When crafting her feature debut, writer-director Chloe Domont sought to create a messy workplace drama with thrills—something people would fight about after watching. She wanted to challenge the belief that “success is a zero-sum game” and to indict the idea that “masculinity is an identity.” With those goals in mind, I’m calling Fair Play a Victory Royale. What I won’t do is tell you whether you should like it or not. So much gets lost when we start arguing about what we like. Why? Because we can like trash or dislike the goods. That’s the duality of opinion. You can never be wrong about your opinion but you can easily miss the facts. I love feelings, they are valid. but today I want to focus on craft. Once again, you can call me Schrödinger’s Critic.
About the movie. On one side of Fair Play, we have Phoebe Dynevor as Emily. On the other side is Alden Ehrenreich as Luke, her lover and the man who becomes her biggest opponent. Beyond that, I can’t set this up any better than the logline from Netflix (whoever wrote this did the thing): An unexpected promotion at a cutthroat hedge fund pushes a young couple’s relationship to the brink, threatening to unravel far more than their recent engagement.
“More than being a film about female empowerment, this is a film about male fragility.”
–Chloe Domont
Despite its flammable sex scenes, its progressive yet misogynistic bosses, the way it pitches finance firms as gladiatorial, and its diagram of the breakdown of a relationship, Fair Play is a cage match. The couple comes to blows in multiple ways, both figurative and physical, and it is intense. The style and tone of the film take us back to 80s–early 2000s burners like Basic Instinct (1992), Fatal Attraction (1987), and Unfaithful (2002)—a genre called psychosexual thrillers. Yet Fair Play isn’t the same, Domont flips the genre like a gender-swapped cosplay. In her feature debut, the fuse gets lit early. Emily and Luke become combatants in a cold-blooded game of achievement when she commits the crime of getting a promotion he thought he deserved (if you’re reading that last bit with sarcasm, you’re locked in). Their entire lives devolve from there and from moment to moment you’ll ask yourself: Who is the opps (the opposition) here? Domont never tells you and she never picks sides but instead leaves you to pick your poison. Because the poison is the point.
What I mean is, when a person seeks to break oppressive systems from the inside, there is a danger of becoming the thing they hate. You could find yourself playing the game. That’s the trap Emily falls into in the second act. I won’t spoil anything but Chloe Domont is ferocious in her dissection of what it means to be a woman at the top of a high-stakes industry. Wait, that’s too focused. Honestly, it’s rough for women at the top of every male-dominated industry.
Women are often punished for succeeding. I watched a sister-friend upend her entire life because she started making more money than her husband and he couldn’t handle it. I’ve seen women brought in to fix a company’s problems, succeed, and suddenly be blamed for something they had nothing to do with, then get pushed out so the men could take it from there. I know women, who were pristine in their behavior, but still got accused of rising the ranks through use of their bodies. Some industries are cutthroat, true, but for women it’s pretty much all of them.
“How can we dismantle the link between male fragility and female empowerment?”
That is a quote from Domont’s conversation with fellow writer-director Rian Johnson, and I need to know the answer. I’ve talked with so many women who have been scapegoated, hyper-sexualized, harassed, or pushed out—all for the crime of being great at their jobs, and thus making men feel bad. Domont questions, “How can women learn to embrace their successes without feeling like they need to undermine them or feeling like it’ll hurt them on some level? Or tiptoeing around them?” Again I need to know. It is a problem we haven’t solved. One you see peeking through the fun movies like Barbie, where toxic masculinity easily takes over Barbieland, and The Barbies put the Kens’ feelings above their own, without receiving any apologies for the destruction wrought by “the guys.”
“I wanted to lean into the thriller genre to explore the themes—the dangers of male inferiority and all the ways in which women are forced to play ugly to survive.”
Fair Play isn’t fun or fluffy, it is a stiletto heel concealing a poisoned blade—it’s uncomfortable to watch because it’s too real. Women at the top of their fields grapple with the weight or morality versus the shine of success, but they must also choose how best to protect themselves. Does that mean rebellion or total assimilation?
Some people call Fair Play a horror movie. I get it. Others question whether the film finds female empowerment in emasculation. That I don’t get. Crying, mistreatment, or gaslighting aren’t forms of emasculation, unless you somehow believe those things are inherently feminine—they are not, they are human problems left unsolved. Yet we have to question, why the pain placed on women in the workplace is suddenly called emasculation when it happens to men in the same forum? Those abuses are dehumanizing. Period. Yet if you’re paying attention to the language and the discomfort felt when watching men face the issues that are commonplace for women; it’s clear that we’ve gendered both the pain and the predatory. Damn. That is the hypocrisy of patriarchal thinking. That’s the poison Domont puts in a chalice and forces us to drink with Fair Play. It ain’t nice. It ain’t pretty. And it isn’t meant to be.
The transformation Emily goes through while trying to sustain her position, ambition, and her relationship is a dangerous slide. As I mentioned, attempting to change a toxic environment from the inside can leave you infected by those same toxins. Domont says she wanted, “to lean into the thriller genre to explore the themes—the dangers of male inferiority and all the ways in which women are forced to play ugly to survive.”
That’s the reason her movie is called: Fair Play. The same as the question of emasculation, are we still as happy with gender roles when who gets hurt is reversed?
[insert me laughing maniacally here]
RIOTUS 