Oscars special: ‘Promising Young Woman’ and female revenge

The nomination of this film is quite a surprise since it is the debut of Emerald Fennell, a very talented director who has just started a career behind the camera since within the audiovisual industry she was known for her role as an Actress in the English series, The Crown. In LatinaAmerican Post, we analyze this film with a very clear message of feminism and we tell you why it has garnered so much praise from the international press and the reasons why it has been considered by the Academy for the Oscar for Best Picture.

Promising Young Woman has a plot that seems very simple but that hides a background of a context on gender violence and machismo imposed both in certain sectors of society and in nightlife settings.

The story centers on the protagonist, Cassie, a thirty-year-old, who has dropped out of medical college to work in a cafeteria and at night dedicate herself to a double life: she attends discos and bars and pretends to be drunk to expose the men who take advantage of women who are in this state of loss of mindfulness. Part of her motivation for blaming and humiliating men is related to a traumatic and reprehensible event from the past. It is a painful memory that is discovered little by little in the film, with a lot of verisimilitudes and cinematographic quality to portray it. Actress Carey Mulligan, in the role of Cassie, makes an impressive demonstration about a character broken in the human, very cold to act, ironic and cynical, with a great representation about detachment towards the masculine gender.

Why has the Academy considered you for a nomination?

Emerald Fennell's film transitions very well between different tones in the narrative, from mystery to humor to drama. It is difficult to classify it within a specific genre, but with the advancement of the plot, the story becomes increasingly gloomy and dark, and gives rise to revenge with what is positioned in the dramatic genre completely and leaves those behind. first sequences in a humorous way. There is a very good recreation of male stereotypes, of that North American middle-class sector of men who were previously young people from crazy fraternities without respect for women as a person, treating them as sexual objects, and who in the present have little matured and reconsidered.

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The director's vision is aligned with female empowerment, but without ever trivializing this female struggle, and neither wanting to start with any particular social or political movement, if not that all the director's dramatic intentions are at the service of the narrative and the potential that the plot hides, the potential that resides in the mystery of that painful fact from the past that has Cassie anguished and hurt, while we empathize with her.

Another great success is the fresh handling of rhythm and editing, accompanied by a pleasant aesthetic and fluid work of digital color, this gives the film a high technical level to consolidate a cinematographic production at the height of the Oscars. The film has the achievement of portraying gender violence and the harmful ability of men to take advantage of women in sensitive situations such as drunkenness. It also shows, like an ace up her sleeve, Cassie's lucidity in turning spontaneously from an innocent exposed to danger to a woman with absolute control of the situation and remarkable power to cruelly humiliate and expose true intentions and clichés. extremes of the most basic masculinity, perverse in the sexual and sadly common.