly failed not only to admit women as equals, and to reflect and represent our experiences, but even on the most basic level to acknowledge us as human beings with a valid perspective – as the #MeToo scandal made abundantly clear. In this respect, film has much to learn from publishing. The books sector is far from perfect – witness the “Jonathan Franzen effect”, by which male writers are given a canonical status that is much harder for female writers to achieve, and the lower pricing of books by women than books by men. Nonetheless, fiction in particular is an artistic form in which women can thrive. In 2017, Haruki Murakami was the only male writer to make the top 10 bestselling literary authors in the UK – quite a contrast to the measly 4% of female directors on the top 100 grossing films of 2018.

So my resolution this year is to make sure I get a more balanced and nutritious cinematic diet. This means actively seeking out films by female writers and directors – whether that’s through reading feminist film journals such as Another Gaze, or working through the BBC’s mega-poll of best films made by women. Women make up 51% of cinemagoers, so change will surely come if we all vote with our wallets. Personally, I’m not only doing this because I want to support women film-makers, but because my late-onset allergy has taught me that I actually need them.

• Alice O’Keeffe is the author of On the Up