• Three with Carey Mulligan (or, in what planet is _Promising Young Woman

    From septimus_millenicom@q.com@21:1/5 to All on Sun Dec 5 21:26:43 2021
    I have always loved Carey Mulligan on stage, but it
    was only recently, when I rewatched _An Education_,
    that I was blown away by her cinematic roles too. I
    saw _An Education_ on the big screen with company,
    which must have distracted from the experience,
    especially since I suggested the title and hated to
    disappoint people. Looking back, Mulligan clearly
    deserved her nomination for an Oscar. The auction
    scene alone, where she is shy, exuberant, over-eager,
    and embarrassed all at once, would have made her a
    star. The directing and the technical aspects of
    the film are good too, without being too showy, and
    the supporting actors are wonderful (especially an
    understated Olivia Williams as her favorite teacher).
    But it is Mulligan's film all the way; hers is surely
    one of the most fully realized cinematic teenagers
    of all time. (Mulligan was about 24 at the time.)
    Once upon a time I was head over heels in love with
    French culture and Camus too, like her character.
    Wish I was as brilliant and inspired.

    Full of admiration for Mulligan, I bought not just
    this DVD, which has a commentary track by the leads
    and the director (a rarity these days), but also
    those for _Suffragette_ and _Promising Young Woman_,
    all starring the actress. Danish director Lone
    Scherfig has a rather thick accent; fortunately
    even the commentary track is subtitled. She calls
    Mulligan not sufficiently "camera-ready"! The
    actress concurs that she used to hide from the
    camera. Mulligan is as usual endlessly inventive
    and dryly funny in the commentary; she speaks
    exactly like the Olivia William character does in
    the film. The real-life Lynn Barber on which her
    role is based did not end up writing for the New
    York Times; she went the Penthouse route. Still,
    "she can be anything she wants," as her teacher
    predicts. The camera work is functional without
    being showy, and the period design (London in the
    1960s) is seductive. Scherfig was one of the
    "Dogme" directors and made _Italian for Beginners_;
    good to see she has escaped from that evil cult.

    ---------------------------------------------

    _Suffragette_ received faint praise from critics
    and no major award. It was criticized as too
    serious, too narrow (focused on one fictitious
    working class whit woman), too broad, and even
    for ignoring that African American women were
    deprived of voting rights (isn't that on a
    different continent?). _Promising Young Woman_
    won an Oscar for screenplay, BAFTAs, and a
    mountain of awards. Isn't it focused on a
    fictitious white (American) woman to illustrate
    date rape and sexual assault? Doesn't it
    completely ignore African Americans (the only
    representative is a would-be predator)? And
    that's why we should pay no attention to awards
    and most critics. Someone probably pulled dirty
    tricks to derail the award chances of _Suffragette_,
    like they did for _Zero Dark Thirty_ and countless
    other deserving films. The criticism business is
    so dirty and corrupt.

    _Suffragette_ features a performance by Carey
    Mulligan that rivals the very best I have ever seen.
    She takes a long road from being a mousy wife/mother,
    laundromat forewoman, and spectator (near victim) of
    the British Suffragette's confrontational tactics,
    to a halting, furtive participant, to a prisoner
    who is force-fed and loses her parental right, to
    a full-fledged activist who never quite loses her
    ambivalence. It is a privilege to witness her slow
    evolution, her opening up to the world (including
    reading books from her compatriots with more class
    privilege), and her moments of levity and humanity.
    She even does a proto-Chaplin dance in front of
    her son, whom she can visit only in secret. The
    fundamental conflict between pacifism and descent
    toward violence in all political movements (like the
    recent demonstrations in HK) is nicely illustrated.
    At the end of the film, having witnessed first hand
    the death (suicide?) of her co-conspirator at
    the famous King George racetrack event, she is
    traumatized, yet picks herself up, runs to her
    old employer, plucks the young girl she knows her
    boss is molesting, and saves her (having just lost
    her own child to adoptive parents). It is a stunning,
    heroic, humanistic, profoundly empathetic moment
    in a very great film.

    Director Sarah Gavron and writer Abi Morgan are like
    US National Public Radio talk show hosts on the
    commentary track, speaking softly and without pause
    in their professorial, encyclopedic way. They reveal
    that the policemen who force-fed the woman hunger used
    to laugh at their wards, but the filmmakers elect to
    omit that out of classical restraint. This is in stark
    contrast to _Promising Young Woman_ (or anything by
    Jane Campion). They also mention that Mulligan did
    not wash her hair for weeks to achieve her frazzled
    look during her prison times. Most of the film is
    shot in a furtive, hand-held style, rapidly cutting
    between Mulligan's face and the street scenes she
    takes in. Barney Pilling's editing apparently took
    a year to complete. In fact, apart from the acting,
    the greatest achievement here is the organic assembly
    of the visages, so that everything falls perfectly
    in place like a jigsaw puzzle in motion. This deeply
    beautiful effort probably deserved to be listed among
    the greatest films of the decade. I'll think about
    it next time I see it again.

    --------------------------------------------------

    I think of _Promising Young Woman_ as a non-heroic
    (not anti-heroic) Iliad. Cassie loses her best friend
    (just like Achilles lost Patrocius his "cousin"),
    throws away her responsibilities and sulks at home.
    The ultimate battle is with her friend's rapist, but
    instead of slaying him, she gets killed herself.
    After all, we live in an era of race-to-the-bottom
    glorification of victimhood. The Trojan war, or the
    Suffragette-like struggle to actually make a difference?
    We don't hear a pip.

    No doubt woke Generation Zers who still live with their
    parents, have no career, but seem to have endless means
    to fund hitman or champagne at lunch, identify with
    Cassie, instead of the "serious" Mulligan character in
    _Suffragette_, who actually goes to prison and loses a
    son. Cassie uses herself as bait, puts herself in extreme
    danger, to teach a lesson to would be sexual predators.
    She could have channeled her rage and sorrow into
    activism, work at a woman's shelter, gone to law school
    and argued in front of the Supreme Court. But a film
    like that wouldn't have scored all those awards.

    (I have voted straight-ticket Democrat for 25 years;
    I've increasingly wondered why.)

    Mulligan's endless inventiveness and variation in her
    delivery save _Promising Young Woman_ from itself.
    It is fun to watch her in various outre costumes
    and acting outrageously (without descending to the
    caricature-like, entitled acting-out of Frances
    McDormand, on screen and off). But the candied color
    sets and the Wes Anderson-like static symmetric
    composition gets tiresome real fast.

    Seldom does a director's commentary track detracts
    from a film quite as much as writer-director Emerald
    Fennell's. She sounds like one of those consummate
    industry insiders who write for Indiewire. "Genius"
    and other coded jargon get thrown around endlessly.
    Worse, every scene is explained as giving a specific
    message. This is the worst type of commentary which
    only emphasizes the shallowness of the script! She
    claims that the static, toy-house composition reflects
    the rigidity of Mulligan's character's family. No,
    the rigidity is in the director's head! The rest of
    us just suffer through it.

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