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Reviews
Promising Young Woman (2020)
The "nice" guys
I propose an exercise in imagination: you are in the club at night, drunk and confused, without friends and without a phone, and in front of you appears a benevolent stranger who offers to help you in those moments of deep vulnerability. The stranger not only does not leave you safely at home, but takes you to his corporate apartment, intoxicates you even more, and when he is fully convinced that you are completely devoid of defense and lucidity, he begins to undress you, full of emotion and curiosity, like a child opening his present on Christmas morning.
The debut in feature film of British actress and director Emerald Fennell, "Promising Young Woman" (2020) starts as a real horror, in which we are forced to watch, in a discomfort that is accentuated with each moment, the whole unfolding of the apparent sexual trauma that will stand at the basis of all subsequent actions of the protagonist. The repulsion that Fennell invokes in the prologue - although it has its origins in an event that overwhelmingly affects females - is universal. The fear of being the victim of abuse is present in each of us, only the reality has shown over time that this problem materializes most often in women's lives. And it materializes so frequently that the social nonchalance with which it was treated until recently becomes retrospectively worrying and therefore frightening.
But the protagonist, Cassandra (Carey Mulligan) wakes up before the aggression actually takes place. Specifically, she was lucid from the very beginning. She is not a victim and this will not be a rape. It's a social experiment as elaborate as it is desolate. "Promising Young Woman" is at the first level a revenge story, or, more specifically, a rape revenge story, and in this sense Fennell follows a structure as classic as possible: we start with a vaguely articulated trauma, which gradually fades along the sequences, a quasi-hermetic protagonist who dedicates her entire existence to payback, an optimistic love interest in the person of Ryan (Bo Burnham), able to break through the protagonist's anger with affection and honesty and a final act that overturns her social and sentimental evolution and propels her at full speed towards the goal she had set for herself from the start: revenge on the element that irretrievably stopped her possibility of a happy life.
Secondarily, but perhaps even more visibly, Fennell's film presents itself as a carefully nuanced feminist manifesto, the director taking care not to turn Cassandra into a vehicle of evil, a dehumanized beast purified of empathy. On the contrary, the filmmaker places Cassie in a higher moral sphere, completely separated from the other characters - especially the males - all of her actions being ultimately clearly justified and never truly excessive. Because the experiments used by the protagonist do not have a malicious intent and no desire to produce serious and irreversible physical and mental consequences, but aim at an honest awareness of the problem and a possible revelation of the aggressor.
Poetic justice seems to be the motto that Fennell pursues in every sequencea and the character she creates for Carey Mulligan is finely outlined, but that doesn't save the director from a particular and, in the end, avoidable excess. Every male character who appears in the film is either from the beginning or until the end, either rude, misogynistic, abusive or sexually obsessed, or cowardly, pathetic, embarrassing or simply repressed in his fragile masculinity. Fennell appeals to an absolute generalization of the idea of toxic masculinity, all men engaged in the action of the film being represented, with one exception, as careless, hostile or unable to admit their own mistakes. Of course, it could be argued without too much difficulty that the mere nature of Emerald Fennell's feature film prevents a less acute approach, but the world the filmmaker chooses to illustrate is an almost hopeless one, in which the evil associated with masculinity can be held accountable only at the cost of one' own life, and not even such a heroic endeavor will in any way stop it from spreading further.
Moreover, it soon becomes apparent that the aversion to the entire male ensemble in the film belongs primarily to the filmmaker, not the main character, as one might think and as Fennell herself tries to suggest in some interviews. It is initially interpretable whether men are unilaterally toxic because they are viewed through Cassie's distorted perspective of pain or because the director decides to strictly portray them in this way. Almost all the sequences of the film involve the protagonist directly or are actually provoked by her, so that every scene or setting in which a male character appears involves mediating the interaction through Cassie's eyes.
Take for example the first appearance of Ryan in the film, in fact the first completely pleasant appearance of a male character in the film. The interaction begins awkwardly, with a reluctant and passive-aggressive Cassie and a seemingly shy but later surprisingly assertive Ryan, but Fennell quickly signals that this is not an ordinary conversation. Moreover, Cassie lets her guard down for a few moments and even begins to fall in love - a fact subtly signaled from the beginning of the scene, the director choosing to infuse a dose of melancholy and romance through the background song, "Nothing's Gonna Hurt You Baby", from Cigarettes After Sex.
We can deduct from this narrative fragment that the filmic environment reacts directly, intra- or extradiegetically, to Cassie's feelings. In fact, Fennell, in addition to the delimitation by chapters, divides her movie into three carefully separated directions, all equally focused on the protagonist: Cassie against the abusive patriarchal system, Cassie in her parents' house, managing her trauma and Cassie in relation to Ryan. Almost every contact she has with the patriarchal universe is either offensive or disgusting (she is whistled by street workers, she almost gets molested by an embarrassing guy who also tries to explain the concept of femininity to her, she is honked at and cussed in traffic by an angry driver etc.), and the sequences themselves are marked by an approach that mimics reality, but not rendering it quite objectively. When we watch her at home, the atmosphere seems downright fake, observing a bizarre dynamic between the protagonist and her parents, always present and always refractory to her thoughts and feelings. On the other hand, in the sequences that deal with the relationship between her and Ryan, the setting becomes almost idyllic, only warmth and pure feelings passing through the lens.
Therefore, the desire to filter the events of the film and their substrate through the particular optics of a character who seeks to alleviate her suffering and to find a solution to the problems that press her is visible. It seems that the entire patriarchy, along with all of its adjacent elements, is against Cassie, and that translates, for much of the film, into a subjective virtual angle. It's just that men remain detestable even in the absence of the protagonist. Moreover, their malignancy reaches paroxysm only after her distinct perspective can no longer be spoken of. And here the director seems to lose sight of her original goal, throwing herself into a gratuitous, simplistic and clichéd representation of an entire social category by virtue of personal considerations.
Simply put, Fennell starts well, but gets lost, thematically, on the road, abandoning the honest and empathetic exploration of a subject as sensitive and relevant as possible in favor of a gradual and, finally, unexpected expansion of the antipathy she starts with. This does not make "Promising Young Woman" less fascinating in its construction or less important for the current context, but it inevitably detracts from the potential of the message it set out to convey.
Joker (2019)
We, the clowns
Chaos is not born suddenly and does not form out of nothing. Chaos forms imperceptibly, from small actions, from small reasons, from lack of communication, from an increasing absence of empathy. With little notice, chaos sets in as an uncontrollable force, an amoral plow that swallows everything in its path and leaves void in its place. Good and evil become concepts of extreme relativity in a chain of weaknesses that finds its finality in the deconstruction of the foundations on which people have built their social edifice. In the face of hazard, the ethos crumbles and all those who struggle between confusion and despair are forced to look into the abyss. And the abyss gives birth to monsters.
Todd Phillips' "Joker" isn't exactly close to being a cinematic masterpiece, but not truly far either. It's blunted in many places by the formalisms of the Hollywood construction, by clichés and stereotypes, by redundant or purely dispensable elements, by a perfectly observable desire to appropriate the mainstream. And perhaps the shortcomings mentioned are not even attributable to the director, who has worked since the beginning of his career in a lax area, as far as structure and substance of cinema go (from "Road Trip" to "The Hangover" trilogy) or the subject, in the same measure restricted and potentiated by its comicbook origin. Perhaps the only valid reproach to the film is that Phillips didn't dare enough, that he didn't step on the pedal whenever he had the chance, most likely in fear of alienating too much an audience accustomed to a different type of superhero stories.
In fact, Phillips' "Joker" is far from a superhero movie, but a more applied reiteration of a modern myth. The legendary figure of the Joker, the arch-nemesis of Batman and agent of chaos par excellence, fundamentally different in each interpretation, is now seen from a strictly human perspective. There is nothing supernatural in the story of Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), nothing that goes beyond the realm of reality, nothing that could not happen in the daily life of the average viewer. Strongly glamourized and affected in some places by too calophilic tendencies, "Joker" is not so much an origin story of one of the most prolific villains in the history of comics, but the vision of a dark transformation of a poor mentally ill person, who for independent reasons becomes the symbol of anarchy and liberation in a society on the verge of collapse.
And Phillips doesn't try to hide his disinterest for the cinematic legacy behind him too much. There are no spectacular action scenes and fancy gadgets, as they abound in Cristopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight", or Tim Burton's "Batman". Instead, there are dance scenes carefully choreographed in the key moments of the character's evolution. Arthur's laughter, grimaces, behavior are not the result of a chemical accident or a gimmick specific to films in this genre, but the consequence of a neurological condition that occurred as a result of repeated physical and mental trauma. And the classic confrontation between the good and the bad guys is totally non-existent, for the simple reason that there are no authentic representatives of any category. Arthur Fleck is not a fundamentally evil man, but a poor soul who's been hurt too many times, prone to a pessimistic view, while Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen) or Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro) are in no way heroes, but only exponents of the upper class, which decides "what is funny and what is not", the moral battle which we are spectators to being one without any clear marks.
Moreover, Phoenix does not draw the strength of the character from previous representations of the villain. In Phoenix's interpretation, Joker is first and foremost a man, vulnerable, confused and fearful of the progressively more hostile environment in which he has to live. Unlike Heath Ledger's Joker, who, according to his own description, was a propagator of chaos, Arthur Fleck is before all a victim and afterwards the image of this toxic phenomenon. Through an extremely specific conjuncture, he becomes the symbol of the lower class protests, not once intending to start a social or political movement. As the character himself states: "I don't believe in anything", completely opposite to Ledger's Joker, a convinced anarchist, who through his various social experiments seeks to prove something, to send a message, either about the limit of incorruptibility or about the fragility of morality.
A discussion about the authenticity of the interpretation in relation to the source material becomes irrelevant, since neither the film nor Phoenix seek to conform to any structural pattern. The terrain is clear, and Arthur is being watched in full metamorphosis, from the perpetual and harmless victim to the colorful demon of Gotham, both feared and admired. Arthur's change is explored in detail, and the key moments are easily visible. From the appearance of the gun in Arthur's character sphere, he's only a step away from the first murder, and from finding out the truth about his troubled childhood, there's a minimal series of decisions to killing his mother. With each murder, Arthur renounces the burdens he diligently and willingly carried behind him. Every crime works as a point of no return. With each life that Arthur brutally snatches from existence, Joker comes harder to the surface. Killing Randall (Glenn Fleshler), the colleague who offered him the weapon, closes the circle of causality in Arthur's life and records the transfer of control to the alter-ego, which vividly takes over the reins of his personality. Arthur's rebirth is sealed with the last murder (instead of the carefully planned suicide), the live assassination of Murray Franklin, his idol, the figure closest to paternity that the protagonist knew, during his own comedy show, which Arthur used to watch religiously, who in a moment of hyper-lucidity assumes a whole new perspective ("My life is nothing but comedy").
Phillips and Phoenix's "Joker" is a statement, both as a film and as a character, about people, about choices, about freedom and last but not least about conflict, especially ideological. It could also be seen as a warning signal on the increasingly turbulent reality in which we all find ourselves at the moment, or it could be interpreted as a more sensitive exposure of an eminently fatal figure. Whatever the perspective, one thing is certain: in the absence of comedy, only the chronic, dissociated and inopportune laughter of a future Joker remains.
Arrival (2016)
Notes about intelectual Sci-Fi
Looking at "Arrival" (2016) from a quasi-canonical perspective, its adherence to the unwritten principles of the intellectualist Sci-Fi of the 2010s is easily observable, next to movies like Jonathan Glazer's "Under the Skin" (2013), Alex Garland's "Ex Machina" (2015), "High Life" (2018), by Claire Denis or James Gray's "Ad Astra" (2019).
Each one of these movies bear the sign of the same resemblance: the abandonment of the of the audio-visual effects glorification that the genre often uses in a deeply consumerist manner in favor of a limited use of the cinematic spectacle, meant to point out the nuances of the acutely philosophical discourse developed among the frames.
Specifically, Denis Villeneuve's film, much like the others mentioned above, is not and does not try to be a blockbuster, rather cultivating the stylistic manner explored and polished in his previous films, although the plot itself seemed to announce a sordid show, which we have all seen in many Hollywood productions.
Aliens visit Earth in "Arrival", the whole conceptual and thematic area of the diegesis revolving around this fact, but at no point does Villeneuve's film establish any identitary connection with productions such as "Independece Day" (1996) or "War of the Worlds" (2005). Instead, the Canadian director navigates the narrative thread stretched by Ted Chiang in his book, "Stories of your life", and further amplifies a Kuleshovian structure that first deconstructs the temporal nature of the film only to finally recompose it into a form that directly serves the concept he is questioning.
"Arrival" talks about time and predetermination with a palpable sensitivity and although a not very successful attempt to infuse the bombastic suppurates in the film through its final sequences, Villeneuve does not lose sight of its real essence and finishes a complex story, that is all the more relevant in the current context.