Crime Today News
I want to leave before something terrible happens, says a guest at a party that has been fraught with intrigue, tension and nastiness. Her host responds, the best time to leave a party is after something terrible has happened and the police have arrived.
The evening is indeed long and portentous. Mean things are said and done. People behave honestly and therefore badly. The threat of a cataclysmic event swirls around as easily as alcohol. It’s all a game for the host Hedda (Tessa Thompson), who moves between tables and rooms with a surefootedness that conceals her nervousness.
Hedda has invited people over to her new house in the countryside, a hulking mansion that she and her academic husband George (Tom Bateman) can ill-afford. Hedda plans to extract the full price of her social climbing from her guests, which include a professor whom Tom wants to impress so that he can get a cushy teaching position, and Hedda’s former lover, who is George’s professional rival.
Eileen (Nina Hoss) walks into a situation where her current partner Thea (Imogen Poots) is present, as is Hedda’s resentment.
Nia DaCosta’s Hedda is an absorbing character study, seething with grasping women and self-serving men. The 107-minute film is out on Prime Video.
DaCosta’s short but wildly varied filmography includes the supernatural horror Candyman and the superhero adventure The Marvels. Hedda is based on the Henrik Ibsen play Hedda Gabler from 1891. Among DaCosta’s contributions is to change Hedda’s ex-lover to a woman from a man – which also adds a layer of queerness to the proceedings.
Ibsen’s anti-heroine, one of the most complex characters in fiction, has endured over the decades, adapting herself to any society that reduces women to their wiles. In DaCosta’s screenplay, the quest of women for survival, relevance and control is strong, palpable and bordering on desperation.
Like its literary source, Hedda has no easy answers or solutions to the behaviour of its characters. Instead, the movie invites viewers to see them as both targets and perpetrators of the very order they seek to upturn.
The movie is set in the 1950s, and plays out entirely in a Downton Abbey-type English estate. The action moves between various nooks and crannies. The camera accompanies Hedda as she schemes away to secure the best possible deal for her husband while also re-setting her terms of engagement with her former lover.
Always ready with blandishments and putdowns, Hedda’s deadly silk-and-steel approach is beautifully portrayed by Tessa Thompson. Nina Hoss is terrific as Eileen, whose war of attrition against Hedda and Thea peaks in a spectacular outburst. The film has been building up to this moment from the time we see Hedda, a smug and secretive smile on her face, plotting nothing less than anarchy.
Also start the week with these films:
In ‘Raat’, a never-ending night of terror
Brotherhood and betrayal in ‘Garuda Gamana Vrishabha Vahana’
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