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Tuesday, December 29th, 2020

Promising Young Woman

 

There is no actual connection between  Emerald Fennell last acting role to a her writing/directing debut but it’s worth mentioning.  After playing Prince Charles long suffering mistress Camilla Parker-Bowles in The Crown,, Fennell is now responsible for creating Promising Young Woman an excellent revenge thriller that is determined to exact punishment on nearly all men..  We wonder how that would screen  at Highgrove?

Whatever the real reasons are for Fennell creating this powerful new film right now are, there is  no doubt it was intended as a star vehicle of Carey Mulligan who gives a career best performance. 

Mulligan plays Cassie Thomas, a 29-year-old-turning-30 medical school drop out who works in a coffee shop with her friend Gail (Laverne Cox) by day.  At night, Cassie goes out to local clubs and pretends to be so drunk she can’t walk. When, inevitably, a nice guy offers to see her home safely, only to take her back to their place and try to have sex with her despite her outward inebriated state, she drops the act.

These men are not particular connected with her problematic past, but Cassie  thinks that all men who try to take advantage of any vulnerable women need to be taught a lesson.

Fennell takes her time revealing Cassie’s real reasons for her double life and why she dropped out of med school.  Nothing is easy to predict in this tale and even when old classmate Ryan (Bo Burnham) comes into the coffee shop one day and asks Cassie out, we are so unsure why she says yes.

It turns out that she thinks he can play a part in her getting revenge on the people who derailed her life, and ended that of her very best friend.

Cassie, who has put her own life on hold, is ruthless in her search for tracking down all her ex-college mates who were responsible for the trauma she cannot forget.  It is inevitable that it can only  end in fatalities, but not necessary the ones we predict.
Mulligan is riveting as Cassie and her calmness and self-determination make her plan seem both logical and morally correct.  She doesn’t seek  sympathy or compassion but just the right to be take revenge as she sees fit.  Her Cassie is not a ‘Me Too” flag waver but a quiet self-assured feminist who just wants to handle her own battle to be able to then get her own life back on track.

 

Fennell, who was also the writer of the Golden Globe Winning TV Series “Killing Eve” directs with great skill, and with Mulligan has created  a somewhat extraordinary movie that we’ll be thinking about for a long time still


Posted by queerguru  at  12:57


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