Promising Young Woman: “We were kids!”
(Spoilers ahead)
Promising young woman pulled something in me. There is something about Cassie’s grief, her helplessness as she says it once, but no wonder thinks over and over, a thousand times in her head, I am sorry I didn’t go with her. Is she apologising to Nina’s mum or is it an attempt to absolve her of her own guilt?
Fennell’s debut gives us all. The laptop screen flashing lights at Cassie in the night to the weird fusion of bars in neon and cassie’s pastels, its a menagerie of colors and emotions. What she manages to do, which I would have been very skeptical about, is to add an element of pop to a story that is so raw, so painful. There is an element of very acidic, biting humour, of romance, all in such a shrewd and brilliant concoction to deliver the punch that she set out to achieve. While you’ll laugh and swoon sometimes, you can never forget the loss. It is a tragedy, have no doubts.
We never see Nina, but we see her traces and we see the indelible scars that Cassie and we are left with. It’s her part of the heart she sees when she is dressing up and it’s that fulfilment she reaches when she puts it on herself in the end.
I would assume you have seen the trailer. Still, let me oblige. Every week Mulligan dresses up, goes to a club and pretends to be completely shitfaced when a ‘nice’ guy comes over, asks her if he should call her a cab or she needs his help and then proceeds to force himself on her thinking that she is too drunk to say no. Fennell takes apart the whole rape culture so gorgeously, because when suddenly faced with a completely sober woman, all of these men lose their shit. Why? If they thought they weren’t doing anything wrong? Why suddenly they feel a need to make proclamations of their ‘niceness’?
(“Any man who has to say “I am a nice guy”, is not nice at all.” Tywin Lannister, 299 AC.)
Somehow for me, the soundtrack of the film accompanies it extremely well, the pix of pop and old school hits with Donna Missa’s rendition of ‘Nothing’s gonna hurt you baby’ going in my playlist for sure.
In one of the interviews Fennell said she almost had an ending where the film ended with Al and Joe burning Cassie’s body, which would have been more realistic according to her but the investors won’t have it. There was an alternate, happy, but just too wishful of an ending where she gets it all, but Fennell as all other females in the audience knew, thats all it was, wishful.
It’s almost painful to know thats what the reality is. That there was no way Cassie was going to enter that house full of twenty drunk, absolutely fucktards of men and come out unscathed.
She knew the chance she was taking, knew it well enough. You only make a contingency plan if you know how screwed up it would be.
Fennell spoke to her father-in-law, to know the time that it would take to smother somebody and presents to us all of it. All hundred and fifty seconds of Cassie’s writhing, I had to squeeze my eyes shut, but there is no escaping it. Like there is no escaping the terror, and the absolute lengths that people would go to for self preservation. I love her stance on violence in films, in an interview ith variey she says, “ We timed it out. He said about two-and-a-half minutes. It’s completely unrelenting. But I really believe strongly that if you’re going to show violence, you need to… I think actually the worst thing you can do is treat it glibly. So it is shocking, but it’s not supposed to be nice.”
You almost hate her, hate the film, for succumbing to a flimsy fur hand-cuff, but that’s what it is. She showcases perfectly the toxic bro-code, of Jake comforting Al saying it wasn’t his fault, when at this point, even he is like, I think it is. She’s fucking dead.
Fennell doesn’t say the word ‘rape’ or show us Nina, yet we end the movie with these two things branded in your mind. And in the end, you are as exasperated and angry as her when we hear, ‘we were kids’ and the million fucking excuses that we listen to in the movie and otherwise.
The film is roller coaster of emotions, with Cassie’s dad whispering one night at dinner, ‘ God, we have missed you’, you are weighed down by how grave the consequences always are, on the person who is gone and on the person grieving.
We have had too many of crusades of men avenging their lovers, where it becomes almost like a fight for honour. This, in turn, is one of the most beautiful tales of friendship and female fragility. The love and loss at the hands of patriarchy. Mulligan breathes this fragility with so much honesty, its unreal. Her stoicism in her revenge and her life barely hanging by strings, you know at the end that she is barely there. That she knows she has stretched herself too taut. This one’s to Fennell and Mulligan and the whole team. Thanks for making the film we needed.
Also, sorry, I just cannot stop writing about this film, when this shitface says, ‘It’s every guy’s worst nightmare getting accused like that,” and Mulligan’s absolutely sick-of-everyone-but-still-barely-keeling-it-together face, “Can you guess what every woman’s worst nightmare is?”
Seriously, can you?