‘She Said’ is an empowering and profound film from start to finish, displaying the power of investigative journalism and the rise of the #MeToo Movement.
It’s hauntingly real, and that’s a problem.
The myth about nice guys is wrong: it’s the “loose girls like that” who inevitably finish last. Promising Young Woman slips so effortlessly from dark comedy into horror that its unsettling effect is ever more striking by how sugarcoated with charm lead Cassie (Carey Mulligan) is. That’s Cassie’s superpower, to disrupt our expectations – and prove that “nice guys” really don’t exist.
Writer-director Emerald Fennell, who also produced the film with Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap Entertainment, marks her impressive directorial debut with Promising. The film captivated critics at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival before its Christmas Day release. Costarring Bo Burnham, Alison Brie, and Laverne Cox – plus a slew of famously nice guy actors like Adam Brody, Max Greenfield, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse – Promising proves we really can’t judge someone by their so-called sloppy (and presumed slutty) exterior.
Thirty-year-old med school dropout Cassie works at a coffee shop by day and trolls for unassuming men by night. Every weekend, she pretends to be too drunk to stand at a local bar, only to stumble into the arms of a “well-meaning” gentleman who graciously offers to take her back to her house…oh wait, nevermined, it’s easier just to go to his.
Through different outfits, hairstyles, and makeup tricks, patron saint of vengenance Cassie snags a variety of self-important men who find that discussing the hardships of masculinity while quoting David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster” an aphrodisiac. A Cindy Sherman for the nightclub scene, Cassie projects what her targets want to see, all before holding up a mirror to reflect their attempts at assault.
Promising’s rape culture revenge story is elevated by stunning cinematography, Mulligan’s intoxicatingly raw performance, and snappy soundtrack that packs a punch akin to Birds of Prey’s flashy bubblegum-popping good time. That is, until Cassie finds herself entangled with a past acquaintance, and is forced to come to terms with why she gave up her “promising” career years prior.
Cassie’s raw determination against patriarchal assumptions blazes more forcefully than token Christmas Day blockbuster Wonder Woman’s golden lasso ever could. Need we look any further than Cassie for our 2020 feminist icon?
Promising leaves us asking whose fault it is that promising young women’s careers – and lives – are shattered by date rape. But the real question is, whose fault are we comfortable admitting? From complicit taxi drivers to bartenders, Promising spotlights a culture that can’t question what it doesn’t want to see. Thankfully, this film makes it hard to look away.
“Promising Young Woman” is in theaters December 25.
Revenge is a dish best served bold.
Following the 2019 Film Independent Spirit Awards, IFC Films held their annual celebration yesterday in sunny Santa Monica, California.
This is a review of “Wildlife,” a new film directed by Paul Dano and featuring Carey Mulligan, Jake Gyllenhaal, and more.
Here’s a slice of our country’s history to not be proud of!
Writer-director Dee Rees’s historical epic “Mudbound,” based on the novel by Hillary Jordan, details the daily hardships and vicissitudes of farm life in Mississippi during the post–World War II era.
Sarah Gavron showed up at the 2016 Athena Film Festival this past Saturday to showcase her new film about the women’s suffrage movement in Britain in 1912. Director of Suffragette, a film starring Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter, and Meryl Streep, Gavron was in attendance at the festival which promotes women filmmakers, and what better film than one showing how women received the right to vote in England.
We asked Gavron a few questions about the film, about her choices in casting as well as just getting the film made. You can read her answers below and watch the rest of the interview in the video:
You’ve said countless times that you’ve wanted to make this film for a long time.
Yes I’ve wanted to make it for about ten years, it took six years to actually get it off the ground. There had never been a film about the British suffrage movement—it felt like it was overdue in terms in resurrecting the women who changed our course of history, and it also felt timely because the issues women were dealing with then are ongoing issues women are grappling with equal rights still, equal pay, lack of representation in government, with sexual violence, with education, so it felt that it had resonance with the 21st century.
Your choice not to cast a woman of color was also met with some controversy.
Well what we chose to do was tell the story of one group of women of one part of east London in 1912 and in Britain the working class women were white. In America of course you had a similar movement happening differently and that had a very different ethnic makeup because of the different immigration here. Subsequently in the UK we had an immigration that changed the makeup of the movement, but we didn’t at that time.