Promising Young Woman is a film by a woman that ostensibly empowers its victimized female lead through acts of vengeance, and that’s probably why the British actor Emerald Fennell won a 2021 Oscar for writing the movie’s cheeky original screenplay. Fennell also made her directorial debut with the film, and her second feature as a writer-director, Saltburn, recently played at local theaters. This latter effort showcases the talents of Barry Keoghan (so mesmerizing in The Banshees of Inisherin) in the role of Oliver Quick, a nerdy pariah who is starting at Oxford. Like Fennell’s previous heroine, Oliver is bent on doing some very nasty stuff, though not necessarily to avenge himself.
Saltburn is essentially aristo porn. Its raison d’etre is to glory in the eccentric fabulousness — albeit neurotic and decadent — of the family life of one of Oliver’s upper-crust classmates, Felix Catton, played with effortless allure by model-handsome Jacob Elordi. To assuage the guilt of this guilty pleasure, the movie follows underprivileged Oliver’s embrace of — and triumph over — Felix and his family, who are remarkably powerless against him. Oliver does this through a kind of sado-masochistic domination of Felix and Felix’s sister and gay mixed-race cousin, and if there’s any question about Oliver’s own queerness, the scene in which he laps up soapy bathwater after Felix has masturbated and soaked in it should provide the answer.
Oliver is a fabulist, constantly redefining himself and scheming, in the mysterious vein of Keyser Söze: indeed, at a Hollywood meeting, Saltburn might be pitched as The Usual Suspects meets The Ruling Class. The only problem is that it lacks the biting satire of The Ruling Class, which has a sweetly deranged Peter O’Toole eliminating relatives who stand between him and an inheritance, or the brilliant suspense of The Usual Suspects, in which crime kingpin Keyser Söze inflicts mythic terror.
The movie takes place mostly at Felix’s manorial estate, which should satisfy anyone’s Brideshead Revisited or Downton Abbey fetishes, though in Saltburn the production is contemporary and fashion-forward. Keoghan makes the most of his protean character, but the movie is only superficially outrageous and mostly irrelevant. What if Divine had starred and John Waters had directed?
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster is another movie about existential dread and the truth or falsity of people’s stories that recently played in local theaters. But unlike Fennell, Kore-eda, who directed The Shoplifters (2018) and Like Father, Like Son (2013), is a master. Monster, an award-winner at Cannes, follows the travails of 10-year-old Minato (Soya Kurokawa), a Japanese schoolboy and son of a widowed mom who suddenly starts acting troubled, presumably because of an abusive teacher. But presumptions are continually overturned in the film, which tells and retells Minato’s story from multiple points of view: first his mom’s, then the accused teacher’s, the school principal’s, and, finally, Minato’s.
What Minato’s story reveals is that the teacher may have nothing to do with his sudden agitation, even though that’s what Minato had told his mom in the beginning of the film. Instead, what is key to his state of mind is his relationship with another schoolboy, Yori (Hinata Hiiragi), who is unflappable despite being bullied in class and physically abused by his father at home. The two boys’ relationship, though prepubescent, is intense.
Also figuring into the characters’ feelings of powerlessness and torment is a narrative frame of disasters: in the beginning of the film, sirens proclaim a major fire in a high-rise building where a bordello of sorts is housed; at the end, a monsoon leads to flooding and mudslides. These events eventually tie the various points of view together in a strongly suggestive but not conclusive way.
Monster is certainly not the first film to use multiple points of view — Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon is a signature example, offering various versions of a rape and murder by those involved. But in Rashomon, each story is a discrete chapter of the movie, and they don’t all jibe, leaving the question of guilt up to viewers and whom they believe. In Monster, each new point of view arrives with a chronological jump backward, yet it’s woven together seamlessly without a break, as if it were part of a quilted whole. The movie presents the separate points of view as equally valid, though they reveal different things. They’re all part of one never fully comprehensible reality.
The effect is fascinating and exhilarating. Kore-eda, who usually directs his own screenplays, here worked with a veteran Japanese TV writer, Yuji Sakamoto, and it was Sakamoto’s astounding script that won the prize at Cannes. The movie also has a haunting and lyrical score by Ryuichi Sakamoto (no relation), an Oscar winner for The Last Emperor and his last effort before dying in March 2023. Whatever happens during awards season or on critics’ best-of-the-year lists, Monster ought to rank prominently on them all.
Todd Haynes’s May December is already in contention on that front. Now showing free to subscribers on Netflix, it’s yet another movie about who gets to tell the story of a scandalous incident, in this case, an affair between a married woman in her mid 30s and a 13-year-old boy who is a classmate of her son. Samy Burch’s screenplay is fiction, but it’s loosely based on an actual cause célèbre in 1996 in which a Seattle teacher had an affair with one of her sixth-grade students and, after serving time in jail, married him.
In May December, we enter the story in the present, more than 20 years after the scandal. The older woman, Gracie (Julianne Moore), is now in her 50s, and her young lover, Joe (Charles Melton), now her husband, is the same age she was when she met him. They live near Savannah, Ga. with their twin children who are about to graduate from high school. (An older daughter is already in college, and Gracie’s kids from a previous marriage are adults.) The stench of the scandal remains, sometimes only subliminally, but Gracie lives an insistently normal life of friendly small-town relations despite occasional crying bouts.
Then Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), a TV star researching an independent movie role, shows up in Savannah. The movie-within-the-movie on which Elizabeth is about to start production is the story of Gracie meeting Joe as a 13-year-old, and Elizabeth hopes to spend time with them to help her shape her performance. Gracie gives her full access, despite the misgivings of those around her. Elizabeth, trying to sort out the tabloid hysterics from the emotional reality of those involved, gets to meet and observe everybody — and sometimes more than that. She becomes the arbiter for the movie-within-the-movie’s truth, but what May December presents is its own infinitely complex portrait.
Haynes is an avant-garde chameleon as a filmmaker (Safe, Velvet Goldmine, I’m Not There), but he’s also a fan of postwar Hollywood melodramas, especially those directed by Douglas Sirk, exemplified in his period pieces Far From Heaven, the HBO miniseries remake of Mildred Pierce, and his adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Carol. He engages his full toolbox for May December, and the effect is electrifying.
All the performers are restrained yet searing, with everyone duplicitous except poor Joe, and it’s Melton who has been garnering most of the award attention. Haynes’s eye, seemingly aloof, gets its message across in every shot. The movie is a must-see, if only for Haynes’s ingenious use of Michel Legrand’s score from the 1971 Joseph Losey–Harold Pinter film The Go-Between, the terrifying tale of a child marred for life by his involvement in an extramarital affair in Victorian England.
