About a month ago, my housemates and I decided to plan a girly outing to the cinema – popcorn, pic ‘n’ mix and 50 Shades of Grey. For most of us, the negative publicity surrounding the film had already prompted a change in opinion about the franchise that we had previously seen as a bit of ‘harmless fun.’ However, tickets bought, we went along anyway, enticed by a mixture of curiosity and the prospect of a topless Jamie Dornan. As we took our seats and sat through a series of outrageously sexualised adverts, I was surprised by the diversity of the audience around me. Amongst groups of females of all ages there were also a surprising number of couples, and if the queues outside the screens were anything to go by, people were coming in their masses. Whatever their motivations for seeing the film however, I can’t help but suspect that they were disappointed. For me, the film proved anticlimactic on almost every level.
Dornan, who was so smoulderingly menacing in BBC’s The Fall, gave a performance that was disappointingly wooden. Reports say that he felt compelled to apologise to his co-star before and after their most extreme scenes together, and this discomfort was palpable onscreen. Dakota Johnson plays the role of Anastasia slightly more convincingly, but sadly, the character is so clichéd and one-dimensional that it’s hard not to find her performance irritating.
The presentation of story as a ‘chic-flick’ style romance, with Ana and Christian soaring through the sky to the swelling score of Ellie Goulding’s ‘Love Me Like You Do’ was, in my view, a little ridiculous, especially considering that Ana is not permitted to sleep in Christian’s bed, touch him, or participate in anything normally considered as romantic without his prior approval. The elements of emotional and physical abuse that underpin their relationship are made even more ominous as a result of their neat incorporation into this so-called ‘love story’ – is it really acceptable to present a relationship this unhealthy as an ideal of romance to which we should aspire?
Many of Christian’s comments had the whole cinema gasping, and not for the reasons they had anticipated. He threateningly reprimands Ana for getting ‘too drunk’ (‘If you were mine, you wouldn’t be able to sit down for a week’), and in response to Ana’s disbelief that any women would want to engage in his very particular kind of relationship, he nonchalantly explains their motivations – ‘to please me.’ In one particularly jarring scene, he appears to invite Ana around after a hard day at the office (interestingly, one of the only points at which this self-made billionaire actually appears to be doing any work) in order to ‘let off some steam’. The violence of the situation creates some very worrying parallels with domestic abuse, parallels which are perpetuated in the film’s climax as Ana is left emotionally and physically broken by Christian’s violent sexual practices. I definitely wasn’t the only one who found these scenes deeply uncomfortable to watch, and I can imagine that anyone in the audience who had come to whet their appetites for Valentine’s day were left pretty cold too.
The film ends with Ana leaving Christian’s apartment after vehemently refusing his advances, a cliff-hanger that left many of my fellow audience members deeply unsatisfied (if the collective gasps of shock and horror were anything to go by.) It also nicely sets up the possibility of a sequel, but I’m afraid that if this is the case, no amount of Pic ‘n’ Mix could compel me to sit through another 2 hours of Ana’s panting/lip biting and Christian’s infuriatingly awful one-liners. So the verdict? It’s a no from me.
Image credits: starcasm.net