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>Guadagnino’s empathy for upper-class agony (I Am Love, A Bigger Splash, Call Me by Your Name, Queer) feels intimate, but he doesn’t go all the way. He employs some elegant narrative trickery: blurred focus, overheard off-screen direction (“Cut!”), and an ironizing atonal music score. Yet, instead of closer analysis, Garrett’s slick script shies away from the exposé she sets up. Accused of being aloof and impenetrable by her porn-addicted husband, Alma confesses her own failings and hypocrisy, and regrets that her “rottenness was seen” before she could “expunge it.” Such wordplay inflates and trivializes everything the film was meant to reveal.
>It all comes down to the very egotistical class defensiveness the film ought to explicate. Alma and Maggie anticipate mutual fealty and then misconstrue it. Roberts’s aged, drawn look contrasts with Edebiri’s callow insensitivity, but both modern types are predatory and repellant (as if Garrett poised Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler against Ibsen’s Nora). They struggle with understanding and forgiving each other, but shared victimhood (“Higher education is run by white men”) ultimately distances them — from each other, from others, and from us.
>Todd Solondz’s groundbreaking Storytelling comes to mind in an early classroom scene when Guadagnino and Garrett initiate a philosophical question: “What determines the moral worth of a nation?” But the Ivy League narcissism in After the Hunt provides no answer.
