He also said all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun, an aphorism that will prove equally relevant here.īut I’m getting far ahead. It was Jean-Luc Godard who once said the best way to criticize a film is to make another one. Rather than immersing us in the sordid details of Eddie’s racket, the story leaves us stranded on the outside with Jean, a character who might have been quickly sidelined in a different movie: ignored, smacked around, maybe killed off. That image is an obvious allusion to the ending of “The Godfather.” But it marks only the beginning of “I’m Your Woman,” Julia Hart’s beautiful, engrossing and potently subversive new crime thriller. Jean has learned not to ask too many questions - not now, as she accepts the child with shocked resignation, and not later, when Eddie closes the door on her with a smile, retreating into the next room with his gangster buddies. They’ve also paid for the infant Eddie mysteriously brings home and plops into her arms that morning: “He’s our baby,” he says, and that’s that. (The lustrous surfaces are the work of production designer Gae Buckley, costume designer Natalie O’Brien and cinematographer Bryce Fortner.) His dirty dealings have paid for her fabulous outfits and their comfortable house, with its ostentatious wallpaper and period-perfect yellows, browns and beiges. She knows that much at least, and is content not knowing much more. Jean’s husband, Eddie (Bill Heck), is a thief. It’s the ’70s, as you can deduce from her hexagonal sunglasses, the sound of Bobbie Gentry crooning on the soundtrack and even the reverse-zoom movement of the camera as it slowly pulls back, revealing - in the first of many crucial shifts in perspective - the smallness and stultifying loneliness of Jean’s world. She’s lounging in her backyard in a leafy Pennsylvania suburb, smoking, nursing a drink and trying to rip off the tag still clinging to the fur-fringed gown she’s wearing. We tried over the course of a couple of different days to get that scene and they just were not into my singing.When we first meet Jean (Rachel Brosnahan), she seems the very picture of a mobster’s trophy wife: beautiful, sullen, entitled, expendable. But that day, the babies were not having it. And we felt that that was important for the audience to get to see it and understand that even though they can and everyone else can, that Jean can’t see it herself. And one of the things she talks about is her lack of confidence in her relationship with Harry, but mentions that she sings to him and there was a scene in the film before that scene where you saw Jean singing to Harry and you saw how capable she was and how close they were before she realizes it. “It happened every single day, but the biggest example because we were concerned about what the story implications of it would be is that there’s a scene with Jean and Cal in the diner where Jean sort of spills her guts to Cal and finally lets him in and lets him know who she is. had to make significant adjustments to accommodate their commitment to working with real babies. That challenge pays off big time in the final film, but there were instances when Brosnahan and co. It was extraordinary, but holy shit was it hard!” So being able to see the baby’s face and being able to watch the baby grow - we actually shot primarily in chronological order so you literally get to watch this baby grow up before your eyes. It’s a developing of their relationship and it’s a journey that they largely undergo together. But Julia and I spoke a lot - particularly Julia - about how important having the baby present was for this film, because while we talk so much about this being a journey that Jean undergoes, it’s really a partnership. “I have never been a part of something that involved children and babies where we used the fake baby so little. Given how many scenes they share together in the film, I had to ask, how much of I’m Your Woman involves a fake baby? Here’s what Brosnahan said: Brosnahan has loads of chemistry with everyone in the film including Arinzé Kene and Marsha Stephanie Blake, but Jean’s growth is largely tied to her connection with baby Harry.
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