There are key recommendations in this article for A promising young woman and other works including the film Hard candy and the series Maybe I’ll kill you, as well as a discussion of sexual assault.
How do you like your revenge on screen – through pain? In flames? High blood pressure?
What about … via text message?
Here’s how A promising young woman, Emerald Fennell ‘s humorous, tart and inspiring story is about a woman recovering from the grief of her best friend’ s sexual assault and about suicide years before. Well, that’s partly how it ends; to be more precise, it ends with Cassie (Carrie Mulligan) dead at the hands of Al, the man who raped her friend, but gets the last word by leaving things behind about where the she disappeared. In the last kiss, Cassie sends a pre-recorded text to her ex-Ryan (who was apparently present at the time of the rape) just as Al is arrested in the middle of the his own wedding for her murder.
He is very gloomy and unhappy. It is also an inspiring creative choice.
A promising young woman It has been described as a thrush of revenge, and the “thrush” of such films should look at the income of the perpetrator. But gender has its limitations. Even among the best examples, there is often too much reliance on the idea that reparation in the form of physical pain and / or death equals a kind of justice. (See: Fairly good but also very violent John of Wick movies, which start because of a murdered dog.) They also tend to smooth characters in avatars and not much else; this is especially strong when applied to wrong female protagonists, where revenge is not just personal, it is (apparently) a middle finger to patriarchy, as with films like The Night and Am Perfection.
As a real hobby, are they satisfying? Maybe in an instant. But what are these characters left for after revenge? And what does it mean for us, the audience, to root for such realistic results?
In certain ways, A promising young woman it is a tease, walking its audience up to the edge of normal elements of the revenge genre only to be removed and worn. The first news lies in the establishment. When Cassie is introduced to us, it’s been several years since Nina’s death, and it’s been a strange habit: going out to bars alone and pretending to be drunk near black to lure the men who would take advantage of these women. Each time one of them definitely returns to his place, she waits to see how far he can relate to a relatively responsive man, before revealing that she is completely solemn, smearing them. -into a frightening moment of self- reflection.
From a purely creative point of view, the conceit is clever. It’s hard not to get a little excited at watching Cassie dress down one of those “nice, self-explanatory boys,” Neil (played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse with the right amount of creeping, with the name of energy): “You woke me up. before putting your fingers in me, “she snores.” That was sweet. ”
But in taking a step back and understanding that seo the way she has dealt – accepting the role of a sort of “Scared Straight” vigilante who aims to teach the laws of consent – night after night and week after week, it doesn’t feel like tension distribution; it just feels sad. Cassie has spent years coping with her trauma, having dropped out of middle school after Nina’s death and, metaphorically speaking, her own life. Her parents notice the lack of friends, as well as her total interest in pursuing a career of any kind. In one scene, even Nina ‘s own mother urges Cassie to move on and stop living with remorse and bitterness for what happened to her daughter.
This is the point. Fennell has described A promising young woman using the terminology of slavery, since the targeting of boys in bars is too high for Cassie from whom she must surely be dragged back into despair, every time. This pattern, the director said IndieWire, usually goes “in one direction.” Slavery statements, by their very nature, are against catharsis. Watching a character spin into this state is harrowing and disturbing to us – Requiem for a dream, anyone? – and viewers are hopeful that the final character is seeking help to deal with their illness, rather than continuing on the path to self-destruction.
But Cassie doesn’t want help; she wants Nina not to be present to go over everyone involved in her attack and what happened in the aftermath, just as he does to her. Perhaps the most troubling and unusual of Cassie ‘s intended revenge was inflicted on Madison (Alison Brie), an old friend. After Madison refuses to disparage Nina’s accusations of those years before, Cassie hires a strange man to bring Madison’s unbroken back to a hotel room, so that Madison wakes up, she thinks she was attacked. (It is revealed later that it is a disappointment.)
Cassie’s methods complicate our understanding of rape retaliation, and in doing so open up the “eye for eye” lie – Cassie no longer feels better after she turns the tables on Madison, the dean of the school, or the lawyer who, it turns out, is the only one who doing expressing sincere remorse for Nina ‘s failure. It is still not enough.
Fennell’s interest in fixing the trauma of the victim rather than punishing the culprit is the rare culprit for this type of film. Most of 2005 film Hard candyfor example, bending over the bait and the subsequent torture Hayley (Elliot Page) 14-year-old acts on a 32-year-old photographer named Jeff (Patrick Wilson), whom she suspects to take charge of young children. As Cassie enters A promising young woman, Hayley at one point makes a real turn out of her own boards, deceiving him into believing she is castrated. But unlike Cassie, Hayley almost always has the upper hand in her cat and mouse game with Jeff, and she manages to persuade him to kill himself with the promise that she won’t let publicly testified about his crimes after he left.
Hayley is an enigma, and Brian Brian’s screen knows it. In the final act, Jeff is deadly and anxious wondering who she really is, and if any information she told him about herself was true. Hayley nonetheless avoids the issue with a sharp retort. “I’m every little girl you’ve ever watched, rubbed, scratched, scratched,” she says, confirming her character’s on-paper offer as a loaded symbol. After hanging himself, Hayley runs off and the film ends is is she motivated for revenge? And how does this affect her ongoing psyche?
A promising young woman assumes that such revenge could be a future exercise. Cassie’s failure to fulfill her plan to get back at Al at his obnoxious party is twisted and depressing. Then again, so was her way of dealing – or not dealing – with her grief.
I can’t help but think of the HBO series I can destroy you, whose creator Michaela Coel plays Arabella, a successful writer confronts the emotional wreckage of her own sexual assault after being drugged by a stranger at a bar. Arabella spends much of the season trying to bury her feelings or find the rapist hoping for revenge and closure. The events of that blurry evening eat Arabella completely, taking her away from her work and from healthily processing what has happened.
The weekend plays brilliantly with the idea of other settings that night. In one, she thinks of beating him to death; in another, the police arrest him, but not before they both have a heart attack where he states that he has also suffered rape. The third and final setting is very romantic and daring, thinking of Arabella as the initiator of what happens as a beautiful consensual encounter.
The program ends back in what appears to be a “reality”: The events have unfolded as she originally remembered but after some time, Arabella is more at peace with her. herself, putting her grief to the end of her second novel.
If so I can destroy you is an exercise on how one chooses to learn how to keep up live (and not just already) against that trauma, A promising young woman it is about what happens when someone survives. The Arabella rapist is never monitored, but she has to keep going; Cassie consciously risks her life and strikes back at Al, even though he’s from the other side of the grave. (And apparently, no matter what punishment imposed by law Al will receive for her death than what he did to Nina.) There is no doubt that one outcome is not as satisfying, but both are phrases. rights of our culture’s inability to properly deal with consent and violence against women.
And in both, closure is understood as a slippery state, which is not so easy to explain. Closure may not be fully accessible at all.
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