Fair Play

I saw Fair Play at Sundance 2023 in a crowd of cinema enthusiasts, making the theater experience electric and engaging! While Fair Play isn't my typical movie taste, it was exceptionally well done, with tension and stress building consistently from start to finish and exploding into all-out insanity and paranoia in the film's final act. My heart was pounding as the selfishness and jealousy of these characters devolved into pure hatred and disdain. Once the credits rolled, I finally felt like I could breathe for the first time in an hour! Domont did so much with so little, mastering suspense and keeping the audience on edge. With such arrogant and self-centered characters, it is hard to "enjoy" the film and the sexual content was unnecessary, but the craft and skill are undeniable, and it's no surprise why it was so well received at Sundance and scooped up so quickly by Netflix.

To be honest, Phoebe Dynevor's passionate performance in this film is quite seductive and different from her previous roles. Fortunately, the main focus of this film emphasizes that they are colleagues who are in love and whether they have different views regarding the only career advancement opportunity. If it were me, I would certainly wish my loved one the best and support her to climb higher. But I'm not the male lead, and I'm just an ordinary Taiwanese person. I'm not very familiar with whether Americans in the finance industry need to uncover secrets like in this film to advance their careers.

First of all, it's incredibly distracting that it's NOT actually filmed in NYC but in Serbia. I literally had to pause the movie and look up the filming location within the first 10 minutes or so, because the entire "feel" of the movie was NOT New York, and I wondered, "Are they supposed to be living somewhere overseas? But everyone has American accents..." It's amazing how unique NYC's entire energy is, that you can't really copy it by filming elsewhere. So, the whole film had an otherworldly feel to it, and that bugged me.

On to the plot: I was engaged for the most part, and wanted to see what was going to happen. The acting was good. By the time we got to the final scene, though, I was just underwhelmed. It needed a twist, or it needed to have gone much, much deeper into the characters' inner lives. It was kind of like a cross between a character-driven film and a plot-driven film, but neither of those was strong enough to give it the "oomph" it needed to make it a great film.

I read someone's review that they said the ending was what every power woman dreams of or something. What?? No. I'm a woman who is successful career-wise, and I don't relate to the female lead character at all (okay, maybe a little bit professionally, but not in her relationship with her fiancee). In fact, I would have just dumped the guy after he started pouting incessantly due to my promotion. I couldn't understand why the character wasted her time with him, and I found it tedious.

That character is also annoyingly terrible at communicating with her mother. The way she lets herself be led around by her is BEYOND annoying. I'm in my 50s and I wouldn't have ever let my mother do what her mother did... (hint: call off the unasked-for party like a grown-up!). How would a younger woman in today's world let that kind of 1950s behavior go on? It just doesn't make sense.

Overall, the movie was still entertaining. A decent effort and not a total waste of time. But it could have been SO much more, and left me kind of wondering, "What was the point of this movie?"

So many missed opportunities.

"Fair Play" had a chance to be a spicy erotic thriller about all sorts of gender power dynamics. But instead an incident late in the film puts one character in the unequivocal role of victim and the other in the unequivocal role of aggressor, and all nuance or ambiguity for the audience is stripped away. It doesn't help that the two leads have zero chemistry, and they're also both fairly reprehensible people as far as anything the film tells us about them (which isn't much). They're superficial and materialistic, and both are willing to sell their souls to a morally bankrupt profession. There's no rooting interest here, so I didn't much care who came out on top. The movie mostly just felt me leaving bad and like I needed to take a shower.

Grade: B-

The pair to compartmentalize their personal and work lives to some extent, but all hope of keeping work and love separate goes wrong when she receives a promotion he thought he was going to get. This is not the erotic thriller Netflix's algorithm so desperately would like it to be. There is sex, yes, and a psychological duel, but not so much perverse desire. It's ultimately an ugly film. Fair Play is about the sort of guy a lot of women are uncomfortably familiar with - the one who's perfect until he's not, who's an ally as long as he stays in power. It's about the sort of woman other women dread to become, the one who realises her own power is illusory only when it's far too late. Both the lead actors deliver good performances but in my opinion you don't know where the whole story is going..