Why leering men should be wary of Carey
British star dazzles in Bafta winning drama that grasps the nettle of sexual politics
Promising Young Woman (15)
Verdict: Grimly comic revenge thriller ★★★★✩ The Year Earth Changed
Verdict: Animal magic ★★★★✩
PROMISING Young Woman arrives on our screens today freshly anointed with a pair of BAFTAs, for Outstanding British Film and Best Original Screenplay. That’s the kind of promotional thrust money can’t buy. At least, we assume it can’t.
You may well be aware by now that the debutante writer- director is Emerald Fennell, who made an impact of a different kind with a charismatic performance as the confident young Camilla Parker Bowles in The Crown.
One of the producers is Margot Robbie, who played a victim of sexual harassment in the 2019 film Bombshell and was a beguiling Sharon Tate in the same year’s Once Upon A Time . . . In Hollywood.
It seems apt that the movie industry, which spawned the #MeToo movement, is benefiting from it in the form of some terrific films about predatory men, even if some of them are driven by agendas in the same unsubtle way that chariots in biblical epics were driven by Romans, so furiously that occasionally a wheel comes off.
Promising Young Woman gets round this problem by presenting itself as a black comedy. The comedy is sometimes wellconcealed, yet it’s there if you look hard enough, from the very opening shot of male crotches pumping on the dance floor of an American nightclub. That’s a view we are normally given of women. Plainly, Fennell is out to turn the tables.
Her lead is Carey Mulligan, giving a performance that has bagged her a Best Actress nomination in the forthcoming Academy Awards. Mulligan plays Cassandra, whose namesake in Greek mythology led on the god Apollo, then withdrew her favours. In a 21stcentury sense, that’s also what happens here.
WE MEET Cassie moments after that opening sequence, lolling on a sofa, apparently blind drunk. One of a group of men carousing at the bar sees her less as a woman who needs to be helped than as a sexual opportunity.
Back they go to his place and all seems to be going to plan for him when Cassie suddenly, with a conspiratorial ‘Fleabag’ look directly into the camera, snaps out of her feigned stupor. She is on a mission, it transpires, to entrap predators who don’t recognise the slurred protests of an inebriated woman as any reason to stop. But her missionary zeal is all-consuming. At 30 she works in a coffee shop, lives with her parents and has turned her back on medical school, where she was a glittering student. She is unhealthily obsessed, but why? Well, Fennell’s screenplay drops only hints for the first third of the movie, so I won’t issue any spoilers here.
What I can say is that it comes as a relief to her, her parents, and indeed us, when Cassie starts going out with Ryan (Bo Burnham), a sweetly self-deprecating paediatric surgeon, who fancied her from afar at medical school. Might her relationship deflect her from her mission?
Far from it, as it turns out, as in another nod to Greek mythology Ryan leads her to her Nemesis.
By now, the film has become a full- blown revenge thriller, although unlike 1987’ s Fatal Attraction, say, the unstable woman here has all the moral force. Maybe that’s a reflection of how cinematic sensibilities have changed not so much in the past 34 years as just the past four.
Whatever, there is almost a Western vibe as the story moves towards a surprising resolution, with Cassie targeting, one by one, all those she feels deserve punishment for past behaviour.
Mulligan is splendid throughout, and anyone who also saw her as the ineffably English, genteel, grounded Edith Pretty in the recent Netflix film The Dig must surely applaud her impressive versatility. Actually, I thought both performances were worthy of BAFTA’s Best Actress shortlist. Regrettably, she was overlooked entirely. But at least Fennell got her Best Original Screenplay gong for what is inarguably also a directorial debut of power and promise.
From a promising young woman to an accomplished old man. Any new David Attenborough documentary should be a cause for celebration, but that is especially so in the case of The Year Earth Changed, which shows how, despite the blight on humanity caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the natural earth has benefited in myriad ways.
THERE are fewer jaw-dropping images than in most wildlife documentaries narrated by the great man, probably because, by definition, this one has been rushed out. Nevertheless, it is hugely uplifting to be presented with conclusive evidence, over and over again, of animals prospering while human beings languished in lockdown.
In the ocean off Alaska, for example, humpback whales are literally able to hear each other speak, now there is no disruptive cruise traffic. One researcher offers a pleasing human analogy: that it’s much easier to communicate in a quiet coffee shop than in a crowded bar.
Well, the whales have at last got their chance in the coffee shop. And the film, directed by Tom Beard, shows us delightful footage of a humpback mother leaving her calf while she goes to feed, on the basis that if it needs her, she will hear it call. Before, she would never have been able to leave its side.
Of course, the question is whether we can learn from all this and ensure that the benefits for nature endure. Promisingly, in Alaska they are working towards legislation that will force cruise ships at least to move more slowly and therefore more quietly: a whale of an improvement. n ProMiSing Young Woman is on Sky Cinema and noW from today. The Year earth Changed is on Apple TV+ from today.