Emerald Fennell’s bitter and grandiose tragic comedy about sexual violence “Promising Young Woman”.
It is not every day that you come across films that have won 109 prizes and 169 nominations – according to a list of a well-known cinema database. When “Promising Young Woman” came out at the Sundance Festival in early 2020, it was sure to attract a lot of attention – not only because Emerald Fennell, a prominent TV writer and actress who played Camilla in the series “The Crown”, made her directorial debut here.
The label as Hollywood’s answer to the me-too debate in the form of a “Rape Revenge Movie” aroused great expectations. The disappointment is all the more pleasant: Instead of a genre film about sexual violence, you get to see something completely different. A tragic comedy about a young woman who threatens to lose herself after her girlfriend’s suicide after a campus rape – to the self-chosen role of a nonviolent avenger. It is neither a thriller nor an action film, but – if something like this were possible – almost a Woody Allen film turned into a feminist.
The most prominent of the many film awards, an Oscar, was won by the leading actress Carey Mulligan in the role of Cassie – an abandoned medical student who makes ends meet as a waitress in a coffee bar. It’s the classic job of people who want to keep their backs free for something else. But Cassie is not one of the countless hopeful young actresses in Los Angeles. Nonetheless, she goes out in the evening to play a role that she has long since perfected. In bars and discos she pretends to be helplessly drunk. She never has to wait long until a man is found who offers himself as an escort on the way home – and usually heads for her own apartment for the “last nightcap”.
It would not occur to any of these innocent and well-behaved men that his intentions could constitute rape. Cassie doesn’t pillory her, the only documentation of her actions is a tally sheet, which at the beginning of the story already fills many pages of her notebook. Apart from the hopefully wholesome shudder it gives them, the men have little to fear. The situation is different when she begins to research the circumstances of the rape of her friend – and to organize meetings with the guilty. The director and author artfully interweaves the second storyline with the first.
What began as a bitter comedy, as a disenchantment of the “hangover” genre about male-allied party excesses, has now turned into a very serious drama about marginalized sexual violence. It’s not just men who are to blame. At the top of Cassie’s list is a dean. Cassie only penetrates her conscience when she pretends that her own daughter is in similar danger. A former fellow student, who always played down the incident, puts her drunk in the situation of not knowing whether something similar could have happened to her. She spares the lawyer who helped cover up this and similar cases for the university – at the encounter he turns out to be a broken, severely depressed man who cannot forgive himself. There remains the main culprit, now a successful medic who is about to get married.
A clear role model can also be identified for this part of the film: Cornell Woolrich’s revenge novel “The Bride Wore Black”, which François Truffaut filmed with Jeanne Moreau. It is a stroke of genius to reinterpret these male-dominated cinema motifs. With all the admiration that Truffaut deserves as a filmmaker, he was the perfect example of a director who combined his film work with the private “conquests” of almost all leading actresses. His controversial quote that filmmaking means “letting beautiful women do beautiful things” is also well known.
When Emerald Fennell weaves in yet another plot pattern, an implied love story, she almost does too much of a good thing – but thanks to brilliant actors this also succeeds: Bo Burnham is the ideal cast of the innocent and well-behaved “good guy”. When Cassie identifies her former classmate as a viewer on the video of the rape that surfaced, the romantic glimmer of hope in her life is darkened in the bitterest way.
One could cite even more role models for this nevertheless unique film, above all Luis Buñuel’s social satires – only that Fennell does not indulge in surreal exaggerations. For her, the demands of the Enlightenment are too serious, and the topic is still not well received by the public. She avoids overdrawing admirably. Only in this way does she achieve a level of credibility that at the same time allows part of the male, heterosexual audience to identify with the “good guys” in her story. She is rightly confined to a huge corpus of film history – including beloved classics that used to celebrate sexual assault as male collectors’ luck.
Promising Young Woman. USA 2020. Regie: Emerald Fennell. 113 Min.
