By Keri O’Shea
When we were approached by Michael Matteo Rossi, the director of Misogynist, he introduced the film by saying that it’s been getting a lot of attention “as the indie antidote to the Fifty Shades craze”; now, I haven’t seen Fifty Shades of Grey, but neither have I been living in a bubble – so the reference was intriguing enough for me to offer to cover Misogynist, even if only to see how, exactly, it related. Certainly, judging by the cover art, Misogynist looks like it’s firmly in Fifty Shades territory, with a prone young woman and a besuited man all looking eerily familiar – though whether it looked like this before the bigger-budget film made waves earlier this year, I couldn’t say. What I can say is that any further links to Fifty Shades are null and void; there simply isn’t anything else there to compare, and anyone expecting similarities would be disappointed here. There’s no romance, no love, and contradictory to the nudity on the cover, no sex (save for one very unpleasant aside towards the film’s close). There’s also no real female characterisation, which to be fair to Fifty Shades does figure fairly importantly, with the story coming as it does from a woman’s perspective. Misogynist is instead an attempt to be provocative which quickly descends into self-parody. If it’s trying to challenge the views about women which it represents, then that gets lost in the mix – with such limited depth and development, it even seems to perpetrate rather than to question.
We begin our story with a young man, Harrison (Jonathan Bennett) receiving some bad news in the form of a letter. A passer-by stops to see what’s up with him, asking if it’s to do with a woman (and evidently, it is). This well-wisher is a bloke called Trevor (Jon Briddell) and he hands Harrison his card, telling him that he can help him fix his woman issues by showing him how to control women. Not put off by this frankly barking mad conversation, Harrison clearly agrees to meet him for drinks – as we’re then taken three years on, and these two seem to be running some sort of finishing school for twats. Men come to these seminars literally in their twos and threes to hear Trevor’s words of wisdom, which mainly consist of platitudes like ‘all women want to be controlled’, peppered with self-conscious, awkward swearing – the kind of swearing that teenagers do when they’ve only just adopted the new words and don’t quite know where they ought to go, exactly. From time to time, the men exchange blows. And that’s it.
The first thing that struck me during these seminar scenes is that, perhaps aware that little is actually happening, drama and tension are supplied by copious shouting. It’s overacting, plain and simple, and it seems no one can have even a slightly challenging thought without screeching it at the tops of their lungs. Alongside the swearing and the vitriol, things soon begin to feel a bit silly. One of these classes takes up the greater share of the film, too, which makes for challenging viewing to say the least. It’s not so much that the anti-woman diatribes we hear over and over again are particularly effective or chilling or anything of the sort (I laughed out loud at the fact that Trevor uses a PowerPoint slide to display the words ‘fucked’ and ‘hurt’ for the benefit of his multi-media savvy acolytes) but that where the film would ordinarily be getting on with the plot, it simply stagnates. We the audience are made to participate in the world’s worst extra credit class. When the men threaten to quit, which they do continuously, I really want them to, because I want to get the hell out of there too. And when the film does eventually move on from here, it has limited space and time to do much more, so that Harrison and Trevor’s back stories feel like afterthoughts, unconvincing and under-explored.
But perhaps the film’s biggest sin is that it trots out its anti-woman rhetoric for over an hour, but doesn’t seem to do anything with this other than parroting it over and over; whilst I’m not for a moment going to suggest that the director or anyone involved actually holds these views, of course not, when it’s all you’re getting over and over from male characters who are borderline cartoonish in their spitefulness, then the film isn’t doing much there to make us consider any of this, or question it, or challenge it. It’s difficult to identify how self-aware the film is, ultimately, and although it tries to flesh out its characters towards the end, in so doing it still relies on a narrative which sees women as needy, irrational victims. It’s all too little, too late, and the ‘inspired by real events’ element which is crowbarred in there at the end is pretty insulting stuff.
Whilst an attractively shot film, Misogynist sadly lacks the bite or the plot impetus to really get under the skin of the woman-hating which gives it its title. Yes, there are people out there who think like our main characters; that is something truly scary, but the opportunity to explore this here has been passed up in favour of bluster and two-dimensionality.
Misogynist is available now on DVD from Midnight Releasing.