No deer longs for the hunter’s arrow, and no art designed to maintain the status quo is ever as good as it thinks it is. Say what you will about Luca Guadagnino, he has made three solid movies in the last eighteen months, a level of career output rarely seen since the studio conveyor belt system was smashed. Challengers was about power and sexuality through the metaphor of tennis, Queer was about Daniel Craig smashing his Bond image to smithereens through the metaphor of psychedelic drug use, and one year later, also premiering at the Venice Film Festival, we have After the Hunt. It stars Julia Roberts as a philosophy professor at Yale who finds herself in the middle of a sh*tstorm. But the nasty subtext of newcomer Nora Garrett’s script is as ugly as that of Tár. That is to say, Hollywood has once again made a movie about a woman being held responsible for a sexual assault. Where, where are the movies from the point of view of the male perpetrators of these crimes?
Alma (Ms. Roberts) is married to psychologist Frederick (Michael Stuhlbarg) and they live in an enormous apartment perfect for hosting the kind of academic parties where everyone has a “great” time debating each other. Her friends are fellow philosopher Hank (Andrew Garfield) and psychiatrist Kim (Chloë Sevigny) and her favourite grad student is Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), after whose family one of the buildings on campus is named. At the party Hank sprawls all over the furniture and flirts with everyone, including Maggie, despite her being a lesbian. He is such close friends with Alma they basically snuggle on the sofa, which Frederick and Kim observe without comment. During this party Maggie snoops through a bathroom and finds an envelope taped to the bottom of a shelf, from which she pockets a newspaper clipping. Later she and Hank leave together bickering cheerfully as they go. And after everyone is gone, Alma collapses in such pain to which the housekeeper’s reaction makes it clear she’s been secretly sick a while.
Well. The most obvious plot twist happens but the aftermath is not actually about what Hank may or may not have done to Maggie with or without her consent. The issue somehow becomes twofold: whether Maggie’s family wealth, race and sexuality give her equal power to a white man like Hank in the current moment, and whether Alma’s hesitation to support Maggie is because of a dark secret that shouldn’t be spoiled but you sure can guess. Alma’s more visible crimes seem to be an unwillingness to speak about herself, a masculine-coded career that has made her “an unfeeling [c-word],” and an inability to think badly either about Hank or her own shonky choices. And yet this is not nearly the same as committing a sexual assault, and the fact that the movie exclusively follows Alma in the aftermath hangs her on Hank’s hook. It’s exhausting.
The use in the opening and closing titles of what can only be described as the Woody Allen font means the agenda here is deliberately muddy. The seventies-style costumes throughout – Hank has a beard and dresses like he left his chest medallion at home, while Kim has a bowl haircut and Alma a tendency towards the kind of tailoring Diane Keaton made famous in Annie Hall – seem designed to undermine the modernity of this story. The tale is indeed as old as time, but what is new is that a failure to acquire justice from the wrongdoer – in this case Hank – is matched by an eagerness to acquire justice from other people. And by people, we mean women. Why is Alma is the one confronted by students in the quad and embarrassed in the student press? Why is Alma’s imperfect reaction what Maggie obsesses over instead of the assault itself? Why is Alma being punished for Hank’s behaviour? Why is Alma the main character here, instead of Hank himself?
Mr. Stuhlbarg leans hard on his mannerisms as a husband who can largely accept his loveless marriage, except when he can’t. The scene where Frederick repeatedly flounces through the kitchen while Maggie and Alma are trying to have a sensitive conversation is a masterclass in passive-aggressive body language. (Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, working again with Mr. Guadagnino on the score, clearly enjoyed Anatomy of a Fall like everyone else, but their deliberately overbearing ticking noises and jump-scare stylings are too much.) Mr. Garfield weaponises his nice-guy persona in some truly nasty ways, and Ms. Sevigny does solid work in an unshowy part.
Cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed spends a lot of time filming Maggie’s hands and torso, but the scenes between Maggie and her nonbinary partner Alex (Lío Mehiel), the only ones in the movie not from Alma’s perspective, should have been redone. Ms. Edebiri does her best with a part that’s impossible by design, as someone who is both victim and destroyer, confident and overwhelmingly anxious, intellectual and idiotic, focused on and indifferent to gender, privileged and discriminated against, all in a setting that despite itself has no idea how to handle any of those dichotomies. On the other hand, no actor could have done this: the character of Maggie exists only as a contrast to the character of Alma. The black lesbian is there to suffer so a straight white lady can learn some lessons.
As for the white lady, Ms. Roberts plays Alma like a coil wound so tightly it’s on the edge of exploding. She projects a guarded intellect that can burn like a laser ray when she wants it to – onto Hank, or a particularly sloppy student – but most often and most clearly has burned inwards, out of spite. Alma is furious that even as she never talks about herself, she cannot escape the fact that she is still there, existing in a body with manicured fingernails and a good haircut and still being judged. And not fairly judged either, let’s be honest. Where are the scenes of Hank getting judged? Let’s see Hank moping on a sofa and grappling with the knowledge of the harm he is capable of causing. Let’s see Hank being cruel to his partner. Let’s see Hank in the dean’s office trying to weasel out of this. Let’s focus on the man who actually caused the harm, instead of the women caught up in it.
Why are we so afraid of asking men to face up to the harm caused by sexual violence to women that we can’t even make a movie about it? Because we are afraid of the violence men are capable of and know that this question is a virtual guarantee of further violence. So it’s much safer to direct that anger onto the nearest woman. Even in movies. Even in movies directed by homosexual men. The cowardice is incredible.
And yet the movie’s worldview is most clearly expressed in the throwaway comment the dean makes to Alma about his executive assistant: “Be nice to Wendy. She still thinks what she does is important.” After the Hunt is about (white) women achieving power by weaponizing our identity and our traumas. It’s profoundly offensive to see all this talent in the service to something so reactionary, and it’s a dangerously boring direction for Mr. Guadagnino’s career. It bears repeating, no art designed to maintain the status quo is ever as good as it thinks it is. And no matter how we dress up the old philosophies, it is impossible to ignore the flaws of the old philosophers.
After the Hunt recently played at the Venice Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the official Venice site for the title.
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