Promising Young Woman

Many parts of writer/director Emerald Fennell's Promising Young Woman are howlingly funny but then they collide into moments of wrenching sobriety and pain, not unlike the brutally cockeyed psychodrama/love story Killing Eve, for which Fennell wrote.

In Promising Young Woman, Carrie Mulligan plays Cassie, a former medical school standout whose life was derailed by a sexual assault -- not hers, but that of a friend and classmate who never recovered. Cassie works at a coffee shop run by a supportive friend (Laverne Cox) and spends her evenings hunting down and entrapping men by pretending to be falling down drunk in bars. When they make their move she unleashes her ferocious malice on them.

A chance meeting with an amiable pediatrician (a charming Bo Burnham) gives the audience reason for hope for this woman who is being consumed by spite and regret right before our eyes. In this way, the film echoes the message in Michaela Coel's brilliant BBC series I May Destroy You.

Mulligan is wonderful as Cassie, an avenging angel whose cause is just but who is so prickly and barbed that the caring world can't get close to her.

Carousel

Seeking some solace from the rancor of contested counts and a constipated candidate who can't seem to get off the can, I settled in the other night to reacquaint myself with Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel, the New York Philharmonic's 2013 staged concert production. 

It had been years (decades?) since I'd spent time with romantic wallflower Julie Jordan (Kelli O'Hara) and her rough carousel barker beau Billy Bigelow (Nathan Gunn) [yes, the names, cutesy] and the lusty, musty denizens of a New England fishing village. Julie is poor and in love with burly Billy, who makes woo, loses his job, shacks up with Julie, who he knocks up and then knocks about, falls in with a bad-sort schemer, gets caught during a robbery, and kills himself to avoid prison. He's given a chance by angelic gatekeepers to complete unfinished business  before being admitted to heaven, which he does and everybody sings "You'll Never Walk Alone," tears flow and the audience cheers. 

Yes, it's pretty dark, and, I think, problematic for a modern audience. We see Billy is a charming baritone brute and could shake Julie (poor choice of words) for sticking with him, even after she tells best buddy Carrie Pipperidge (Jessie Mueller) that he hit her. But Julie, being a soprano, goes high and endures, births a daughter, Louise, and keeps the home fires burning for Billy, because this is a lusty bunch. (I don't think it's really the seafood all these folks are crowing about during Act II's opening number.)

Near the end of the show, Billy visits young Louise to urge her to walk the right path and respect herself and while doing so whacks her one and disappears. (Old habits, etc.) Louise asks her mother if it's possible to be hit "hard" and it not hurt. Julie says, “It is possible, dear, for someone to hit you — hit you hard — and not hurt at all.” 

Now, if one were inclined to be forgiving, one might argue that Julie is speaking metaphorically.  "Hit," as in "ton of bricks," not "hit," as in "balled up fist." But, in doing so, what are we telling young women about love, guarding their own safety, the dangers of co-dependency? Sure, setting the production squarely in the time of its composition (mid-40s) might help and saying Billy does indeed pay for his sins might take some of the sting out of the message but, somehow, it doesn't feel like quite enough. As wonderful as the music is -- and it's truly heavenly -- I worry the show is asking women to suffer long and silently for the sake of love. 

Sophia Loren is 86 years old, and in her latest film, Netflix's The Life Ahead, she shares the screen with 12-year-old Ibrahima Gueye in a story that affirmed for this viewer our capacity for goodness and grace, despite our superficial differences and individual traumas. What a welcome message!

Loren plays Madame Rosa, an aged prostitute and Auschwitz survivor living in a city on the coast of Italy, where she cares for the abandoned children of local hookers. Gueye, in his first feature film, plays Momo, the drug-dealing son of a murdered Senegalese streetwalker who ends up in Rosa's care after a kindly neighborhood physician (Renato Carpentieri) asks her to tend to the angry and defiant boy for a short time. His hope is she will be able to salvage what cruelty and abandonment have left.

While the arc of the story is familiar, director Edoardo Ponti (Loren's son) takes a fresh turn at guiding his endearing collection of characters to the film's inevitable conclusion. Most important are a transwoman hooker (Abril Zamora), who is the surrogate mother to another abandoned child, and a generous Muslim shopkeeper (Babak Karimi), who, at Rosa's request, helps Momo mend his faith in God and people.

The film, which is in Italian, is enormously affecting, the scenes between a still radiant Loren and Gueye, who possesses untouched youthful beauty, are moving and memorable.

Small Axes / Mangrove

Director Steve McQueen is deliberate and patient. He slowly unfolds his stories and enwinds the viewer in the fates of his characters. We are invited to read the lines that aren't written -- those in the brows of the characters: anger, resolution, defiance, indignation, resignation, hope.

In the first film of his Amazon/BBC anthology Small Axes, titled Mangrove, McQueen tells the story of nine Black Britishers who were tried in 1968 for rioting after a demonstration in the Notting Hill / West Indian community against police intimidation and brutality turned violent. This is a challenging film; the depiction of the residents' distress and the raw racism of the police and the courts are tough going but it's also an important film and the performances are riveting.

Particularly noteworthy is the work of Letitia Wright (Black Panther) as Altheia Jones-LeCointe, a Black Panther Movement organizer, and Malachi Kirby (Roots), as Darcus Howe, a resistance leader. McQueen and co-writer Alastair Siddons have crafted powerful, bracing scenes for both characters that not only propel the narrative forward but also reveal McQueen's intention for making the film -- to hold England accountable.

Happiest Season

 

Writer/Director Clea DuVall's holiday rom-com Happiest Season (Hulu) is delivered beautifully wrapped in chintz and tinsel but the usual epigrams about the magic of Christmas and love and family have been replaced with sermonettes about good and bad choices -- and I'm down with the change.

DuVall has not completely scrubbed romance out of the rom-com; she's written a pretty hot pairing with Kristen Stewart's Abby and Aubrey Plaza's Riley, chemistry that is more intense than that between Stewart's Abby and her lover Harper (Mackenzie Davis). I think that's deliberate. It seems DuVall has more on her mind than heat.

Harper, who hides her sexuality from her family, brings "roommate" Abby home with her from Pittsburgh for the holidays. She has asked Abby, who is openly lesbian, to keep their secret until she can tell her parents about them after the holidays. Dad is running for mayor, Mom is a control freak, older sister is a disapproving bitch, younger sister is a flake, and on and on. Harper has chosen the path around all of this stress and gets Abby to agree to play along, which she does, reluctantly, and almost immediately regrets it.

What gives the film its freshness and weight is DuVall's commitment to this idea of choices. Our lives are a succession of them. Some get buried, some we outrun and some catch up with us. We choose to pursue. We choose to conceal. We choose to compete. We choose to deceive. And it seems DuVall is saying we choose to love. Which brings us back to Abby and Riley, the "couple" many in the audience might wish would be because Riley is lovely, grounded, out and proud. But Abby has made her choice, and it is not for this woman who seems to get her. She's chosen someone who will take more time. That's new and is as far from the squishiness of "You had me at hello" as one can get.

In the end, after all of the shouting and tussling and accusations and denials and tears we see a frightened family that has chosen to live in fear of one another for forever and they promise to stop. Now that's one hell of a Christmas message.