M.F.A. (2017)

(On Cable TV, May 2021) At some point, we’re going to have a conversation about the leeway that modern movies give to the use of violence by disadvantaged characters. It’s not anything new (“Woman takes gory revenge over her rapists” has been a staple since at least 1978’s I Spit on Your Grave) and it’s not wholly unjustified, considering the systemic power imbalance being explored in those films. We are in a transitional power shift at the moment, and I consider overreach to be a normal part of such transitions. But there’s also a conversation coming about double standards and films like director Natalia Leite’s M.F.A. are going to be a part of it. For its first half, it laboriously goes through expected motions, as a young artist is raped, then accidentally kills her rapist and then goes on a revenge rampage against the surprisingly numerous neighbourhood rapists having walked free despite overwhelming evidence. It’s clear from the get-go that this is a film that deals in genre clichés all around: a protagonist who finds self-assurance in serial murder, violent rapists who need no further characterization; ineffectual intellectuals and academics who do nothing to help; and so on. Everything is predictable and familiar and rather annoying despite a subject matter that thinks it’s all cool and edgy. M.F.A. does become slightly more interesting in its last third, as things get a bit more complex and there are consequences to the protagonist’s increased thirst for murder. Still, there’s no mistaking where the film’s sympathies lie: de-escalation advocates are portrayed as naïve idiots, a psychiatrist assessing victims is threatened with violence for doing her work, and the police are portrayed as overreacting to the wrong cues. (It’s a wonder the protagonist doesn’t get gunned down in the film’s final sequence, but I have every confidence that had M.F.A. been shot in late 2020, its love for clichés would have led there.)  Watching the ending, I was struck with the same feeling as the hasty wrap-ups of Hays-Code era movies, where the villain had to be punished in time for the ending credits: “Yeah, kids, the cool crime of revenge killing is not something you should do at home, okay?” While no one will shed tears for the kind of hilariously unrepentant rapists used as knife-fodder in M.F.A., there’s not much more sympathy for the protagonist. It does occur to me that a truly transgressive filmmaker could create a scandal by gender-flipping M.F.A. and highlighting the incredible latitude given to the protagonist, but I’ll leave that to others. Still, looking at various recent movies who are surprisingly gleeful about violence as long as it’s committed by the right people to the wrong people (no matter if we redefine “good people” by identity rather than actions), I expect that we’re in for quite a wave of reactionary films in the next few years. Grab your popcorn (and possibly your barf bag), because that’s how movies go in periods of change.