For all its (oft-discussed) flaws, a 2017 New Yorker short story states:cat personI understood the basics about sexual relationships between women and men. There is an undercurrent of fear in women’s daily lives that men don’t. When someone walks behind you on the street Across the. I enter the parking lot with the key clenched in my fist. Because you don’t know how he will react if you say no. This truth, like many others, fails in the film version. cat personpremiered at this week’s 2023 Sundance Film Festival.
cat person Consistently making mistakes and burying its points in a very unrefined and very poorly thought out way of short story to invalidate the same concerns it is built on. When a cop tells the protagonist that he should stop watching murder shows, it is not an organized indifference to violence against women. A therapist who seems to state subtext as text and then disappears and a one-dimensional best friend of color who exists only to drop the feminist buzzword of five years ago (by Geraldine Viswanathan) It’s a movie that includes both Being ignorant is self-assured, not a way to emphasize the same qualities of a 20-year-old heroine.
Anthropology sophomore Margot (Emilia Jones) also works part-time at a movie theater that only shows controversial Hollywood movies from the 1960s to the ’80s. There she meets an elderly man, Robert (Nicholas Braun)—who she thinks is 25 years old and old in her friends’ eyes—with whom she strikes up a flirtatious relationship via email. Build. They blend beautifully with the phone screen as mediators. He tells good jokes, you might say. But when they do meet in person, Robert is awkward and evasive, and Margot isn’t even sure if she really owns the two cats she spoke of in her email.
The centerpiece of both the short story and the film version cat person is the scene where Margot changes her mind about having sex with Robert, but goes in favor of the encounter anyway. she looks ridiculous. he looks more stupid She agreed to sleep with him. But now the attention is neither warranted nor pleasant. He’s a bad kisser and so is his lover. Oh, and he’s actually 33 (in the story he was 34 and he was knocked down a year later). An awkward moment, but a very relatable moment for many.
![Cat Person's protagonists Emilia Jones and Geraldine Viswanathan crowd around a light-lit mobile device as they scroll.](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/hdkq9HnDR_CMrsrKLuPiVeekOKs=/0x0:2000x1125/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:2000x1125):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24385339/Cat_Person_3_1.jpg)
Photo: Sundance Institute
Unfortunately, director Susanna Vogel is best known for writing book smart, Michelle Ashford (Witch of Mayfair) handles the scripting role here — bringing this experience to the screen in a flat visual style. For most of the scene, Margot speaks to herself standing on the other side of the room. It’s an externalized, internal monologue that layers comedy over the film’s most heartbreaking moments. However, the dialogue isn’t all that interesting, so the whole thing doesn’t work out.
The same goes for the film’s flourishes of horror, which are bluntly inserted and quickly dismissed. The overall concept of female hyper-awareness of the dangers posed by men is presented in such a researched manner. cat person A particularly daunting final stretch drains all emotion from the theme. None of the additions to the story actually work. Like Viswanathan, Isabella Rossellini is mostly wasted as a professor who likes to talk about how male honeybee penises shed during the mating process, dissecting their abdominal cavity in the process.and what happens in the movie rear The ending of the short story is particularly misplaced. Without spoiling, Margot has quite the ax to grind with Harrison Ford.
To be fair, rolling your eyes and saying “Star Wars is soooo boring” is what 20-year-olds do. The problem is, in the dynamic between Margot and Robert, this is an endearing nod to the unearned superiority complex inherent in twenty-year-olds. It’s not clear if it’s believed to be, or if the movie is actually rehashing Twitter discourse from halfway through. Play like the latter.
There was a time when the crack about men not having bed frames was fresh. Perhaps too quickly to develop, produce and publish a feature film based on a short story inseparable from the online chats around it.Part of cat person‘s observations about sex and dating are relevant, at least for those who are attracted to men. Which of us hasn’t seen a movie on a laptop lying in a man’s dirty sheets after bad sex? when you’re trying cat person Most useful as a lesson in what not to do.
cat person It premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. The film is currently seeking distribution for release.