(The camera, meanwhile, leers along with her male oppressor at her calculated desirability.) Pike does her best to locate the character in the spaces between her most extreme outbursts and her most Stepfordian mannerisms, finding pockets of sympathy even where the writing does not, but can’t do much with dialogue as leadenly obvious as, “Hating him only hurts me.”įailing to make sense of a raging psycho who also happens to be a thudding doofus, Fernandez is outsmarted by his co-star at every turn, while few demands are made of a bizarrely overqualified supporting cast. As B-movie instinct takes over, more expected power dynamics come into play, yet Mikati and his writers remain cavalier in their treatment of their conflicted protagonist, refusing engagement with her wounded psyche and defining her only in icy polarities of control and derangement. The film’s depiction of rape trauma syndrome is already so superficial - Miranda can no longer frost cakes with a steady hand - that articulating the more perverse realms of human desire might be a reach too far.
(Pike is dreamily costumed throughout by couture-conscious designers Kurt and Bart.)įew will be fooled, however, which is probably for the best. When she starts visiting William in prison, the film notionally teases auds with the distasteful possibility of fatal attraction, as she flirts through the protective glass in a succession of floaty day dresses. As she lashes out at everyone from her kindly father (a maximally raspy Nick Nolte, his lines frequently traveling no further than his beard) to a hapless dry-cleaning clerk, it would appear that recent stress has only unlocked pre-existing sociopathic tendencies. Though he’s arrested and imprisoned in short order, Miranda’s recovery isn’t so tidy. In the film’s one successful instance of misdirection, William is revealed as an impostor who proceeds to savagely rape Miranda in her kitchen.
As it turns out, our reservations are founded.
0 kommentar(er)
