The New Yorker Bad-Date Story Gets Frustratingly Literal in Cat Person: Sundance Review
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The post The New Yorker Bad-Date Story Gets Frustratingly Literal in Cat Person: Sundance Review appeared first on Consequence.
This review is part of our coverage of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.
The Pitch: In 2017, Kristen Roupenian regaled The New Yorker readers with a startling, elliptical short story called “Cat Person,” about a bad date gone worse between a college sophomore named Margot and a thirtysomething loser named Robert, a tale of mixed messages and scrambled signals and questionable lines around consent.
It lit up the Internet, crystallizing the thoughts of so many women who’d suffered their own uncomfortable dating stories (and, at the height of the #MeToo era, were reliving them on the daily as one celebrity after another was found guilty of transgressions ranging from serial sexual assault to poorly followed or communicated boundaries).
The voyeuristic appeal of Roupenian’s story lies in its ambiguity: Is Robert a licentious creep? Or just a guy who doesn’t know how to act around a woman? Or does it even matter? And that’s the starting point for Susanna Fogel (director of The Spy Who Dumped Me and co-writer of Booksmart)’s adaptation of the story, which uses expressive cinematic grammar to express Margot (CODA‘s Emilia Jones)’s caginess towards Robert (Succession‘s Nicholas Braun, apparently cornering the market on skinny dorks in adaptations of viral Internet stories). And it works, at least for a while — until the real short story stops and it’s time to get rid of the ambiguity.
Tall, Dark, and Problematic: Fogel’s approach to the material is laid bare in the opening text, that infamous quote from Margaret Atwood: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” Indeed, Fogel and screenwriter Michelle Ashford smartly spend the first two acts cloaking Emilia and Robert’s first brushes with dating in the cinematic grammar of horror.
DP Manuel Billeter frames Margot as isolated in the frame, small, with the tall-as-a-weed Braun towering over her in reverse shots. When her imagination about Robert’s motives goes into overdrive, the lighting grows ever moodier, bathing him in the red of a college darkroom or the backlit menace of a car window that traps her in with him. She imagines him dying in various ways when she wants to ditch him, or sitting in on his therapy sessions when she imagines him to be a romantic whose awkward advance she’s shirked.
It’s this negotiation between Robert’s real and imagined intentions, filtered almost entirely through Margot’s subjective perspective, that makes Cat Person‘s first two acts as effective as they are. Granted, Margot remains a bit of a blank slate, a canvas on which we can project all manner of things about modern dating dynamics: she’s young and inexperienced, but confident enough to want sex and pursue it even with someone she may not be all that crazy about. If nothing else, CODA proved Jones can carry a film like this, and her assured mixture of curiosity and paranoia helps carry the day through Cat Person‘s two hours.
Cat Person (Sundance Institute)
Ashford expands the original Margot’s inner monologue by giving her a cohort of female compatriots to bounce ideas off, whether it’s her self-possessed teacher (Isabella Rossellini, stunning in a small role) or her hyper-feminist keyboard warrior roommate (Geraldine Viswanathan) who plants so many ideas in her head of Braun’s grim intentions for her.
As for Braun, he perfectly straddles that like between doofus and danger, every awkward bit of mansplaining or bad kissing believably read as either fumbling ineptitude or an older man preying on a younger woman. No matter how you slice it, he thinks he’s a “nice guy”; the question Cat Person poses is whether how he perceives his actions matters. That balance becomes crucial as the film crawls further towards multiple points of no return, including a mid-film scene with the two in bed, wherein Margo converses with another version of herself watching him mindlessly pumping away, wondering whether it’s safe to revoke her consent.
You Like That, College Girl? But the literalizing of Margot’s inner negotiation with her own perception of Robert grows tiresome after a while, and there’s a clear breaking point in Ashford’s script when the film reaches those eerie final words of the original short story… and then keeps going. Rather than follow the story’s enticingly open-ended footsteps, the film chugs along for another 35 minutes, for a final act that blows past our original ambiguity and gives us a thunderously obvious answer to Robert’s whole deal.
Margot goes from hunted to hunter in a way that almost, but not quite, implicates her in her inability to communicate the parameters of her relationship with Robert — there’s something interesting in the script’s fabric about the wobbly levels of culpability each of them has in the dissolution of their dynamic. Sure, Robert’s a loser with the technical capacity for physical violence, but the film feeds Margot plenty of suggestions that she should be afraid long before Robert gives her similar signals, leading to a climax that’s too big and demonstrative for the movie that preceded it.
The Verdict: It’s clear that the original “Cat Person”‘s appeal lay in its narrative fluidity — that tantalizing question of whether or not the Margaret Atwood quote is universally true, or whether it sets up men and women for an irreconcilable game of romantic suspicion.
Cat Person The Movie feels like the natural extension of post-#MeToo politicking about consent in modern dating, with a healthy dash of the post-Promising Young Woman wave of feminist indies that came after it: Well-intentioned, to be sure, and keenly aware of the difficulties women face in a world of male entitlement and social media signal-crossing — but thunderously literal and patronizing to boot, especially in its unnecessary ending. Like the Schrodinger’s cats that mark the story’s title — Robert tells Margot he has cats, but she never sees them when she visits — Cat Person works best when you don’t know the answers to those questions.
Where to Watch: Cat Person premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.
The New Yorker Bad-Date Story Gets Frustratingly Literal in Cat Person: Sundance Review
Clint Worthington
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