\n<\/p>\n
The following contains spoilers for After the Hunt.<\/p>\n
After the Hunt, the latest film from the director Luca Guadagnino, seems designed to inspire debates about \u201ccancel culture.\u201d Set in 2019 amid the #MeToo movement, the movie follows a group of academics in Yale\u2019s philosophy department who are embroiled in a sexual-assault scandal. The characters are perfectly comfortable discussing morality. But as soon as they\u2019re made to confront their personal beliefs, philosophy becomes, as Guadagnino put it in an interview at the New York Film Festival, something of a \u201cspecial effect\u201d\u2014the fuel that can turn any conversation incendiary.<\/p>\n
The movie, now in theaters, hinges on a provocative event: Maggie (played by The Bear\u2019s Ayo Edebiri) accuses a popular professor, Hank (Andrew Garfield), of sexual assault. Hank\u2019s colleague, the enigmatic Alma (Julia Roberts), is subsequently caught between the two\u2014the student who worships her, and one of her closest friends. The most daring scene, though, arrives right at the end: In a brief epilogue, Alma reunites with Maggie five years after the allegation dissolved their relationship. The women are disinterested in relitigating what happened. Instead, they insist upon their own happiness: Alma has recovered from the drama; she\u2019s now a dean at Yale. Maggie, too, is thriving\u2014engaged, with a giant ring she shows off to her former mentor. After their conversation wraps, the camera lingers on Alma until Guadagnino, from somewhere off-screen, calls out, \u201cCut!\u201d<\/p>\n
The director\u2019s voice breaks the fourth wall with as much subtlety as a character waking up to say that everything was merely a dream. The moment is jarring, and implies that everything that happened on-screen until then shouldn\u2019t be taken too seriously. Some critics have interpreted the ending as a glib last-minute twist that threatens to neutralize the story\u2019s potency and dismisses the seriousness of the movie\u2019s premise. Among the other complaints: There seems to be no point, beyond pure button-pushing, to using a Woody Allen\u2013style typeface in the opening credits, thereby referencing a real-life disgraced figure. The script is blanketed in sweeping claims found in online discourse about sex and gender, but it ultimately has little to say about cancel culture. Perhaps its message is meant to be deliberately ambiguous\u2014or maybe there\u2019s no message at all.<\/p>\n
Yet Guadagnino\u2019s decision to insert himself into the movie\u2019s final beat is revealing, in that it clarifies more about After the Hunt than anything that precedes it. The scene illuminates the story\u2019s preoccupation not with the post-#MeToo world but with performance, hints of which can be found throughout the film. An early sequence finds Alma and Hank theatrically debating, before a collection of awed students, whether any of the philosophers they study led a wholly moral life. Inside Alma\u2019s home, her husband, Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), acts the part of the dutiful spouse when guests come over, baking a tart for Alma\u2019s colleagues; alone, he falls asleep to porn. Alma visits the dean of humanities to talk about Maggie\u2019s accusation, but they don\u2019t discuss how the assault may have happened\u2014or the fact that Maggie just attended Alma\u2019s boozy, intimate dinner party, which encouraged a fair amount of boundary-blurring. Instead, the dean worries about how the situation will come off to the rest of the academic community. \u201cAgainst all odds,\u201d he says, \u201cI\u2019ve found myself in the business of optics, not substance.\u201d<\/p>\n
Studied mannerisms inform every relationship in the film. The movie questions whether anyone is telling the truth: whether Maggie falsely accused Hank in order to deflect how she plagiarized her dissertation, whether Hank\u2019s pitiful self-deprecation is an act belying a disturbingly aggressive demeanor, and even whether Alma actually cares about her students. But truths go ignored, the film argues, when everyone prefers inventing realities for themselves. Consider the fantastical visual language Guadagnino deploys\u2014he frequently captures characters via their reflections, including a moment in which Hank is positioned in front of a pair of intersecting mirrored walls; his gesticulating makes him look like a many-tentacled beast. Alma, who seems to almost always be hiding behind a mask, fades from her couch at one point via a bit of camera trickery, like she\u2019s a ghost.<\/p>\n
After the Hunt, in other words, is not what it initially seems like it might be: a film that examines changing cultural mores. Rather, it\u2019s a cynical movie in which characters carefully position themselves for maximum validation. This need to be seen as morally good poisons them all\u2014the more Alma stands up for Maggie in public while doubting her in private, the more Alma\u2019s health deteriorates. The more Frederik keeps up a facade of warmth in his marriage, the more he descends into cruelty. After the Hunt pointedly avoids showing the faculty\u2019s deliberations on Hank\u2019s firing\u2014the titular hunt, if you will\u2014in favor of examining how each of its characters, indifferent to what actually happened, insists on being perceived as correct.<\/p>\n
Guadagnino, in interviews since the film\u2019s debut at the Venice Film Festival, in August, has waved off critiques that the film is hollow. He has resisted the notion that After the Hunt is a \u201cmovie about #MeToo,\u201d calling the label \u201ca bit of a lazy way to describe it.\u201d And, he\u2019s noted, the choice to insert his own voice into the story\u2019s final seconds is nothing but a way to remind the audience that the film is, well, a film. \u201cOnce we say \u2018Cut,\u2019 we invite the audience to think that this is a movie,\u201d he said at the New York Film Festival. \u201cWe wanted to entertain them.\u201d<\/p>\n
After the Hunt does entertain. The production design impressively transforms a London soundstage into New Haven, the plot is fabulously convoluted, and Roberts is particularly compelling to watch, clearly relishing the opportunity to deliver a slippery performance. The film around her is equally slick, using as its backdrop a moment in recent history when people in power felt under the microscope. It never peers through that microscope itself, but in its final moment\u2014\u201cCut!\u201d\u2014After the Hunt invites the viewer to do so instead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The following contains spoilers for After the Hunt. After the Hunt, the latest film from the director Luca Guadagnino, seems designed to inspire debates about \u201ccancel culture.\u201d Set in 2019 amid the #MeToo movement, the movie follows a group of academics in Yale\u2019s philosophy department who are embroiled in a sexual-assault scandal. The characters are<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29779,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[1520,9668,11929],"class_list":{"0":"post-29778","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-audience","9":"tag-hunt","10":"tag-tricks"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29778\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/29779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}