Anna Kendrick takes over the director's chair for the first time and takes us on a film that is sometimes suspenseful, sometimes true crime - but most importantly, it brings a female perspective on the horrors that countless women have gone through in past decades and still go through in a world where sexism is so present. With a real and absurd case in 1970s Hollywood, the director has good ideas, but in my opinion the execution is somewhat inefficient, due to the editing that has abrupt cuts and time jumps, but the atmosphere of tension that never proves to be as effective as the soundtrack evokes.
We are introduced to Cheryl Bradshaw, a girl from New York who moves to Los Angeles to try her luck as an actress in the city that is the central hub of the industry. We follow her attempts at auditions, where she realizes that the people conducting the auditions are not people of a trustworthy nature. Here Kendrick already puts us inside the situation that is the main theme of this project, the difficulty that women were insulted, provoked and that even so they had to maintain their posture and swallow dryly, how she finds herself in a context where only men have control, and the power to decide the future of careers.
Soon after, we are introduced to our antagonist, Rodney Alcala, who introduces himself as a photographer and approaches women for photo shoots. He takes the women to isolated places to later commit his crimes, which were murders, something very similar to what would later happen here in Brazil with the case of the Maníaco do Parque, and so we meet the character who is the subject of the film. The editing alternates between events from the present and the future, which I didn't find interesting for the film, as some cuts were abrupt in the middle of scenes that had a good atmosphere of tension, or with passages that addressed more intimate aspects of our protagonist.
Although the title in Brazil does not give away any plot spoilers, and for those who have not seen any marketing material, the film gives great focus and conflict to one of the famous dating shows of that decade in the US, The Dating Game, something that for us would be similar to Silvio Santos' programs and the most recent segment on Rodrigo Faro's program - that is, putting strangers together to meet each other and "setting up" situations to form couples. Here the filmmaker already provokes the public with things like how the authorities of the time allowed a criminal like this to participate in reality shows and appear on television, even after several complaints, even with several reported cases with sketches and everything else. Here is another accurate criticism that Kendrick makes about the protection of men, towards their peers.
The Woman of the Moment is a good film, even though it is clear that the lack of budget did not allow for greater ambitions on the part of the production in the technical and visual elements of the film, and with the focus on closed environments or open shots of natural landscapes, the film brings a good vision of the horrors experienced by women who are almost always discredited in these narratives, but it fails in evoking the thriller, even though the characters who were victims express the horrible situations they went through, the film never demonstrates the real weight of the cruelties committed by Rodney.
Comments