After the Hunt
Directed by Luca Guadagnino
New Haven's Edge of the Woods reusable grocery bags have officially made it out of the shadows beneath your situationship’s kitchen sink and onto the big screen. One of those classic green-inked beige bags plays a breakout role in the new film After the Hunt by director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, Challengers).
I watched the movie at Cinemark in North Haven Thursday afternoon. During the film I caught glimpses of New Haven among beautiful cinematography, a gripping soundtrack, and an unfortunately overwrought plot.
The story is set within the ivory towers of Yale, meaning it is also set in New Haven. For proof, you can look to the Atticus Cafe mug on main character Alma’s desk, the food trucks along scenes of Long Wharf, or the organic grocery bag Alma uses to give her student Maggie leftovers from a fancy dinner party.
In the movie, Alma, a philosophy professor at Yale, struggles with clashes of identity after Maggie makes an unwelcome disclosure, forcing the career thinker to contemplate harder than she’s ever had to contemplate before.
Race is included in these analyses, though it feels reluctant. The film mentions a couple times that Maggie is Black, which the audience can see, and doesn’t take it much further than that. Maggie’s race is folded into markers of the new generation, along with other students’ queerness and disability, as if these realities were trends. Alma, along with almost every other character, is white.
The movie stumbles around mentions of class. “Hover, don’t sit,” Alma tells colleague Kim when she needs to use the bathroom at New Haven dive bar Three Sheets. “Rich kids are filthy.” Alma herself is rich, and the patronage of the bar is not defined in the movie.
This leaves the tension to center on gender and generations, with Alma torn between allegiances to either side. We see her switch from laughing with colleagues at Gen Z’s sensitivity to bristling at a male student’s assumption that her success is a result of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion measures), tossing her back on the same team as Gen Z, fellow woman Maggie.
Most importantly, the film validates that the all-you-can-eat lunch buffet at Tandoor on Chapel and Howe used to be $9.95! I think about that delicious deal every time I step foot in the place, not that the new prices (at some point around $14, now $17.95) have deterred me. The deal is for a buffet, so perhaps the real challenge is on the customer to step up their appetite to a new economy.
The characters in After the Hunt have noticeable appetites themselves: for love, sexual gratification, pills, cigarettes, candy. Their uncontrollable urges drive the action, to the detriment of the story. The characters switch from soft to aggressive in an instant, invoking power plays in order to get what they want. When Alma’s mild-mannered husband is unsatisfied by Maggie’s dinner conversation, he abruptly leaves and blasts music from another room, which lasts until the end of the scene.
Rather than explore this, the movie goes on to repeat the pattern in different keys. It was difficult for me to make sense of a story where no one seemed aware of what they were doing.
I’m biased, as I’ve been a fan of Maggie’s actor Ayo Edebiri since her early comic beginnings. But I venture to guess the movie could have hit a more resonant note if it had explored Maggie’s inner world a little—or at all, really.
Maggie manages some golden, incisive digs in back-and-forths with Alma, which might appear vindicating. In the end, though, they mostly serve as a cathartic, moral dressing-down for the wayward philosophy professor’s benefit. Alma leaves hurt but cleansed, one step closer to finally getting it. Maggie leaves …wait, where is Maggie?
Wherever she is, however she’s handling it, the camera is not catching it. Maggie appears as Alma sees her: weeping, impossibly wise, or simply nonexistent.
The film, constrained by an Alma-focused frame of reference that sees honesty as punishment and silencing as sacred duty, must draw from somewhere to explain why Maggie would possibly want to punish Alma. A tall order for a character so underdeveloped.
Well, there’s one thing. Maggie is gay. And although there is nothing in the plot to paint her as impulsive (if anything, she is pointedly hesitant and cautious), enough people in the story are driven by their vices that the tendency is teased as a core human characteristic. Tiny hints from the opening scenes blossom into a third-act subplot about Maggie’s psychosexual attraction to Alma, which is not reciprocated.
By the end of the movie, Alma learns some life lessons. They are old lessons, ones that don’t leave viewers with much to dissect. Alma thinks she is being punished by warring societal clans (her students, for siding with professors—or women, for siding with men—or men, for siding with women), but it turns out she is really punishing herself for not speaking up in her own life. All I could think was, “Collective Consciousness did it better.”
I saw the local theatre troupe’s rendition of playwright Eleanor Burgess’ work The Niceties last year. The similarities in plot structure were enough to make me wonder if Guadagnino or screenwriter Nora Garrett might have seen the same play.
If not, maybe they should have. Like the film, The Niceties features a young Black woman student and an older white woman professor in the humanities at an Ivy League institution, illustrating the professor’s increasingly unstable oscillations from well-meaning mentor to hostile below-the-belt hitter as the two argue with each other. Also like the film, the play takes a time jump, revisiting the pair after things go south for the professor (in both stories, as you can already guess, she’ll be just fine).
Unlike After the Hunt, Collective Consciousness’ production of The Niceties did not feel like an investment of audience interest in the white professor’s personal development. It drew timely conclusions about political radicalization of youth and tension between generations, but whether the professor even understood was not so relevant.
As a lover of many kinds of movies, my own level of criticism for After the Hunt surprised me. In trying to give it a fair shake, I wondered to what extent the film was self-aware; was there any chance the emptiness I felt as the credits rolled was by design?
It seems the filmmakers at least considered this question. In one scene, two men (some of the only people of color in the film besides Maggie) hang out for a smoke by their car at Long Wharf, noticing Alma in one of her lowest moments. It feels like an attempt at stepping back toward the big picture, acknowledging that the events of the story belong to a tiny, self-contained bubble.
The attempt, though, doesn’t quite land. For all its efforts to be complicated and real, the film feels like a fable for Alma alone. By staying zoomed in on her lash-outs and the aftermath, the perspective of After the Hunt limits itself by the same rigid parameters it sets out to provoke.
