There’s a remarkable early scene in which Cal and Jean are interrogated by a white police officer, clearly rattled by the sight of a Black man and a white woman traveling together in the same car. And if her domestic frustrations are telegraphed with perhaps one too many shots of her struggling to fry an egg, the gradual awakening of her own maternal instincts - and her embrace of a child she’s still getting to know - is among the picture’s subtlest satisfactions. It’s all quite the wake-up call for Jean, who at one point finds herself alone in a way she’s never been before, with only little Harry to keep her company. Hart can build suspense with the smallest of gestures, as when a friendly-nosy neighbor (an excellent Marceline Hugot) comes a-knocking. Warning Jean never to lower her guard, Cal ushers her into a menacing world of near-death escapes and not-so-safe houses. Soon she’s escaping into the night with her baby, Harry (played by Justin and Jameson Charles), and an armed protector, Cal (Arinzé Kene, a charismatic brooder), who is intent on keeping her one step ahead of some unnamed pursuers. Jean knows nothing of her husband’s business, which is both a mercy and a liability, and her ignorance persists even when his latest gambit goes terribly wrong. One of the virtues of “I’m Your Woman” (which Hart co-wrote with her husband and producer, Jordan Horowitz), is its adherence to the present tense (emphasis on the “tense”) and its poker-faced refusal to even foreshadow what’s to come. He also said all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun, an aphorism that will prove equally relevant here.īut I’m getting far ahead. It was Jean-Luc Godard who once said the best way to criticize a film is to make another one. Rather than immersing us in the sordid details of Eddie’s racket, the story leaves us stranded on the outside with Jean, a character who might have been quickly sidelined in a different movie: ignored, smacked around, maybe killed off. That image is an obvious allusion to the ending of “The Godfather.” But it marks only the beginning of “I’m Your Woman,” Julia Hart’s beautiful, engrossing and potently subversive new crime thriller. Jean has learned not to ask too many questions - not now, as she accepts the child with shocked resignation, and not later, when Eddie closes the door on her with a smile, retreating into the next room with his gangster buddies. They’ve also paid for the infant Eddie mysteriously brings home and plops into her arms that morning: “He’s our baby,” he says, and that’s that. (The lustrous surfaces are the work of production designer Gae Buckley, costume designer Natalie O’Brien and cinematographer Bryce Fortner.) His dirty dealings have paid for her fabulous outfits and their comfortable house, with its ostentatious wallpaper and period-perfect yellows, browns and beiges. She knows that much at least, and is content not knowing much more. Jean’s husband, Eddie (Bill Heck), is a thief. It’s the ’70s, as you can deduce from her hexagonal sunglasses, the sound of Bobbie Gentry crooning on the soundtrack and even the reverse-zoom movement of the camera as it slowly pulls back, revealing - in the first of many crucial shifts in perspective - the smallness and stultifying loneliness of Jean’s world. She’s lounging in her backyard in a leafy Pennsylvania suburb, smoking, nursing a drink and trying to rip off the tag still clinging to the fur-fringed gown she’s wearing. When we first meet Jean (Rachel Brosnahan), she seems the very picture of a mobster’s trophy wife: beautiful, sullen, entitled, expendable.
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