I. they weren’t expecting to watch Promising Young Woman, the revenge rape fantasy film that garnered four Golden Globe nominations this week. I just read the little description and, egg, I was out. Movies in this genre tend to encounter violence with violence and always feature drawn-out rape scenes that are – like every other rape scene in every movie other, and a lot of bad crime fiction, too – portraying torture porn as a kind of female movement. Who needs it after a long day at work?
I can’t say what changed my mind, although reading accounts by Evan Rachel Wood and four other women, this week, of the abuse they committed at the hands of Marilyn Manson certainly put me off in for something harder than raising hands. Promising Young Woman – the title goes against the trope of the “promising young man”, a phrase that grows up, with a gloomy frequency, in the defense of college-age men accused of rape – written and directed by Emerald Fennell and critics are divided. It is thin, didactic, preachy, derogatory, irrational and flippant towards sexual assault victims. On the other hand, it ‘s an inspiring and cathartic way of post – #MeToo female rage towards a problem that will never go away.
True, the film is thin in some ways. Carey Mulligan plays Cassie, a 30 – year – old drifter with a promising medical career, cut short by something terrible (I avoid spoilers) that happened at college. When we meet her, she is involved in a revenge campaign that involves going to bars, going against black alcohol, and waiting for an offer of booty “nice people ”To take out her home. In all cases, the boy takes her to his apartment for one last drink, puts the movements on her body like a body, and suddenly she has a heart attack as she sculpted into sobriety. and asks him what the hell he thinks he’s doing.
This is not a film that explores with any realism the fall of PTSD from sexual assault; for that, you need something like Incredible, a 2019 miniseries directed by Lisa Cholodenko, which features the same images I’ve ever seen of rape that weren’t fired from the rapist’s perspective. And it’s not a template for action; some madder critics have suggested that, because Cassie ‘s character does bad things in the pursuit of gross justice, she seeks the status of victims everywhere. This is a bizarre explanation of why there is drama, and builds on the old eloquent lie that victims must be polite in order to deserve sympathy.
You can imagine how this film would have looked under the direction of, say, Quentin Tarantino, and it shares some cartoonish aspects with its style. Crucially, though, the swagger and humorous humor will not end in blood, but only a twist I will not spoil. Cassie is not a serial killer and the rape scene itself is never shown – just her expression as she sees it on video. The heroine is just trying to correct an imbalance of opinion, one thing despite major accusation moves that won’t go away at all: that sexual assault has been excused to a point where there won’t be too much great when the victim is drunk; promising young men are more important than promising young women.
The amazing thing about Promising Young Woman, of course, is the politeness of Cassie’s intentions. The flap was caused when a reviewer at Variety said Mulligan was lying – she explained she was not “hot enough”; he claimed it didn’t mean that – there were too many people. However, there was one mistake in his review, in my opinion, which was a description of Mulligan’s character as a “seemingly femme fatale” who “dresses for his noses” once a week to ward off predators. take home.
The gloomy, and completely true, side of the film is that she is not, in costume, adorned with the nets, and “femme fatale” is the completely wrong description. In the opening scene of the film, Cassie is not seductive, cute or flirtatious. Instead, she laments “drunk” on a banquette, dressed in mediocre business attire. This is the main point of the film, and the criticism it made: it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you are old, young, thin, fat, fit or dressed. It doesn’t matter if you are “hot” or not, promising or hopeless. All that matters, in these times, is that you are too off to give permission. There is no honey trap; just a woman in a suit who “wants it”.
• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist