No one could accuse writer and director Julia Jackman of lack of ambition. Her second feature, shot with the visual flair and deadpan drollery of Wes Anderson or Yorgos Lanthimos, is based on a graphic novel that reinterprets the One Thousand and One Nights as a queer fairy tale about a kingdom that suppresses women’s education in service of a cruel, birdlike deity, narrated by a personification of a violet moon…and it stars Charli XCX. As much as it sounds like a hotchpotch of clashing ideas and influences, in just 90 minutes Jackman miraculously manages to weave these disparate threads together into an imaginative, funny and genuinely affecting fable of queer female liberation.
After just a touch of table-setting featuring a Richard E. Grant cameo as the god known as Birdman, we’re flung into an unnamed kingdom where women are forbidden from reading or writing. It rather resembles an Elizabethan acid trip, all dark wood panelling, ruffs, pearls and puff sleeves lit by psychedelic shafts of purple light. Think The Favourite or the early sections of Orlando but set to a twinkly synth score.
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Noblewoman Cherry (Maika Monroe) must bear an heir or else she will be sentenced to hang by the Beak Brothers, a religious order that makes the Spanish Inquisition look positively cuddly. But her husband Jerome (Amir El-Masry) won’t consummate their marriage, and her devoted, enigmatic maidservant Hero (a pixie-like Emma Corrin) is her only companion.
Unbeknownst to either, Jerome and the roguish lord Manfred (Nicholas Galitzine) wager that in Jerome’s absence, Manfred will be able to seduce the sexually frustrated Cherry within one hundred nights. Galitzine is a treat here as this deliciously devious but not too bright interloper, giving a broader, even sillier version of his performance as a Jacobean social-climber in last year’s HBO series Mary and George.
Corrin and Monroe, who have great chemistry, wisely play it more straight (ahem) than Galitzine. Their erotically charged chess game begins; a secret signal between them has Hero thwart Manfred’s amorous advances by regaling them with a folk tale on each of those one hundred nights. This tale comes to life with lush, Pre-Raphaelite-esque visuals, as pop It Girl Charli XCX plays one of three sisters who resist patriarchal subjugation with their secret literacy. But should Cherry give in to the sin of her own pleasure by sleeping with Manfred, thereby securing an heir and saving her own life? Or will she be executed regardless because of her betrayal? It’s quite the predicament.
As long-winded and knotty as all of this sounds, the story unfolds at breakneck speed, with never a dull moment. Jackman deftly interweaves her multiple narrative threads and indulges (complimentary) in woozy, dreamlike montages of image and sound, as if the story of Cherry and Hero is part of a long lineage of tales of rebellious women echoing through the generations. She nails the tricky tonal balance of sincerity and humour, of intimacy and epic fantasy, culminating in a sweet but never saccharine alternative kind of happily ever after.
