Don’t touch me
Carey Mulligan’s revenge-seeking Cassie riffs on 90s femme fatales in Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, while True Mothers is a gentle adoption drama from Naomi Kawase
In Bafta-winning and Oscar-nominated revenge drama Promising Young Woman predatory male behaviour around an apparently vulnerable woman is exposed, asking some awkward questions of our culture, director Emerald Fennell and star Carey Mulligan tell Laura Harding
Ayoung woman in crumpled business attire is drunk and alone in a bar. She is fumbling around looking for her lost phone.
A man in a work suit, tie loosened and collar unbuttoned, cracks a few “jokes” with his friends at her expense before going over under the guise of “helping her get home”.
Except he doesn’t help her get home, but instead takes her back to his place, hoping she’s too far gone to resist his advances.
It’s a scenario that, in prepandemic times, might seem painfully familiar.
But in the new film Promising Young Woman, she isn’t actually black-out drunk. And when the so-called “nice guy” starts taking her clothes off, she snaps into focus and, in a chilling and stone-cold sober tone, demands to know what he is doing and shames his predatory behaviour.
This is the opening of The Crown actress Emerald Fennell’s accomplished directorial debut, which won two Baftas last weekend for Best British Film and Best Original Screenplay and is also nominated for five Oscars.
“What is so fascinating about this stuff, and so troubling about it, is it was and remains completely commonplace,” 35-year-old Fennell says.
“And it was important right from the get-go when writing it that there is nothing in this movie that hasn’t been played for gags in quite recent Hollywood comedy movies or network comedy TV series or songs.
“The culture that we grew up in, and that so many people grew up in, made a joke of getting girls drunk and taking them home, girls waking up not knowing who was next to them and going on a walk of shame.
“This stuff was just normal and so it was very interesting and exciting and also terrible to then start to examine it.”
Carey Mulligan plays Cassie Thomas, a former medical student whose life has been derailed by the rape of her best friend, Nina.
Cassie processes her rage and trauma by feigning black-out inebriation and baiting men (played by classic TV nice guys, such as The OC’S Adam Brody and Superbad’s Christopher Mintz-plasse) into taking advantage of her, before giving them the fright of their lives by revealing it was a trap all along.
“It felt like a different lens through which we have seen so many stories before,” says 35-year-old Mulligan, who is nominated for an Oscar for her performance, “and I just thought it was such a unique way of looking at this”.
“The more we talk about things like this I think there can be somewhat of a fatigue with difficult things, and I think finding a new way to talk about them, a new way to raise questions, it does bring that to a wider audience than perhaps a different version of this film might have.
“Not that that is the absolute intent of this film, but it does do that.”
The film merges a picture-perfect Instagram aesthetic of pastel colours, tousled plaits and kitsch neon with Fennell’s knife-sharp social commentary.
Asked if she deliberately wanted to use beautiful visuals to lure people into a false sense of security before going in for the kill, Fennell, who is nominated for the best director Oscar but might be best known to audiences for playing Camilla in The Crown, jokes: “That’s how I do all of my murders.
“It was important that this is a film about appearances being deceiving,” she adds.
“Whether it’s the kind of men we like and have crushes on, who end
up doing bad things, or whether it’s Cassie dressing like a beautiful candyfloss, it’s important that the movie is just as alluring and enticing as all of these things are and then it’s got a slightly troubling centre maybe.
“But you can only be funny up to a point when it comes to this stuff, because it’s not funny and the stakes are very very high.
“So I think it’s a delicate balance of making it an incredibly pleasurable movie and one that people enjoy but also being honest about what we are talking about.”
Fennell does not let anybody off the hook. It’s not just the toxic bros who prey on vulnerable women who come in for scrutiny. She also turns her attention to the societal mechanisms that enable rape culture and the complicity of women.
“I think it’s just a completely cultural thing so it’s looking at what happens when the balance has been tilted for so long, so instinctively, so subconsciously, to believing men,” she says.
“Of course there are women who participate in this culture or who back it up, but it’s also important to say that their complicity is often because of their own experiences and their own trauma.
“There is a character in the film, Madison (played by Alison Brie) who is an old friend of Cassie’s and it’s quite clear that there is something that has happened in the past and her way of dealing with it was just forgetting about it, laughing it off.
“There is a woman in a position of power (played by Connie Britton) and the position of power she is in is one in a very, very masculine world and she has often had to check certain things at the door in order to get to where she needed to get to.
“So it’s important to examine it all, but also to be very specific about how different those things are. I think it’s a very different type of complicity
when it’s something you’ve had to do just to survive yourself.”
For Mulligan, known for her work in An Education, Shame and The Great Gatsby, the best way to dive into Cassie’s character was to establish who she was before Nina’s assault.
“Emerald and I just talked and talked about Nina and about her impact on Cassie’s life, in every part of her life.
“We just wanted to be clear on who Cassie was before any of this stuff happened and what her relationship was with Nina and what they meant to each other.
“I always felt in her mind she was trying to be loyal, she’s trying to look for that, she has survivor’s guilt, she feels responsibility around it.
“It always felt to me a story about grief and about love.”
Promising Young Woman is available on Sky Cinema and Now TV.
Promising Young Woman (15)
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True Mothers (N/A)
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Clapboard Jungle (15)
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What is this, the 90s?” proclaims one of the many reprehensible characters in Promising Young Woman, Emerald Fennell’s blackly comic, newly crowned Bafta-winner about a medical school drop-out (Carey Mulligan) on a mission to avenge her best friend following a sexual assault seven years earlier.
Coming where it does in the film, the line feels like a blatant reference to Peter Berg’s 1998 comedy Very Bad Things, and if you know the basic plot of that film it’ll likely play as a grimly ironic gag, a way to link the jokey mainstream normalisation of lad and frat-boy culture in the late 1990s to the rape culture epidemic that the film presents as the lethal reality of the current moment. But it also complicates the film’s purpose by drawing attention to its own insouciant, very stylised take on violence and amorality, not least in its problematic finale, which is designed to deliver the kind of cathartic comeuppance of a rape-revenge fantasy, but only works if you avoid drawing too much of a distinction between the figurative and literal meaning of someone’s life being over.
That ending can make it easy to dismiss the film as an empty provocation – as I did when I first saw it the Glasgow Film Festival in 2020 – but there’s also much to admire here, starting with Mulligan’s Cassie, who pretends to get blind drunk in bars as part of a ruse to expose self-proclaimed nice guys for the wolves in sheep’s clothing they really are. Keeping a colour-coded tally of her exploits, her mission is an unnerving one and the shrewd casting of Mulligan – here playing the antithesisofher damsel-in-distress in the equally stylised Drive – adds to the film’s discombobulating effect, especially as a random encounter with an old classmate (played by Bo Burnham) simultaneously offers a rom-com style respite from her own misanthropic downward spiral and gives her a more focused target for the vengeance she seeks for her best friend Nina, whom we only ever see in photographs.
The latter can make Cassie feel like a throwback to the diabolical femme fatales of 1990s classics Basic Instinct and The Last Seduction as she sets in motion ever-more elaborate schemes to force people to confront their complicity in Nina’s demise. But a throwaway reference to another of that decade’s staples, Single White Female, offers more of a clue to Cassie’s own psychological make-up, hinting at mental health problems that predate the trauma she’s attempting to exorcise by appointing herself as Nina’s avenging angel.
Fennell – hitherto best known for playing Camilla Parker Bowles in The Crown and show-running the second season of Killing Eve – doesn’t concern herself too much with plausibility here; the cartoonish colour-schemes designed to reinforce Cassie’s own state of arrested development also reinforce the cartoonish exaggeration of a plot that depends on no one ever calling the cops on Cassie, even her old college dean (Connie Britton), whose teenage daughter she at one point threatens in order to make a point about not giving men the benefit of the doubt. But this candy coloured hell-scape is also a way to symbolically prevent Cassie’s fury from slipping into a he-said/she-said grey zone, which gives the film an effective bluntness, even as it ultimately embraces the same 90s cinematic tropes it thinks its subverting.
Adoption drama True Mothers is the latest from Japanese auteur Naomi Kawase and, like her 2016 film Sweet Bean, it operates in such a gentle manner you can practically feel the camera giving the characters a protective hug. It’s the story of Satoko (Hiromi Nagasaky) whose nice but anxiety riddled life with her husband and their sweet-natured six-year-old son is upended by a young woman claiming to be her son’s real mother. Though flirting with the conventions of a mystery, the film reveals itself to be more of a compassionate study of the complexities of parenthood as the film’s flash-backing narrative repeatedly switches between Satoko’s journey to become a parent and that of Hikari (Aju Makita), a pregnant school girl who gives up her son and drifts into a life where exploitation is rife. It takes much longer to get where its going than the story really justifies, but it’s a warm, engaging film nonetheless.
Following the years-long exploits of independent horror filmmaker Justin Mcconnell to achieve some kind of career breakthrough, Clapboard Jungle doesn’t so much capture lightening in a bottle as document the Sisyphean struggle required to get anywhere in the film business.
Part video diary, part inquiry into the wider industry, the film dispels the myth that there’s any glamour in low-budget filmmaking, in part because the democratisation of filmmaking in the digital age has created a glut of content that makes it harder to get anything seen, good or bad. Mcconnell is realistic about his abilities and prospects here: he’s not some delusional neophyte in the
Part video diary, Clapboard Jungle dispels the myth that there’s any glamour in low-budget filmmaking
American Movie-mould.
But interviews conducted with the likes of Guillermo Del Toro and the late George Romero continue to serve as inspiration and, as he plugs away and broadens his skills, the flickers of success he experiences are accompanied by a dawning realisation that enjoying the journey he’s committed himself to pursuing is perhaps where true career satisfaction lies.
Promising Young Woman is on Sky Cinema and NOW; True Mothers is available on demand from Curzon Home Cinema; Clapboard Jungle is streaming on Arrow