![]() ![]() Much of the violence is depicted off-screen and we watch Jean stumble upon its awful consequences, again linking up with the perspective of a bystander to the careening violence and mayhem from her romantic attachment to a life of crime. ![]() There are violent outbursts from time to time, but much like You Were Never Really Here (the two of these movies would make a good double-feature, folks), the violence is far from glorified and often denied to the viewer. We're on the run with this woman, trying to make sense of the plight as we go, and being trapped in a position of limited information is an intriguing and relatable dash of realism. We're used to criminals neglecting their molls, and I'm Your Woman declares its allegiance right in the title. Admittedly, some will find this to be rather boring and a lacking perspective, but I thought the approach of director/co-writer Julia Hart (Stargirl) was to highlight the perspective of a character often taken for granted and forgotten in gangster cinema and its celebration of doomed antiheroes. Every scene when she's been left alone and sees a car coming closer, every knock on the door, it raises the suspense because your mind, like hers, is questioning everything. We as the audience are left very much in the dark with Jean, and this precious little information allows us to very strongly feel her paranoia and anxiety. He tasks Cal (Arinze Kene) to drive Jean and her baby out of town, watch over her, and wait until the heat dies down or everyone else just ends up dead.Īnd with that, the movie is off to a gallop and Jean doesn't know what's happened to her life, only that it's bad, and she doesn't know where her husband may be, or even if he's alive, but she's told that people will be coming for her to get to him or to punish him, and so she must be whisked away in the middle of the night into hiding. One of his associates barges into her home in the middle of the night, bloodied, and tells her that Eddie is gone and she needs to likewise be leaving in a hurry. Another day, her husband goes out with some friends and never comes back. Where did this baby come from? Jean cannot say but she chooses to raise this child as her own son. One day Eddie (Bill Heck) comes home with a baby that he declares is theirs. Jean (Rachel Brosnahan) is married to a man who she knows does some very bad things. It's a refreshing and modern take that works as moody paranoia thriller just as much as it does a subversion of them. I'm Your Woman imagines a typical crime story but from a very human perspective, focusing on the wife who has to deal with the confusion and fallout from her husband's misdeeds. We've been inured to gangster cinema for decades and love following the criminal antics of bad men without fully thinking about the collateral damage on the periphery of their story. I'm Your Woman does for the gangster/crime genre what You Were Never Really Here did for the loner revenge thriller, namely demystify popular tropes and find a humanity often missing below the surface. ![]()
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