The quiet end of ‘promising young woman’

Warning: major destroyers ahead.

Is Cassie Thomas, the femme fatale with floral print, played by Carey Mulligan in Promising young woman, Want to die? The first time I saw the movie, a full year ago now at Sundance, I did not think so. When I looked at it again recently, I found myself less confident. It seems Cassie certainly does not expect harm from the predatory softboys she trolls in pubs for, at least not beyond what she is willing to allow. She can turn her body into a target, and play on it to be insensitive to see who benefits, but she is always in control in the scenes in which she lingers. faux– previously while an Adam Brody or a Christopher Mintz-Plasse tried to maneuver her out of her clothes. A sudden sobriety stops every assault in its tracks, a gloomy appearance that the film allows because the focus is on a specific kind of rapist: the self-described nice man who never force, but who has no problem having sex with someone who is wasted keeping her eyes open, and giving even less permission. Promising young woman teasing his protagonist as a vengeful killer on his way home from the first of these encounters, as the camera slides past a red drop across her leg as she walks barefoot at dawn – only to expose the liquid that ketchup is from a late night snack. The punishment Cassie prefers is to force men who seek her out to see themselves, even if only for a moment.

But then there’s the scene where Cassie takes a bandit to the car of a guy yelling at her for stopping at an intersection for too long, and there’s no calculation to her actions, no big plan – she’s just a woman who dares a bigger, stronger stranger to answer her explosive anger with his own. And there’s the end, that spectacular awkward end, in which Cassie is on her way to an appointment with fate during the release of Al Monroe (Chris Lowell), the classmate who once raped her black addict best friend Nina in front of a screaming heard, and after that she had a glorious career while Nina fell out and killed her. It’s in that cabin, the other participants pass downstairs, where Cassie finds what she’s been looking for all along: a man who inflicts on her the kind of damage that amounts to consequences he cannot escape. Though may not be willing to admit what he did to Nina, he is willing to suffocate Cassie in a panic to prevent the information from coming to light. Cassie screams and kicks her legs in white panties through the painful long series and fights like someone who wants to live. Yet she was fully prepared to die, scheduling text messages and leaving evidence in case of her disappearance. And when she parks outside the party, ready to bluff her inside by posing as a stripper, she takes the plates off her car and throws them into the woods with a terrible finality, the gesture of someone calling her way out will only find out if it comes up.

There are still a million urgent COVID things in this universe, but the one I’ve been thinking about lately is the one in which Promising young woman was opened in theaters less than two months earlier in April as originally planned I may destroy you had its premiere on HBO. Emerald Fennell’s film is stage and dark, but Michaela Coel’s series is personal and chaotically empathetic, but they are both post-Me Too works that try to get the same idea of ​​how to take into account the reality of rape culture. It’s about women whose lives are interrupted by incidents of sexual violence, a second-hand nightmare in Cassie’s case, and directly for Coel’s character Arabella, who is intoxicated and assaulted at a bar, an experience that is frustratingly out of her attention. remains in her memory. But it is more urgent about what happens next, and about righteous anger than powerful but ultimately debilitating to live with – something that can crush a person as effectively as trauma can. As Promising young woman and I may destroy you if they had come out in close proximity, as originally planned, they would have looked like they were in a serious conversation.

They could also have seemed like they were engaged in a debate, with the brilliantly discursive finale of Coel’s series serving as a gentle rendition of Fennell’s film, giving its heroine an act of self-destruction for justice. to find for her deceased friend. . Both of these works are about the struggle to find a way forward – emotionally, but also narratively, because what is a satisfying conclusion from an experience that is both mundane and world-destroying, to a horror we have been told is extraordinary and accepted to, suddenly everyone changed their mind? Nina is the one who initially dies in Promising young woman, but Cassie’s life ends early in his own way; she exists in a kind of girl silence, lapses into her coffee shop work, forgets her own thirtieth birthday, lives in her bedroom in her childhood while her parents float in loving concern. What she apparently wants is to turn back time and save her friend, or, subject to that, that everyone admit that they are complicit and guilty of her death, and apologize. And yet, when she encounters someone who is willing and willing to do so – a depressed advocate, played by Alfred Molina, who used to specialize in defending young men accused of rape – she is lost, moved and muffled , but also drained from direction.

Anger can be a sanctuary, and it can also be a dead end. In I may destroy you, Arabella publicly declares the publisher of the publishing house who pulled off a condom during her sex without her permission, and has a brief flirtation with the fact that he is an angry voice on the internet, telling the truth with power and follows the addictive nature of the affirmations and agreements. She looks lost as she staggers through the streets in a demonic Halloween outfit and shouts out her behavior in real life and patriarchy on social media. It’s a diminished version of the feeling Cassie chases in her own costume set in her weekly ritual, picking the same scab over and over again and opening an old wound again to be reminded that she’s right in her resentment. And yet, when I may destroy you revenge is the first of the scenarios Coel considers and then throws away while her character, and her series, seek an end. Arabella looks at her attacker, David (Lewis Reeves), at night at the bar where she was assaulted, and finally remembers what happened that night. She makes him buy her a drink, and makes him believe he drugged her, and lets him drag her to the bathroom – at that point she pulls a Cassie and reveals that she is fully aware of what he is trying to do .

Arabella and her friends go further, stab the man with a syringe of his own drugs, and follow him staggering down the street and try to sexually humiliate him and then beat and strangle him, in an echo of Promising young woman‘s last act of violence. Then everything stops, because Arabella, who has been writing on screen all along, understands that there is no closure that way – if that’s even what she’s looking for. Time turns back, and in the next turn, Arabella takes enough cocaine to counter the roof and confronts David alone in the bathroom, leading to sobs apologizing and talking about his own dark past and about damaged people doing harm . It’s reminiscent of the scene with Molina in Promising young woman, the two of them come to an impossible and undeserved point of understanding. It’s another dead end, this humanization of her rapist, and so Arabella takes the story one last time, and rewrites her encounter with David into one in which she has the agency to approach him, to penetrate him, to to take pleasure in him and decide when he can go. She transforms him into a character who goes through her narrative, as opposed to someone who derails it, after deciding that she is the one who will have to move past her trauma, or stick to it forever.

To hold on is what Cassie does, after researching the other options that Arabella does, and also finding that it is lacking. There’s a moment in Promising young woman when Cassie, despite her many defenses, fell in love with another former classmate named Ryan (Bo Burnham), Cassie seems to be moving on. She begins to think about the future and takes steps to become the person she was before sadness and guilt broke her. But like a muted pastel Orpheus, she can not resist looking back, and when she visits the old pain one last time by watching a cell phone video of Nina’s rape, it does what she see, a chance to have a normal life. . Promising young woman prefers not to complicate the end of it by letting Ryan admit that he had Nina’s death on the sidelines – like all the other ‘nice guys’ in Cassie’s life, he immediately falls into a defensive squat and confirms everything she does. believe around the world. However, I wish it did – I wish it made the heroines’ final decisions feel a little less straightforward, and a little less supported by the world that creates them. I may destroy you embraces a radical, revolutionary empathy in its finale that may be more aspiring than repeatable to most of us, but it provides a way to imagine life after trauma, and to release anger as an act of self-care , rather than weakness or forgiveness.

What Promising young woman opting for it is something grimmer, with Cassie crowing from outside her unmarked grave as the consequences eventually summon the men who destroy others and move on thereafter. She can come out on top in the infectious, awkward ending, and broadcast her triumph with a posthumous smiley emoji. But justice is cold comfort when you are dead.