Promising Young Woman

  Here’s a director to watch. Writer/director Emerald Fennell’s feature film debut is a richly detailed exercise in woman’s empowerment. (By the way, she’s excellent as Camilla Parker Bowles in The Crown, though too far from rotweiler to be simply accurate.)

        The title points two ways. Cassie was a promising med student, top of the class, when she dropped out. Implicitly, she is living out a promise to avenge the videotaped gang-rape that drove her friend to suicide. That is, Cassie has shifted her dedication from addressing physical disease to the moral affliction of sexist violence. She’s trying to cure the body social politic. Her name evokes the Greek seer Cassandra whose visions were not believed.  

Aptly, Cassie comes to her climactic date, a pre-wedding stag party in the woods, in the guise of a call-girl’s nurse uniform. She even intends a surgery — carving the lost friend’s name into the rapist groom’s chest. The doctor’s stellar career could justify such revenge. The film ends on her complete attack upon male privilege.

Fennell carefully calibrates her scenes. When Cassie strides away from her first turnaround “date” we think we see blood on her clothes. But that would befit a male avenger. Cassie’s not killing the guys that she plays falldown drunk to trick into trying to take advantage of her. It’s catsup from her breakfast burger.  She only wants to expose them. 

Cassie addresses both genders’ role in our pervasive sexism. The men she tempts into thinking they can exploit her helplessness. “I’m a nice guy!” one bleats, frightened of her surprising strength that has shown him to be worse. 

We don’t know if the experience does chasten and enlighten the men, but here’s a sad clue. Pickup Paul recognizes her as the psychopath other guys have been warning about. Even having been exposed, the victimizers blame the victim.

So too the women, whom Cassie exposes for their more respectable assumptions. The Med School dean has crashed the patriarchal ceiling — by assuming the  males’ bias. As the man is innocent until proven guilty, the complaining woman must be either lying or asking for it. Cassie pierces the dean’s shell by hiding away the dean’s daughter and making the rape threat directly personal. With the superior Madison Cassie sets a similar trap. Having gotten her drunk Cassie pays a handsome man to take her friend to a hotel room where she will awaken wondering if she has been taken advantage of. Cassie gives both women the experience of helplessness they wouldn’t believe in Cassie’s friend. 

Cassie’s romantic encounter with Ryan promises an escape from her self-restrictive mission (however noble). Unconventionally, he drinks the coffee she spat into.Their dance in the pharmacy seems to turn the film into madcap RomCom. Most touching are the scenes where the lovers lie on a bed, clothed, chatting warmly. This idyll is disrupted when Cassie sees Ryan in the videotape of her friend’s rape. This sinks him to the level of smug sexist abuser, like the lawyer, like the macho privilege fully revealed at the stag.    

Cassie’s parents suggest a domestic version of the society’s strained artifice. They sit side  by side at the breakfast table, bracing each other without communicating, apparently arrayed against her. Their living room seems a display of expense without taste, frozen in the ‘50s with its plastic-covered upholstery and pseudo-art. The mother seems more disturbed than Cassie. This may be explained when her father says he too misses the lost friend and is so relieved “to have [Cassie] back,” thanks to the brief effect of Ryan. 

One shot sets Cassie against a wall blank except for what looks like a cake icing pattern on the wall. Like the antithetical drunken party scenes this backdrop suggests the false comfort and civility of our predatory dating scene. The moment typifies director Fennell’s full command of her medium.