Promising Young Woman (70)
… or rather, Some Promising Young (Wo)men.
In attempting to dissentangle a piece as complex as Promising Young Woman seems to constitute, a focus on genre conventions and modes of production is inevitable, insofar we take Emerald Fennell’s sensibilities for granted.
Deviating from the postmodern media discourse, which now the adjective topical can also characterize it, when looking into the statistics of pieces of cinema by women being produced, we find ourselves confronting the reality of how predestined those conversations can be when only alluring their affinity towards the so-called, award season; it is of course the case that Promising Young Woman, set somewhere in the present, in a regular suburban North American setting, has a lot of buzz (sic) around it, with FOMO-award aficionados going amok.
Leaving Focus Pictures marketing strategies on the side, the film at hand offers an insight into some of the most well-employed generic terms of genre vocabulary, such as revenge, forgiveness, and obviously gender and sexual politics. Carey Mulligan’s Cassie, a woman we are never let to experience outsife of her trauma, makes for an interesting case in reading the piece against the background of the Symbolic, that is paralleling the narrative’s traps to a commentary to complex topics about female identity. Obviously, talking in such terms, as if this film is set out to rewrite Baudelaire, we shall not deviate from the actual craftmanship at play. Fennell, a writer who is an expert at child stories, fires back with an aestheticized boldness that subverts intra- and extra-textual expectations, engaging spectatorship in ways that surpasses identification. Cassie, expertly played by Mulligan, lingers between different genre tropes and narratives, at times even attempting to incline towards a gender-bender narrative of assimilating into a shell of a male-body, in order to make the point come acrosss. Interestingly, the legal machinations of it all (GOAT Alfred Molina and Connie Britton cameos) pinpoint towards an equally interesting film that could actually cause an even more interesting cultural coup, yet Fennell seems to choose to take a road of redemption unlike what you might expect.
What the film leaves for the post-discourse of the actual ending are crumbles about the quantitative measurement of culpability in association to consent and/or sexual provocation (see Bo Burnham’s Ryan, a guy who likes to be a good adult boy, but not the biggest asshole apparently according to who and what price is paid), but also, I think even most importantly here, the question about the effect those actions can have on peoples’ lives who may not be in direct connection to the abuse itself; Fennell seems to accept her character’s suicidal reverberations throughout the text, highlighting the obssessive mental fixation at play as something with an actual cause. This is as fatalistic of a character driven-scenario as the one in George Sluizer's Spoorloos.
