British actress and screenwriter Emerald Fennell’s debut feature film, Promising Young Woman, very noticed at the Sundance Festival in 2020, but whose release was shaken by the health crisis, is presented as a feminist satire of a stale American society where relations between men and women are still determined by patterns of violence and domination.
On the threshold of her thirties, Cassie (Carey Mulligan), who has resigned from medical school, still lives with her parents and stagnates in a small job as a waitress at the local café, with no real prospect for the future. On weekends, she goes out alone to a club and feigns drunkenness, each time hooking a different man to take her home. And it never fails: as soon as the young woman finds herself at their mercy, none of them, even the most decent ones, deprive themselves of crossing the red line, taking advantage of their vulnerability to obtain sexual gratification. That’s when, every week, Cassie’s trap closes to give everyone a lesson and the scare of a lifetime.
After this argument, which could have been that of a black comedy deriding predatory masculinity, the film engages on a traumatic slope consisting in probing the past of its heroine. It is obviously a tragedy, the loss of his best friend Nina, raped on the benches of the medical school, which sheds light on the springs of his attitude. However, Cassie learns that the culprit, a certain Al Monroe, son of a good family legally whitened, is back in the area to get married. The young woman then implements a Machiavellian plan in order to punish not only the executioner left in freedom, but a whole small accomplice environment, which overlaps with her former promotion.
Embodying post- # metoo issues
Taking it upon himself to embody the challenges of post- # metoo society, Promising Young Woman endeavors to give through fiction an illustration of a whole range of notions that emerged in the wake of the movement, such as consent, harassment, “slut-shaming”, the culture of rape or toxic masculinity. Its heroine who disguises herself as a party girl the better, from behind, to re-educate the male sex is the thinly veiled metaphor of a film which, itself, sports a playful form and variegated colors to strike, scene after scene, its sound. message. Claiming to dust off Hollywood patterns, the film takes up the codes of “Rape and revenge movie” (literally “rape and revenge”), a sub-genre of exploitative cinema that emerged in the 1970s as a reaction to the hippie movement and sexual liberation. A curious reversal which thus sees a form once openly reactionary serving, fifty years later, as a vehicle for progressive ideas.
You have 30.98% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.