The other day, my pilates teacher told everyone during class that she was going on a blind date that night.
“I hope he’s not a serial killer,” she joked. We all laughed, nervously. Later, I thought about how disturbing it is to consider such a joke and understand the subtle meaning behind it. We all laughed because we were all women, and we all understood the potential violence that we face in pursuit of love.
That dating is dangerous, and that being in a romantic relationship with a man can be dangerous is a fact women understand.
The volatility of such phenomenon was very subtly (and infamously) examined in the explosively viral short story “Cat Person”, published more than six years ago in the New Yorker.
The translation of such a nuanced story onto the big screen was pre-destined to warp in some fashion. Nevertheless, Cat Person, the film, takes the original story and puts a rocket pack on its back.
If you recall, the story follows a young 20-year old college student Margot (played here by Coda’s Emilia Jones) who meets an older man, Robert (played by Succession’s Nicholas Braun), while working at a movie theatre candy bar. He gets her number. They text flirt, go on a date, and he turns out to be a very bad kisser — and an even worse bedfellow.
She doesn’t know how to let him down politely (patriarchy’s agenda has been to indoctrinate women to behaving in a way that hurts men’s feelings the least) and when she does, finally – he texts her: “WHORE”.
This is after just one date. One sexual encounter.
The movie is two hours long. The first hour follows the original story by Kristen Roupenian, somewhat faithfully. It dramatises the ordinary yet frightening fear we feel as women existing in the world: walking alone at night and being in public enclosed space alone.
There are horror undertones added to heighten the suspense. Watching the film, what felt ludicrous to me was that all these scenes felt very real. Any woman who watches the movie will understand the quotidian terrors we endure walking around inside a female body.
It’s difficult to translate the literary qualities of the story onto the big screen. The film does an adequate job of conveying the agonising impatience of textlationships — Margot texts Robert, she stares at her phone, obsessively waiting for his reply. Text messages shown on the screen aren’t in a director’s toolbox of good cinematic techniques, but they can’t really be avoided here.
The phone is one of the film’s central characters. We see it framed as a gateway to romance in the beginning and it quickly becomes a threat. A weapon, even.
The legendary actor Isabella Rossellini makes a few lovely cameos as our heroine’s brilliant tutor and teacher. She’s conveniently tossed to the side in the second half of the movie — when the filmmakers abandon the short story’s original appeal (which is that every single woman on the planet who read the story could relate to the awkward violation of entering a sexual experience she knows she really does not wish to) and leap into something of an un-subtle warning of male violence.
Margot’s friend Taylor (played by the brilliant Australian actor Geraldine Viswanathan) is the friend we all need. She tells Margot to ‘Stop apologising for everything’ and “don’t’ double text” and to see Robert for who is really is — a 33-year old man whose controlling manner is bad news, and whose idea of “romance” is grabbing a woman under duress and implanting himself onto her.
The movie isn’t sure if it wants to be a thriller or a psychological drama, or a zeitgeist-ie MeToo text (recently, we’ve had Promising Young Women, Fresh, The Royal Hotel) but I’m not bothered by this identity crisis because I relish any film that speaks to my experience as a woman. Movies that centre the female experience remain a minority in Hollywood.
The third act of the film tips into a whole other ball game. Still, I walked away from the screening, beaming with recognition.
I turned to my friend and told her I thought the movie felt to me a bit like Get Out, only instead of a racial commentary, the filmmaker took a gendered stance. Women are constantly managing and resisting the ubiquity of male violence. My joy, post-viewing Cat Person, was evidently not in this fact, but in the existence of more films that demonstrate this fact.
‘Cat Person’ is screening Australia wide from this week.