Carey Mulligan), is on a quest to right a terrible wrong from
her past, one “good guy” at a time.
“Every week, I go to a club,” says Cassandra. “I act like I’m
too drunk to stand. And every week, a nice guy comes over
to see if I’m OK.” Once a brilliant med-school student, now
a dropout living at home, Cassandra spends her evenings
teaching the men of her town a dark lesson. But when
someone from her past reappears and throws all her best laid
plans to the wind, she has to decide whether to continue,
or finally put the past behind her.
The subject matter is sticky, leaning very much towards
the greyest end of the grey area, but that does not mean
that the film itself needs to be grey. To the contrary, Promising
Young Woman is a riot of pastel and neon, matt lipsticks and
glossy nail polish. It is romantic and blackly comic, with
a twisted pop soundtrack made up of Charli XCX, Britney
and (crucially) Paris Hilton.
Humour and beauty go hand-in-hand with horror, in life
as in the cinema. My favourite films – To Die For, The Beguiled,
Heathers – have a lot of sugar with their poison. Just because
something is deadly serious, it does not mean it needs to
be Deadly Serious. And just because Cassandra is on a very
dark path, it doesn’t mean she has to wear the sleeves of a
hoodie pulled over her hands and a pair of leggings that have
started to sag around the knees. Her nails aren’t bitten to the
quick, and her mascara isn’t smudged. Quite the opposite:
Cassie knows exactly how useful clothes can be, especially
in a crisis, and her outfits are chosen with the precision and
stealth of a sniper.
It’s always intrigued me that a love of fashion is often
used as a shorthand for a certain type of airhead vapidity.
There is still the pervasive idea that clothes are silly, and
to like them is to be silly yourself. But the clothes we
wear and how we choose to wear them have a language
of their own. And, like all methods of expression
(especially those as hard to police and as open to
interpretation as fashion), our clothes can be powerfully
subversive, a way for women to be defiant, to assert their
independence, to send signals, to divert attention, to
camouflage, to mislead, to frighten, to seduce.
For Promising Young Woman, we needed a costume designer
who would implicitly understand this and, luckily, Nancy
Steiner agreed to come on board. One of the greatest costume
designers working today, responsible for the iconic clothes
of (among many other things) Lost In Translation, The Virgin
Suicides and the Twin Peaks revival, Nancy is the queen of
subversive, ironic dressing, of the uncanny feminine, and
of creating a wardrobe to be both desired and feared.
And so, for a character as dark and enigmatic as Cassandra,
we decided to focus on bright colours, girly patterns and
tactile, soft materials. It is a wardrobe made up of breezy
gingham, ribbons, pink mohair and baby-blue jeans. It’s an
inviting, butter-wouldn’t-melt look that allows Cassie
to expertly hide in plain sight, and deflect any difficult
questions by seeming innocuous, sweet and trustworthy.
Because women who care about how they dress are... kind
of dumb, right? And definitely nothing to be scared of.
I mean, who would be scared of a woman in a floral dress,
with her pretty blonde hair spun into a braid, tied together with
a ribbon? Who would suspect her? Who would see her coming?
You wouldn’t, would you? Not before it was too late. n
Promising Young Woman will be in cinemas on 17 AprilHumour and
beauty go
hand-in-hand
with horror.
My favourite
films have a lot
of sugar with
their poisonAbove: Britney Spears at the 2001 VMAs.
Fennell’s film-style inspirations include:
right, from top, Clueless; Heathers;
To Die For; Bonnie and Clyde; and...... above, from top: The Virgin
Suicides; Grease 2; and Pretty
in Pink. Below: GreaseGETTY IMAGES; SHUTTERSTOCK118VIEWPOINT04-20-Viewpoint-Promising-Young-Women_2031973.indd 118 11/02/2020 12:17