a thriller that hates lesbians (and women in general)

But what is Rosamund Pike playing? It's very clear in I Care A Lot : She plays a con artist as cold as she is ambitious, whose activity is to bring under her tutelage wealthy elderly people, but in reality, not at all senile. While they languish at the nursing home, she swims in the dollars that she withdraws from them, spraying her accomplices in the process – a rogue establishment director, a rogue doctor… On the other hand, we understand less why she chooses to again '' to be the guarantor of a misogynistic production: after Gone Girl, which shows that women can lie about sexual violence to better ruin men's lives (fatigue), here she plays a feminist who is inevitably lesbian, misander and childless. Qualifiers that wouldn't be insulting if everything wasn't done, in this original Netflix production, to make his character hateful, more so than any man who gets on the screen.

90% female roles, 100% odious women

Let's not be unfair: in this thriller that would like to play the Coen brothers (hello Lady Killer and Burn After Reading), all characters are hellish, regardless of their gender. Peter Dinklage plays a mobster whose outbursts of anger are as subtle as his sandwich throws against the walls, his henchmen are mostly Nickel Feet, and the abusive nursing home manager … is an abusing nursing home manager. Nags, but at least fitting with the soundtrack that beats up and the cream pie messages served by I care a lot (capitalism is wrong; in life there are wolves and lambs). No, what really poses a problem is the subtle varnish that covers an otherwise heavy work.

From the first scene, a confrontation between a man whose mother has been unfairly placed under guardianship and Marla Grayson / Rosamund Pike, she shouts: "Does it hurt because you got beaten up by someone with a vagina?" Marla talks about her crotch which, in the eyes of director Jonathan Blakeson, makes her an angry feminist. Ah, the vagina… It is decidedly the source of all the ills of our humanity, if we are to believe I care a lot. Even if she spends her time vaping with an oversized phallic device, Marla Grayson prefers them to the penis, since she is in a relationship with her assistant Fran – Eiza Gonzáles, who has neither last name nor personality in the film, the thickness of his character consisting of a post-it on which would be written "The lesbian girlfriend". At the turn of a kidnapping scene, we also learn that if Marla Grayson abuses the parents of others, it is because the original vagina, her progenitor, was abusive. We will spend the sex scenes between Marla and Fran, which are less authentic than male gauze (this dominant visual perspective that forces us to adopt the gaze of the straight man). As well as the rest of the female cast, composed of unworthy women, often lesbians or who could well be, if we refer to the choice of this real 'who likes so much the clichés to make them the hair very short. Rather than pampering their neighbor, all of them have chosen to manipulate, torture and destroy. So here they are, these women who want to play on equality with men: much worse than them, they are monsters.

A final that makes male

We could still retain a few bits of bravery, quickly drowned in barely believable inconsistencies (two women with no training whatsoever screwing up frightful Russian mobsters, really?). We would then keep the verbal clashes between Jennifer Peterson, the tough granny (very fair Dianne Wiest) and Rosamund Pike, who is not half of a great actress. But because of the famous modernist (in reality, anti-feminist) varnish, these sequences take on the air of a bun. We are far from the subtlety of a Thelma and Louise, where, when women use violence, it was to free themselves from men and emancipate themselves from patriarchy, not to play the card of empowerment which is in fact ultra-capitalism. Here, we will have understood it, the feminine motivations remain the money and the pleasure of making guys sweat, without it ever being able to be pleasurable. Blame it on a cartoonish heroine, which ultimately comes down to a pair of XXL heeled pumps and a few punchlines. Too bad, because as the Times notes, we need more evil women on screen: real villains, who have thickness and flaws to spare, where Marla offers nothing to justify her carnivorous smile that 'a vague Freudian explanation of his past.

The great frustration also comes from the fact that the film passes the Bechdel test with flying colors. In 1985, American and lesbian comic writer Alison Bechdel published Dykes to watch out for (Lesbians to follow), where there is a plate titled "The Rule", which shows two friends considering going to the movies. One of them explains choosing a film according to three criteria: that it includes at least two female characters with a name, that these two women are talking to each other and that they are discussing something other than a man. , which will make it a film less misogynist than the vast majority of productions. Alas, if I care a lot The score explodes, this full card also shows the limits of the Bechdel test: yes, women are everywhere, talk, act … But the empowerment machine is running empty. She's even perverse since all of this is for the better (warning, spoiler) to make the heroine die on a corner of the sidewalk, in the middle of a pool of blood. And who ends up killing the dreadful Marla? The poor fellow at the start of the film, the one to whom we had announced the great revenge of the vagina and who returns to plant the lesbian (or rather, the stuffing of lead). Finally, there is a subtle message in I care a lot : ladies, don't try too hard to disobey patricarchal norms, or it will cost you dearly.