電影《花漾女子》影評：[Film Review] Promising Young Woman (2020)

Title: Promising Young Woman

Year: 2020

Country: UK, USA

Language: English

Genre: Crime, Drama, Thriller

Director/Screenwriter: Emerald Fennell

Music: Anthony Willis

Cinematography: Benjamin Kracun

Editing: Frédéric Thoraval

Cast:

Carey Mulligan

Bo Burnham

Alison Brie

Laverne Cox

Clancy Brown

Jennifer Coolidge

Chris Lowell

Connie Britton

Alfred Molina

Molly Shannon

Christopher Mintz-Plasse

Adam Brody

Max Greenfield

Francisca Estevez

Sam Richardson

Rating: 8.0/10

Subverting a cornball avenging angel fantasy, actress (THE CROWN’s Camilla Shand), writer (of KILL EVE fame), now film director Emerald Fennell’s debut feature PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN is a candy-striped confection that inveighs against the pandemic 「rape culture」 and the prevalent, noxious sexist double standards.

Mulligan plays Cassie, a 30-year-old woman still lives with her parents, who habitually feigns drunk in various night venues and waits to be picked up by lascivious males, so that she can teach them a lesson. But exactly what does she do to them? It is left in audience’s imagination, is she a bloodthirsty predator with an aim to kill? If that is your first impression, there are many curveballs are in stores for you!

Retribution is the operative word, but Cassie is not a rape victim, her deceased best friend Nina is, and poor Cassie is so invested in her righteous side hustle after Nina’s tragedy, she can barely operate her own life, not until she meets old college mate Ryan (Burnham), the perfect specimen of an upstanding, eligible white guy, now a pediatrician, who takes a shine to her. For the first time, Cassie dips her toes into a relationship, but also, from Ryan, she gets wind of the news that Al Monroe (Lowell), Nina’s rapist who got scot-free due to institutionalized sexism, so a daring revenge-is-best-served-cold plot is hatched and executed, posing as a stripper to blow in Monroe’s stag do, Cassie can finally give him a taste of his own medicine, but there is also a fallback position if things do not pan out as she has planned, poetic justice will prevail at any dear cost.

Fennell’s execution puts her female identity at the forefront, not a masculine film masqueraded by a female director holding the rein, like Kathryn Bigelow’s THE HURT LOCK (2008), PYW basks in many tropes from female-fronted genres, a combo of sororal slasher, silly romance (dancing to tunes of Paris Hilton’s STARS ARE BLIND in a drug store, noughties pop gems is Fennell’s blatant manifesto of girl power!) and oddball comedy (Cassie’s birthday gift from her parents is a modish suitcase), with the appurtenances of Fennell’s fabulous choices of decor and palette, it is a girlish-looking movie, but its thematics are grave, urgent, important and PYW makes a cogent case of it.

Just when we smack our lips for the forthcoming gratification of Cassie’s revenge plan, a gut punch blind-sides us and leaves us petrified, we cannot credit what we are watching, PYW goes to extremes to fulfill Cassie’s pyrrhic victory, against what? There is no monstrous psychopaths here, but the banality of evil perpetrated by ordinary members of our species, it never occurs to some of them their offenses are such a big deal (Connie Britton makes an effective volte-face as Dean Walker, the bad seed of bureaucratic connivance), that kind of apathy and bigotry is the most refractory impediment to human race’s betterment, and what Cassie persists doing is so brave but puny in this regard, she puts her life on the line only to enlighten those libido-driven men, one male a time, one sacrosanct code of conduct: it is not okay to take advantage of girls when they are vulnerable.

Surprisingly, 「vulnerability」 might be the last thing we can expect from a fearless heroine like Cassie, but courtesy to Mulligan’s preternatural versatility, Cassie is nothing like those broad-stroke feminist man-haters. She is so expectant that Ryan is not that kind of guy (but Fennell is so determined that no man is wearing a white hat here); she flinches when a big guy moves near her (a reunion with an uncredited Alfred Molina, who plays a guilt-driven lawyer to a T); when Madison (Brie, oozes an enjoyably self-conscious air of fickleness and tizzies), her former friend who chose not to believe Nina and slut-sham her, visits her unexpectedly, Cassie is bewilderingly kind to her, even apologetic, betrays that when caught off guard, she is just a normal gal tries to appease an awkward situation like you and me.

Praise be Mulligan’s takes-no-prisoners commitment in chiseling out a multi-layered heroine finally puts her back in the running for an Oscar over a decade after Lone Scherfig’s AN EDUCATION (2009), as for the triple threat Fennell, she might be just the kind of feminist filmmaker we need now, explicitly subversive, outrageously entertaining, uncompromisingly elevates a 「chick flick」 to become a force to be reckoned with by the most prestigious film awards entity.

referential entries: David Slade’s HARD CANDY (2005, 6.3/10); Lone Scherfig’s AN EDUCATION (2009, 7.9/10).