From McCarthyism to #MeToo, you could be next

Insists the last film of the very productive Luca Guadagnino in which the current, exhausting, militant and vehement social polarizationprevents us from seeing the forest of nuances and contradictions that lie ahead. And around. And within ourselves. Almost like a suicidal act, Guadagnino’s film sacrifices itself as the perfect example of your own thesis: she came out beaten from the last one Venice Festival; too equidistant for some, too gentlemanly for others, too woke – who knows – for some clueless person in the room. He positioning that requires criticism becomes witch hunt more in a meaning of ours than of the film itself. And there is Guadagnino’s first victory, who manages to prove his point. Ambiguity is seen as cowardice, rather than discursive terrain. And we are all looking for the mistakes of decisions, conscious and subconscious, to point out the true hidden nature of the author, ready to point the finger.

What would you do if your best friend was accused of rape? This question could be the logline of witch hunta drama with touches of thriller university student with whom Guadagnino gets into the puddle of the cancellationthe great garden of our days. Or the great battlefield, rather. The scream queens on college campuses are no longer young girls on the run from a serial killer, but male and female teachers fleeing from a serial canceller.

It is interesting that the original title (After the Hunt), unlike Spanish, does not refer to the hunt itself, but to the time afterward, when the torches have been lowered and tempers have cooled. That’s why Guadagnino bothers to film a final coda, five years after the events around which it moves witch huntto wonder if it was worth it to the characters that attempt at mutual destruction when they are already… on to something else.

Julia Roberts is Soul in witch hunta Yale professor in the philosophy department. Guadagnino portrays very well – as always – that intellectual, bourgeois class with European interests who likes to lecture, drink – a lot, all the time everyone has a glass of alcohol in their hand – and border on the wrong. “Don’t let what’s right stop you from doing what’s right,” one of the characters says. Alma has a psychiatrist husband (wonderful Michael Stuhlbarg) who idolizes her to the point of conscious submission, lives in an inspirational apartment avant garde which probably costs a fortune and a half and fights for a professorship at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. As a roommate and friend he has Hank (Andrew Gardfield), a type of working class rebellious with the system, who has taken a lot of work and brain to find the crack that has allowed him to rise in class, and a seducer who likes to border and/or break the rules. And who also seeks to achieve the financial security that a permanent place at Yale offers.

Students and teachers mingle at after-meal dinners. Everyone drinks and talks about Hegel, Heidegger or Nietzsche. Teachers find it gratifying to be admired, revered, and have their egos fulfilled. To the students, be the chosen ones. Admiration and desire they can get confused in the malleable youth brains in a relationship of symbolic power – that which Bourdieu concretized in spell, seduction, charisma – that with the #MeToo changes: what meanings and perceptions do we accept as legitimate and natural? Which ones no longer? How many of the artists elevated today by the canon would not stand up to superficial analysis of your personal life or your ideas? What will happen when there is a change of political and social wind, like the one we already seem to be experiencing?

This power play is broken when one of the students, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), denounces one of the teachers for having – it is understood – forced her – because she never dares to specify the story. And Guadagnino knows how, in the face of inability to know reliably Whether what happened in a space where only the two people were is rape or not, the rest of the world tends to fill in the hypothesis with our own prejudices and our own personal agenda.

The main problem of witch huntno matter how much moral ambiguity is attributed to Guadagnino, is, precisely, the lack of ambiguity in the portrait of the character of Maggie; we can feel that the director and screenwriter Nora Garrett They have made it from scraps of their deepest antipathies. Maggie presents herself as a privileged person from a multi-millionaire family – the main benefactor of the University – who depicts herself as a victim of the system – for being a woman, African-American, the partner of a non-binary person -, ignoring her class advantages. Guadagnino also portrays her as a mediocre student, while her adversaries are carefree, carefree and innate lucidity. There is a palpable contempt of the creators for their character. And this disfavors the game proposed by Guadagnino and Garrett. Nor does it work in favor of the script decisions around the way in which Maggie learns a secret from the past of her favorite teacher, Alma, but which then gives rise to a reflection on the abuse of power in teacher-student admiration relationships.

Beyond Guadagnino’s positioning, which is clear, every witch It is a frenetic portrait of social behavior in cases of cancellation. Of thea “spiral of silence”, which the German Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann theorized in the late seventies and which talks about how we adapt our behavior to the prevailing current of what is acceptable and what is not. How certain classes have adopted the performative suffering as a model of identity -according to Guadagnino-, how we are afraid to express our opinion so as not to be canceled on the rebound, how we intend to build a world of “rounded edges” to avoid discomfort, and how we are willing to let a single person atones for historical and systemic pain.

Con a beautiful photograph full of details, witch hunt It is a movie related to Warehouse (2022) but Todd Fieldbut it lacks the subtlety and elegance displayed by the film starring Cate Blanchett. Guadagnino tries to spin the film with a couple of final revelations that once again make shake the spectator’s hypothesesin its attempt to make the public participate in that moral judgment about the protagonists. Witch Hunt maintains continuous tension with Julia Roberts immersed in a swarm of moral decisions gasping like a fish out of water to survive. Both Garfield and she are positioning themselves in the Oscar race in a Hollywood that is now fighting to survive the reverse witch hunt. From McCarthyism to #MeToo, you could be next. According to Guadagnino, of course.

Insists the last film of the very productive Luca Guadagnino in which the current, exhausting, militant and vehement social polarizationprevents us from seeing the forest of nuances and contradictions that lie ahead. And around. And within ourselves. Almost like a suicidal act, Guadagnino’s film sacrifices itself as the perfect example of your own thesis: she came out beaten from the last one Venice Festival; too equidistant for some, too gentlemanly for others, too woke – who knows – for some clueless person in the room. He positioning that requires criticism becomes witch hunt more in a meaning of ours than of the film itself. And there is Guadagnino’s first victory, who manages to prove his point. Ambiguity is seen as cowardice, rather than discursive terrain. And we are all looking for the mistakes of decisions, conscious and subconscious, to point out the true hidden nature of the author, ready to point the finger.