Language: English
Note: Spoilers ahead
Emerald Fennell’s debut feature Promising Young Woman draws you in with a killer opening hook. Cassie (Carey Mulligan), a med school dropout reduced to grief-stricken inertia and still living with her parents, has worked up a curious nocturnal routine. Every night, she hits a local bar, pretends to be too drunk to function, and waits to see which “nice guy” comes to her aid. Invariably, he does, pretending himself that he’s rescuing her while in fact proceeding to take advantage of a woman not conscious enough to consent. Just before he goes too far, Cassie confronts her assaulter.
The confrontation isn’t violent but educational. For this isn’t yet another blood-soaked rape-revenge thriller. The marketing team only misled us into thinking it is. The scene from the morning after sets up an effective misdirection. Cassie walks home barefoot, with what appears to be blood dripping down her leg. When the camera slides up, it turns out to be the ketchup from the hotdog in her hand. Fennell is reorienting what a “walk of shame” usually implies in one of the film’s many subversions.
While Promising Young Woman showcases Fennell’s undeniable strengths as a visual artist, it can’t hide her glaring weaknesses as a short-sighted allegorist. After a strong start, the film suffers a case of diminishing returns as it progresses, before the egregious ending renders it a victim of its own ambiguous intentions. For this is a revenge drama that prizes rude awakenings over emotional catharsis. To be sure, none of it undoes the stellar work of Mulligan, who holds things together through it all.
There’s no doubt over Fennell’s visual flair either which the film’s very first images will attest to. Charli XCX’s “Boys” plays over slo-mo close-ups of drunk bros, collars unbuttoned, paunches whirling and butts swaying on the dancefloor. The POV reverses the roles of subject and object to challenge the hyper-sexualisation of women in music videos. This is in contrast to Coralie Fargeat’s approach in Revenge, where she co-opts the codes of the genre to circumvent them. The central character’s eye candy appeal is magnified to confront the male gaze.
If Fargeat’s film by design plays up the fantasy of the vengeful pursuit, Fennell’s film wants to ground it in reality, calling out the practical obstacles, and the ramifications if and when they go wrong — even as it dresses up this truth in lip gloss and candy colours. Films like Revenge believe there’s catharsis in women fighting back against their abusers. There’s relief too in the brief reinforcement of moral order. Promising Young Woman suggests catharsis and healing mean little when taking on a few individuals won’t heal a rot endemic to whole institutions, nor will it stop acts of sexual violence from happening again. That’s why you don’t see any sense of emotional release on Cassie’s face after each nightly conquest. She marks them in her journal with a painful mundanity like she is doing a job society won’t: exposing the widespread and insidious threat of sexual violence.
All of Cassie’s actions are driven by the trauma of losing her childhood friend Nina, who was assaulted by her med-school classmates and later killed herself when neither the school nor the system offered her justice. Unable to move on, Cassie has devoted her life to avenging Nina. Who Cassie is beyond her friendship to Nina doesn’t interest Fennell. Her life and personality have been reshaped around what she believes Nina would want.
In an interview, Fennell spoke of the name Cassie (short for Cassandra) being inspired from Greek mythology. Cassandra was a princess of Troy, and another promising young woman with the gift of truth but cursed to have no one believe her. What Cassie and Nina suffered is an injustice suffered by many young women when they report on-campus sexual violence. And Fennell faults the whole system for it: the perpetrator, the bros readily covering it up, the “innocent” bystanders, the powers that be taking the perp’s side and blaming the victim. As she builds a manifesto on consent, Fennell catalogues every kind of abuser and abettor. They aren’t all masked assailants jumping out of dark alleyways. Cassie’s routine functions with a mechanism that brings to mind Borat’s, as in she coaxes out the unwitting subject’s worst impulses. Their anger on being found out speaks to how “nice guys” hide their true selves under the garb of being feminist allies.
The casting is on point: Adam Brody, who played Newport’s boy-next-door Seth Cohen on The OC; Christopher Mintz-Plasse, the horny nerd “McLovin” in Superbad; Sam Richardson, the only nice guy on Veep; Chris Lowell, Veronica Mars’ spurned Piz; and Max Greenfield, the ditzy lothario Schmidt in New Girl. The women are complicit too. Connie Britton plays the med school dean who believes boys should be given the benefit of the doubt. Alison Brie plays an old friend who believes Nina’s fate was her own fault for getting drunk and leaving herself vulnerable in the first place. Alfred Molina is the lawyer who harassed Nina into dropping charges, but he’s a man eager to atone for his sins.
Cassie’s faith in men is briefly restored when she meets the charming paediatric surgeon Ryan (Bo Burnham). Only briefly, before romcom optimism is negated by Ryan’s own by-standing involvement in Nina’s assault. Fennell seems to suggest even the sweetest of romcoms and pop songs have a dark side to them. The lyrics of Paris Hilton’s “Stars are Blind” — “I can make it nice or naughty/Be the devil and angel too” — hint at Cassie’s own duality, faultlessly captured by Mulligan. The strained violins in the cover version of Britney Spears’s “Toxic” imbue a funereal pall to the pop song as Cassie walks to the scene of her eventual murder.
Speaking of which, Cassie’s death undermines everything that came before it, invalidating her entire arc. Fennell speaks truth to a reality where neither justice nor revenge can be realised easily, if at all. Cassie felt powerless after Nina’s death because the system was rigged against the survivors and failed to punish the abusers. That’s why she decided to take her own measures. There’s no rhyme or reason for her U-turn at the end to trust the same system to do the right thing.
The law already failed both Nina and Cassie when they were alive. Fennell presents Cassie as some sort of martyr whose death will magically reform the law. The perps were white and rich enough to get away with rape once, and they’re white and rich enough to hire capable lawyers to get away with murder too. So, two promising young women may have lost their lives for something ultimately inconsequential. It feels empty and mean, as if it’s just another in Fennell’s gallery of “gotcha moments”, all wrapped up neatly with a winking face.
Rating: 2.5
Promising Young Woman is now in theatres.
source https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/promising-young-woman-movie-review-carey-mulligans-oscar-winning-revenge-thriller-is-a-dish-served-tepid-9864591.html
