After the Hunt, Luca Guadagnino’s laborious dissertation on #MeToo (review)
Available on Prime, the film starring Julia Roberts is a somewhat confusing imitation of Tar.
After the Hunt will probably not go down in the annals of cinema, but its credits are memorable. Jazzy soundtrack, Windsor typography in white letters on a black background, cast presented “in alphabetical order”…Gosh! Luca Guadagnino chose to open his thesis film on #MeToo and cancel culture with a tribute to… Woody Allen. A way for him to remain faithful to his ways as a “vampire” filmmaker, always excited by the idea of drawing on the work of other directors (Ivory for Call me by your nameArgento for SuspiriaDeray for A Bigger Splash…), and therefore placing itself here in the Allen wheel – the Allen 80s, period Crimes and Misdemeanorswith its intellectual characters in full moral questioning. But this wink serves above all as a slightly show-offish note of intention for Guadagnino, as if he were immediately warning the spectators that he is there to make them uncomfortable, that there will be no trigger warningsechoing the tagline of the film, “ Not everything is meant to be pleasant » (“ Not everything is supposed to make you comfortable “), surmounting on the poster the faces of actors with very intensely frowned eyebrows, to make it clear that they have taken up a highly flammable social subject.
The social subject in question is the #MeToo revolution, the reactionary backlash that it caused, and how all of this was experienced in the high places of the American intellectual elite. In this case, Yale University, where the heroine of the film teaches, a philosophy teacher played by Julia Roberts, soon turned upside down by the accusations of sexual assault that one of her students (Ayo Edebiri) will bring against one of her colleagues, and probably lover (Andrew Garfield), as well as by the slow rise to the surface of a trauma that she thought she had carefully buried. Moral fable told in the tone of a slow-moving thriller (really very very slow), After the Hunt dissects through the character of Roberts the contortions of an intelligentsia that is certainly progressive, but overwhelmed in its intellectual comfort by the new woke generation – a generation against which the film also intends to pick lice.
The style, both chic and old-fashioned, carried by the beautiful dark photo of Malik Hassan Sayeed (former collaborator of Spike Lee), can evoke the cinema of Mike Nichols, in its most talkative and formal vein, but it is above all in Tar by Todd Field and Cate Blanchett who we think, an obvious model, pumped up in a frankly clumsy way in a scene where the booming teacher loses her temper against her students who are too sensitive in her eyes. That said, despite the provocative intentions displayed, the film does not actually bite very hard, contenting itself with observing this merry-go-round from a distance, with the irony of a European amused by the convolutions of Americans entangled in political correctness, and drawing the very lukewarm conclusion that the truth is changeable, depending on the place from which it is observed. Julia Roberts is fascinating to watch, a spectacle in itself, we are happy to see her driven by a real desire as an actress, after the comeback with Sam Esmail (Homecoming, The World After Us) and many years when she seemed to have tired of acting, but the film ends up resembling its characters of smooth-talking teachers, very satisfied with themselves and giving themselves airs of importance – right down to the final words, pronounced by the filmmaker himself, in a terribly pretentious signature effect.
After the Huntby Luca Guadagnino, with Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield… On Prime Video.
