Meewella | Critic

According to P

Tag: Geraldine Viswanathan

QuickView: Drive-Away Dolls (2024)

Drive-Away Dolls posters

“I’ve had it with love. I know bards and troubadours are high on it, but I don’t believe it’s relevant to the modern 20th soon to be 21st century lesbian.”

Jamie

Ethan Coen’s first feature as a solo director is a delirious sapphic road-trip set in 1999 but frequently adopting the sensibilities of exploitation movies from the decades prior. Drive-Away Dolls follows two friends on a trip to Florida, pursued by inept criminals seeking to recover a briefcase hidden in their car. In terms of classic Coen styles, it leans more toward the screwball comedy of Burn After Reading than its crime thriller elements, while visually blending eccentric antagonists, lesbian dive bars and raunchy sequences into a Lebowski-esque 90-minute fever dream. At its heart is the central friendship between Margaret Qualley’s uninhibited fast-talking Texan and Geraldine Viswanathan as her reserved and repressed best friend — your enjoyment likely hinges on how you connect with these characters and the film’s earnestly tender moments between them. Particularly by Coen standards, Drive-Away Dolls feels rough around the edges but it brings a fresh energy to its atypical queer romance and seems primed for cult appreciation rather than mainstream success.

7/10

QuickView: Cat Person (2023)

“Make peace with a little discomfort.”

Dr Enid Zabala

Cat Person occupies the same space of ambiguity in relationships as The Accusation but its tonal approach is more akin to Promising Young Woman, particularly in its use of genre expectations as a tool. Susanna Fogel avoids resorting to inner monologue by externalising Margot’s psychology through her fantasies — often using horror tropes — and this is particularly effective in demonstrating how women’s legitimate fears can be amplified disproportionately by the media they consume (“People choose to be scared,” opines her professor). As Margot’s relationship with Robert develops unsteadily, the audience and characters alike are trying to piece together what genre we are in. Both Emilia Jones and Nicholas Braun deftly play with this confusion: the age and height difference can make Robert threatening, yet he can seem clumsy and inexperienced compared to Margot. Films frequently use overlaid text messages but rarely do they capture the cadence of these conversations so well, including asynchronous engagement and the insecurity it elicits. Whilst Cat Person very much presents Margot’s subjective perspective of their interactions, it is provocative rather than preachy. Margot’s roommate might typically be the voice of reason but here highlights the toxicity of ostracising men and imposing rules on other women’s dating. The New Yorker short story that spawned the film was not the same viral sensation on this side of the Atlantic, and Cat Person may fare better without the comparison. There is enough universal familiarity in the awkward dating experience to make any viewer cringe, but that same universality is lost in the escalation of the last act which perhaps indicates an overextension of a taut short story. Until then, the ambiguity is deployed effectively, inducing anxiety and discomfort in the viewer — precisely the reaction Cat Person wishes to evoke.

7/10

"A film is a petrified fountain of thought."

(CC) BY-NC 2003-2023 Priyan Meewella

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