DON’T WORRY, DARLING. (2023) DIRECTED BY OLIVIA WILDE.
SCREENPLAY BY KATIE SILBERMAN.
STARRING FLORENCE PUGH, HARRY STYLES, OLIVIA WILDE, GEMMA CHAN, CHRIS PINE AND DITA VON TEESE.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
This film got some pretty rough reviews, but I actually like it. It’s set in one of those ‘Fifties-style ‘planned communities’ or ‘company towns,’ a town in which the main employer and builder of houses and accommodation is, in this case, the Victory project, run by a mysterious man called Frank and his wife, Shelley. The project is set in the vastness of the California Desert.
Florence Pugh (MIDSOMMAR) and Harry ONE DIRECTION Styles play Alice and Jack Chambers, the new up-and-coming young couple on the block. Jack is an attractive go-getter, who drives off to work in his car with the other men every morning while Alice, a gorgeous young ‘Fifties housewife, stays home and cleans the house, cooks the food, and gossips and drinks wine with her housewife friends on the block, including Bunny, played by Olivia Wilde, the director.
It’s really quite a visual spectacle, all the lovely colours of the pretty outfits on the women and the cars and the houses. It certainly seems to be a good place for folks to live. Everything is pleasing to the eye, there isn’t a homeless person or stray dog or even too many kids to be seen anywhere spoiling the perfect picture, and people are usually in a good mood at all the many barbecues and block parties and celebratory dinners and get-togethers that they hold. Well, why wouldn’t they be in a good mood, goshdarnit? Victory is a wonderful place to live.
It’s certainly a great place for the men, anyway, or so it seems. They come home from work every evening to be greeted at their door by their ‘Fifties wives, all gussied up in a clean pinny and fresh lippy holding out a tumbler of whiskey on the rocks to their hunky breadwinner. And the Stepford Wives are ever so humbly grateful for the wonderful sexual favours their darling hubbies bestow on them the minute they get in the front door.
Although my (adult!) kids and I nearly died of mortification when Harry Styles, the filthy bugger, stuck his curly head up Flo-Po’s lovely frock and starting chowing down on her lady-parts while the roast was sitting on the table waiting to be carved. Their roast, I mean, not ours. We’d been eating pizza.
But that scene was way over the top. And no housewife, no matter how horny and abandoned, would fling her lovingly prepared side-dishes to the floor and ruin them just because hubby had a momentary inclination to, erm, drink from the furry mug. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but I know women. I’m one of them, after all, even if my idea of a side-dish is a battered sausage to go with me chips…
Uniformity, order, the absence of chaos are all what’s important in Victory. This is mirrored in the beautiful synchronised dance pieces we see randomly throughout the film that put us in mind of those gorgeous Busby Berkeley-type spectaculars of the nineteen-thirties. What was wonderful about those musicals was the measured, flowing way in which the dancers all moved beautifully in unison with each other.
To apply the image to Victory, the town is only as strong as its weakest link. If Alice or any of the other inhabitants of Victory stop kicking in time to the same beat as the others, the centre won’t hold and the whole thing falls apart. The wives are brainwashed as they do their daily chores by the droning voice of their leader, Frank, banging on and on about ‘sacrifice’ for the common good and loyalty to the Victory project.
Anyway, it’s not long before Alice starts experiencing a few glitches to the old circuitry. Did she or did she not see that plane crash in the desert, the desert she and the wives are forbidden to ever go near? And, if a plane crashes in the desert and no-one sees it happen, does it still make a noise? And are the little in-flight packets of peanuts anybody’s then, in that case…? That’s what I want to know.
And what’s wrong with Alice and Bunny’s friend Margaret? Maybe she slits her own throat to get out of Shelley’s boring-as-hell ballet lessons, or maybe there’s another reason, just a tad more sinister…?
And that strange structure out in the desert, which, if you touch it, it has the same effect on you as licking toads, what the ding-dang-diddly-doodly is that? Is it a Tardis? A telephone exchange (‘So I says to Irma, I says…’)? A bus depot? Or a portal to a galaxy far, far away…? Who knows?
Well, Frank knows, and Jack knows, and probably all the rest of the men know as well, the patriarchal bastards. And Alice is freaking out, and we all know what happens to hysterical women who don’t do as their husbands and doctors tell them and take their sedatives and their Forget-it-alls without any fuss, don’t we? That’s right. ‘Tis the electric shock therapy for them, the ungrateful hussies…
I enjoyed the fillum, and I probably will watch it again at some point. Striptease artiste Dita von Teese does a saucy little number in a martini glass- no, definitely not a number two!- and there’s a great soundtrack of ‘Fifties music if you like that type of thing. I do not.
I hate the ‘Fifties on film, the music, the dancing, the dresses, the bobby-sox, the Peggy Sue-type glasses, the works. 1967 to 1974, that’s the time period for me. I would have thrived in those years. But how-and-ever.
Shades of M. Night Shyamalan’s THE VILLAGE and Cameron Crowe’s VANILLA SKY with this movie, which is a good thing as I love both of these films. And Florence Pugh, a phenomenal and very bankable actress, is no less terrific in this than in any of her other films.
The title, DON’T WORRY, DARLING,has undoubtedly been chosen because it’s reminiscent of all the other patronising things men from the ‘Fifties still say to women today. It’s the same as telling a bird not to worry her pretty little head about anything her hubby does, because Hubby knows best, innit? And if you believe that, folks…
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