Coerced Text – Weekend
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“Cat and Mouse” by Suzanne Vogel is being released – this is how the film adaptation of the feminist story “Cat People”, which six years ago became a hit for The New Yorker magazine, has been renamed in Russia. At the beginning of the year, the film was shown at Sundance, but without much success: chasing the viral popularity of the story, the filmmakers never figured out how to translate the text into film language.
There is nothing intriguing about the premise of Cat and Mouse. Twenty-year-old Margot studies archeology at a provincial American university and works part-time in the evenings selling popcorn at a movie theater. One of the regulars is a shy, insecure man who goes to the movies alone and buys licorice from Margo every time. After several awkward attempts at dating, they finally exchange contacts and flirt for a long time by correspondence, until finally Robert – a lover of cats, Star Wars and old-fashioned gallantry – invites the girl on a date to her own cinema.
This all seems rather trivial, but Kristen Roupenian’s short story “Cat Person”, on which the plot of Suzanne Vogel’s film is based, became an American literary sensation six years ago. The New Yorker published prose written from the perspective of a twenty-year-old student and from the perspective of “millennial”, if not “Zoomer” ideas about relationships between men and women. The story went viral: it was then, at the end of 2017, that accusations against producer Harvey Weinstein launched a wave of scandals and discussions about the extent to which violence and coercion are normalized in patriarchal culture.
Roupenian’s success lay precisely in the fact that nothing out of the ordinary happened in her story: not violence, but unsuccessful sex, which was not really wanted, not villainous manipulations, but a few vile phrases that could be ignored. The story of sophomore Margot and 33-year-old “tube” (as they call it now) Robert is all about such “not really” and “could have been”, a story from the gray zone of uncertainty: nothing “like that” happened, but a residue remained . For many readers – both women and men – all this turned out to be painfully familiar, and “Cat People” became the magazine’s most popular literary publication for the year. There was a lot of debate about the interpretation of the text on social networks – an opportunity that, alas, is not provided to viewers of the film adaptation, because its moral, for convenience, is briefly outlined in the epigraph – from Margaret Atwood.
Yes, “Cat and Mouse” is not a case where they are embarrassed to explain everything literally. Conveying through cinema the internal monologue for which the source story is valuable is always a thankless task, and the authors of the film solve it using several techniques of varying degrees of clumsiness. Sometimes Margot retells her own experiences out loud in dialogues with her friend, who is only needed for this purpose in the plot (and also in order to voice feminist slogans in the same dialogues). In other cases, we see the heroine’s fantasies on screen: for example, she imagines Robert in a psychotherapy session, where he expresses his emotions (as Margot imagines them). Finally, in the central sex scene of the film, the heroine splits into two. One Margot moans falsely under the puffing Robert, the other stands against the wall and comments on what is happening. This awkward sex itself is well-done from a directing point of view, with an appropriate amount of grotesqueness (Robert, whose ideas about this part of life are associated mainly with porn, comically fusses and, like a real overage vulgar, plays the Depeche Mode soundtrack). But it is not possible to completely follow the golden rule of the Hollywood screenwriter – “show, don’t tell” – here too.
When metaphors are used, it doesn’t turn out very well either: conservative male publicists like Steven Pinker usually like to compare human life with the behavior of arthropods, and these comparisons are also voiced here in text (it’s not clear why it took a whole Isabella Rossellini). But the key problem of the film is not even the excessive literary quality, but the way its creators tried to avoid being literary. Following the task of reworking the story for the needs of commercial cinema, screenwriter Michelle Ashford turns it into a thriller with horror elements. Roupenian herself is no stranger to these genres (she wrote the script for last year’s horror film “Bodies, Bodies, Bodies,” which, however, was completely rewritten by another screenwriter), but nothing in the text of “Catman” invites them. In addition, a dashing third act was added to the film, where the authenticity and logic of the characters’ behavior had to be sacrificed to genre aspirations. And even before that, from the very beginning of the film, Margot’s ominous fantasies and nightmares (accompanied by appropriate disturbing music behind the scenes) are glued together with everyday scenes about the difficulties of her personal life, made in a completely different intonation.
Both scenes themselves are shot and edited deftly, if not particularly brilliantly, and one can hardly blame director Suzanne Vogel (best known for the witty script of the comedy “An Education”) for how unconvincing “Cat and Mouse” looks. . This is not the fault of the artists Emilia Jones and Nicholas Brown – they are also trying, but, for example, the choice of Brown for the role of Robert was dictated by purely commercial considerations. In a film about a relationship, a handsome man with a stellar filmography should play (the actor starred in the series “Descendants”), because this is necessary for box office receipts, but the role of Robert, a man mediocre in all respects, should still be given to an artist with a less interesting appearance . The problem with the film is its very idea – and this, to call a spade a spade, is the idea of riding the wave of hype and making a box office hit out of material that is not suitable for such a task. This cannot be cured by production, editing, or acting: “Cat and Mouse” turns out to be an illustration of the fact that literature, even narrative and popular literature, is not always possible to translate into the language of commercial cinema.
In theaters from October 26
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