You know you are looking for a meeting with someone who wants to start shit when the opening frames for Luca GuadagninoS “After the hunt“A thriller about a sexual abuse scandal that is rocking an intellectual society, is designed in the tradition of none other than woody Allen: White Windsor font against a black background, the role including Julia Roberts and Available AYO in alphabetical order and the credits that recognize the alphabetical order. “It happened at Yale,” announces the prologue text and also evokes the academia -centered mysteries of someone like “The Secret History” author Donna Tartt.
It is an exciting provocation from Get-Go that Guadagnino would like to announce its new film By calling back to Allen, an artist who has become the poster figure for scandals for sexual abuse. The fact that Guadagnino would like to interrogate the rhetoric about how alleged abuse is placed at all via Allen’s signature is a Sit-up-in-your seat creative choice that almost cuts the first moments of this yale set drama, about a philosophy professor (Roberts) that does not).
But it is unfortunately about as dangerous as the strange chaste “after the hunt”, despite the characteristic strengthening direction from the visionary filmmaker behind at least two masterpieces: “call me with your name” and “queer”, two increased submissions to the subjective state of desire, and perhaps a third “,” suspiria, “if you are willing to go there For the generation difference between Gen Z Youth Culture and Pre-Woke-Era Gen Xers-Works from a script by the first time Function Writer Nora Garrett, who came to Guadagnino’s attention at the beginning of last year. Post-#metoo context for how assault fees are handled, reacted to, and also in Ottvinga a tricky identity political investigation that brushes against race and gender.
Yale Philosophy Professor Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts), as the filmmaker, clearly has a taste for risk as well. She hosts a party Chez Elle that mixes colleagues and faculties, she breastfeeding a significant glass of red wine while she is dressed in a top-to-to-white suit, and it is probably not the first drink that this secret hard boozing, self-destructive teacher has had today. Roberts Has Great Fun In A Career-Recharging Dramatic Performance-She’s at her Most Dare-to-Bebelable SINCE Mike Nichols’ 2004 “Closer”-as a fucked-up, boozing, and eventual Fund Popping Highbrow with a mystery chun Toward Her Younger Colleague, Hank (A Raffish Garfield).
One of her students, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), is the type to postpone her hand first in the classroom even when they are uncertain about the answer. She strongly admires Alma but has her own secrets: in the scene that settles, Maggie absconders to Alma’s bathroom and finds an envelope with a photo of a stringing stranger taped under the sink. (Why Alma would hide this photo here, a relic from a hidden life, in New Haven, where she lives with her husband rather than the Pied-à-Terre she holds in the city, suddenly revealed in the third act, is unclear.)
In other words, as much as Maggie idolizes his teacher in the way that young people who were not loved enough when children project parent -like silhouettes on their mentors, Maggie can also build a case against Alma. Soon into the film, a rain soaked Maggie shows up, beaten and nerve -off, to the home Alma parts with her psychotherapist Make Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg). Maggie admits that Hank at night by that party forced himself on her after going home. “He crossed a line,” she says. A skeptical Alma will eventually tell Maggie a very unholy version of “If it is real to you, then it is real” while trying to balance a loyalty to Hank, which may be in love with Alma. Or is she in love with him, or just idealizing his worship of her, as she does with Maggie?
Alma is a victim of her own pursuit of love and parts of information about her past that can inform her reaction to Maggie’s claims that release in Dribb throughout the movie. At the same time, her relationship with Hank is thrown out of the track, as this very clear accusation of rape promotes them from each other and Hank from his academic environment, where he is similar to a wild animal being chased out of the crew.
Chloë Sevigny, who crazy incarnated the freakiest scene from Guadagninos Ya Cannibal -Romantik “Bones and All” and played in his HBO series “We Are Who We Are”, has a small role as a kind of direction Kim, which holds the students. My problem with Garrett’s unpublished investigation of Gen Z against Gen X-Paradigm is not demonstrated more sourly than in a scene where Kim, which throws back some drinks with Alma on the local dives three sheets, gives an on-nose note on how anachronist-for-spring-time it is, as I said, colleges of the colleges, trout, trout, trout, trout
When it comes to subversiveness and hints to a kinkier underground under the surface, “after the hunt” feels strangely ground: why not turn up the heat more on the tangible safe friction that sinks between Alma and Maggie? Calignant close-ups on each other’s hands when they embrace in the moment of emotional sincerity and both painted with what seems to be the same nail polish antyda to a relationship that could have been explored with more risk. The camera handled by Kinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed and works with Guadagnino for the first time, which is around his subjects to indicate the shakiness of their framework. Guadagnino takes back his regular points collaborations, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who may have played the plowing, judgmental piano-refrain of “eyes wide” some too many times during the brainstorms phase.
Edebiri’s character is limited to the actress’s Bona Fide capacity, and is mostly treated as an inconvenience, a fly to be curved, which makes the racial policy for her position as a black student whose money has requested the university (thus thrown maggie’s inherent academic dignity in question) particularly indefinite and unrelated. The Maggie’s thesis – as Hank claims is plagiarized when he crawls to gain traction in the midst of his downfall – and the study field is on the revival of “virtue ethics” suggests something provocative, more satirically and evil Garrett’s sleeve. But it is unclear, and not in a spicy ambiguous way, what Garrett tries to say here.
The latest film “After the Hunt” call is Todd Field’s “Tár”, similarly a cancellation -culturally -minded story set within academy and about a female teacher who abuses his power. That movie succeeded so well, in a way that everyone seemed to be without a nose-rinking because of its humor about themselves. “After the Hunt” leaves some potential brambler of humor that is unpaved, such as the fact that Maggie may only meet her non -binary, Transpeer (Lio Mehiel) for the spot. Or when Alma sounds on Maggie and her partner and asks, “Don’t you have any unclear protest to be publicly angry with?” while Mehiel’s character repeatedly incorrectly. It’s more Cringe than intentionally fun.
Guadagnino is a beautiful manager of Jolting Power and Skill, especially to capture the Queer longing and the mental collisions of people towards their station in life. “Challengers” pulled up the pens-sexual vibbs between a trio of tennis-playing lovers with unauthorizedness, a sneaky slide, who actually felt revolutionary, and the assumed age gap romance of “call me by your name” remains a topic of hot debate even when the film now lives as a contemporary classic. The way he has also stood at the “call me” star Armie Hammer, all except Persona Non Grata after a wave of outrageous harassment discussions, indicates a subversive artist who is not afraid to go against the grain.
But “after the hunt” in the end is not enough against barley. It strives for moral ambiguity, but ends strongly morally strongly and spoils the viewer against discomfort in a final code that feels taped on, post-factual insurance. It hurts me to take down a Luca Guadagnino Film-Han is one of the best filmmakers who work-but after the hunt “is not enough for its ideas from an earlier time, transferred to our own with a broad kind of ambiguity about what they want to say.
Rating: c
“After the Hunt” premiered by 2025 Venice Film festival. Amazon/MGM Studios opens the film in theaters on October 10.
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