Cat Person
Dating can be really awkward as Emilia Jones discovers in Susanna Fogel’s funny and terrifying look at the sexual war zone.
The gall and the tall: Emilia Jones and Nicholas Braun
Don’t you just hate men? They’re self-obsessed, insensitive, clumsy and largely immature. Even so, thanks to an evolutionary quirk, many women put up with the male of the species and are even attracted to them. For some reason, sophomore student Margot (Emilia Jones) is drawn to offbeat and very tall men. Unfortunately, she’s also got a heart of gold and would hate to offend anybody. Working part time at an independent cinema in Jersey City, she finds herself drawn to Robert (Nicholas Braun) a dark, very tall loner who is a regular habitué. She makes dour remarks about his choice of snacks and he cannot help but find her attractive. After all, she is smart, funny and terribly pretty, as well as being unable to say ‘no’…
At the start of this quirky, unsettling, genre-tweaking film is the Margaret Atwood quote, “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” It’s safe to say, then, that there is a struggle of the sexes at the heart of Cat Person. It transpires that the tall, dark stranger who haunts the foyer of Margot’s workplace is a man who likes cats (hence perhaps the ironic title), as many a lone male of the species might profess to. Margot is an animal lover, but is not allowed pets in her dorm. The best that she can do is to look after the ants in the laboratory where she studies anthropology, under the watchful eye of her tutor Dr Enid Zabala (Isabella Rossellini), who says things like “People choose to be scared.”
Susanna Fogel, who previously co-wrote the smart and bookish Booksmart, could have called her second directorial effort Cinéaste (she also helmed The Spy Who Dumped Me, but we’ll brush over that). Margot is cine-literate (she is a fan of Japanese animation) and can dispense useful trivia on American Graffiti, but she’s not that into Harrison Ford, even though he plays Bob Falfa in the latter. However, there’s a cinéaste and there’s a cinéaste, and the tall, dark stranger is a Harrison Ford obsessive…
Initially, there’s an air of Promising Young Woman here, for several reasons. Both films exhibit an acerbic take on the male/female divide, both protagonists are played by British actresses with faultless American accents and in each case the ‘boyfriend’ is over 6’5”. What are the chances? And both films slip between genres under the deft supervision of their female directors. Where Cat Person comes into its own is in its excruciating scrutiny of the dating game – not just because men are contemptible but because they are tactless and inadequate. Both films are shocking, although, tonally, the former was a far more stylish affair, even if one could argue that the raw, indie texture of Cat Person is more in keeping with the mindset of its character, perhaps an inchoate version of Carey Mulligan’s more experienced and ruthless feminist warrior. It should also be pointed out that Emilia Jones, who starred in last year’s Oscar-winning CODA, is an actress who is definitely going places.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Emilia Jones, Nicholas Braun, Geraldine Viswanathan, Hope Davis, Fred Melamed, Isabella Rossellini, Christopher Shyer, Liza Koshy, Josh Andrés Rivera, Isaac Cole Powell, Liza Colón-Zayas, Michael Gandolfini.
Dir Susanna Fogel, Pro Jeremy Steckler and Helen Estabrook, Ex Pro Susanna Fogel and Elizabeth Banks, Screenplay Michelle Ashford, based on the short story by Kristen Roupenian, Ph Manuel Billeter, Pro Des Salli Levi, Ed Jacob Craycroft, Music Heather McIntosh, Costumes Ava Yuriko Hama, Sound Eric Hirsch, Dialect coaches Jane Fujita and Julia Lenardon.
StudioCanal/The New Yorker Studios-StudioCanal.
118 mins. USA/France. 2023. US Rel: 6 October 2023. UK Rel: 27 October 2023. Cert. 15.
