Click here to listen to the interview with Emerald Fennell.
It is fitting that SALTBURN starts with a flame. Emerald Fennell’s black comedy of a sophomore effort is, after all, a scorched earth approach to class warfare, and one that then proceeds to rub metaphorical salt in the wounds said warfare engenders. That’s it’s also a thing of grotesque beauty and sublime wit is a testament to Ms. Fennell’s talents as both a storyteller and a commentator on the absurdities of the human condition.
Our hero is the aptly named Oliver Quick, a, ahem, promising young man with plenty of brainpower, but little in the way of financial resources or social skills. It’s enough to have procured him a spot at Oxford in the year 2008, but not enough to ensconce him in the company of the cool kids, the ones with money, glamour, and invitation to the college Christmas party. Instead, Oliver is haunted by the college oddball (Ewan Mitchell in a performance terrifying sociopathy), a math genius with fewer social skills than even Oliver, and a preternatural lack of being able to take a hint.
In particular, Oliver longs to be pals with Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), a classic ephebe who, in his good looks and easy charm, embodies everything Oliver longs to be. Or at least hang out with in his rarified orbit. A series of fortunate coincidences brings him to Felix’s attention, and an unfortunate occurrence cements their bond of friendship and elicits an invitation by Felix for Oliver to spend the summer at the family’s palatial country house, the eponymous Saltburn. Thus begins a fateful summer that will leave none of Saltburn’s denizens unscathed, and Oliver educated in what it means to be posh.
The single most brilliant thing Fennell did when making SALTBURN is casting Barry Keough as Oliver. His embodiment of twitchy tentative hero-worship makes the audience cringe in embarrassment and become desperate to comfort this equally desperate young man who can do nothing right once he enters the rarified world into which he longs to enter. Eager to please, endlessly forgiving of the insults, intended or not, he is a creature who exists only to find favor in the eyes of Felix, the golden scion of a family warped in ennui and pettiness.
There are the usual tropes that find Oliver flummoxed over the protocols of arrival and then of breakfast. Felix giving Oliver the grand tour of museum-quality treasures with an off-hand attitude that synchs with the tennis match they play with sister, Venetia (Alison Oliver), and cousin Farleigh Start (Archie Madekwe) while wearing haute couture, all leading up to a birthday party thrown more to divert Felix’s parents than to commemorate Oliver’s birth. There are the usual characters, the poor cousin lording it over Oliver, the profligate sister with several psychological disorders that money just can’t cure, the vain parvenu mother (Rosamund Pike in a masterpiece of narcissism that she confuses with empathy), Poor Dear Pamela (Carrie Mulligan) the victim of being a plaything of the rich, and the oblivious, titled, old-money father (Richard E. Grant) longing to dress up in his suit of armor. And, oh yes, a butler (Paul Rhys) who is a model of sinister obeisance. Yet Fennell builds on these tropes, toying with audience expectations as Oliver navigates the familial politics and social niceties and violates a few. This working-class lad will bring them all up short and force them back to reality with his absolute sincerity about the pursuit of his dream.
To say more would be criminal.
This is only framework, though, as Fennell explores the roots and nature of longing and desire, both of which are depicted in ways designed to shock us out of our complacent notions, and to convey the visceral nature of those dangerous emotions. It’s anything but straightforward, and bodily fluids loom large, emphasizing the carnal and the animal natures aroused and explicitly depicted. The physical setting of unselfconscious, entitled luxury and vicious personalities is rife with monumental statues that serve as commentary on the scenes played out beneath them, as well as visual reminders of the smallness of humankind physically and, when it chooses, spiritually.
Humanity playing at being humane, and not understanding how to drop the formality of protocols when the reality Oliver ushers in overwhelms them. The etiquette of a meal taking precedence over grief; a glass filled to overflowing with wine unremarked upon though it stains the (no doubt) expensive table linens and brings no succor to the person filing it in a state of shock. And this is why SALTBURN gets in your craw and stays there. Indelible images in a wickedly funny gloss that defines victims and victimizers with a bracingly original idiom, and leaves no one, especially the audience, unscathed.
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