Movie Review: Una

Una **** / *****

Directed by: Benedict Andrews.                                              

Written by: David Harrower based on his play Blackbird.

Starring: Rooney Mara (Una), Ben Mendelsohn (Ray), Ruby Stokes (Young Una), Riz Ahmed (Scott), Tobias Menzies (Mark).

 

Una is a film that will like make most viewers queasy – which is precisely its intent. It is a film about the after effects of rape – how the victim struggles with what happened for years, whereas the perpetrator is often able to rebuild their life, and go on as if nothing happened. Adapted from David Harrower’s acclaimed play Blackbird by the playwright himself, and directed by theater director Benedict Andrews, making his film debut, Una is anchored by three great performances and tells a story that is incredibly uncomfortable to watch – but also unforgettable.

 

The story involves Una (Rooney Mara) – a woman in her late 20s, who still lives at home with her mother, acts like a sullen teenager with her, and goes out to loud clubs, and has rough sex in the bathroom. We see her early with a picture that looks like its printed out of the internet as she packs herself into her car, and drives to a factory and asks where she meets with a man named Ray (Ben Mendelsohn) – who is thunderstruck to see her. He whisks her into the factory’s lunchroom – all fluorescent light and windows, the worse place imaginable to hide – and we start to understand how these two know each other. When she was 13, and he was 40, the two had a consensual affair – the fact that it was consensual doesn’t make Ray’s actions any less illegal or disgusting, but does explain Una’s complex feelings. We are reminded through the course of the movie that love and hate are not opposites – but flip sides of the same coin. Una is torn between her anger towards Ray for what he did to her – and her family – leaving her life in tatters, and hurt because she has never gotten the answer as to why he left her. He was convicted of the rape – spent four years in jail –but since getting out has changed his name, gotten a good job, and gotten married to a woman his own age. Their “affair” started with “innocent” flirting at a neighborhood BBQ – he was her neighbor, and a friend of her fathers – and ended when the two of them ran away together – although after they had sex in a B&B, he vanished, leaving her alone. Throughout much of the film, Una seems torn between her desire to seek vengeance on Ray, and perhaps her desire to be loved by him.

 

I haven’t seen Blackbird on stage, but it’s my understanding that the play is a two handed – taking place in one room, all between Una and Ray, and no one else. For the film, Harrower and Andrews “open up” the play, with some rather mixed results. The best decision they make is to include flashbacks, intercut throughout the film, that shows the “relationship” between Ray and Una (played by Ruby Stokes), in scenes that make it incredibly uncomfortable for the viewer to endure. We see how calm and reassuring Ray was, who deftly and subtly he seduces the naïve teenage girl. It helps put the scenes between Una and Ray as adults – the heart of the film – into perspective. People are likely to have wildly different reactions to Ray in the present (which will likely say more about themselves then the film) – because in the present, he tries to be soft spoken, calming and reassuring. He seems to legitimately care about Una – and assures him that he is not a pedophile – not an ongoing threat to anyone else around him. It was a onetime thing, and that’s all. Yet, it’s impossible to not see the connection between the tone he uses in the present – and the one he used in the past to seduce her in the first place. As the movie moves along, and he’s caught in more than one lie – including a fairly shocking one at the end – it’s becomes clear to me that he is a liar – others may disagree. Mendelsohn, who ever since Animal Kingdom in 2010 has become one of the great character actors alive (films like Killing Them Softly, The Place Beyond the Pines, Starred Up, Black Sea, Lost River, Mississippi Grind and Slow West may vary in quality – but he’s excellent in all of them – and that doesn’t even include his recent Emmy winning work on Bloodline – a Netflix show I keep meaning to check out) delivers a great performance here. He tries to maintain control of the situation, and every time he seems to lose it, he recalculates and pushes forward. In most movies, Mendelsohn’s performance would be the best thing – but Rooney Mara is perhaps even better as Una. Like Mendelsohn, Mara has become one of the best performers around – and one of the most versatile (her work in films like The Social Network, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Her, Side Effects, Carol and Kubo and the Two Strings is all great – and all very, very different). Here she alternates between angry and hurt – between moments where she’s seems to want to kill Ray, and others where she wants to collapse into her arms. In some ways, she is just as calculating as he is – she manipulates others into doing what she wants them to – often using sex. It’s a performance to brings to mind PTSD and how she cannot leave behind what happened. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the great work by young Ruby Stokes as a 13-year old Una – flattered by the attention, and not sure what to do. Her performance and Mara’s are calibrated together perfectly.

 

Not all the additions to the play however really work here. The film adds several other characters and subplots – Una happens to be visiting Ray on a day where, as foreperson in the factory, he will have to fire six employees – perhaps even the friendly Scott (Riz Ahmed) – the first person Una meets at the factory – who is also genuinely nice to her. When Ray refuses to do the firing – very publicly – the film spends more time than necessary with him, Una, Scott and Ray’s boss stalking around the factory, separately, trying to find each other. Again, this also just happens to be the day that Ray and his wife are having a big party at their house, which is, of course, where the film will culminate with others looking on. The heart of the movie is between Una and Ray – at TIFF where I saw the film, director Andrews said their relationship is one that can only ever happen in a bubble away from everyone else, a visual motif he uses throughout the film to isolate them. When there are others who are not the pair of them in the film, it suffers – you want to keep them in that bubble and not let the tension dissipate.

 

Overall though, that is a minor quibble with what is overall a very good film. The film will leave viewers shaken, and that is how it should be. We still do not talk about rape – and its effects – enough, and although I would love to see a version of this story written and directed by a woman – I think Una remains and interesting conversation starter, if nothing else.