As awards season ratchets up, Carey Mulligan’s performance in Promising Young Woman is the one to beat for over-the-top best actress accolades. She plays a sharp-witted young woman who has had enough! The National Board of Review named Mulligan Best Actress, and screenwriter/ director Emerald Fennell is slated for the Independent Spirit Award’s Best Director. Capturing the Zeitgeist, Promising Young Woman promises recognition for this film, lingering way past its final moments: even as it becomes most outlandish, it rings most true.
The specter of Brett Kavanagh’s unmanly past at a frat party hangs over Emerald Fennell’s feature debut, Promising Young Woman, as do the million microaggressions endured by girls/women finding their place in the world. Carey Mulligan portrays Cassie, a medical school dropout, aprowl in bars at night, picking up men who see her, drunk, out of it equating with easy prey, easy lay. Legs astride, makeup dripping, her look signals anything but control, but she’s got a trick waiting. As they undress her, she bolts up, confronts their predations and takes off, a quiet act of revolt.
And that’s just the first scene. At times Promising Young Woman seems dark rom com, as Cassie dates Ryan
(Bo Burnham), a guy from the past her parents, the wonderful
Jennifer Coolidge and
Clancy Brown are relieved to see, even though she’s still spending a night or two settling scores with various men, and even women, such as a former classmate (
Alison Brie) who witnessed the gang rape of Cassie’s best friend, the catalyst for Cassie’s madness. Everyone, including a female dean, wants Cassie to get over her obsession, give in to the tired bromide, “Boys will be boys.”
At a post screening panel, Mulligan said she herself wished that things could lighten up for Cassie, that she’d end up avenged, and better off for her efforts. But, a realist, Mulligan knows: things have to go extreme for voices to matter. The film’s final scene suggests a start: Time for all the Kavanaghs of the world to man up, and apologize. And award recognition suggests, attention will be paid.
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