3/2/2024 0 Comments Im your ladyShe harnesses Brosnahan’s vulnerability to startling effect in one of the film’s finest scenes, involving a friendly neighbor of the safe house ( Marceline Hugot) who might or might not be in on a ploy to capture and kill Jean. Hart is skillful when it comes to crafting tense scenarios in languid ’70s settings and cat-and-mouse chases. ![]() Soon, she finds herself on the road to a safe house somewhere with Harry and Cal (a magnetic Arinzé Kene), whose job is to protect her. “Where is Eddie,” she asks the men she doesn’t recognize. ![]() But she gets tossed into the snake pit one day when a group of strangers barge into her home in a nondescript city. Jean decides to mother him, no questions asked. She doesn’t even question it when Eddie turns up with a baby he calls Harry one day, completely out of the blue. She isn’t used to taking care of things on her own and doesn’t seem to know a whole lot about Eddie’s shady line of work. She puts a premium on her appearance and grooms herself to the nines as her perfect long blonde hair suggests. Jean is not much of a cook-she can barely handle frying a couple of eggs. There's something about a baby she was supposed to have with her husband Eddie, who seems to be gone a lot to dubious whereabouts. With startling economy, Hart and Horowitz trickle details about Jean’s life into the first act. Just then, the candy-colored “I’m Your Woman” title vividly appears in an unmistakable ‘70s fashion that would later on be amplified by a pitch-perfect production design of loud wallpapers and earth-toned furnishings, eye-popping costumes, and orange-tinted cinematography, as well as needle drops full of Aretha Franklin and Bobbie Gentry. That realization intensifies when she casually adds a line about her routine loneliness as the camera finally reveals her-a beautiful vision stretched on an outdoor chaise, wearing a shocking magenta robe and heels, while sipping a drink, perhaps on an unusually early part of the day. Before she becomes a “Gloria” of sorts-the savvy, on-the-run John Cassavetes character played by Gena Rowlands-we meet Jean’s soft voice when she gently but matter-of-factly states, “Eddie and Jean met, and fell in love.” But something in her tone tells us promptly that this isn’t a love story she’s about to tell. Vigorously played by the terrific Brosnahan, Jean certainly feels like the product of a similar mindset that yearns to see something original in the commonplace. ![]() Needless to say, this achievement is hardly surprising for a filmmaker who has been steadily building a noteworthy and diverse body of work in the recent years, outfitting familiar genres-from superhero pictures (“ Fast Color”) to intimate character studies (“ Miss Stevens”) and even Disney fare (“ Stargirl”)-with her own unique spin. And she thoroughly succeeds in her mission, putting forth a fresh noir-adjacent thriller that deals with womanhood, motherhood, and race with a gracious sense of honesty. But thankfully, “I’m Your Woman” never approaches that territory, since Hart (with her co-writer, producer, and husband Jordan Horowitz) concerns herself more with gifting the genre an exciting and under-explored point of view, much like “ Widows” recently did in a contemporary setting. ![]() If she had stopped there, “I’m Your Woman” would have been painfully limited in its artistic scope, and perhaps even fallen into a faux-feminist “strong woman” trap-you know, by becoming one of those films with a one-dimensional female lead whose strength is often synonymous with her physicality. It’s important to note that Hart has bigger aims here than just broadly challenging the masterworks of a traditionally male-skewing field.
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