Thank goodness for the insistent score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. It throws modernist shapes, with panicked strings and urgent brass, in a film otherwise entirely devoid of momentum.
That’s not to say that Nora Garrett’s #MeToo script for Luca Guadagnino’s new feature, shown at Venice International Film Festival, doesn’t work awfully hard to push buttons. Conveniently set against the fraught contemporary environs of Yale University’s philosophy department, After the Hunt offers a dull retread of the PC-gone-mad arguments that have dominated the culture wars since the 1990s.
Characters announce, with all the subtlety of a brick to the face, that they are “terrified because of the climate in higher education these days”. Others wonder why their generation – Gen Z – is fair game for their elders in a film that consistently has Gen Z in the crosshairs.
Julia Roberts attempts to marshal this muddle into an acceptable dramatic shape. She plays Alma Imhoff, an inexplicably sexy philosopher – white pantsuits! – worshipped by Hank (Andrew Garfield), a mentee turned doctoral colleague, and by Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), a promising student. Her asshole husband, Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), watches wryly from the sidelines and plays opera scores by John Adams as his wife basks in glory.
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Then double disaster strikes in a wild conflation of coincidences. Maggie accuses Hank of sexual impropriety on the same evening she discovers sensitive documents relating to Alma’s past. The aftermath is not unlike getting stuck at a dinner party for dullards. Hank rages against the “privileged coddled hypocrites” whom he teaches; Alma frets about the “business of optics” and warns Maggie not to talk to the press – “You will become radioactive.”
This ought to coalesce into Roberts’s Tár moment. For about 15 minutes her character has a punishing meltdown of similar dimensions to Cate Blanchett’s conductor. But for the rest of the film she’s playing an entirely different part, a study of froideur and stoicism with a voguish opioid-abuse habit.
How ironic that MGM – which, through Margaret Booth, codified the fluid Hollywood style of editing – is credited on a film that unsuccessfully attempts to tear up that rule book. In this spirit, every aspect of Guadagnino’s film feels like a pointless provocation, from the Woody Allen-inspired opening credits to the use of Morrissey on the soundtrack.
The cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed, so brilliant on Spike Lee’s Girl 6 and He’s Got Game, makes Godardian choices in a film that can’t offer similarly stimulating dialogue. A final meeting between Alma and Maggie is framed like the Pacino-De Niro restaurant meet-up in Heat. But that’s not the underpowered film we’ve been watching.
