Two films about sexual assault in academia have emerged in recent months. One was a small masterpiece. The other was a clattering disgrace.
The one you are more likely to have heard of, thanks to old-fashioned star power, is Luca Guadagnino’s head-wrecking After the Hunt. Asked if it was a #MeToo movie, the Italian director told Variety that “it’s a bit of a lazy way to describe it”. Yeah, okay, mate.
The film stars Ayo Edebiri as a black, gay grad student at Yale who reports a sexual assault by Andrew Garfield’s bluff lecturer. Immediately cancelled, he complains that “the common enemy has been chosen, and it’s the straight, white, cis male”.
An Italian journalist got in trouble for asking Garfield and his costar Julia Roberts – but not Edebiri, who was also in the room at the press event – what had been “lost during the politically correct era” and where we go now “the #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matters are done”.
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I can’t imagine why anyone would think this whiney, confused rant of a film had anything to do with the fightback against sexual abuse that followed the Harvey Weinstein revelations in 2017. “The #MeToo scenario the movie … constructs and then dismantles is an orgy (if you’ll pardon the term) of glib button-pushing,” the veteran critic Glenn Kenny wrote for RogerEbert.com. The whole thing is an extended troll for those who live to find “woke” alterations in everything from movies to marmalade.
Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby, winner of the Waldo Salt screenwriting prize at Sundance, could hardly be more different in its approach. “Making a film about something difficult is a way of reckoning with it,” the director, herself a survivor of sexual assault, told this newspaper in August.
Victor chose to process her own abuse through the medium of oblique comedy. Sorry, Baby follows a university lecturer as she seeks to get on with life after assault by a senior professor. No obvious paths are taken. The protagonist, played by Victor, mounts no legal campaign, wreaks no wild revenge. Like so many, she seeks solace in the company of friends and lovers.
The film acknowledges the unsatisfactory nature of such an accommodation but recognises that every survivor takes their own path. It is both much funnier than After the Hunt and much, much more serious.
So there are ways of addressing these issues on screen. The artistic success of Sorry, Baby only points up how scrappily Hollywood dealt with a crisis that emerged in its own backyard, however. There were literal-minded attempts to address true stories in Maria Schrader’s worthy She Said, following the journalists who got to the bottom of the Weinstein case, and in Jay Roach’s ham-fisted Bombshell, about abuses at Fox News. Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, in which Carey Mulligan takes delayed revenge, could not be faulted for its righteous anger, even as it made a stranger of subtlety.
What seemed to be missing was a less explicit shift in the weather. Many of the best films “about” Watergate were conspiracy thrillers (often conceived before the events emerged) that did not deal directly with that political scandal: films such as The Conversation and The Parallax View.
You saw hints of that post-#MeToo in a film such as Sarah Polley’s Women Talking. The members of a Mennonite community gather in a barn to discuss systematic abuse by their men folk. One can hardly imagine a more powerful analogy.
There were not nearly enough such studio projects. We saw fine independent films such as Kitty Green’s The Assistant, starring Julia Garner as a harassed assistant in the movie industry, and Leigh Whannell’s horror The Invisible Man, a hugely imaginative engagement with gaslighting, but there was little such movement at the top of the industry. Too risky. Too unpalatable. Too distasteful.
Maybe we can blame the public for this. Many reviews suggested the film After the Hunt really wanted to be was Todd Field’s Tár. That hugely impressive drama, starring Cate Blanchett as an abusive conductor, really did walk a perilous tightrope as it guided its antihero towards blacky hilarious humiliation. There was something there for the “anti-woke” crowd. There was plenty there for those properly concerned about power imbalance in the workplace.
It got six Oscar nominations. Blanchett won best actress at Venice. Critics raved. And audiences stayed away in their droves. Tár was the 95th-highest grossing film of 2022 at the US box office – right behind She Said, at 94.
Hollywood is nervous about politics. It is always more nervous still about money. Good luck effecting real change with the streaming services breathing greedily down the studios’ necks.
Oh well. You can rent Sorry, Baby for €5. It is one of the year’s best films.
