{"id":242688,"date":"2025-10-22T04:38:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-22T04:38:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/242688\/"},"modified":"2025-10-22T04:38:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-22T04:38:09","slug":"julia-jackmans-colorful-fantasy-debut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/242688\/","title":{"rendered":"Julia Jackman\u2019s Colorful Fantasy Debut"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe Handmaid\u2019s Tale meets The Arabian Nights in Julia Jackman<\/a>\u2019s feature debut, a feminist fantasy that leans hard into whimsy while making some salient points about the place of women in the real world. Festivals have been generous to it so far, with both the Venice Film Festival\u2019s Critics\u2019 Week and the London Film Festival<\/a> giving it their closing-night slots. How it will fare in the real world is a moot point, however, and the film\u2019s arch aesthetic \u2014 imagine what Wes Anderson might do with a BBC budget, and less \u2014 is hardly a strong selling point. The film\u2019s flaws are pretty much all front-loaded into the almost aggressively twee prologue, and if you can handle that, the rest of the film should be plain sailing.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs per the graphic novel it\u2019s based on, the events of the film to follow occur in a parallel medieval world with three moons, a place that was created by a being called Kiddo. Kiddo intended for her subjects to live their lives as they wish, but her despotic father Birdman (Richard E. Grant<\/a>) muscled in on the act. As a result, his legacy is everywhere; bird imagery is pervasive, and the world is run by a masonic cult called the Beak Brothers who wear bird masks to obscure their faces.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnother of Birdman\u2019s idiosyncrasies is that the women in his daughter\u2019s world must marry and give their husbands a son, which brings us to the first of the two female leads in Jackman\u2019s movie: Cherry (Maika Monroe<\/a>), who is in her late 20s and every bit the eligible bride. As the film\u2019s unseen narrator (Felicity Jones<\/a>) attests (and Jackman shows), Cherry is \u201cBeautiful, obedient, good at chess and falconry\u201d. But what Cherry doesn\u2019t know is that she\u2019s about to change her world.<\/p>\n

\n\tBy this time, we are in that world\u2019s present day, and Cherry\u2019s recent marriage is already in trouble; not only has she not yet given birth, her husband Jerome (Amir El-Masry) is showing next to no interest, and, after a meeting with some higher-up within the Beak Brothers, she is effectively sentenced to death if no child is imminent. The reasons for Jerome\u2019s indifference are left vague, as is Cherry\u2019s attachment to her co-lead, Hero (Emma Corrin<\/a>), who is described as \u201ctechnically\u201d Cherry\u2019s maid. But though sexual fluidity is a running theme throughout the film, the overwhelming mood, at first, is one of innocence.<\/p>\n

\n\tJust as the pressure on Jerome is mounting, he gets a visit from an old friend, Manfred (Nicholas Galitzine). In actual, real life, Galitzine is something called a \u201cglobal fragrance ambassador\u201d for Armani, and that alone might explain a lot about his casting. Manfred is a traditional English rogue, the kind that puts his hands on his hips and snootily yells, \u201cHa-HAH!\u201d while tossing his hair \u2014 and the macabre reason for his sudden arrival is that his wife (\u201cR.I.P.\u201d) has just been executed for being unfaithful. He asks Jerome if he can stay a couple of nights, but Jerome surprises him by announcing that he is going away on business. He tells Manfred he can stay for a month, on the understanding that, if he succeeds in seducing Cherry, Jerome will hand over the castle and everything in it.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe creepy subtext of the bet is that there is something in it for both men and nothing for Cherry. \u201cWhen I win,\u201d boasts Manfred, \u201cI\u2019ll be right there with you to watch her hang.\u201d But if Jerome wins, all Manfred has to do is procure a child for him \u2014 after all, he talks proudly of knowing plenty of people with \u201cone to spare\u201d.<\/p>\n

\n\tMuch of the comedy from hereon comes from Manfred\u2019s predatory pursuit of Cherry, who is shocked (and faints) when he asks to see her boudoir, and her fears are not assuaged when he seemingly butchers a deer with his bare hands for lunch. Luckily, Hero is on hand, and as Jerome extends his stay ever longer \u2014 hence the 100 nights of the title \u2014 Cherry\u2019s maid offers to provide distractions. <\/p>\n

\n\tThese come in the form of a story that runs through the film until its climax, unfolding in parallel. Hero says it is The Story of the Dancing Stones, but it also tells the story-within-a-story of The League of Secret Storytellers, an underground society for women as founded by three sisters \u2014 Mina (Kerena Jagpal), Catarina (Olivia D\u2019Lima) and Rosa (singer Charli XCX<\/a>) \u2014 who disgraced themselves by doing something \u201csinful, wicked and forbidden for women\u201d. In other words, they could read and write (something that doesn\u2019t end well in either story).<\/p>\n

\n\tFrom here, the stage is set for Cherry\u2019s awakening, masterminded with wide-eyed economy by Corrin\u2019s gnomic Hero. It\u2019s cartoonish for sure, which Jackman \u2014 for better or for worse \u2014 doesn\u2019t really try to hide, and its agenda might seem a little on the nose. But as history keeps telling us, from Afghanistan outwards to the West and East, the suppression of women isn\u2019t going away any time soon.<\/p>\n

\n\tTitle: 100 Nights of Hero<\/a>
Festival: London; Venice (Critics\u2019 Week)
Director\/screenwriter: Julia Jackman, from the graphic novel by Isabel Greenberg
Cast: Emma Corrin, Nicholas Galitzine, Maika Monroe, Amir El Masry, Charli XCX, Kerena Jagpal, Olivia D\u2019Lima, Richard E. Grant, Felicity Jones
Sales agent: WME
Running time: 1 hr 30 mins<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Handmaid\u2019s Tale meets The Arabian Nights in Julia Jackman\u2019s feature debut, a feminist fantasy that leans hard…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":242689,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[72127,19905,72128,88,131661,133302,56151,67075,206,899,67825],"class_list":["post-242688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-100-nights-of-hero","tag-charli-xcx","tag-emma-corrin","tag-entertainment","tag-felicity-jones","tag-julia-jackman","tag-london-film-festival","tag-maika-monroe","tag-movies","tag-review","tag-richard-e-grant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242688\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/242689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}