Friday reviews: 3 November 2023

Bad Behaviour, Cat Person and Loop Track are all in cinemas

For lots of this long life I have always assumed that, when it comes to gendered exper­i­ence of the world, there was more that was uni­ver­sal than not.

That what sep­ar­ated us gender-wise was on the mar­gins and that our art could reflect that, but also that the best art tran­scen­ded those differences.

Well, as I get older I real­ise that is a pretty pat­ri­arch­al way of look­ing at the world. A reflec­tion of pre­vi­ously unex­amined priv­ilege, if you like.

By way of con­firm­a­tion of the wrong­headed­ness of those assump­tions, along come two films by women writers and dir­ect­ors that demon­strate that the female exper­i­ence of the world is, indeed, fun­da­ment­ally dif­fer­ent to mine and my cohorts.

One of those films very much wants us to under­stand the female point-of-view and the oth­er, I think, does­n’t give two hoots about wheth­er people like me get it or not. It’s not for us.

Regardless, men should be pay­ing atten­tion. We might learn something.

Cat Person (writ­ten by Michelle Alford from a New Yorker short story by Kristen Roupenian and dir­ec­ted by Susanna Fogel) is about dat­ing but it’s not a rom-com. In fact, it’s a genre-hopping thrill­er with comed­ic, hor­ror and coming-of-age overtones.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Emilia Jones plays Margot, a sopho­more at a New Jersey uni­ver­sity, work­ing part-time at the loc­al art­house mul­ti­plex. Bored, she flirts with one of the pat­rons, Robert (Nicholas Braun), and they start a text rela­tion­ship that soon looks like it might tip over into some­thing more serious.

Robert is much older than Margot – he’s in his mid-30s – and her best friend (Geraldine Visnawathan) is determ­ined to pro­tect her from mak­ing what she thinks is a big mistake.

But when someone is set on mak­ing a mis­take then mis­takes will surely be made and these ones have some dev­ast­at­ing consequences.

The suc­cess of the film is in the vivid por­tray­al of the inner feel­ings of women around men they don’t know. There’s a bril­liantly handled scene where Margot wants to change her mind about a tryst with Robert but doesn’t know how to escape it and has a furi­ous debate with the bet­ter ver­sion of her­self on the oth­er side of the room.

Cat Person should be man­dat­ory view­ing for all young folk at their 15^th birth­day – maybe even young­er. Maybe then people might go through life with a bet­ter under­stand­ing of what’s in the heads of the oppos­ite sex and not have to wait until they are in their 50s to finally ‘get it’.

It doesn’t mat­ter wheth­er Robert is a fun­da­ment­ally decent but mis­un­der­stood guy or not, what mat­ters is how his blind­spots, his pri­or­it­ising of his own feel­ings, his bluster instead of self-confidence, his ter­rible role mod­els about mas­culin­ity and sex … how those things make women feel. Because, one would hope, that if he knew what was actu­ally going on he might find ways to mod­u­late him­self a bit.

Or is that too much to ask? 

Jennifer Connelly’s father-in-law Thane Bettany spent a few years in the 1960s per­form­ing with Aotearoa’s first pro­fes­sion­al theatre com­pany, the New Zealand Players. The New Zealand Players were dir­ec­ted by Richard Campion who was the fath­er of the acclaimed film dir­ect­or Jane, who in turn is the moth­er of Alice Englert who is the writer-director of the new film Bad Behaviour which stars Jennifer Connelly.

It’s per­form­ance whakapapa of a sort. Certainly an exten­ded fam­ily connection.

Hollywood vet­er­an Connelly is an abso­lute force of nature with a per­form­ance that is rich­er and braver than any­thing I think I’ve seen her do before.

She is a former tele­vi­sion star liv­ing off end­less resid­uals and attempt­ing vari­ous forms of self-help to deal with her child­hood trauma and her own par­ent­al guilt. At a retreat in Oregon with a British guru (Ben Whishaw – who wouldn’t want ther­apy from Paddington?) her self-absorbtion reaches an all-time high.

Meanwhile, her daugh­ter (Englert her­self) is a stunt co-ordinator on a fantasy film being shot in Otago, fall­ing into an unwise affair with a col­league (Marlon Williams).

Some will quibble with the lack of nar­rat­ive logic or the ‘rich people’s prob­lems’ aspect of the film but I choose to believe that – like the early films of her moth­er – Englert isn’t too per­turbed about things like ‘story’ or ‘a sat­is­fy­ing end­ing’. It’s not what interests her.

What pre­oc­cu­pies her is what these char­ac­ters will say and do with each oth­er when they are put in a room with each oth­er under pres­sure – that’s all that the story is there for, to make that happen.

And what we get is wildly vari­able but nev­er not inter­est­ing. Do we believe it? Elaine Stritch once said of watch­ing Marlon Brando at the Actors Studio that he would often make ter­rible choices but that they were always truth­ful. I hope that’s what Englert is going for here and if a lot of it doesn’t work for me that’s fine.

A final obser­va­tion, the hotel scenes in the film were filmed at Wallaceville House which is a couple of miles up the road from where I’m typ­ing this. Which means that Jennifer Connelly drove past my house and nobody told me! I’m dis­ap­poin­ted in all of you.

It’s clearly Tom Sainsbury week as he has a small role in Bad Behaviour and also Orson Welles’s him­self into all the import­ant roles in Loop Track, an effect­ive low budget thrill­er about an anxiety-ridden man hav­ing to engage with strangers – and a stranger thing – on a New Zealand bushwalk.

Famous in New Zealand for his com­edy, Sainsbury shows him­self to be a more than adept dir­ect­or of hor­ror as the early broad-brush char­ac­ter­isa­tions make way for some­thing more nuanced.

As a writer, I wish he’d tightened up the script a bit more – the film could do with los­ing a few minutes in the third act which should just be going hell for leath­er in my opin­ion – but it’s a great idea pretty well executed.

Nice to see indie stal­wart Hayden Weal get a decent chunk of screen­time. There are very few New Zealand act­ors who a cam­era loves quite as much as Hayden and I sus­pect it works the oth­er way too.

Editor’s note

One of the things about tak­ing on this news­let­ter that I hadn’t quite con­sidered was that, if I’m going to be also pro­du­cing con­tent for RNZ – for Nights, At the Movies and for the web­site – I’m going to be watch­ing a lot of stuff. And that stuff takes time.

I know there have been some reas­on­ably high pro­file films land on stream­ing ser­vices this week and I would nor­mally attempt to cov­er them here but I just haven’t had the time to sit and watch them.

The plan is to get there even­tu­ally and – if worthy – they’ll become “Something to watch tonight” entries later on.